NO matter where people live on the planet, no matter their lifestyle, income group or identity, people want to see the systems that affect their daily lives function efficiently and with minimum stress.
Acquisition of passports, birth certificates, various licences, permits, public utilities, public transportation, police services, health services, education and whatever else makes the list of basic government services, must be efficiently provided.

In this decade, I lived in China for about three years. Even though those of us who were cultured in Western style democracy tend to heap scorn on Chinese political system, the way of life of the majority of Chinese people suggests a kind of jolly carefree satisfaction with life, generally.
I believe this is so because, in China, the services required for daily life function at a high level of efficiency and in a way that meets the general expectation of citizens.
Little over a decade ago, I studied in Germany for two years. During that time, I became very close friends with a German young lady in my class. In discussion one day, she lamented how many of the other classmates are forecasting that their line of career will take them to distant developing countries and their earnings would be sky high.

She was adamant that she has no interest in that sort of lifestyle. She loved the simplicity of daily German life. Her point of view was that, everything works in Germany, the health system is efficient, police do their work the right way, crime is low, housing and food are affordable and the government serves the people. No amount of money can compensate for this kind of peace of mind.

This brings me to Guyana. Most citizens, perhaps in the ninety-percentile range, would prefer to live in a country where basic public services work. I will not pretend that all systems in Guyana are in tip-top shape but things are improving measurably.
Guyana is in a peculiar political and economic synapse. Many government services that were tolerated at varying levels of underperformance are now being heavily flagged because citizens genuinely believe that in “oil rich Guyana” if not one thing it’s the other that is supposed to be better.
This is an expectation that, if it is not purposefully, carefully and watchfully managed and explained by the government, it can serve to create hurdles for its 2025 electoral ambitions. The opposition knows that this is a major vulnerability of the government, as a result, even though the opposition has not

presented a single sound alternative plan for running the country and managing our income from oil, they are successfully exciting the emotions of some sections of the electorate by repeating the question, “why is this happening (or not happening) in oil rich Guyana?”
So, they walk around with a camera and look for a solitary dilapidated latrine in the interior and make that the centre point of their activism and some media outlets in tow. Never do they show the one thousand that are being improved, nor will they show the government’s defined plan for improvement.

The opposition is enjoying some measure of success in feeding the false expectation that oil money is so plentiful that everything that is underserved in Guyana could be fixed in an instant.
Opposition elements are preaching ‘miraclenomics’ because it is finding some amount of resonance among the electorate. I do not think the government is doing enough to address this particular mental apprehension that exist.

The Vice President at his weekly press conferences do try to plug some of the issues but this is not enough. For example, this past Thursday he spent some time addressing the ills of raising of salaries too fast while outlining measures to ensure its implementation is managed over time. However, many media houses did not carry this in any of their articles and most ordinary citizens will not sit through the entire press conference to flesh out the gist of it.

Therefore, more than anything else, the government needs to design a firm strategy around managing the expectations of citizens. Otherwise, all the massive levels of development, improvements to services and growth in the economic fundamentals of the country will not have the necessary impact if it is

not reinforced with an effective strategy to mitigate against buzzing false notions of how far the current income from oil can reach and when.
I urge citizens to look at the developmental trajectory of the other “oil rich” economies of the world. Nothing happened overnight, our own expectations have to be tempered in line with reality. We are and would be better off offering constructive policy suggestions than to fuel runaway unrealistic expectations.