Dear Editor,
The fake ‘furore’ over pay increases to senior executives of the state is sure to be bled for its full propaganda by the opposition, the cynics, and those imbued with a certain culture that left many high functionaries of the old PNC government in modest circumstances at the end of their time in power.
Several factors are eminent in the thinking about the issue.
First we have to take into account that the earnings of ministers and parliamentarians are no more than the revenues of the average middle class personnel in any part of the world. It is by no measure of things “enrichment.” The earnings are far from being exceptional. I read of the equivalent of perhaps US$40,000 per year for many ministerial and senior positions. It is what this writer was earning twenty-five years ago as a public affairs director of a territorial government department in the United States Virgin Islands. It is a position that now pays double. Given the cost of living in Guyana and the lifestyle choices imposed by their positions, it is not possible to believe that leaders can live on what they were earning previously. There is an obligation of the state to provide liveable salaries not only to the active “workers” and normal pensioners, but to all engaged in production for the state, and this according to their level of functioning and market standards. The alternative is not necessarily, corruption, which as it is remains outside the cultural possibles of a lot of Guyanese. But as we know from our experience with the old PNC, the alternative is that a lot of senior civil servants at the end of career could hardly afford a house and to live at levels expected of their social status, after decades of public service. We have a strong residue of expectation where the government job provides a form of security and status, but as in a lot of third world states, it assures the job-holders of a merely precarious existence from generation to generation. In fact, for many of the culture from which many civil servants are drawn, an obvious interest in money was considered unseemly and re-inforced by what I remember as the prohibition of civil servants to make money on the side through business activities. This is one factor. The other is that the PPP team quite unashamedly set themselves right in keeping with their perceived status, and funnelled resources to their families.
I once read a paper by an Indian academic on corruption. It made the point that corruption serves essentially as a form of capital accumulation by people who have the other markers of status. Some part of the money earned from corruption is retained in the local economy and may contribute to growth and the well-being of the old dispossessed. Marginalisation is rolled back for some peoples and groups. It is what we witnessed recently. It reminds me of what one sociologist has called I believe “status equivalence,” where the social status inevitably imposes the need for an equivalent financial standing. High social status calls for high financial status and the temptation to match the different forms of standing is complicated by the demands made by family and friends on politicians once they come to power. It is known as the old African problem, and exists in many third world countries. The network of kin and acquaintances multiples the needs of the man in power way beyond what meagre earnings could support. The situation responds to its own obligations and laws. The results could be the barefaced and self-serving Pradoville/Berbice bridge/pharmaceutical company type schemes we now know. Or it could be settling for a status quo from which no one benefits.
The old PNC was born of the culture and time from which it sprang. Fantasies about Burnham’s Swiss bank account and this or that Minister Ten Per Cent speak more of the dreams of the accusers/critics than of the practices of that party when it was in power. We came to see who ended up with the foreign bank accounts and the ten per cent. Working for the civil service in the old PNC time was, for many, a form of vows of poverty. It is disheartening for me to have read of old radio announcers and people I started a career with, appealing for public assistance in their times of illness and need. We needed to put in place structures to take care of our retired. Old GDF and other public servants need to be urgently taken care of even if it means creating a scheme or pension fund parallel to the NIS.
The other matter to which I wish to refer is the public relations handling of the whole matter. All salary raises for government leaders immediately draw forth cries of “what about the small man” and arguments about the new rulers thinking about their own pockets. We remember that we are not a society with a landed or rentier class, able to afford a political career while it lives on comfortable earnings it was guaranteed on the sweat of a working class exploited in the family’s past.
In fact the populace will get over it. It will cost the parties nothing, in political terms, to pay fair salaries to their executives. It cost the PPP nothing electorally. Their loss may be more due to demography than to disgust at the self-enrichment of certain leaders. In the end the coalition is unlikely to suffer, as it will surely, progressively, increase payments to other categories of personnel sooner or later. What was obvious is that some of the pre-electoral promises were badly thought out or calculated. It is strange that the ruling parties seem to be discovering that laws or budgets prohibit some of what they planned to do.
My own feeling is that the salary increase will blow over and ministers and others settle down to making an honest living in keeping with perhaps fifty per cent of what they would have earned as practising lawyers or consultants or US based Guyanese, had they chosen to resist the urge to come to our rescue. The PPP will make expected noise. It merely lends a comic sideshow effect to the politics of today. For in fact this government has got to start de-marginalising all categories of people and they have some things to learn from the way the PPP managed this, and to extend the categories by generosity with land, contracts and other resources that some of the poor saw distributed to others in the past two decades
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
