GUYANA WILL LOSE OUT

Jul 02, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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I am sure that the vast majority of Guyanese are enjoying the football. The matches are being televised live by the very entity which the country’s main opposition parties were denying a subvention from the State. Without that company, ordinary Guyanese may have been hard pressed to see the matches.
I trust that as local fans watch the matches on television and cable they would have taken a good look at the crowds and witnessed how many persons from all around the world are in Brazil for the matches.
One of the many nations which had tremendous support at the World Cup was the United States of America. The USA’s team turned out to be fighting underdogs in the tournament. They were eliminated yesterday after a gallant fight against Belgium.
The performance of the team at this year’s FIFA World Cup in Brazil has been extremely heartening. The quality of their play is improving with each tournament and given the resources that can be attracted to the game in the United States, it is only a matter of time, perhaps within one more generation before they have the biggest league and eventually become World Cup Champions.
The performance of the United States at this year’s tournament will allow for more resources to be ploughed into the Major League Soccer (MLS). But that is just one benefit that will flow from their participation in Brazil.
Already, economically, the State of Miami has benefitted by being the transit hub for hundreds of thousands of passengers from all over the world who had connecting flights to Brazil. Miami was a major hub and would have raked in the dollars. Before the tournament started, Miami Airport was expecting a 30% increase in persons transiting through their airport. That is a massive increase in travelers and one that will boost the fortunes of the State.
FIFA World Cup attracts 32 teams. The supporters of these teams travel in their thousands to support their players.  These supporters come from all over and there is not just a sprinkling of supporters. One television commentator mentioned how some 5000 persons from Mexico arrived on a cruise ship. Imagine then how many visitors were in Brazil for this tournament. There were fans from as far as Africa, Australia, South Korea and Japan.
And this is just for a tournament that attracts thirty-two teams in one sport. Imagine then the influx of tourists that will descend on Brazil for the Olympics where close to two hundred countries will be represented in forty-one sporting disciplines ranging from archery to wrestling. This means that perhaps forty times the number of tourists that have gone to Brazil for the World Cup will go for the Olympics.
This is two years’ time. Miami will also be a major hub for those tourists.  Guyana could also have been such a hub considering its strategic location, especially for persons travelling from Asia and Africa.
But we cannot be such a hub, because of the shortsightedness of the opposition parties in the National Assembly. They have refused to approve of funding for the extension of the airport. And they are yet to provide convincing grounds for opposing the funding for the expansion of this project.
This failure almost certainly means that the extension of the airport cannot be ready in time for the Olympics and therefore Guyana cannot, even with its limited resources, market itself as a hub for the hundreds of thousands of tourists that will be commuting from various parts of the world to Brazil for the 2016 Olympic Games.
This is a serious loss for Guyana which must be paid squarely at the feet of the parliamentary opposition parties. It is not as if the money is not there. The Chinese are providing the funds. All that was needed was for the opposition to be convinced about the economic benefits of having a better airport. And what better evidence is there than the experience of Miami International Airport. That airport is a transit hub, the largest transit hub for passengers going to the FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
The opposition’s actions will leave this country in the economic backwaters. We will continue, so long as they have their way, to call our airport international, even though when it is raining, and an aircraft lands, passengers step out of the plane into drenching rain on the tarmac. They then have to walk through the rain to get into the terminal. By now we should have been well on our way to having an airport which would have allowed passengers to step from the plane directly into the terminal.
But do not tell that to the opposition parties, especially that one which ran the country into the ground, so much so that at one stage the check-in area at our main airport was like a cowpen.

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