Government Adviser Gail Teixeira said she is unaware of whether Government will accede to Leader of the Opposition David Granger’s request to President Donald Ramotar for collaboration on the 2013 national budget with a view to averting a collision as was seen this year.
Further, she said that as far as she knows, there has been no further attempt on the part of the Government to convene
meetings of the tripartite discussions on the budget or on a myriad of other issues, as the last round of talks was derailed to some extent by the Commission of Inquiry into the Linden shooting deaths and its Terms of Reference.
Granger recently wrote the President calling for there to be collaboration on the budget as had been proposed since December 2011.
“I am not aware of any letter from the Leader of the Opposition to the President on the budget,” Teixeira said. She said that she assumes there will be some discussions but she is not aware of any planned for the immediate future.
However, Teixeira noted that up to now, there has been no agreement on the chairman of the Economic Committee for Linden as part of the agreement between the Regional Administration of Region 10 and the Government of Guyana. She said that the Government keeps rejecting the persons put up by the Region 10 Administration and likewise, the Region 10 Administration is rejecting the persons Government propose.
She said that for the last set of names that the Government proposed, there has been no response from the Region 10 Regional Administration. “We are still awaiting word from [Sharma Solomon, the Regional Chairman of Region 10],” she said.
Last week, two prominent private sector bodies stressed the need for the Government to make the effort to facilitate the Opposition’s call for a meeting of the minds before the presentation of next year’s budget.
The private sector expressed concern that while there was little forward movement on Government’s side to facilitate the Leader of the Opposition’s call for a tripartite budget committee.
Granger had requested in a recent letter to the President that Government re-engage the opposition in a tripartite budget committee to avoid the collision not unlike what transpired this year when the Opposition comprising A Partnership for National Unity and the Alliance for Change cut $21B from the budget.
PSC Chairman Ron Webster said he strongly recommended that the budget for 2013 becomes the focus of attention since the end of 2012 is fast approaching.
“I would have thought that the parliamentarians on both sides of the House would be looking at the things that affect their membership and start putting together ideas which can be discussed with the finance minister before the preparation of the budget,” said Webster.
“Some of the disagreements could be resolved at the end of the budget. I really think that that should be the focus at this point in time. The budget preparation takes a while and we have only got a few months left,” he said in an interview last week.
Webster said that the PSC is working on submissions it wants to make to the Minister of Finance, many of them to do with lowered taxes.
He made the point that the work the private sector has done over the last three years has resulted in the reduction of Corporate Tax. He said too that because of Guyana’s small population and high overheads, productivity must be upped for growth to continue.
Chamber President Clinton Urling said that collaboration between the Government and the Opposition on the budget would certainly be the most favoured scenario. He said that Government should present its budgetary proposals to Opposition counterparts before presenting to Parliament to get a sense of what elements they endorse and which they do not, with the aim of adjusting to arrive at a consensus.
He spoke too of the necessity of both Government and Opposition consulting with other civil society stakeholders, including the private sector, in coming up with the allocations for the National Budget.
