The PPP parag de whole country

It has often been said that people have short memory. They hear something today and within days they forget.
The late Dr Cheddi Jagan often described Guyana as a seven-day wonder. There is a big episode today and seven days later, the people would forget about it.
Imagine, then, what happens when political parties make campaign promises. The politicians stand on a stage and speak with such conviction as to convince the electorate. When the dust settles all those promises disappear. And the people often forget.
As fate would have it, these days there is electronic storage of information. At the click of a button material can be retrieved. And people did retrieve this information in the wake of the pompous announcement by the government of a seven per cent hike in salaries for public servants.
Minister responsible for Finance, Dr Ashni Singh, stood at the rostrum and said that his government cares about people. He then spoke about the COVID relief, the flood relief, the uniform voucher and all those instances of the government sharing out money.
Then he announced the seven per cent hike in public servants’ salaries. When he made the announcement that the money would be retroactive to January 2021 he was certain that he had made the greatest statement on earth.
Soon after, there were reports from the government-sponsored and government-supported media, that the public servants were over the moon with happiness. The truth was something else.
The critics of the payout were very vocal. And there were many.
The Guyana Public Service Union was upset that the announcement was made without consultation. There is a Collective Labour Agreement but this was honoured in the breach.
Then came the people whose memory are not as short as some would want to believe. One person posted a placard that the People’s Progressive Party had put up during the 2015 elections campaign. The placard proclaimed that the PPP would offer public servants a 50 per cent increase in salaries.
Immediately, the defenders of the government came out to accuse the person who posted the placard of photoshopping the image. One Member of Parliament, Sonia Parag, during an interview, proclaimed that the government had never promised a 50 per cent pay hike.
Guyanese are a humorous bunch. On one chat site, a former Queen’s College student posted the kind of message that would appear in a lexicon. The caption read ‘Word of the Day’. That word was parag and was defined as a verb.
There were some definitions: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive; to create a false or misleading impression; and as a noun, something that misleads or deceives.
There were examples of the use of the word, parag. She was paragging when she said that they never promised 50 per cent. Another example was that the PPP paragged about giving public servants massive increases.
There was a warning that the word should not be confused with paragon.
I laughed. Sonia Parag has added her name to the English dictionary, something that many people had hoped to do but lived and died without achieving such fame.
When I thought that the issue of the pay increase ended there, I was mistaken. People went into the video library and came up with speeches by Irfaan Ali and Bharrat Jagdeo in the National Assembly. At the time the two men were in political opposition.
So there I sat and heard Irfaan, at the top of his voice, proclaiming that should he be elected, his government would give the public servants much more than 20 per cent. He said that they deserved every cent.
And his message sounded good to the ears of the public servants who had already enjoyed some whopping pay hikes from 2016 right up to 2019.
Whoever posted that clip then juxtaposed it with Bharrat Jagdeo speaking in the National Assembly about the public servants deserving at least a 50 per cent increase and that he would support the Guyana Public Service Union in that quest.
He accused the Coalition of abandoning the Collective Labour Agreement, something his government would never do. To hear him speak was to believe that he had the public servants at heart.
There were other moves to justify the pay increase. Priya Manickchand compared Guyana’s seven per cent increase with the increases offered by other countries, including the United States. Indeed, Guyana’s was higher by number.
I could not resist posting that two per cent of a million dollars is far better than 10 per cent of $70,000.
The truth of the matter is that prices have gone through the roof. The prices of some items have risen by 50 per cent and more. Inflation is at a whopping 14 per cent, prompting Mr. Vincent Adams to state that with the government’s pay increase, the people are poorer than they were last year.
He suggested that the pay increase has merely condemned the public servants to live at least seven per cent poorer than at the start of the year. They were 14 per cent poorer before the announced increase and they still are because they have not received one penny.
And to think that they have to pay tax on the increase. So the hike is not really seven per cent.
It is, therefore, no surprise that the announcement by Ashni Singh is no longer being peddled by the government supporters and members as a landmark achievement.
In fact, the people who spoke up for it are now remarkably silent. They have been chided and they now await seven days to elapse—the time when people would forget.