Harmon says budget ‘meaningless’

Leader of the Opposition Joseph Harmon on Tuesday declared that the 2021 budget was mostly vacuous and meaningless.

“[A] Budget is meant to be a template for development but [this one] is a testimony to disarray in the Government,” he told a virtual press conference yesterday

Harmon stressed that the budget was filled with “terminological inexactitudes” including a “reengineered truth about US$135 million from Norway.”

Minister with responsibility for Finance Ashni Singh in the budget presentation claimed that more than US$135 million that was earned by Guyana as part of a forest partnership agreement with Norway is sitting in bank accounts outside our economy.

At the end of an electoral cycle where the occupants of the seat of power change and before the newcomers get down to the business of showing us what they can do, we usually embark on an excursion into political theatre. A prominent feature of those ‘joy rides,’ are ‘disclosures’ that point fingers at those who no longer hold the keys to the vault where the supposed indiscretions of their tenure are locked away. Sooner or later there begins an opening of the Pandora’s Box and a revelation of the ‘discoveries’ found therein

This is a recurring circumstance with which, by now, we ought to be familiar. Beaver-like ‘specialists’ are let loose on mounds of material thought to be fertile with likely long-kept secrets that can be metamorphosed into scandals. The legal people in the incumbent administration wait, poised to put their own imprimatur on every seeming indiscretion.