GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Stabroek News – Last week, Prime Minister Kenny Anthony of St Lucia presented his Budget for the year 2013-14, an event that followed a three-week strike by the country’s civil servants in protest against the government’s wage offer for a triennium ending in 2013. The Budget was presented, and the strike was held, against a background of a certain level of dissatisfaction with the government’s original wage offer of 0%-0%-0% for the triennium, a figure which was eventually raised to 4%, and still rejected by the Civil Service Association. The government’s offer was made against a gloomy picture drawn by the Prime Minister as Minister of Finance, a central element of which was the worsening of the fiscal situation of inadequate revenue in spite of the introduction of a Value Added Tax in 2012, and a deep fear that the country’s debt to GDP ratio was going beyond 70% ‒ unprecedented for the country. That the country’s Civil Service Association, representing those who are required to implement government’s policies, decided that they would accept nothing for the triennium ending, rather than what they considered a meagre final government offer of 4%, suggests a deepening disaffection with the state of things in the country, and with the government which they are required to serve. In the week preceding St Lucia’s budget presentation, OECS ministers of finance (in effect the heads of government) gathered in Grenada, representing the member states of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). There, Governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, Sir Dwight Venner, the monitor of the sub-region’s single currency, the Eastern Caribbean dollar, allegedly painted a picture of relative gloom, both in respect of the state of the international economy itself and in respect of the fiscal situations of the participating countries, as well as the growing debt situation of most of the area’s economies. But this could not have been news to his listeners.
