The hunter and the prey

Apr 12, 2011 Editorial

The minibus strikes are surely disrupting national life but this needs not be the case. It is true that everyone wants a better standard of life; it is true that everyone has a family to maintain; it is true that the rising cost of living is placing increased hardships on family life. It is also true that is becoming increasingly more expensive to maintain vehicles.
The minibus operators are of the view that the paying public should foot the increasing costs. They are signaling that they are not prepared to lower their living standards and indeed this is what life should be. No one should be made to live worse than the previous day. People should always strive to be better than they were the previous day.
The shopkeepers are of the same ilk. At the first sign of a pay hike they would up the cost of the goods they retail because they too feel that they deserve to earn more. They also pass on any increase levied against them to the hapless consumer.
Both the minibus owners and operators and the shop keepers could get away with this because the people with whom they interface are rather docile. These people are content to say that if they have to pay more they will. Unlike their counterparts in any other country who would protest the slightest increase if they feel that it is unjustified, Guyanese simply adopt a nonchalant attitude.
If it ended there one would understand except that they then stage a protest to get even higher pay so that they could meet the higher costs. A vicious cycle begins. And people have short memories. In 1999 when they struck and eventually went to arbitration they got a fifty per cent hike in their wages and salaries. Within one year, that increase was eroded; the workers were no better off than before the hefty pay hike.
This is because everyone sets out to prey on the public servant and if the self-employed person gets caught up—too bad. But the self employed person can easily compensate by charging more. Those trapped are the wages and salaried employees. And most of them have only themselves to blame.
Gone are the days when people felt the edges of their money; when they were reluctant to waste money. No one sought to board any transportation system to travel a distance of two miles or less. The younger ones walked while the older ones rode. Bicycles were the common fare for short distances.
It was not unusual for people to ride to the city from some distances as many as five or six miles away. School children did this as easily as kissing hands. Kitty was a joke for travel by bicycle as were distances on the lower East Bank Demerara. It is true that there were no minibuses but by the same token there were no more than two or three taxi services and these were used almost exclusively to transport people to the airport.
It is said that development comes at a price and one can only assume that the price of development in this case was laziness and the rush to become the exploited. We as a people simply do not learn from others who have been in the same position. Housewives in Texas refused to pay a penny more for a pound of beef; Jamaicans actually torched tyres on the streets to protest a hike in fuel prices.
People saddled with what they considered unconscionable actions by the operators of public transport systems opted to walk. In the southern United States, following the Rosa park incident they walked for two years but in the end they prevailed. Guyanese are not prepared to undertake such actions.
Yesterday, many school children opted to walk but this was only after classes had begun an hour earlier and no buses were in sight. Workers turned up late for work because they too had opted to stand on the streets in the hope that some form of public transport would turn up. When that failed only then did they walk.
But they are not going to learn from this most recent episode. Whatever increase they received at the end of the year has been eroded but they will continue to present themselves to be preyed upon by people who insist on refusing to give up anything by way of sacrifice.

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