UNITED National Congress (UNC), Winston Dookeran has issued a stern warning to Central Bank Governor Ewart Williams, to be straight with the government, even if his views on the management of the local economy are not politically correct.

Dookeran made the call as he delivered the feature address to an estimated 800 people at a cottage meeting at Paraiso, Union Village in Claxton Bay.

Expressing grave concerns about economic mismanagement by the government, Dookeran said: “Government in its own way had been creating clients of the state and the money that we have is simply being spent on high expenditure.

“Recently they came to Parliament for $4 billion of new expenditure, after spending $34 billion before.”

Referring to what he termed an “illusion of an affluent society,” Dookeran told UNC supporters: “So I called on the Governor of the Central Bank in the Parliamentary debate on this issue, saying as a Central Bank, you have a responsibility to say the right things, whether or not it is politically correct, because when I was the Governor of the Central Bank, under the UNC Government, they respected me because I said the right things whether they liked it or not.”

The former Central Bank Governor added that he was surprised by the recent claims by Junior Finance Minister, Conrad Enill, that economists were responsible for economic problems.

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He said: “I was astonished when I heard one of the Ministers in the Ministry of Finance say that he has to blame the economists, and by inference he has to blame people like me and people like the Governor of the Central Bank because he (Ewart Williams) wrote an entire report in which he showed them where things are going wrong.”

“And he is now blaming the economists for the crash that is likely to come in this country.

“It is a frightening situation.

“I had to deal with this in the 1980s.

“Myself and my other colleagues; Selby Wilson and others had to deal with this.

“It was a difficult situation!”

The St. Augustine MP added: “It is true that there are high oil prices.

“It is true that there is a lot of energy investments in the country, but we will soon be facing the problems of bottlenecks in the supply of gas.”