Having announced recently that its Third Business Development Forum was due to commence today, Friday, November 11, the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry President, Timothy Tucker, declared that of late, the Chamber has been focussed on access to capital and the securing of (presumably lucrative) joint venture partnerships, altogether sound and legitimate preoccupations that are a corollary to the wider mission of it taking advantage of the entrepreneurial openings that have been created by the opportunities that have been opened up in a Guyana economy that is in a condition of accelerated transformation and ensuring that its members benefit from those opportunities.
Contextually, the circumstances make the Chamber’s current Business Development Forum and its outcomes highly anticipated at home, in the region, and further afield since the posture of the Chamber will help shape the country’s investment profile not just among local businesses, but among regional and extra-regional ‘players’ who, even now, continue to seek their own helpings of Guyana’s investment pie.
Local Business Support Organizations (BSOs), not least the Georgetown Chamber, have accumulated significantly generous helpings of clout, lobbying clout, mostly in terms of the shaping of the country’s investment profile so that whatever transpires over the course of the ongoing forum and whatever the outcomes, these will presumably be used to help shape official positions in relation to the country’s wider investment posture, going forward.
However, to say that that one of the Chamber’s objectives is to help fashion the national investment profile is to make a comment on what would very much appear to be a desire to enhance its influence in a rapidly expanding Guyana economy.
In the first instance it has to be said that a local Chamber of Commerce which serves as a lobbyist for the private sector and its interests and which serves to seek to ensure that the private sector’s investment interests are not unduly curtailed by various forms of unfair official restraint, is much of what we need in Guyana today. There is no virtue or merit, for that matter, in an economy which like ours, while bursting at the seams with opportunities for growth through investment, remains shackled by a regimen of overzealous oversight which seeks to have its fingers in every conceivable pie, serving as awkward intermediaries whenever opportunities for private sector investment arise, particular in circumstances where, not infrequently, questions are raised about the veracity of those interventions.
After all, the whole idea of a private sector is to serve legitimate business interests that operate within the framework of the laid down laws and regulations, in which circumstances, there is no need for political ‘minders’ or godfathers to enable the process.
Whether it is true or otherwise, there is usually far too much talk about political intermediaries through which envisaged investment ventures must be ‘filtered’ if they are to benefit from a guaranteed green light. Part of the responsibility of the Chamber is to help work to erase the impression that serious business cannot be done in this country unless it is attended by one or more political minders.
There is yet another obligation which the Chamber has. That has to do with broadening the base of its membership to accommodate greater numbers of the small enterprises which, up to this time, continue to make a noteworthy contribution to the shaping of what is being seen the ‘new’ Guyana economy. The consensus of opinion in some quarters is that in the maze of the exalted agenda that now fashions Guyana’s ‘new economy’, many of the country’s smaller businesses that have been successful in their own right continue to be denied opportunity to grow. Indeed, when one compares the potential that micro- and small-businesses offer to our expanding economy against what it has, in fact, been receiving, the whole scenario becomes reduced to nothing short of tokenism.
The question therefore arises as to whether it has not become important that the Chamber begin to shift a more generous measure of attention to the interests of micro and smaller businesses since, amidst the enormously enhanced decibel level of a business environment now possessed of a singular focus, there are huge numbers of small operators across the spectrum who simply have no voice. After all, it is simply a matter of the Chamber delving deeper into what are other aspects of its own agenda.
