JAN­NELLE BERNARD

Se­nior Re­porter

jan­nelle.bernard@cnc3.co.tt

Econ­o­mist Dr In­dera Sage­wan says while she be­lieves the prime min­is­ter of a coun­try should not be earn­ing less than the CEO of a com­pa­ny, it is not the right time for Dr Kei­th Row­ley to ac­cept a pay in­crease.

Speak­ing on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew yes­ter­day, Sage­wan said Row­ley’s ac­cep­tance of a salary hike pro­posed for him and oth­er top pub­lic of­fi­cials by the Salaries Re­view Com­mis­sion should be based on the coun­try’s eco­nom­ic cli­mate and his per­for­mance.

“For the past sev­er­al years, I mean, I think for the life of this par­tic­u­lar ad­min­is­tra­tion, we the peo­ple of the coun­try have been told we need to tight­en our belts. First, it was they in­her­it­ed a Trea­sury that was emp­ty. Then we went in­to things like COVID, post-COVID, the whole is­sue of very high in­fla­tion, et cetera,” she said.

Sage­wan said Row­ley has a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to show sol­i­dar­i­ty with cit­i­zens.

“And it has been a cli­mate where the in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions sit­u­a­tion has been ter­ri­ble at best. It has been one where trade unions have been at­tempt­ing to ne­go­ti­ate, you know, very old pe­ri­ods of wages and salaries. The Min­is­ter of Fi­nance has been very firm that the coun­try ... tax­pay­ers, in fact, can­not af­ford any sig­nif­i­cant in­creas­es. But here we have a sit­u­a­tion where the Prime Min­is­ter, who is the per­son who’s charged with re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, who ac­cept­ed the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty of de­vel­op­ing and grow­ing this econ­o­my, is pre­pared to ac­cept a 47 per cent pay in­crease when the coun­try’s eco­nom­ics is at best, un­healthy,” she said.

Econ­o­mist Dr Vaalmik­ki Ar­joon agreed with this sen­ti­ment. He said eco­nom­ic dis­par­i­ties and so­cial ten­sions can be ex­ac­er­bat­ed when pub­lic of­fi­cials re­ceive salary in­creas­es while the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion con­tin­ues to face fi­nan­cial hard­ship. He said pol­i­cy­mak­ers should al­so work to­wards low­er­ing food prices, im­prov­ing safe­ty and se­cu­ri­ty and mak­ing for­eign ex­change more ac­ces­si­ble to cit­i­zens.

“The goal of those in po­lit­i­cal of­fice should be to cre­ate a more re­silient and eq­ui­table econ­o­my, where the wel­fare of all cit­i­zens is the pri­ma­ry fo­cus. Ac­cept­ing the rec­om­mend­ed salary in­creas­es now can fur­ther erode trust in pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions. The Gov­ern­ment should demon­strate sol­i­dar­i­ty with cit­i­zens by de­fer­ring pay in­creas­es un­til eco­nom­ic con­di­tions mean­ing­ful­ly im­prove.”

The 120th SRC re­port pro­posed in­creas­es for the PM, Op­po­si­tion Leader, MPs, Ju­di­cia­ry and Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er among oth­ers. Last Thurs­day, the PM said he was ready to ac­cept that some mem­bers of the pub­lic won’t be hap­py with Gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to ac­cept the rec­om­men­da­tion.