Greece in 2014 will determine if Guyana can ever survive

Nov 20, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Greece is not a country in which the average Guyanese takes an interest. Greece has never been a 20th century powerhouse. CARICOM citizens hardly take an interest in what goes on there, contrary to places like the UK, US, Canada, India, Germany and France.
It may be a correct statement to say that not even political and academic circles in Guyana take an interest in Greek society. Generally regarded by World Bank standards as a developed or First World country, Greece is both an industrial and manufacturing territory that towers above Third World nations.
Last year, Greece ran into so much economic trouble that it began to sink lower than many Third World countries. Finally, in 2013, the Greek economy virtually collapsed. Not since the Second World War, has a western economy sunk so low. To literally survive and to stave off prospects of becoming a failed state, Greece needed hundreds of billions of dollars in loans. It got $240 billion from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. But Greece had to swallow medicine that was only reserved by international lending agencies for poor Third World states.
In economics, this medicine is known as austerity measures. It simply boggles the mind to understand how harsh these measures are. I have read where pro-austerity economists and ultra-capitalist commentators have classified as almost unbearable the economic alterations Greece has to make to its economy and society. One British pro-capitalist professor referred to the measures as almost criminal.
Literally hundreds of thousands of public sector employees have been retrenched. Hundreds of government institutions have been closed. All state sectors have had their budget slashed by more than fifty percent, some by more than seventy percent. State television has been closed. Some state-owned universities have been shut down. Health delivery has been badly affected and bank interests have dried up.
But perhaps the sadistic dimension that is unbelievable is that state pensions have been slashed. Imagine working for forty years and depending on your pension to sustain your remaining years, only to wake up one morning to find out that it has been reduced by fifty percent. No state employee in Greece gets paid at the end of the month.
The waiting period is two weeks. In other words, a large percentage in Greece may be unable to live.
The Prime Minister said in Parliament last week that next year will see Greece returning to a sound economy. This is what the Guyanese people need to take note of. I am not an economist, but I would argue that at the moment, Guyana is a more viable economy than Greece and there is more income certainty in Guyana than in Greece.
Should Greece return to economic stability in 2014, to where it was before its economy collapsed, and Guyana remains as poor as it is, then I would say this country hasn’t got a chance of having a future.
If Greece can return to an economy where poverty is eliminated and Guyana still persists with its excruciating forms of poverty as we have endured for more than thirty years now, then surely it is time to dismiss Guyana as a country that will never have a future.
If Greece can fall down so hard yet pick itself up and survive to be a better economy than Guyana in 2015, then this country is not worth living in. But here is my take on the issue. I believe Greece will rebound in 2015, while we are still mired in bestial poverty. What Greece will do, Guyana will not – pursue nationalist development.
The Greek government will pour money into the educational system once it is available. It knows the value of education. It will reinvest in economic sectors that make Greece competitive. All we have done since Independence is to sell our raw material in exchange for money.
We did it with sugar, now we are doing it with gold. Sugar is gone, now the new kid on the block is gold. When the gold goes, the country will close down.
The post-colonial West Indian economists like Norman Girvan, Clive Thomas and others referred to this type of economy as monoculture, meaning an economy that is based on the sale of a single crop. It hasn’t changed since Independence. We import boxed milk and tinned sausages from Barbados, a country whose entire square miles is smaller than Hog Island.
Greece will move on in 2015. Argentina in 1985 went through worse than Greece while Guyana was better off. Today, Argentina is way ahead of us and so will be Greece next year.

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