The available evidence continues to make a pretty strong case for asserting that the extent to which the major Business Support Organizations (BSO’s) consider themselves to be responsible for overseeing in a meaningful way the steady growth and development of micro and small businesses is strictly limited. One hastens to add that this is not to say that that there have not been periodic BSO interventions to create one-off market-related opportunities for small businesses and here we note, as we have done before, the initiatives undertaken by the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association to provide micro and small business in the agro processing, craft and some of the various trades amongst the creative industries with market opportunities particularly through its UNCAPPED events and Farmers Markets, all of which have been attended by a fair measure of success. One might add that the success of these events appears to have been due, in large measure, to individual BSO officials, who function at executive level, including the serving President of the GMSA Shyam Nokta and his colleague on the executive Ramsay Ali, the CEO of Sterling Products Ltd.
That being said there is no persuasive evidence, insofar as this newspaper is aware, of any serious effort being made to embrace small and micro businesses, the ‘hustlers’ as they are called, as members of any of the fraternity of high profile BSO’s.
It has not escaped the attention of the Stabroek Business that our BSO’s have, for some time now, become seriously preoccupied with the country’s emerging oil and gas sector, particularly in a circumstance where there are considerable potential ‘drawbacks’ to be had from this pursuit. Here, one must make the point, again, that this is in no way a criticism of the BSOs’ agenda. Indeed, it would be neglectful of their right to seek such legitimate gains as may exist in the oil and gas industry which could potentially benefit both the businesses themselves as well as the country as a whole. That being said, and the nature of private enterprise notwithstanding, one ventures to suggest that there continues to be a worsening imbalance between what, we repeat, are the legitimate private sector local content interests to be derived from the oil and gas industry and any substantive and sustained concern for the fate of local micro and small businesses.
No one is asking the BSO’s to be godfathers to every seemingly worthy cause. What one wonders, however, is whether we are not far more likely to seek a holistic enhancement of the country’s private sector if the PSC, for example, were not to open a highly visible and active window that allows even the smallest of micro businesses access to the kind of advice and technical and other forms of coaching that would help support the growth of small and micro businesses at this point in time. Certainly, there has not been any gesture – as far as we are aware – up to this time on the part of our high-profile BSO’s to intervene as best they can, including executing a robust demarche of government to make the case for putting together some kind of structured and serious rescue plan for those micro and small businesses which, the efforts of the Small Business Bureau (SBB) notwithstanding, many of which may well have ‘gone under’ by this time on account of the injury that has been inflicted on the country’s economy by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our BSO’s need to be reminded that, in various ways that are patently obvious, the creation of a robust framework for supporting the strengthening of micro and small businesses, will have a positive knock-on effect on their own businesses to say nothing about how such a circumstance will impact job creation, enhancing overall business growth and consolidating a much needed spirit of entrepreneurship.
But those, perhaps, are not the key issue here. The attitudinal transformation which this comment seeks has to derive from a vision, a private sector vision, that makes the connection between the growth and development of micro and small businesses and burnishing the profile of private enterprise, as a whole, a point at which we can arrive only if the leaders in the private sector begin to advocate more strongly the position that the legitimacy of what one might call the individual hustle cannot be allowed to stifle the ambitions of those who need help, considerable help in many instances, to stay in the race.
Here, we can begin, first by government robustly re-stating its commitment to the restoration and survival, as the case may be, of those micro and small businesses that have been the major business of COVID-19 not just through some kind of rousing public statement but by nailing its colours to the mast through a plan – backed by sufficient resources – to help those enterprises to restore themselves. We need a great more serious persuasion that the BSO’s are prepared to be their brothers’ keeper.
