Winston Jordan must tell Guyana which projects he thinks are “waste”

This is an open challenge to Winston Jordan to tell Guyanese which present infrastructure projects fall into his category of “waste”. In his latest peeping out of the hole, he also waxed totally out of tune on taxes, revealing that tax subsidies in agriculture are a “waste”. He exposes his and the PNC’s obsession with taxes, wanting to use taxation to raise money anywhere and anyhow possible. It is not enough or acceptable for this gentleman to surface now and then and proclaim like a “genius” what we need to do. He must state categorically which project must go and which taxes we should reintroduce.
It is not that Jordan speaks without distinction; he speaks as the worst Minister of Finance ever in Guyana and Caricom. For one, he does have the distinction of being the Minister of Finance who foisted the most taxes in the history of a one-term Finance Minister on the people of any Caricom country. From his latest idiotic pronouncements, he spoke as if taxes are the solution to a country’s problem. Jordan must not be allowed to think Guyanese have forgotten – we remember who placed taxes on education, water, electricity, data and Internet services, medicines, land lease rates, drainage rates, etc. In part, Winston Jordan played a significant role in the PNC-led APNU/AFC losing government after just one term. Oh! when will they ever learn?
PNC rank-and-file members should demand a malfeasance charge against Jordan. Here is the difference between Jordan and PPP finance ministers – Jordan believes a government must find every opportunity to impose taxes on people; PPP’s finance ministers look for every opportunity to reduce or remove taxation from people.
The former Minister of Finance who was responsible for either introducing new taxes or raising taxes for 200 different kinds of taxes in Guyana peeped out of his hole last week, albeit very briefly, to inform Guyanese that the Government could increase the salaries of teachers and public servants by more than double it agreed to pay the teachers for 2024, 2025, and 2026. He said the money could have been taken from “waste” projects. I am interested. I would like him to tell me and the Guyanese people which project presently undertaken by the Government falls under the category of “waste”.
It is easy to say that the Government is wasteful in undertaking projects that are not needed at this time. It is also lazy and dishonest to say that the Government could cancel or defer the use of resources it has allocated for certain capital projects to fund wages and salaries without identifying the projects. This column, therefore, challenges Jordan to be brave, to show his conviction, by telling us plainly which project and how much money cancelling the project would provide to fund a percentage of teachers’ and public servants’ salaries and benefits for decades.
Project investments are one-time investments. Salary increases must be sustained forever. Maybe monies from one project could support a salary increase for a few months or even a year. But what happens afterwards? I know Jordan comes from a place where Mathematics is an onerous task, where voodoo Mathematics prevails unconstrained, but proper Mathematics rejects Jordan’s absurd notions.
It is insulting to the Guyanese people for someone of the stature of Jordan to be so flippant. But this is just noise from an empty vessel. He does not dare name a project because there is no project presently being implemented that is not of value to the nation and that is not in dire need if our country will begin to look like and function as a high middle-income country.
Maybe, he wants the country to abandon the Demerara River Bridge and save US$160M or about G$30B. Maybe he wants us to halt the construction of the six regional hospitals in Lima, De Kinderen, Diamond, Enmore, Bath and Skeldon for US$180M or G$36B. Or is it the Wismar Bridge? Maybe he meant the various roads between Georgetown and the East Coast or Georgetown and the East Bank, or the Linden Highway or the Road to Lethem or the Schoonord Highway.
Could it be the Child and Mother Hospital in Ogle or the New Amsterdam Hospital? Maybe, it is the new stadium in Berbice or the new airport in Palmyra? Who knows! Jordan opened his mouth, but was afraid to tell us which project he would have preferred for the Government not to do.
Or maybe it is the newly proposed Berbice River Bridge? Just two weeks ago, their comrades in the AFC claimed the investment in a new Berbice River Bridge is not needed. At least, not needed, until a feasibility study has determined its need. This is even though a feasibility study when Bharrat Jagdeo was President had recommended a fixed-bridge and even their infrastructure spokesperson at the time, David Patterson, had suggested a fixed-bridge as the preferable option. If today any of us need a feasibility study to tell us that we need more than ever before a fixed-bridge model for the Berbice River, we are the ones who are looking to “waste” money. But Jordan, like his comrades in the PNC and the AFC, always gets desperate any time we talk about development in Region 6.
Why the obsessive hate for the people of Region 6? Why is the hate so intense that the leaders in the PNC and the AFC would abandon their own supporters in Region 6 as collateral damage by trying to suffocate development in Region 6? Why can they not see that development in Region 6 is also development for all of Guyana?
Is “More Taxes” Jordan too “chicken” to name the projects he wants to cancel and the taxes he would like to reintroduce or introduce again?