Dear Editor,
Stabroek News used some of its reserve energies to visit Region Nine for episode 171 of its Cost-of-Living series. An enduring shining ray of light in a world deliberately darkened. When data is distorted, official stats innovatively refitted, and info withheld, there was SN’s cost-of-living broadcast that told the story of the plights of Guyanese in an oil rich sensation of a country. Whatever else may be outdated, due to slick data denial, SN’s weekly presentation of the real Guyana with real Guyanese and their real pains was as current as current can be, and none timelier. And piercing. Embarrassing and upsetting, too.
Verse 171 from SN’s Book of Revelation is just as apocalyptic as the 170 from before. Together, the 171 pages of SN’s book present the result of Satanic rites, as I prefer to describe the conditions of Guyanese. So many billions, and so many hungry, shaky, bodies filled with uncertainty. When there is not enough in hand to buy sufficient food, then uncertainty is what fills vast open spaces in stomachs. When a businessman from a far corner of Guyana could register a complaint about what leaves shorthanded and struggling, it doesn’t speak well of the state of the town man, village man, and countryman. Be assured of the absence of any visions to exclude women, since they are the ones that have to transform into Paul Krugman and Archimedes to make the money and its math work. Here is the irony, the perplexity, of Guyana’s leaders boasting (fulminating, actually) about foreign policy, when domestic policy leaves ordinary Guyanese men and women, and their children [and dependent elderly] gasping for breath, while clutching at straws. A $5,000 banknote feels that flimsy. Break one of those, as Guyanese say, and I say that leads to heartbreak. Purse flipped open, money flyout.
When only small slivers of the $90 million plus were paid in a calculated trickle, one objective was to slap a cease order on the rawness of SN’s cost-of-living series, and put it out of business. Slow walk to a crawl paying for the ads, and shorten the life of the cost-of-living burr-in-the-rocking chair of the PPP Gov’t. Then abruptly stop the ads altogether, for one last wring of the knife, and to prove who is boss in this desolate, godforsaken town.
There is always the Bureau of Stats to display its unparalleled brilliance, and now its unchallengeable hegemony. Numbers don’t lie. Who is there, and what to offer, to counter the stats that are tricky, slippery? Well, there is the DPI, for one; NCN for another; and the rest of taxpayers’ media, which is to take a man’s money, then beat him senseless with it. Simply ask the suffering citizens in Region Nine from SN’s last cost-of-living visit, then the other nine regions of Guyana. I take off the gloves, throw down the gauntlet in front of the president, vice president, budget president. Present stats, call others outdated, then let’s trot out Guyanese from all 10 regions of this country, to prove who did right, and who ‘deh baad’. I have no intent to make Excellencies Ali, Jagdeo, Singh, and de la Cruz look shifty. Just the facts, the facts of reality, the facts of Guyanese without enough food, clothes, pills, and the means to pay their bills. Not the monthly installment on a Mercedes or a luxury apartment complex. But a bag of tennis rolls, so they can roll their hunger dice into tomorrow in the hope that they get lucky.
Guyana is now in the throes of a nuclear winter, the picture of a barren wasteland, inclusive of TV and all those towers spouting up from the earth, as though on steroids. Basic vittles are what Guyanese cry out for, hold their hands out. Those are now a thing of the past, for who in the all-powerful, all-controlling, PPP Gov’t will speak to the pain of the poor, and the agony of living in this country? Cost-of-living should be renamed the cost of dying in Guyana. So much oil, so many famished. With SN’s last gasp delivery of Volume 171 of its cost-of-living series, the PPP Gov’t realizes one of its objectives. Cost-of-living crisis, where is it? What about it? Who dares to say that there is a cost-of-living catastrophe in oil laden, PPP burdened Guyana?