Dear Editor,
I am grappling with whether to praise SN or pummel it. The series about the Cost of Living, now in its ninth chapter, and how it is impacting ordinary Guyanese is raw, searing, and too much of a grim reminder of the reality of oil soaked, oil bloated Guyana not having much of a material impact on citizens where it matters. In their pockets. On their tables. And in their visions and hopes for themselves. Because SN has run the great risk of being dismissed and denounced into the wilderness of ‘naysayer’ and ‘troublemaker’, I think that alone is worthy of giving thanks for its continuing efforts to shed light on the true state of real Guyanese in the byways and alleyways of local life.
What I read to the point of numbness was ‘gone up’ and gone up and gone up from lip to lip; and that people are struggling and suffering. This is neither imagination nor exaggeration; it certainly is not partisan. So, I wonder what the PPP punditocracy has to say about the hurting of the small Guyanese man, woman, and family. Biggest GDP and fastest growing economy might as well be on Mars, or 2,000 years ago during the time of the Roman Empire, for all that those curvaceous statistics mean to those who are grasping for pak choy and bora, and only coming up with a battering of the psyche and dignity. It is for the simple reason that what is not out of range is out of reach, pricewise.
Still, this does not mean that those essentials are out of mind for Guyanese trying to put the next pot together. I ask a favour: somebody please send a cable to the President busy with his latest jaunt and junket, and give him the straight story of how Guyanese are reeling from the cost-of-living impacts. Editor, while the President and his cabinet labour over this year’s budget, the hope is that they will remember, in the broadest expanse of the word, the plight of poor Guyanese families punished by spiraling prices. It means that they have to do with less, or nothing at all, given their limited purchasing power. My wish is that the private sector (the less than 1% of the population section) will get their due, but not as much, and the poor and weak of Guyana will get more, and more of what is realistic. I can present a whole array of measures involving income tax relief, VAT relief, subsidies, and the like, but I know that the budgeteers know more about what is needed, and what has to be done than I ever could.
The onus is on the PPP Government, and the President to grasp the pain and fears of Guyanese and do something about those. Not presidential pontificating. No more political propaganda, please. Just the goods; deliver them, so that there is palpable difference in the lives of those bruised and beaten down by the cost-of-living. Once the PPP Government is more giving, the people would see their way through the cost-of-living torments. For them, inflation is not a textbook term, it is the specter of an empty plate most days of the week. As an aside, somebody said the other day, I think it was GAWU, that the PPP Government has made its moves and extended helping hands, but that the pass through effect has not touched the Guyanese who need the aid the most, the little ones. What GAWU sensibly left out was that the people who have been beneficiaries of the PPP Government’s well-intended relief measures are almost exclusively PPP backers, yet they turn around and gouge their fellow citizens.
This is not a critic working overtime to make the PPP look bad, but its own people undermining its sometimes-noble measures. Regardless of who is doing what, the time has come for the President to step on the gas/accelerator and deliver through a well-thought out, structured, and comprehensive package of measures what is real, what is tangible, and what instils in Guyanese dragging on their bottoms in the mud that they, indeed, do live in a fabulously endowed oil country. Be done with poultices and plasters; quick fixes are not working beyond the moment. My final word is that the President should visit the slums of Kolkata to get a glimpse of humanity on the ropes, so that he can identify with the lot of some Guyanese not too distant from that tableau. And if he is really bold, take in Kashmir, and then he can know what the Mayor of Georgetown meant.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
