FINANCE Minister Winston Jordan will today present his fourth consecutive national budget and Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo expects it to take policy-makers back to the grassroots.

Writing in his ‘My Turn’ column carried by Guyana Chronicle on Sunday, the prime minister said Guyanese could expect a budget with social content that would address the more pressing needs in their communities.
He said the street folks were not glued to the so-called big ticket projects such as hydro schemes, deep water ports and multiple-lane highways, the promise of which the previous Government had dazzled them on the eve of elections.

Many of these projects, he said were hurriedly executed as legacy or signature projects, but were clumsily and poorly implemented.
“The task to re-design and complete those projects had fallen upon our coalition. Works on the East Bank Highway have been wrapped up, leaving installation of road markers to be done. To come on stream within months are upgrades of the East Coast and West Coast highways, and the Cheddi Jagan International Airport runway and terminal building,” he said.

This occasion, the prime minister said, Guyanese people — ordinary, every-day folks — want a budget for 2018 that contains many little things that could help change the condition of their communities and improve the quality of their lives.
The coalition had promised a new beginning to address the major problems it had inherited, and according to the prime minister, in almost all communities there is evidence of incremental, modest change.

“We have roads, bridges, and street lamps where before there was none. We have regional out-reach radio stations for the first time that draw the coast and the interior closer. We have new telecommunications links with many classrooms being hooked up to Internet. We have surveillance by air for pirates, and patrols in boats, on horseback and foot for narco-traffickers. And in an emergency, we can now dial 911.

“We could look around and find cleaner surroundings, renovated schools, health facilities, new wells and housing projects. Over the months we witnessed frenetic efforts to maintain allocations for and to improve the delivery of the essential social services, though it would have been difficult to keep pace with growing expectations,” he said.
These, he said, was done without a boast or fanfare.

“We are the people’s players in the middle doing as best as we could. We let the audience in the Opposition jeer us, cheer us and make the noise.
“Louder noise means that we are doing better since we embarked on building the edifice of a law governed, orderly State. We have checked Executive abuse and lawlessness, and endemic corruption. Our “big Ticket” achievements were in areas of governance, starting from the holding of Local Government Elections.

These were denied for over 20 years but were held within months under our new Government,” the prime minister noted.
The election of Councils at the village and municipal levels, including in three new towns, he said, has re-invigorated the base of society.

And on that score, he contended that the many little things that ought to be done would be laid at the feet of the regional administrations and these Councils, given shifts in budgetary allocations for community projects.