And, regarding the pay cut, Minister of Home Affairs Kareem Musa has to - in a sense - break the bad news to his ministry's over two thousand police officers. They've been working on the frontline throughout the pandemic - exposed to great risks - and now, for their hard work: a paycut.
For frontlines it may be among the most bitter of pills - but, Musa says, retrenchment was the only other option:
Hon. Kareem Musa - Minister of Home Affairs "It's certainly not the kind of news that anybody wants to deliver in government, not myself the Minister of Home affairs, I'm certain it is not an easy decision for the Prime Minister to make but the truth of the matter is, we have been forewarned about this economic crisis that we are in from the last prime minister and even the leader of the opposition intimated to the fact prior to the election that retrenchment, not salary cut was a huge possibility and that they would have to somehow merge those in the public sector into private sector work. I don't know how he planned to do that, magically because that doesn't happen overnight and so there has always been this talk of whether retrenchment or salary cut or any other type of mechanism to prove that we are making inroads when it comes to our very huge wage bill. I think it's universally accepted, whether your UDP or PUP, I think everybody can accept that our wage bill is extremely excessive. Gone in just 13 years from 270,000,000 to 670,000,000 dollars in our 1 billion dollar budget each year and obviously now, we have taken a hit in tourism, which accounts for 45% of our total economy, where is it that we're going to find this 670,000,000 dollars? And so, it's a difficult decision, one that no government would want to have to make but in all the circumstances we're not talking retrenchment, we're talking a salary cut and so I think in all the circumstances it is as fair as possible as we can get at this time."
