Guyanese should be celebrating the happiest birthday globally

May 26, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Guyana is closing in on that three-score level. Happy 58^th Independence anniversary Guyana from the Kaieteur family. Considering their extraordinary gifts, Guyanese should be celebrating the happiest birthday of all, the most joyful people in the world. Some are, but they are so few, those who partake of the fruits of this land, to the victors the spoils. Then there are the losers, that big multitude left out of the sharing and celebrating. We tick off another year reached in this nation’s Independence anniversary calendar, and a fresh US$300M is withdrawn from the Natural Resources Fund. Little of that, so small a fraction of the whopping national budget, a record breaker, touches the lives of those groping their way forward. It is the ongoing battle for daily survival, where there are only straws to lean on, and they crumple easily.

There are those on the inside of the rich, gravy train that is today’s Guyana, a few thousand at the widest expanse. The small band closest to the top know what it is to be financially independent. They have much to be joyful about, more to finance their revelries, this cohort of less than a thousand of the connected to the movers and shakers in Guyana.The rest, the seven hundred plus thousands, are of a house with different floors. Clustered around the middle or a rung or two above are those who can manage comfortably to maintain their heads above the pressures of the day. They number a few tens of thousands, perhaps, from the business sector, the senior public servants, those who inherited some small or large fortune and have held onto it. They know what real independence is about because they live it. They do not fear the coming of a new dawn, they don’t shrink from the mail carrier bringing a new bill. These Guyanese possess what is required to rise above the times and circumstances of Guyana with ease. When this is weighed on this Independence Day, there is still a world of citizens, Guyanese by birth or heritage, who are not accounted for, who fall outside the positives of the great big natural resources net.

They are the real Guyana. It is of the disappointed Guyanese who deal in the daily fare of heavy trials, so little in their hands. Guyana is in the news of the world, then there is this world of cost of living that bring dread, chronic sickness that stir fear, children for whom there is only so much to give, and the grayer of head and slower of step, who worry about how they are going to make it. No one at any level could be so shameless, so obscene, as to tell them that they are independent, that Independence Day is a beautiful occasion. It should be, given what Guyana has been endowed with, but this has not been the case. There is no choice left, but for us at this paper to ask: Independence Day, it is; but what is the state of their independence? Of what are they independent, when hopes fade, and anxieties about a decent existence play havoc with their minds? On the conservative side, they amount to hundreds of thousands in this small population. Too many lack enough food, struggle to meet their obligations. So, to speak of independence is to insult them, remind them of where they are, how they have been forgotten by those that they trusted. This is the brutal contradiction of close to half of Guyana’s population reduced to eking out any existence that they can squeeze out of their day in one of the richest countries in the world.

There is the irony of most Guyanese living in the fastest growing economy in the world and the ordinary man and woman, working class families, in this country forced to economize. They must count every scarce dollar as if it is a lifetime. To take to the next meal, to obtain some needed medicine, and to hail a passing minibus for some vital purpose. Independence should be a time of celebration. It is not for most Guyanese. According to one leader, when they are patient, they will be prosperous.

anniversary, celebrating, Editorial, Guyanese, Kaieteur, record

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Guyanese should be celebrating the happiest birthday globally

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