Dear Editor,
Decades ago the PPP were approached by Brazil to build a 1500 megawatt hydropower project at Tortuba, a deep water harbour in Demerara or the Essequibo and a highway to Brazil. The Brazilians wanted our hydropower to smelt their alumina, and power a series of activities in that country including the 1.8 million people in the city of Manaus just 600 miles due south from Mt Roraima. It was called the Investe Brazil programme. I want readers to understand that the Pakaraima mountain chain, and the high rainfall we get here are available in very few other places in South America. It is why it is so important to Brazil, because you just don’t build a hydropower dam anywhere; you have to have the rainfall water and the terrain to do it. The landlocked and partly undeveloped states of Roraima and Amazonas are 10 times bigger than Guyana, and are waiting for only two things, a road to the ocean and power. And we have both to offer! This is how you develop, not by taxing people out of existence.
For whatever reason we decided against it. I understand that ‘they are going to gobble us up’, was a statement attributed to Bharrat Jagdeo in 2005 at a function with businessmen in Lethem.
For all of the 23 years the PPP were in power, they never saw the benefit to our economy of a good reliable and cheap rate for electricity, even though we occupy this very unique geological location on this planet, to become a major manufacturing and industrially powerful nation, because of our hydropower potential and therefore cheap electricity potential ‒ especially if we are selling it to Brazil. I honestly believe that we can make more money as a nation that way than from the royalties from oil.
Recently we had ministers and government officials making every conceivable excuse and pronouncements about our manufacturing sector’s cry for better conditions to develop. Even GWI is in trouble; their electricity bill is frightening. I have written about it before; when the PPP brought Severn Trent here I said in a commentary, that they can bring 27 Trents and the result will be the same. Unless we fix the electricity rate we are wasting time and money, and the electricity rate in Guyana is higher than almost everywhere and is a disincentive to all manufacturing and industry. Fix that and everything else will fall in line. For example, in this country in 2006 we produced 307,000 MT of rice; in 9 years by 2015 we produced 688,000 M/T of rice and our farmers did this with incentives other than the PetroCaribe deal with Venezuela. Now they are saying that if the price of rice does not go back up, they will return to producing 300,000 tonnes, and earn less badly needed foreign exchange for us.
We must listen to them. It is so simple, and yet we just don’t seem to understand; what is wrong with us? We are so busy fighting each other that we don’t recognize the real enemy and what it is doing to us. There are problems which we can easily address for the benefit of the country and everyone in it, but we don’t, since our system of governance has moved so far away from what it should be, that it has produced a completely dysfunctional legal system, a government which does not function as it is supposed to, and a manufacturing and industrial sector which cannot flourish under our present poor policies which fail to enable them.
Instead of the Westminster system which sees the permanent secretaries, who are supposed to be highly trained administrators in their particular field as the real managers of our system and are, according to our laws, legally responsible for their ministries, we have ministers who assume managerial roles which they are totally unprepared and untrained to do. They are really only supposed to give political guidance to their PS, not to be an opthamologist one day, and managing and totally responsible for a multi-billion dollar budget ministry the next day. Am I singling out one Minister in this statement? Yes I am! Since it is helping me to make my point, I am not taking issue with the bondgate matter; I don’t know enough about it to do so, but I heard this particular Minister on television saying that he has to shoulder the full responsibility of the Public Health Ministry.
Well he does not! His Permanent Secretary has that invidious responsibility, since they are legally to be blamed when their ministers are allowed to take over their functions and make these mistakes. Why anyone in this country would take a job as a Permanent Secretary is beyond me. To say we have senior political government officials saying that they are on a learning curve, and that they will inevitably make mistakes, is an incredibly stupid thing to say, especially since our system of governance, which works very well in the UK where it originated, tells us that in fact these political ministers are interfering in matters far above their competence, mostly with disastrous results.
So they have concocted an excuse to tell us, the public, why, what is not supposed to happen, is causing problems. If these political appointees can’t take the time to read up on our system of governance, and operate in a manner which is consistent with the Westminster model, then we have no obligation to accept these excuses or them. But let’s see what happens when people work together.
A good example is the Pinehill UHT liquid milk which features in a letter on Saturday, August 20 in the KN captioned ‘Imagine! We are importing milk from Barbados’ which is written by Conrad Barrow, Mr Barrow is perfectly right, Pinehill milk from Barbados is selling here in Guyana in our supermarkets, but there is more to the story about how a tiny island like Barbados (430 sq kilometres) can achieve this distinction and we cannot. We don’t do anything evenly remotely comparable to it, notwithstanding the vast land space we have in this country (215,000 sq kilometres) compared to Barbados. And it is a good example of the difference between Guyana and Barbados; the difference between G$204 to one US$1 today, and Bds$2 to US$1. Exactly the same as it was on the independence of that small island from the UK. And when both two Barbados dollars and two Guyana dollars were equal to one US dollar.
The Pinehill story is in fact based on a masterpiece of cooperation and collaboration between the Barbadian government, a private company, and private farmers. And as small as it is, because they are working together, they have created something wonderful, and even in the opinion of Mr Barrow, something incredible.
The Pinehill website contains the following paragraphs: “The local dairy industry consists of farmers and producers with some contribution from the Government of Barbados. With the supplying farms being typically family owned, there is a long legacy of dairy farming in Barbados with farms often spanning generations. This is a legacy which the farmers along with the PINEHILL team consistently seek to preserve and extend. There are 15 farms which currently supply PINEHILL with an average of 4 million liters of milk per year which equates to approximately 500 cows being milked daily across the island.
“The farmers have worked in conjunction with PINEHILL (owned by Banks Barbados) to improve their farming standards, make technological advancements in their farming practices and modernize their milking operations. PINEHILL has sought to strengthen the interest in the farms and improvements in technology, in order to more readily satisfy the local market and secure external markets to the benefit of the local dairy industry. The Government through the Ministry of Agriculture lends support through their many agricultural programmes and the farmers have established the Barbados Beef and Dairy Producers Association which is part of a wider body called the Barbados Agricultural Society. International agencies are also available to the farmers such as the Caribbean Agricultural Research Institute (CARDI) and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA)”. Editor, imagine they have only 500 milking cows and they have taken it this far, even breaking into the US market in the tristate area New York/New Jersey/ Connecticut in America.
And this same informed, enlightened and intelligent way of handling its affairs, is apparent in other sectors, for example the Barbadian government has sought to keep its electricity rates low at around 25 US per kilowatt, and to do so Barbados even subsidizes its electrical generation by 45 per cent, so that Barbadian manufacturing can flourish through a combination of vison, experience and knowledge. Equate this enlightened approach with farmers in Guyana asking that their fuel, fertilizer, and insecticides be sold to them at a price which has some concessions built in (duty free, vat free maybe) to keep them competitive with other countries, which are in fact subsidizing their agriculture in major ways and which are competing unfairly with our farmers.
These farmers are earning foreign exchange without which this country cannot flourish or even survive.
We have now learned that we have a huge amount of oil offshore Guyana, but nowhere do I see that we have approached the IDB or the World Bank to finance our hydropower potential. Having learned that we suddenly have this monstrous collateral as a country with this oil, why are we not acting to secure finance to develop our nation? That is how you get elected to govern!
Having the potential for hydropower in the same country with bauxite is a double blessing, and taking Venezuela as an example there are only 4 countries which are bigger exporters of oil than they are, yet they generate 98% of their domestic electrical power from hydro. Most of Venezuela’s hydro production facilities are located on the Caroni River in the Guayana region of that country. The 8,900-megawatt Guri Hydroelectric Power Plant on the Caroni River is one of the largest hydroelectric dams in the world, and provides the majority of Venezuela’s electric power. Using google earth I have discovered that this massive Guri Dam is situated less than 250 miles due west from Mount Roraima in the same Pakaraima mountain chain, which extends from east to west between Guyana and Venezuela and in the same geological latitude which gives us, and them, our enormous amount of rainfall annually.
What is wrong with us? It has been there for millennia and we have not used it. Build it with the Brazilians as our strategic partners; if we did that Venezuela will be unable to do anything about it against Brazil’s interest. Venezuela spent from what I can find out around US$3.3 billion on its military in 2012, but has since slashed its military budget by 34% since 2014. Brazil spends US$25 billion annually on its military, which is number 11 in the world.
No matter how much oil we find, we will not prosper until we work together. A divided nation cannot thrive; it will crumble as have all such which went before.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
