To create thousands of jobs, Gov’t working aggressively

The Government is working diligently to meet and even surpass its manifesto promise of providing 50,000 jobs for Guyanese. This declaration was made by Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo on Tuesday, during a follow up visit to Region Two, where some 2,000 persons are benefitting from the administration’s part-time jobs initiative.

“That’s always our aim. Now you will recall that in the period before the pandemic, because of the taxation policy of the last government, we lost in almost every sector, in mining and the forestry sector, in the sugar industry. Many people were laid off,” Dr. Jagdeo said. The Vice President related that this action by the APNU+AFC, led to the lost of 35,000 jobs before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, followed by the shutting down of the country.

Dr. Jagdeo noted that this exacerbated the situation with another 35, 000 to 40,000 jobs lost.  “So we started in government with a deficit of about 80,000 jobs. And this is why we took the the step unlike many other countries that had shut down totally, we said we’re going to try to address the pandemic and still keep the country open. Had we not done that. Then we would have been in a worse situation today,” the VP explained.

Dr. Jagdeo said that the government’s policy of keeping the country open, while aggressively tackling the pandemic through vaccinations and capacity building in the health sector resulted in Guyana emerging in a better position than many developing countries around the world.  “So because we took that approach, we managed to get the economy going again, even though it was very difficult in the two years, because you had read we could never have had a gathering like this one here to bring people together in the last two years, but now that we we have done that we have recovered, we’ve started working on all the big initiatives for the country. They are transformative initiatives to generate the jobs of the future,” he explained.

The Vice President spoke about the government’s co-investment programme, which involves a collaboration with the private sector in lucrative areas that will lead to the creation of thousands of jobs across the country.  The VP disclosed that Government will be embarking on numerous transformational projects and partnerships that will see the modernisation of non- oil sectors.

The Vice President appealed to persons to take full advantage of training opportunities in technical and other areas, as these skills will soon be widely needed, owing to major investments stemming from the oil and gas sector.