In Guyana politicians on all sides proclaim their concern for the poor and commitment to ease their condition, but over the years, knowingly or unknowingly, many of their proposals have undermined their professed concern. Policies are rolled out without any proper identification and targeting of the actual poor with whom we are concerned. Political immediacy appears to take precedence over the needs of the poor but even this could only be so because we generally hold a backward understanding of distributive justice.
The $10,000 per child education grant in the current budget is only the latest and most blatant of these questionable policies. The fact that it could be presented in the belief that we will consider it to be an optimal use of our scarce national resources in this policy area, tells us about the perception of our understanding of distributive justice.
This policy has everything wrong with it. It is intended to improve school enrollment and attendance but is untargeted and applies to the entire public school population. It is without stated baseline data and targets against which effectiveness can be judged. And it is promised for only one year as if it is expected that the problem will be solved in that period! So, more likely than not, it would simply be disruptive to family planning and financing. No wonder many see it as political grandstanding of the worst kind (“$10,000 per child programme is a cynical move:” SN 27/03/2014).
However, there have been other, well intentioned, occasions when, in my opinion, the policy choice was similarly questionable. Very few people in Guyana would want to question Cheddi Jagan’s commitment to the welfare of the working people. Yet in 1993, when I was Minister of Labour, Human Services and Social Security, we were divided on an issue, which (although I am still of the opinion that my position was the correct one) I believe I would lose if it were even now put to the country.
At the time, the old age pension was only about $263 per month but the minimum wage was about $3,300: a much worse ratio than it is today, when the pension is $13,125 and the minimum wage about $40,000. Cheddi suggested to me that the government should remove the means test for old age pension. I objected on the grounds that if our concern was to deal with poverty, instead of seeking to universalize the pension to even the well off and rich reaching the age of sixty-five, we should properly target what additional resources we had to those who needed it most.
Jagan disagreed; so far as he was concerned we are all Guyanese, we all work for Guyana and as such we all deserve a pension. This discourse came to mind as I read Mr. Allan Fenty’s most recent article, in which he praised the PPP for removing the means test, although he did appear to bemoan the current level of the old age pension and the miserly 5% increase being presently offered (“On budgets and growing old:” SN 28/03/2014).
Speaking of the elderly, there has been a culture of political disrespect for them in Guyana. There are over 43,000 people over 65, which translates to between six and eight seats in the National Assembly, and the 2002 census suggested that more than 66% of them depend on this pension to maintain a most marginal existence. How then, at a time when that Assembly is so precariously balanced and there is much talk about impending national elections, can the government feel that it can act with such unconcern for this massive body of possible support? I proffer the suggestion that it is because in our ethnically divided society, the elderly cannot be easily politically organised and thus have become politically irrelevant!
There is an abundance of empirical evidence that in every society, the older people become the more confirmed they are in their ideas and behaviour. But this general conservatism does not hold when their basic interests are affected (e.g. when policy positions either keep them in or drive them into poverty) and herein lies the problem for the elderly in Guyana.
A day hardly passes when they are not defined as generally and politically useless. Yet they have a vote like everyone else and would like to have a decent quality of life to the end of their days. But the political elite believes that, more than any other age category, the elderly view their basic interests in terms of racial exclusion: how to keep the other race out of office! Indeed, the elite tends to view the elderly as the bulwark of tradition political attitudes. Thus we hear: “We must work with the old generations to teach this new one about the past and the need to vote for us and keep us in government if our people are to be safe” and “We have to worry about the youths who have never experienced the devastations of the Burnham era”.
Therefore, in my view, until the elderly as a group stop being handmaidens and become a threat to the political status quo, their material condition will not keep pace with their expectations.
To a degree, this kind of backward distributive approach exists even in the area of remuneration. In recent years, the government has been increasing salaries by across-the-board sums, usually about 5%, which hardly even cover the rate of inflation. The result of this is to give the person who already works for say $500,000 dollars a month a $25,000 increase and those who are literally on the poverty line, earning a minimum wage of about $40,000 per month only an additional $2,000. It is quite probable that $500,000 per month is still too small to attract the quality of people who now receive that sum and it would be developmentally counterproductive to attempt any level of redistribution by skewing a percentage that barely covers inflation, towards those earning the minimum.
However, a better approach, which Cheddi Jagan’s PPP/C agreed to with the trade unions in the public sector, was that salary increases should be divided into at least two parts.
One section should account for the level of inflation to attempt to maintain the value of salaries across the board and the other to reflect growth in the economy. This latter part could then be divided to take account of performance and/or improve the relative condition of the employed poor.
In my view, even the quarrel about the current rate of the VAT is a quick fix, untargeted approach. We need to devise, inculcate and seek to implement modern and more progressive notions of distributive justice.
henryjeffrey@yahoo.com
