Dear Editor,
Four voices from the rich soil of Guyana are singled out today. Though swift in uttering, those voices echo across Guyana. In an oil rich land, three of the four represent living with reality, speaking to what’s real. The fourth voice lives excitedly in a world of unreality, what’s watery, especially sickly.
Right nearby, leading members of the PNC spoke to the heart of the record 2026 budget. Mr. Aubrey Norton stood at the Stabroek Market and said the ‘budget will benefit the rich and hurt the poor.’ Anyone disputing that statement after looking at the allocations is a lying liar. Any other insisting that that’s how the PPP Govt defines One Guyana, and budgets accordingly, still has some truth inside. MP Sherrod Duncan, one of Mr. Norton’s Stabroek Market comrades asked the million-dollar question: “This $1.558 trillion budget, you must ask yourself one question, how much of that is in there for you?”
Messrs. Norton, Duncan, and the others unmentioned (MPs Terrence Campbell, Flue-Bess) can be accurately called ‘political’, hence partisan, biased against the PPP’s budget. Yet the truths of the 2026 budget, and the punishing conditions of living in this oil rich paradise with a record for record-breaking national budgets, can neither be minimized nor denied nor ignored. So much for infrastructures, so little for human fractures.
Enter Ms. Dhanpatie Gopaul of Den Heuvel, East Bank Demerara. She was a contributor to SN’s Cost-of-Living series, now on series 169; an encyclopedia of poor Guyanese anguish. Hear, Ms. Gopaul. Study her words. Swallow them. See how they help or hurt in the struggles for survival by the poorest. “It [cost of living], right now in grocery, in bills; in everything. It is very hard, because when you get a little money, and you go buy groceries, all your money done; groceries expensive.” Partisan? Or Guyanese pain expressed in the grassroots eloquence of the truly hurting?
Ms. Gopaul has no husband, is 60-years old, and may own her home. No monthly rent due is a blessing; but no husband means no second income, and her not being 65-years-old yet indicates no senior citizen pension for another five years. Her choice, like that of quadrillions of other Guyanese who can identify personally with her plight, has five more years to go. By then, she and similar stationed Guyanese may not matter as much, with warm Commonwealth bodies available to do the necessaries.
Now, to emphasize the terrors of Guyanese poor more, I reuse Ms. Gopaul’s words, “you go buy groceries, all your money done.” The mystery is how she manages with the bills. Mystery to strangers; poignancy to citizens such as Dhanpatie Gopaul. After stupendous, incomparable PPP Govt’s budgets, there are these forgotten, scorned, and dismissed Guyanese, of which she is only one. It is seldom that me and Mr. Norton agree nowadays. On the 2026 budget, minds meet.
Pres. Ali’s mind was at a higher vista. His was the fourth voice. In a rich land with an abundance of impoverished people, Dr. Ali prioritizes bottling local water. “We have to look at all the verticals so that we can bring down the cost of water. A country known as the land of many waters must have the cheapest water available to its people and its visitors.” Excellency Ali speaks of “all the verticals” relative to water, while legions of Guyanese are reduced to the horizontal. Flattened by cost-of-living. Frail from lack of food. Fouled by the PPP Govt-Private Sector-Insider Contractor 2026 budget. A gathering of heroes, or the congregating of vultures, that’s the question for all Guyanese, especially mocked, discarded poor ones.
Presidential prioritizing of local bottled water qualifies as the height of unreality, of disconnection, of dismissal, of the brutally painful lives that half of Guyana know daily. And yearly, with each new record budget. Water is one of life’s vitals. But so also would money in fair, balanced budgetary portions for Guyanese poor. When they can afford to buy Maine’s Poland Spring and Alpine Evian water, then the locally bottled would be a cakewalk. I note Pres. Ali spoke of water available for local “people and visitors.” Apparently, the Woods and Routledge scripts have caught on: there’s always pride of place for Guyanese. Four Guyanese voices: three alive to budget horrors and frightening local living; the fourth as good as dead to Guyanese agonies.