On With Development
A lot is happening in Guyana that we don’t hear about nor see often enough. It has to do with the development of our country. We’ve been experiencing so much of the negatives when growth should be everyone’s focus, that some people risk lapsing into an attitude of passive resignation. That could be one reason why too few people gasp in disgust at street violence becoming a characteristic of "peaceful" protests, and at some in the upper crust of anti-government leadership opting for confrontational processes, like strikes for more pay from a kitty of declining revenues, to resolve differences. It’s ironical, for example, that workers of the Customs and Excise and Inland Revenue Departments opted to strike for a 40% hike in wages, when months earlier those very workers seemed unwilling to support the creation of a Revenue Authority under which they stood to earn more than a hundred pecent increase in wages. Yes, the street protests and the strike by public servants have taken their toll on the nation’s economy. Preliminary figures indicate that revenue collection in June fell $1.3 billion short of the month’s target of $3.2 billion. We’ve lost markets we may never be able to recover, and some economists forecast lower-than-projected earnings by year’s end, partly because of the impact of the strike on productivity. But for all the grim forecasts of our prophets of doom, and even though it’s going to take a while to get over the effects of the recent strike, Guyana isn’t headed for a grand apocalypse. The word from the Finance Ministry is that our balance of trade is improving, our international reserves are on target, our GDP is growing — it’s around 2.6% compared to this same period last year — and inflation is 5.5%, the target for 1999. Our foreign debt has gone down significantly. It has spiraled downwards from US$2.1 billion in 1992 to well under US$1.4 billion, thanks to our government’s continually successful lobbying, and it’s likely to reduce still more, thus releasing much-needed funds for increased spending in the country’s social sectors. The private enterprise is, of course, a major factor in this developmental thrust. The privately-managed Guyana Airways 2000 Inc inaugurated its nonstop Timehri/New York schedule on Friday, and several initiatives by a number of other local companies are taking shape. But foreign investors are also turning to Guyana in increasingly large numbers. The takeover of the Guyana Electricity Corporation by a British/Irish consortium has been successfully negotiated, awaiting only the passage of two pieces of legislation to become legally effective. Esso Exploration, a subsidiary of EXXON Exploration Company, is preparing to implement a three-year offshore oil exploration project; and BEALE Aerospace Technologies, another prominent U.S. company, is talking almost daily with government on setting up a multi-billion dollar high-tech satellite launch site in Barima/Waini (Region 1). Many more foreign investors have signaled intense interest in setting up business in Guyana, and many local companies are gearing for expansion either alone or with foreign partners. As it should, government is facilitating this developmetal thrust by intensifying its focus on education, character development and skills training. It aims to ensure that the public service is staffed with highly qualified, committed and responsible people, to provide the quality, efficient and speedy service that is needed to accelerate the pace of national growth. It aims also to give private enterprise the support it requires to realize its role as the engine of growth. Hopefully, the destructive elements in our midst will be enthused by all of this to shed the mentality of being skeptical of the panacea of growth, yet wondering why it is that our contemporaries in less-endowed countries are two to three times "richer" than we are. 
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