Dear Editor,

Guyanese must realise that although our country is, like many other countries both developed and developing, beset with many problems based on the difficulties of promoting satisfactory and rewarding economic growth and development, most of which problems were inherited from the 28 year mal administration of the PNC Guyana has done remarkably well under the prudent and wise fiscal management over the nine years of the PPP/Civic democratic administration.

Our opposition politicians have put together a menu of grievances, which they play on as on a piccolo, to keep tension, distrust and animosity alive in the minds of some of their supporters and cause alarm and despondency in the minds of others.

Their main purpose, it seems, is to distract our minds from what is happening in the rest of the world which would help us to see our problems in the proper perspective and thus appreciate how much optimism we can realistically have for the future.

We see in the media that oil rich Trinidad and Tobago is now sounding a warning that the staff reduction and restructuring of BWIA is only the start of further cuts that may have to come in other sectors, such as tourism, import, export and the energy industries.

In addition, we see and read ever day of Argentina's struggle to turn around a four year recession in its economy. The country has $141 billion foreign debt and because it has suspended payments on this debt it is unable to raise any credit on foreign markets making the IMF its only source of outside help.

This is exactly what Guyana did when the PNC was in power. In 1985 when President Burnham died our foreign debt was $800 million US dollars rising to US$2.1 billion dollars in 1992 on which payments were suspended and Guyana was declared un credit worthy. No PNC apologist up to now has been able to reconcile this huge debt with any identifiable related development or building of the infrastructure or the economy.

In fact the opposite was clearly evident when Guyana was declared to have become the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Also, annual financial reports by the auditor general were not laid in Parliament by the PNC for ten years from 1982 to 1992. What happened to the money?

It took the PPP/Civic administration to successfully deal with the foreign debt and return Guyana to credibility and they have laid the auditor general's reports each year in Parliament from 1993.