OPINION: Budget seen through poor Guyanese eyes

Last Updated on Sunday, 19 January 2025, 13:35 by Writer

By GHK Lall

Oh sure, this year’s budget is bright with numbers. Billions for one area, more billions for another, and still more billions for favored ones. Why is this bright budget so dim for me, a poor Guyanese teetering on the poverty line? Everyone tells me how rich I am, yet I am so hungry, always short of necessaries. What has gone wrong? Why do I not feature more prominently in all these records, all these hundreds of billions? Does living in poverty in this country, or too close to that condition, make me and my family, and the cohort of economic contemporaries, into a colony of Guyanese lepers? Consigned to the periphery of national budgets year after year, condemned as an inconvenience, and made into cripples by a government that says it cares, but is a stunning portrait of unconcern?

If one kilometer less of road is built, I could have a meal on the table for the little ones. A full one, a square one, such as has not been seen nor touched in a long time; the last time now obscured by the haze of memory that doesn’t reach back that far. It doesn’t take much, a big percentage bite, out of a national budget that breaks another record, but breaks my heart, to give a little more to the little people. Like me and the mass of Guyanese in the same condition as I am. What is 4, 5, 6 percentage points more from the budget for the bruised and battered in Guyana? Cost-of-living pressures are said to be so negligible as to be meaningless, but it is not nonexistent for me and the children. The rich and comfortable can say that with confidence. But if only they know the realities of Guyanese life, the indignities of facing one seller after another and having to turn away. Emptyhanded. Heavyhearted. Sickened to the soul. People like me live with cost-of-living squeezes and they are so piercing, so painful, that the screams of anguish must be smothered. If that one sliver of self-respect is all that I can hold onto, then so must I, come what may.

There ought to have been so much more coming from this year’s budget. More than that $5,000 monthly increase for pensioners. Some dogs and cats in this country live at a higher standard. Just ask the connected, the comrades, and the carnival of carousers in this country. What would it cost for $10,000 a month instead of $5,000 for Guyana’s 76,000 pensioners? For a little more for those who are challenged and on some public assistance program? I doubt whether any such consideration, certainly not the provision of an arm and a leg, would inhibit the progress and development of this country now the stuff of real-life fables. And real-life and real-time official follies and individual fears, if I may add. When those laboring (only the Fates know how), with a minimum of wage of $60,147 since July 1, 2022, can’t even have a kind word said in their favor in less than 30 seconds of that 305-minute budget presentation, then that parliamentary reading is not about building up bottom-of-the-line Guyanese. It is about breaking them. No question that the government is beholden to the private sector, even terrified of going against it. But in an economy, a country, where record profits are the norm for businesses, surely some more for minimum wage workers could be made today’s policy. How hemorrhaging would such be to income statements and cash flows for the private sector? Certainly not depressing to profit projections, nor paralyzing to a vibrant and growing operation.

Almost every sector that could be imagined is to benefit richly from this year’s budget, and then some more when supplementary budgets are lined up throughout the year. The richest asset, the most cherished resource, of a country is said to be its people. Why they feature so poorly in such a rich country remains a mystery to me. I am giving voice to the voiceless working class in Guyana, because that is from whence, I came. Some prefer not to look back. I do, which some stubborn strain in me doesn’t allow to do otherwise. I know what it is to be poor, hence, I appoint myself a speaker for their plight, against the famines with which they coexist, and of what should not be. Perhaps this makes me presumptuous. God forbid that it makes me contemptuous of the lot of peers, the people with whom I identify the most. In a budget this grand, it should not be so blank for those citizens who need that extended economic hand to lift them from where they are, up to where they already should have been.

The budget should have been a confirmation of powerful commitment to public and private workers, fearful pensioners, stricken parents. Private commerce won out again, and how! The powers that be got their priorities all wrong. Guyana’s lower orders, forsaken castes, lose again, live in bitter, resentful agony.