.
Bickering over the island’s fragile economy just got worse as political parties, mostly without any knowledge of how the economy works and how to deal with the problem, stooped to a lower level of mud slinging and name calling.
The Governor of the Central Bank very rightly took a non-partisan approach in his testimony to the House Finance Committee, but was scorned by the ruling Akel party for daring to suggest that unemployment would remain at high levels of 7%. The Akel secretary general even demanded that Athanasios Orphanides apologise “if his data is proven wrong.” Has anyone in the present government ever apologised for all the blunders they are responsible for?
The governing party relies on information it gets from the Ministry of Finance, and it is natural that there would be a percentage point gap in their predictions, with the state suggesting unemployment should be closer to 6%. After all, these are predictions and not written in stone.
The ultimate target of Akel’s attack was soon made clearer when Governor Orphanides warned that the current situation of public spending was not sustainable and that no matter how much earnings are increased by clamping down on tax dodgers and by hiking taxes, they will never be able to compensate for the growing government costs.
Reading between the lines, one would see Orphanides starting to get a bit agitated by the noises made by the civil servants union and the administration’s inability to voice a different opinion, especially as we are nearly seven months away from parliamentary elections.
The opposition parties did not see the argument and chose to play the popular vote by “revealing” that the present administration and the loose coalition that supports it had enlarged the civil service by nearly 2,000 jobs.
Was that the best shot coming from the opposition? If so, then God help us if any of these same people are elected to parliament next May. At least the peripheral parties took the easy way out of the argument and simply agreed with the Governor’s statements about the unsustainable level of public expenditure.
Instead of calling on one or the other to apologise, why don’t the know-nots leave the economy alone and try to resolve the island’s political problem, which is a bigger burden on the stability of the economy and subsequent reason to raise, lower or keep international ratings?
