In this section of Budget Focus 2013, we identified and discussed what we considered eight pressing issues not only with budgetary implications but also having wider social, economic and constitutional relevance. The issues were:
● Amaila Falls Hydro Project
● Chavez
● Parliamentary Budget Office
● The Travails of the NIS
● China and Guyana
● The Rise of Inequality
● University of Guyana
● Budget Cuts
Amaila collapsed when Sithe Global, the investor, walked away from the Project after the APNU withheld its support. In what was one of the most dramatic pieces of photojournalism in Guyana that we can recall, the Amaila Falls, the main source of water, ran stone dry in October 2013 as shown in the Kaieteur News.
Focus had cautioned about Guyana’s dependency on Venezuela for generous credit facilities on oil purchases and as a market for Guyana’s rice. That country continues to simmer with a number of persons killed in street demonstrations against the Government of Nicolás Maduro, Chavez’s successor.
The NIS and the University of Guyana continue to hang in but days before Budget 2014, the unions representing the main bodies of employees at UG took the unprecedented step of taking the University to Court not only for failing to pay over statutory deductions from employees’ earnings but for repeated late payment of salaries. On a more positive note, the World Bank’s US$10 Million project to upgrade the Science Department finally got underway, albeit several years late.
Disappointingly, despite all the talk by the parliamentary opposition, they failed to make any progress on having a Parliamentary Budget Office, a principal function of which would be strengthening fiscal accountability and budgetary analysis. It failed too to have either its own, or one of four Parliamentary Legal Counsel now housed in the Chambers of the Attorney General, relocated to the National Assembly.
The absurdity of the absence of such an officer meant that the National Assembly had to rely on the Chambers of the Attorney General to draft the parliamentary amendment changing the deadline for local government elections from “December 31, 2014” to “August 1, 2014”.
Readers will recall that at the date of the last Budget, the Court had only delivered a preliminary ruling. On 29 January 2014, Chief Justice (ag.) Mr. Ian Chang handed down his final decision, controversially ruling that the National Assembly could disapprove the entire Budget but not any Agency, Programme or line item of which they disapproved.
Focus 2014 has therefore identified the decision as a key item for discussion along with the following:
1. Flooding
2. Muri in the context of the Public Trust Doctrine
3. Why Guyana has failed
4. The Exchange Rate
5. CLICO
6. Reforming the Judiciary
7. Surviving on the Minimum Wage
