The ‘failed model’ that the PPPC is using

Oct 02, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – It is always a curiosity when politicians forget their own record, as though a promise spoken in the marketplace becomes null once the echo dies. One such curiosity arises in the recent contention that cash transfers, drawn from the oil purse, are a failed model.

To call this statement astounding would be to understate the matter. For it is not the idle critic on a street corner who has said this, but a Minister of the very government that has made a veritable habit of giving cash grants.

This is the same government that places little envelopes in the hands of the parents of schoolchildren and calls it the “Because We Care” grant. It is the same one that pressed cash into the palms of families during the pandemic, branded as the COVID-19 grant. It found money for newborns, for the disabled, for health tests, and for citizens in general. It will soon find monies for what will be known as a transportation grant. And the Because We Care cash grant will see a steep increase.

Every corner of the country has seen the official hand distributing crisp notes, sometimes ceremonially, sometimes hurriedly, but always with the same message: here is a token of your government’s concern. To now suggest that a cash transfer, particularly one sourced from the oil revenues, is somehow a failed enterprise is to saw off the very branch upon which the government itself has been perched.

Prior to setting out on the campaign trail, the leaders of the PPPC did not mince words. They said, directly and repeatedly, that one way to ensure that oil wealth touches ordinary citizens is through cash transfers. And just the other day, the President himself, with a glint in his eye, assured the people that “Christmas will be nice this year”—a remark widely understood as a hint of more largesse to come.

To walk back from such commitments would be not only to rewrite one’s own speeches but also to trifle with the hopes of a people already conditioned to expect that the blessings of oil will flow not only through asphalt and steel but also through the soft comfort of household budgets. The Minister may take a little instruction, too, from beyond our shores. During the darkest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States government mailed cheques to its citizens. They called it “stimulus,” but what was it in substance if not a cash transfer? No one at the Treasury paused to ask whether a cheque might encourage idleness. They simply wrote them and sent them out, because a crisis demands that people have the means to endure.

And in the United Arab Emirates, where oil wealth has long been the wellspring of prosperity, citizens receive all manner of cash benefits and subsidies. Their model has hardly collapsed. Their citizens, far from being indolent, live industrious lives in a society that hums with activity and modernity.

Closer to home, Ghana—another oil-producing country—has made use of cash transfers as a component of its social protection programs. If cash transfers are a failed model, then why have governments from Accra to Abu Dhabi, from Washington to Georgetown, reached for them time and again? A failed instrument is seldom played twice, and yet here is one that becomes the favorite instrument of governance.

There is no validity or empirical proof that cash transfers, by their very nature, encourage laziness, weaken the work ethic, and create a dependent citizenry. This argument is easy to state but hard to prove. Empirical studies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia have shown that cash transfers, whether conditional or unconditional, rarely reduce labor supply. In fact, in many cases they improve it, because the poor are then able to afford transportation to work, childcare, or even the simple nourishment that sustains effort. Reviews of dozens of such programs and found little evidence to support the notion that cash makes layabouts of men and women. On the contrary, cash often lubricates the machinery of effort—it allows small investments, the repair of a tool, the purchase of seed, or the start of a small business.

One wonders, then, what model the Minister believes is not failed. Is it the model in which oil wealth bypasses the people altogether, traveling instead to contractors, consultants, and creditors? Is it the model in which roads and bridges are built while households struggle to buy bread?

Development projects are fine, and no one doubts their necessity. But they are long-term in effect, and families live in the short term. They need relief now, not in twenty years when the ribbon is cut on a new span of highway. Cash transfers are not a panacea, but neither are they a failure. They are, at best, a modest recognition that oil belongs to the people as much as to the state, and that its benefits must be felt not only in the grand and public structures of society but in the private and ordinary life of a family’s kitchen table. To criticize them is not only inconsistent with the government’s own practice, but uncharitable to the very citizens whose faith sustains the government in office.

The truth is simpler than the Minister makes it. Cash transfers work because money, in the hands of ordinary people, works. It buys food, pays rent, clears medical bills, and puts shoes on children. The Minister may yet rediscover this truth when Christmas comes, and once again the government makes its seasonal pilgrimage to distribute cash. If that, too, is a failed model, then it is one in which failure makes people happy.

(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, Failed model, Peeping Tom, PPPC

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