Parliament to discuss draft budgets for 2020 and 2021

“Parliament will prepare and discuss the draft budgets for 2020 and 2021 simultaneously,” the chairman of parliament, Marinus Bee, told Times of Suriname. “The budgets of 2020 have not been approved yet so we will have to discuss and accept those first before discussing those for 2021.

The goal is to discuss the budgets for 2020 in mid October and those for 2021 at the beginning of December,” said Bee who explained that the new budgets can’t be approved as long as the previous ones have not been approved yet. “We can’t skip a national budget,” said Bee. MP Rabin Parmessar (NDP) explained that it would not be the first time for a budget to be approved late in an election year. “When the NDP came into office in 2010 the last budget of the previous government also had not been approved yet in parliament and so the new government had to do it.

We did not make a huge fuss about it at that time because back then there were huge debts and there also were no funds. Thousands of people had also been hired by the government and there were also issues with government vehicles. We were a government of love so we adopted the situation and went to work.

We approved the budget which the previous government had left behind and we solved the problems afterwards,” said MP Parmessar who made it clear that the current government must realize that the elections are over and that the constant complaining about the policy of the previous government is aimed at gaining favor among the people. “In the past couple of weeks the president and others from the current government have accused the previous government of many things and people have even been criminalized but afterwards it became clear that things were not based on facts. They claimed that they did not know how many debts the country has but everything can be found on the website of the State Debt website. The NDP faction has written a letter to the president but still has not received any reply. Nevertheless we will do our jobs in parliament accordingly.”