Looking… for freeness

As your Eyewitness predicted yesterday – long BEFORE Pressie delivered his announced address to the nation – the only thing Guyanese were interested in was a cash grant for Christmas!! As such, your Eyewitness is willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that if you randomly ask ANY Guyanese today – including “born PPP” ones – what Pressie said, they’ll tell you that the cash grant won’t be coming till next year!! And it’ll be told in a doleful voice with mournful eyes and a long face!!
Now your Eyewitness likes to shop as much as anyone else – ok…ok…not as much as his missus!! – So he would’ve been tickled pink with a cash infusion in the week before Christmas!! And so there was the hope he woulda been able to take the family to one of those fancy gourmet restaurants that are popping up around town!! But there wasn’t the EXPECTATION – which was clearly in the minds of most Guyanese – about the cash grant that amounted to an ENTITLEMENT!! And this should be worrisome to anyone concerned about where our country’s heading – since it signals the emergence of a “handout culture”!!
Take, for instance, Pressie’s repetition of the announcement that there’s gonna be a development bank launched with $200 MILLION of capital – available at ZERO INTEREST to any Guyanese with a plan to start a business!! Or that there will be “investment zones” created around the country – especially where there’s high unemployment – where businesses won’t have to pay taxes?? Shouldn’t this have generated some excitement?? Isn’t this a perfect example of the aphorism that it’s better to teach a man to fish than give him a fish – since rather than getting a single meal, he can have meals for the rest of his life??
Now this doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be assistance for those who’re still stuck in poverty. And this is where the government’s preference for DIRECTED cash transfers makes more sense. Help those who’re in need rather than everybody – even those who are foreign – who really don’t NEED the top-up but certainly WANT it since – as the saying goes – there’s never, ever too much money!! The projected increase of pensions from $41,000 to $60,000 monthly is an additional directed cash transfer, innit??
With all of that as a background, your Eyewitness believes Pressie should ease up on the promises of cash transfers and focus on teaching more folks to fish! Or if they ain’t entrepreneurially minded – to work for those who are!! Our oil is a finite resource, and the President must stick to the PPP’s policy of diversifying the economy to prepare us for when it runs out!!
Just look at the example of what went down in T&T!!

…at “moral promises”
As expected, the Opposition’s making hay on Guyanese’ disappointment at not getting a cash grant for Christmas. They’d created the cash grant narrative – with the rump (runt?) PNC even picketing for it at their Square of the Revolution!! But your Eyewitness was kinda intrigued by a statement from Sanction Man – who defines himself as “LOO in waiting” but walks like he’s “waiting for a LOO”!! He said “a moral contract” had been created when Pressie said back in August that “Guyanese would have a beautiful Christmas”!!
Overlooking the assumption that only a cash grant could deliver a “beautiful” Christmas and ignoring that Pressie’s given us one of the most beautiful Christmas experiences in the Christmas Village, it would seem that to Sanction Man, statements on the campaign trail form enforceable “moral contracts”!!
So when on the same campaign trail, he’d said he didn’t smuggle gold to the US. Didn’t he make a “moral promise” to clear his name??
So why fight extradition to an American court??

…at names
Indians have been here for almost two hundred years, but it seems their existence still hasn’t been integrated into the national psyche. Imagine a letter-writer with a common female name – Surujdai, meaning Sun Goddess – is referred to as “he”!!