This newspaper’s interview earlier this week with the newly appointed Chief Executive Officer of GO-Invest Mr Owen Verwey, provided some important and long-overdue insights into the likely future of the agency charged not only with promoting Guyana at home and abroad as a worthwhile investment destination but also with helping to open up new external markets in which Guyana can pay a trading interest, apart, of course, from shoring up the traditional ones.
Perhaps the most important revelation made by Mr Verwey, the one-time State Planning Secretariat employee, is that GO-Invest, after all, will be functioning as a so-called one-stop agency, though he provided a pretty specific definition of what that means. What it does not mean is that all of the various facets of processing associated with applications to invest in Guyana will be handled at the GO-Invest, which is the manner in which the concept of a one-stop agency had been widely interpreted and hence had become the criticism of the length of time it took to process documents. What Mr Verwey said was those state agencies that are specifically responsible for processing particular aspects of investment applications like the Guyana Forestry Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Lands & Surveys Commission and the Guyana Revenue Authority will be expected to play their particular roles but that GO-Invest will interface with those agencies in a manner that ensures a measure of mindfulness of the need to have those processes expedited. “Where there is no need for that interface we will facilitate” the investors fully, he told this newspaper.
It follows, of course, that GO-Invest will have to step up its own game as far as creating an enabling environment for potential investors is concerned and that process, the new CEO says, has already begun with initiatives designed to provide relevant training for staff, to strengthen some of the traditional relationships that had previously existed to promote investment promotion and to create new ones. The existing ones targeted for consolidation include the traditional relationships with the country’s diplomatic missions abroad. In this regard, Mr Verwey conceded that links with missions will have to be consolidated and that GO-Invest itself will have to do more to ensure that missions were properly positioned to support the investment promotion drive. Of significance too was the disclosure that there is to be a greater role for the diaspora in promoting Guyana as a location for investment. Here again, the new CEO is pointing to a strengthened secretariat which, of course, cannot be separated from the need for government to invest significantly more amounts of money in getting GO-Invest to where it wants it to be.
Perhaps not altogether surprising was Mr Verwey’s disclosure that the GO-Invest Secretariat is to be relocated, a disclosure which, it would seem, points at last to a new vision for the entity. It had always been patently obvious that the building which the agency currently occupies is unsuitable to offer the range and quality of services required of a major investment and trade promotion agency. The building is old, awkwardly laid out, lacking in the conveniences consistent with the provision of the services which GO-Invest needs to deliver and situated at one of the more awkward corners of the city as far as traffic nuisance and parking are concerned. The quicker the agency is given a suitable complex of its own the better.
There is more that can be said about the likely prospects for GO-Invest now that the issue of the new CEO has been settled. What we would now need to be assured of is that there is a serious official commitment to ensuring that GO-Invest functions as a professional investment agency; and that we cease to hear the age-old complaint about investment enquiries circumventing the agency and going elsewhere. The last thing that we need—government having gone to great lengths to preserve GO-Invest and to breathe new life into the entity by going to the trouble to give it what is perhaps best described as a fresh start—is to drift back into old ways that result in a loss of face and relevance for GO-Invest.
Mr Verwey, incidentally, is concerned that he not be seen as some fresh face plucked from the diaspora and dropped into an environment with which he is altogether unfamiliar. He is here, he says, because he wants to be here and because, having previously served as a Planning Officer at the State Planning Secretariat and having fashioned what he considers to be an enlightened understanding of both the Guyana society and the economy, he is equipped to do the job. If he declines to embrace any exalted expectations, he appears to be under no illusions about what is expected of GO-Invest and, by extension, of him.
