THE WRONG DOCUMENT
Peeping Tom
Kaieteur News
December 18, 2006
I feel more than a trifle sympathetic towards the young Minister of Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh. I am sure that if he had his own way, he would not have adopted the position that his government took in relation to the PNCR motion on the National Development Strategy.
But as the national poet, Martin Carter, reminded us in an interview that was published this past week in the media, politics sometimes make you do things that you normally would not do.
I like the new Minister of Finance. He is a decent young man. He is exceptionally brilliant, and such a compliment coming from the Peeper says something of the type of ability I think he possesses.
Unlike so many of our former Guyana scholars, he chose to come back home after his studies. He could have opted to stay in greener pastures, but he came back to serve his homeland.
He is a very mature young man and his presentation this past week in the National Assembly lacked the rancor and the suspicion that has typically characterized the PPP's attitudes towards the opposition.
In the debate on the PNCR motion to revise the National Development Strategy (NDS), what the Minister of Finance presented was his government's position. He is a technocrat, not being part of the PPPC's list of candidates for the elections.
What he said in the National Assembly, I believe, reflects the position of his government and not necessarily his own personal feelings.
Before I examine the absurdity of the government's position, I would like to say that I personally do not agree with the PNCR motion concerning the National Development Strategy. My reasons for disagreeing are however completely different from what the government thinks.
The Peeper believes that the PPP has made a mockery of the National Development Strategy and never had any intention of implementing that strategy. Even when the revised version came out under Dr. Kenneth Singh, there was ambivalence on the part of the government as to whether it should be tabled in the National Assembly.
The PPP has paid only lip-service to the NDS, which was initiated by the Carter Centre and which is perhaps the most comprehensive economic strategy ever developed in this country, providing a blueprint for all the major sectors of this country.
While the situation in the country since the original NDS was formulated has changed and while the NDS therefore requires updating to take account of the calamitous performance of the economy since 1997, there is no need to take this process forward because the PPP has no interest in the National Development Strategy and in fact has never implemented that strategy.
If the PNCR is serious about calling attention to the NDS, it should meet with Hammy, request a burial plot in Le Repentir, and have a symbolic burial of the NDS. Under the PPP, the NDS will simply not see the light of day.
The PPP has its own strategy which was a top-down strategy even though it involved consultation throughout the country. It however did not involve the participation of one-tenth as many experts as did the NDS.
The development strategy that the PPP is working on is a plan developed by specialists attached to the Washington Consensus who must have been outraged when they learnt that Guyana had the audacity to have begun to formulate its own development strategy with the assistance of the Carter Center.
The strategy that has been imposed on the country is what is known as the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and this is the strategy that the PNCR should be asking to be revised because this is the economic blueprint that is being followed by the government.
In giving the government's explanation for not assenting to the motion moved by the PNCR, the Minister of Finance explained that the difference was with the model that was being proposed by the PNCR for the revision of the strategy. The government, he explained, could not agree to a process that would miniaturize its role in the revision process.
I understand the dilemma in which the young Minister of Finance has found himself, but I respectfully ask of his government, not him, whether in developing the PRSP the government was not itself miniaturized by the dictates of the international funding agencies.
The PRSP is not homegrown. It may have involved consultations but the very framework on which it was based was externally directed and imposed on this country, and the PPP knows this.
Parliament is concentrating on the wrong document. The plan that needs revising is not the NDS but instead the PRSP.