Dear Editor,
I have a dirty job today. I am joining PPP Government critics. No! not those who criticize a wasp-eaten, worm-infested government. Today I link arms with the critics from the PPP side who criticize those who criticize their beloved government. To the people in charge at Stabroek News (SN), I plead: please stop this cost-of-living series. This is done with every respect for the hard-hit communities affected, and the struggling people interviewed, who share their anguish in a country lavish with oil. I also tip hat to the tireless workers at SN. What follows is not tongue-in-cheek; both are swollen stiff from cost-of-living observations.
Frankly, SN’s cost-of-living series, now in its 36th week of running, is a source of embarrassment to a society that is the drooling envy of the world. If it were a Broadway show, it would have been a smash. Because it is about people short of finance and falling just short of famine, it is a monster slash and lash. How could this be? So many in so many places left to hold the ‘dirty end of the richly varnished oil stick’ to paraphrase Excellency Ali? In the interest of further saving the face of the PPP Government, and propping up a rather outclassed President, I refrain from mentioning what kind of matter varnishes the stick. But to SN I say, this is airing dirty laundry not only in the local domain, but globally, and doing so weekly. It is enough to drive any leader, any supporter, bananas, if they were not so already. I can imagine an Aleutian (Eskimo) chortling: Guyanese can have their ocean of oil, and shorthandedness, we will take the tundra with its ice, and a raging fire in the igloos.
Editor, I suggest that it would be infinitely more constructive to focus on the billions spent on roads and bridges that the villagers and city swells use, compliments of the PPP Government, to get to the refurbished markets, again thanks to a set of benevolent leaders. As good as those are, the bad news is what awaits at the shopping marts, markets, and mausoleums of accessing and buying. I didn’t even read SN’s Monday edition, regarding where its team visited, and what my fellow Guyanese had to say about the punishing cost-of-living. I can tell.
In terms of what I just referred to as mausoleums of shopping for food, the basics only, no luxuries like broccoli or Brussel sprouts, the price of admission is GY$10,000. Leave home on any given Saturday with less than that, and it would have been better to save the minibus fare. Or return home emptied of cash, and a basket half-empty. Since I am trying to say a kind word for President Ali and his PPP Government standing astride this national oil spectacular (it is a daily expo, isn’t it?), I look on the bright side of local life, and now see a food basket half full. Half full of what, with what left out, inaccessible is the question. Learning and adjusting such a mindset is called, though it is a work in progress. There are, however, some places where I absolutely will not go for any political party, or any party to the suffocation and starvation of working-class Guyanese: there will be no burying of head in the sand by this source. In the event that the last two sentences sound like readying for an election run in 2025 (looks like 2024 to me), I keep those embers warm and glowing, just to keep the stress and excitement levels up, and everyone at attention.
Seriously editor, Guyanese are feeling the cost-of-living pain, and it is savaging, crippling, draining. I take my leave by leaving four questions for my Guyanese brothers and sisters (all are) to take off their party hats, and put on their thinking caps, their human hats. First, what good is all this oil if there is one Guyanese yearning, hungering, possibly starving? Second, what happened to not one child (man or woman) left behind? Third, what does it say about many Guyanese classified as high income, when the item they can most easily afford is rum?
Finally, how do brothers Ali and Jagdeo (both doctors) live with themselves, can be so more fixated on sand when poor Guyanese have so little in their hand? Focus so much on steel, while gnawing pains of Guyanese are so real? Concentrate so heavily on wood, with numerous Guyanese condemned to the hood? Infrastructure on the rise, Guyanese fracture and study their demise? On each occasion, leaders look in the mirror, I believe it shatters and scatters their failures before the world.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
