‘Smoke and mirrors’

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The suddenness with which the regime decided to make a $200,000 cash grant to all Guyanese households and with which it also altered both the procedure, quantity and timing of this handout is most reminiscent of a similar difficulty and quick reversal it had to make in relation to the miserly salary increases it sought to pay to those qualified teachers that could migrate.  Now it appears that both it and some in the opposition will have us believe that the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government has suddenly become responsive to public pressure. It is all smoke and mirrors.

No amount of parliamentary circus is likely to cure me of the belief that, with all the Drs and well-paid advisors in the house and its lengthy association with such issues, if it wished, the government was more than able to properly conceptualise an efficient, effective and less politically opportunistic method of distributing the suddenly materialised G$60 now about G$63 billion.

What rules Guyana is not a regime that needs to or does pay much attention to public opinion, particularly when political advantage is concerned, and the PPP would not have willingly given up the political advantage the process of such a distribution offers.  Was this not so the decision to deal with the cost of living would not have been so abrupt and would have happened at the imminent budget time.  And the more politically opportunistic process that would have seen the populace paying homage to scores of red capped/shirted persons associated with the handouts galivanting around Guyana nearer elections time would have been adopted.

Of course, even if the change of policy was the result of its acquiring ‘feed-back’ from the public as the regime would like us to believe, the obvious embarrassment it is attempting to disguise would not have occurred if it had eschewed its autocratic unilateralist mode of governance. Democratic governance would have meant that given the size and range of the expenditure, particularly since it could not find resources to properly remunerate teachers and other public servants, it would have gone to the National Assembly, possibly at budget time, with a properly documented proposal of its intentions and the ‘feed-back’, which is apparently now responsible for its deviations, would have been acquired.

But the PPP is unlikely to lose a single vote over the ‘embarrassment’ it has again suffered. Indeed, given the critical personal relief it is likely to bring to many suffering the results of the hopeless conditions its policies have unnecessarily wrought, it might even win some votes! Thus the opposition’s concern and piggy-backing!

Guyana has now found its El Dorado and so must establish policies that can instil hope in the poorest of its people. The most a universal, $100,000 one off, cash grant can do is help the poor with their immediate financial problems and give the well-off an unneeded bonus.  What is truly sad is that by about 2010 the global powers thought that the world had reached a level of development that could ensure that everyone received the basic requirements of existence. In 2015, the United Nations adopted its 2016 to 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the PPP government was very much a part of the lengthy process.

The first goal calls for an end to ‘poverty in all its forms everywhere’, and the second to ‘end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture’. The first goal also commits governments, according to their means, to ‘Implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable.’ Floors are Universal Basic Income (UBI): ‘a basic set of essential social rights and transfers in cash and kind to provide a minimum income and livelihood security for all and to facilitate effective demand for and access to essential goods and services.’ The second goal is premised on the idea that everyone should have access to sufficient nutritious food.

One would have thought that this kind of studied approach, not arbitrary one-off cash grants, would have provided the framework for some kind of long run ‘El Dorado’ project that initially focuses on the poor but gradually, as resources becomes available, is expanded to all. The colloquial objections associated with cash transfers – they encourage laziness, binging on parties, alcohol, cigarettes, etc. – have all been considered and largely debunked. Nineteen studies ‘almost without exception … [found] that cash transfers improve education, health outcomes and alleviate poverty’.

‘The evidence on the impact of cash transfers on poverty outcomes shows an overwhelmingly positive picture. Cash transfers are mostly having a statistically significant effect on beneficiary’s expenditure and poverty levels and when they do, they increase expenditure and (improve) poverty indicators’ (http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/ en/617631468001 808739/pdf/WPS6886.pdf).

Most relevant to Guyana, it has been suggested that ‘a simple transfer of 10 percent of oil revenues could effectively eliminate poverty in several oil-exporting countries’ (Ibid), and thus the notion that UBIs can be obstacles to more important social development goals is a result of ideological bias. With this in mind, in ‘A universal basic income for all Guyanese’ (SN: 30/08/2017), I said, ‘I believe that every citizen in Guyana should have direct access to a proportion of the revenues flowing from our oil and gas resources. … a reasonable percent of the oil/gas revenue should be permanently set aside as direct cash grants to the most vulnerable but gradually, as revenue increases, reaching the level of a UBI (an amount sufficient to secure basic needs as a permanent earnings floor no one could fall beneath) for all Guyanese.’

But importantly, it should be noted that studies found ‘at least one statistically significant effect, suggesting that design and implementation features matter in shaping poverty impacts.’ Two potentially important design and implementation features are that ‘transfer levels need to be meaningful to reduce poverty rates [and] for the transfer to have a bigger and more sustainable impact, beneficiaries should be receiving the transfer for longer periods of time.’ (https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/resource-documents/11316.pdf).

Since 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King said, ‘I am now convinced that the simplest solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a new widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.’ Contemporarily, Milton Friedman, the right-wing American economist and statistician who won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, President Barack Obama, etc., have all given some support to a UBI but some in the upper echelons of the PNC have taken the archaic ideological stance of associating UBI with dependency syndrome, laziness, etc! Luckily, one of their associates, the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) by way of Prof. Clive Thomas and what it calls the Buxton project supports this general approach.

The PPP has no interest in a universal project of upliftment for in Guyana’s caustic ethnic context, to extend and hold its political support it must keep other ethnic groups – since they are its main protagonist over whom it has no control, Africans – in relative poverty. So please, notwithstanding the propaganda, without some serious nudging, do not expect the PPP government to support or establish of any process that will either identify the nature of existing inequity or lead to equitable development in Guyana. It is all smoke and mirrors.

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