Waiting for the ‘good life’

In the 1995 movie “Waiting to exhale”, four women are waiting to “breathe easy” after they find a “good man” to share the “good life”. Guyanese have been “waiting to exhale” since 2015, when the PNC-led APNU/AFC government took office and promised them the “good life”.
After three years, it is certainly time to decide, since the AFC made the task easier by offering their conclusions, which we can then evaluate from a citizen’s perspective. However, being an “interested party”, maybe they should have announced that fact in the interest of full disclosure. The quotes below are from the AFC’s statement.
“A better, prosperous and glorious Guyana lies in wait for us.” It has become obvious by now that this is a fundamental fallacy from which the coalition suffers. There is nothing “lying in wait” for Guyana, but what the Government will facilitate to develop with the funds from our taxes that have been entrusted to it. The statement is redolent of the perennial promise of the “potential” inherent in our natural resources. We have been consistently asking this Government to outline its strategy for development, and a plan for its implementation, without any success. The creation of a “green economy” is merely an aspiration, made rather hollow by the Government’s obdurate refusal to commission the Amaila Falls Hydro-Electric Project, or another comparable means of generating electricity that literally drives a modern economy. In the meantime, blackouts have once again become endemic.
After 2015, there is now “a true government of national unity under the Presidency of His Excellency David Granger and Prime Ministership of the Honourable Moses Nagamootoo.” This is the single most debilitating statement that destroys whatever hope of real change citizens might have retained after 2015. How can a coalition that wrested the Government from the PPP with a mere 4545 votes – amounting to 1.11% and a 1 seat difference — constitute a “true government of national unity”? In fact, the AFC’s statement confirms the PPP’s suspicions of the cynicism behind the Government giving Moses Nagamootoo the authority to conduct negotiations with the PPP to create a more “inclusive” Government. How can Nagamootoo negotiate for that which his party affirms is already in place? Any effort to bring in the PPP would be tantamount to gilding the lily.
“The epidemic of piracy in Guyana’s waters has been eliminated.” While the statement might have been crafted before the latest and worst piracy attack in the history of Guyana – with 16 fishermen massacred – it is indicative of the AFC’s and the coalition’s overall position on crime. Citizens’ fears on crime was one of the major issues in the campaign, and the AFC and APNU leveraged their leadership, made top-heavy by members of the Disciplined Forces, to assure citizens they would address those concerns. Unfortunately, they have depended more on manipulating statistics than actually reducing crime to convince citizens of their security bona fides.
“The lot of our long-maligned indigenous peoples has improved ten-fold.” Being so precise with its declaration of the factor by which the lives of Indigenous Peoples have improved, it would appear the AFC has conducted a comprehensive study on the condition of Indigenous Peoples. The AFC should share it with UNICEF, because when that organisation launched such a study last year, in collaboration with the APNU/AFC’s Ministry of Indigenous Affairs, it could not find any data after 2006 which was analysed in 2015. UNICEF’s final report towards the end of the year stated that the Indigenous population continued to exhibit the highest level of poverty in Guyana. This confirmed Guyana’s Situation Analysis of Children (SitAn) 2016, which found that the health, education and socio-economic indicators for the Indigenous population were among the worst in Guyana.
The movie “Waiting to exhale” begins with one of the women burning the clothes of her “significant other”, who had cheated on her. Guyanese will have the opportunity to express themselves to the APNU/AFC coalition in 2020.