-Working-class Emancipation
Frankly Speaking… By A.A. Fenty
So how or when can poverty look or seem pretty?
When it is denied or disguised. When it becomes pervasive enough over years so as to be actually accommodated in and by the national collective psyche of the majority in the society. If it’s tough to “fool yourself”, many in Guyana are great at trying. If only to survive.
So what am I going on about today? It is the result of my confrontation, this week, with talk and concepts of Emancipation, the travails of the “employed poor” and President Jagdeo’s announced promise of salary increases for public servants later “this year”. Ho-hum.
You see, in under-developed states like Guyana, ironically still a resource-rich country, economists and social engineers will demarcate and define “poverty lines” and go on about quality-of- life markers and indices and about “social safety-nets” as well. But after just a generation or two an unemployed or otherwise disadvantaged citizen resident in Moruka and the underpaid University graduate in Kitty – and their numerous dependents, all know the consequences of continuous need; the constant characteristics of material poverty!
Dictionary definitions of being “poor” refer to “wanting the means to procure the basics, the necessities, and the comforts of life”; “needy, deficient, indigent or ill-supplied”. The real poor, of course, do not need the definitions. They know well the meanings and the realities in the house and the yard every day. And when the (poverty) line is crossed under, it’s hardly possible to return above it. Mind you, some poverty – lines in Sweden, Kuwait (any poverty there?), Costa Rica or Trinidad, would be a measure of relative comfort for us Guyanese at this time.
But we are great at national stress relief and therapy against our collective working-class poverty-stricken condition. Firstly, we tell ourselves that we are more fortunate, even better off (?) than the millions in South Africa’s Soweto, than the flood victims of Bangladesh, the refugees of Darfur and the peasants of Colombia or the slum-dwellers of Brazil. I say, however, that we should never compare poverty. We have a resource-rich idle country that should have afforded us a much better quality of life, but for the successive political managers of our patrimony and economy!
So our survival alternative/techniques include the weekly fetes and concerts; the “co-operation” with Donor countries; the narcotics friendly buildings that bedazzle us; the sports meetings and international tournaments. Alas, after the play at the Cultural Centre we return home to the reality of need. But yes, we certainly need the therapy of temporary relief.
The “employed poor”, their back-up
So what’s the poor to do? Employed or not? They create their own “social safety-nets” when the official or Private Sector ones fail them.
Recall that some thirteen/fourteen years ago; I was captured by Trade Unionist Leslie Melville’s apt description of our Public Servants as the nation’s “employed poor”. Pity the wretched unemployed and under-employed, but appreciate the plight of Guyana’s Public Servants and other government employees. They cannot dodge paying taxes as those taxes are deducted at source, thus making them the brunt of the contributors to national services that fail them. They cannot also escape the VA Tax and nowadays any salary increases depend on government’s largesse and not negotiation.
Since one salary can never here cope with rent, daily meals for say four, transportation, medicine, education, insurance and clothes, there has to be supplementaries, “back-up”.
We know too well those “sources” – the remittances from overseas relatives; the extra lessons teachers arrange, the extra added job worked at “after hours”, the overseas barrels received; the garden-plot if available and yes, the illegal activities, from simple “runnings” and hustle to partnering bigger crime and scams (coke and/or corruption).
That’s how too many of us survive here today: the meagre government pay which they explain, the hustle and immoral/illegal sources and the parties, sports and games façade to divert the spirit. We must survive, mustn’t we? Those with a God will expect him to understand. And to forgive!
Working-class Emancipation
Yes, I’m staying away from July 31/August 01, Emancipation issues in this column this year. Why? Because some of us who capture the public attention can over-politicise even ice-cream! (But I’ve written copiously on 1838 liberty elsewhere this week-end. Hope it sees public print…).
To “emancipate” – to release from power or influence and from legal, social, political, intellectual, mental or moral restraint or yoke. Wow! You realize what then it is to be truly emancipated? Bet this week-end will be deluged with discussion and debate, amidst the celebratory soirees and other merriment.
My simple wish, within the context of this year’s Emancipation week-end, is for, at the very minimum, the country’s working-class poor to be liberated from the low salaries, poor conditions and victim-prone status they now experience. I know that like any other society, there must be a working-class; a manufacturing class of wealth and upper-echelon status, our leaders though, should be ashamed of our majoritarian poverty.
I leave you with these notes from a credible international source:
“Personal wealth is distributed so unevenly across the world that the richest two per cent of adults own more than 50 per cent of the world’s assets while the poorest half holds only 1 percent of wealth.
So much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in few hands that if all the world’s wealth was distributed evenly, each person would have $20,500 of assets to use. Almost 90 per cent of the world’s wealth is held in North America, Europe and high-income Asian and Pacific countries, such as Japan and Australia.
While North America has 6 per cent of the world’s adult population, it accounts for 34 per cent of household wealth.”
Ponder…
*1) Oh my! The revelations are flying furiously out of New York! I rely on the American justice system to verify the prosecution’s informant’s testimony, however…
*2) Once it is verifiable, with solid proof and evidence, well…
*3) Let the soirees be almost exclusively Guyanese folk in character! And they must go on peacefully ‘til dawn!
‘Til next week!