THE platforms to empower and create small and medium-sized businesses with the supporting simplified financial options for growth are the only means of opportunity that will determine the survival of most Guyanese in the immediate future.
This spans existing and new sectors, in the bold new world of labour-eliminating technologies and new methodologies. In some places high tech is replacing old working formulas in most areas, the die is cast.
In Guyana, as in most small countries where Government is the dominant factor in national development, rather than private investment capital, which, with the latter, in some cases are naturally hostile to the potential competitiveness of small and medium-sized businesses. This of course is not exclusive to Guyana; therefore, government becomes tasked with creating the philosophy and empowering mechanisms through laws to initiate a workable, level playing field.
To elaborate on the predator nature of the ’business food chain,’ the recent revelation of the controversy at the Guyana National Broadcasting Authority involving two prominent board members reminded me of a profound incident in early 1993. A group of creative people in Advertising, Photography, Art, Designing and Writing had bonded ourselves together on the pretext that we comprised the talents that were sub-contracted for a meagre percentage by the existing ‘connected’ larger entities and we would forever be selectively utilised and underpaid, even tricked and bullied out of principled rights [ Copyright, Licensing, royalties etc.] and independent negotiating opportunities.
We had publicly announced ourselves as the Independent Media Workers (I.M.W.), but had failed to put the money together to pay the lawyer attached to the group to file the paper work, because we were busy assessing the network strengths of the I.M.W. The major private media houses went ahead and registered themselves under our name. They became the Independent Media Workers, having a legal fraternity within whispers away. Without shame or guilt. Then we next realised that all the Government relationships that we serviced had been severed from us; at that time I did advertising work for G.E.C. and GuyOil and freelance work for The Department of Culture and G.N.N.L. Within weeks, I had lost most of them, the rest soon followed, this latter development we could not readily ascribe to the ‘Connected Group’ that had stolen our business name or just to the vengeance natural against all things that went before exhibited in an overwhelmingly vulgar way by the PPP in its first months in office. Most of our group drifted into stages of hunter-gathering to stave off complete economic collapse, many of us remained in debt for years. Off course, the ‘Connected Group’ continued to offer selective avenues for the usage of our talents, now comfortable that we were reduced to ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water.’ Not all complied, some migrated, I went down a different and difficult path to retain a livelihood and hold on to some integrity. The bottom line is, that wherever private enterprise is active, this scenario is evident. Especially in a country of no clear-cut laws for the accommodation for business development, and no penalties for public officers who feel that every contractor owes him/her 30% of his earnings.
A recent letter by Cyril Walker ‘The procurement system needs complete overhauling’ that outlines a common complaint that has reverberated for years. A specific official that lived in the Kitty area epitomised the criminal vice of the cutback, a minister in the last regime even had the nick name ‘De 10% Minister.’ But even more serious is when Government purposely on the pretext of Politics and Race illegally moves hundreds of millions of contractual dollars to create unqualified power brokers, who will then marginalise qualified and proven expertise as permanent subcontractors in an overwhelming atmosphere of finance and equipment that they, the real contractors are unable to compete against. Finance that enables the recruitment of a parallel public service within the public service to do their bidding. This system is also supported by banking regulations that will make the marginalised unable to compete, using the current bank terms for larger contracts.
This is not only a thing of the past administration, though they seemed to have moved it from the criminal activities of a sub-culture, to a national culture. A popular Pork-Knocker told me the gruelling episode of a former commissioner during the Desmond Hoyte presidency that took his lands and sold it to a large stakeholder, he took a lawyer who conveniently lost his papers and neutralised his defence. Only laws that are clear and easily implemented as the sad fact, that in a fist fight if an opponent is punched and he collapses and dies, you will be charged, the outcome may not be as severe as premeditated murder, but the stressful legal consequence is assured, for most Guyanese. All the above constitutes the taming of the landscape that will allow the cultivation and reception of new ideas, that will grow into livelihoods. We must learn by the temerity of anomalies occurring around us.
The work will be tremendous for both the Attorney General and Auditor General’s office. With the recent disclosure of the Auditor General’s report of the reluctance of the ‘System’ to implement recommendations, is in itself an omen of the task ahead to shape the new Guyana, because many of the ideas and concepts that will be laid on the desks of heads of departments will be from new streams of thought, by persons and groups who hardly thought that it will take three to six months before that head even remembers the document after several dozen phone calls. One of the pivotal trademarks that must be etched in the consciousness of the public officer is ‘Timely response’ rather than indifference, procrastination or the custom that attributes a file for tomorrow’s reflection, as the current colloquial determines ‘To whenever’.