Dear Editor,
I have lapsed in doing duty to citizens, those who need their predicament to be placed before the public. SN’s sweeping series on cost-of-living has continued week after week, while I prioritized calling out and exposing disreputable people. I neglected the struggling and suffering, and that I deeply regret. In chapter 71 of SN’s broadcasting of the grinding reality of ordinary Guyanese in Bare Root, East Coast Demerara, there was the universal cry: ‘prices going up’ or ‘prices changing every time the shop is visited.’ Five out of the ten residents of Bare Root used a word that should have no place in today’s Guyana. Coping. Trying to cope. Coping somehow. Coping with calamity. In the grandest country in the world, with the most dazzling statistics, why is anybody in this society groaning about coping? They are, and it is not a sound imagined on the wind. Is it heard, Mr. President?
When the name was first heard soon after returning here, I made a mistake. The thought was that the area was Beirut. Except that it was Bare Root, as in rock bottom, the gnarled and gritty ingredients for daily sustenance; the grimness of a dismal and drudgery-infested existence. There was such a Guyana then when there was no oil. Why are there these Bare Root hamlets dotted across this society in this time of great tidings, greater developments, and the greatest degree of national leadership? Like those fabulous GDP numbers, all the charts and graphs and tables and formulas (and leadership grandiosities), flew past these wretched communities with their wretchedly distressed people of Guyana. From 6 boulanger for GY$200 one week to 2 for GY$200 the next week, that was the endless dirge for a plethora of food products that sprang from those centre pages of SN on Monday, April 15th. Basic food products, I point out to Dr. Ashni Singh, he of Arthurian budget legends, and not Alaska salmon nor Beluga caviar nor Atlantic sturgeon. Simply some vittles and veggies. All this oil, and all these glorious budgets, and almost all our people are wasting away, one crippling droplet of blood at a time.
At a time when many Guyanese are complaining about food, President Ali should put a pause to his platitudes. The Hon. Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, has just the right prescription: wait for 2027 or thereabouts. In another age, and another version of me, I could commend his cure for the pangs of hunger, the pains that wrench Guyanese in Bare Root and those others who have bared their souls in the prior 70 episodes of SN brutal symphonic march. The problem that I push before the VP is that getting from today to tomorrow demands such sacrifice. I like Dr. Jagdeo’s cure; the concern is that it is killing Guyanese. To tell people dying on their feet about the heaven on earth to come is really the ultimate in leadership nonchalance, nothing but depraved indifference. There is something inhuman somewhere in there. To my dearest brother, Bharrat Jagdeo, I offer a prescription of my own: don’t rave and rant so roughly. Instead, work heartily and work honestly to come up with a different remedy. The future is now. People need relief now. All this budget money and oil money and infrastructure money, as if Guyana is in a race against time. In the meantime, there are those Guyanese in Bare Root and the many other Bare Roots of Guyana, who are either trapped in time or lost in the time of a primordial Guyana.
From a female resident of Bare Root came this stream of sublime profoundness: “I am hearing that we [the country] are receiving oil money now. Guyana, I think has the most resources, and still we are living in a crisis.” It may not be Shakespearean, but “crisis” does have the Dantean about it. Talk about the circles of hell, and there is Bare Root being one of them.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
