Dear Editor,
As we launch our important Guyana Development Bank, aiming to make every one of us Guyanese, entrepreneurs in spirit in practice, in awareness and in truth.
Our LEAP programme in Linden made some headway in its intended purpose, to convert our fellow citizens in Linden from the old-time company-town mindset to a new entrepreneurial, self-responsible, paying-your-way, profitable mindset.
I wish that we had been more successful, even as I recognise that culture is difficult to change. We are not aware that in the existing culture there are a thousand questions for which we know the answers. In our transition to a new culture, we must believe that we will arrive at new answers that are acceptable and better, to those same thousand questions.
As we set out on this key venture of a national development bank, aware of our history in such ventures, we must avoid thinking of it and approaching it as a government hand-out in another form. It would be good for us to have wide and deep discussions about profits and losses, subsidies and support/investment for the medium to long term, how wealth is created, and so on.
Profitability and profits are essential but our history and religions have disposed most of us to be cautious if not outrightly suspicious of and denouncing profits. But we need perhaps two thirds of all our activities to be highly profitable beyond paying their way, so that there is money to be invested in projects that will provide an improved setting for continued and greater profits in the medium and long term.
Losses offset by subsidies and support could only be temporary, to get through troughs or to transition out of goods and services that we could no longer offer competitively, or where we could not offer them competitively and profitably, soon.
We rightly honour our Cheddi for being a great fighter for workers and the downtrodden against mighty capitalists. I dare say that he was at the same time a fighter for profitable enterprises that were fair and just, for sustaining the enterprises in which our people worked, and having profits and savings to invest and thus improve productivity and incomes.
To many it might seem that I am rewriting Cheddi, but I point to his characteristic path towards ending a strike: calling for a going to the books, proposing deferral of or reduction of debt repayments and/or less pay to the top (including reduced profit take) so that workers at the bottom could get something that was more just without collapsing the enterprise. Cheddi was aware of and acted out his awareness that a collapsed enterprise would be bad for workers.
Cheddi looked to bringing better rewards for workers in the not-too-distant future by deferring some present consumptions and investing the savings in society wide developments.
Let me admit that as one who was an 18yr old youth at the time, I was attracted to Cheddi’s 1962 development budget, regretting the view with which so many of our people were excited to riot, that Cheddi wanted us to do without, to save and invest in projects which our children and grandchildren should do!
May we have greater success as we launch on this perhaps fourth attempt in my knowledge, to kindle the entrepreneurial spirit in every one of us Guyanese, to profitably provide lawful and morally acceptable goods and services to our fellow Guyanese (and in time to our world) in a form that at the current time they are able and willing to pay for.
Our new Guyana Development Bank is for earnest, serious business, not another vehicle for handouts but a vehicle for many of us to create wealth in our country.
Let all of us be entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial in whatever work we do in ways that earn profits and at the same time make “profits” a good word. Make profits that are fair and just in the prevailing circumstances, so as to enable us to do good things and extend subsidies and support losses in others enduring hard times and times of transition and transformation. Only fair and just profits can do good – losses cannot.
Let all of us be entrepreneurial. Let us all be profitable. Let there be profits all around. Let us make “profits” a good word, for profits are essential. Let us make our new Guyana Development Bank the enabler for many of us.
Yours truly,
Samuel A A Hinds
Former Prime Minister and President.