The alternative is worse than the original        

Oct 15, 2024 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The government has sought to ease the burden of rising costs with a gesture it presumes generous: a cash grant to every household. Yet, as is the fashion with all gestures that draw from the public purse, it has inspired a debate— in fact a counterproposal a proposal: rather than dispensing this windfall to households, it should be distributed to every resident adult.

The debate, as debates often do, has come down to the core of arithmetic versus equity. And it is clear that while the suggestion might seem neat on paper, it suffers in its reckoning with reality.

Let us first consider the matter of databases, which underpin any sensible distribution. Those in favour of a grant to every resident adult have not been shy about offering a solution: use the database from the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM). It is, after all, a database that claims to be inclusive of those who reside in this land, recording names and numbers with bureaucratic diligence. But those who point to this database as a means of achieving fair distribution must contend with an inconvenient truth: this is the very database that the Opposition has accused of being padded—swollen with the names of those who have long since departed, either to another country or to the grave. Should a government lean upon such a faulty ledger, it risks both misallocation and the cynical gaze of a public that is already suspicious of the integrity of such efforts.

Yet even if we were to imagine, generously, that the database could be scrubbed clean of its spectral entries, the issue of equity remains. In the fervor to revise, advocates of the alternative grant have lost sight of the fundamental disparities that would result. Consider the practical arithmetic of their proposal: a grant of, say, $100,000 to every resident adult. For a household with five adults, this becomes a half-million dollars—a comfortable cushion, if not a windfall.

Yet down the street, a single-parent household with one adult and five children would receive only $100,000. Here lies the true inequity of the alternative proposal: it does not account for the different needs of different homes. It presumes that the burdens carried by a household of one are comparable to those borne by a family of six.

The original household cash grant scheme, while far from perfect, at least acknowledges that a household is a unit of mutual dependency. It attempts, albeit imperfectly, to direct aid to where it might be most needed, recognizing that children, the elderly, and the unemployed all have stakes in the household’s fortune. To shift to a system based purely on the individual without regard for context is to forget that no person is an island—least of all in a place where kinship and family are more than abstract notions. The alternative proposal risks becoming a cold exercise in numbers, detached from the warmth of everyday living where what matters most is not just how much, but how fairly the help is apportioned.

Those who rally for a resident-adult cash grant insist that it is a quicker, more direct route to assistance. In their haste, they overlook the slow work of building a credible database—one that could serve as the bedrock of a fair and orderly distribution for both now and the future.

Certainly, such a database is no small task; it is the work that will take years and involve continuous refinement. Yet this slow, meticulous effort is worth more than a hasty policy change.

No one denies that the present method of household cash grants will be plagued with administrative hiccups. But the solution is not to abandon the concept of households altogether in favour of a system that is, in some ways, even more flawed. Rather, it is to do the unglamorous work of improving the existing framework—of ensuring that the mechanics of the grant process are handled with care, and that the data on which it is based are as accurate as possible. The true promise lies not in reinventing the wheel but in ensuring that the wheel we have does not wobble at every turn.

The temptation to pursue shortcuts is a perennial one. But when it comes to public policy, the easy solution is rarely the best. It is more often a sugar rush—a quick satisfaction followed by a long reckoning. The suggestion to shift from household to individual grants might appeal to those impatient for reform, but in truth, it does little to resolve the fundamental issue of fairness. To chase after it would be to trade one set of imperfections for another, while leaving the underlying problem unsolved. Better to stay the course, even if it means enduring some discontent and delay along the way, than to set off down a path that promises ease but ends in disorder.

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

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• cash grant, GECOM, household, Peeping Tom, resident adult, rising costs

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