Dear Editor,
It takes a special kind of government to turn its face from the cries of hardships coming from the people. It calls for an extraordinary type of leadership to hear the repeated anguish of their brothers and sisters and move along without so much as shrug. Long suffering citizens who are at their wits end, because they don’t know what to do to make it with the local cost of living epidemic. Like a virus, the cost of living in Guyana travels from place to place and it is contagious to those whose defenses were thin to begin with and have all but collapsed. Hilltop Village on the Soesdyke-Linden Highway is the newest casualty now revealed by SN this week. Why is this feature, this series, not awarded a medal for the coverage of what the real Guyana looks like, sounds like, and lives with somehow?
It is chapter 82 in the SN coverage, which has become a weekly threnody of the agony of Guyanese scattered across the richest country per breathing human being in the global sprawl. It is 82 slaps across the mug of Excellency Ali, a reminder that people feel, and they can’t eat steel; and after all the rising infrastructure monuments made of sand and stone, there are those Guyanese who exist in cost-of-living tombs made of sand and stone. When the assaults of rising prices rain down on them, the poorer people of Guyana wash away, and when the heat of this food item going up, and that one already gone way out of hand, then the stone of their tombs trap them in an inferno from which there is no getting away.
From Hilltop came those piercing, sobering, blasts. I read about the cost of living is “hard on me and my husband” (Ms. Kalawattie Couchman); how it is “very hard on us” (Ms. Gangadai Persaud); how it is “still hard on me” (Mr. Nathram Persaud); and how when he considers where the cost of living is “things expensive bad” (Mr. Alfred Cramer). These are not unindustrious citizens, or fast money, get rich quick Guyanese. They are Guyanese dreading to deal with the dawn and then dragging themselves around to the corner shop or, worse, the market. Dr. Jagdeo is the man about economics, and it would be interesting to hear his expositions on why this is so in Hilltop Village and all the other Hilltops across Guyana. I refer to the previous 81 visited by SN; the other 1,081 and more still to be touched for a moment by the market clock paper.
It is as if the Stabroek Market clock fell plumb center on the heads of Guyanese who encounter such heavy weather in managing with a paralyzing and fear-inducing cost of living regime. Perhaps, the economist in the big kahuna may tell them that they must learn to economize better. In the country with the most drawing power in the universe, one that disdains economic gravitational forces, there are these Guyanese (dose peeeple) forced to draw their belts tighter and tighter than ever before. I identify for economist Jagdeo, that this is what happens when there are reverse budgetary allocations (reverse distributions) from the national wealth of Guyanese. In creole, who get get, who aint get aint get. They also get to deal with cost of living hourly and SN weekly.
How can the man responsible for the money, Dr. Singh, be so irresponsible? Genuinely papered, but still insanely so, intolerably so, and irreparably so. I take the liberty of saying so. What can be a bigger “national development priority” Dr. Ashni, when Guyanese are hungry, empty, going crazy? There is appreciation that they may have had frontal lobotomies, but c’mon, not heart removal too. They all speak of Guyana being a shining city on a hill. But then there comes along a forlorn Hilltop in a faraway place called the Soesdyke-Linden Highway that strips them of their clothes first, pretenses at expertise next, and whatever standing they had in the national leadership tank last.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
