…from oil
Your Eyewitness has been thinking about why exactly all those countries that found oil and had oodles of money pouring into their treasuries yet contracted the dreaded “Dutch Disease”. Did the money itself have a virus with it or something, or was it one of those non-communicable diseases we’ve been hearing so much about? For Guyana, your Eyewitness believes the cause is that virus called “greed”!
And going by what’s been going down ever since oil was struck in 2015, we’ve already contracted the disease bad! And why not? Isn’t greed one of the defining characteristics of the PNC? Think of it…why else would you have a fella like Trotman insist that the three-day seminar he took at Harvard qualified him to negotiate with all those high-flying lawyers from Texas and England? He was just plain greedy to live the high life – which is distinguished from the “good life” as chalk from cheese! – and just bent over to give away the store! And let’s not hear any noise about Trotman being “AFC” and not PNC”. Don’t worry about his rhetoric…just look at his actions. You can take the man out of the PNC but you can’t take the PNC out of him!!
And Trotman is as good an example as any to exemplify the innate nature of greed in the PNC’s functionaries. It all stems from what Granger announced at Linden last weekend: WE ARE BORN TO RULE GUYANA!! PNC born to rule!! This, of course, was the rallying cry of the monarchy in Europe for centuries and is the defining trait of the PNC brass. The shopkeeper is looked down upon as “grubbing for a living” and those that labour in the fields are even further beyond the pale. The symptoms of Dutch Disease, we’re told, is the sectors of the economy that had been sustaining the country are allowed to wither away by policy makers who only see the oil dollars pouring in. And these sectors have been the infra-dig agriculture and business!!
Trotman and the rest of the PNC top echelons, like the European nobility of old, see themselves “ruling” as merely issuing decrees from – in modern times – air conditioned offices. However, they resent the self-earned rewards of those who work for their living and insist on living more luxuriously than them. They’re to be taxed and harried out of existence – hence Dutch Disease – while the PNC overlords enjoy the oil spoils and tax collections as their birth right to rule.
Their model is the Plantation Manager, lolling around being served hand and foot. But they forget there will always arise a Cuffy!!
…and spiking the US$
Your Eyewitness is sure, dear reader, you’ve been reading about the US dollar becoming scarce and the conversion rate rising inexorably upwards. For most of you, that mightn’t seem such a bad thing since that “small piece” Aunty Mildred sent from New York with neighbour Sunil is now not that small!! But the problem is, that’s only one piece of the picture – a very small part.
The bigger part is that since almost everything we consume or wear or enjoy has to be imported – since we only manufacture plantain chips (as advised by Granger) – it takes more Guyanese dollars for our importers to buy those foreign goods. And you can be sure they’ll be passing on those increased costs once their present stocks are used up. And since you’re not getting that small piece from foreign every day, you’ll have to be digging deeper into your pockets to make do.
This, of course is what they call “inflation”. Part of the Burnham legacy Granger insists he will fulfil!!
…by hook or crook
We’ve also noticed the spike in robberies in the country. The PNC doesn’t want to accept it…but there’s little money circulating in the lumpen elements.
Yet they want to live it up like the PNC big ones!!
