Dear Editor,
So we have a clamour against our Parliamentarians for raising their salaries before paying the masses.
Editor, I think the complaints are premature and unjustified. The ex-prime minister says in his reaction to Minister Harmon’s comments that the PPP was developing the country. The reaction to the increases and other current national issues including the recent elections shows how undeveloped we really are.
Part of the problem is likely due to ignorance of basic economics. Many probably are unaware that governments cannot simply increase everyone’s pay by 50% without dire consequences. This lack of education goes back to the old PNC days when they refused to include ‘capitalist economics’ on the school curriculum. So we perhaps have a whole generation without this basic knowledge. If you think that all the government has to do is simply write a cheque for whatever increases it chooses you will of course be very angry they didn’t.
Those who know better think they should have waited in the queue, ensuring the workers are happy first. This group no doubt includes an ample amount of the management hypocrites who over the last 30 years inverted the principle of granting the highest salary increase % to the most lowly paid to one where we have the opposite. It would likely include union leaders who were complicit in the development of this same culture.
Red Thread says “We ordinary citizens are responsible for the government being in office. If it wasn’t for us, the presumably ‘no quality’ people, the ‘quality’ people would not have been in the positions they now hold. “. We need to put this in perspective. They followed the leaders. The architects of Mr. Hinds’ “development”, a word he could only use because he believes his own press (witness for just one thing the financial holes they were busy papering over like the Guysuco chasm the size of which even the good professor Thomas turns out to have underestimated) were busy intimidating anyone who dared to expose or criticise them and most of us, weasel-like, simply resorted to whispering in our corners . They intimidated and insinuated perpetual ownership of the country until some lawyers decided to act. Their names were Trotman (he who is too quick to apologise) and Ramjattan. These men took the bile and spit from their respective parties. They later linked hands with other lawyers and military men. There is a good reason why it is lawyers and doctors who take up politics. No one can intimidate their customers away.
But the problem with successful lawyers is that they are accustomed to being paid at a certain level and frequently. “No” say the highly principled population “Hol strain”. I disagree. When you want to impose philosophy and religion pick other leaders to follow – not lawyers. You had a choice and you will have it again. When you want to clean up the Augean stables that Guyana has become expect a lawyer to demand reasonable payment (in his opinion not yours)
It may yet turn out that this lot is just as self-serving and venal as the last. But we have to wait. My only concern is why that code of conduct has not been published.
The government can only pay the masses out of created wealth (or borrowed money – in which case it is someone else’s wealth) if we are to avoid the inflationary spiral ex PM Hinds is so afraid of. That job falls to the ministers who need to be paid now. How much is their call.
Under ex-PM Hinds “development” Guyana began to produce a considerable amount of brass for the first time. You have to have a lot of brass to parade a prominent expensive white elephant like the US$200 million Skeldon albatross, threaten another like Amaila Falls, and represent this incompetence as genius, and almost get away with it.
We have given some lawyers and military men the permission to lead a basket case of a country whose leaders of a previous generation bequeathed them a foreign policy nightmare which they are expected to solve while we find common cause with quislings and appeasers who will try to sabotage by their very words. And we expect them to do it while worrying about their expenses.
Are we really serious?
Yours faithfully,
Frederick W. A Collins
