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Last Friday’s downgrade by Standard and Poor’s of the Cyprus and eight other eurozone economies did not come as a surprise to most of us, with the exception being the Akel-led administration that wants to play to its voters and adopted the populist strategy of “the capitalists are to blame.”
What Finance Minister Kikis Kazamias should have done was to criticise all social partners (political parties, trade unions, employers) for not doing enough collectively to ensure the Cyprus economy returns to normalcy and to a manageable public sector deficit.
Instead, he unleashed yet another vicious attack on the agency accusing the latest credit rating of being “arbitrary and unsubstantiated” and “serving other interests”.
S&P did us all a favour by not trashing our economy last August, when the first promises of reform and budget cuts were first declared but not implemented. The government has dragged its feet on negotiating a deal with the powerful trade unions and refuses to listen to any opposition voices that may offer creative proposals to get us out of the current mess.
Blaming the profit-making banks for everything is a cheap shot, but the current administration chooses to ignore the fact that its party supporters account for a third of the banks’ customers, a third of the tax-paying workers and a third of the business community and employers.
Even Akel MP Pambos Papageorghiou has joined the blinker patrol and prefers to blast the rating agency for “changing its policy” from “only” rating the banking system in the past to reviewing the economy as well.
What certain people don’t realise, or refuse to understand in view of the 2.5 bln euro lifesaver that Russia is throwing that will keep civil servants’ salaries paid up until November, is that the banking system, the exposure to toxic Greek bonds and the euro crisis are interlinked and all end up at one point – our reputation.
Patting ourselves on the back, just because the European Commission declared a few days earlier that the measures taken by Cyprus to consolidate our public finances were “commendable”, does not help solve the problem of an exorbitant public payroll, an antiquated and counterproductive wage inflation system, rising unemployment and lack of entrepreneurship.
Using the gas discovery is also far-fetched; on the one hand the government wants to impose a media blanked on the project, but then it uses the potential discoveries (that will start earning revenues after 2020) as another life-saver for the economy.
Public officials should grow up and stop blaming everyone else when the real problems are here and we should all take collective responsibility in order to move forward.
