By Johann Earle
Presidential Candidate of the PPP/C Donald Ramotar gave an undertaking to residents of Annandale on the East Coast that his government will root out corruption, but blamed the previous administration for the state of affairs the PPP inherited in 1992.
“They talk about corruption, and I want to assure you that we are going to fight corruption and try to root it out root and branch. But we must also know that it was the PNC that have entrenchedcorruption in our country,” he said, speaking at a modestly attended public meeting in Annandale North last evening.
“We know that there is corruption, but we will fight it. Since we came in government we have been putting the systems in place to fight corruption. We ensure that the Auditor General audits the Government’s books every year. But they are so dishonest…all they do is take out the negative things of the report. What they don’t say is that nowadays the Auditor General is saying how things have improved,” he said.
“Comrades, we have many plans to develop our society and we have to be careful because of the Opposition is now coming around and promising all kinds of things to people,” he said.
He said that the Alliance For Change’s (AFC) promise of a 20 percent increase for sugar workers will shut the industry down, were one to consider the numbers carefully.
He said that when the Government tried to help GuySuCo and the sugar industry last year by seeking to transfer $4 billion to the sugar company, “the AFC and [Khemraj] Ramjattan opposed it and they even took [Housing Minister] Irfaan Ali to the Committee of Privileges of the Parliament. Now they come and tell you they love you. Well they have to be mad.”
He reminded the residents that the European Union cut the price of sugar by 36 percent. “We lost billions of dollars because the price of sugar was cut by 36 percent last year. If you give one percent increase to the sugar industry it costs $150 million,” he said.
“Obviously with a cut in the price of sugar by 36 percent, if you give a 20 percent increase immediately then you are leading to closing the industry. Our party is committed to sugar and had it not been for the PPP the sugar industry in this country would have been closed down already,” he said.
Speaking of the many countries that had to come out of sugar because of the effects of the price cuts, Ramotar said, “Comrades, only Belize and Guyana are still in sugar.” He said that Government has invested in sugar in order to counter the price cuts. “We have invested US$200 million in a new factory at Skeldon and we know that we have problems with that factory but we are going to fix it and Skeldon is going to come on stream,” he said.
“We have already started to generate electricity by burning bagasse at Skeldon and we hope to outfit other factories with co-generation facilities like Enmore and Albion. Those factories will have the capacity to earn more money for the sugar industry,” he said.
Ramotar spoke of the new packaging plant at Enmore and said this and the one at Blairmont are all part of the effort at countering the negative fallout of the price cuts.
“Those are some of the things we are doing but of course the AFC does not expect to win at these elections so they are making all kinds of fancy promises. Their job is to try to see how much more they can undermine from the PPP/C to allow the PNC to win the elections. That is their job,” he said.
“They want to lower the threshold and cut VAT. Where are they going to get the revenue to keep the education system going, to keep the medical services going?” he asked. “They [want to] spend more and more without talking of how they will get the revenues to pay for all the things that they are promising. Obviously they cannot be serious,” Ramotar said. He said that the PNC-APNU and the AFC are “two sides of the same coin. They want to do what was done in 1964.”
