By Neil Marks

THE Opposition PPP/C continues to flood the 2016 budget debate with claims of mass dismissals in the public sector but Wednesday Minister Cathy Hughes asked for the evidence.It was PPP/C frontbencher Gail Teixeira who continued to peddle the Opposition’s line that the Coalition government has acted with revenge and retribution in its first months in office; a claim the government has denied. Apart from laboring the case of the dismissal of close to 2,000 Amerindian Community Service Officers (which the government justified by saying the Officers were being used by the PPP to do party work), Teixeira went on to refer to others dismissals, which she put as “hundreds of qualified people with university degrees,” professionals within the public service and state entities including all staff of special programmes such as the One Laptop Per Family Programme, Amerindian land titling, and the Climate Change Unit.
She said too that there were dismissals of workers in the lower levels of the public service, such as cleaners, clerks, and drivers who caught the government’s eye “as being politically incorrect.” Teixeira said too that contractors were told to halt works and after they were kept waiting for months the contracts were taken away and given to those whom the government considered “politically correct.” “In the interim, thousands of workers lost their jobs in the private sector, especially in the construction and manufacturing sectors,” she claimed. Teixeira charged that this has resulted in highly skilled people having to migrate. “You have in eight months contributed to the brain drain of this country which had, in fact been, slowing down.
“You dismissed or refused to renew contracts for thousands of people, and therefore the government contributed to unemployment levels that could be taken back to the 1978 deployment of public servants, retrenchment of bauxite workers in 1976, and the 1986-87 period, and the closure of GNC centres in 1990.” She said that the public sector of almost 40, 000 was reduced to 28, 000 in 1992; this, Teixeira noted was done by the Desmond Hoyte administration so Guyana could be deemed credit-worthy by the International Monetary Fund and get funding for the Economic Recovery Programme.
“This country has not seen this level of mass dismissals, except in those times,” she stated.
She said the cost of this “retrograde action is phenomenally high” resulting in lost opportunities, lost investments, while trust and confidence has been eroded. “So, Mr Speaker, the culture of fear is creeping in as a result of this myopic, vindictive and irresponsible approach to governing this country and disregard for the basic tenets of democratic governance,” Teixeira.”
Teixeira said she was among those who were terminated “willy nilly” but that she didn’t need to get a “nice official letter” from Minister of State Joseph Harmon that she was dismissed. She said she knew that with a new President she would be out of a job. In rebuttal, Minister Cathy Hughes denied that there was a case of revenge and retribution, but suggested that the government was looking to fix the scams that defined the 23-years of PPP rule. She urged Teixeira to bring to the House a list of all the persons she claims were dismissed. Minister Hughes said the government had the right to review contracts. As an example, she noted that under the PPP, some $1 billion was spent to build a secondary school at Kato, but to date, no students can be housed in the school.
Then she pointed to infrastructure in the ICT sector. “Where is the fibre optic cable that we spent US$200 million and we have nothing to show for it?” “The past PPP government had to throw it aside.
“So… who is the vampire that sucked us dry?” Further, Minister Hughes pointed to the travesty of other contract awards under the PPP. She noted that government pharmaceutical contracts were handed to one specific company which offered drugs that were “most expensive.” Further, she said that the company was paid upfront for the pharmaceuticals, some of which are yet to be delivered.
Under the One Laptop Per Programme, Hughes said that laptops were procured but could not be handed out. She pointed to 4,000 laptops without batteries which currently exists, and asked “how do we give those to the indigenous communities?”