Investor confidence and sustainable growth

RUNNING a smooth ship to manage the affairs of this country as government accelerates the development agenda with massive projects in the pipeline and on the go, requires a keen sense of the pulse of the people, of how the public is responding to an unfolding new Guyana. The state would want to take into consideration the social impact of the society’s steep, rapid, sudden rise, the curving up of the development chart from a slow, steady horizontal climb over the nation’s history, to this high-velocity vertical ascent of monumental upward lift now happening.

How could the average soul adjust to Guyana’s per capita GDP moving from a mere US$300 in 1992, to around US$18,000 by 2025, from a US$4 billion economy in 2021, to, according to the International Monetary Fund, a US$14 billion Caribbean and South American powerhouse by 2025?

For one, there is a fine line to walk, in balancing the needs of capital investors who, in these early days of Guyana’s meteoric rise, may expect excessively favourable treatment for their hard-cash investments, with the expectations and presupposition of ordinary folk who see their country through lenses that were honed for so long to filter their world through the rigours of a poor society.

It is not an easy thing to quickly transition up the hierarchy of progress, to rise from a state of laid-back existence as one of the poorer GDP lands in the world for decades, to all of a sudden become, literally, the fastest-rising economy in the world. Such a transformation of pace requires a national mental shift of proportional intensity.

One of the fundamental necessities of these times is the fine management of public information across the land, which, in today’s world, is a sophisticated skills set that the state would want to cultivate and hone, both with professional training of its own staff, and with looking beyond the local pool to tap into the expertise of international experts.

National institutions, including the mass media, have learned over the years how to react to what goes on in the society, and much of that reaction becomes a kind of knee-jerk Pavlovian instinct, with a habit of distrusting government’s intention, to see some big international private sector enterprises as anti-people, and to paint a negative picture of what the public may perceive as an unknown factor, and hence, a threat. Given this learned behaviour of the public, in order to re-position the Guyanese worldview to proactively cooperate with the new dynamic and the new paradigm of a fast-rising society, it is the state’s job to bring to the national table a fresh perspective of the country. This is necessary to welcome international players on the local ground, without the public seeing them as threats to sovereignty, or here to take away from local wealth.

In other words, it is part of the governance process to refresh and reset and reboot how Guyanese see their world, the way citizens approach the task of developing their country, of welcoming the building building-out process, of also recognising that not every time everybody would get everything right, and that government is not a god, but mere humans managing the affairs of state, and that the way to deal with challenges and issues that would inevitably arise on this amazing journey of building a world-class country, is to be positive, to care with wisdom and good sense, and to seek always to cooperate and reach out in good faith, trust, and confidence that everybody wants only the best for the Guyanese nation, that government is committed only to the welfare and prosperity and progress of Guyanese.

One example that comes to mind is the national response to ExxonMobil’s gas-flaring scenario, which is evolving into a controversial story, and could cause adversarial fallout around the oil-and-gas sector. Government recognises that in these times, balancing the oil-and-gas sector with Guyana’s asset as a net clean climate generator is an important prerequisite to the development process. Nobody is more keenly aware of this fine balance than government, and the country has established a national plan for the natural environment to be preserved, with a strong sustainability factor built in.

However, there seems to be a faultline in communicating this commitment of the government for sustainability and preservation of the natural environment to the public consciousness. Instead, the public’s focus lasers is on the oil-and-gas sector without seeming regard for the climate agenda of the state, with a real risk that heavy, constant public criticism of the sector’s development could become so pervasive, that it would damage the viewpoint of potential investors, and even cause angst within the oil-and-gas community.

Government’s respect and love for democracy and open debate and professional public analysis and commentary is laudable and is to be encouraged, and it is also government’s job to make sure that the society is well-informed, that critics have all the facts, and that emotive, irrational, instinctive outbursts do not cause a negative impact across the still delicate investor climate in the country.

Guyana’s growth rate will outpace even China’s socioeconomic development, by more than 10 times. Such a heady, spinning rise could be disorienting to some people, and it therefore behooves government to lay out the realities of the playground, the factors that must be fitted together to balance out investor confidence and sustainable development, with a fine-tuned communications platform that secures global investor confidence in Guyana, and that underlines government’s commitment to environmental sustainability.

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