Bitter cooking
Kaieteur News – With no parties getting permission this New Year’s Eve, I was forced to return to what most Guyanese do as they welcome the New Year. With a plate of cooking in hand, I tuned into a TV for the traditional New Year’s Eve countdown to 2021.
At midnight, the explosion of radio celebrations was interrupted by the President’s New Year’s Address. It’s a tradition for Guyanese to greet each other for the New Year and then tune in quickly to the President’s New Year’s Address radio and television broadcast to hear what the government has in store for them.
Most Guyanese would have been disappointed by what the President had to say. He sounded more like a ‘sweet guy’ than a statesman, mouthing sweet nothings.
‘Sweet men’ are adept at making a general promise, “I can take care of you, everything’s not right with you, you don’t have to worry about nothing.” But behind the words coated with sugar there are no firm promises.
The President promised that this year will be a ‘springboard’ for recovery. The metaphor could not be more inappropriate. It’s like saying that going into hospital will be the catalyst for recovery.
Recovery is more crawling than leaping or sprinting. But who cares? President’s supporters would have increased that with the excitement of a child on a trampoline.
At the end of the address, the only takeaway was the idea that 2021 will be a springboard. This idea of recovery is difficult to reconcile with the statement that Guyana is enjoying its brightest prospects yet.
But what got me choked up was the President’s statement that he was told that business was brighter this Christmas than over the last five years and that money was circulating. I am not sure exactly how the President came through this assessment but he should dissect his friendship or relationship with whoever communicated this to him. I guess they weren’t all.
The business people, I have spoken to, have a different perspective. Their ruling is that this was the slowest Christmas in over 30 years. The frequent refrain from shop owners and sellers alike was that business was slow and money was not circulating as before, quite unlike the lies the President was told.
Consumers, who had the courage to go shopping last Christmas, would have found that very few products were on display. Many of the electronic shops, for example, mainly offered speakers as their main attractions. Shop owners have barely imported, preferring to dig into their inventories and dig out old stock as they are aware that a pandemic would have reduced purchasing power.
That purchasing power was further reduced by the government’s failure to offer public sector employees the usual ‘back pay’ for 2020. Only the joint services received a fortnightly bonus, quite different from the 13 month pay recovery promised during the election. campaign.
Christmas bonuses are not part of the public sector tradition. The APNU had paid a $ 50,000 per person bonus in 2015, reduced it to $ 25,000 next year and then abolished it all thereafter.
Under the PPP / C a back pay was established. It was always considered extra income for Christmas. Not offering any retrospective increases to employees this year left a bitter taste in the mouths of public sector workers. And the feedback may have prompted the government to make the $ 25,000 late per employee pay out.
The payment came out too late to fund traditional New Year’s Eve cooking or a New Year’s dinner spread. It has been ridiculously titled as a COVID-19 pay-out which makes it all the more absurd, as it makes COVID-19 payments far more unfair and discriminatory. If a husband and wife from any household work in the public sector, it means that the total COVID-19 grants received would be $ 75,000. Yet a poor home with no public sector employees would only receive $ 25,000
Incompetence and shame compel governments into this kind of absurd situation. It appeared that the government had not grasped its financial needs for the past four months. He had to rush to the National Assembly for approval for supplementary expenditure.
Then he suddenly realized he had the money to pay public sector workers, including sugar workers. But without wanting to set a precedent for a Christmas bonus, President Ali and his Finance Minister, who is due to become an accountant, have absurdly taken the title pay-out as a COVID-19 grant.
All of that made this year’s New Year’s Eve cooking more bitter in Guyanese’s mouth. That bitterness was exacerbated by a speech to the nation that was more of flatulence than substance.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)