–President Ali defends gov’t initiatives

–outlines more plans for economic growth through strategic advancement agenda

DEFENDING his government’s economic strategy to create wealth for Guyanese and further develop the country, President Dr. Irfaan Ali on Thursday said the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) has a “skillfully crafted” development model.

The Head of State, during a live broadcast on Thursday evening, in response to recent criticisms of the government’s methods of economic development, said the development model is one that is built to meet the needs of the country’s social and economic transformation.

“The type of analyses that I’ve been seeing are self-created to convey a message that the transformational benefit of the investment by the government is completely ignored in the propagandistic messaging of those editorials and those analyses,” he said.

Within the development model, the government has crafted a considerate plan to manage the country’s finances.

“We cannot just say that we have projected finances in the future so that we are going to spend in a way that is not sustainable. So we are creating a resilient approach to managing our finance; a careful and considerate approach to ensure that our current expenditure does not become bloated, and to ensure that our capital investment itself is adding value and creating value to the population in general,” Dr. Ali said.

He gave as an example the recent completion of roads along the East Bank Demerara corridor.

“Because of the infrastructural investment, we are making in these communities the net present value; I’m not even calculating the future value, the net present value of some of these properties would have increased by 25-30 per cent, some areas its 50 per cent, some areas is more 100 per cent,” the Head of State said.

These investments, the President said, benefit the ordinary man. “When you look at that person owning a low-income home that would have cost $6.5 million, and because of the investment in housing and the investment in infrastructure,” he said, “the net value of that house now $10 million. We are talking about an increase in value, immediately, within one year.”

The government, he said, is building wealth through a support system that is impacted by policies and programmes.

And many people, Dr. Ali said, have capitalised on these to realise their full financial potential.

“You can use that money now to invest in a small business. Some buy a taxi; some buy a truck. And that is how you grow wealth; that is how the transformation is linked to wealth creation,” the Head of State said.

He reiterated that wealth creation and growing wealth is a key component of the government’s model to advancing the economy and supporting Guyanese.

“When you look at the investment; when you look at the billions of dollars that would have been released in the system to bolster income in December, that is billions of dollars that went into the local economy that helped to create wealth at the local level; create wealth at the regional level,” the President related.

He added: “When you take the initiative of the grant, or the dialysis; when you look at the grant for people living with disabilities, when you look at the investment in the healthcare system, when you look at the grant for the school children all of this removing a direct expenditure from your income pool.

“At the family level, if you have someone with dialysis instead of budgetting $600,000 for the dialysis, the government subsidised that $600,000, if you’re a low income… This is how the benefit is translated into helping people; delivering to people.”

He further referenced the removal of more than 200 taxes to put back billions of dollars into the pockets of ordinary people.