Old Kai had a nice chuckle after reading a letter published in the media by the AFC’s culture representative Ruel Johnson on the recently read 201 National Budget. The lad is a fictional writer and has been awarded in this regard so I am not surprised at his latest attempt at story telling. This was confirmed by the fact that his letter is riddled with inaccuracies and innuendos.One of Johnson’s main grouse is the introduction of a $10,000 grant scheme to assist parents for each child they have in the public education system. I will stress on the word ‘assist’ as this is what the initiative sets out to do and should be seen in context with the drive by the PPP/C Government to achieve and maintain universal nursery, primary and secondary education in Guyana in keeping with our Millennium Development Goals(MDGs.
Instead, he shamefully twists this into some political gimmick by stating that the programme which will benefit 188,406 families “is the most blatant example of using the national budget for temporary popularity points and possible electioneering as opposed to sustainable development, and in the crucial education sector of all places.”
Johnson should know that this is not the first such initiative by the PPP/C government to assist parents but rather is an addition to the already existing, national school uniform programme and the national school feeding programme, both of which have helped to lift overall attendance rates as we were informed by the Finance Minister in his budget presentation. Let us also not forget the One Laptop for Family project. He quite conveniently omitted this bit of information of the minister’s speech on the issue.
He has also determined that the initiative “… was not meant to be long term, and is really just for 2014…” as an effort to bolster his contentions. Surely, the average Guyanese is fully aware that the annual budget could only allocate resources for the current year. Was he expecting allocations up to 2040?

From here, his contentions continue to unravel at an alarming rate. He states that the initiative ‘might seem tempting to the majority of us poor Guyanese’ and goes on to ridicule the amount. But then a few lines later, he is also critical that “this one-size fits all handout did not take into account the range of incomes of parents whose children are in the public school system…”
Why would there even be a need for this as Johnson has already pronounced earlier that the majority of Guyanese are ‘poor’? Has he now accepted that his initial statement was a fallacy?
Interestingly, he also attempts to use the issue of accountability or lack thereof to justify his main aim of having his party and the APNU, team up to cut this initiative from the budget.
One can argue however that having to establish a system to verify parents financial standing across the country to qualify for such assistance may prove more problematic and be open to manipulation as opposed to what has already been tried and tested, such as the school uniform voucher distribution scheme from which this new initiative seems to have been adopted.
Johnson’s concern for the ‘poor’ also seems to be very convenient or maybe it is out of an ignorance of the Value Added Tax, no doubt from all the misinformation that was spread by his party colleagues.
He suggests that instead of this initiative to assist parents of children in the public education system, it would be better to “…reduce the level of VAT from the onerous 16%…a 5% reduction in VAT will comfortably put far more than the $10,000 as disposable income into the hands of parents and other Guyanese, including teachers and other education sector or auxiliary workers.”
Again he has contradicted his initial statement that the ‘majority of Guyanese are poor’ as VAT is a consumption tax. Basic economics tells us that the higher our income, the higher our propensity to consume. So those who will be paying more are those with the ability to spend more.
Added to this is the fact that there is a wide range of items that have been zero rated, including school supplies and basic essentials from which no VAT is charged taking into consideration the low income families in Guyana.
President Donald Ramotar had invited the opposition to propose any other item they had wanted to see added to the zero rated list close to two years ago. We have not heard from them since.
So Johnson is being disingenuous in his calls to reduce VAT rather than provide this assistance to parents, as his proposal and it would be logical to assume that it came out of personal conviction, will only serve to benefit those like himself who apparently ‘easily spend $10,000 on a Saturday night sporting.’