Dear Editors,
I am grateful for some space to discuss a few issues and extend the spotlight that MP Amanza Walton-Desir put on the Christinas of Guyana onto the Mikes of Guyana – male single parent households that are also engaged in the daily mental acrobatics to make ends meet. We hear a lot about single mothers because they are the majority, but unfortunately, not all mothers are Christinas, and we do have single fathers whose struggles are invisible to policy makers. When a minority group is invisible, it means that they are granted no rights and survive in a state of oppression.
In Guyana, in general, we have little empathy for the emotional well-being of men. Social services are characterized by the stereotype of men as abusers of women and a woman can show up with any story and be readily believed. Men in Guyana are not supposed to ask for help. They are supposed to be tough, to go get a job, to slog it out, to find some way to bring home the dollars. The reality is that men are people too – they have emotions, they get emotionally hijacked, they have mental health issues, they do suffer from depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and lack of confidence, immaturity, negativity, autism, dyslexia and the whole range of human emotional and psychological experiences.
Combined with poor education and poor coping strategies of smoking, drinking, ‘rowing’, cursing, suicide, crime, obsession, and violence we end up with a bleak reality for the most vulnerable and stressed out in society. If the Agencies with responsibility for social services cannot articulate the social problems that the nation faces (and they cannot, because they don’t) then we will continue to stir pots in big offices, make a lot of splashes and go nowhere, while people who need help do not receive any. The areas where the most vulnerable people of Guyana need help receive little or no recognition from the Government.
MP Amanza Walton-Desir’s full ‘Christina’ presentation in Parliament can be found on her Facebook page and I agree with her that very little can be considered cute in the face of the dire economic situation that most Guyanese find themselves in – even those of us with jobs are living from paycheck to paycheck. There is certainly irony in policy makers feasting while others can’t afford to buy simple basics like chunks in the supermarket. This was not cute in the Burnham era and neither is it cute today. However, the mathematics error is not the first time that this MP has made errors in her public utterances. A life in politics in a diverse nation will necessarily expose to us our biases, weaknesses and challenge our false assumptions. But regardless of the mistakes, what is consistent about MP Amanza Walton-Desir is her passion for dealing with the issue of the cost and standard of living, the bread-and-butter issues and economic injustice– and this is a unifier as social and econonomic injustice is a problem that cuts across all divides.
I do wonder why more politicians and leaders are not as enraged as Amanza Walton-Desir as that three children died in a fire while their mother was at work? Why aren’t policy makers in a rush to put in place systems to ensure these kinds of tragedies never reoccur? Children died!!! Three of them!!! Because their mother was at work!!! Our policy makers aren’t enraged because they don’t care. Women in Mahdia have to leave their children in the care of ‘family members’ because they need to work. The untold stories of early childhood suffering, rape, abuse, neglect find their echos in retarded intellectual and psychological development. These are the kinds of problems that we need to put an end to in Guyana but meeting the needs of Exxon Mobil is more important and especially to the men in parliament – of both sides of the divide.
We need balance and it seems to fall upon the women to bring that balance. The PPP/C always finds a woman to lead the Ministry of Social Services – for reasons that only they know. We need to start somewhere in this country with social policy. Single parents, of both genders, need consistent support not random handouts. Never should we ever ask a single father or mother to go to work when underaged children will be left at home unsupervised or in the care of the unfit. I would never condone that, and neither should a government. At minimum, our society must support the development of children. I am energised to see a woman packing a punch like Amanza Walton-Desir in parliament. Letter writers and opinion setters don’t create great change. Parliamentarians do.
Unfortunately for the MP, her party has less than zero credibility and a dismal track record. The Ministry of Buses, Boats and Bicycles became a joke on the Granger Administration and another example of partisan politics, for where was the transparency and fairness and justice in its implementation? At the back of my home, buses were taking poor children of one ethnicity to school. At the front of the house, poor children of another ethnicity were walking to the public road to pay their $100. It is in this argument for the Buses, Boats and Bicycles of the Granger Administration vs the ‘Because We Care’ Cash Grant of this administration that Amanza Walton-Desir fell flat on her face.
While I, and many others, have never received the Covid-19 cash grant and the numbers to call to get it never worked and the list of unanswered requests for help to Social Protection is endless, implementation of the ‘Because We Care’ cash grant is done in an equitable and consistent manner across gender, race, regions, religion, Public and Private Schools because the Ministry of Education has an existing infrastructure to support it. The argument was hollow and maybe that is why a brilliant woman would stumble in trying to articulate it. Another problem for Amanza Walton-Desir is that the economic policies of the previous administration strangled the economy. And there can be no social and economic justice with a poor economy. The economy must be fixed first.
The previous administration relied on taxation for Government revenue, and they increased cost of living to such an extent that most of the country, me included, was glad to see the back of them. What the Ali/Jagdeo administration is doing is something different – and for us to make progress in this nation, at least some members of the PNC/APNU, as the major opposition, need to demonstrate understanding of the economic theory that is being pursued by Ali and Jagdeo and be able to argue sensibly against them, if needed. If we invest the time to listen and learn from the Other side, then we may actually be able to stop with the ‘duplicity’ and the ‘mental laziness’ and all the other projections.
The MP essentially stated in her presentation to Parliament that she has no understanding why the PPP/C was dealing with VAT exemptions for cement board and lubricating oil, and airfares and bringing such things to Parliament and maybe some basic understanding of economics will help quench the righteous anger and improve the quality of the argument. But what her arguments also show is her focus – she aimed directly at a blind spot of the PPP/C because she was asking for the House to get serious about the living conditions of the People of Guyana and for a Universal Basic Income (being experimented with in Barbados) for every Guyanese over the age of 18 to uphold the Fundamental Human Rights of our Citizens.
After decades of a PPP/C Government, we have no proper social policies that are targeted at the Bread-and-Butter issues facing the population and it is time they get serious about the people of Guyana – those people who never saw the inside of an aircraft, who can’t fly out and run away and who do not know what their family will be eating for dinner. The fact of the matter is that a good percentage of Guyanese are begging for food and shelter and clothing – our basic needs are unmet, a violation of our basic human rights. And it is us, the ordinary Guyanese who are helping our brothers and sisters, neighbors and countrymen, with remittances,
barrels, charity, ‘box hand’ and the informal granting of credit from the tiniest corner shop to small businesses – we are subsidizing the Government and are providing social security net to each other and doing what our governments, across the political divide, have systematically failed to do.
Successive administrations cannot even fix the black hole of NIS disappearing our contributions. It is just not important enough. Some of us are being murdered in the process of helping others, small business owners are stressed out trying to collect debts owed to them, and minibus drivers are still racing each other down the road to earn a dollar. Ours is a desperate reality that we sweeten with a lot of humour and kindness. Amanza Walton-Desir has said that President Ali doesn’t know what One Guyana looks like – maybe it looks like the best of all of us working together, bringing the competitive advantage of each of our diverse cultures into synergy for the development of the nation’s people. Maybe it looks like the economic policies of the PPP/C and the social policies of an Amanza Walton-Desir and the environmental policies of Lenox Shuman? And the wisdom of the Chinese? For Rebellion is not the only answer as the wise say that the acme of skill is not to fight and win a hundred battles, but to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Just maybe, One Guyana is the best of all of us working together? To get there, we all need to overcome our own resistance to working with and learning from the Other. As the saying goes, everybody wants change, but nobody wants to change. I have been calling for a better social policy in Guyana for years, but writing creates little change – it is action that is required. And I stand with the poor people’s champion in Parliament – Amanza Walton-Desir. Passion doesn’t fizzle, so I look forward to more of Amanza Walton-Desir because, finally, we are seeing representation for the poor People of Guyana. The Ali/Jagdeo administration needs pause and introspection because its members are living in a Bubble and the PPP/C is no longer on the side of labour, they are no longer the workers’ party and the handouts it is throwing at us are like a raindrop in the ocean of need.
Sincerely,
Sandra Khan
