Getting Help

Jan 23, 2018 Peeping Tom

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“Fire and Fury” is a book which is causing a great deal of controversy in the United States. The White House has described it as fiction.
One of the central themes of the book is that the Trump team did not expect to win the 2016 Presidential race and therefore were ill-prepared for the victory and for the responsibilities of administering the United States of America.
Roll back one year earlier to the May 2015 slim electoral victory in Guyana by the APNU+AFC coalition. They seemed shell-shocked by the victory. It seemed too good to be true. They stumbled through the inauguration ceremony and then later the big inauguration parade at the National Stadium.
But the real test has come with the assembling of the team to administer the affairs of Guyana. It is a team which does not seem prepared for the task of governing the nation. More than half of their term had ended and they are still struggling to come up with their own developmental projects.
Even the projects which they had pilloried under the PPP/C such as the Marriott Hotel and the Cheddi Jagan International Airport Extension Project are being pursued still.
The PNCR, out of power, for so long, has not been able to muster the talent needed to deliver the plans which the coalition promised. The coalition is stuttering. A big hole exists in the Ministry of Finance and until it is recognised that there is vast difference between crunching numbers and managing an economy, only then will the coalition realise the mistakes that it is making.
It continues, because of its political misguided actions, to make mistake after mistake. It is making the PPPC look like a bunch of saints. Imagine it called a meeting recently with the sugar unions, a move that was favourably received, to discuss the developments in the sugar industry.
Days after that meeting, there is an announcement that more sugar workers are likely to be laid off. If this is true, then how can the unions feel that the government is negotiating in good faith? You claim that you are concerned about the impact of the job losses, yet you compound the agony by now announcing that more jobs are going to be lost.
In the 1970s, Burnham was led astray by Clarence Ellis and Kenneth King. They advised him to cut imports and state spending in the face of rising oil prices. Burnham should have been doing the opposite. He should have been growing the economy to raise more foreign exchange to offset the increases in oil imports. Instead, he decided to cut imports and this hurt production by limiting the availability of spares and inputs. The downturn in production hurt the economy.
Fast forward to 2008 and Bharrat Jagdeo faced the effects of the financial crisis which included an increase in oil prices to their highest levels ever and a contraction in demand due to the fallout from the financial crisis. Jagdeo did not panic. He did not contract the economy. He kept trade open, he cushioned the high prices of grain and fuel and Guyana survived far better than it did in the 1970’s.
The government’s plan for sugar is to contract the industry. But this will only lead to one result – the closure of the industry because the sugar workers know that it makes no sense for them to continue to see a future in the industry.
If the industry does not shrink because of workers attrition; it will collapse because of the absence of economies of scale caused by reduced production. It makes no sense producing 150,000 tonnes of sugar, no sense at all.
The government is not interested in doing what its own Commission of Inquiry recommended. The COI never enjoyed consensus needed so that its findings could be taken seriously, including by the sugar unions.
The good thing about globalisation is that if you do not have the talent, you can always import it. The government should, even at this late hour, do what the IADB did in 1994. The IADB had a pilot mission to Guyana led by Professor Bishnodat Persaud who incidentally passed away last year.
The mission produced a very important report entitled, “Building consensus for social and economic reconstruction: report of IDB Pilot Mission on socioeconomic reform in the Cooperative Republic of Guyana.”
Despite the recent betrayal, the sugar union should press the government to have a pilot study of the sugar industry as a means of pointing the way forward in the interest of savings jobs. If that mission confirms the findings of the COI then there is nothing preventing the government and the union for actually sitting down and developing a plan based on the findings of the COI, rather than the present myopic course.

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