Announcing El Nino interventions….
PRESIDENT Bharrat Jagdeo has described the budget debates by the Opposition as “extraneous and missing the point.”
He was speaking last Sunday at Eighth of May Community High School at Dartmouth, Essequibo Coast, where he met with farmers of Region Two (Pomeroon/Supenaam) to discuss the current El Nino phenomenon and interventions being made by the Administration.
“I have seen some of the debates on the budget and, frankly speaking, they are not just shabby but extraneous… they miss the point,” the Head of State said.
According to him: “They talk about everything else under the Sun, excepting the budget and I fear that a lot of people, at the political level from the Opposition, they focus a lot on those things to sidetrack very important features of the budget.”
For example, President Jagdeo said Government has set aside $300M for a uniform programme this year for every school child.
“They don’t think that’s positive,” he remarked.
President Jagdeo said, apart from that, about $800M has been earmarked for a school feeding programme, through which every child going to school will have a meal.
“It will be less for children on the coast and the hinterland children,  Amerindian children in some regions will get a hot meal and the children on the coast will, probably, get a meal with fortified biscuits and fortified juice, so that they have the minerals and vitamins placed in these things, so that they can develop better, they can study hard,” he explained.
“It is not going to solve every problem but it helps. They don’t find that positive. They don’t find that we are training 4,000 single parents and young people positive,” he remarked, too.
President Jagdeo also mentioned extending care to the elderly and an eye care scheme that will cater for some 10,000 operations on people’s eye for free, this year.
“That is not positive, too. So what you hear the debate is about? It is everything under the Sun, excepting what’s in the budget. We, the citizens of this country, must not allow people, because of laziness or because they want to portray misleading impressions, to think for us,” he urged.

Source document
“We must learn to think for ourselves and the only way you can do this is to go to the source document. Most of you can get a copy of it, if you strongly desire a copy of the Budget. It is online,” President Jagdeo pointed out.
He exhorted his audience to pay attention to the details and see what is there for Region Two.
“This region is a very important region, as all of our regions are to us…a very productive region and you can see the commitment of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Government to the region,” he maintained.
“You have seen, not just in words because people can say things all the time, but you see it in money allocated to this region. Every single year that budget has been growing,” he said.
President Jagdeo acknowledged that farmers are experiencing severe difficulties and said: “I just want to assure you that the Government remains cognisant of the difficulties that you are facing and that the entire apparatus of the Government is focused on bringing as much relief as is humanely possible to our people right across Guyana.”
He assured that there is a full scale effort by the Government to take relief to people and funds have been dedicated to it.
He announced that Government, in its continued effort to deal with the current El Nino phenomenon, will be injecting $258M more, for a range of interventions, as well as the post crisis period.
“The Minister of Agriculture just brought an additional document to the Cabinet to seek support for interventions in several areas for cash crop farmers and for farmers, generally. They are already looking to the future, not just to the crisis but what happens in the post crisis period,” he asserted.
“So we have just decided to give him, he had asked for $258M, to give him the $258M so he can continue in this period and in the near term to bring relief to people and this is in addition to money that we are spending on an ongoing basis,” President Jagdeo said.