……hitting a million
No!! Your Eyewitness didn’t stumble over a bag with a million dollars as he blearily navigated the couple of blocks from his neighbourhood watering hole!! Not that it would’ve meant that much with Tom Ford suits going for at least US$6000 – equivalent to 2.3 million of our greenbacks!! No…he’s talking about the announcement by our Bureau of Statistics that our population hit 1,025,334 by the end of 2025 – up from 956,044 at the end of 2024!! Finally!!
Imagine we live in a country about as large as all the Caribbean islands combined and we hadn’t been able to reach that number in the couple of hundreds of years we’ve been a viable proposition!! For the record, the Caribbean’s population’s around 44 million and like us they’ve had an extensive continuous migration for over a hundred years!! But let’s face it; our migration has been a veritable deluge ever since Burnham established his dictatorship from the sixties! While Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba also had vicious dictatorships – unlike Papa and Baby Doc, Trujillo and Castro, Burnham didn’t try to stop no one from decamping!!
He figured that migration was like the valve on a pressure cooker that let off steam – here the likelihood of a revolution by the oppressed masses!! And so we’ve got a situation where Guyanese are the FIFTH largest ethnic group in New York City – occupying large swathes of Queens and Brooklyn!! It’s said that there are more Guyanese “outside than inside” – and there’s no reason to doubt that claim!! The remittances that have poured in for decades from them – amounting to more than all our agricultural exports – brought in crucial foreign currency that made those of us who remained in Ole Mudland live with some degree of dignity!!
Anyhow, here we are with finally a million of us within our borders!! What happened to the bleeding?? Has it stopped?? Nah…even with all our vaunted oil riches and cash grants, Guyanese are still leaving for “furrin”!! The grass supposedly being greener and all that – even with ICE’s scorched earth policy towards immigrants!! But in addition to a SLOWING DOWN of the bleeding, one reason for the uptick in population might be that scads of Guyanese from furrin are obtaining local addresses to collect the aforementioned cash grants!! Are they being counted as “living in Guyana”??
Then, of course, is the massive influx of refugees from Venezuela – amounting by some estimates to be as much as 60,000!! And also furriners coming in to fill those jobs calling for skills that we’re short of. Like all those Cuban doctors who’re so visible in our hospitals across the country!!
Maybe all these new blood – not having our historic ethnic gripes – might end our divisions??

…a bubble
As we enter the big leagues with our oil production about to reach 1 million bpd – and our reserves sure to increase with new seismic surveys – we gotta watch out for economic challenges that come with the territory. Remember what Johnson said about the rich contracting gout because of their rich diet?? Similar challenges face poor countries suddenly coming into BIG money!!
One of these is the creation of “bubbles” in the economy. That is, in particular areas of economic activity at various times, there will be feeding frenzies as the nouveau riche smell blood…er, profits…and jump in all at once. So, the old law of supply and demand kicks in and prices in that area reaches for the sky. Right now in Guyana, your Eyewitness can see a bubble developing in the hotel and apartments sector. Ain’t no way the occupancy rates are gonna be high enough to service the mortgages!! The problem is the speculating moneyed local and foreign folks!!
Until the bubble bursts!!

…reversing a collapse
When your Eyewitness heard about us importing a thousand pregnant cows from Brazil, the crack about “shipping coals to Newcastle” came to mind!!  Didn’t we have a Cattle Trail to ship OUR own cows from the Rupununi??

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