Aren’t you scared to know what “per capita” is?

Jul 18, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I don’t think if Jaws turned up on the Sheriff Street seawall it would scare Guyanese as much as the thought of a professor explaining to the citizens of this world what the economic methodology of “per capita” means.
When you tell Guyanese about the social factors at work in their country and employ the framework of per capita, then Guyana is perhaps the most negative and frightening country in the world.
Let’s describe this land of horrors for you using the per capita approach.
But first, let’s define per capita and give a hypothetical example. It has a simple delineation. It is dividing something in a country by the number of people that country has.
Let us say Enmore has a million people and Leonora has two million people. If five road deaths occur each week in Enmore and the same in Leonora then they do not have the same fatality rates.
You must factor into the equation that Leonora has double the population of Enmore yet has the same road fatalities.
It means that of the two villages, Enmore has a higher death rate because you have to divide the five into one million in Enmore and divide the five into two million in Leonora. That is what it meant by per capita.
I don’t know if it has changed but Guyana was the suicide capital of the world about two years ago because of the number of suicides here given our small population. We have two factors that are wonderful positives in our favour in Guyana.
Per capita, we have more barrels of oil than all other countries. Remember we are under 800,000. Per capita, we are also one of the most under populated territories on Planet Earth.
When you look at the number of citizens in Greece, Ireland, Holland, the UK, Barbados, Trinidad and you look at their square miles then compare them to Guyana, we are almost an empty land.
Now let us isolate the horrible negatives in Guyana and apply the per capita method. But a caveat is in order before we proceed. When you are applying the per capita argument to Guyana, you must factor into the equation, the age demographics. Here is why. Guyana’s population in 2018 is listed as 782,225.
But please remember the NIS and the GRA do not serve 782,225 souls. Of that number, a huge percentage is children under 16.
This percentage does not interface with the NIS, the character clearance department of the police force, the vehicle fitness certificate section of the police force, the commercial banks etc.
Children do not pay NIS. Children do not drive vehicles. Children under sixteen cannot have a bank accountant in their own names.
What that means is that the NIS, the GRA, UG, the commercial banks and other places are serving a clientele whose numbers are small.
How then can you explain such sick announcements as the following – Lands and Survey says it has a backlog of 30,000 applicants and the Ministry of Housing is calling in persons for processing beginning with 1999 applicants.
How do you explain as a prominent Christian clergyman complained in the letter pages of this newspaper last week, that UG took two months to reply to him?
How do you explain that when you make a telephone call to the Bank of Nova Scotia and there is no response? A recorded voice comes on and request that you leave a name and number and you will be contacted within three working says? How many customers a small bank like this has that you have to wait for three days as a customer before you are tended to?
Space is quickly filling up so let’s do the per capita thing. Member of Parliament, Michael Carrington told me that the figure he got from the prison service is 444 inmates serving time for conviction of marijuana. Per capita that is one of the highest in the world.
Guyana per capita must have one of the highest, if not the highest rate of neonatal deaths among countries. The figure is 119 between June 2017 and June 2018. That is staggering man!
In 2016, road fatalities were 126. In 2017, it was 104. We are just halfway into 2018 and it was 51 in June. That number has increased since July began. Remember these are deaths.
The number of non-fatal accidents may be the highest in the world. I don’t have the figures for incest, wife murders, rape, child molestation, divorces, homicides, robberies etc. However, this I know – Guyana’s image is a horrible one.

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Aren’t you scared to know what “per capita” is?

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