When I was small, I heard this thing

Mar 18, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When I was small, I would hear my parents and their guests in our home saying that in India you have the rich and the poor and there was nothing in between. My father and mother and their friends who came to our home were not people who were widely read. I guess they must have picked up their India remark from others.
In Guyana, one would like to think that either you are rich or you are poor, because those are the classes we see all over Guyana. As you drive around Georgetown, lower East Coast and lower East Bank, there are literally countless resplendent buildings going up or have gone up. And these structures are humongous and have expensive clothing.
As I gaze at this new Guyana, those words I heard in my home when I was ten years old ring in my ear. In Guyana, we have the wealthy strata and the working classes. There is hardly anything in between.
When you look at this new Guyana, you see that there is money in this country. You see money the quantity of which puts us in the same category as Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica. But it is a mirage. It is a gigantic deception. Guyana is dirt poor or as one of our top entrepreneurs once put it, “p-ss poor.” Alongside this decadence stand abject poverty, poor wages and salaries, laughable minimum wage standards, cruel old age pensions, a jeopardized National Insurance Scheme and dilapidated public buildings and plantains that sell for a hundred dollars (don’t contradict me on the plantains, I buy them all the time).
When former President Jagdeo held a Day of Appreciation as a form of farewell, it must have crossed the minds of every citizen as to what was there to extol. If you examine a prodigious set of statistics from all kinds of international institutions, Guyana under the “appreciated” President hardly achieved anything. Go to the statistics from the World Bank, IMF, IDB, CDB and UN, you will find that far from catching up with the larger CARICIOM territories, Guyana has stagnated.
On every level; growth rate, migration rate, mortality rate, suicide rate, crime rate hospitable environment for investment, index on human capital, level of trained teachers per capita, spending on education and health per capita, Guyana in a comparative context lags badly behind (see the latest UN Human Development Report and how badly Guyana is ranked) CARICOM states and the rest of South America
Visiting UG professor, Rory Fraser wrote; “By these estimates (statistics from the UN report) Guyana had significant losses between 2000-2005 in intangible capital, per capita, which declined from US$4,770 to US$2,176.” You wonder what the PPP Government has achieved over the past fifteen years. But let’s move away from statistics and look at actualities in Guyana.
Sugar is in crisis. No one can be so clownish to deny the uncertainly that has drowned GuySuCo. Political observers remind us that since the PPP came to power in 1992, the current President sat on its Board until the general elections last year.
Do you know the simple art of keeping traffic signals going, this Government then (under Mr. Jagdeo) and now cannot do? There isn’t a traffic light at any junction that has worked for four straight days.
One of the most depraved failures of the PPP Government is its tax policy. The wealth that goes into those magnificent buildings, whether domestic mansions or business structures is hardly taxed, if taxed at all. This paper (or any other) will not publish the information I have in my possession (for 2010) on individual figures of tax evasion.
I contend without fear of contradiction that if there is any Guyanese who love this country that sees these figures on who evades paying taxes, they will take to the streets and protest immediately.
One of the wealthiest Caribbean citizens, who is a Guyanese living in Guyana with investments here, paid less than a million dollars in taxes in 2010. A derelict property in central Georgetown was bought for half a billion dollars (yes, half a billion). But you should see the tax return of this family business. It makes you sick. A well known multi-billionaire jeweller doesn’t pay taxes.
A multi-billionaire with a major investment on the lower East Coast never sent in a property tax form. I wrote about this in 2010 and 2011, but the GRA never contacted me for his name. They know his name. In Guyana, in the abundance of wealth, the poor get poorer.

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