Elections always bring out the best in Guyanese

Nov 06, 2016 Features / Columnists, My Column

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In the run up to the May 11, 2015 elections in Guyana I saw how active young people were. In just about every part of the country they could be seen going house to house, regardless of whether the persons they were visiting were supporters of their respective party.
Indeed, in places where a particular party was strong the various young people would assume that the household was supportive of their political party and would take extra care to get the persons to cast their ballot.
Social media played a very prominent role. I got messages from people I didn’t even know, exhorting me to vote. There were messages about my polling place. The more enterprising ones sent messages about the failings about one party and its supporters. Guyana was abuzz.
After the euphoria of the victory by the now coalition government, I began to hear the complaints and the disappointments. People expected manna to fall from above and some did in the form of pay increases. But there were the young people who complained about being jobless.
This was an issue I raised with President David Granger who said that even if the government was willing, it simply could not employ all the young people. He then spoke of the government-sponsored programmes to have these very young people fashion their own employment.
It is working in parts. I have seen the growing number of self-employed youths. There are many young women who have become hairstylists and beauticians. Some have opened kitchens and are providing meals to the extent that some eating houses have been pushed into competition mode.
The less enterprising young people have gone on to become policemen and soldiers. There are the nurses and the health care providers. A few have entered the realm of journalism, but many lack the basic rudiments and have failed.
The less academically qualified are not doing too badly. These are the people who have transformed the city streets into places that motorists find pleasurable. Others have become ensconced in the continued beautification of the city and they make no bones about dealing with people who are bent on spoiling the environment.
President Granger then reminded me that so much more could have been done had his government not been saddled with some severe financial burdens. He spoke about the huge expenditure on maintaining the sugar sector. I did the mathematics and found that he was indeed right.
Next year the government must spend $18 billion on the Guyana Sugar Corporation. That translates into US$90 million. To put that into perspective, that money could build five Specialty Hospitals. If it would take $1 billion to build a primary school then we could build eighteen primary schools—all in one year.
That is only the tip of the iceberg. We had spent US$200 million to get this industry going, so perhaps what we did was pour money into a voluminous hole. Then we had to pay a lot of legal debts, not to talk about trying to collect money overpaid to the numerous contractors. It was as if the previous government was spending its own money as it pretty much pleased.
It is small wonder that Guyana was considered the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. We had money that we kept throwing around. We made people behave as though they were kings and queens, all at the taxpayers’ expense.
That being said, I must return to the election issue. We live in this country and we have had ours, but we seem to be very interested in the American elections. You would believe that Guyanese resident in Guyana are voting in those polls.
I have relatives in the United States and to a man they kept regaling me about Donald Trump’s attitude. My 92 year-old mother, according to my sister, spent her time following the campaign and using every opportunity to cuss out Trump.
Back in Guyana, people who probably have no intention of travelling to the United States are expressing worry at Trump becoming the president ahead of Hillary Clinton.
I remembered the 2008 elections when Barack Obama acceded to the presidency. Perhaps because he was a black man that Guyanese so badly wanted him to win. To his credit, he did a lot that made them happy.
Now there is this worry that there could be a president that would push the world toward a global conflagration. More than that, many see him as a racist who would sooner see Guyana sink into the Atlantic than prosper as a nation.
Remigrants bought their plane tickets to head back to the United States to vote. These are people who showed precious little interest in local elections in the land of their birth.
From my vantage point, the campaign was worse than anything we have had here. Had we attempted to raise some of those issues, we in the media would have been pilloried by the rest of the society. We would not have dared write about Granger being a man who sexually harassed women if he had been such a person.
Jagdeo mistreated his wife and when we wrote about that there were people who accused us of getting involved in man and woman story. It made me realize that although we are a poor country our people still have moral values, not that it ever stopped them from dipping into the till.
Back in 2008 the newspapers kept their pages open until the United States elections were declared. The same is going to happen this year. Of course, the clock would be turned back, to our disadvantage. People are going to sit in the rum shops glued to television screens. And the next day would see some bleary-eyed people at their desks poring over the reports in the newspapers.
Not much work would be done. GuySuCo would continue to lose money and there would either be smiles or expressions of concern. I would be preparing my column for the following week and perhaps I would deal with an issue closer to home, like the father who has issued a plea to young men to walk away from a life of crime. His son was shot dead trying to enter another man’s home by force for some ulterior reason.

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