What is your bottom line?

Feb 03, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – It is a rude question, almost an impertinent one, and that is why it unsettles. In Guyana, at this time of the year, it is drowned out by louder, more theatrical questions: Who is winning the Budget debate? Who is exposing whom? Who sounds convincing in the National Assembly?

The country, inside Parliament and outside of it, becomes absorbed in a kind of annual ritual drama. Yet while the speeches echo and the headlines churn, the most important reckoning takes place — or ought to take place — in silence, behind closed doors, at the kitchen table or in the quiet of one’s own head.

Every year after the Budget speech is read, I find myself reminding Guyanese that they place far too much reliance on the national Budget for their personal prospects. The Budget is not a promise of individual salvation. It is a one-year financial plan of government expenditure and revenue, an instrument of the state, not a life plan for the citizen. To look to it as such is to misunderstand both its purpose and your own responsibilities. If, as a citizen, you wait each year to see what the government will do for you, you already have a problem. It is not primarily what the government is giving you that should occupy your thoughts, but what it is taking from you, and how you intend to earn, spend, save, and survive.

The old anxieties have faded. We no longer live with the constant fear of devaluation, of foreign exchange shortages, of import restrictions that cripple enterprise and shrink ambition. Those dangers once shaped every private calculation. Today they are muted. That should have freed the citizen to focus more intently on his or her own budget. Instead, many have surrendered that responsibility altogether.

There are too many people who are more concerned with the government’s Budget than with their own. Many do not budget at all. They know, instinctively and vaguely, that their income will never match their spending, so they drift through months and years as before, hoping that something — luck, a windfall, a benevolent politician, a distant relative — will intervene. Hope replaces planning. Wishfulness substitutes for discipline.

Yet these same people follow the Budget debates with intense devotion. They listen closely as one side paints a bleak picture and portrays the government as careless or cruel. They listen as the other side responds with moral rebukes, reminding the nation of past mismanagement and inherited ruin. It is a familiar exchange, endlessly repeated, and curiously comforting. It allows the listener to feel involved without being responsible.

Meanwhile, the Guyanese people are engaged in a quieter, harsher struggle: the daily game of survival. It is played with ingenuity, resignation, and sometimes desperation. Many place their faith in luck and chance. Each week they buy Lotto tickets, sit in gambling shops, feed slot machines, and dream. Their dream of a better life is not anchored in skill, planning, or long-term effort, but in the sudden intervention of fortune. The overwhelming majority lose, but hope survives defeat. It always does.

Others adopt different habits. There are men with money perpetually in their pockets who nonetheless ask, almost by reflex, for a raise. The request has become mechanical, detached from need or circumstance. It is made without curiosity about the other person’s situation, without embarrassment, without reflection.

Still others depend heavily on relatives overseas. If they were to witness the long hours, the exhaustion, the quiet sacrifices that produce that US$100 remittance, they might ask less frequently. Distance softens reality. The Finance Minister has read his Budget. It is the largest in the country’s history, cushioned now by oil revenues. This fact is repeated with pride and alarm in equal measure. But too many forget that while oil money exists, what the country receives from extraction remains small relative to the wealth produced. That controversy will persist for years, until the Guyanese people themselves compel unity and demand renegotiation. The oil companies’ bottom line is secure. The government’s bottom line, for now, is strong. Trillion-dollar budgets are possible.

But the essential question remains unanswered: what about the average Guyanese? What is that person’s bottom line? How far in the red is he or she? And how is that deficit financed?

These questions are rarely framed in technical language by ordinary people. They are felt, not calculated. They are expressed in terms of living, of coping, of getting through. Survival is the true national occupation. The masses hope the government will not mismanage the economy and make life harder, but hope is not a strategy. Governments, like individuals, face uncertainty. In the end, people must look after their own well-being. They must live within their means. They must learn that a person can have much and still be unhappy, and that contentment often belongs to those who understand their limits and respect them. The real Budget debate is not in Parliament or on television. It is private, personal, and unavoidable.

So again: what is your bottom line?

(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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• Budget Debate, National Assembly, Peeping Tom, rude question

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