SARI got paid just after lunch today and you know, even before the sun sets, he’ll be back to where he was before lunch. It’s been that way since … ever.
It’s not the pokies or the races or the card games though over the past five years, they have featured prominently in putting him back to square one.
It’s actually paying his creditors that really bite off sizeable chunk of his pay packet.
He’s lucky if he has anything left over but that is soon eaten up by his most pressing needs.
One of his most pressing needs in most cases is the need to change the family diet like a packet of cocktails, which would certainly be a change to a diet which consisted mostly of locally produced tapioca and borrowed rice without protein for nearly a fortnight.
Sari’s been through this all before so it has become a habit of sorts.
His Kerema wantoks have a frank phrase to describe the situation: Never learn!
And Sari has never stopped to even digest the truth of the phrase because in this vicious cycle, there is no time to reflect on the pros and cons of the situation.
This was the situation a fortnight ago and the fortnight before that and the fortnight before … well, many other fortnights before that, he recalls.
It’s just that he doesn’t keep count. He’s more concerned about living each day as it comes and as if it’s his last.
But he doesn’t let on about “his last” bit lest his creditors think twice about lending him their services. He knows that he can’t afford to miss it.
Maybe ‘his last’ would be a most welcome offering because they say ‘a cemetery is a place where you have no worries’. He certainly would not be pressured with debts.
But he’s very much alive and the name of the game is to stay that way.
You’ve heard many voices raised in our midst about the vicious cycle of debts and more debts “like a cancer eating away at society”. They’ve now attached a name to the full-blown version of that cancer – corruption.
Stretching the kina nowadays has become a formidable challenge to anyone regardless of their intellectual capacity.
When you look at it, we live in a world of “borrowing” – from the grassroots through the corporate citizen to the highest level of Government, though the latter’s situation is best described as ‘sanctioned and plausible’, while all others are seen as ‘risks and liabilities’.
We read in the newspapers just about every second day that the Government is sourcing funds from donor agencies for this and that and tells us at year’s end that we have a couple of billion in debts yet to be serviced.
And you look at your own situation and conclude that the Government is in the same boat except that your debt is a private affair and in the 50s and 100s between you and your creditor.
The Government, on the other hand, is spending millions of your money and lets you in on where it is spending it, how much it borrows and how much it owes because at the end of the year, it boils down to you pitching in with your hard-earned cash to chip away at what had grown to be a massive outstanding debt.
And that debt is not guaranteed to fade away soon either.
Successive Governments inherit it and blames former governments for it, while adding to the debt woes with additional loans …. and the cycle continues.
Sari is not an economist or a financier but lately, there’s been a new awareness – something about life’s dependency upon it.
Instead of browsing the comics in The National as he used to do, he’s flying straight to the market report because somehow he feels that he is totally linked up with it.
It just came to him only last week in fact, when he was told by a friend at work that “the more the value of the kina drops, the more he was likely to dish out in payment for goods and services, not to mention the seemingly endless taxes that are subtly added to the prices of goods and services”.
Images of a flying dollar cartoon were conjured up his mind – money with wings, often used in some politically incorrect satire in magazines and newspapers signifying the diminishing buying power of the American dollar.
Sari has come to a sudden realisation that he’s a connecting point in a greater mechanism of the system of things.
It seems that not only is he trying to make ends meet in his own life, he is contributing also to the Government and the commercial sector to make their ends meet.
The simple equation is that most of the goods are brought in from overseas and when the governments have extracted their share from the transactions, the retailer passes that “lost” income to the consumer and consumers like Sari fork out the money to ‘fill the space’ that was taken by governments.
When he thinks there would be no more taxes, the government comes up another tax so that he no longer have access to the luxuries that he remembers he could afford earlier in life.
Sari has made concerted efforts to shrug off his reliance on creditors. But he’s in too deep to get out. He’s chipped away at his debts but with these creditors, any outstanding automatically gains interest over time and slapped back on him.
He feels like a slave to his creditor for all the time he has outstanding dues and he knows it.
Don’t get him wrong. When he gets paid, he sets his mind on settling his debts. But after the initial hand-outs, he starts thinking twice because he’s got to eat.
And he recollects the words of a colleague: Just when you think you are about to make ends meet, somebody moves the ends …”
And this, he acknowledges, calls for a lot of patience to bridge but life does not provide the time for that.
Suffice it is to echo the Wise Counsellor’s words: “When saving for old age, be sure to put away a few pleasant memories …”

 

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