Dear Editor,
For many years it has been mystifying to hear the Finance Minister declare in his budget speeches the moderate rate of inflation. No one believes these numbers as the actual experience of living here is that prices have skyrocketed in the past five years. How might this be possible?
A check of the cumulative percentage change from August 2020 to August 2025 for the main CPI categories in Georgetown, Guyana points to a number of absurdities, the most glaring example being that housing costs have decreased by 1% since 2020. Really? Try renting a Georgetown apartment or buying a house for the same price as 2020.
Food: +50.7%, Clothing: -0.1%, Foot-wear & Repairs: +0.5%, Housing: -1.0%, Furniture: +7.8%, Transport & Communication: +3.3%, Medical Care & Health Services: +9.7%, Education, Recreation & Cultural Services: +3.9% and Miscellaneous Goods & Services: +12.5%
Transportation has apparently only increased by 3.3% in the past five years. As for the anachronistic category of footwear and repairs this has increased by only 0.5%. How many cobblers are there left in the country? However all these lower increases feed into an overall price increase of only 23.1%.
The best indicator is the Food Index which has increased by 50.7% in five years. And there is no doubt that all the other categories have followed suit. What is also disgraceful is that the New Guyana Marketing Corporation has now stopped publishing market prices because they showed how much the basic commodities have been increasing.
We are being misled much like in Orwell’s 1984 where Big Brother convinced citizens the price of a chocolate bar had decreased.