In Guyana politicians on all sides proclaim their concern for the poor and commitment to ease their condition, but over the years, knowingly or unknowingly, many of their proposals have undermined their professed concern. Policies are rolled out without any proper identification and targeting of the actual poor with whom we are concerned. Political immediacy appears to take precedence over the needs of the poor but even this could only be so because we generally hold a backward understanding of distributive justice.
The $10,000 per child education grant in the current budget is only the latest and most blatant of these questionable policies. The fact that it could be presented in the belief that we will consider it to be an optimal use of our scarce national resources in this policy area, tells us about the perception of our understanding of distributive justice.
This policy has everything wrong with it. It is intended to improve school enrollment and attendance but is untargeted and applies to the entire public school population. It is without stated baseline data and targets against which effectiveness can be judged. And it is promised for only one year as if it is expected that the
