-cites external forces on economy
President Bharrat Jagdeo on Friday assured the residents of West Berbice that the success of projects currently being implemented will provide the revenue for lifting communities out of some of the issues and problems that residents complain to Cabinet about during outreaches across the country.
Some of these projects are CGX Energy Inc’s hunt for oil, the proposed deep water harbour for Berbice ,and ICT job creation and e-government through enhanced bandwidth.
Speaking to residents at Bath Settlement , he said that hopefully , Central Government will be able to advance resolving most of the issues that affect people on the ground. He said Central Government does not make light of these problems and called them “real issues.”
“…issues of a family not getting the lease or title, or comrades living on a reserve and getting a notice that they have to move and they are very concerned that in the movement they may not be able to earn. Some may not have access to water. Some communities or individuals within communities may not have access to electricity or they have a problem with their electricity bill. In some areas the drainage and irrigation system is clogged up or the NDC is not providing service to pick up the garbage.”
He said: “And we understand these problems and we will never make light of them, because we know how important they are to people who are trying to improve their lives and their children’s lives. But I want you to understand that in our sympathy with these problems there are also another set of problems that we confront everyday at the national level and often the resolution of these problems impact on our ability to solve the problems that you raise with the ministers when they come to your community.”
The President said that the Government’s ability to generate enough revenue to meet the huge demands that are so validly needed across the country by the people, “the great expectations that they have of us to solve the problems that have been identified.”
He said that the ability to generate this revenue becomes increasingly difficult particularly because “a lot of our prosperity in Guyana depends on the rest of the world because we are a very open economy and we earn a lot of our money from selling our goods to those markets: our bauxite, our sugar, our rice, our rum, our timber products, into those markets.”
“And our wives!” shouted a man from the audience, mush to the amusement of the crowd.
President Jagdeo continued, saying if there is a problem with demand in these countries for the goods that Guyana produces or any problem at the global level it will affect Guyana’s prosperity. “And we know for the past two of three years that there was a global recession. We know that millions of people across the world have lost their jobs, we know that millions of people have lost a lot of their pensions that they had [set aside for old age]. In the United States of America, millions more losing their homes,” he said.
The President said this is why Guyana has focused on the management of Guyana’s economy which has caused it to be able to withstand some of the vagaries of the crisis. “We have managed to avert the impact of the global crisis to a large extent despite the fact that we rely on these markets for our prosperity. And we did that because of good planning and sound policies and because we have been consistently practising these,” the President said during the meeting.
He said when the Government took office in 1992, it recognized that apart from the broken infrastructure and the hopelessness that people felt, some other key things had to be addressed. He said that the debt that the previous administration racked up became a burden on the backs of the people of the country, something that while seemingly invisible, was always there. He said over the years the Government has been able to manage this debt to a point to where money can be spent on the people in terms of education, health care and other social services.
“Because we have removed that burden, the ability of the Government to accelerate this has been greatly enhanced. We complained about that Opposition practicing bad policies, but we dealt with it. We banded our waists and we dealt with it. So when you think that there are problems in the community, our country has bigger problems,” he said.
The President mentioned that within a matter of month,s there will be exploration of oil and gas in the Corentyne Region. “We think that Guyana will become a major [oil] producer in the future. The US Government sent somebody who advises [US Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton to meet with me and in their estimation, within ten years, Guyana can be a major producer of oil in this region,” he said, adding, “That could transform our economy.” CGX President and CEO Kerry Sully recently disclosed that the company will drill its first well by second quarter 2011, and the chance of finding oil is one in five, due to the modern 3-D Seismic work shot on the potential drill sites.
He said that there has been quite a lot of money invested in Regions 5 and 6 and noted that the road all the way to Moleson Creek has been done at a cost of over US$70 million.
The President also spoke of the need to expand the Berbice Campus of the University of Guyana, the building of a technical institution in Mahaica, the bridging of the Corentyne River in a joint effort with the new Surinamese Government, and the opening of a deep water harbour in Berbice.
“It’s the big things, if we get them right, that will provide the revenue to do the small things,” he told the people of West Berbice.