Tomorrow, Guyana goes to the polls. Elections are the lifeblood of democracy since it gives life to the democratic ideal of “rule by the people”. Because we will be deciding who will be governing our State over the next five years, the onset of oil revenues flowing into our coffers gives an added fillip to the need for careful and contemplative consideration when casting our ballot.
What are some of the issues we should consider? Let us look at the economy, which is related to our living conditions. The PNC-led coalition has been stressing the growth of our “Gross Domestic Product” (GDP) – 4.7% they claim this year. But by now, we should know that this macro-metric can hide a multitude of sins such as the fact that huge chunks of “income” – such as, say, gold production – does not remain to be spent in Guyana where it can circulate and end up in the pockets of our citizens, but are remitted to the foreign corporations that are our largest gold miners. This is one of the reasons why we should be very leery about claims that our GDP will be exploding into high double figures this year, with oil production commencing.
For decades, there have been attempts to devise new measurements that focus on “human development” rather than “economic growth”. A truism has been the recognition that economic growth does not necessarily translate into human development. One of these new measures is the “Human Development Index” (HDI): “a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and have a decent standard of living.”
But for the average person, the most important indicia of how well he or she is doing is to have a job: even one that might not deliver the best life is better than facing the abyss of joblessness. Humans have an inner drive to self-respect and dignity, and this is what a job produces when one does not have to depend on handouts. When the PPP took over governance in 1992 from the PNC, unemployment had reached almost 50% of the workforce, while most of the others were “underemployed”. That is, their skills were not being utilised optimally. Poverty was tagged at 43%. But within their first decade, the PPP reduced poverty to 36% — and even more so in the urban areas where it dropped to 33%. It achieved this feat not by handouts but by creating the conditions that opened up jobs in all sectors: agriculture, mining, forestry, fishing, commerce.
Take rice farming. It is not given enough recognition that this industry is the largest employer in the country and generates foreign currency to boot, which gives us the wherewithal to import foreign goods that we do not produce to live a better life. The PPP resuscitated the industry so that when they demitted office, production and exports had almost doubled to 600,000 tonnes. In mining, while there is much angst generated by rabble-rousers on the downsizing of the bauxite industry, it was the PNC that destroyed it after nationalisation in 1970, by failing to meet delivery schedules. By the time the PPP took over, most customers had moved on to other suppliers, whose products were not as good as ours. The PPP performed yeoman labour to attract Bosai and Rusal, two of the largest aluminium producers in the business, to invest in our bauxite.
The fundamental flaw in the APNU coalition government is that their leader David Granger is still imbued with the dystopian vision of his mentor Forbes Burnham. In that vision, there is no place for the private sector – the creator of jobs and production – which Burnham destroyed after nationalising 80% of the economy. While Granger may talk about the private sector being “the engine of growth” in the economy, his treatment of that sector over the past five years demonstrates that these are empty words.
The PPP will create jobs when re-elected.
