Latest update May 7th, 2024 12:59 AM
Feb 01, 2015 Features / Columnists, My Column
Technology is really going places and it is taking me with it. A few years ago if I wanted to research a topic I had to rush to some library where there were tomes of Encyclopedia Britannica. Of course it meant some travelling and a lot of note-taking. The laptop was not as ubiquitous as it is today; the tools were mainly a tape recorder into which one would whisper in the library, or a notepad and a pen.
But then the computer industry burgeoned and then came Google with information on just about everything under the sun. I now refer to Google whenever something would elude my memory or if I wanted to check something.
So it was when I wanted to examine the claims by the government that it had increased wages and salaries by humongous amounts. Indeed, this is a communication ploy to make people feel that they are better off than they ever were.
Of course, for years I have been hearing that the government improved wages and salaries by hundreds of per cent. Old age pensioners were akin to millionaires with the money they got and the boast went on. Those figures were imposing, so I turned to Google.
I found that when the Guyana Government built the Soesdyke-Linden Highway it did so at a cost of US$17 million. It built the Demerara Harbour Bridge at a similarly low cost. Today we hear that simple road repairs cost millions of dollars, much more than US$17 million. The government is spending some US$230 million to improve the West Demerara road which is about half the length of the Soesdyke-Linden Highway.
Similar checks revealed that the Pegasus Hotel was constructed for a fraction of the cost the country is spending to build the Marriott.
The point here is that inflation has made its impact. Money no longer has the same value it has today. I recently edited a feature on one of Guyana’s entrepreneurs and was shocked to see what $5,000 in 1976 would mean in today’s currency. Gunmen robbed the entrepreneur and he had to borrow and beg to replace what was taken.
In his book $5,000 in local currency would be worth close to $15 million today. Could this man boast that his money has increased hundredfold?
When I started working I earned a princely $96.50 less taxes back in 1966. I was able to help pay my mother’s rent and give her money to help with food while I supported myself at Bartica. The minimum wage today is nearly $40,000 per month, a far cry from what I received as a teacher back then. I surely cannot boast that the government has done fantastically for anybody by moving a salary of $96.50 per month to the $50,000 that is paid to an untrained teacher.
There is a joke I still tell people. Back in 1979 I paid $24,000 for my house. Today I cannot even find a shack that I could buy for that sum. In fact, when I replaced the eastern wall a few years later I spent more than $80,000.
My bridge cost me more than the house did and painting it costs hundreds of times more. Is it that I indulged in luxury when I did those things? But then again, electioneering is something that one can never really understand.
I recall Godfrey Wray buying a house in Bel Air Park for $200,000 back in the 1980s. For me it was a dream house. A few years later he sold it for $2 million. He can’t even buy a dilapidated house in the most depressed part of the city for that. He might get a government house lot.
So I sit back and hear about the fantastic improvements the government talks of when it comes to wages and salaries. The very government sells a plot of land for house lot at a whopping $1.5 million. It is therefore mindboggling that a government can ignore the effect of inflation unless it wants the simple-minded Guyanese to believe that they are so much better off, even as some live in squalor.
Which of us can give a child a dollar to go to school these days? I was tempted to say 25 cents, but then I remembered that this latter sum is a matter of my imagination. In fact, it is so unimaginable that when I asked some reporters, all of them under 25 years old, to tell me how many cents are there in a dollar, not one could tell me. They had no concept of a cent.
Beggars frown on $20 bills and with good reason. I surely do not make life better for a beggar who used to jump to high heavens when he got a dollar back when, if I now give him $20. I am likely to have that piece of paper thrown back at me.
Of course, there are things that depreciate; things like computers and external hard drives which have storage capacities that were unimaginable a few years ago—in the days when a 10 megabyte storage was a big thing for an e-mail account.
Who can recall getting a message that you did not have enough capacity to receive an e-mail? Not so these days. And so it was that people are clamouring for more money. In 1999 a tribunal awarded public servants a 50 per cent hike in their salaries. Two years later they were right back where they started.
Don’t tell me about the whopping increases paid. My taxes also went up astronomically to help pay those increases of which the government boasts.
GRA catch EXXON trying to hunch GUYANA over 11 BUS dollars in one shot!!!!
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