Cash transfers can have direct impact on poverty

Jul 19, 2019 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

It’s pretty rich for the rich to sit around and disparage the notion that giving poor people monthly cash transfers from oil revenues would make them lazy. Investment Fund Manager, David Pollard, is reported to have said at a recent Guyana Securities Council hosted meeting that with such payments, “there is a danger that that encourages recklessness. You don’t have to work. Why work?”
Of course, when you see the photos of the audience, only the elite were invited to the meeting, not the poor of which he talked so condescendingly about; the same working class poor people who grow the food, clean the streets, pump the gas and help raise the children of the rich. Perhaps if they were to get out a bit more from their air conditioned offices, homes and SUVs, they would learn that it is the poor who work the hardest in this society, who have suffered the longest and thus deserve the oil money above all others. Moreover, they may begin to understand that the idea that the poor would squander their cheques is simply bourgeois stereotyping and comes from a conservative ideology that poor people are poor due to their own moral failings. It is deeply anti-Guyanese.
But wait what does it matter if the poor were to stop working? Would it be any different from all those Georgetown property owners collecting their monthly cheques or shareholders living off their quarterly dividends while living a life of indolence and excess? Who are they to ever judge the working class?
I would also urge Minister Jordan and the Cabinet to look carefully at cash transfers in part because they are so effective at stimulating economic activity within poor communities, but mostly because if they truly believe in the “Good Life” for all, such monthly payments have a direct and immediate impact on poverty. Such payments can also be conditioned on school attendance and visits of children to health clinics, thereby helping to improve their lives for generations to come.

Yours sincerely
Albert Russell

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