Dear Editor,
I was preparing to comment on the previous day’s housing allowance headline when I read on Wednesday that the “$500,000 maximum house allowance applies only for ministers from out of town” (SN June 28). This clarification is helpful, but it does not add up to much of a difference. It is too much; it is another terrible message that speaks to feathering of nest.
To begin with, it would be interesting to learn as to what is the definition of “out of town.” Given the sometimes thoughtless and reckless, and increasingly insulting behaviour of this government, out of town could come to mean anywhere past the Harbour Bridge, and in any direction, except to the north, as well as to the east of UG.
More pointedly, $25,000 a month (and more) is what the working, struggling, crying class in this society has to scrape from somewhere to pay for rented facilities. It is a monthly demand and grind that cannot be evaded, and impacts teachers, nurses, gardeners, domestics, labourers, students, and that army of citizens whose pay is below $100,000 monthly. Everyone knows that the going monthly rate for decent unfurnished space is not $25,000, but anywhere between $35,000 and $75,000. And somehow this is found, with the hope that funds still can be found for food.
With this as hard reality and context, it is incredible and inexplicable that there would be this development of a maximum of $500,000 monthly for out-of-town ministers. It is insane and insulting to the suffering Guyanese toiler. I understand that housing allowance could include basics such as bed, television, refrigerator, microwave and the rest. But $500,000 per month conveys that somebody in government may be a sleeping partner in some rental business through the supplying of rental apartments –luxury apartments. I know of landlords who rent fully furnished apartments in Georgetown (by the narrowest definition) for less than half of that maximum figure. It is why I advance that $500,000 a month rises to the lap of luxury, and also opens the door to chicanery and creativity.
Editor, here is another thought and reality: the nation’s soldiers, teachers, and others posted to locations away from their homes are not privy to this kind and level of financial generosity. They have to make do with what is thrust upon them, take it or leave it.
Sometimes it is ramshackle and threadbare. Even as I write this, I just noticed that there is a move on in the mighty US for an annual housing allowance of $30,000 for members of Congress; also a thoroughly undeserving bunch of mainly underperformers. Come to think of it that works out (using my convenient exchange rate of G$200 to US$1) to $500,000 Guyana per month. I congratulate the local thinkers and engineers for wanting to be on par with the rich and famous, and brethren from the ducal class.
My position is that this housing allowance should not exceed a maximum of $200,000 monthly, and that for a furnished flat. I appreciate that it could be a bottom flat; this could be their real-life (and real) log cabin story. In this way ministers get to identify with how real Guyanese live; they get to experience firsthand the incomparable delights of waking on water (some believe that they walk on it already) in the house.
Through this, ministers can come to associate with the dismay, the travails, the anxieties, the noise pollution, the garbage cycle, the parliamentary language and decorum, and the overall harshness of true Guyanese existence. I think it is a much-needed lesson.
All of this would help all ministers to get some rare humility; some servant-leader gloss, and something resembling (however sparingly) a self-sacrificing nature. The message to neighbours would be: I know your pain; I feel it. I am living it, too.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
