On August 23, Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh urged former Finance Minister Carl Greenidge to desist from distorting history, in reference to Greenidge’s recent forays into the letters’ columns of the daily newspapers.
Greenidge held the finance portfolio under successive PNC administrations for nine years – from 1983 to 1992. Dr Singh, in a statement, said that Greenidge should account to the Guyanese people for the performance of the domestic economy for the full duration of his ministerial tenure, instead of trying to rewrite his own fantastic and abbreviated version of history. Singh described that version as conveniently ignoring the factual realties that obtained in Guyana during the period that Greenidge superintended the economy, and he called it a version that is replete with selective, self serving recollections.
Singh pointed out that the domestic economy sank to its lowest depths during the period that Greenidge served as finance minister.
Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh
He cited Greenidge’s own words in his 1992 budget speech, when he described the imbalances facing the domestic economy as “high and rising levels of inflation; extreme and damaging exchange rate volatility; the loss of foreign exchange reserves; a growing gap between the official and parallel market rates for foreign exchange, and an increasingly virulent and ubiquitous parallel market; and declining investment, production and job opportunities”.
One year before that, in his 1991 budget speech and well into implementation of his much vaunted Economic Recovery Programme, Greenidge described the domestic economy as facing “two fundamental problems … severe fiscal imbalance and severe external disequilibrium … there was also uneven economic growth and a decline in GDP”.
During the period 1984 to 1992, the Guyana dollar depreciated from G$ 3 to US$ 1 to G$ 125 to US$ 1, a fact that Minister Singh described as ” perhaps the most striking symbol of the economic decline of that era”. Minister Singh stated that ” Mr Greenidge clearly wants to be remembered only for the Economic Recovery Programme, but he should stop pretending that he became finance min ister in 1989 when that programme commenced, and he should account to the people of Guyana for the economic policies implemented and economic outcomes achieved during the full period of his stewardship starting from 1983. His own words paint a compelling picture of the tragic economic episode that corresponded with the duration of his ministerial tenure”.
Comments are closed.