It was with special interest that I read your article captioned T&T unemployment at five per cent—Trade Minister in your newspaper of 23 March, 2013.
My interest stems from the fact that in recent years Guyana has published no such unemployment information as far as I am aware and I am an avid reader of our serious, civilized newspapers. No doubt the partisan press may have printed propagandist and spurious numbers in their intelligence-insulting rags. I never read these but use them particularly when I go to Mon Repos market.
Why is Guyana so afraid of publicizing regular unemployment statistics? Is it then true that the real figure hovers around 50% rather than 5% as is the case in Trinidad and Tobago?
And, it’s not just the unemployment figures that we seem to play lotto with and continuously obscure, but also other important statistics. A few years ago I asked a very senior government official roughly how many Brazilians live in Guyana. The answer I got was “between 30 and 30,000”. When the official saw the look of alarm, disbelief and pity on my face he quickly added “we really don’t know but we can hazard a guess”. Other less important observers advise around 50,000.
Even when we do get official information, the figures on sensitive statistics seem self-serving, biased and largely illusory.
Some lively political and economic observers are convinced that often these critical statistics are conjured up out of sheer fantasy and the will, sometimes, to satisfy a foreign diplomatic corps considered supine by many and a rather lazy clutch of international financial institutions.
If it was Benjamin Disraeli who first coined the expression “ lies, damned lies and statistics’’, were he Guyanese his remark may well have been ….”lies, damn lies and no statistics.”
Yours faithfully,
F Hamley Case
