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Sep 04, 2016 Features / Columnists, My Column
Each day something happens to make me wonder whether we are a self-destructive people. We start to import things that are readily available in Guyana, right down to bottled water. I am sure that I could not find a single bottle of water bottled in Guyana in any store outside of Guyana.
I will not even think about the imported coconut water. There I was at a friend’s home in Canada and he offered vodka and coconut water from Thailand. It turns out that the beautifully boxed product was not pure. It contained sugar and God knows what else to give the product some taste.
I suppose that Guyanese in the Diaspora would buy it out of nostalgia, but it is a waste of money. I refused to use it. Later, I learnt that I was not the only one. So we import coconut water because we cannot find the time to pay somebody to climb the tree in our yard or simply go to any of the coconut water stands that dot the landscape.
Things get even more complicated. I was once a public servant and one major concern was the pay. In my day there were annual increments, so the arguments for higher pay were not as strident as they are today. Increments went out decades ago and paved the way for this bargaining.
Former President Bharrat Jagdeo simply scuttled any attempts at bargaining and unilaterally offered a five per cent hike over the years. And being the smart person he was, he paid the money close to Christmas time when everybody seems to need every bit of money they could get.
This year there was the first serious attempt at bargaining. As could be expected, the proposal by the bargaining union and the position of the government would not gel. So, there is often an agreement. From the government side there is a need to look at the budget and at the cost of these increases.
I remember when the Armstrong Commission ruled that the public servants should receive a 50 per cent increase over two years. The public servants were happy, but the government eventually claimed back every cent over a very short time. Four years after that astronomical increase, the public servants were once more haggling for a pay increase.
Then something else happened. The International Monetary Fund had always told the government to cut jobs, reduce public spending. Public servants suffered. Many were simply let go and their positions were never filled. We then witnessed the contract worker who got more than the public servant and enjoyed other benefits.
The public service has grown since May 2015. More people have been employed, but the economy has not grown correspondingly. This would mean that any demand for more pay would have an even greater impact on the economy.
The police force is constantly increasing in size given the desire to crush criminal activity in the country. We have all remarked at the rate of crime solving. I see expansions in other sections of the public service. The Finance Minister has said that the proposed increase would hike the wages bill by $20 billion.
From my layman position, I see a ten per cent increase for the lowest category of public servants, greater than the previous administration ever offered. And this followed the payout the new government made last December.
My simple calculation tells me that the lowest public servant would get somewhere between $6,000 and $10,000 per month more. Those earning a million dollars per month would also get a $10,000 increase.
But the problem rests with the fate of the public servants if the international lenders should have to become involved in determining the way forward for the country. One thing though, the government has not closed the door to further negotiation, but I would have thought that the public servants would have grasped the pay increase at this time especially when many have to get children back to school.
But who am I to dictate to the Guyana Public Service Union? I am sure that its decision does not find favour with the public servants who want money. Don’t tell me to deny myself with the hope of getting more. I may not get more.
There is also another thing that makes me conclude that we are self-destructive. Most of us take a drink, some in alarming quantities. The medical experts say that Guyana has an exceedingly high percentage of diabetes and hypertension. These are largely lifestyle diseases, so we are doing something wrong.
We have become fast food junkies, so we increase our risk of becoming diabetic. To compound the issue, we drink beverages that only increase our blood sugar—things like beer and rum that are high in sugar content.
I was amazed when I saw the number of people requiring dialysis. There were young people who might have been predisposed to renal failure, but there were others who developed this disease because of their lack of activity.
But outside of the diseases there are things that happen with large quantities of alcohol in our systems. I got a shock when I read that a drunk driver had killed a man on the Railway Embankment. What was surprising for me was that this was a man I met under strange circumstances. He had knowledge of the Freddie Kissoon miasmic incident.
This man was having regrets, so a friend persuaded him to come forward and to apologise to Freddie. He did come forward and offered to testify against the intellectual authors. I know that he gave a statement to the police.
Now that he is dead his statement should still be presented to the court for what it is worth. When I heard of his death on the road I believed that he was target for execution. It turned out that he was just having fun and was unlucky enough to be hit by a drunk driver.
While there are those who may be celebrating his death, there are others who regret this young man’s death. One person said that he believes that obeah had a role in the man’s death.
LISTEN HOW JAGDEO WILL MAKE ALL GUYANESE RICH!!!
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