Dear Editor,
Health Minister, Dr. Leslie Ramsammy’s letter (`All decent Guyanese should take offence at what happened in 1973 on the Corentyne’ SN, May 4), in which he painted himself as both a witness and a victim of the 1973 elections violence, is an attempt to follow his President in dredging up the PNC’s past so that traditional PPP supporters will not repeat what they did in 2006 and stay away in large numbers on Election Day.
For the first time, it appears as though the PPP is deeply worried about low voter turnout among its traditional support base, and not because of the PNC – which was rendered virtually impotent during the Jagdeo presidency, thus forcing the PPP to go as far back as 1973 to dredge up the PNC’s past – but because of the prevailing perception that the PPP, under Bharrat Jagdeo-Donald Ramotar, has alienated the party’s support base with the manner in which the government was run since President Jagdeo took over in 1999.
Despite all the claims of economic progress and infrastructural development, the ives of the ordinary people compared to the new breed of middle and wealthy classes.
Many Guyanese, including traditional PPP supporters, are also of the view that whereas the PPP finally benefited from free and fair elections in 1992 with a promise to be a working people’s government that is lean and clean, by 2000, new leadership appeared to deem the repeated victories handed it by its majority votes among Indians as a mandate to accelerate engagement in the most corrupt behaviours with absolutely no regard for public accountability or even the law.
The New York-based Financial Standards Foundation (www.estandardsforum.org), in a July 2010 report on Guyana, said, “There are laws that penalize official corruption but they are not effectively enforced.” Ergo, despite signs of infrastructural development backed by foreign loans and grants, corruption actually rules the day in a Guyana that is awash in money from foreign loans and grants for government projects that end up in people’s pockets and bank accounts, foreign remittances, narco-trafficking, money laundering and misappropriation of state funds from disposed resources.
This endemic corruption has enabled the emergence of the new middle and wealthy classes, who are basically enablers of the corrupt ruling class. The ordinary class of people who lack access to money flowing from corrupt activities is then faced with one of three basic choices to survive: 1) depend on whatever wages and salaries they receive from government and private sector employers, 2) turn to a life of street hustling and crime, or 3) migrate.
The notion of getting into private business is always there, but the economy is already oversaturated with consumer-based businesses and not enough people earning enough money as customers of the new businesses, so that migration then becomes the go-to option for many, but especially those with skills and education.
The Financial Standards Foundation (FSF) report alluded to earlier, avers that one of the ways to generate strong self-sustaining growth that will boost the meagre standard of living and lower the high unemployment rate is to ‘decrease the emigration of highly educated and skilled citizens who either cannot find employment opportunities or can only find jobs at wages that are a pittance of what they can earn overseas’.
Editor, for a country with less than three quarters of a million people for the last four or five decades and so much untapped natural potential on so much virgin land, it is a disgrace for the government and its supporters to call what we are seeing true ‘progress and development’, even as Guyanese keep running away. Which country can truly develop without its human resource base?
Further, when the PPP, its government and sympathizers at home and abroad keep pointing to signs of progress and development – and some even go so far as to present statistical data to back their defence of the government’s handling of the economy – do they really understand the role of the informal economy in the formal economy?
According to Financial Standards Foundation (FSF), “AEGIS, a British based Security and Risk Management Company, notes in its country report for Guyana that ‘With estimates that the informal economy represents 40-60% of the formal sector, and with widespread smuggling, narco-trafficking, and money laundering, the impact of financial crime on the legitimate economy is significant…Despite being established in 2003, the Financial Intelligence Unit, which has anti-money laundering responsibilities, still only comprises one person’. A 2003 IMF report estimated the informal economy was equal to 47% of GDP.”
Since that report, does anyone believe the informal economy has diminished to negligible levels in the last five years? This is why we need to understand the context of this mirage of progress and development, because money gleaned from the informal economy is ending up in banks or real estate or businesses, and not in ordinary people’s pockets, who still have to find money from somewhere to pay for imported and locally produced goods, pay rent/mortgage, transportation and utilities, clothing, among other budgetary items. Can wages and salaries alone do all that?
According to the same FSF report, Guyana has a population of 748,846, “but ranks 114 of 182 countries in the 2009 UNDP HDI. Poverty is widespread, with 7.7% of the population living on less than US$1.25 a day.” Additionally, “Without major structural reforms to diversify the economy and create job opportunities to lower the high unemployment rate, the economy is unlikely to break out of its recent modest performance which saw it grow at an annual rate of just 1.6% between 1998 and 2009.”
After 19 years, the President and the PPP’s presidential candidate will be hard-pressed trying to sell government’s performance or the big bad wolf PNC as reasons for voters to give the PPP another five years. If anything, voters should see this year’s elections as a referendum on the PPP’s and PNC’s combined 47 years in government versus the expectations and dreams of the people of Guyana since we gained independence from Britain in 1966.
Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin
