– President Jagdeo
“ON MONDAY, Ashni [the Minister of Finance] will present his budget, and it will not be an election year budget,” President Jagdeo declared yesterday.
“We have enough confidence not to produce an election-year budget in an election year, and largely because we need to send a strong signal that this country has turned corners, that there is, and will be, stability at least in the management of the macro-economy, even through difficult periods or periods when one would expect that you would deviate a little bit from the norm,” the President said at the opening of Republic Bank’s latest branch at Diamond on the East Bank of Demerara. Giving an inkling as to what this year’s Budget, which will be presented in the National Assembly tomorrow, might entail, he said: “We will have a lower fiscal deficit this year than last year; we are programming a lower fiscal deficit in an election year; very few countries do that,” he said.
“We have identified several growth poles that we think, if implemented, will catapult Guyana to a new era of prosperity never seen before in this country; prosperity that will provide significant incomes to people who invest here, but also significant opportunities for Guyanese. We have started putting in place the foundation for this prosperity,” the President added.
Turning to other money-related matters, President Jagdeo noted that Government has a long journey ahead to put in place policies that would allow for investors to have decent returns on their investments; policies that won’t be inimical to their long-term interests, or take away opportunities from them. “Because of the efforts of our people, we have crossed that hurdle, but we had to spend a lot of time rebuilding, while other countries were actively creating wealth,” he said, adding:
“Today, if you look at where we are, you would see that all of the indicators have converged around what is universally recognised as stable, sound macro-economic environment in Guyana and the International Monetary Fund, which does not like to give credit to countries, has recognised this.”
He said, too, that Government now has a provision whereby, “if the country cannot raise money through loans or grants or revenue, we cannot spend…We are not going to allow the Bank [of Guyana] to do so; it is prohibited from financing the fiscal deficit.
“We have the confidence, and we need to make sure that others have that confidence that throughout difficult times, we will manage this economy well. This is important for investors; that is the foundation, and on this foundation now we have aggressively been pursuing capital to get into the new wave of investment as part of our strategic vision, hence the Middle East visits, and to China, and to Brazil and to Trinidad and Tobago here in the region,” he said.
In response to the hypothetical question as to why he visited some of the countries he did, President Jagdeo said: “…Because they are capital-rich countries. If we can find some mechanism to tap into private capital in Trinidad and Tobago, combined with the huge opportunities in Guyana that often languish because of the capital, and because of the absence of a large private sector…” 
So as to justify this argument, he made the point that while Guyana’s private sector is growing and vibrant, it is not of the size that can take on the new projects of the future.