What’s…our population?

In Guyana, for well-known reasons, our population is not an academic term!! Now, determining populations of people has a looong history!! In Exodus, it’s written that God himself told Moses to take a census in the Sinai desert! And we discovered His reason from the words of the Big Guy himself – from behind burning bushes. According to Exodus, “When you take the census of the people of Israel, then each shall give a ransom (half a shekel) for his life to the LORD…that there be no plague among them.” God gotta be paid for not launching plagues and such – as a kind of tithe?
Thousands of years later – around the time Jesus was born – we hear, “In those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.” By then, there were all sorts of reasons for these censuses – going back to King David, who conducted his census to determine how large an army he could raise!! The Romans held a census to determine how much tax they could impose to run their empire!!
Well, the British – who fancied themselves succeeding the Romans – followed suit and held censuses in all their colonies – including us in dear Mudland!! These were held every ten years after they combined the three colonies into British Guiana in 1831! Our population then was 93,000. A century later in 1931 – with over 250,000 indentureds entering and remaining – we’d only grown to 310,000. There gotta be more deaths than births!! By 1960, when our reasons for looking at censuses started to become political since they signalled how the votes might be split, we didn’t just look at the total numbers – 560,000 – but the ethnic breakdown!!
By 1970 we’d jumped to 710,000 but flattened by 1980 to 760,000, then in 1991 dropped to 723,000 because of massive migration!! Burnham’s riggings made ethnic breakdowns irrelevant, but now the Indian numbers – even reduced since the 1980s’ 50 per cent – were still enough to get the PPP over the hump!! The PNC’s 42 per cent of the vote in 1992 mirrored the African/mixed percentage!! In the new millennium, the 2002 census showed only 751,000 – with migration unabated and Indians inexorably slipping to 43 per cent! 2012’s 746,000 showed the trend increasing, with Indians now 39 per cent – and no group having a majority!! With the game now to attract from outside the tribe, the PPP was checkmated in 2011 and then lost in 2015.
Well, this year, the 2022 Census revealed that our population actually grew to 878,674. With the PPP rationally using the oil revenues to launch a development programme where ALL ETHNIC SHIPS HAVE BEEN LIFTED!!
Ethnic breakdowns are now irrelevant!! Hallelujah!!

…electric theft?
One nugget the IMF team that last visited left us in their report is that a whopping 25 per cent of our generated electricity is lost in transmission!! Imagine that!! A substantial portion of that is due to the physics of electricity moving through electric wires at high voltages – and losing some of that energy through heat. The longer the distance, the greater the heat and loss – and unfortunately, we’re a very large country – unlike islands like Barbados and TT! It’s for this reason that the Government’s gonna be spending so much money on transmission lines from the Wales GtoE plant that’s being built.
But in Guyana there’s another loss – as far as the bottom line is concerned – in that there’s substantial theft of electricity by customers! Announced last week by the Minister at 12 per cent!! While there’s individual theft, there are certain communities notorious for having illegal connections!! Often it’s with the connivance of bribed GPL workers bypassing the meter.
Laying new transmission lines ain’t gonna solve this source of electricity loss!!

…moving ahead?
One neoliberal mantra dominating the economics of the present world order is “rising tides will lift all ships”. But the analogy sends a false message that we will automatically rise.
Actually, we gotta paddle our own canoe!!