Dear Editor,
Reading yesterday’s Guyana Times, I want to commend Minister Walrond and the Government’s sense of and programmes for development manifested in the article, “Everyone has equal opportunity to bid for contracts” – Walrond.
The first step in development is indeed to enact and enforce open transparent systems. A second, no less essential, step is to work for similar high levels of participation (bidding) and success of all groups so as to give substance to our aspiration of “One Guyana”. For a Society to stay together the necessary standards should not be seen and approached as hurdles to fail and exclude many, but as standards to which many, if not all are to be trained and could be trained (by various methods and paths) to attain. I commend also other reports on training to achieve required standards in smaller infrastructural works and the acceptance of the alternative concrete roads which in terms of capital needs, experience and expertise, pose lesser hurdles (than asphalt roads) to small contractors; and thereby putting persons in the street to work. Development must get on to a path of putting our people to work in their own development; doing, working and learning the work and learning about working; getting better each day: and in that process developing ourselves, our surroundings and our country and arriving in time at a developed state.
We could be on the road of that development. The faces in the picture of a section of the potential contractors were full of attention, and in which I thought I discerned at the same time a great desire and some anxiety about doing well and being successful. And though a small number of faces, eleven, it was a good representation of who Guyanese are, in race and gender.
Without doubt my sensitivity to this issue of “Development” has been heightened by my attendance on Monday afternoon at the “Presentation of the World Bank’s Review for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)” by Mr. Bill Maloney, Chief Economist for the Region. It was a challenging and inspiring presentation. On many measures, we of LAC as a whole, are not doing well: a projected average growth rate of 1.4% compared with 2.1% for the whole World. Yes, averages often obscure wide variations around the average – two brighter spots were the Dominican Republic which has been doing especially well in diversifying their economy, and good prospects for Guyana in developing their young, rapidly growing oil sector.
The Chief Economist posed some tantalizing questions ‘on the run”. “About 100 years ago, Chile was number 1 in production of copper in the world, and Mexico was number one in silver – and who was number 2? – Japan. How was it that Japan developed a diversified economy from its number two position and Chile and Mexico did not from their number one position? I said tantalizing questions, because I think the Chief Economist knew the answer that I would venture. A lot depends on how we see each other and if we see worth, purpose and a valued end in working for the good of each other: being comfortable to approach and discuss with each other how we may better ourselves and country. And so as the Chief Economist hinted, in Japan the work and income in copper and silver could in the number of ways required, be the base of and lead on to ever widening economic activities. Japan was already or nearly already one Japan, whilst many of our Countries in the LAC are still to become One Country. In Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Pedro Castillo in Peru and even Lula in Brazil, we see made evident the conflicts, contradictions and struggles still to be resolved, reconciled and synthesized across race, class, and the urban/rural gaps remaining from the colonizing era set loose by Columbus. As is evident here, often, when answers cannot be found to issues in the sector being studied, one may have to look into other very different sectors to discern and open any barriers. Evidently the nature and quantity of development in our LAC Region is still largely socio-politically constrained. We probably have to resolve those constraints before we hit the periods of high sustained growth rates for which many Asian countries have been known; or if we hit those rates we would have resolved our socio-political problems unknowingly.
The Chief Economist perhaps with an eye to the future put another puzzle to us. In a named area in Mexico there is a similar concentration of electronic firms as in South Korea – How is it that we have had a Samsung (and an LG) emerging in South Korea and none similar as yet in Mexico? These are not fanciful considerations – they are recognized in business studies as “the mind of the business” beyond earning enough profits. Indeed, we can and should ask of any organization, what is its mind? Its world view? The kind of world it is seeking to fashion?
For us in Guyana, and still so for us of the PPP/C, Cheddi Jagan and his period of study in the USA has been a great boon to our people and country. The America he lived in of 1936 to 43, was still then revolutionary in a number of ways, still suspicious of Old Europe holding on to its Empires, and still the place where the small men had the best chance to become big men; and where the view of each other as toiling workers was still widespread. No doubt Cheddi’s American experience (enrolling himself in and successfully completing an American Liberal Arts Course at a YMCA college) inspired him and fortified him to establish UG (whose sixtieth anniversary we are in the midst of celebrating) through the taunts of “Jagan’s night school”. Cheddi wanted to bring an American Liberal Arts Tertiary education within the reach of every one of us in Guyana.
The Chief Economist threw some other difficult questions before us of the Caribbean. “You have been working at Integration/Federation for decades now without success should you still retain the idea? (if not rethink it fundamentally). And referring to migration and subsequent remittances, he questioned one Ambassador- “Imagine you were a young person thinking you could make a name in Nuclear Engineering, would you not emigrate to North America?
Our Economic development, requires our Socio-Political development to become One Guyana , One Guyanese People against the background in which Cheddi found sustenance- One World, One Human Race in all our diversities of physiological appearances, languages, religions, cultures, histories.
Yours faithfully,
Samuel A A Hinds
Former Prime Minister
Former President
Ambassador to the USA
