By GHK Lall- Guyanese are in the middle of a two-card con game, and they are yet to detect it. The street has a three-card version, where dumb suckers are led to believe that they have a chance with what is below the coconut shells. The odds are one in three for a favorable outcome and collecting the cash laid down by the confidence tricksters.
It is a proven standard of life that ignorance is a wet blanket wrapped around the head of a blind man. Guyana is a blindman country with some one-eyed, cock-eyed, and ‘baad eye’ people running the show here. I hold aloft the PPP Government as a classic example of the obscene nudeness that hangs over Guyanese. Auguste Renoir, of the impressionist school of painting, would have drooled.
The two-card con game operated by the PPP Government involves the $100,000 cash grant. Considering what has come from the PPP Government, Guyanese have been treated to the equivalent of card one: we win (the PPP) and card two: you lose (Guyanese). Anywhere Guyanese turn, they get their brains scrambled. When they wonder how and why things have to be this way, their liver gives out on them.
The game is fixed and the fixers swarm around it, having a jolly good time. First, it was immediately, then the by the end of November. By month’s end was said and heard repeatedly from different sources. I know that the step is slower, but the hearing is just as sharp. November! November, it will be for public servants and pensioners.
It made sense to deal with and remove approx. 100,000 Guyanese out of the cash grant arithmetic. A captive audience, those two segments in the population are, and part of systems, date sets, and what nots. It is December, and 70,000 plus pensioners still have their hands stretched out, and their expectations stressed past the breaking point. They are set to get their 2025 pension books, but of the cashbook, they are uncertain. Thus, it was from the end of November to the end of the year. I still think that that means December 31, 2024 and not another year.
To give jack his jacket, Vice President Jagdeo did make his position clear from the inception: the process could take as long as five months. It is good to locate an honest man in the PPP Government. Though that took an eternity, one of these days the others will be found. They are there, just not too many. Still, I believe that in the PPP Government’s two-card game is now operating with Christmas lights blazing. The limitation with the jacket that I give to Dr. Jagdeo is that it is so small that a midget could be suffocated while trying to fit into it. Checkout where cash grant matters stand today.
November, December, with the next stop promised likely being Mashramani. The government did have a fleeting thought about how good it would be to honor Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday in January, but that rainbow was quickly obscured by clouds. Give the people the cash money too early, and they would forget even more quickly. What do Guyanese have later next year? Here is the first clue: it is not Easter alone. There is the season of elections, which surpasses Christmas for excitements and the best expressions of Guyanese thanksgiving.
In the two-card con game perfected by the PPP Government, November, December, Mashramani (too much Burnham), and around Easter are all part of keeping already on edge Guyanese hanging by a thread. This wanton and callous government is like a dog owner that holds a piece of meat just out of the reach of a poor canine, even as that hound rises on its hind legs, and pants and reaches for a little relief from it hunger pangs.
Why does a cash grant for $100,000 mutate into an inquisition (registration)? Why does a cash handout from the hands of the government to the hands of the Guyanese people convert into an inspection (photo)? And why does a cash payout program from the PPP Government now transform into the equivalent of collection from a bad debt partner, or a deadbeat father? Citizens are forced to line up one day and then return another day.
In the beginning, there was talk of an app. Where is that blasted app that was supposed to be the solution to eliminate corruption, to minimize confusion, and to enhance collection? What started out as some mysterious program has now boiled down to paper. Part of the government’s two-card con game is to tell Guyanese what has tiny truth, then tie them up in barbed wire. Hence November is December, and December is the twelfth of never. For pensioners, it is. For the economically disabled, it is. For the cost-of-living battered, it is.
Another cunning calculation of the all-too-clever PPP Government was to announce the cash grant, when it was far from ready, even didn’t have the money. It was how news about cost-of-living pressures faded from the morning and midday sun. Make a promise and then engage in a Ponzi scheme. Cost-of-living is off-air, but the cash grant is offseason. Any Guyanese-PPP, PNC, AFC-who doesn’t see a two-card con game in all this is like a con artist also.