Over in Venezuela, the communist Mad Maduro – who’d declared he didn’t believe in God, much less in Jesus Christ – moved the celebration of Christmas from its ecclesiastically determined date of Dec 25 to Oct 1st!! Not that long-suffering Venezuelans, experiencing mass starvation for years, received any gifts from him, but the streets were festively decorated!!
In Guyana, however, to Guyanese citizens, the announcements by President Ali in his address to Parliament meant that Christmas came early in a bounty of initiatives!!
What were these bounties?? Let your Eyewitness count the ways!! The most mind-blowing to the average Joe or Jailall is a cash grant of $200,000 to every household in our 83,000 square miles!! Evidently, our 780,000-person population live in 300,000 households, since $60 BILLION was set aside for this exercise!! This gives us an average of less than three persons per household, which seems pretty low to your Eyewitness. He suspects that, with Government facilitating all those house lots and housing schemes, birds fly the coops earlier, and so households aren’t as large as they used to be!!
Now, your Eyewitness knows it would take some time for this money to be distributed, but hopes that Government has learnt some lessons from the last time it attempted such an exercise, two years ago. Right off the bat, we know the Opposition would come out swinging and claiming their supporters would be discriminated against. From what your Eyewitness understands, a representative of the Auditor General’s Office would accompany representatives from the Regional Offices when these sums of money are handed out, and it is hoped that allegations of favouritism or discrimination could be addressed by the former body.
Then, of course, what constitutes a “household” must be widely publicized in order to deal with the “pink slip” phenomenon from the last time.
All in all, this is a great initiative, and your Eyewitness hopes there’s also gonna be some kinda feedback surveys afterwards to find out how Guyanese spent their windfall. If it’s spent on basic needs, like food and shelter, this might buttress those reports of widespread strained circumstances among Guyanese.
Another good initiative is the offer of a $10,000 health voucher to facilitate diagnostic tests to discover health issues that can be dealt with by the “for free” health facilities. A whole lotta Guyanese wait till they’re at death’s doorstep before seeking medical intervention – ignoring the caution: “prevention is better than cure”!!
Another significant measure is the increase of the Public Service minimum wage from around $80,000 to $100,000 – nothing to sneeze at, since this works out to $240,000 annually!
Incentives for poultry farmers might help alleviate the annual Christmas season chicken shortage.
However, increasing the tax incentive for parents with children might strategically help to increase family size!! Christmas nights!!
…Opposition thumbs down
While Pressie was sharing out goodies like Christmas Father inside the Parliament – when the President’s in the National Assembly, it becomes “Parliament!” – Leader of the Opposition (LOO), Aubrey Norton, was leading most of the PNC’s top leadership in a protest outside. Ironically, they were kvetching about the impact of the increased cost of living on the Guyanese people while Pressie was dealing with that issue inside!! Talk about stealing the Opposition’s thunder!!
Does the PPP have a mole in the PNC shadow cabinet, where the decision to protest was determined??
But your Eyewitness is still encouraged by LOO Norton’s protest on the East Coast Demerara Public Highway – far away from the madding, tumultuous, and volatile crowds of Georgetown, especially near the Stabroek Market environs around Parliament Buildings. Had the protests been held there, matter could’ve easily gotten out of hand and doomed the PNC to another decade of “bad name”. As it is, with elections scheduled a year away and the PPP having access to a stuffed treasury, the PNC don’t need additional handicaps.
…due respect to history
Maafa (Swahili for “Great disaster”), the African Holocaust of Enslavement, has been popularized since 1988 to commemorate that crime against Humanity. It is being commemorated in Guyana today at the Kitty foreshore.
