Dear Editor,
I am writing in response to Prem Misir’s letter, ‘Why is the President’s pension only now a matter of concern?’ which appeared in Monday’s edition of the Stabroek News.
We agree on one thing, and that is that it is indeed a shame that parliamentarians appeared to be asleep at the wheel when this eyepass Act was passed in parliament.
After nineteen years at the wheel in which we have seen the gap between the rich and the poor widen to obscene levels, when foreday morning we continue to see long long lines outside the Canadian High Commission and US Embassy of people trying to leave, the PPP continues to try to use the PNC past as a convenient jumbie to distract people from its own record of destruction: the abuse, the corruption, the fat handshakes to friends, and a fat presidential pension when most pensioners could not live for one day on what they currently get.
If it is being raised on campaign trails now, then it is about time that efforts are being made to tell Guyanese how their taxpaying dollars are being misused.
In April I wrote a column in response to Dr Roger Luncheon who like Dr Misir would want Guyanese people to believe this package is just like what obtains elsewhere.
No it is not, for a number of reasons I pointed to and which I will repeat now.
(1) Dr Misir claims that the argument about ‘caps’ (or limits to how many gardeners, maids, technical assistants, etc, former President Jagdeo will be entitled to) is an irrelevance. If that is the case, why in all the other countries he has listed, Jamaica and the US for instance, those governments sought clearly to put limits on those expenses. The Jamaica Pensions (Prime Ministers) Act makes this absolutely clear, that so and so expense shall be at the rate a minister gets, or at the rate a senior civil servant gets. This, Dr Misir, is what we call caps.
(2) Since Dr Misir is fond of quoting the United States (because I presume for the 1% of Guyanese who have benefited from the PPP/C’s misrule, they live as if they are in a country that can afford this), can he tell the Guyanese people why the US President’s pension is a taxable one? Did I miss the report that said Guyana is ranked higher than the US, which allows us to be able to afford a tax-free pension for our former presidents?
(3) In Barbados, the prime ministerial pension is halted if the prime minister takes up public office in any other capacity. This seems fair to me. In Guyana the Act that our parliamentarians shamefully passed into law allows Mr Jagdeo the pensioner to keep his ridiculous benefits and tax free pension, should he decide to re-enter public life.
(4) The pension discussion in Jamaica was not a straightforward affair. And I would not at all characterise Bruce Golding’s JLP as challenging the economic policies that continue to oppress poor people in that country. But since Dr Misir quoted Bruce Golding, let me offer another quote that he probably missed in his zeal to defend the indefensible PPP: According to a Jamaica Gleaner article of February 13, 2008, Prime Minister Bruce Golding, noting that civil servants were entitled to two-thirds of their salary when they retire, declared that he would opt for exactly the same and no more when he left office, stating that “We feel that there is no moral basis for us to go beyond that – the one thing that we must not do as persons in whom the people have vested their trust. It is wrong for us to seek to do for ourselves what we can’t do for them.”
Yours faithfully,
Alissa Trotz
