Surinamese president Chan Santokhi has suspended salaries and special allowances for thousands of civil servants. He said that in the Surinamese parliament.
He says he is intervening on the advice of a specially established presidential human resources committee.
It has established that hundreds of committees and working groups have been set up in recent years of which it is not clear what their task and activities are.
However, it appeared that the members of these committees often received high salaries, sometimes supplemented by allowances and other benefits such as free telephone calls. “This weighs heavily on our budget.
Should we as a government sit and do nothing?” Santhoki wondered aloud. This alone yields 2 million Surinamese dollars per month, “Santokhi calculated. All ministries are also instructed to cut back 15 percent.
Santokhi emphasized once again how dire the financial situation of Suriname is at the moment.
And how it could have been if the previous government of Desi Bouterse had not borrowed so much money and had left the country with a debt of almost 2.5 billion dollars. “Then there was less poverty”, according to the president installed in mid-July.