Street exchange rate: $15,000 for $1.6 million

Street exchange rate: $15,000 for $1.6 million

OPINION BY: GHK LALL— September2026

It’s unbelievable.  Try wrapping head around this: 90 feet of cable worth $1.6 million bartered for $15,000.  It’s the new street exchange rate that allows a man to eat.   I don’t know about powder or smoke, not going near those two.  After all, I have told this to Drs. Ali Mr. Food Security, Dr. Jagdeo  Mr. Food Psychology imagine being full, and not famished until blue in the face: a hungry Guyanese cannot eat concrete, cement, or sand, i.e., roads, bridges, and culverts.

People in this place are hungry.  A hungry man is a desperate man.  Grabbing ninety feet of heavy-duty copper cable weighing 30 pounds could not have been an easy feat.  With so many eyes watching.  With so many lights around.  But a hungry man somehow digs deep, finds that last ounce of superhuman strength.  Plus, the adrenaline gushing in torrents.  I would slap him around for the drugs, but give him a pass for the food.  Because that’s reality in oil rich PPP Guyana. 

A citizen so hungry, that he faces danger with aplomb, lugs 90 feet of cable that weighs dozens of pounds, so that he can get a bite to eat. 

If I were among the leaders in the PPP Govt, I would hang my head in shame, have difficulty facing the poor people of Guyana.  All these billions, and a citizen is forced to steal to sate the pangs of his hunger, so that he could survive to tomorrow.

Mothers shoplifting milk for their children.  Mothers cutting their fingers when slicing whatever they have.  To spread it around, so that all the children get something to take to school for lunch or the lessons that come later.  Meat and fish are usually off the menu, whatever the mothers are slicing.  Too expensive.  Too out of reach.

I am thinking of this national embarrassment, this governmental humiliation.  In a land of abundance-rich stats, richer leadership rhetoric, and the richest cash flow in its history-there are those who are compelled to scrounge to make it through another day.  Is the president listening?  Is he still seeing political motives in every statement, around every corner, behind every shadow?  Whatever the president sees, he should peel away the scales from his eyes, and see that man from Albouystown breaking the law, and pilfering a load of copper wire to reduce the gnawing wrenching that stretches from his esophagus to his duodenum.  Hunger is a hurting thing.  It’s not Lou Rawles, it Guyana’s cruel environment

Look at this tragic episode in the life and times of this dazzling new era in Guyana’s existence.  To lift himself out of hunger’s ferocious grip, a man has to break the law.  To the PPP Govt, I say.  Argue about true rate of poverty.  Hide that statistic.  Boast about cash grant.  Extol PPP Govt wisdom and generosity. Then face this set of unyielding facts and circumstances: how many more Guyanese are engaging in below the radar, petty theft, to make ends meet, to put a pot on the fire? 

How many citizens of this glorious Republic are rummaging in either private or public receptacles to see how lucky they could get, if they would hit the jackpot today?  Meaning, a slice of leftover bread or bake thrown out for the pickup people to haul away?

Hunger is transforming Guyanese into lawbreakers.  How many caught?  How many have the book of justice thrown at them, put away?  An injustice, from my perspective, when leaders live like lords of the manor, flitting from one banquet to another, guzzling the fat of the land.  Fat that first belongs to the Guyanese people, and not their abusers and deceivers.

The question I have is what is Guyana’s justice system to do with this copper cable thief?  Make him an example?  What is the PPP Govt going to do with him?  Probably, make him into a monster, then sell that as a Xmas toy to scare the children.