President Jagdeo tells GDF…
– says Army needs to understand the future challenges that our country will face and then build a structure to address those challenges
COMMANDER-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, President Bharrat Jagdeo, said yesterday that, in re-engineering national defence and security, the future challenges of the country must be understood and focus has to be on greater efficiency and better use of resources already available.

Commander-in-Chief President Bharrat Jagdeo addresses the conference.

“But I don’t want this to become a sterile exercise, an exercise based only on text book knowledge or what the theory is, because, often, the theory that we learn is not appropriate to our environment and the challenge to you today, therefore, is with the academic knowledge that you have, that you have received from various training courses; you have to situate that knowledge in the reality of the Guyana context.

“Therefore, you have to have a very, very clear understanding of what this context is before you can even speak about re-engineering. You need to understand the future challenges that our country will face and then build a structure to address those challenges,” he said.

The Head of State was speaking at the opening of the two-day Guyana Defence Force (GDF) Officers’ Conference 2010 under the theme ‘Re-engineering to Enhance National Defence and Security’, at the Officers’ Mess, Base Camp Ayanganna, Thomas Lands, Georgetown.

President Jagdeo warned that the challenges range from internal security, including criminal gangs, piracy, backtracking , illegal immigration, the narcotics trade and political disruption, relations at borders, particularly with neighbouring countries, climate change, food security and migrant populations.

He continued: “They all require particular approaches to deal with them. Traditionally, the GDF has been structured to maintain peace at our borders and to maintain the territorial integrity of our country.

“….you have this huge pool of talented people here in the military and we can’t have them wait on a war with our neighbours, which, hopefully, will never happen,” he said.

“We are trying and we have committed ourselves that the diplomatic approach, particularly for small countries and the approach of resort to international law is best suitable for dealing with our border relations.

“And, whilst we still need to maintain a capability and we still need to have our forces adequately trained to ensure the integrity of our borders, the sole focus of the traditional concept of the military has to shift to one that is wider in its understanding and with a better use of our resources.”

He said the challenges need to be examined and ranked on the basis of what are the immediate and medium term that may emerge and longer term ones, as well.

“Because we will always, in a country like ours, never have the resources to meet all of our needs,” President Jagdeo noted.

ATTENTION
“I say to you, pay close attention to context and resources and better use of resources,” the Commander-in-Chief advised.

President Jagdeo reiterated that this country is doing better economically wise and it is funding more of its expenditure from revenue, recalling that “there was a time, in the not so distant past, when, outside of debt payments and wages and salaries, we had to borrow to do everything else. We even had to borrow to pay some of our debts.”

He said, today, debt servicing and wages and salaries account for about 40 per cent of revenue and just about four per cent of that goes to service debt, with 60 per cent remaining to fund other expenses for health, education, housing and other infrastructure.

“This is important. It means that we have emerged out of a state of bankruptcy and we are progressing to one where, hopefully, over time, we can finance all of our needs, all of our demands. But we are yet to get there,” he observed.

The President reported that the country’s revenue has grown significantly, not because of increased taxes but, largely, because of the expansion of the economy and Government has managed to tame inflation.

“There was a time when inflation was triple digits, over 100 per cent per annum (but) in the past, maybe twelve, thirteen years, it has been single digit with the exception of one year when we had a spike in global food prices and oil prices,” he related.

Continuing, he said: “These are all very, very important indicators and, many times, people don’t pay attention to them and it is because of this management that, today, a Guyanese can walk into a bank and borrow, between five to ten percent in mortgage financing, to build a house when, in the past the mortgaging financing rate was as high as 36 per cent.”

He said last year ended with $650M foreign exchange reserves and with PetroCaribe resources, another $100M and three-quarters billion United States dollars in the Central Bank, the highest ever in the country’s history and that was in a crisis year.

“So our country is
doing better but are we where we want to be? And does this mean that we have tackled all the challenges that we have to adequately deal with if we are going to grow at a different pace, at a pace that is accelerating, a pace that is not evolutionary?” he asked, adding: “Because what we need now is a leap-frogging type of development.”

In that context, President Jagdeo said there are a few major strategic projects, along with the routine growth in investment and economic expansion which would deliver this leap in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and in the creation of greater income and wealth.

He said these projects are firmly in the country’s development plans being situated in the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) and the National Development Strategy, because of their potential transformative impact on society.

VENTURES
He said such ventures include renewable energy, mainly through hydropower and also at Skeldon Sugar Factory where there is a co-generation facility.

The President said, apart from the immediate impact of lower electricity rates to consumers across the country, it would also set the base for further industrialisation.

He said the Government is hoping to start the hydropower project, which requires some US$600M, this year and revealed that bids for building the access road to the site have been received.

He said another area is improved and modern telecommunication facilities for the people.

“The world has used this in a transformative way. This is making a huge difference in terms of productivity increases. The use of telecommunication in all spheres of activity, from services, including military, to the production of goods,” he remarked, stating that IT related improvements have the potential to also generate thousands of jobs.

“But we have to make changes here and this is why you have seen that we are constantly in discussion and, sometimes, in conflict with the major telecoms providers, because we feel that the services have not been adequate to allow national development of a transformative kind to take place,” he stated.

President Jagdeo said two new fibre optic cables are coming into Guyana, one, by the Government, from Brazil, which is dedicated to meeting needs to allow for delivering services in more effective and efficient fashion.

“We think that having dedicated bandwidth, bandwidth that is cheap, could be transformative in the ways that the State provides services to the citizens and also relate to citizens, because it can take these services directly to their communities,” he said.

President Jagdeo said the forces, particularly the Joint Services, will, hopefully, see a more modern way of gathering intelligence and monitoring the security environment.

“The new form of internal security and policing against crime has to be intelligence driven and this tool allows us to gather a wealth of intelligence data that can be transformed, analysed and generated to improve, significantly, the way you work,” he told the soldiers.

He also alluded to the economic sectors of the future and touched on productive ones that can generate wealth and create the jobs.

President Jagdeo said the link with neighbouring Brazil, which is a growing world power in many areas including food production and technology production, is important.

OUTLOOK
“One of the major growth poles that I have been speaking about and there are several new growth poles that we are trying to catalyse in this new economic outlook, is to link the northern States of Brazil with Guyana through a series of infrastructure that will support economic activities,” he said.

He said that is a major growth pole of the future that could generate significant transformative impacts on the society and the Government is actively pursuing it.

The Head of State said there is the production of fossil fuel and food production and Guyana is already a net food exporter.

“We have all the attributes here, to meet the growing demand for food in the world and that demand will grow,” he anticipated.

He said, currently, several large scale plantation type agricultural projects are being explored, carefully utilising the intermediate and the Rupununi savannahs to bring more food into production without affecting the eco-system in those areas.

He reminded that there is a very aggressive agricultural diversification programme that is being rolled out right across the country.

Another area, about which the President spoke, is eco-tourism and the environmental strategy.

He said: “The sale of the service that our forest provides could, over time, be the largest earner for this country and, along with that, there is a symbiotic relationship with the tourism sector, because they feed off of each other.

“These are the major sectors that we will be pursuing over the next five to ten years. It doesn’t mean that we are going to neglect other areas. Manufacturing still has some ability to generate jobs in our country and all of the other activities that we see happening here.

“But these are the strategic areas that we have decided that could deliver the transformation that we need as a country, so that we can generate more jobs and better paying jobs for our people right across the country,” he said.

However, he acknowledged that, as these are pursued, a new set of challenges will emerge,
such as the demand for skills and labour.

THREATS
“How do we try to minimise the threats that will come our way,” he pondered, saying; “We feel that the way that we can have a stable Guyana is if every Guyanese feels a part of the development here and they have a stake in the development.

“We are not going to be able to give everyone that stake immediately but there must be a clear pathway, a natural progression towards fulfilling that need,” he maintained.

He said several areas have been identified to work on assiduously, utilising some of the resources to ensure that people have a stake and the threat to national cohesion becomes less or is minimised.

About investment and progressive developments in areas like housing, health care, access to electricity and water, President Jagdeo said: “It is ensuring that the money is spent back on them”.

He went on: “There is another type of security that is also vital, the security that comes with improving living standards and that security also contributes significantly to social cohesion and less disruption in society, because people feel that, progressively, their needs are met.”

President Jagdeo said even handedness is also very important, as it creates a sense of fairness and another way of ensuring a safer environment and less problems from internal disruption is to find effective means of ensuring justice.

“…what you do matters greatly, that is providing security on our borders and now, moreso, I expect internal security, that we will go after the criminal gangs; we will go after the pirates; we will go after the backtrackers and those who are in illegal immigration and we will go after the drug dealers, the big ones, as well as the small ones who peddle the drugs in the community,” he urged the military.

“…you need to be able to build up our intelligence capability and our analysis, our forensic capability, our ability to analyse and investigate,” he advised.

“All of these are important and they cost money but doing all of that alone, taking all the money and not fixing the other things that I mentioned, they can also make your problem harder and, in fact, it could become overwhelming, because we are not creating the national environment to reduce crime and probably disillusion.

“We are doing better now and that is why you see your budget reflecting that, every year it is growing. It is growing significantly. We spent $6 billion on this outfit last year,” he said but indicated: “We still have a major task ahead of us.”