The People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government has fulfilled its promise of providing 50,000 jobs during its present term, even though it was seen by some as a “pipe dream.”
This was the assertion of Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo on September 29th during his feature address at the commissioning of the West Central Mall at Groenveldt, Leonora, West Coast Demerara.
“From the days of unemployment, we said we want to create 50,000 jobs in the new term… More than 50,000 people are working more now since we got back into office and that’s a massive number,” Jagdeo declared.
The creation of 50,000 jobs during its five years in office was a major manifesto promise of the Irfaan Ali administration. Critics have said that there is no evidence of 50,000 jobs created and no hard evidence has been provided by Ali or any leading official. Proof of the 50,000 jobs is an issue that the government will likely continue to be pressed on.
Jagdeo said that during the previous administration of A Partnership for National Unity and the Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC), it was found that “there were quite a bit of disincentives to investment…”
As such, the PPP/C that was in opposition at the time, had predicted that “the economy will not expand, we will not create jobs, we will not create wealth for our people if the previous government continued to pursue the policies that they were pursuing.”
He stressed that the main reasons for that were the “lack of investment and enabling infrastructure because the capital budget was less than what was spent in 2014…” It was also because “of a slew of taxes that came into operation in the five years…”
Jagdeo also stated that a large number of jobs were lost, resulting in disposable income being lost as well. This caused the government to come up with a strategy, through its economic philosophy, to pick up where it started in 1992, and that was to transform the country with a clear vision.
“First of all, to have a stable macro-economic environment and secondly, to put in enabling infrastructure and thirdly, to reduce the burden of taxation and to get rid of the massive debt overhang, that had caused almost two decades of lost growth because we had to service that debt”, the Vice President said.
He said that the two defining elements of that economic philosophy were the “pro-poor, reflecting the nature of the PPP that had consistently fought for poor people,” as well as pro-private sector.
“We want to make sure all of our people benefit from the momentum in the economy… You have a lot of naysayers today, people who don’t understand. They want jobs and they want economic expansion, but they don’t understand the risk of investment…,” Jagdeo said.
According to him, some people talk about disposable income, where the oil resources are not being spent back on the people. He noted that the school children grant that government issues, has put $8.4b ($40,000 per child) in the pockets of the parents per year.
He said too that the public servants have benefitted from a $37b increase in wages and salaries while government has also created 15,000 part-time jobs, while the pensioners got a $13,000 increase in pension and would move up to $40,000 by the end of the term, amounting to another $14b.
He said when you add those four categories, it is $70b alone in disposable income that people have more now in their pockets than in 2020.
Speaking about the electricity, Jagdeo acknowledged that “there is a spate of blackouts and that the lack of investment (in the Amaila Falls Hydropower project) in a timely manner affects you…”
He noted that when fuel prices went up, government “subsidised the price of electricity and water to keep the cost of living down in this country. So a lot of the big users now who are self-generating have come on the grid and are taking power from the Guyana Power & Light Inc.
“So the demand now in a single night is 180 megawatts and we only have 174 megawatts of installed capacity,” making it necessary to take some people off the grid.
“We just agreed on a policy that for the peak hours – where demand is greater than the supply – we will put punitive taxes for those big users”, he noted.
Government, he noted, was buying another 30 megawatts of power for emergency, hopefully before the end of the year, which “will resolve itself once that 300 megawatts (gas to energy) project is completed.”
