Well, it’s that time of the year again: with our New Year excesses hopefully worn off with regular infusions of our hangover concoctions, we’re about to be regaled with another record-making Budget Speech this coming Friday!!
The last one clocked in at five hours and forty-three minutes, and your Eyewitness was told it was a record!! Well, it certainly beat the longest speech ever at the UN – made by Fidel Castro in 1960: that was a mere four hours and twenty-nine minutes!! But, in Fidel’s defence, he was speaking off the cuff!!
Since the custom is to give each speaker 15 minutes, Fidel had informed the Assembly, “Although we have been given the reputation of speaking at great length, the Assembly need not worry. We shall do our best to be brief.” Imagine if he wasn’t “brief”!! In 1986, he went on for seven hours, ten minutes at the Communist Party Congress in Havana!!
Anyhow, this being an “Elections Budget”, your Eyewitness expects Ashni Singh might just give Fidel a run for his money. He just hopes the rest of the MPs arrange for water refills!!
The last Budget had set another record, this time for size: it was our very first TRILLION-DOLLAR Budget!! Impressive, innit?? With budgets, governments like to focus on how much they spend – the expenditure. This, of course, is geared towards improving the lives of the citizenry – so the custom is ”bigger is better”!! The 2024 budget detailed total expenditures of G$1,145 billion, which worked out to US$5.5 billion!! Now, no matter how you parse that, it works out to a whole lotta dough for a country that just the other day was walking around with a begging bowl, after Burnham and the PNC did a number on the economy!!
This year, your Eyewitness suspects, Budget expenditure might just be DOUBLE last year’s!! After all, we’ll be including about $420 billion (US$2 billion) just for the Gas-to-Energy project!! And since the electorate quickly gets used to the new scale of doing things, Government would have to be responsive to the jaded eye-rolls and “so what else is new” shrugs!! Expect big bucks on all the now usual infrastructural developments – bridges, roads, etc, etc.
Now, if you’re spending big, the Budget’s gotta say where the money’s coming from – especially since the VP said they’ll leave more money in your pockets by slashing taxes. While we’re all focusing on the Oil Revenues, US$2.6B was collected in 2024 when total revenue was estimated at G$94B (US$4.5 billion). This produced a budget deficit of G$199B (US$1B) which we had to borrow. So, this year, if we spend more, we’ll borrow more?? No problem!! The more money you got, the more people will lend!!
See you this Friday!!
…political ambitions
Guyanese are a fascinating people. Imagine, in the last elections, one moneybag who made his money in rice, and was looking to get into hemp, backed a bunch of young professionals to launch a party, and collected a TOTAL of 144 votes!! Now, this means that not even the families – let alone the friends – of the sixty-five candidates on the ballotvoted for them!! That’s COLD, eh?? But that’s politics in a society like ours.
Your Eyewitness was quite bemused when an individual announced she was withdrawing from contesting this year’s elections – which she’d evidently entered last year!! Now, your Eyewitness had seen letters from the individual as a PR person for GuySuCo, but running for the presidency without an organization?? Are Guyanese so daft they feel they can run just as a Presidential candidate??
She mentioned her relatives several times – so your Eyewitness hopes it was they who told her to chuck it in!! If friends and family can’t tell you about your (say) breath, who will??
…Dante’s Inferno
We all heard about Los Angeles housing Hollywood celebrities who forget to separate fact (in their lives) from fiction (in their scripts) and wallow in decadence!!
Fires just destroyed 12,000 of their homes.
