How much money is enough?

Mar 27, 2011 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

It was only last week that I had cause to examine the issue of how much land does a man need. It turned out that all a man needs is six feet of burial plot. Some people, depending on their height, may require a bit more but when all is said and done, this mad scramble for large chunks of land is not worth the effort.
Someone read that column and said to me that this scramble for land is rooted in the scramble for money. I had to agree, because if there is no money then one cannot buy land. Of course, this is not entirely true, because people would also try to grab land that they believe is not owned. And even if it is owned, they would proceed by prescriptive rights.
However, I was forced to ask, “How much money does an individual need?” I am well aware that the salary the average worker receives is never enough, because in life there are so many things that an individual needs.
I remember back in 1973 we got a substantial back pay. I had no fridge, no floor model stove and certainly no house of my own. When the government announced the back pay I was ecstatic.
I told myself that I would continue to live on what I was earning and that I would use the back pay to buy the things I needed. Having achieved that, I would then save the extra money.
The truth was that I managed to buy the fridge on terms from Fogarty’s, but I never managed to save all of the extra money. For some reason prices simply went up and it began to cost more to live day to day. It became like that with every back pay. Trying to save became a chore.
It was in such a context that I understood why many people tried to get as much as they could. They began to demand money to do their job.
This past week I reported on a horror story involving City Hall and the Central Islamic Organisation.
The latter wanted a plot of land that had been bequeathed to it. All that City Hall needed to do was issue a notice that stated that all the taxes had been paid and that the way was clear for ownership of the land to be transferred.
Ever since October last year this cannot be done, and as the President of the Central Islamic Organisation stated, it seems as if someone wants something before the transfer could be completed.
People spoke of dropping a change to get birth certificates; some did so to get visas and some paid to get basic things done. There were those who paid to be awarded contracts and unless the contracts were padded they cut corners to make a profit, with the result that the work suffered.
These days there are people who have tons of money that they cannot spend even if they try. As a reporter I hear about drug dealings that net millions of dollars. The money is so much that the dealer cannot even try to bank it.
Under such conditions I would expect that the dealer would quit, because the money is so much that it becomes meaningless. This, however, is not the case because as someone once told me, the more we get, the more we want.
This explains why major players in the drug market stay until they attract attention and are caught. Some of them go to great lengths to defend their territory and would even kill. Guyana understands this trend. It has even seen the gunfights over territory.
For me, I would have left it well enough alone because I would have told myself that I have too much. And with this being the case, I cannot understand why these people do not give some of that money to development. They could sponsor sporting events and ease the pressure on the government; they could build sporting facilities and charge for their use; they could easily buy clubs.
My publisher, Glenn Lall, believes that there are Ministers of the Government who are also filthy rich. His conclusion is that they dipped into the till and collected substantial bribes. There was a businessman who spoke of a Minister who sent someone to his office to collect “his thing” after the award of a contract.
I must assume that once the “big ones” collect the small ones would emulate them. Corruption must become a norm. On Friday there was the news that a man who registered vehicles actually set about stealing them and selling them to other buyers.
Getting the stolen cars re-registered would not have been difficult and the original owner of the car would have been hard pressed to find his vehicle unless he had some special mark that could not be removed or disguised.
I understand that he has gone into hiding because the long arms of the law are after him.
Yet I must ask, “How much money does a person need?” Some for a vacation at exclusive resorts, some for exotic foods, some for fancy cars — perhaps two or three, although a man cannot drive more than one car at a time, some for the girls, some for future generations and perhaps some for a fancy funeral.
But there are people who have money to do all these things and they still go after more. I wish they would pour the extra into sports. Guyana is not doing well at cricket and worse in the other sports.

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