THERE IS NEED FOR A SHAKEUP

Oct 24, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Those who received national awards this year should not be envied. But the ones who really deserve a national award are the businessmen and businesswomen in Guyana, and very few unfortunately received awards this year.
It is not easy doing business in Guyana. It is not easy at all. Just ask any businessman and he will tell you how difficult it is, especially if you are an honest businessman. There are always bureaucrats who want to do what you, as an honest person, would not want to do.
Bureaucrats in Guyana have too much authority. There is too much red tape. To get around this red tape businessmen often have to grease the system.
Bureaucrats can hold up your documentation indefinitely and there is nothing you can do about it. If you complain, you risk being victimized. Bureaucrats have too much discretionary power and if you oppose them today, they are likely to go after you the next day. So some people give into the demands made by the bureaucrats.
There are few other ways to survive in Guyana because if you do not do as they say, they will frustrate you to the bitter end and you will end up having to close your business down and leave Guyana in frustration.
Businessmen go through this every day in Guyana. They know how frustrating things can be to do business here.If you can make it past one agency without hassle, you can bet that you will run straight into a steel wall with some other agency. The frustrations are just interminable and it takes men and women of steel to do business in Guyana.
Being a business person may seem to be the most lucrative profession in Guyana. But in reality it is the most difficult. Those who are in it deserve national awards for the frustration they have to endure day after day dealing with bureaucratic red tape and some pretty disgusting bureaucrats.
There must be radical changes to the way in which certain agencies in Guyana work, especially two in particular. Those two are the Bureau of Standards and the Food and Drugs Department. There has to be greater transparency in the way these agencies operate.
These agencies have important work to do but they should not have to be inspecting or approving goods while they are at the ports of entry. This is not an efficient or effective way to operate. It leads to red tape and it can lead to businessmen being held to ransom in order to get their goods cleared quickly.
These agencies should be out in the supermarkets and in the stores checking to see if expired goods are being sold. They should not have to be going through every shipment that arrives in Guyana to ensure that the requisite safety standards have been met. The ratio of approved to defective goods will be extremely high because the vast majority of imports will pass muster. As such, it does not make sense for these agencies to be slowing up the clearance of goods just so that they can place a stamp of approval.
These agencies should be scouring the markets to ensure that there are no unsafe and expired goods on the market. They should do so using established protocols such as having video cameras when they undertake these operations so that there can be no suspicion of unprofessional conduct.
To have these agencies stamp a piece of paper even before they examine any goods on the country’s wharves is a complete waste of time and an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
APNU+ AFC promised change. They should shake the systems up at the Food and Drugs Department and at the Bureau of Standards.

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THERE IS NEED FOR A SHAKEUP

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