The diaspora column is edited by Alissa Trotz
Editor’s Note: The 10th parliament is now in session, and Guyanese are now waiting to see what will unfold with the presentation of the 2012 budget. The report in yesterday’s Kaieteur News disclosing the astronomical sum of over $1 billion paid to New Guyana Pharmaceutical Corporation on the basis of single sourcing raises the urgent matter of appointing the public procurement commission. On what possible grounds could such a flagrant violation of process – with no competitive tenders, this amounts to no less than giveaways to favoured ones – have been sanctioned by the previous parliament in which the PPP held the majority?
Yesterday too, the Stabroek News reported that Minister of Finance Ashni Singh will be bringing two financial papers to Parliament, amounting to $5.6 billion in expenditure for the final months of 2011. It is difficult to see how this could be any indication of “prudent financial management” – Singh’s reported defence. At the very least it suggests that there is something profoundly wrong with a budget process and budget forecasting that could now deliver all of these items as supplementary expenditures with a claim on the Contingencies Fund.
Transparency and accountability. Will we see it this time, not just in words but in actions? And whose everyday experiences will shape the discussions and the setting of priorities? As we gird ourselves for the 2012 budget debate, this week’s column runs a letter from women from Red Thread and Grassroots Women Across Race, a network formed out of women who came together to organize in the aftermath of the 2005 floods. It is a sober comment on our national priorities that this letter, published over a year ago on the eve of the 2011 budget discussion, should remain so relevant in 2012 (the only thing that has changed is that pensions have been increased to $7,500 and Public Assistance to $5,500 per month). Given that there is supposed to be some party consultation before the budget is laid before parliament, this letter makes a direct appeal to those who will be participating in these deliberations.
Dear Editor,
We are writing this open letter to all Parliamentarians as they prepare for budget day on Monday, January 17,2011. We write as mothers and other carers, and we are addressing in particular any Parliamentarian who genuinely defends the interests of working people – be they sugar workers, bauxite workers or mothers whose caring work is unwaged and who therefore have to struggle to find money to feed their children as vendors, small farmers, junior nurses or teachers, security guards, domestic workers, sales clerks , receptionists or shop assistants, or by performing other jobs with low and/or insecure incomes. Very many of these women are single mothers from all race groups. A few of them have spouses but all – all are struggling for survival.
A letter written and signed by a group of women who are old age pensioners, people on public assistance, security guards and domestic workers, which was published in Kaieteur News and Stabroek News on December 3, 2010 under the caption, “Why should we be forced to live like this?”, showed in detail why all of them find it impossible to live on the income they receive. Red Thread assisted the women who wrote that letter to organize themselves and we recorded their stories, views and demands. We assisted them because their struggle is our struggle and it is the struggle of the majority of unwaged and waged women workers in Guyana. Whether you as a parliamentarian are guided by your politics, your religious beliefs, or both, you cannot in good conscience continue to accept a situation in which the rich get richer and richer every day while the daily income of an old age pensioner is insufficient to buy a loaf of bread, the daily income of a mother on public assistance can’t buy a pint of oil, security guards have to work shifts of 12 hours for only $100 – $105 an hour, domestic workers get as low as $4500 per week and shop assistants get $5000 – $6000 per week. Is this injustice not against your professed beliefs?
If the answer is yes, then let this guide the changes you press for in the 2011 budget. Listen to the budget presentation as though you were one of the women who wrote that December 3 letter:
* A mother who is forced to leave her children unsupervised and unprotected for long hours to do work for money in a job that takes her miles away from her home, often against her will.
* A woman with a disability or one caring for a relative with a disability, having to do the extra work of coping with homes and minibuses and public places and streets that are never designed with people with disabilities in mind – and to do all this on that inhumane level of public assistance.
* A security guard forced to work under very dangerous and unhealthy conditions, sometimes sent to work at desolate sites with merely a baton as a defence, working for shifts of 12 hours and even 18 hours when there is no one to relieve her.
* A domestic worker who has to wash, clean, cook, iron and sometimes care for a child or an older or sick person in other people’s homes for as little as $4,500 per week out of which she has to pay transport.
* An old age pensioner who has made her contribution to this economy and is still making it, who has to pay a rent of $3,000 – $6,000 per month out of her monthly pension of $6,600 plus other essential expenses and so is forced to walk to and from home to a church from Monday to Friday just to be able to get some food and on weekends and holidays has somehow to find her own food.
And given the recent demolition of the stalls of many vendors and the insecurity into which all vendors have been thrown, to this list we add, put yourself in the place of a vendor who is prevented from making a legal living for herself and children in the name of curbing illegality.
Listen to the budget presentation from their perspective so that if you are told for example, that a rise in old age pensions is being proposed which will cost the treasury billions of dollars, you move yourself away from that abstraction and ask yourself what the rise will mean in the life of one pensioner. How many loaves of bread will her share buy her?
Listen to the budget presentation from the point of view of the mothers and other carers in Guyana struggling to survive as you are told that there is no money to raise incomes further, no matter the massive surplus being made from the 16% VAT rate.
Listen to the budget presentation with your conscience.
