A city will be constructed on this swamp
Viewpoint
FLY over the northwest region today, look down and this is what you'll see. A vast stretch of completely undeveloped swamp, grass lands and forest which have no commercial value. Look more close,y. You will see scattered communities, villages and isolated groups of population, most of them barely eking out a living and surviving on subsistence farming. Fly along the Waini River, running east to west, parallel and close to Guyana's shoreline, right up to the Venezuela border and the mouth of the Orinoco River. There you will see, not villages and communities, but scattered families, farming and fishing, barely able to make ends meet. The northwest region has been like this for all the years that we have been a country and before. Some apparently and selfishly, want to stay this way. But, take a time machine, fly over the northwest region four years from now, and this is what you'll see. A very different picture. Instead of thousands of acres of largely uninhabited, unproductive swamp land, you will see a spanking new spaceport, close to the Waini River, a miracle of modern technology and a multimillion dollar investment. You will see launch pads with shining new rockets built to transport million dollar satellites far into orbit above the earth. You will see an airport with facilities bigger and better than Cheddi Jagan International. You will see docking facilities for ocean going vessels. You will see roads linking the spaceport to the rest of the region. You will see a city built out of a swamp, with housing, with offices, with a school and a hospital and with a guest house for visitors. You will see a US$300 million Commercial Space Launch Facility owned and operated by Beal Aerospace and it will not have cost the people of Guyana a single cent. You will also see some 200 or more Guyanese employed by Beal, earning good money and many of them employed directly from the Northwest region. Guyanese trained by Beal to work in a high technology industry with skills which they would have otherwise never acquired. But long before four years from now, probably two years from now, fly over the Northwest, you will see as many as 500 Guyanese working with the latest machinery to drain and fill the swamp lands and construct the spaceport which will take this country of ours into the 21st century. The Agreement which the Government has just signed with Beal Aerospace is intended to make all this possible. For the sale, not the giveaway, of 25,000 acres of completely unproductive land, where the spaceport will be built, and the rental of another 75,000 acres as a Buffer Zone, Guyana will get, absolutely free, the first multimillion dollar privately owned spaceport in the world. There are two other spaceports in South America, both state-owned. French Guiana has Kourou which cost the French government billions of dollars. Brazil has just built Alcantara, costing Brazil some US$5M. Ours will cost us nothing. The Beal spaceport is intended to launch as many as 20 space rockets with their satellites on board each year. When that happens, Guyana will receive more than US$2M a year in direct revenue and without having spent a single dollar. Spaceports are risky business, often incurring millions of dollars in losses. Ask the Brazilians, ask the French Government. Guyana takes no risk. The risk is all Beal's. Far from being a giveaway, the Beal deal is closer to a gift to Guyana. And just suppose that this space age project fails. That, after all, this huge investment turns out to be a failure. Guyana loses nothing. The land, drained, cleared and developed, returns to us. We give back only the US$75,000 paid for it. The naysayers, the pessimists, the bad-talkers, would prefer that Guyana stays stuck in the 19th century, instead of leap-frogging into the 21st. They scream and shout and mislead that somehow Guyana is being ripped off. It's simply not true. The Venezuelans have now joined the chorus. Why, because they know better. They know that the Beal investment is truly an expression of Guyana's sovereignty. It may be politically expedient to electioneer against this Agreement. In the end, it hurts only Guyana. Isn't it time, that Guyana should, indeed, come first? If you care about our future, you will support this investment. It's why I support it.
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