Hurting citizens pressuring governments

Feb 24, 2023 Editorial

Kaieteur News – What does Sri Lanka, Great Britain, and neighboring Suriname have in common in recent times? The short answer is that many of the ordinary people, hardworking citizens, of those three very different countries are struggling with intensifying hardships. They are having a very difficult time coping with higher and higher prices for everyday necessities of life, which have fueled a chronic and punishing cost-of-living crisis on workers, pensioners, and citizens in general in those three countries. Citizens in other countries are also feeling the suffocating squeezes, but in the three countries identified, the people are doing something different. They are getting in the face of stubborn government leaders, sometimes corrupt leaders whose only interests are feathering their already fattened nests, and protecting their families and cronies, the only ones benefiting and prospering.

What sets apart the people of Sri Lanka from before, then those of Great Britain and, just last week, the Surinamese is the anger and energy that they brought to bear to make the whole world know their pain and suffering. As said earlier, the cost-of-living is killing them in all three countries, gets worse daily, but the result has been that the governments of those countries have been largely unhearing, or slow to react, or nothing moving at all. This left citizens with two choices. First, sit on their hands and lament their woes, meaning doing nothing. Or taking matters in their hands and getting up to get government to move.

In March 2022, the balloon burst in Sri Lanka with tens of thousands of Sri Lankans taking to the street to protest corruption, mismanagement, crippling national debt, fuel, fertilizer, and other shortages, and the generalized agony of a population forced into a hand-to-mouth existence. The government resisted at first, then dismissed some senior officials close to Prime Minister Rajapaksa, but that was still not enough for the angry people, who were branded as ‘terrorists.’ The protests eventually forced the Prime Minister to flee, leaving Sri Lankans to figure out how to pick up the pieces.

In Great Britain, the trade unions did something that they did not do for years. They found the muscle and the energy to take to the streets in strike action. More recently, British healthcare workers are up in arms, and in the streets, for they too are struggling and hurting. Train drivers, teachers (Scotland), and ambulance staff are all on strike action. This is a special test for the new and embattled Rishi Sunak Conservative government, and it has the ingredients that could make or break him and his ruling party. The bottom line is that fed up citizens in their capacity as workers have had enough and are acting. They just can’t take any more of what they have been taking for so long, with their backs bent double, and their pocketbooks bare. It is a certainty that other citizens, and other segments of the British workforce, are paying the keenest attention to what follows from their action, meaning, what government does.

In next door Suriname just a few days ago, hundreds of citizens raged at the government of President Chandrika Santokhi for rising fuel and energy prices, which means that cost-of-living pressures are biting deeply. Not satisfied with storming the Surinamese parliament, protestors degraded to looting businesses, which can never be condoned, and only condemned in the harshest terms. The objectives of protests are defeated when they deteriorate to these kinds of ugly, criminal activities by the opportunists who use them as cover to create mayhem. Further, genuine protests and protesters are given a bad name, which makes it difficult to gather mass and momentum, and lead to government leaders digging in their heels with their own resistance to sincere pleas for help.

Notwithstanding, the Surinamese protest descending into looting, peaceful protest actions by citizens are of incomparable value in opening the eyes of obstinate government leaders and recognizing that their citizens are suffering terribly. Many are hurting badly in Guyana from daily cost-of-living torments, and while the PPPC Government has finalized some small remedial measures, much pain still remains. Limping Guyanese are going to have to decide how much they can take in a country this rich.

Editorial, Great Britain, President Chandrika Santokhi, Sri Lanka, Suriname

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Hurting citizens pressuring governments

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