There can be no question that the advent of an oil and gas sector and the attendant international attention that it has brought Guyana has dramatically opened up the country to external interest that is attended mostly by upbeat assessments of its investment potential. At the same time national discourse is beginning to settle around the notion of opportunities for Guyanese businessmen and women to grow in their entrepreneurial ambitions and for ordinary Guyanese to experience the transformational knock-on of the wider change.
One of the now clearly visible manifestations of these developments is the speed with which established local business enterprises have been seeking to attach themselves to joint ventures in contemplated partnerships with visiting investor types who are not unmindful of the fact that meaningful investments in Guyana at this time are, in essence, investments in a future that could pay significant dividends. Simultaneously, our micro and small businesses are ‘pawing the ground’ impatiently on the sidelines waiting for the still non-existent meaningful state interventions that can significantly alter their entrepreneurial fortunes.
One has only got to ‘hang about’ the lobbies of the city’s high profile hotels to catch glimpses of local businessmen and their foreign potential partners. Shadowing visiting investor hopefuls has become, in some instances, a full-time preoccupation of some of our local businessmen who appear determined that such Local Content opportunities as may arise do not pass them by. If the legitimacy of this pursuit is accepted, the incumbent political administration is still to provide persuasive evidence that our micro and small businesses are ‘in line’ for the kinds of incentives that can have a truly transformative impact on their endeavours.
One assumes, of course, that the Guyana Office for Investment is one of the busiest state agencies these days, never mind the fact that the ability of suitably important potential investors to circumvent the procedural arrangements for which G-Invest is responsible has a tendency to cause this aggressively marketed state agency to appear somewhat superfluous.
Two points should be made at this juncture. The first is that evidence that the ship of national prosperity might, intermittently encounter the choppy waters of official corruption ought not to be perceived as justifiable cause for its abandonment. The problem of official corruption only really threatens the end objective of the mission in circumstances where there is an absence of a few good men and women who are uncompromisingly committed to putting the accumulation of national wealth above self-aggrandizement. True, history may not be entirely on our side in this regard; still we must do what we can to buck the trend.
The second point has to do with the need to create a state machinery that has what it takes to do its part in accomplishing the various tasks that could see us through to the goal of national prosperity. Here, it has to be said that prospective investors who are in the process of buying into investments in the country’s potential are more likely than not to demand a level of service that corresponds to the extent of their investment risks.
A corresponding level of service from our state agencies that matches the extent of those risks is hardly likely to be realized given the condition in which a great many of our state agencies find themselves.
There exists incontrovertible evidence that some of our state agencies that are most critical to the level of service-provision necessary for the country to realize the desirable goals have become infested with ‘red tape’, graft and corruption – the ‘red tape’ sometimes appearing suspiciously to be one of the instruments with which to fashion the corrupt practices. There are instances, we are told, in which these practices begin at high levels to which significant numbers of less well-appointed but nonetheless key facilitators and expeditors are attached. When such schemes become underpinned by what one might call a hand-wash-hand culture, they can become fearfully difficult to dislodge.
National leaderships that become hostages to their own aggrandizement and which set their faces in the single direction of self-satisfaction have been known to derail the very best of intentions. Accordingly, whoever rules, and whatever promises are forthcoming with regard to the future of the country as a whole, we must never lose sight of the reality that publicly articulated national goals have, in other societies, been contemptuously set aside and supplanted by corruption-driven self-aggrandizement These are not times in which popular pronouncements clad in seemingly altruistic motives can be taken for granted rather than be constantly put to vigorous tests that offer assurances of their veracity.
