Wild talk about doubling public servants’ salaries in 2022 is mathematically impossible

Wild talk, no matter how ridiculous it is, is a pastime that has become too popular today. The latest wild talk is that $12B can enable the Government to double Public Servants’ salaries and old-age pension for 2022. The wild talk ignores that to double Public Servants’ salaries and old-age pension alone would need $180B.
One of the political commentators, who is obsessed with the Oil and Gas resources in Guyana, went on a radio and TV tirade demanding the Irfaan Ali-led Government double Public Servants’ salaries and benefits and old-age pension in 2022. According to him, the Government can commit the use of US$60M (G$12B) of the US$608M of the Natural Resource Fund (NRF) that will be transferred into the Consolidated Fund for this purpose. Claiming that the total Public Servants’ salary bill is just US$30M, this commentator claimed that with US$60M, the Government can double Public Servants’ salaries and old-age pension and do more. He and his collaborators did not stop for one moment to see how mathematically impossible this assertion is. He is a successful businessman, and so it begs the question: is he just mathematically dumb, or is he just being mischievous, perverting mathematics for egregious purposes, hoping that enough people are gullible to buy into his mischievousness?
Public servants’ salaries and benefits in 2021 amounted to almost $78B (US$390M). Doubling Public Servants’ salaries in 2022 would lift this amount to $156B. Budget 2022 provides about $12B for old-age pension. Doubling this would lift it to $24B. Together, these two lines alone would amount to $180B (US$900M). This is $54B more than the total amount ($126B) available in the NRF. Yet, this wild man insists that only $12B of the $126B would support doubling the Public Servants’ and pensioners’ monthly income. This is wild talk, because just the doubling of salaries and pensions requires $180B for 2022, and this obligation would continue forever to infinity. Yet, the impossibility of his demand did not bother him one iota.
Jesus was the Son of God, and he fed thousands with a single basket of fish. This commentator wants President Irfaan Ali to outdo Jesus and use $12B to fill a hole that needs $180B. He is asking President Ali to use just $12B as $180B. But there are many among us who are supposed to be intelligent enough to see the ridiculousness of such trash talk, who will deliberately ignore such wildness and argue in favour of it. All these people know the truth, but they are all counting on people being gullible. While there is always a small proportion of gullible people in any population, the mistake these commentators and mischief-mongers make is that they believe they can fool most people. The truth is gullibility is always limited to a small group of persons. Even the majority of Public Servants and pensioners do not buy the impossible story the mischief-mongers try to sell them.
President Ali and his PPP Government have committed to use the NRF for a balanced development. No one can argue that Guyana’s infrastructure is underdeveloped. Bharrat Jagdeo and the PPP Government after 2001 began a new era of infrastructure modernisation and expansion. Even with its successes, there remains major underdevelopment. Roads, highways, bridges, drainage and irrigation, electricity, water, schools, hospitals, other public buildings all need dramatic transformation. The NRF will be the major source of funding for these things. The Amaila Hydroelectricity and the gas-to-shore projects are critical because, without cheap, reliable and enough electricity, Guyana’s trajectory into looking like and feeling like a high middle-income country cannot be achieved. Without modern highways and bridges linking our country, we cannot equitably bring opportunities to all communities in Guyana.
Further, the Government has provided for an unprecedented level of safety-nets; example, Budget 2022 has provided more than $20B in safety nets to help families. This includes increasing cash grants for every child from $19,000 to $30,000 and employing more than 4,000 Amerindian youth as CSOs, bringing in more than $1B into Amerindian communities. Scholarship and training programmes are building capacity in our people to take up better-paying jobs in both the Public and Private Sectors.
But we have a bunch of wild people who continue to stun the world with crazy mathematics. The wild man arguing that $12B can double Public Servants’ salaries is not the only mathematics “genius” among us who defies logic. MP Holder, who is also Chairman of the PNC, slowly and deliberately took the MPs in Parliament and the country’s citizens on a journey to show that US$608M could be distributed to 750,000 people, every man, woman and child, US$5000 each. He never took time to determine that G$1M each for 750,000 people is G$750B and that US$608M is only about G$126B, meaning only 16% of every man, woman and child in Guyana could get G$1M each.
This kind of mathematics comes directly from the school where professors like Moses Nagamootoo use quarter bottle and half bottle rum to explain why 33 is not more than 32.
Wild talk is no recipe for Guyana utilising our new Oil and Gas wealth to develop our country, so that every family everywhere in Guyana benefits. President Ali and the Government are on the right track. The time has come for us to reject the wild men.