SENIOR Minister in the Office of the President with Responsibility for Finance and the Public Service, Dr. Ashni Singh, has noted that it was this People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Government that restored the option for public servants to choose between receiving gratuity or pension.
The minister made this known as he was responding to questions posed by opposition parliamentarians during the 101st sitting of the Twelfth Parliament, on Monday.

Dr. Singh said that it was the former APNU+AFC Government that had “outlawed” contract employment and compelled public servants to give up their contract gratuity status and go on the pensionable establishment.
Giving a breakdown via social media later, the senior minister indicated that under contract employment, persons receive their gratuity as they work, and under the pensionable establishment they receive no gratuity and only receive a pension if they remain in the employ of government until age 55.

“These persons lost their 22 and a half per cent gratuity, they suffered a cut in their emoluments… that 22 and a half per cent was lost by the heavy-handed approach taken by the APNU+AFC to say you must go onto the pensionable establishment,” he said.
It was then that he reminded that doctors in the public health care system were told at that time that they must go on the pensionable establishment and their gratuity was taken away.

Dr. Singh related that several of those doctors reported to the then opposition leader, now Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, that they were aggrieved by the move of the APNU+AFC.
Those doctors, he said, appealed to the PPP/C to fix it and, as such, they wrote it into their manifesto that their administration would restore the right of people to go on contract.

“As soon as we came back into government, we gave those doctors the right to go back on contract gratuity and they all went back on contract gratuity,” Dr. Singh said.
Public servants, as of 2020, retained the choice as long as they meet the relevant requirements, to be either on the contract system or the pensionable establishment.
Dr. Singh noted that the People’s Progressive Party/Civic will always respect the wishes of the people of Guyana.