H@RD TRUTHS BY GHK LALL – Take Dr. Jagdeo along to the next outing

Nov 17, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – I have a little suggestion for Stabroek News.  Please take along the good Dr. Bharat Jagdeo on the next visit to a village or other area in Guyana, when SN’s conducts its next series of interviews about local cost-of-living, and its impacts on ordinary citizens.  I am sure Dr. Jagdeo, not to be mistaken for any practitioner attached to the Ministry of Health, but the same one that sits as third in command of this country.  First, second, or third, whoever else is counting, I am not. Rather, I am counting all those places and faces in SN’s weekly wall of pain. It is a stain on the richest country and people in the world.  Carry the man for a ride, and let the big boss man hear for himself about cost-of-living and get the strongest sense of the genuine and poignant struggles of citizens.  Guyanese, and for his special delight, I include Venezuelans also.  Since Dr. Jagdeo has developed a remarkable antenna in detecting whoever says what in this country, none like what displeases, he should have zero difficulty discerning the troubles of Guyanese constantly hurting from dealing with a punishing cost-of-living regime.

The recommendation is made because this world-famous economist when asked about Guyana’s cost-of-living travails, had the shortest of short and jarring answers: cost-of-living, what cost-of-living?  To that I add these that were unsaid by Dr. Jagdeo: where in Guyana?  Who is impacted negatively?  How so, how can this be?  When is this happening?  All of that was embedded in the Vice President’s quick and scornful dismissal of SN’s cost-of-living series, as I gathered from a line here and there from his last press conference.  Truth be told, it is all I can stomach, and there aren’t any GI issues, of which I know.  The SN cost-of-living series was at part 48, when El Supremo gave one resounding kick to SN’s 48 weeks of painstaking effort, to what is probably among the few honest endeavours across Guyana’s urban and rural spaces, and its remote areas too.

It is amazing that a man of the people, like Dr. Jagdeo could be so warm and endearing when the anxieties and priorities of foreign investors are involved or so energised when the issue is voting rights for Venezuelans.  Yet he can be so callous and cold when his own Guyanese people in the local landscape are falling behind, drag on their heels in trying to cope with spiraling cost-of-living demands.  It has been a losing battle, a long and tiring one.  I mean those are real people forced to deal with real prices (eggs, chicken, celery, bora, and much more) that are really racing away from them in Success and Chateau Margot), always tripping them up.  In fairness to the Vice President, he could be absorbing the food inflation numbers recorded by the Bank of Guyana.  Whoever came up with those numbers either doesn’t live here, doesn’t buy local food items, or doesn’t have the first idea of what they are calculating.  Of course, the central bank’s numbers could be driven by other considerations, besides baskets of goods and what they say.  Whatever formula, the Bank of Guyana has been using for its food inflation calculations, it should be submitted to Stockholm for consideration in the next Nobel Prize for economics.  If there was one for politics, that might be a better fit.

Regardless of what Dr. Jagdeo thinks about cost-of-living (or if it is his usual politics), here is a reality check that is a brutal gut check: many Guyanese can’t buy food because they can’t pay.  For many of the basic items needed.  For what it takes to feed a family.  For lack of sufficient funds, dollars to cover necessities [spending power].  Perhaps, Dr. Jagdeo should take a look at that United Nations report that notes Guyanese children ‘wasting’ away more from malnutrition than others in different places in the region.  Perhaps, the UN (like SN) also has hard feelings for the PPP by publishing what is exaggerated, or doesn’t exist.  Then again, $25,000 one-off bonuses, and 8% goes very far in Jagdeo’s impatient thinking in alleviating cost-of-living blues, and removing Guyanese living in a grey world to a shinier one. Last, some book smart people speak of these developments in textbook tones, as though they have lost sight that it is flesh and blood people hurting around Guyana.  Academics can wax mightily, smartly, and impressively about velocity of money and the multiplier effect in the big national picture, with little pushback from this quarter.  But the long and short of local cost-of-living is poor Guyanese do not have enough spending money in their hands.  Not because they squander.  But because they start with too little.

The concern is that the higher and the more insulated the ivory towers lived in by academics, men of politics, and other mystics, the more they lose touch with hardworking Guyanese not having enough money in hand, so they cannot buy enough.  Enough as in what is needed for a decent existence. This is not about textbook interpretations, applications, and extensions.  It is about the violent battering that citizens endure from remorseless cost-of-living realities, even with bonus and 8 percent money counted.

(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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