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Women know
Kaieteur News – Guyanese women know what it takes to run a home, care for a family. Currently, they are catching hell, and the women of Red Thread recently spoke of the condition of Guyanese most eloquently. “People are still suffering, though we have oil.” Oil the remedy is not touching Guyanese at the bottom of the economic pile. The richness of oil is a stranger to working class men and women, and their families, in Guyana. The PPP/C Government that presides over this oil either has the math wrong, or it just doesn’t care.
When the world talks of Guyana’s economy, its present and its future, it is always in superlatives. When the poor in Guyana tell their story of living in an oil-rich country, reportedly the richest in the world, then all the statistics come crashing down, fall apart, for all they are worth. Try telling a man struggling to provide for his hungry family that he is among the richest people per capita in the world, and he is likely to go berserk. Somebody is insulting him, making a mockery of his already hard circumstances. The irony is that the lush statistics are accurate, with plenty to spare. The Guyana economy has no equal, and it is set to outmuscle and outrun most of the competition for top honours. But there is this horror of the country’s masses bringing up the rear in what has transformed into a battle of survival of the strongest, with the weak falling farther behind.
It is clear that the planners and the decision-makers in the PPP/C Government are mainly concerned with what enriches cronies and other familiar faces in the cabal of those having a wonderful time feasting at the public trough. Almost two hundred billion Guyana dollars drawn out of the Natural Resources Fund, and the government is still absconding on its responsibilities to the less well-equipped, and less fortunate, in Guyana. The well-known problem in Guyana is that the poor at the bottom are competing with greed and corruption and criminality in political circles, and the bureaucrats who do the dirty work for bosses. Unless there is some revolutionary development, those at the bottom and on their knees always lose. There are enough millions to spread around, but then the corrupt in the ruling political class would have to do with less.
Hence, it is not surprising at all to hear the women of the Red Thread group lament about the dreadful challenges faced by single mothers. Their reality is harsh and unrelenting: come up with a balance diet for the family, or come out as a deadbeat who cannot pay the bills. It is this draconian condition of paying the bills, leading to the family suffering. When a balanced diet is lacking for too long, then the medical bills are to be feared next. This cannot be an oil rich country, not with citizens forced to live like refugees racking their brains on how to manage on the pittances they have in hand.
The PPP/C Government and its leaders (and mouthpieces) celebrate the lavishness of 6.5% for 54,000 public servants. If each of those 54,000 Guyanese have only one dependent (a child, or an elderly parent), 6.5% is not just bleak, but savaging beyond imagination. The women are complaining bitterly, the unions are raging in disbelief, and the public servants themselves are rendered speechless. New housing schemes go up for the elites, top of the line vehicles are the trophies of the chosen ones, and modern luxuries proliferate for the entitlement class. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of bottom-of-the-barrel Guyanese are constantly reminded by the output of the PPP Government’s choir of the many billions of barrels of oil that this country has, and how much it is going to mean for Guyanese.
It is always later, as if the future ever gets rosy; it may forever be unreachable. Bharrat Jagdeo, the Chief National Policymaker (self-appointed, like everything else about him) had an inspired line: revenue maximization. According to Jagdeo, it is waiting and Guyana is going to be great. This is the eternal story of Guyanese and their political leaders. They are told to be patient, but they always end up as patients.
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