Six years of richness

Dec 25, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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(Kaieteur News) – Merry Christmas, fellow citizens.  Similar wishes are extended to strangers, visitors, partners, and others in Guyana’s new and widening commercial family.

Six years of national richness ought to mean that Guyanese of all stations are in a better state financially, a happier state emotionally, overall.  Six years after bottomless depths of a natural resource was discovered, Guyanese should be on top of the world.  Small population, the kind of money, American billions, that was never a part of the local language, is now as everyday as the sun, and just as brightening, blistering.

The world has stood up, been pushed to watch, then gush.  Guyana is number one.  Guyanese live in a situation that make them the cream of the world.  The best.  Are they today, six years after First Oil?  Ask an ordinary Guyanese if he or she is better off today, and he glares, as if listening, talking, to a moron.  Ask a Guyanese at the upper levels of this society, with hands deep into the national pie, and there is diplomacy and humility.  It is trickery, really.  The superrich who leapt from being merely rich into the stratosphere aren’t coming out straight and boasting about riches.  It would expose how much the haves have gotten of the rich national black-cake, and how poorly the have nots have fared in the last six years.

Operating under the assumption that their wealth has been honestly earned, I say congratulations to the superrich-politicians, private enterprise, other princes of this realm-on this Christmas Day.  So, what do I say in the next breath to the super-poor and poor in Guyana?  Condolences?  Condolences amid a basket of plenty?  Hold strain, for better will come?  When?  It has been six years.  Today, life is harder than yesterday, going all the way back.  When there was no money, the times were tough.  But now that there is a wash of cash, an explanation is needed as to why things, the times, and life in general, are all tougher.  I take a stab at this on this day of peace and goodwill to all men.  Note: no names, no groups, no heat.  Simply care and warmth, almost like the inside of a private manger.

Prices have gone up astronomically, and that word may still not be doing justice to the situation.  Whatever distressed Guyanese could have afforded before, they can afford only less of those same items in this the Year of our Lord, 2025.  Take basic food items, as an example.  It is a stark one; alarming, frightening.  When prices for food are steeply higher (and going still higher [like some rocket]) then shorthanded citizens are forced to buy less.  Thus, they are those many Guyanese, who are not just poorer in 2025, they are also hungrier, and probably more of them on that line that drives people up a wall.  What to do?  What’s the way out of this predicament?  Christmas Season or all the other days of regular starvation season?  For emphasis, killer prices mean less food on the table, hence more hunger, and perhaps longer.

Statistics can be concealed, played games with; but a man or a child cannot hide hunger forever.  The stomach, entire system revolts, after a time, when less and less food is available to be eaten.  Monthly bills are ignored.  Other crucial elements of living-clothes, transportation, medicines-not even considered.  This is about food on a Christmas morning.  Whoever is reading, whoever can still be honest enough to think in a compassionate manner, the question lingers: are Guyanese better positioned today, in this Christmas Season, after six years of national riches?  Not Guyanese on the upper half of the national economic high-rise, but rank-and-file Guyanese trapped on the lower floors of that same building.  If they are even marginally better off, then I would argue that a cash grant would not be so desperately needed.  It is, isn’t it?  Or, it could be that poor, pulling-out-their-hair-by-the-roots Guyanese are playing their own games, by faking hard times.  In a nutshell, they are greedy, never satisfied, since so much has been done for them, given to them.

In normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be my first choice of subject to present on Christmas morning.  Having known Christmases, in Guyana and the early days in America, that were tougher than nails, and sharper than toothaches, there is no choice.  I identify with the poor and anguished, and it is my duty to speak of their plight, highlight their condition.  When there is a dollar to share across a family, or a country, and one tiny section receives anywhere from 75 to 90 cents of that dollar (in some form), then the arithmetic is simple and staggering.  The crumb of 10 to 25 cents is left to handout to the massive remaining segment of the family or country, leading to poverty, fear, and despair.  It is just too little for too many, no matter how sliced or stretched.

Hundreds of thousands of Guyanese are hurting, desperate for any port from the financial storms that batter them, leave them breathless.  I have spoken, written, about this so many times that I have lost count.  Nothing, not the outputs of powers or principals, has done much to relieve the situation of those left with nowhere to turn to, and no one to go.  No sparkling Facebook presentation, no self-serving picture, makes a difference to a father or mother, who cannot feed their children, let alone themselves.  For this to be the ugly, paralyzing story of legions of poor Guyanese after six years of breathtaking national richness, has to qualify as an unequalled travesty.  Just as King Herod sent his goons and hooligans to wipeout those infants in the time around that first Christmas, there is this eerie parallel in 21^st century Guyana.  A land rich in so many ways, and one also rich in its multitudes of poor living in daily agony.

Still, I say Merry Christmas to my fellow Guyanese.  Make the best of it, even if there is only black bread, and black-cake or Black Forest ham is the stuff of yuletide dreams.

(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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• Christmas Day, GHK Lall, Merry Christmas, richness

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