Dear Editor,
I refer to a letter from one Ravin Singh, `President’s citing of changes in consumer behaviour was intended to inform policymaking’, (KW Wed, August 26 2026) who I am told is an adviser to the President’s wife, Ms Arya Ali. Ravin Singh’s letter attempts to frame the public backlash against President Irfaan Ali’s cost-of-living remarks as a failure of “nuance” and “analytical depth.” Ironically, it is Singh’s own defence that lacks critical rigour, relying on verbal gymnastics and a willful ignorance of the core issue from the perspective of the “man-in-the-street”.
Mr. Ravin Singh statement is flawed and weak as he attempts to gaslight the Guyanese people into believing his poppycock. But not on my watch. I lay out my position below with “nuance, context and analytical depth”.
1. The Straw Man Fallacy: “He didn’t say ‘change your habits'”
Mr. Ravin Singh spends considerable energy insisting that because the President did not explicitly utter the phrase “change your eating habits,” the public and media are guilty of “misinformation.” This is a classic straw man argument. The President did not have to say those exact words; the implication was clear to any reasonable listener.
When a Head of State, in response to a question about rising costs, lists “a change in consumer behaviour,” “shopping in supermarkets,” and “eating out more frequently” as problems that “need to be addressed,” he is explicitly linking citizens’ choices to their financial strain. To argue that this was a neutral, diagnostic observation is intellectually dishonest and being willfully obtuse. If a doctor tells a patient, “Your diet has changed, and that is an issue we need to address,” the patient is not wrong to hear a prescription for behavioural change.
2. The “Policy Intervention” is a Red Herring
Mr. Ravin Singh argues that because the President mentioned creating farmers’ markets, his observation was purely diagnostic to inform policy. This is a red herring. The existence of a proposed solution (farmers’ markets) does not negate the fact that the President blamed consumer behaviour for the current high prices. And why was the farmers markets not implemented permanently since 2023, when the cost of food started to skyrocket; why allow your people to suffer for more than two years from runaway food prices? This represent a silent callousness and calculated detachment on the part of the President from the struggles of the people.
Furthermore, Mr. Ravin Singh’s defence inadvertently exposes the hollowness of the President’s policy suggestion. He claims the President wants to “redesign the choice environment.” But the President himself noted that supermarkets have higher overheads (AC, rent). If supermarkets are inherently more expensive, the government’s proposed solution is to… create more markets? This does not address why supermarket profit margins are “exorbitant” or why imported inflation is hitting local shelves. It is a superficial fix that does little to tackle the structural economic issues Mr. Ravin Singh claims the President was diagnosing.
3. The “Straw Man” of “Living Above Their Means”
Singh correctly points out that the President did not say Guyanese are “living above their means.” However, he fails to acknowledge that the President’s comments implied a form of financial irresponsibility on the part of the people who are struggling by living from paycheck to paycheck. By highlighting “eating out” and “supermarket shopping” as factors in the cost of living, the President—wittingly or not—echoed a tired, global trope used by out-of-touch elites: that the poor are poor because they make bad choices.
The reality is that Guyanese are shopping at supermarkets not because of a “cultural” whim, but because urbanization, changing work patterns with the Chinese supermarkets being opened late into the night, and the sheer consolidation of the retail sector have made farmers’ markets less accessible. They are eating out not out of luxury, but because long commutes and double-income households leave little time for cooking. Mr. Ravin Singh’s defence strips these behaviours of their socioeconomic context, reducing them to mere “choices” rather than adaptations to a changing economy. And there is the bigger question, who is bringing all these Chinese Supermarkets to Guyana?
4. The Real Misstep: Tone and Empathy
The most profound failure of Mr. Ravin Singh’s analysis is his complete disregard for the politics of empathy. When citizens are struggling to put food on the table, they do not want a lecture on “consumer behaviour” or “profit margins.” They want to know that their leader understands, attunes and empathizes with their pain.
President Ali’s fatal error was not the content of his policy diagnosis, but the tone and target of his observation.. By placing consumer behaviour—even momentarily—in the same sentence as the “rising cost of living” as a problem to be “addressed,” he shifted the focus away from his government’s macroeconomic policies and onto the daily habits of the electorate. Mr. Ravin Singh’s letter fails to grasp that in public discourse, how something is said is just as important as what is said.
Conclusion
Mr. Ravin Singh is correct that public discourse lacks nuance. However, the lack of nuance lies in his defence. He demands that we parse the President’s words with the precision of a legal document while ignoring the visceral, real-world impact of those words on a struggling populace.
The public did not “misconstrue” the President; they rightly interpreted the subtext of his remarks. Instead of blaming the media and the public for a lack of “analytical depth,” Mr. Ravin Singh and the administration should accept that the President made a political misstep and apologize to the nation. A true leader addresses the cost of living by tackling corporate profiteering and supply chains head-on, not by delivering academic observations about where people choose to buy their plantains.
Yours faithfully,
Surujdai Juglall
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