Dear Editor,
Guyanese people of all races are concerned about the economy. Inflation, high prices, VAT, source of daily bread and daily denial of basics of life. Living on the precipice of every pay cheque. Weren’t the PPP supposed to be brilliant economic managers? Why are Guyanese at this point? It is because of the system the PPP built since 1992. The system was not built for or to help poor people. Since 1992 a draconian taxation system grabs everything from those with nothing to begin with. Guyanese pay some of the highest total taxes in the world.
Then there are insane prices for basics such as electricity and water. There is an exorbitant fee for anything and everything in this country. Now add the price of corruption. The PPP makes the PNC look like altar boys on corruption. Now, on to that monster of inequality. That is the heart of the problem in Guyana. We have gone from all destitute under the PNC to massive inequality under the PPP with a few rich and the rest dirt poor. Since 1992 a lot of wealth has been created in this country. Pity it has ended up in the hands of a few.
Government collects taxes from everyone. Government then pays out a lot of those taxes to a select few using a flawed contracting/tendering system. Another portion of those taxes are wasted, mismanaged or stolen. Poor people operating within the confines of integrity and legality simply cannot compete. This broken donkey-cart economy with a hobbling donkey at the front has enriched a few at the expense of the many. This economy was built on crime and remittances with little legitimate business activity.
Poor people are squeezed for every single dime by an atrocious system of unfairness and inequality. At some point, the people of this nation will have to wake up to the reality that they don’t matter except for the taxes they can sweat. It is time for people to put money before race. In developed countries from which hundreds of thousands of Guyanese send remittances to keep this country afloat, governments fall when they fail on the economy. You fail, you fall. Because people realize that the issue of standard of living comes before race.
Because people in those lands are not going to starve themselves and continue their own impoverishment because of race. Betterment always beats race. Which is why a predominantly white USA voted a black man into the highest office in the land. Because if after 18 years, Guyanese have brand new roads that are washed away in the next rainfall and empty hospitals and ghost community centres and big shiny sugar factories that can’t run properly and spanking new wharves that float away and they are still are struggling every single day of their life to put food on their table and to stay alive in a crime-ridden, corrupt and failed environment where they depend on family abroad to survive and where they pay their life away in taxes and see nothing but Pradovilles popping everywhere, it is no longer about race. It is about money. Their money. Sometimes you have to take a chance on someone else because they will put more in your pocket. It is that simple.
Yours faithfully,
M Maxwell
