Georgetown: President Irfaan Ali has assured that public servants will benefit from a wide range of provisions in the 2020 Budget, even though they will not see a retroactive increase in their salaries for this year.
The Head of State made this pronouncement during an interview with the Caribbean Times News, New York, on Monday where he reminded of several critical relief measures in Budget 2020, which will directly impact the lives of all Guyanese, including public servants.
He said, “Our focus was to put people back to work and put back more money in people’s pockets. So the public servants will still benefit, their children will still benefit from the cash grants, the uniform allowance; they will still benefit from the removal of vat on electricity and water, they will still benefit from a number of programmes that we have in the budget. The help that we gave to the productive sector will allow them to go back into production which will create jobs, create opportunities and all of this will help every segment and sector of the economy.”
President Ali sought to give clarity on the Government’s decisions regarding budgetary allocations.
“As you are aware this is an emergency budget. We only have four months to the end of the year and we have taken up a broken system. As a matter of fact, more than B$30 in the budget are liabilities. Expenses that were incurred by the previous government that now has to be paid. So the space in the budget was not there to allow for everything that we wanted to do.”
Notwithstanding, the Head of State pointed out that the Government will address key long term, medium term and short term issues in the Budget to be presented early 2021.
President Ali also explained that US$60M was also reprogrammed to address COVID-19 issues.
“All of these environmental changes, both external, internal and dynamics would have created some gaps in terms of what more we would have liked to give,” he added.
You must be logged in to post a comment.