Defending his government’s trillion-dollar 2024 National Budget and the underlying policy that informed the fiscal plan, President Irfaan Ali Friday night reminded the nation of the former APNU+AFC government’s rule which he said was characterized by failure across sectors and an altogether declining economy.
Dr. Ali believes there must be an understanding of the “mess” his government was forced to build from and an acknowledgment of what it took to turn the Guyanese economy into one of the fastest growing in the world.
“A budget is an annual plan of an overarching strategy, that overarching strategy is outlined in a plan for five years and in our case, that is our manifesto.
“Budget 2024 is a component of that holistic plan and to understand it you have to unravel the 2015 to 2020 period and what built from (then), Dr. Ali reasoned.
And to make his case, in a 20-minute live broadcast from his Facebook Page, Dr. Ali highlighted key failures of the former government to “hammer” home his point.
Dr. Ali opened his examination of the period by looking at the output levels of three traditional sectors – sugar, forestry and bauxite – all of which declined under the previous government.
Sugar production fell and contracted by $21 billion; the forestry sector declined by $31 billion and bauxite declined by $9 billion.
“That is what occurred under the APNU government that is shouting from the top of the mountain now,” Dr. Ali said in an indirect rebuke of criticisms of the 2024 budget.
The decline in these three sectors accounts for $61.5 billion or eight per cent of the country’s 2019 Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
“In terms of export at the aggregate level, the decline of these sectors cost Guyana more than US$283 million,” Dr. Ali said as he continuously called for an honest measuring of the APNU+AFC government’s planning and performance against that of the incumbent People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPP/C).
He didn’t stop there as he highlighted the reduction in the country’s gold reserves at the central bank which fell from $25 billion to $800 million, a 97 per cent reduction.
“Equally worrisome was that the central bank overdraft had increased by more than $114 billion.
“Deficit by central government has also moved from $9.3 billion to $30 billion… that is the planning foundation we inherited from them,” the Head of State noted.
He reminded of the more than 200 new taxes introduced during the 2015 to 2019 period, reasoning that the increase in tax revenue led to the extraction of wealth from the pockets of citizens.
“People in 2019 had to pay an average of 22 cents on every dollar earned while in 2015, 15 cents on every dollar earned was paid,” the President noted in an assertion that a prospering economy was left by the PPP/C government when it demitted office in 2015.
And there is more, including the fact that private consumption by Guyanese also declined by $77 billion.
“People were spending less, they didn’t have the resources to spend, disposable income was not there, people were losing jobs and money was circulating.
“They must account for what they left us, what we inherited,” Dr. Ali continued as he pointed to a decline in domestic credit in the central bank, a situation that essentially saw the government borrowing more and making resources unavailable to the private sector.
“This is the record of the APNU+AFC that they cannot stand up and defend, that they are hiding from… I want to see them debate this record and speak of their record,” Dr. Ali noted.
Dr. Ashni Singh who served as Finance Minister before 2015 was brought back from abroad to serve once more as Finance Minister when the PPP returned to government in 2020 and has presented four national budgets since.
This is the second budget funded in part by oil funds and the first trillion-dollar budget for Guyana.
President Ali promised that he would continue his presentation next week and will point out how the PPP/C built from what was left.
The Guyanese economy has tripled in size since the start of oil extraction (end-2019), from one of the lowest GDP per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean in the early nineties.
Presenting the 2024 budget, Dr. Singh said Guyana’s real GDP growth is pegged at 34.3% this year.
Further, the non-oil sector on its own should expand by 11.9% this year.
