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Year-end Musings

Dec 31, 2008 Editorial

Tonight, another year would have ended and we would be remiss if we do not look back and reflect on what might have been done so that our lives could have been improved just a little more.
And we want to emphasise the last point: it is our firm conviction that most of our fellow citizens understand that we are a small underdeveloped country and that any development that comes our way can only be incremental. No one expects miracles.
We have to begin with the flooding that is making so many of us literally drown in our misery. Not only us but our animals: it was a heartbreaking sight captured in our front page of yesterday’s edition that showed so many animals about to go under. We do not wish to be alarmist but it now it appears that the dreaded “Lepto” has returned.
We all understand the administration’s point that they cannot control the weather but as taxpayers, we are not unreasonable to expect that we would not have the identical catastrophe recur year after year.
Our leaders are in the forefront of highlighting climate change at international fora; do they not appreciate the real-life effects in their own land? The explanations of incompetent pump attendants and silted-up canals have worn thin and threadbare: if we cannot fix the problem then we have to begin to think outside the box and maybe begin to move to higher grounds. But for sure we cannot continue to endure the degradation and dangers that come with the now bi-annual floods.
Even though it is contended that our economy will have grown this year by about five percent, there are very few ordinary citizens who can point to any growth in their own family expenditures. And this is the only place where it matters: there is, of course, the old distinction between growth and development. “Growth” can cover a multiplicity of sins, the worst being real people’s lives sliding backwards and yet being told that the “country has experienced growth”. There is no country outside its people.
We appreciate that it takes time for mega-investments to come to fruition but surely by now one would have expected that the long-promised Amaila Falls Hydroelectricity Project would have been nailed down.
Cheaper (or even more reliable) electricity would have improved our lives somewhat. Even the Skeldon mega-expansion that was touted as the linchpin for turning around the sugar industry (and consequently the lives of many thousands of Guyanese lives) seems to have become bogged down.
The touting of a billion-dollar investment in the bauxite sector as a “done deal” when it is only a Heads of Agreement, that is not an enforceable contract, is rubbing salt into a citizenry that has been long wounded. But maybe we do not have to await the silver bullets of mega-investments – small, widely distributed small businesses are more capable of providing increased employment in economies such as ours. Maybe we have been looking for salvation in all the wrong places.
While it may appear that we are placing all the responsibility for our dire straits on the present administration of the day, we are not unmindful of the unfortunate legacy that they inherited. But sixteen years is a long time and it is surely not asking too much to expect by now that we should have been convinced from the truth of our everyday experience that the road ahead leads upwards.
And even to those who extol the virtues of the “night-watchman state” that minimises its function to the barest minimum, we now have the reality of the US, the chief exponent of that viewpoint abandoning it for massive interventions that are intended to stabilize the economy and thus improve the lives of its citizens.
Then, of course, there are the promises of incumbents in the manifestoes issued at every general election.
We can end with the usual homily that extends the hope of a better next year, but we have to face reality and extrapolate our hopes from our present circumstances. From that perspective, it does not appear that we can expect anything other than more of “the same ole, same ole”.
It is therefore left to us “band our waists” and shape our own destiny.

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