THE announcements in the 2020 Budget confirmed that Dr. Irfaan Ali’s administration is set to fast track and streamline applications for housing titles and construction permits. This situation exposed how much the Granger Team failed this nation.

This drive is set to cause a boom in the construction sector. What is set to happen under His Excellency the President, Dr. Irfaan Ali, is that housing development is set to rapidly expand with the targeted issuing of house lots in Region Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and 10 at a rapid pace with the processing being rolled out in the other regions mainly in the towns like Lethem. In total by Christmas 2021, there will be 10,000 proud owners of new land titles thanks to the Dr. Irfaan Ali plan.
But on top of that, there is a push to open some new industrial sites and complete such as the one at Belvedere in Corentyne. But meeting those deadlines will depend on the active participation of some nine state agencies involved in the process of breaking down all doors to get this done.

With the push for greater participation in E-Governance, the existing paper-based process has to be pushed into the history books and replaced by a more digital system to reduce the number of touchpoints. To get a construction permit in Guyana, according to the World Bank Doing Business Report, takes an average of 208 days to complete. This is unacceptable! The reality is that construction approval is more realistically counted in months, not days. This has to change.

Why can’t all documents for the opening of a business and securing all construction permits be done on-line so that the system can be better monitored and tracked so that the slackers can be exposed and displaced? If there is any project that the local government system and the central government system can collaborate on, is getting all the NDC and the Town Councils on-line. It is at this local level that most of the time-wasting can be found.

Navigating the Mayor and City Council in Georgetown is a nightmare and they have no benchmarks to measure their efficiency. Anyone who had any dealing with the City Engineer’s Office can attest to this fact; it is a bureaucratic nightmare that needs urgent technological rescue.

The Ministry of Business should try to make a big push to coordinate a project to get all of these local government agencies on-line and more functional to the point that one can be in New York City and apply for a business permit at any NDC or government agency and once all the right uploads are made, there will be a success. And why not? This is a standard operating procedure in any modern country in the world.

Now that Guyana is once again in the ocean of democracy, it is important that we crush our rating on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Index to enhance our competitiveness. No one is standing still and parking their finances out there waiting for Guyana to become competitive. All market-leading participants in the global economy are hustling and Guyana either gets into the game or not!

A project of this nature to help the local government system to get on-board to fast forward all business permits will also cut directly into a daunting tangle of ancient paperwork and arcane filing procedures that govern the operations at the Local Government Planning System; if there are any functional ones. Such a digital transformation project will create an automated, paperless information repository of the data currently trapped in huge paper ledgers and rotting files in dingy offices (just visit the NDC Office in Buxton that covers the Buxton-Foulis area and you get the picture).

At the end of the day, it is the little things that count in human development and any automation of the house-lot distribution system and the permit-issuing system in the local government network would have both positive philosophical and practical underpinnings.

In the final analysis, some 50,000 Guyanese families are on the radar of the government to secure house-lots and hundreds of legitimate business ventures desperately need land to invest in job-creating opportunities. Let us break down all barriers to ensure they get it.