H@rd Truths by GHK Lall – Cost-Of-Living Crippling First, Then Killing

Aug 16, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – I have a dirty job today.  I am joining PPP Government critics.  No! Not those who criticize a wasp-eaten, worm-infested government.  Today I link arms with the critics from the PPP side who criticize those who criticize their beloved government. To the people in charge at Stabroek News (SN), I plead: please stop this cost-of-living series.  This is done with every respect for the hard-hit communities affected, and the struggling people interviewed, who share their anguish in a country lavish with oil.  I also tip hat to the tireless workers at SN.  What follows is not tongue-in-cheek; both are swollen stiff from cost-of-living observations.

Frankly, SN’s cost-of-living series, now in its 36th week of running, is a source of embarrassment to a society that is the drooling envy of the world.  If it were a Broadway show, it would have been a smash.  Because it is about people short of finance and falling just short of famine, it is a monster slash and lash. How could this be?  So many in so many places left to hold the ‘dirty end of the richly varnished oil stick’ to paraphrase Excellency Ali.  In the interest of further saving the face of the PPP Government, and propping up a rather outclassed President, I refrain from mentioning what kind of matter varnishes the stick.  But to SN I say, this is airing dirty laundry not only in the local domain, but globally, and doing so weekly.  It is enough to drive any leader, any supporter, bananas, if they were not so already.  I can imagine an Aleutian (Eskimo) chortling: Guyanese can have their ocean of oil, and short handedness, we will take the tundra with its ice, and a raging fire in the igloos.

To all media practitioners, I suggest that it would be infinitely more constructive to focus on the billions spent on roads and bridges that the villagers and city swells use compliments of the PPP Government, to get to the refurbished markets, again thanks to a set of benevolent leaders.  As good as those are, the bad news is what awaits at the shopping marts, markets, and mausoleums of accessing and buying.  I didn’t even read SN’s Monday edition, regarding where its team visited, and what my fellow Guyanese had to say about the punishing cost-of-living.  I can tell without turning a page.

In terms of what I just referred to as mausoleums of shopping for food, the basics only, no luxuries like broccoli or Brussel sprouts, the price of admission is GY$10,000.  Leave home on any given Saturday with less than that, and it would have been better to save the minibus fare.  Or return home emptied of cash, and a basket half-empty.  Since I am trying to say a kind word for President Ali and his PPP Government standing astride this national oil spectacular (it is a daily expo, isn’t it?), I look on the bright side of local life, and now see a food basket half full.  Half full of what, with what left out, due to being unaffordable, thus inaccessible, is the question.  Learning and adjusting such a mindset is called, though it is a painstaking work in progress for me.  There are, however, some places where I absolutely will not go for any political party, or any party to the suffocation and starvation of working-class Guyanese: there will be no burying of head in the sand by this source.  In the event that the last two sentences sound like readying for an election run in 2025 (looks like 2024 to me), I keep those embers warm and glowing, just to keep the stress and excitement levels up, and everyone at attention. Such a run would be more of a cakewalk by my calculations: too many conscientious Guyanese have had it with stink and ‘dutty’ politicians, with each citizen having their favourite effigy, their own voodoo doll in which to stick pins.  These guys and gals are the pits, as in cesspit.

Very seriously, Guyanese are feeling the cost-of-living pain, and it is savaging, crippling, draining.  I take my leave by leaving four questions for my Guyanese brothers and sisters (all are) to take off their party hats, and put on their thinking caps, their human hats.  First, what good is all this oil if there is one Guyanese yearning, hungering, possibly starving?  Second, what happened to not one child (make that man or woman or family) left behind?  Third, what does it say about many Guyanese classified as high income, when the item they can most easily afford is rum? When this is so, it means that Guyanese must be among the biggest high-income bums.

Finally, how do brothers Ali and Jagdeo (both caring, compassionate doctors) live with themselves, can be so more fixated on sand when poor Guyanese have so little in their hand?  Focus so much on steel, while gnawing pains of Guyanese are so real?  Concentrate so heavily on wood, with numerous Guyanese condemned to economic hoods?  Infrastructure on the rise, Guyanese fracture and study their demise?  On each occasion, leaders look in the mirror, I believe it shatters and scatters their failures before the world. All this oil and this is the best that they could do.  Great leaders find a way to overcome, contract or no contract.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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