All these riches: all these hurting people

By GHK Lall

Whenever Guyanese awake, some new, remarkable economic number is theirs to savor.  Depending on the quarter, there is great revelry, or there is more anguish.  So much more than ever before, yet so little like never experienced in the hardest of hard ‘guava’ seasons.  The people at the top and their circle of friends celebrate each new economic number coming from overseas, for it means more for them, adding to the ballooning wealth that they have accumulated so far.  Meanwhile, their neighbors across Guyana limp along, and lurch forward not to the next day, but towards wherever the meal may come from, if it is going to come at all.  As I hold the scale of consideration in my hand, try to balance it in my mind, I came to a strange place.  I think it captures the story of Guyana in this glittering, more likely raucous, bawdy oil age.  There was this fellow called Lazarus.

Lazarus was dripping from a string of sores, one condemned to the most pitiful of conditions.  He was a beggar compelled to hang around the gates and doorways of those who had all that life had to offer in abundance.  Enter the familiar rich man, a powerful one, too.  All he had to do was to find a kind and compassionate thought, develop some caring feeling, and say a word.  But he doesn’t.  Thus, the starving beggar lingers in his dreadful state with no ease from his pitiful condition.

I am thinking of that rich man, and there are the fat cats of Guyana swilling their malted liquor, feasting on caviar, and dressed in their purple finery.  Who is richer in Guyana, hogging the fat and cream of this land, but the PPP luminaries made obese from living off the patrimony of the people?  The poor people of Guyana.  The gluttonous in the PPP cabals-contractors, donors, insiders, hangers-on, assorted brownnosers, and soup drinkers-climb drunkenly from their chairs and cheer each new gaudy economic number coming from some local or foreign spreadsheet or PowerPoint.  The bigger the number, the better it is for them to grab some more of it, and hustle another slice of Guyana’s oil pie.  Like the rich man in the Lazarus story, the Guyanese PPP rich are choking from their craw up, and they still can’t bring themselves to split a thought, to spare a dime, for their hurting, hungry Guyanese brothers.

The newest number, and they come in doses laced with honey, are jaw dropping, and mouthwatering.  The first is that Guyana’s economy in 2022 stood at an incredible US$17,000 per citizen.  If there is any Guyanese individual, any Guyanese family, in the 48% that the World Bank found to be scratching out a miserly existence on US$5.50 a day, who thinks, believes, actually feels that he or she (and their own) is US$17,000 stronger, then I urge them to step forward, and sing that beautiful hymn before the whole world.  If there is any Guyanese from that same 48% subset of Guyana’s population that senses, or feels, that they are living life with half (a mere half) of that US$17,000, then that also is a social symphony that ought to be sung before one and all.

In other words, the richness of Guyana’s oil patrimony is reaching and touching and making a difference in the seemingly always stunted existence of Guyanese on the dragging end of the economic ladder.  It is not so.  Not so at all.  It is not so particularly for African Guyanese communities left in the barrenness of their paltry existence; African Guyanese citizens driven away from the national oil banquet.  The PPP Government and its defenders are sure to object strenuously, doggedly.  Be my guest, brothers.  But there are those in the local population who have been deliberately left out of outreaches with outstretched hands loaded with millions for predominantly non-African Guyanese in other communities and sectors also struggling.  They have benefited from a cushion extended.  Meanwhile, Black Guyanese are left to live like Lazarus, with their shortness of basics, their shortness of breath, from not having.

I came across other numbers.  One was how Guyana’s oil economy (only the oil part) grew in 2022 by 124.8%.  Our oil economy by itself more than doubled, but all the while there is that huge, swollen section of Guyanese poor doubled over in agony brought about by shortage.  This oil and its growth, and its great prosperities mean absolutely nothing to them.  Civil servants, the GY$74,000 workers, and those dreading going to the greens and veggie markets.  Another number, more than one, sparkled with the news that Guyana is in the top 5 of this calculation, and the upper 5 in something else or the other.  I think this is impressive, but to what end?  What do these numbers amount to when there are so many Guyanese Lazarus(es) hobbling about, with no place to go, none listening to them.  Certainly not the bigshots, and not the big speechmakers (think leaders) who spout whatever vulgar stupidity that comes from deep inside of them.

The irony is that Guyanese are dealing with reality and the imaginary at the same time.  The reality is that the expert calculations, however arrived at, are on the money, meaning that they are accurate.  They are not faked, nor constructed from smoke and haze.  But for all that US$17,000 per capita, and oil economy growth of 124.8%, and being hailed for top 5 placements in globally watched categories, those are nothing more than the stuff of imagination for those without sustenance, without government fairness, and without leadership consideration.  Nothing of substance.

Indeed, Guyanese are blessed with so much riches, but such is only for the few and the fair.  In a land of plenty, there is this grinding poverty.  In a time of richness, there are Guyanese living with emptiness, and the darkness that it brings.  Do we really have a government, or what we do have are brutal prison guards, with genocidal instincts?