Dear Editor,
Allow me to voice my immense admiration for the Government of Guyana and their masterful command of the “supplementary appropriation” – truly the Swiss Army knife of public finance, wielded with skill and dexterity by our leaders to ensure efficiency, expediency, and just the right amount of, shall we say, discretion. Who could possibly object to a policy tool that so gracefully sidesteps the tedious formalities of parliamentary oversight? Certainly not the opposition, whom this tool has, quite conveniently, rendered impotent.
With each new spending request whisked through with the grace of a baton twirl, supplementary appropriation is fast becoming the government’s chosen medium for “surprise” budget management. It’s like a little holiday for taxpayers, who get to find out how their hard-earned dollars were spent after the fact, saving us all from the burden of forming our own opinions on budget priorities. In a world teeming with frivolous debates, the government has truly hit upon a genius solution: why bother with the opposition’s pesky questions, or the trivial notion of transparency, when a supplementary appropriation can handily solve it all?
Of course, some skeptics might say that the steady reliance on such “emergency” appropriations smells less like necessity and more like a deliberate tactic to muzzle opposition voices. But, I ask you, isn’t silence sometimes golden? Why listen to complaints about accountability or fiscal responsibility when our officials are simply getting things done in the only way they see fit? After all, isn’t democracy more efficient without all that exhausting back-and-forth?
In closing, I tip my hat to VP Jagdeo for demonstrating, time and again, that nothing will stand in the PPP way – least of all parliament – when it comes to carrying out their vision for our nation’s future. As long as we have supplementary appropriations, who needs a real budget?
Yours sincerely,
Keith Bernard
