Dear Editor,
I WRITE with reference to a letter from Rennie Parris, who sought to respond to my letter published in the Guyana Chronicle edition dated January 14, 2023, on the subject of regional allocation of budgetary resources by the central government.

I must acknowledge that the author’s technical analysis is correct, save and except for one assumption he made in his letter which I need to clarify.
The author posited that I have suggested in my argument that Region Four does not need more budgetary allocations.

This is a misinterpretation on the part of the author. The development needs of the entire country–that is, across all regions are too many.

In this regard, I had done some conservative estimates about three years ago based on the basic infrastructural needs alone over the next 15 years for Guyana and came up with a number of around US$13 billion to US$20 billion. And this does not include climate adaptation, social welfare, and the next wave of development that will catapult Guyana into a fully developed economy.

Coming back to the author’s technical analysis, he essentially extended on the analysis I performed, an aspect I did not venture to do because as I mentioned in my letter, to do so one would need to ascertain the total budgetary allocations to each region, including those through the central government apparatus.

And of course, considering that, the need for each region would be different. But to do this level of deep-dive analysis, one would have to delve into the budget estimates (which would be a tedious task) to ascertain the allocations that cuts across all of the regions in physical infrastructure, education, health, social welfare, etc…. To demonstrate the point, I gave one example of two major road projects in Region Four while noting that the true total allocation would be much higher.

So, yes, apart from these clarifications, the author’s analysis is spot on.

Yours faithfully,
Joel Bhagwandin