Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo today cleared the air on the timeline for the distribution of the Government’s $100,000 cash grant, explaining that public servants and pensioners and other persons who register will ‘hopefully’ get the grant before Christmas and in January, while other Guyanese will have to wait until after the 2025 budget.

At a press conference today, Mr. Jagdeo said that the distribution process will take about five months to complete due to the registration component and other matters surrounding the disbursement of the funds.

For now, and before Christmas, the Vice President said the aim is to get Public Servants and Pensioners the grant at the soonest possible time.

“We may be able to do that and a number of other people who are registered, this is being done by technical staff not politicians and they said we can get about 300,000 persons registered before the end of the year and get those cheques cut, they told me they can cut about twenty thousand cheques per day in the Ministry of Finance because they built a system now to do that separately outside of the regular system, because if we have to use the same system that processes government accounts it will take a long time,” Mr. Jagdeo said.

The Vice President said from reports received, about 10,000 people can be registered daily, which can see about 300,000 people benefitting from the grant during the first round of distribution, while the balance will be appropriated next year.

“We cannot appropriate the balance of the money until you have a budget. So, the budget will hopefully be passed by February of next year and then we can seek to appropriate the balance of the money. We anticipate that it will be about another $30B because we think about 600,000 adults in the country or just over that but we will appropriate the rest of the sum in that period,” the Vice President noted.

Mr. Jagdeo said the task ahead is a huge one, but assured that everyone will be given the grant.

“So, its not an easy task when you have to do this right across the country and to make sure that the database is there. Once we get this database in place, in the future when there are similar grants, it will become easier, because you have a database in the system where you can easily cut cheques to those people. So, in the future it will be easier,” Jagdeo said.

Mr. Jagdeo said the Government is putting systems in place to ensure that the system is corruption free and he asked Guyanese to be patient during the process.

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