Guyanese in New York still remember the dark days of the PNC rule

TIMES INT'L

Dear Editor,
It is with great amusement that I have observed the recent attempts by the opposition mouthpiece newspapers in Guyana, Stabroek News and Kaieteur News, to rewrite history and reinvent Mr Carl Greenidge who was once the Finance Minister under the PNC government.
Let it be recalled that Mr Greenidge served as minister of finance from 1983 to 1992, and presided over the worst decline ever of the Guyanese economy, when the entire physical and social infrastructure of the country collapsed, when the public treasury was plunged into bankruptcy, and when the country was deemed an economic pariah state unworthy of receiving credit from any international agency or bilateral partner. It was also during this time that Guyanese left the country in droves for all parts of the world wherever they could have gone at the time.
One merely has to examine Greenidge in his own words. In his 1989 budget speech after he had held office for six years, he confessed “the performance in 1988 as measured by GDP growth was very disappointing. Real GDP declined by three per cent”. He continued, “exports also fell a sizeable 36 per cent below the recorded 1987 level”.
He added, “In addition to lower than planned foreign inflows, the shortage of building materials, especially cement and stone caused delays in the commencement and completion of several projects”.
To compound matters, Greenidge stated that “interest payments continued to claim a large share of current expenditures, rising from the budgeted 32.5 per cent to 33.5 per cent”. He added, “The financial performance of the public enterprises was considerably below expectations as a result of declining productivity”.
Worse yet, he stated that “major roads and highways deteriorated further in 1988 as maintenance programmes were frustrated by the unavailability of road building materials such as stone and bitumen and equipment”. And the story goes on.
So, no matter how much reinvention is done to Mr Greenidge, his dismal track record has been captured for posterity, in his own words, and Guyanese in the diaspora still remember the level of suffering the people endured.

Yours sincerely,
Lambert Constantine
Brooklyn , New York

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