Human Services Minister Priya Manickchand yesterday accused AFC MP Sheila Holder of producing a study which deliberately misrepresents the state of the Old Age Pension Programme and called on the opposition member to apologise or resign as a parliamentarian.
Defending the Pension Programme during her contribution to the 2011 Budget Debate, Manickchand rejected Holder’s assertion that the government was diverting funds through the Pension Scheme and accused her of illogical arguments. Manickchand also argued that there were several plausible reasons for the increase in the number of old age pensioners in recent years. Holder was not in the House at the time of Manickchand’s presentation.
While presenting on Tuesday evening, Holder had accused the government of using the Old Age Pension Programme to divert public funds, noting that over the last four years there has been a sharp increase in the number of old age pensioners and a consequent increase in government expenditure in this area. She charged that there are some 17,640 “phantom pensioners” and alleged that “the monthly hemorrhage from the Old Age Pension fund is over $116M or $1.3B annually.” Using data from the Human Services Ministry, Holder said that between 2002 and 2006, the number of pensioners was somewhere between 33,000 and 34,000. However, since 2007, this number increased significantly, with the figure moving to 40,389 in 2008. There was an estimated 44,000 pensioners in 2010. “Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Holder stood in this National Assembly last night (Tuesday night) and spoke in a manner that disparaged all of my staff at the Ministry of Human Services and all of the pensioners as a whole,” Manickchand said.
Speaker Ralph Ramkarran, however, appeared to disagree with the minister. “Mrs. Holder said that there were “phantom persons who were drawing pension monies. She was not attacking existing pensioners and I didn’t hear her attacking members of your staff,” Ramkarran said.
Manickchand, however, insisted that Holder was disparaging her staff and pensioners. “If you know the system… if you were to do what Mrs. Holder was accusing the government of doing, the staff would have to do it,” she said. “And to say of a group of persons, pensioners, that 17,000 of you don’t really exist but somebody is collecting for you implies that somewhere along the line we could distrust our pensioners. And that is most disgusting,” the minister added.
Manickchand also criticised the self-conducted study that Holder based her arguments on. “There is no where on the record that gives Mrs. Holder… the credentials to do any study like this,” she said. The minister said that the study “is riddled with grammatical errors and strange mathematics” and resembles an article that was carried under the name “Peeping Tom”, an anonymous columnist in the Kaieteur News. “Mr. Speaker, I’m disappointed that we are being brought to this level in the National Assembly… the people who we represent are worthy of more,” she stated.
Reforms
Explaining the marked increase in the number of pensioners, Manickchand said that in 2006, there was a change in the ministry’s system and this resulted in the ministry coming “right to the backyard” of pensioners. She said that with the process being easier, more pensioners came on board in that year and the following year. In 2008, the minister said that the pension sum went up by 62% and this encouraged more people to register. The minister said too that some Senior Counsel also registered as pensioners in this year too. Manickchand added that more persons 65 years and older registered as pensioners since the government issued a waiver for such citizens on water rates.
Holder, in a very unscientific way, had projected the pensioners in 2010 to be 26,360, Manickchand said, while adding that these figures could not stand up to scrutiny. The Minister pointed to a study by an expert demographer from the United Nations which projected that in 2010 Guyana would have approximately 43,539 persons who would be 65 years and older.
Regarding Holder’s assertion that the Performance/ Value for Money Audit undertaken by the Auditor General on the Pension Scheme showed that approximately 24% of persons 65 years and older were not in the ministry’s database and were not in receipt of pensions, Manickchand said that while conducting the audit, the Auditor General had taken a sample of 50 persons. Holder, Manickchand said, imposed this 24 percent on “the whole of Guyana.” “The AFC is trying to snatch from 17,000 people the thing that makes them happy every month that this government lovingly gives,” Manickchand said, as members from the government side cheered loudly. The minister said that there would be cases where a pensioner may die during the course of a year and a dishonest family member may continue to claim a pension on behalf of the dead individual. She said that eventually these persons would be caught at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Manickchand presented to the House the records of payments made last year to all pensioners. She then invited members to examine these records, an offer which Opposition Leader Robert Corbin accepted.
“If Mrs. Holder is going to misrepresent facts like these which were easily accessible, then Mrs. Holder must resign,” Manickchand said. “You cannot call for us to be accountable and then you cannot be accountable for what you say… I call for that, if Mrs. Holder is not going to apologise for this,” she added. The minister said she was making the call on behalf old age pensioners.
