Budget failed to address development challenge, says Dominica opposition

The leader of the parliamentary opposition in Dominica has said that the 2017/18 national budget has failed to address the major national development challenge of the last two decades – that of putting the country on a path of faster, higher, economic growth.

Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Roosevelt Skerrit presented a budget amounting to more than EC$854 million in recurrent and capital expenditure for 2017/18 last Thursday.

This was an increase of EC$173 million over 2016/17.

Lennox Linton, delivering his budget response the following day, said: “The 2017/18 budget presented on a platform of all-time high revenues from the sale of passports, falls well short of showing how government will prioritise and achieve its annual and multi-annual objectives in a way that will impact the economy as a whole by placing it on a path of faster, higher growth – the undisputed major national development challenge of the last two decades.”

The opposition leader lamented what he described as “this outrageous limitation of the time” to respond to a budget statement prepared over a number of months and said it “confirms the hostility to parliament’s oversight responsibility for public finances that has become the modus operandi of this administration.”

Linton said he was curious about the reason for the prime minister’s excitement over the 2017/18 budget which, like other budgets over the past 17 years, is designed to spend more and more of the people’s money to make them poorer, render them more and more incapable of making their own money, and living lives of dignity.

“Where is the excitement in same old, same old? Where is the excitement in haphazard spending that will only lead to stagnation and further decline in the growth engines of agriculture, tourism, light manufacturing, renewable energy and the cultural industries?” he asked.

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