NAR deputy leader: Budget is a fake

Describing the Budget as a “fake,” former government minister Dr Carson Charles said all the give-aways — the free health care, the CEPEP — would become unsustainable because they were  being paid for “with a vanishing oil and gas windfall.” Charles, who is deputy political leader of the NAR, was speaking at a news conference at NAR headquarters yesterday. Charles recalled that the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, which was built in the last oil boom, couldn’t be opened by the Chambers government because there was no money to equip the hospital.

Saying that the NAR struggled for years to find the money to equip and open it, Charles asked, “Will we return to the days of no linen, no drugs, no X-ray or other machines in working order?” He stated that the Budget reflected Government’s vision of “dependency on an unprecedented scale.” He asked how was it possible that 35 per-cent of the population lived below the poverty line, even though unemployment was just seven percent.  Citing CEPEP, he said effective income redistribution could not be achieved through handouts. “CEPEP consists of fake ‘companies’ with fake ‘contracts’ all setting up the innocent for the day when the ‘boom’ ends,” he said. On the issue of education, Charles said the most serious education issue was that the majority of youths effectively ‘drop out’ of the school system while in school because the focus is only on preparing the bright “minority” for passing exams. Charles said the country needed to use its “temporary riches” to make major investments in manufacturing exportable products outside of the oil and gas sector.

Charles said after a record $27.9 billion in expenditure he was convinced that the rich will become richer and the poor will fall further behind and “everyone will become more dependent on Government largesse and the unsustainable oil and gas reserves.” Political leader Lennox Sankersingh criticised the PNM’s housing policy. The PNM does not facilitate the construction of housing, he said, adding that the PNM builds the house and hands it over to the beneficiary, most of whom will never meet the full payments for the house. “In this process, the PNM has gone right back to its pre-1986 policy of building slums, ghettoes and dormitory communities,” he added.

He said the housing developments done by the NAR at Couva North, Caroni Savannah Road, Union Hall, La Paille Village, Bon Air West and Dyette Estate, Cunupia among others, bear testimony to the fact that no PNM housing development can match any of these. Sankersingh also lamented that only 3.1 per- cent of the expenditure in the 2005 Budget was on Local Government. He said the “great travesty” was compounded by the fact that the funding for CEPEP and URP, which carry out Local Government functions, was more than that of all 14 Regional Corporations combined. “While the NAR promotes self-sufficiency and sustainability, the PNM are the big money spenders, continuously keeping their clientele in a state of dependence,” he said.