Last Thursday, President David Granger addressed the National Assembly at the beginning of its new session. He took the opportunity to laud the achievements of his government over the last three years, and to project what the nation should expect in the less than two remaining years of his administration.
While the President cast his net over the entire ambit of his government’s responsibilities, we will examine his comments in two sectors that are uppermost in the minds of the citizenry: the economy, and security.
The President reiterated, “The State’s principal objective is to secure the ‘good life’ for all. The ‘good life’ is about securing sustained economic prosperity, ensuring citizens’ access to quality public services, and promoting social cohesion.” To secure this “sustained economic prosperity”, he claimed, “Your Government will continue to place emphasis on building greater economic resilience through economic diversification, strengthening the traditional sectors, and by catalysing and building capacity in new and emerging sectors such as agro-processing, information communications technology, and ecotourism.”
However, details were sparse in fleshing out these objectives. The most blatant gap between the rhetoric and the reality was exposed when the President discussed the sugar industry, which is emblematic of the rest of the economy. The APNU/AFC Manifesto, under the rubric “Industrialisation and Jobs”, had promised “to create a new economy that will stimulate rapid development through Guyana’s transformation from a raw material producer to a manufacturer of value-added goods and services.”
In reference to sugar, the Manifesto promised to consolidate the industry, for instance, by rehabilitating the factories to “make them cost effective”, while “changing agronomical practices in the fields to boost yields”. Yet, after just a year after taking office, President Granger’s government ignored the advice of the CoI it had established to examine options for the industry and closed four estates, which involved firing 5700 sugar workers from GuySuCo and loss of jobs for another 2000 with private cane farmers.
This decision confirmed suspicions that both its Manifesto and CoI Report were just rhetoric designed to secure votes.
To talk of “the good life” in Parliament, when it took another year to secure severance payments for the fired workers, exposes the President to accusations that he is contemptuous of the intelligence of the Guyanese people. When the closings of the sugar estates were abruptly announced, his government had promised “diversifying” the lands into cash crops through leasing lands to the fired workers, but this proposal was dropped like the proverbial “hot potato”, never to be heard of again.
In Parliament, the President declared rather blithely, “Sugar workers have not been abandoned to an uncertain future. We will continue to work diligently to ensure that displaced workers are provided with opportunities to participate actively in other sectors of the economy, such as the production and processing of rice and other crops, livestock, fisheries, construction, manufacturing, services and mining.” If, after almost two years after Wales was shuttered, none of these proposals has even been initiated, why should he be believed now? The talk about “agro-processing” will remain that – talk — unless the “agro” portion is established; and this takes time, planning, finance and training, none of which is in sight.
The APNU/AFC Manifesto had also acknowledged that “the crime situation is both the most pressing and most depressing problem facing ordinary citizens today”, and had adumbrated 27 initiatives to deal with it. Security had been one of the perceived strengths of the APNU/AFC coalition, fortified as it was by a platoon of ex-security experts. But none of the security initiatives undertaken was consummated, while the Government has focused on what is apparently a political witch hunt, using SOCU – which is supposed to go after “organised crime” – to focus totally on alleged PPP-government’s corruption. To date, the outfit has lost every case that has gone to trial.
In the meantime, crime continues to plague the country as the Police insist on producing statistics to convince the country otherwise.
