Well – I'm officially starting to get a little worried. Back in January, from the comfort of our Cairo Marriot hotel room, March 31st, the date to which the strikes had been moved back, seemed so distant. Back in January, I felt quite confident that I'd be able to finally finish my Peace Corps service – with no evacuations or anything to interrupt it. I'm just not so sure any more. This past week, I've been hearing much more talk of a strike than I had been hearing even the two weeks prior. I suppose that makes perfect sense – the closer we get to the March 31st deadline for union demands to be met, the more that the strike will come up in conversation. But up until this week, I hadn't really thought that Guineans would necessarily go out in force, as they did a little over a year ago, and demand a change at (almost) any cost. What I hear on the street and from my students is still the same as a couple months ago: a strike is only going to hurt our studies, we don't want a strike, the strike last year didn't accomplish much, a strike is only going to set us back. And yet, despite the fact I hear Guineans talk like this, I'm becoming increasingly worried that when the strike gets going, all this anti-strike talk will go out the window and violence will break out on the streets again.
By almost any measure, most Guineans are not getting a fair deal. Unfortunately, some of the things which I most worry will get getting tempers flaring during a strike are things which even a serious strike couldn't possibly fix, namely, the price of rice and the price of gas. Both oil and agricultural commodities are reaching record prices in world markets. Here in Guinea, some of the biggest issues of contention have been price caps on gas and rice, so that the average Guinean, whose income does not rise steadily with the rise in food and gas prices, can afford to feed his family (and many prices also largely depend on transport costs – hence part of the gas problem). Unfortunately, keeping food and gas prices artificially low through some sort of subsidies or other government intervention is not a sustainable policy. Nor is it a policy that government (and not just the Guinean government, but all governments) should implement. Yes, government subsidies of many commodities abound, even in our beloved USA. But in the US, there's plenty of wiggle room with government funds – subsidizing corn farmers in Iowa is largely not going to affect the funds that go toward building highways and keeping schools running; I'm just not sure that type of wiggle room exists in budgets over here. So the price of food and gas keeps rising all over the world, which means it HAS to eventually also go up in Guinea and unfortunately it looks like these prices hikes are going to coincide with the strikes. I'm just not confident that the combination of anger about the current situation and a hike in prices will lead to a happy ending. But we'll see...maybe I'm just entering panic mode since we already evacuated once last year. The new group of PCVs that swore in last month don't even seem to have mentioned it yet or be worried about it – so maybe I'm just over reacting. I just really hope the next time I update my blog it is not from the dining hall in a Peace Corps training center in Mali.
PS. If you know economics, and you understand this whole economics thing better than I do...please, correct me if I'm wrong...I can promise you that you are smarter than me when it comes to economics
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