Responding to a series of protests by Rice Farmers recently on the Essequibo Coast, installed Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo lamented that more could not be done given Guyana’s huge windfall of Oil and Gas wealth.
The Farmers had been protesting the recent reduction in the price millers are willing to pay for rice. They were told that all the monies so far accrued to Guyana should not be spent, even though the PPP regime recently appropriated all the monies of the Natural Resource Fund (NRF) to finance the 2022 National Budget. Jagdeo said, “We want to invest some of the Oil and Gas resources into building the infrastructure so that the non-Oil and Gas Sector in the future can generate the jobs when the Oil monies go, we’ll be poorer than many countries in the world.”
The former President, who has been in the recent past accused of corruption – taking bribes for favors, and which he has denied – stated, “Look what’s happening in Trinidad now, Trinidad in falling apart and that putting it mildly, falling apart, no jobs to sustain periods of negative growth, can’t see the light of day, can’t see the light of day for the near future.”
There appears to be a growing rift between Guyana-Trinidad relations in recent months exemplified in recent months by the absence of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) from February’s International Energy Conference and Expo and prior – a caustic response by former Minister of Health Dr. Leslie Ramsammy to T&T Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley’s assertion that Sputnik-V vaccines acquired by Guyana to fight COVID-19 were not approved by the World Health Organization (WHO).
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