Dear Editor,
The suggestion of Dr Clive Thomas in his Sunday Stabroek article of April 22, titled ‘Beyond the Budget noise‘ for a National Assembly Budget Office (NABO) is ridiculous, unnecessary, non-productive and makes no practical or economic sense. It is a copycat suggestion to emulate the US Congressional Budget Office. In fact, no bureaucracy as suggested will produce professionally and effectively, and Guyana cannot be compared with the United States with its history and separation of powers of the judiciary, executive and legislative branches of government. Absolutely not. The two countries are completely different. Advocating for more incentives for Guyanese to get involved in agriculture is substantially better. It creates excellent, honest, oxygen-producing and financially lucrative employment for everyone. Who can lose with such advocacy? No one can be against hard work for an honest living.
All Guyanese are likely to become self-sufficient and economically independent in such agricultural pursuits. This academic conditioning to teach and create lazy pen-pushing jobs only eats up taxpayers’ money and produces piles of paper with stupid reports; these reports only harp on how they should get the monetary proceeds for themselves compared to those who toil in the sun daily by honest, sweat-producing work.
How can expenditure on Dr Thomas’s suggested bureaucracy be justified if any scarce money were to be invested in its establishment and upkeep? Actually we already have him and a whole UG department of economics personnel to do what he wants, don’t we? Why waste more money, time and good resources?
Dr Thomas has put forward a bad idea which underlines all his theoretical knowledge in economics and underscores a disconnect. All UG produces nowadays are theoreticians with no practical grounding in reality. Why are there no practical job-producing programmes to nurture assembly-line graduates to become productive citizens after graduation? The Kerala communists in India quickly adjusted to encouraging private enterprise after so many university graduates could not find jobs and quit the state and even India. Is Guyana so different?
With Guyana being such a small country, where must funding for another bureaucratic institution come from and which must be maintained? Dr Thomas’s proposal is a waste of taxpayers’ money, creates confusion and only makes more red tape. The UG academic cannot only now be interested in creating non-productive jobs that create no wealth and which earn no foreign exchange? It just seems to be a little politicking on his part.
Yours faithfully,
Sultan Mohamed
