Dear Editor,
Here we go, at least yours truly, still engaged and entangled in SN’s “How the cost of living is affecting people”, chapter 16 (SN March 20). With due courtesy to SN, and high regard for this riveting series, the cost of living situation is no longer affecting the Guyanese people, it is infecting them, and invaliding them. Indeed, it is a miracle that it hasn’t driven some of them insane. SN’s stop in the Diamond-Grove area, on the East Bank Demerara, instilled in our consciousness the punishing and pitiful reality of Guyanese in oil producing Guyana. One interviewee summed up the thinking of most Guyanese feeling the price squeeze: “I think the government has enough money to help the people, seeing that we are producing oil in Guyana now.” Well said brother; and it is a thought that I endorse, which I hope does not attract any sinister thinking on the part of the government’s watchers and defenders. Regardless, some truths just cannot remain suppressed, no matter who wishes for them to be so.
We are an oil producer, and given its near absence of meaningful and sustained benefits to the working class in Guyana (remember them, comrades?), sometimes I think that it is coconut oil that we are producing for its effects on the constitution of Guyanese. Spearheads and public relations helpers can lump the billions and harrumph about how much has been done. All I ask of them is to do the division, and see what results, how much that means, and where that leaves the poor and at the margins. Since nobody else has the care (or the courage) to say where that leaves Guyanese, stretched thin and with perpetually outstretched hands and hopes, both unfulfilled, then the ruff stuff falls on my head. It leaves the Guyanese on the outside of the oil cheesecake baring their breasts and crying their pain to SN on a weekly basis.
Almost weekly, if not quite daily, I read of new loans for new projects, as if there is this unholy hurry to accumulate more yards of roads, and add more completed pages in the bank accounts of those close to the action. I am sorry to be the bad guy, and point to those 11 Guyanese sharing their hurts about being unable to get what makes for a minimal standard of existence and dignity. It used to be a dozen, and my hope is that it is simply a matter of space, and not that the 12th man or woman didn’t have the strength because of anemia; or so much pride that a bad story was best left bottled inside; or that due to raw partisanship not one foul word could be said about the unhappy things going on with prices and cost of living effects. That is, even though family famine is a draining predicament.
Editor, I am asking if anybody cares about these people and the battalions of ones not spoken to standing behind them. What I noticed this week is that even the sellers are sharing their anguish. When 5 of 11 sellers are wailing their pain, then what does that say? Sellers are buyers too, so they are getting struck by lightning twice, and it is not occasional, but more like the norm. I know prices have spiraled to the summits when plantain features so prominently in the plaintive laments. Plantain, for crying out loud! I don’t believe that plantains pass through the GRA, meaning that they are not imported. If Guyanese can’t afford five pounds (or kgs) of plantains for a bare ‘bile and fry’ then what can they afford? How are they managing? Correction: how are they living?
Editor, I have refrained from speaking about the government in these cost-of-living contributions, though it a consideration not due. But I recall that President Ali has a $5B war chest. May I recommend that he releases all of it, and start thinking of some budget supplement to offer genuine, sustained relief to struggling Guyanese for the rest of the year. Please note: no hard words, a simple, humble appeal on behalf of the poor and the forgotten. Let them think, feel, believe, and know what it is to live in an oil producing country.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
