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Another albatross and an obsession for backwardness

Mar 29, 2012 Letters

 

DEAR EDITOR,
The covert plan to build the Marriott Hotel is going to be just another albatross around the necks of the long-suffering Guyanese people, compliments of the previous PPP/C Administration.
President Ramotar, in defending and proceeding with this hare brained project said recently at a press conference he hosted that in four years’ time when the oil begins to flow, we in Guyana will need hotels like the Marriott to accommodate the large amount of oil technocrats, foreign businessmen and the other potential plunderers of our national resources.
Presently in Guyana there are many hotels dotted around the country that have reached very high standards. I will not include the one at Providence in this listing. We must never forget what happened there. Was the loan ever repaid?
This administration seems to have an obsession for backward development projects. I say backward in the context of where Guyana presently is in relation to growth and development. The government has demonstrated a propensity for building monstrous white elephants, e.g. the Skeldon Sugar factory, the Olympic-size Swimming Pool, the Enmore Packaging Plant and a host of other unfinished building projects.
In embarking on these projects, the administration is telling Guyana that progress here is located in building airports, hotels, unworkable factories and countless numbers of infrastructural works that are all rooted in corruption and overt dishonesty. It most certainly lacks the vision and foresight even to consider the best, long-lasting alternative plan to utilise the fifty-eight million US dollars the Marriott Hotel is slated to cost. It is time this government becomes aware that its development emphasis has to be in people, not in things.
A point to note is even at this stage there is no certainty, according to no less a person than Ramotar himself, that the oil is going to flow. In the press conference I alluded to above, Ramotar said that he “hopes oil will be discovered.”  It is in this atmosphere of great uncertainty that he intends to proceed with the Marriott project. If this is not mind-boggling what is?
Another point to note is this: Fifty-two million dollars could be invested in building a training centre specifically dealing with the technology of oil rigs. An oil rig is a mini-city, an engineering wonder and the logistics of keeping it all together needs meticulous operational skills. These skills have to be learnt.
An offshore oil rig has phenomenal differences compared to one that is on land. I had long discussions with “Riggers” working in the North Sea and from their very lucid information I gleaned that an offshore oil rig is no easy task.
First there is the human aspect. Working on an offshore oil rig, a worker after a day’s work does not down tools at five p.m and head for home in an air-conditioned car. You are out there for weeks. Cooks as well as doctors, nurses, structural and mechanical engineers, divers, electrical engineers, laboratory technicians and a whole range of other technocrats are specifically trained to live and work on offshore rigs. Importantly, these people earn very large salaries.
I was told this story: In the early seventies a UK hotel group was in Guyana looking at the development of a tourist industry and the building of more hotels to accommodate the potential influx of visitors. Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham was the President of Guyana and chaired the meeting. He listened carefully to the hoteliers and their proposals for more hotels and the creation of employment in Guyana. At the end of the meeting the UK businessmen who were eagerly awaiting our President’s response were told by him. “I do not want to create a nation of waiters”
Deo Persaud

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