Keeping an eye on “the experts”

Mar 06, 2015 Editorial

For too long the people of Guyana have allowed matters on the handling of the economy to be left in the hands of “the experts”. Based on the economic history of our country since independence, it is not clear that such a course was in our collective and best interest.
In organised societies, economic ideas and policies are routinely discussed as widely as possible – even from the standpoint of theory this makes sense. After all, economics does not just deal with matter and energy like the physical sciences, but is a social science that deals with people – and the subjective reality that we all help to create.
Economic policies and programmes more often than not work if there is a general consensus over them, but this blessed state will only arrive if they are clearly understood by the people.
Ordinary citizens are quite diffident about economics and complain that they do not understand all those fancy words economists are fond of using. But times are changing; citizens have to demand that decisions that affect their very survival be made understandable to them. Those in power always revel in mystification. It is part of their power.
A simple case in point is the soon-to-be-opened Marriott Hotel.
Government, after months of irritating silence, has admitted that all of the money it has spent to date (we may never know exactly how much) to bring the facility into operation, has been from the taxpayers.
We were told many moons ago that almost US$22M represented government’s share of the project. And now we are being told by Cabinet Secretary, Dr. Roger Luncheon, that the government-owned, National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL), has put up “the rest of the money” (after court cases and other factors held back the release of more than US$30M from a bank and two private investors from Hong Kong) with the understanding that the money will be repaid by the investors when the matter is cleared up, sometime in the future.
The repayment arrangement, as we have pointed out, is bound to raise eyebrows as to where NICIL found the enormous amount that they say has been spent to conclude the project, and more importantly, whether it would make sense to give control of the hotel and its adjoining casino to a third party, after spending that sum to construct and complete the facilities. To even the simplest of persons, this makes absolutely no sense.
Issues like these need to be clearly articulated to the people. It is our hard-earned money that has been spent, whether wisely or not. It has been continuously emphasised that the government needs input from the citizenry to ensure that the thrust of all development – the improvement in the lives of the people – must come from the people.
The people do know what is good for them – contrary to what some leaders conveniently insist. The lending institutions have seen too many instances where the money borrowed is spent on white elephants or squirreled away in the bank accounts of cronies. If the multilateral agencies have generally accepted that the people must be involved in the scrutiny of the government of the economy, why shouldn’t we the people be convinced?
There has to be a two-pronged approach. Firstly, the policy makers must themselves make their ideas and findings understandable and accessible to the layperson. This, as we have learnt, has not been a strong point of our administrators.
And secondly, we reiterate that the general citizenry has a duty to take an interest in economic matters and to make the matters sink into their working world view. Only then will they be in a position to make real inputs into the discourse.
The bottom line is that we all need to keep an eye on “the experts”. The economy is far too serious a thing to be left to sneaky economists and politicians.

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Keeping an eye on “the experts”

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