Cost of living – Guyana groaning, gasping

Jul 25, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

Hard Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – From Mahdia came another set of wails: “high.”  Atlantic Ville on the East Coast Demerara upped the volume: “very high.”  Together, fellow citizens-hurting men and women-from those two Guyanese communities bared their bosoms and shared their pain.  I read “high” and “very high” so many times, in SN’s Cost of Living series, section 85, that a little head spinning occurred.

GHK Lall

I am real serious about the real shame of many fellow citizens in a country that is really the richest to be found anywhere in the world, and per person. How could this be happening with food?  Why is this allowed to go on, other than for defensive speeches from political leaders with the resources in their hands?  I have a word of counsel for the hard of hearing and the hardhearted in the PPP Government top brass: stop arguing, start addressing the pain of the people.  It can be done, but only if there is real honesty, real quality leadership.  Not distraction nor dissembling nor disingenuousness, and both President Dr. Ali and Vice President Dr. Jagdeo know very well what I mean.  It should be noted that I keep using that word (real).  It applies to Guyanese in real trouble, encountering real difficulty coping.  All the roads cannot ease all that wretchedness.  Ease up on the rogueries of comrades, give some relief from that same road and bridge money to hungry people.

They are real Guyanese, real people, of flesh and blood hurts, and not that bloodless statistical creature named ‘the richest people in the world per capital.’  I have long ago arrived at a conclusion: the heads of the poor in Guyana were not included in those computations, now nothing but an abstraction (and a source of dissatisfaction) for those grappling with a grinding cost-of-living environment.  Once again, this time not to toss what is deserving in the face of top political people, but to place such on their heads, I bring the shortchanged and shorthanded in Guyana today.  They are from Mahdia and Atlantic Ville.  And all the others before.  We are proud of lavishing extravagant sums to build monuments that reach for the sky; there is distaste and scornful dismissal in dealing with Guyanese forced to the edges of the economic gutter, if not to the bottom of it.  Am I being heard, Dr. Jagdeo?  Does the grimness of their circumstances mean anything, Dr. Jagdeo, Dr. Ali?

It is the national embarrassment of honest Guyanese crying for relief in a season of so much mathematical sweetness, but who are rewarded with the callousness of their leaders, their clumsy rationalizations, their pitiful protestations.  To be high-beam clear, when I say leaders, I am identifying Dr. Ali and Dr. Jagdeo for special mention in that gallery.  I would prefer that it not be the one well-known by people who deal with the law.  To reveal the substances of our leaders in their reactions to this crippling cost of living crisis, I go an extra furlong to cut a fine point.  Dr. Ali and Dr. Jagdeo are now so close to, so enchanted by, their inspiring culture of brick and board, steel and stone, that these are what they have morphed into, in the steeliness of their responses.  Rather than try to uplift, they drop Guyanese overboard without a paddle.  How does that help one hungry Guyanese?  Instead of giving a long, hard, unending moment of scrutiny to Guyana’s cost of living calamity spread near and far, Drs. Ali and Jagdeo argue, as if this is some political debate, with points scored.  When the two of these caring and compassionate chiefs get angry, I ask the brothers to consider something: How does their being angry ease the gnawing pangs of one hungry Guyanese child or pensioner?

The hunger-ridden and anxiety-pounded in Mahdia and Atlantic Ville, do not want to hear about how well Dr. Ali and Dr. Jagdeo have done.  They are saying publicly that this is their position and want to know why all that should have been done is not done.  One female interviewee said a spoonful that was a full ocean of complete contempt: “all the government doing is talking, talking.”  Since the president and vice president miss nothing, they should have absorbed the full brunt of what captured the essence of the PPP Government’s response to the harrowing cost of living conditions of distressed citizens.  Now for the ungloved palm.  Any president, any vice president, who presides over a calumny like Guyanese cost-of-living (at this time) should flog himself for his retreat into oblivion, his misidentification of the environment, and his mismanagement of all the money.  The richest country with all these impoverished people.  The heat of GDP at furnace temps pushing and pushing prices upwards, while turning Guyanese into frozen blocks of ice that just refuse to thaw.  I am sure that that is higher than the heads of the highest people in Guyana.  Our people are being burned by rising prices (an oft repeated term in Mahdia and Atlantic Ville), and that scorching instills a chilling fear.  I hear people crying; I sense leaders smirking, having a whale of a time in the richest country in the world per head.  The head people at the head table who have lost their heads.  They are dead to the harsh cost-of-living realities in Guyana, as lived by real Guyanese.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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