A President fearing to say cost-of-living

Aug 08, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – The president has broken new ground.  Congratulations are extended for his pioneering efforts.  It wasn’t the ground broken for a fancy, new project.  Nor was it the ground from which Guyana’s headman bent from the waist and retrieved the garbage.  Commendable those are, and of that let there be no nitpicking, no quarreling.  What the president did was so groundbreaking that it now stands head and shoulders above all of his other endeavors on the last five years on the bridge of Guyana’s ship of state.

It took Guyana’s president exactly five years to bring himself to that place where he could say those three little words, and then in a sneaky, sleight-of-hand way.  No folks, wrong again.  The three words are not ‘I love you.’  They are cost of living.  Sometimes, there are fused, with hyphens doing the connecting.  It was interesting, and also painful, to read how the president did everything including biting his tongue from saying cost of living.  But ended up with everything that he said having something to do with that killer of Guyanese days, and poor Guyanese lives.

From SN’s “President announces cocoa facility, 30% electricity rate cut for Region One” dated August 3^rd, came “This is how we address costs.  This is how we reduce burdens on your families by opening new opportunities…where Region One has enormous potential.”  I am not the quickest study but “address costs” and “reduce burdens” have the warmth of doing something about cost of living without mentioning it.  There was more from SN and more from the president who was on a tear.  “This means more money staying in your pocket”, with a nod to a rate cut to enhance the $110M electricity subsidy already in place.  The toll at the Four Miles will be removed, which means less out of pocket for miners, small farmers, and transporters.  Now, if only the president could have bitten the bullet and admitted that his immortal and immaculate PPP Government (by his own evaluation) messed up big time with its handling of cost of living.  In beating around the bush with evasive language, he lost some votes waiting to be earned.  One would be for the purest honesty, and right from here.

From KN on August 3^rd also, the president waxed even more brightly.  “These are the things that are key and critical for you.  These are the things that will make the difference in your quality of life”.  I note the president script writers have stuck him with a rhetorical device called anaphora.  It now suffers from overuse.  Also, the president is stuck on avoiding by any means necessary, any mention of cost of living, given how much damage his PPP Government has inflicted on poor Guyanese in that specific aspect of their lives.  The much blander and safer “quality of life”, is settled for, with the hope that it gives the president and his ruling party a pass for their cost-of-living cruelties that battered Guyanese over the last five years.  In the conveniently sanitized mind of the president, the rash of today’s sweet promises is more than enough to compensate for his government depraved indifference towards easing the burdens that were left alone in the last 261 weeks.

The president may not be mathematically minded, but Guyanese can count, and none more than the mass of poor ones in this country.  Because they didn’t have much to count in the last five years due to the PPP’s meanness and stinginess, the crisis for the president is that jilted and insulted Guyanese remember.  They ask themselves why now and why all these rich promises?  It must be because there are elections coming up in less than four weeks.  This is what all of the moving by political parties and the promising by political leaders distil to: Guyanese have about four weeks to decide who among the six contesting groups will be the most faithful to their promises in the next five years.  It is risky business, this matter of where to place that precious, coveted mark on September 1^st.  For whom amounts to a dangerous decision, because it involves the future and that of the children’s also.  These aren’t decisions on which to be casual, or what’s put in the wrong hands.

When a president of five years standing goes to such tortured lengths to dodge saying cost-of-living, what does that confirm?  When the same president bristles against owning up to dealing harshly with poor Guyanese relative to the same paralyzing cost-of-living, he leaves the battered and bruised with a big headache.  Amid the electricity riches, and other splendid measures (belated plasters and poultices, really), can this president and his people be trusted to deliver.  If the president can’t say cost-of-living, then whatever else he says matters for naught.

(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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• cost-of-living, Electricity riches, GHK Lall, PPP, President

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