Georgetown Chamber President sings his swan song
Stabroek News
December 29, 2006
GCCI President Gerry Gouveia
The relationship between the government and the private sector and its implications for the state of health of the business community and, by extension, the Guyana economy, have, for the second consecutive year, appeared on the front burner at the year-end annual awards ceremony and dinner hosted by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce. In the absence of President Bharrat Jagdeo from this year's event Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud "filled in" for the Head of State and while the now imminent introduction of the Value Added Tax was clearly on the minds of the private sector gathering other issues that have a bearing on the sometimes strained, sometimes cordial relationship between the Jagdeo administration and the business community surfaced.
Local businessmen have long learnt the value of discretion and far favour the pursuit of profits to public pronouncements. Perhaps, come March next year, when the sitting President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce Captain Gerry Gouveia demits office a suitably loquacious private sector spokesman will be found. For now Gouveia used his swan song to good effect commenting on a range of issues and dwelling particularly on the desirability of an enhanced working relationship between government and the business sector. Whether his seemingly unbridled optimism about the future of that relationship is shared by all or even most of his colleagues in the business sector - particularly in the light of the prevailing "enduring bellyaching about VAT" - is probably open to question. Gouveia himself is one of the business sector's major investors in the tourism sector. The sector has lost most of its concessions to VAT and while he openly concedes that next year's inevitable increases in local air travel and other tourism-related services could now render the tourist industry financially accessible to mostly foreign visitors he, nonetheless, publicly and enthusiastically welcomed the introduction of the new tax regime.
The private sector continues to be critical of what it has long regarded as the sloth of the state bureaucracy and its impact on what Gouveia described in his awards speech as "the process of doing business" even though he appeared to recognise the inextricable link between a lack of real incentives and what businessmen widely believe to be an inefficient public service. The brain drain, he said is a function of both a scarcity of jobs and a scarcity of jobs that pay well enough to make them worth the while. Both government and the private sector are held accountable in this regard.
This is not the first occasion in recent times on which the Chamber President has publicly urged businessmen to become members of both the Chamber and the various other private sector bodies. Outside the public glare of the dinner, however, he says that the business community links membership of the Chamber to the services that it provides and that, frankly, the Chamber has been functioning more as a lobby group to address the periodic problems of its members than as a service organisation.
Forever an advocate of what he describes as "the stakeholder partnership" Gouveia used his Chamber presentation to seek to rally what he admits is sometimes a sluggish and reluctant private sector behind the economic initiatives being undertaken by government. It was a call that appears to recognise that the private sector may still be somewhat leaden-footed following the recent "exchange" between President Jagdeo and Private Sector Commission Chairman Mike Correia over the VAT issue at the opening of the 2006 GuyExpo.