This month, as the nation celebrates 51 years as an independent country, John Mair looks at its strengths and areas for improvement
Written by John Mair, 21/05/2017 05:00 PM, http://www.voice-online.co.uk/...ecord-revenue-guyana
HOPE: The financial future of Guyana looks bright
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This month, as the nation celebrates 51 years as an independent country, John Mair looks at its strengths and areas for improvement
Written by John Mair, 21/05/2017 05:00 PM, http://www.voice-online.co.uk/...ecord-revenue-guyana
THE MIRACLE about Guyana 51 years after independence is that it has survived as a nation at all.
There is much hope on the horizon for the rainbow nation, with oil scheduled to gush from the biggest find for decades in three years’ time. It is the latest oil hot spot, with Exxon Mobile having discovered between one-and-a-half and two billion barrels of oil offshore.
From 2020, half a million barrels a day will come ashore. That should transform the nation and turn it from the once bread basket of the Caribbean to what became a basket case to the new El Dorado for the oil and gas industries.
Internationally, that has presented problems with its nearest oil-producing neighbours, Venezuela and Suriname. The border dispute with Venezuela has been ongoing for 118 years. It is due to be settled by the UN by the end of 2017.
In any case, Venezuela is in political and social chaos. Suriname also disputed some oil territory off Guyana. That battle was won by Guyana in 2007.
The ‘race problem’ has proved less separable. The nation is divided on colour. Racial fissures express themselves in geography, culture and politics. Elections are ethnic censuses. Currently, there is an African-Guyanese government in power led by President David Granger thanks to a coalition with a small, largely east Indian party, Alliance for Change (AFC). They will be in office until at least 2020.
ROYAL SALUTE: The Queen, left, meets with Guyanese President David Granger last month
Democracy has, by and large, survived in the country. Elections have, by and large, been fair for half of the period since independence. But as each racial group takes the reins of power, they also extract vengeance on the other and press ‘corruption’ as sure as night follows day.
The biggest national problem is simply one of migration. The early morning queues outside the US and Canadian embassies and the passport office give testimony to this. In 2016, six out of every 1,000 of the population emigrated. Simply put, a majority of the population (55 per cent) live outside Guyana. Their major destinations are the USA and Canada since the UK shut her doors firmly.
Internally, there is a huge skills deficit – the brains are in Brooklyn and Toronto, not Berbice.
=To be Continued=
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Guyana has also had to survive national disasters, regular flooding and the vagaries of the world commodity markets. Sugar was king in 1966, but that has now been firmly knocked off that throne. Then, the industry produced more than 700,000 tonnes of raw sugar. Nationalisation and huge subsidies followed. Output has since tanked.
Last year, the Guyana sugar industry produced just 183,652 tonnes, not enough to meet its already reduced EU quota. The A Partnership for National Unity (APNU)/AFC government announced just last week that they intend to ‘rationalise’ the industry to three big grinding centres. Others, with the exception of the Skeldon ‘factory of the future’, will be closed. That will be sold if (and only if) a buyer can be found.
600,000 tonnes of paddy last year. Some of that was latterly used to buy oil from Venezuela as part of Petrocaribe. Today, big rice growers are holding back because of political and economic uncertainty.
Gold is gleaming – 690,000 ounces of gold were mined and exported in 2016 and it could be more in 2017. But even here, there is much ‘leakage’ and non-declaration.
Bauxite has first been nationalised then privatised. Today it is owned by Russian interests. The Chinese have an interest in the new manganese finds. They have already invested heavily in the country but at a cost to the national psyche. In many senses, they are the ‘new imperialists’. Chinese money has gone into timber, infrastructure, building and especially to retail. The two main shopping streets of Georgetown have been transformed into mini-Beijings.
=To be Continued=
=Continued=
The people (all 767,000 of them) are much better housed than they were half a century ago, thanks to house lots on land freed-up by the decline of sugar. More people now have cars, mainly thanks to remittances from those ‘missing Guyanese’ abroad.
One big area of prosperity has been the illicit drugs trade. Guyana has become an entrepôt for cocaine shipment from the growing fields of Colombia and Venezuela to the rich markets of Europe and the USA. Barely a plane or boat leaves the country without hidden cargos. Only some are stopped. It seems to this author that there has been very little ‘trickle down’ of the drugs wealth. It goes to the barons and few others.
Photo credit: US Embassy
Race has been at the heart of the country and its (lack of) progress for (too) long. Until the rise of the AFC, general elections were just racial censuses. The death of the two political Titans – Forbes Burnham and Cheddi Jagan – left a void which has yet to be fully filled.
Politics is too much very sadly ‘our time to thief’. Good governance and lack of corruption has not been at the fore. The new oil wealth may exacerbate that temptation to corruption, but President Granger’s plan to establish a sovereign wealth fund – just like Norway – may, but only may, militate against widespread corruption.
The Guyanese diaspora in the UK is small but strong with many role models. I dubbed it ‘The Guyanese Mafia’ – a moniker which stuck. It included the likes of Baroness Valerie Amos and Trevor Phillips, and more recently Gina Miller, the anti-Brexit campaigner, has come to the fore.
D’Urban Park in Georgetown was refurbished at a cost of GYD$1 billion to be used for the 50th anniversary celebrations last year. Very little has happened there since, but it will spring into action once again for the 51st on 26 May.
Guyana’s recent past may be chequered, but the future does hold much hope for the new El Dorado.
John Mair was born in British Guiana. He has lived in the UK for the last 55 years, though he regularly visits Guyana. He is the most published Guyanese author in British journalism.
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Is this is the case, why did those dunda heads travel to Wahabistan. They should go to Beijing and Texas instead! There they would have had no time to fall asleep!
Perhaps, they will sleep or be sleepy anywhere they travel.
Look carefully at the recent photo-op when Granger paid an audience with Queen Elizabeth.
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