Our season of discontent

Dec 20, 2010 Editorial

As the end of another year approaches, thoughts inevitably coalesce in assessment of what has been accomplished and what lies ahead. In the usual course of events, this would be a season of joy, not only for Christians but for Guyanese from all walks of life.
As a country founded to produce sugar, it was the one time of the year that our foreparents could look forward to a break in their life of unmitigated drudgery and make merry with the end-of-year baubles and trinkets that came our way.
Meagre as their possessions were, they could at least look forward in happy anticipation to the day when the foreign rulers would be thrown out: how much more would they have to enjoy!
Well, that day has come and gone some forty-four years now and our year-end assessment has to consider the irony that in so many ways our situation is even bleaker than before we became “independent”.
It should be of no comfort to consider that sugar, the site of our humiliation and degradation for hundreds of years, remains the largest source of employment in our independent country. If the conditions of that employment were in any way more conducive to a life of dignity, one may overlook the irony.
But what is the reality for the more than twenty-thousand sugar workers today? No bonus to even buy a trinket for their children; no “back-pay” to help pay off their old mountain of debt before they begin to accumulate another in their “out-of-crop” season. The effects go far beyond the workers alone as the businesses, which had counted on their patronage, would be hard pressed to keep their heads above water.
The situation is not much different for bauxite workers – such as those that remain employed. Burdened by incompetent government ownership – as sugar is today – we lost our markets and saw our employment in this sector inexorably shrink from the thousands to the miserly hundreds that have to grovel to keep their jobs.
Does the rest of Guyana ever wonder how the thousands that were thrown out of employment eke out a living today? The bauxite industry in our interior used to absorb much of the excess labour from the coastal villages – especially those dominated by African Guyanese. Are we surprised that these villages are seething – as soon will be sugar-dominated Indian villages?
On the surface the rice industry might appear to be doing well, with three hundred thousand tons exported for the first time in history. But we have to appreciate that the vast majority of rice farmers cultivate plots of five acres and less and their income is therefore sliced into very thin slivers indeed.
If these farmers were to factor in the labour of their children, wives and relatives on top of all the ever-increasing imported inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, their lives of grinding poverty would be explained.
And of course, we come to the many thousands of public servants and teachers that have to exist on an average salary hovering on the high side around thirty thousand dollars monthly.
Our weak dollar forces a distorted picture of that reality which might be corrected if we consider that this princely sum is only US$150 – in an economy that in effect prices goods at US rates. What dignity is left for these workers after their rents, transportation and clothing costs are factored in to give them a daily bread?
But not to worry. We have been assured that our economy is bucking the tide regionally and further afield and is steadily “growing”. Numbers cannot lie, can they? What we do know is that numbers are arbitrary constructs that measure what we want them to measure.
There is today a growing trend to throw out the old statistics that are completely divorced from the lives of the living, breathing persons and to begin talking about the “happiness” factor. This is what life is ultimately all about.
The question then becomes for us in Guyana: are we happy? And the answer has to be “NO!” in this season of our discontent.

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Our season of discontent

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