By Alissa Trotz and Arif Bulkan
Editor’s note: The In The Diaspora column scheduled for Monday, November 28th is being carried in today’s edition.
This week Juan Edghill, who has declared Jesus to be a PPP/C supporter, accused the opposition of running a racist campaign. President Jagdeo and his advisor on governance Gail Teixeira invoked the Rwanda genocide in their attack on the media (that they have not yet delivered on their promise to complain to the UN or caused an investigation of media coverage of the elections indicates their insincerity and possibly provocative intent).
In fact, it is the PPP/C that has been playing the race card in an attempt to keep Guyanese divided in the run up to the polls.
It is the PPP/C that has been making references to APNU supporters as thugs and hooligans.
It is senior PPP/C members who have responded in the most hostile fashion to what they see as a betrayal of their support base.
They have held political meetings directly outside the homes of opposition activists at which they attempted to whip up supporters. How could the families and friends of those individuals so targeted not feel threatened? They go into what are their traditional strongholds to call defectors traitors or ‘namak haram’ (significantly using this term to describe only Indian-Guyanese). They hurl vulgar abuses of all kinds and have twice made allegations about violence perpetrated by African-Guyanese APNU supporters, on each occasion disputed by police at the scene.
With elections just three days away, Guyanese everywhere must ask, is it that the PPP/C must resort to scare-mongering and repeated reference to the 28 years of the PNC to avoid scrutiny of their own 19 year record? Voters must not be fooled, terrified or bullied into forgetting the questions that matter. Can I find a suitable job? Am I able to provide for my family? How many domestic violence perpetrators have been brought to justice? How many families have seen the murders and robberies of their loved ones solved? Why has there been no independent inquiry that could bring closure not just to the country but to the Rodney family, the Sawh family, the Waddell family, the Lusignan and Bartica and Buxton families? Why according to an international survey done two years ago, when asked whether they believed corruption among public officials was common, was the score for Guyana 78.5 of a maximum 100?
In short, who has really benefited from the last 19 years?
Who feels it knows it: The reality for the many
When the United Nations released its Human Development Report for 2011, the Chronicle carried reports celebrating the fact that Guyana had improved its overall ranking. What it didn’t disclose to its presumed readership is that Guyana is now ranked 117 out of 187 countries (compared with 104 of 169 countries the year before), and sits below every other country in the Caribbean except for Haiti. In the last eight years Haiti has experienced coups, hurricanes, a devastating earthquake, and military occupation. Guyana has experienced nineteen years of a PPP/C administration.
But there is a more fundamental issue at stake here, and it has to do with the growing divisions between rich and poor. It is difficult to get accurate figures on poverty, and data for Guyana are frequently missing in international reports. That absence tells its own story, and one might well ask whether it suits the government that we have no systematic account of poverty indicators that would give us a fuller picture of the true state of affairs, or whether the international institutions do not have enough confidence in the numbers submitted by the Government of Guyana to release them. But here are some figures that we do have, about daily life for most Guyanese today:
Job opportunities in both the public and private sectors are limited and underpaid. Consider these wage rates that came into effect in March 2008, which are still used by private sector employers: Security guards (many of whom are women): $100/hour. Pump attendants at the gas station: $4800.00/week.
Drugstore attendants: $4500.00/week. Student trainees in a drug store: $23,000.00/month. Timber grant workers: $1100.00/day. Unskilled sawmill workers: $1000.00/day. Skilled sawmill workers: $1200.00/day. As for the public sector, the shocking revelation was made yesterday that school cleaners earn $18,000/month, which is less than minimum wage, even though they are required to work from 9am to 3pm. It is not much better for skilled public sector employees – senior nurses, for example, earn no more than G$87,000/month, even after 4 decades’ service.
Starvation wages are further eroded by a VAT of 16% on goods and services. In this context, many Guyanese survive only because of remittances from friends and family overseas, conservatively estimated to be some USD$266 million in 2009.
Goods may be freely available, but who can afford them, let alone pay rent, transportation, phone and light bills? The most powerful indicator of the bleakness of life under the PPP is the unabated hemorrhaging of people of all socio-economic brackets from Guyana. Incredibly, the voters list for the 2011 election is smaller than the list for 2006. Other studies estimate that Guyana continues to have a negative population growth rate (more people are dying and migrating than are being born or moving to Guyana). Those who do not get a visa to go to the big countries seek refuge in the Caribbean, where we are treated with contempt. Less than two weeks ago the topic of illegal Guyanese came up in a controversial debate in the Trinidad and Tobago Parliament. The Government of Guyana expressed righteous indignation at what Guyanese face across the Caribbean, but its outrage was misplaced. Instead, the ruling party should have asked why, after nineteen years in office, Guyanese (including many from their own constituencies) still prefer to live as refugees in foreign lands, even when they know they will be vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. And potential migrants should ask who has really failed them: other Caribbean countries, or their own government?
The migration figures that do exist reinforce the hopelessness. World Bank and IMF reports in 2004 and 2006 noted that between 85 and 89 per cent of Guyanese with post-secondary education had relocated to OECD countries.
Today Guyana tops all other countries in the world for the migration of people with post-secondary training. The vast majority of our young people (a significant percentage of the electorate that was born and raised under a PPP/C administration), who have gone on to University or training college in the hope of finding secure and decent jobs, will end up seeking their futures outside of Guyana.
For all the government’s talk of investment in health, Guyana today is a country where according to 2011 figures from the United Nations Human Development Index, 270 women die from pregnancy-related causes per 100,000 live births. This figure is more than three times the average for the entire Latin American and Caribbean region. In the Caribbean, only Haiti has a higher maternal mortality rate than Guyana.
The reality for the few
For the vast majority of Guyanese, including rank and file supporters in all of the traditional PPPC strongholds, bare survival is a daily struggle. But for PPP ministers, high-ranking officials, their friends and family, lavish lifestyles are the order of the day. There is one reality for the rich and another for the poor:
The public sector minimum wage is $35,000.00 a month. Compare this with the salaries earned by current advisers in the Office of the President. In March 2010 Stabroek News reported that Gail Texieira earned $800,962/month and Odinga Lumumba earned $516,457/month. In the course of the last decade, there have been other presidential advisers earning super salaries.
Another phenomenon is the hiring of consultants in the public sector who are paid astronomical US dollar salaries in addition to other benefits and duty free concessions. The most infamous example is Coby Frimpong, who for years earned more than US$20,000 per month (yes, per month) – ironically for heading the Poverty Reduction Strategy Programme. His deputy, Kevin Hogan, earned US$15,000/month. More recently a former Peace Corps volunteer was hired at the salary of US$100,000/year to manage the one laptop per family project. Many of these salaries are financed under loan programmes that the Guyanese people will have to repay.
While many of these super salaries are not taxed, taxable income for everyone else is 33 and 1/3%, reminiscent of some Biblical nightmare (that more will be heaped on the rich and vice versa).
And what must count as the supreme irony (or eyepass) is that Khurshid Sattaur, Commissioner General of the Guyana Revenue Authority and the country’s chief tax collector, received a tax-free salary at one time (and possibly still does, who can tell).
President Jagdeo is the chief beneficiary of this largesse. He has awarded himself state-subsidized land twice, the second time in breach of the law. He travels frequently and rewards himself on each trip with $1 million. He is on the eve of receiving a pension plan that comes with unlimited benefits for life, and that will continue even if he gets another job.
Appointment to or advancement in the public service is virtually guaranteed for those with connections to PPP ministers and officials. There are dozens of examples, but the position of the ruling party on ‘jobs for our boys’ was best demonstrated by Roger Luncheon, who claimed under oath that there are no Afro-Guyanese suitably qualified to serve as Ambassadors of the country.
In the private sector, a closed coterie of the President’s friends and associates receive the lion’s share of government contracts. This continues in the case of BK International even where completed work is bungled, or in the case of Bobby Ramroop’s company in violation of public procurement laws.
Now on the eve of elections, the PPP has been distributing gifts, including public funds, and awarding wage increases. These obvious attempts at bribing the electorate, together with other shameless acts as appointing their Presidential candidate to a public position so that he can campaign at taxpayers’ expense, breach ethical and possibly legal standards relating to the use of public funds. Moreover, further demonstrating the lack of transparency and accountability under the PPP regime, the independent media exposed a series of secret deals entered into by the government this week – deals that will incur significant cost to taxpayers but for which there was no independent bidding.
In 1992 a multi-racial movement of Guyanese at home and abroad brought an end to one party rule in Guyana. What has happened to our hopes for national unity and reconciliation? 19 years later the country is ruled by a small cabal that only cares about itself and its enrichment on the back of the Guyanese people. Around the world this year people have risen up against greedy and selfish elites. From North Africa and the Middle East to the Occupy movements in cities like Toronto and London and New York, we see spontaneous challenges to the 1% whose wealth relies on the suffering of the many.
Here in Guyana, instead of being distracted by ancient history, voters must reflect carefully on what is happening in the present: the plundering of the national treasury for the enrichment of a few and leading to the impoverishment of many. Once again, it is time to take a stand against the divide and rule politics that benefit a few while making us strangers to and enemies of each other.
