The PPP is only distributing our land to us

Aug 24, 2011 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Hydar Ally (“These are facts that cannot be wished away or erased” KN, August 21, 2011) fails to grasp that this land is our land. It belongs to all Guyanese. The PPP is only distributing our land to us. It is not an avenue for political boasting.
A government that cuts a dam into a housing scheme and calls it a road after clearing some bush cannot boast of its stellar progress on housing.
These places still flood when rain threatens much less when the rainy season gets here. The roads turn into mush. Many housing schemes still lack proper amenities.
Playgrounds cannot be found. Proper asphalt roads do not exist. Some areas live in darkness and without water. Yet a propaganda man like Hydar Ally comes here and tells us of the 70,000 house lots the PPP has distributed since 1992.
Listen, none or very little of it was delivered free. Guyanese have all paid something in money, in varying amounts for that land they got. The PPP has sold some of that land for a million dollars or more. If Hydar Ally came to us and said the PPP distributed 70,000 house lots on housing schemes with wide roads, playgrounds, cricket fields, community centres and with every possible amenity entirely free, I would say vote for Hydar Ally.
But for these men to write letters of deceit trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public, it is wrong. Hydar Ally and his PPP friends do not deserve a vote on this housing fiasco.
Unless Mr. Ally forgot, people are paying for these lots. After collecting billions upon billions of our taxes, we still have to pay for lots cut on swamplands. Furthermore, the staggering majority of those 70,000 recipients of house lots took on massive loans to realize their dreams of owning their own home.
That dream of Ally’s PPP of people owning homes and cars is a great dream to the folks at Freedom House. The only problem is that Ally and his Pradoville friends are not assuming the killer mortgages and the car payments to realize this dream in a country where cost of living is sending people to the madhouse.
On top of that, GPL is kicking down your door every month with the light bill. If a house and a car is all that matters to Ally’s PPP friends in defining progress and development, then we will have to find a way to build more cages within those same houses to live a life behind bars as more and more criminals armed with illegal guns try to invade our homes.
Here is the problem I have: how could the PPP try to sell us the dream of owning a house and car but yet they have done nothing to protect us from the nightmare of a growing army of criminals trying to take it from us?
If you want people to acquire material things like never before, you must ensure they are not preyed upon or they are earning good money from good jobs to afford it.
But the PPP is really telling a lie to the people of this country when they fail to reign in crime, for the party asks people to pursue a dream that risks them being killed for it, even when they owe the bank their soul.
These PPP guys like Hydar Ally believe that selling a dream of materialism and materialistic acquisition is good enough as long as they don’t have to bear the burden of mortgage payments, car payments and loan payments themselves and they don’t provide economic development to generate jobs to make it easier for people to afford those payments.
For it is you the individual, not the PPP, who bears the burden. Because if your income is barely rising and the little increase you do get is being eaten away by rising inflation and cost of living and you just got that house lot from the PPP which you paid for and you built a multi-million house and bought a nice car, you then realize that you are being murdered by debt, loan payments and cost of living while your income has barely moved.
Like many are already doing, they will have to make a serious choice: deny yourself and eat less and continue to have a roof above your head and a car in your garage or don’t starve yourself and lose your home and your car next month.
This is the predicament the PPP has delivered in its 19 years of ‘housing success’. In this paradise Hydar Ally speaks of, fancy houses and shiny cars while there is still a multitude of poor due to growing inequality. These houses have become fortified prisons to those living within it.
This is not the PPP’s success, it is the success or depending on how you see it, the struggle, of the individual Guyanese. Ally cannot take credit for any of it. Big deal that the PPP managed to get more Guyanese to take on more personal debt than the PNC. Tell that to the homeowner whose mortgage payment is due on August 31, 2011.
M. Maxwell

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