Pressure up, squeeze on

Mar 20, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Guyanese are feeling the squeeze from all over. Intense pressure is felt by most citizens earning below an annual seven-figure level. It is advances in unrelenting fashion, and can be best presented in one word: prices.
Soaring prices impact cost of living and standard of living, with the latter being those essentials that have to be looked at, left alone. The money just isn’t there to partake of the basics for some kind of quality existence. It is ironic that this is in a country awash in oil production, oil developments, and prosperous oil visions. Though that may be so, the harsh reality is that our people, the poorer and lower on the economic ladder, are barely managing to get by from day to day. Guyana’s oil might as well be in the Himalayas for all the good that its six-figure daily production number is doing for us.
Meanwhile, steep price increases stalk struggling Guyanese everywhere they turn. Flour price is now up 15 percent, and we all should know what that means. Flour is not for the annual Christmas cake alone, but an everyday commodity, in some form or the other. It just went up to put it on the table, and to get it from the breakfast and lunch counters. Packing a kit for lunch for the working and studying simply became more expensive, more intolerable than it was before.
Getting out of the house is now a more expensive consideration. This is regardless of whether citizens possess their own vehicles, or take public transportation (minibuses or boats), or partake of what is a receding luxury, a taxi. Gas prices went up to $1120 per gallon, an increase of a shade over 14 percent, using the previous $980 per gallon as a base. The public transportation people are not usually known for their slowness in reacting to a gasoline increase. This means that the pain from the pump is transferred to the people patiently waiting at the parks, and on the rural parapets. Further, the price for a 20-lb cylinder of cooking gas, almost a national household item, given the disappearance of firesides and kerosene stoves, is now reflecting a close to 20 percent increase, at around $5,000. The story is the same, though at different rates of increase, for chicken, and Guyanese have been crying out about fish and veggie prices for a long time, which need no repetition today, since they speak for themselves.
The point of all this is that in crucial areas of daily existence Guyanese are being beaten to a pulp by price rises. Food and transportation are only two areas selected for mention, but they should tell the story of where we are. We are an oil rich nation, but we are struggling more now, with little of the fabulous benefits of oil discovery and oil production touching the lives of ordinary Guyanese, where such matter the most; at the table and in daily getting around. If things continue at this rate, Guyanese could end up being like the man with money in the bank (oil fund) but who withered away and died from starvation and neglect.
Against this backdrop of price increases and deep consumer stabbings, the trade unions have made public appeals for action from the Government of Guyana. GAWU, FITUG, and the TUC have all come out with spirited calls for some sort of relief to be advanced for working Guyanese and their families (KN March 14). They all give due space to the effects of the extended COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, global supply limitations, and always the bruising and bloodying consequences of prices going only one way, meaning, up.
The unions desire relief in tangible forms, ranging from an increase in the current minimum wage to subventions, but always with intervention from Government in mind. Minimum wage at some of the levels advanced are nonstarters because they are unrealistic, as they mean little today. There must be a national wage policy and a staggered approach to address the woes of workers. We agree that there must be tangibles coming from the Government, especially with so many billions earmarked for numerous projects. Guyanese need relief, and they need it now.

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