The Alliance For Change is calling on leaders of industry such as the Manufacturers Association and the Private Sector Commission and other major users to demand a reduction in local fuel prices.
The AFC noted that “their silence on this issue is almost deafening” and urged that they “openly and bravely come out and demand” a reduction in the high fuel prices. The party in a press release yesterday said that one shudders “to think that such silence is as a result of being cowed by the PPP-Government’s instinctive attitude of vindictiveness and probabilities of witch-hunting.”
The parliamentary opposition party further said that the “almost ridiculous conditionality that the President stipulated when he said that he will only reduce the high taxes on fuels if he sees ‘minibus drivers reducing their fares’ only vindicates the AFC’s position that there is a deficit of leadership on this issue for some time now.”
According to the AFC, the President’s “arguments that such high taxes are a price stabilizer are most ridiculous.” The party asked whether this was what he had in mind when he set the VAT rate at 16% instead of 8% and remarked that “everyone knows that taxing fuel is for extraction from both the poor and the rich more revenues for the President and his Government to continue their misspending, extravagance and waste.”
Oil prices on the international market, the AFC noted, have now dropped to remarkable lows this year to below US$70 per barrel from a high of US$147 some months ago, and in all other Caribbean countries this drop is reflected at the pumping station except here in Guyana. And this is due entirely to the Government moving up the taxes on fuel as the international oil prices came down, the party added.
The AFC said that the Government seems not to understand that the local high prices of fuel, especially dieseline and gasoline will directly affect not only ordinary consumers like private car owners and transportation dealers, but also farmers and fishermen and users in industry.
The AFC further contended that industry especially can find their final product uncompetitive as a result of this high local cost when in every other Caribbean country there has been a downward swing. And farmers would find the local cost too high to get a competitive edge while national experience has shown that there is less smuggling of fuel when local prices go downwards, the party added.
The bad economic leadership on this fuel issue must not be allowed to continue, the AFC asserted, as it is one of the root causes of the impoverishment of Guya-nese.
