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Avoiding the Coastal Public Infrastructure Sinkhole

Aug 29, 2020 Editorial

Over the next few months, hopefully Guyana’s political leadership is going to find the courage and consistency to review and renegotiate the disastrous contract with Exxon. The pushback the company has faced in the wake of its bluff that it would take its investment elsewhere is encouraging.

The Guyanese people seem to be, at last, becoming aware of the arrogance and disrespect with which this multinational sees this country and its people. As we awake from our slumber, the sort of anger that has emerged is a fitting first response, and should not be reserved for Exxon alone but for all the multinational companies here to exploit our patrimony with the willing complicity of our political ‘leaders’.

Beyond the reactive anger, however, we have to move towards ensuring that any additional benefits that come from increased revenue are put towards credible, long-term strategic use. When it comes to the allocation of expenditure, necessarily the lion’s share is going to go towards public infrastructure. Unfortunately, our national record on infrastructure has not been the most stellar, particularly over the past thirty years. Floating wharves, roads to nowhere, overpriced, shadily conceived and executed projects from the Cheddi Jagan International Airport to the COVID-19 hospital. Public corruption has been inextricably linked to public infrastructure and there has to be vigilance going forward considering the sheer level of monies involved.

That said, equally important is to ensure that the projects that we embark on are not pulled out of thin air, but are carefully considered, emerging out of a public policy on public infrastructure that can catapult Guyana into a future that has long evaded us.

As things currently stand, there is no cohesive vision of how public infrastructure is intended to develop over the next ten years. We have ad hoc, sporadic projects but nothing that has been truly transformative, particularly with regard to sustainability. Indeed, we seem to be heading in the opposite direction, as evidenced by a set of concurrent occurrences. Within the last few months of its artificially extended tenure, the former government saw it fit to give away thousands of acres of what we can call prime land on the East Coast of Demerara. According to the Granger government, the vision that was being fulfilled was that of the City of Ogle. Further up the coast, in Region 5, we are hearing of a US billion-dollar infrastructural investment, less than a month into the new administration. Not unrelated to this are the reports of breaches in the sea defences, with the Atlantic pouring into multiple breaches at Mahaicony. Taken together, what we are seeing in essence is an unfortunate public infrastructure scenario for the future.

What we will have will be private development on a coastal belt increasingly prone to the impact of climate change being given increasingly costly protection via public works, at the expense of more sustainable public infrastructure initiatives, the justification being that the coastal developments are too big to fail. This paper has described how much public infrastructure money has been wasted on, for example, filling potholes. Unless something meaningful is done in terms of sensible, sustainable long-term development on the coast, what we are heading for is a cycle of seeking to fill a widening sinkhole of public infrastructure funds.

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