Whatever happened to the plan for secondary towns in Guyana?

May 02, 2009 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Way back in the 1960s, right through to the end of the seventies, if you wanted cheap pants lengths, the place to go was Rose Hall Town on the Corentyne. Quite a few Guyanese would, when visiting that town, take the opportunity to buy a few lengths of suiting since it was always cheaper there than elsewhere.

It always fascinated me how bargains could be had in some areas when things ought to have been cheaper for the same items to be procured cheaper elsewhere. No one, for example, would have expected with most imports coming through the city, that garment materials would have been so competitive in a small town on the Corentyne. And yet this was the case.

New Amsterdam had some lumberyards that produced high quality lumber and yet one expected that the town of Corriverton would have had this honour since a great deal of the lumber came from that area.
It just showed in those days that despite the concentration of trade within the city that small towns and villages still have their special niches.Certain areas had their own appeal.

I still recall that market day at Leonora was the place where you could get vegetables at reasonable prices. Over time, many of the towns and villages lost their appeal. Village life began to fragment as more and more persons sought refuge in the city in order to pursue opportunities for employment and education.
Today, this deterioration of the villages in Guyana is striking. There used to be a time when everyone knew everyone else within a village. Everyone also knew your family tree. Thus, they could tell you who was your uncle or your aunt just by learning your name.

Today, you can walk in and out of a village and hardly be noticed. A great many persons have left for overseas also, and this has contributed in no small measure to the decline of village life.
One of the great hopes when the PPP administration came to power was that there would have been an attempt to rejuvenate villages by fostering development. There were great hopes that the underdevelopment of rural Guyana would have been reversed.

In the sixteen years since the PPP has been in power there has not been the level of reversal necessary, and today there is an appalling lack of opportunities in almost every village in Guyana, thereby contributing to the further underdevelopment.
The residents of these villages are keen to either send their children to the city or overseas, rather than have them destined to a life of idleness and poverty within the villages.
The government is proposing to establish a number of secondary towns in Guyana. And this is a good idea, except that the administration does not seem to understand what is required to convert the identified areas into towns.

Infrastructure is necessary if an area is going to be elevated to the status of a secondary town. But one can have the best infrastructure in an area and yet have a ghost town since there may not be sufficient economic activity.
It is economic activity that will define what constitutes a town and not just the infrastructure. So what is the government doing to generate economic activity and consequently employment in the areas indentified for townships?

And what will be the comparative advantages that these areas will have over other towns? What is it, in other words, that will make these secondary towns viable?
These are the questions that the government needs to be addressing rather than simply moving towards building roads and culverts for these areas that will never qualify for even secondary township status unless there is a rapid increase in economic activity.
All of this, of course, revolves around the need for planning, something that should have been a strong point for the ruling administration.

And among the projects, which must be considered as part of this planning process, there must be those that generate jobs by utilising the skills, which can be made available from the areas.
In fact, it would be much better, rather than simply building infrastructure, if job creation could be boosted in these areas by the establishment of industrial, commercial and entertainment zones. While some areas may be suitable for example, for the establishment of large farmers’ markets and export processing zones, others may be suited for industrial development, while other secondary towns can be commercial business centres and entertainment zones.