Dear Editor,
Is anyone else getting tired of press releases from the PSC lecturing the opposition on parliamentary matters be it the budget, money laundering or the Amaila Hydropower Project?
Let no one be fooled that their agenda is somehow for the welfare of the people or for democracy or other noble, philanthropic aims. Rather it is for their own selfish ends, namely to continue their rampant accumulation of wealth on the back of the exploited Guyanese worker.
One just has to look around Georgetown and see the literal rise of the private sector, in numerous tall and often ugly buildings that pay no attention to their surroundings. Now contrast this grandeur to the decline, the utter squalor that is the capital city ‒ the garbage, the chaos, the random violence of the average citizen’s everyday life.
So how in the past twenty years has the private sector actually contributed to improving the quality of life for the common man? In wages alone, the government in tandem with the private sector has carefully calibrated wages to rise just in line with inflation.Minimum salaries in the public sector from 2001 to 2011 have increased from $20,045 to $35863 ‒ an increase of 78%. Headline inflation during the same period has gone up by 71%. And that inflation figure should be open to some serious scrutiny given that the cost of electricity per kwh has risen almost three fold from $25.44 per kwh in 2001 to $64 per kwh in 2012.
We can see that the government and the private sector are engaged in an unholy alliance, a symbiotic relationship where one suppresses wages, supplies the contracts and tax concessions, while the other offers its political support.
So the private sector through its various bodies has no moral right to speak on issues related to the parliament; their voices have the same weight as that of the average citizen now being represented in the National Assembly. It’s called democracy and yes, right now it is messy, stuttering and largely dysfunctional, but no browbeating of the opposition by a lobby group of a few hundred members with a narrow agenda should be allowed to influence any party into voting against what it perceives are its supporters’ interests and concerns.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address provided)
