Dear Editor,
In the news article, ‘President says he is horrified by the murder of Ramdass,’ (SN, August 30), the President, at a Private Sector dinner, spoke on LCDS and answered questions on several topics, including government’s monopoly on radio, migration, the Sexual Offences Bill, the media’s alleged tainting of the country’s image abroad, and his continued disinterest in a third term.
I am shocked that no question was raised at the dinner about the government’s failure, after seventeen years, to make the private sector the main engine for economic recovery and development. The last decade saw greater emphasis on establishing so-called macroeconomic stability, even as the private sector cried out for a greater role than was accorded it.
And now we are moving gingerly from macroeconomic stability towards establishing a so-called Low Carbon Development Strategy as the main engine for economic recovery and development, with the government, not the private sector, playing the lead role. Why was the LCDS concept not jointly undertaken or developed from the outset by the government and the private sector, rather than the PSC staging a belated dinner for the President to show up and discuss LCDS with stakeholders in the private sector? Won’t foreign donors/investors in our LCDS feel a lot more comfortable if the local private sector had an active role in the birthing of LCDS, rather than government going at it alone and belatedly involving others by way of informing them?
By the way, is there anyone out there who can point us to another industrialized or Third World country where this LCDS concept is being implemented as the main economic engine? Our immediate neighbours – Suriname, Brazil and Venezuela – all have huge rain forests, yet not one of those countries has made LCDS their main engine for development. They have all opted, instead, for traditional economic development strategies that involved Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) in which the private sector is given a greater role to play, with government merely creating the environment conducive for such development and ensuring policies and mechanisms are in place to help everyone play by the rules while the country benefits. Of the three, however, Venezuela, under Hugo Chávez, seems bent on adopting a new economic strategy linked to his Bolivarian Revolution, but even so, he is not linking economic development to his rain forest.
So why is there such a strong push by the President for LCDS? Is it that he is as climate conscious as he wants many to believe, or is it because the PPP never came back to power in 1992 with a viable economic recovery and development strategy and so he decided to make LCDS his brainchild, thus focusing all his attention and energies on it? When former PPP cabinet minister Dr Henry Jeffrey said that Dr Cheddi Jagan originally planned to abandon the capitalist system and disregard the nation’s foreign debt his government incurred from the PNC regime, only to turn and deal with the IMF/WB after the Soviet Union collapsed, it seemed that an economic recovery and development plan was then left to the President, hence LCDS.
The major sticking point with LCDS, however, is that Guyana is now at the pity of foreign investors, the very people we needed since 1992 to constructively exploit our natural resources and yet no one seems willing to blame the government for not doing enough to attract to help create jobs and generate foreign income. If they didn’t come in droves in the last seventeen years, what is it about LCDS that will make them suddenly decide to come now? Is it the President’s climate crusade? He said he won’t seek a third term and so he has only two years in which to make those investors come. Is it because Guyana has a huge rain forest? Well, so do Brazil and Suriname, and except for Brazil, where the WB earmarked US$1B towards preserving its rain forest, investors are not being aggressively courted by either nation to pump money into any economic concept like LCDS. Brazil and Suriname are developing via the pragmatic and traditional FDI route; any other investment is incidental.
I think it is time the President acknowledges that LCDS is basically a gamble and not a guarantee. In fact, if you ask me, I think he is bluffing his way on this issue the same way he has bluffed his way so far through his presidency, but little does he know or care that reality has persistently been calling his bluff, and it is just a matter of time before even he realizes that he is losing where he should be winning and winning where it doesn’t really matter at all. I don’t care how many people in and out of Guyana sing his praises for his climate change crusade, the truth is, not all who sing his praises might live to see the huge economic benefits he is dreaming about becoming a reality.
He may get a little something from here and there for LCDS, but today’s global crisis that is threatening a paradigm shift in our global economic system is forcing major financial donors that lost much in the recession to now look for safe and sure returns on their investments. Many of these donors are aware, based on international reports, that Guyana on many levels is steeped in corruption, the country lacks a requisite human resource base, and the potential for instability continues to exist because of politically inspired ethnic conflict and charges of ethnic discrimination. If the President has one pragmatic brain cell left, he would come up with a Plan B in the event foreign investors don’t pony up the kind of money the he is eagerly seeking to make LCDS a huge success, because it does appear he is staking the legacy of his struggling presidency on LCDS; a rather huge gamble if he can pull it off, but a big black eye if he cannot.
And even if, hypothetically speaking, LCDS gets going, Guyana will have to either lure overseas Guyanese back home or import workers, and this brings us to the issue of migration. The President, like any CEO of a major international corporation, has to pay careful attention to the ready availability of a professional and skilled workforce for development, and it doesn’t augur well for him and his much vaunted LCDS if donors/investors see Guyana haemorrhaging its most precious resources to other countries and the President dismissing it as if it is normal. He has to show he is doing something to stop the bleeding or donors/investors will import their own people and pay them internationally competitive salaries they won’t pay Guyanese workers. Wake up, Mr President!
Besides the migration crisis, the President also has to pay attention to arresting the soaring crime crisis or run the risk of having international donors/investors refuse to pour tons of money into a nation that experiences cycles of deadly violence – even if politically inspired – that threaten stability and rule of law. For this reason it does not help when the President says he won’t lose sleep if armed criminal gangs are engaging each other, or, in response to a question about the ghastly death of Mr Ramdass allegedly at the hands of GDF Coast Guards, that he couldn’t “promise… this would never happen again.” That’s the voice of resignation and it runs counter to the President’s duty to at least sound as though he cares and at least offer a solution for a people stressed out by runaway crime in government and on the streets. If the apparent inability to resolve the crime crisis ever forms part of the PPP’s 2011 re-election strategy to goad its support base to vote in large numbers, it is one sick game no Guyanese should tolerate let alone play!
With government unable to control crimes via its law enforcement and criminal justice agencies, it also begs for a clarification from HPS, Dr Roger Luncheon that Guyana will not compromise its sovereignty by allowing the British to station their personnel in Guyana to aid in the reform of the Guyana Police Force. Did he intend to convey that Guyanese have to protect their sovereignty against people trying to help them become a better society, but lose their lives at the hands of people who don’t even care about their own lives because they realize the government is too compromised and corrupt to make a difference in caring about people who are frustrated and angry or helping create jobs or enforcing the law even-handedly?
Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin
