Putting VAT on eggs was a mad decision
The Freddie Kissoon column
Kaieteur News
January 27, 2007
It should be asked over and over – What went through President Jagdeo's head when he saw the items that he took from a zero-rated position and placed them in the VAT category?
This approach to economics has left a gaping hole in the President's command of the science of economics. It also shows that either the leadership of the PPP is a cruel set of people who have no love in their hearts for the poor classes or that in fact they did oppose the working class foods that were placed in the VAT category but President Jagdeo overruled them.
As an analyst, I honestly find it hard to classify President Jagdeo as an astute, perceptive head of government endowed with leadership qualities. This is my sincere assessment of him. I have arrived at that judgement because I have seen him in power for the past seven years. Some impassable roads that he should ignore, he ventures onto only to become stuck in the middle. Still he carries on in the old way.
During the election campaign, I made the observation that in a homogeneous society where racial preference did not figure in the way people voted Mr. Jagdeo would not have won the battle. Though I agree he is a far better leader than a majority of his detractors in the total opposition package, his record as President is a soiled one. Way back in 1999, he took an inflexible position on the PSU strike.
They lost both the battle and the war. The union wanted a fifteen percent increase. President Jagdeo frowned on that. He went to arbitration and the union came out with 50 percent over two years.
His Cabinet choices have not been glowing ones since he became President. He lacks subtlety and finesse in judging character. This is a major weakness of PPP leaders. One can go so far to say that Cheddi Jagan was one of the poorest judges of people the West Indies has produced.
It was the late Lloyd Searwar that coined a certain phrase which has since become very popular among social commentators.
This is what he said – “Take an enemy of Burnham and leave him in the room alone with Burnham, he will come out as a friend. Take a friend and leave him alone with Jagan, he will come out as an enemy.” Lloyd Searwar told me that himself.
If there is any fault that Cheddi Jagan had it is that he was not psychologically sharp enough to understand the nature of people. Jagan had a high tolerance level for mediocre underlings.
Mrs. Jagan, who succeeded her husband as President, is perhaps the worst judge of character in the history of politics in the entire Caribbean . Tell Mrs. Jagan what she wants to hear and she will make you a king or a queen. She is not the kind of politician that has even a passing interest in knowing what makes up the personality of a person.
No wonder her presidency was the second poorest in the CARCOM region after Chambers in Trinidad who took over as a compromise candidate after Eric Williams died.
The leadership quality that enables a person to study and understand the people around him is referred to in the textbook as “conceptual complexity.”
Adding to the mistakes the President has made is the performance of the economy under his watch.
How can President Jagdeo be the main man behind the economics of his government (which we know because he is really the man that decides on fiscal and monetary issues and not his Finance Minister) and not be discomfited by the fact that the Guyanese economy doesn't grow. We are told that there was growth in 2006.
Peeping Tom did a nice column on that--poking fun at the statistics when you think of what the great floods of 2005 did to the country and then the floods came again in 2006. I leave it up to the economists to debate the President on his claim of growth in 2006.
Without trying to be unkind to Mr. Jagdeo, I don't believe he possesses conceptual complexity. President Jagdeo is a helpless inheritor of PPP culture with its attendant characteristic of omnipotence.
Cheddi and Mrs Jagan, people like Feroze Mohamed, Clement Rohee, Gail Teixeira, Ralph Ramkarran and a host of other PPP leaders will not ever concede a point to their opponent. This stems from the communist culture with its arrogant assertion that communism is the embodiment of the truths of history therefore communists better understand the world.
I will ask it again and again: What went through the mind of Mr. Jagdeo when he “VATTED” the food people depend on? Let me tell President Jagdeo about a poor man's food called egg curry.
Egg has never been out of the reach of the small man. I grew up with a constant diet of egg curry on D'Urban Street . It was good food that met the pocket of the impoverished family. My mom put an egg in the pot for each member of the family and mixed it with “nuff” potatoes.
Eggs are on the daily table of the working class families because it is affordable. To have taxed eggs was a political act that was extremely cruel.
President Jagdeo has backed down. Analysts and commentators should not ridicule him for his retreat. On the contrary, we should express our appreciation that he didn't persist with misplaced bravado and runaway chauvinism and proclaim that he is not moving on the items that carry VAT.
Has Jagdeo learnt his lesson? Should he not listen now? Not every critic hates the government. Not every displeasure shown by a citizen of a policy by the government means that person is anti-government.
This has been the problem with the PPP. It got worse under Mrs. Jagan, and under the Jagdeo presidency the paranoia has deepened. One hopes that we can see the beginning of a new Jagdeo now that he has seen the consequences of one of his mistakes.
One businessman told me that Jagdeo would not have backed down on the harshness of VAT if Cricket World Cup wasn't around the corner. It was told to me that he was afraid that protest action would have deteriorated and jeopardised CWC.
I really don't know if that is true. But I know that it has been proven right in the past that the only time the PPP is accommodating is when the witches in Macbeth begin to stoke the fire. Desmond Hoyte called it “mo fyaah”.