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Growth Industry
Every year, as our University churns out another batch of graduates into the world, there are grave concerns expressed, not the least by parents who had to fork over their hard-earned cash for their offsprings’ tutelage, about their chances of obtaining gainful employment.
Not to worry – we believe that our newly-minted baccalaureates might have been looking for work in all the wrong places, and we hope that this editorial puts their minds (and their parents’) at ease.
We ask these graduates: do you want to hang out at five-star hotels and splashy conference halls? Do you want to mingle with globe-trotting professionals and international wheeler-dealers? Do you want to be paid in US dollars, even as most of your expenses are paid by your clients? And save the world to boot? Well look no further: one of the burgeoning growth industries, predicted to grow even faster in a world collapsing in its financial meltdown, beckons you.
We’re talking about that elite group of high-fliers that Guyana knows so well for the past two decades – the various and sundry international (and their national wannabees), bilateral and multilateral (and even unilateral) agencies concerned with saving us from all that ails us.
They are concerned with our development. They work like beavers to help us eradicate poverty; fight HIV-AIDS; battle gender inequities; protecting our environment (including our lovely forests) and not least of all – protect our human rights. The list, while exhausting to consider, is not exhaustive, but we hope you get the idea of the opportunities available.
Part of the problem that our graduates can learn to solve, while living high off the hog, of course, is that their fellow Guyanese, like so many in the developing and especially underdeveloped world, do not even recognise that all their problems have already been solved by these organisations and they can make those problems vanish, with a press of their fancy laptops’ buttons – only if we could provide them with sufficient funding and resources. Now you may reasonably object (you think) that where would a cash-strapped country such as ours (second poorest in the hemisphere, these same worthy organisations assure us) get such funding? Once again, not to worry!
These organisations are plugged in to the web (even more extensive than the world-wide web) of institutions that can tap into funding simply by the fact that they are plugged in! It is a fraternity that harks to a common world view (not a crass “ideology, mind you) that even as it struggles in some instances against “entrenched” interests, ultimately receives its funding from those same interests. Take our own country, for instance.
We have been receiving the ministrations of the World Bank and the IMF since 1988 and in that time they have spent billions towards our development. Of course, most of those billions are loans that have to be repaid – with interest, “soft”, as they reputedly are. They might be do-gooders, but, as the President of the World Bank once remarked, by golly they are bankers and bankers are in the business of making money.
We will not go into the sticky question of whether we have undergone the promised “development” but in line with highlighting opportunities for our graduates, merely point out that literally thousands of consultants have been hired in that time – at a cost of at least a quarter of the billions that have ever been “loaned” to us.
And the work is not too onerous – to say the least. These organisations are as modern as you would want them to be, so they do not believe in reinventing the wheel. They first thing their bright-eyed legionnaires do after they have descended into a country about to be saved, is to pull up the reports that their predecessors have compiled (and are on their flashdrives, but on the dusty shelves of the “host” country).
After spending months gathering data, in the well-frequented watering holes of the local towns and cities, among other fertile sources of “hard” details, they deploy that marvel of modern technological innovation – the cut and paste feature of Microsoft Word.
So what if the new report is vaguely familiar to those local bureaucrats who bother to read the previous “studies”? They, and we, would have had the opportunity to work with experts who have dedicated their lives towards saving miscreants like us. Seek and ye will find (worthwhile) work, young graduates.
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