Hard truths…Opposition on the move with cost of living

Jan 29, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

---

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – Parade Ground was the scene, and the Opposition Leader, Mr. Aubrey Norton had the platform and bullhorn. Cost-of-living is going to be a major underpinning and energizer in his group’s election campaign. It is good to hear, most likely food for the soul of many Guyanese, with his supporters making up the majority of those moved in expectation. I think that cost-of-living is enough of a personal, familial, and communal-indeed, a national-concern, if not a crisis-in many broad swaths of Guyana to be a meaningful component of any political entity’s election strategy and energies.

The cost-of-living is sky high, and continually on an upward trajectory that seems endless. I can point to the PPP Government and cry foul. But I leave that alone, for the ruling party’s actions condemn it more sharply and piercingly than I ever can. I stay with the opposition, and set sights on cost-of-living being made into a thick plank in its election efforts. Cost-of-living, when it has gripping, unrelenting hold on citizens, has an essence that every poor, suffering citizen in every community in this country can identify with, for they live it. Trials and traumas. The pinches and punishments that are now an inseparable aspect of daily existence in a country that has no limit in the calculations and descriptions of those who measure these things.

The conversation is about riches, and Guyana’s name tops the list, depending on who is the last one doing the weighing, assessing. Talk about pure potential, and there is no competition to Guyana being crowned king. But there is this long, frightening shadow hovering. Like a total eclipse, there is thick, remorseless darkness. It is about what has been done, in the stinginess and callousness of its total.

It is about what is not being done for those who are gasping for breath financially. Compare that to what is so generously tendered to those who have already received, grown exponentially, immeasurably, richer from the national patrimony. If someone said that the PPP Government has taken care of its inner circle of comrades, friends, and family, through unprecedented generosity with the wealth that belongs to all Guyanese, it would still be a meager understatement.

This is where the opposition has opening and opportunity. There is nothing that can equal touching the passions and visions of those treated inequitably with what is paltry, with how they are short, in the ways that they have been mistreated, taken for granted, and scorned in presentations and practice. But that high cost-of-living is only a single leg in the tripod. The easier leg to latch onto and twist is the PPP Government, and all that it has failed to do. Or with what it did for the left behind in this country, which was nothing but the insult and obscenity of pittances. It is what should have only the harshest reception in a place as endowed as Guyana as estimated by the experts.

Now for the harder part. It is the third leg in the tripod. It is the no man’s land that is laden with political and leadership boobytraps, which no one-no Guyanese party, no Guyanese leader, none but few in Guyanese society-wishes to venture and test the safety and surety of the ground. The mighty specter of Exxon hangs.

No sitting President, no standing Vice President, no former president, can speak of and address the devastating cost-of-living environment here without casting a long, tough look at Exxon. No Opposition Leader can sidestep that most grueling of challenges. To date, all our leaders (and I mean all of them) have pussyfooted, fooled around, and fished about on how to deal with the anaconda that is Exxon, which has Guyanese securely wrapped and trapped in its corporate coils.

Leaders prefer to attack, or get their henchmen to ambush, the handful of Guyanese, who say: things are not right with Guyanese, particularly those at the lower half. Things are not on the up and up with the Exxon-PPP Government connection; things are not inspiring, of what is viable, in the APNU+AFC (at bottom, PNC) condition. When the circumstances and political-corporate relationships are in such a deplorable state, then Guyanese are the losers every day of the year.

If the talk and thrust is of cost-of-living realities forming an integral part of any local election campaign, then Exxon cannot be spared. Exxon must be confronted. Exxon must be challenged. Exxon must be called upon to do more, and if it means combat of some sort, then that just has to be. Guyana needs Exxon now that its oil operations are so far along.

But the issue is who needs who more. Who can do without all this spending that generates so much debt, so much depleting of the retirement, the rainy day, savings. Think of the Natural Resources Fund. So much taken out (GY$208.9B in 2023), and examine where it went, and who repeatedly scored big in the sweepstakes.

I keep saying that Exxon will not become a Grade C- debt risk, or forced to join the corporate breadline like GM and Chrysler of a few years ago, if it gives Guyana more. Exxon must part with a few more percentage points for Guyana, agree to the enhancement of other contract components to do more for Guyana. It would not be so much less for the company, no material dent to its profitability. The PPP Government has utterly, miserably, and abjectly failed at going in this direction, pressing Exxon.

The local oil warriors have not even tried; rather, they declare war on those who say why not. The opposition cannot be exempted. Now that cost-of-living is made into the opposition’s paramount issue, then Exxon must know how and where it stands. So must all Guyanese also.

(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.)

---

• cost-of-living, hard truths, Oppostion, Parade Ground, PPP Govt.

---