Jagdeo is clueless when it comes to the cost-of-living

Aug 12, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – If you do not understand a problem, you cannot fix it. It is a plain truth that sits quietly at the heart of the PPPC administration’s repeated failures to bring relief to Guyanese households groaning under the weight of rising prices.

Last Thursday’s press conference offered a rare admission, although I suspect the speaker did not intend it as such. Vice President Jagdeo, acting as the party’s General Secretary, explained that the government had intervened with success in five areas—electricity, water, transportation, mortgages, and internet but had failure in respect to food prices. Five out of six! It is the sort of report card you would hand to your parents and hope they did not ask too many questions.

However, had Jagdeo and his party kept their feet firmly in the streets and markets they claim to serve, their strategy would have looked different. It would have been more targeted, more nuanced, more alive to the realities of the poor—and, most importantly, more successful in keeping prices subdued.

Electricity was the first boast. Yes, tariffs did not rise with imported fuel costs, because the government absorbed the increases. This, however, is not cost-of-living relief; it is simply holding the line where it already stood. If your patient has a fever, you do not call it a cure when the thermometer stops climbing—you bring it down. Jagdeo neglected to mention that electricity prices could fall by more than 30% if his government had been able to cut the massive technical and commercial losses that have dogged the system for decades. High tariffs are not only the offspring of oil prices; they are the inheritance of inefficiency and electricity theft.

Then there was water. Water tariffs have never been a meaningful driver of the cost of living in Guyana. To announce the removal of VAT on water and call it cost-of- living relief is like tossing an ice cube into the Demerara River to cool it down—harmless, well-meaning, and irrelevant.

Transportation is trickier. For the poor, the mini-bus and the pay-per-seat short-drop car that ply rural Guyana are lifelines. Their fares have remained relatively stable. But special hires’ rates have gone the other way, with some short drops leaping from $300 to $800. If Mr. Jagdeo had ever needed to take a ‘special hire’, he might have known of this extortion. But the vice presidency offers a cushion from such experiences.

Mortgages and internet rounded out the list, and here the detachment from reality became most apparent. Mortgages are not the daily worry of the poor, young office assistant or domestic help. Rent is. Over the past five years, rents have climbed into the absurd—$160,000 per month for an unfurnished two-bedroom flat. A government serious about cost-of-living relief might have leaned on landlords with taxes, nudging them away from predatory pricing. Instead, rents went unmentioned.

The greatest failure, however, has been food. This was admitted, but without reflection. The government needed no expensive study to see the trouble. Stabroek News’ “Cost of Living” series practically spelled it out: the poor complained. But most of the complaints revolved around the rising cost of brown rice, imported milk powder, and cooking oil.

Two of these are produced locally and the government should have asked why these prices increased.  These three items were the staples that strained exacting household budgets. Greens and vegetables, by the government’s own measure, rose more than 75%. Poultry, despite generous concessions to producers, soared in price when it should have fallen. Even a child’s lunch kit is not immune from the rising prices. Can you imagine a one-litre bottle of soda, prior to the pandemic, cost $240? Today it is $360, a 50% increase.

One of the government’s preferred response tools has been to increase disposable income. In theory, this lets the consumer breathe easier. In practice, it has been like pouring water into a sieve. The faster the extra money comes in, the faster it runs out—swallowed whole by the rising prices.

The trouble with all these interventions is that they are scattered, cosmetic, and unrooted in a proper understanding of the problem. They resemble the sort of advice you get from a distant uncle at Christmas—earnest, confident, and entirely inapplicable to your life.

If Mr. Jagdeo had walked the markets quietly, without entourage or camera, and asked the women buying a pint of oil or a quarter pound of rice what they feared most, he would have heard a different story than the one he told last Thursday. He would have seen that the cost-of-living crisis is not a single balloon to be popped with one neat pin, but a tangle of strings—transport, rent, electricity, food—that pull on each other in strange ways. To understand it is to respect its complexity. What you do not understand, you cannot fix. The government’s efforts have been many, their intentions perhaps genuine. But without that first act of comprehension—of standing among the people and listening—they will remain the sort of cures that vanish the moment you go shopping.

(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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• clueless, cost-of-living, Jagdeo, Peeping Tom, PPPC

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