To argue against this budget is like complaining about a spouse’s shopping list. Of course it’s profligate, positively reckless in its quantum, but it is not the be all and end all of Guyana.
After all it’s mostly money for rocks, sand, metal, materials (a CapEx budget of $666B) . As such it is an utterly banal document – numbers dressed up as sacred stone tablets handed down and transported in utmost secrecy by a chosen disciple to be announced in an absurdly long monologue full of sound and fury…
Always with the pledge that this time – for sure this time – it will lead Guyanese to the promised land. But it is just one of dozens we have heard over the decades. Pile them all up on a table and they would reach the ceiling. What have they achieved other than cumulatively to bring us to where we all are today? Living in a poorly managed, lawless and filthy country still cursed with poverty where it is hard to conduct oneself with principle, peace or dignity.
We hear the lament from the opposition that the people can’t eat roads and that is true. But equally you can’t get justice for your raped daughter, drive illegal miners from your ancestral lands, or silence your neighbour’s boombox with roads. You can’t get your NDC Chairman to stop filling his family’s pockets with roads. More roads could not safeguard the 20 Mahdia children from negligence. Or even deliver a coherent report into their deaths.
It’s easy to get caught up in the annual budget carnival with all its salacious and disgraceful behaviour by our elected representatives, the preening, the puffery, the mangled grammar, the schoolyard boorishness. And this year, while we are called to be impressed by the meaningless Austin Powers’ word “Trillion”, it actually reveals more about how far the Guyana currency has sunk in the past decades than any economic achievement. It’s just our dumb luck that Exxon found oil here. And it may not even end up being good dumb luck.
Anyone with a proper job would have paid little attention to the circus.
That said it is worth pointing out one dangerous aspect as signalled in the Budget Speech: that of the upward revision in the withdrawal rule of the NRF. The argument Mr Jagdeo gave for the revised legislation back in 2021 was that the fund would be “an arm’s length away from political interference.” But why does this matter when after only two years you go to Parliament to change the rules you made and get more money? Why is this such a risk? It does not factor for a crash in oil prices to $30-$50 per barrel that would slash Guyana’s take to a trickle. Not likely you say? How about it has happened four times since 1998? Add to that the increased borrowing and the government is living dangerously rather than exercising sensible caution with the nation’s patrimony. Maybe the President learnt something from his trip to the oil producing but cash-strapped Ghana last week.
But even with those risks Guyana’s problem is no longer about having enough money. It is about whether this sudden jackpot will be good or bad for what has always been our fragile democracy.
The jury is certainly out on that and what with the political turmoil that started in 2018, the attempted elections rigging in 2020 and the subsequent punishment/sidelining of the opposition and civil society, it appears we are heading to become a less democratic society.
At the heart of this direction of travel is the increasing financial autonomy of the government. Revenues from personal taxes in 2023 make up less than 8% of this year’s total budget.
They do not need our money anymore so they don’t need to listen to us.
That is why not one minister cares to point out that the self-employed paid 10% less taxes in 2023 than in 2020 despite that year being peak Covid and the subsequent years experiencing a booming economy. It is this autonomy which is loosening the democratic pillars of accountability and transparency while consultations on our collective future become unnecessary without the need for a mandate.
This is the contest before us. Can the people preserve democracy amid the torrents of cash the government is receiving and from a capitalist class only interested in their profits? What is clear is we cannot rely on the politicians nor the same business class to defend it. It will require a herculean effort by civil society and a free press, both of which are under siege directly by ministerial attacks and through the creation of rival straw organisations including in the media where so called independent news rooms act as shameless DPI surrogates. Genuine constitutional reform that is not self-serving is also essential although we must push for its completion in the next few years, not just more talk. Finally the smaller parties remain possibly the most realistic hope of demanding accountability to the Parliament via a minority government whichever party wins in 2025.
Oil money will of course play a subversive role in next year’s elections. Will the people be so grateful they fail to finally realise that the reason their communities are rubbish tips and all the other social ills and injustices they experience, is that they derive not from a lack of money but from a deficit of real democracy?
