Latest update April 26th, 2024 12:59 AM
Oct 25, 2015 Countryman, Features / Columnists
By Dennis Nichols
The heat is on, and I’m not talking only about the El Niño-generated kind that seems to be kicking in across the region. It’s also the flak our government is taking for those little ‘developments’ that appear contrary to some people’s recent expectations,
including of course the matter of ministerial salary increases to which John Public is taking very keen and bemused interest. Governments past and current expect such reactions I would think.
The heat gives voice to this hypothetical citizen and his female counterpart, Jane, who live their lives governed largely by something called perception, which is embraced in something called reality, especially where standard-of-living is concerned. I empathize with them because I am a part of that social class whose periodic income greatly exceeds its ‘outgo’ and who would feel greatly blessed by a tenth of some government officials’ salaries.
Perception is a deceptively unexciting word, but to John and Jane Public it gives structure and focus to what is happening in their lives. It also brings a great deal of apprehension about their present situation and to what the future holds for them under a government that, in its own perception of reality, (or reality of perception) appears, even if it’s not actually doing so, to be disconnecting itself from the daily dollar-stretching exertion of the common class. This is the Public’s perception, which is in fact their reality. And this is what many of them live out.
They have seen a family falling apart because of a cycle of poverty, disillusionment and immorality. They see a single mother with four school-age children living in a small apartment for which a rental of $30,000 a month was demanded. The woman works shift as a security guard for approximately $50,000 per month. Food, electricity, water, phone, transportation, school, clothing and miscellaneous expenses make a mockery of the remaining $20,000. She is in dire need. Her man-friend helps, but demands extraordinary favours of her including access to her teenage daughter. Anger stirs, violence ensues, and she is on the verge of mental and physical collapse. The Public know that this situation is not unique; is in fact multiplied a thousand times across the country.
There is another perception. Government Minister X works out of an air-conditioned office. He is unmarried and lives in his own house for which he pays an affordable monthly mortgage from a salary of between $500,000 and $1,000,000 a month. He receives several allowances, drives a duty-free car, receives discounts and get special treatment when he shops, supports two girlfriends, and twice a month spends in clubs more than what our security guard single mother earns in a month. His bank account is as stout as his waistline. All of this may not be absolutely true, but the PERCEPTION is very real.
Now our single mother has a 16 year-old son who dropped out of school in Form Two. He tries to smoke and drink away his perceived troubles, occasionally beats and threatens his siblings, accuses his mother of neglect, and imagines criminal activity as a cure for, or at least a distraction from, his problems. He has a girlfriend whose background is familiarly similar to his. Sex is a welcome release for both of them, care is not a priority, and an unplanned pregnancy is the result. Criminal activity no longer resides in his imagination, and the Camp Street jail becomes his home for a year. The ruinous story replicates itself endlessly.
As I said, John and Jane Public know all of what is alluded to in the previous three paragraphs. Into these scenarios enters a new national government, and suddenly, wild and joyous hope is kindled in the hearts and minds of the single mother, her incarcerated son, and tens of thousands of ordinary Guyanese. Change has come. Perception has changed. Anger and frustration are replaced by joy and happy anticipation. There is a palpable feeling of rebirth and renewal; lower cost of living will correspond to a higher standard of living, the public service will get a makeover; teachers, nurses, police officers and municipal workers will receive improved wages and who knows, government leaders may take a salary cut. But with the last of these speculations, perception and reality part ways.
Many have tried to justify the ministerial salary surge with the common denominator being that these officials need to be financially comfortable in order to put their best feet forward and work at optimal capacity for the good of our nation. Fine, but what about the feet, and the efforts of John and Jane Public? They must be finding it very hard to understand what to them is simply inexplicable. And the jargon-filled statements they see put forward by some persons to explain or justify this probably makes little sense to them as it does to me.
How many man-in-the-street Guyanese are linguistically astute enough I guess, to decipher, for example, this ‘sentence’ constructed by a Kaieteur News contributor in last Sunday’s paper? It reads thus – ‘The multiplicity of sometimes immeasurable performance oriented stresses sustained in the ministerial portfolio, to provide visionary, applicable, unique and easy to understand policy structures, considering multilevel factorial with several tiers of substructures considerations and possible interactions associated with main inputs such as technical, globalized, managerial, specification based, legal, availability, conformance, economic, crossed by myriads of block variable features for utility by the end-user (citizen) to facilitate measurable outcomes, must be primary considerations’.
So they try to plough through a muddle of reasons and explanations for what our political leaders have done and are doing, while at the same time trying to maintain their sanity and a degree of balance in a seemingly unbalanced world. At the end of the day, where this issue is concerned, all John, Jane and most of us are really interested in are the cost of living, our standard of living, and having the financial means to do more than just survive in the land of our birth. It’s a matter of dollars and ‘sense’!
I remember back in the seventies agonizing over the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots even then. I didn’t think too much about our politicians as belonging to the former group, but some big-shot ones made me consider certain ironies and anomalies. One of these was the fact that prominent political leaders who could afford many of the finer things in life often got those things as gifts from fawning supporters and forward-thinking business people. Not much has changed since then.
When I first heard about the proposed ministerial salary increases I told a Facebook friend, facetiously, that I thought it was a joke and I was waiting for the punch line. Now I am a bit more serious and less sarcastic. Maybe the ‘big ones’ can indeed have their increases which, hopefully, the passage of time will vindicate. And maybe also there will be a punch line to this apparent jest soon – a hefty, across-the-board dollar bonus for all public servants, prefiguring their own increases next year.
For the time being, December would be a great month for the bonus speculation to mesh with perception and reality. Time will reveal either my new-found intuition or my enduring naiveté.
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