The financial gurus are outsourcing Guyana’s development strategies

Sep 11, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Guyana’s financial gurus are so accustomed to farming out its economic development strategies that it has requested assistance from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to help it decide how to spend the oil revenues.
Guyana has approached the IDB for a loan, which translates to about G$400M to fund the four components of a project aimed at developing and implementing a medium-term development strategy. The strategy will focus on the identification of growth poles, encouraging business development and identifying large-scale infrastructural projects, which could be established in partnership with the private sector.
It is appalling that Guyana has to go to an international financial institution to produce a medium-term development strategy to decide how the oil revenues are going to be spent. The present project proposal leaves little doubt who will be the prime beneficiaries; it will be the private investors, which rewards of such investment in large-scale infrastructural projects.
The trend of outsourcing Guyana’s national development strategies is surprising considering the foresight of our financial gurus. We have financial gurus who can determine that a gas-to-shore energy project is feasible and will reduce energy costs by 50 percent without a feasibility study specific to this project. Yet, these same financial wizards have to farm it out to the international organisations?
The PPP/C was elected to office in 1992 and was encouraged by the Carter Center to develop a National Development Strategy (NDS). This strategy benefitted from the inputs of hundreds of Guyanese experts. It was the closest Guyana ever came to an indigenous development strategy.
However, by the time it was finished, Desmond Hoyte, still smarting from his election defeat and suffering from the mental aftershocks of losing power, criticised it because the Carter Center was involved. A compromise was brokered in which Dr. Kenneth King was asked to prepare a revised version. By the time he was finished with it, it had outlived its usefulness. He made a mess of the exercise.
The original strategy, however, could have still be redeemed, except that the international financial institutions which were providing support for Guyana’s development, wanted to implant a neo-liberal and so the NDS was abandoned.
The international financial institutions came up with their own focus; it was called Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) and in essence was about mitigating the effects of neo-liberal economic policies on the poor. The PPP/C utilised the expertise of an international expert in developing this.
However, the PPP/C ignored its own strategy. But no one could identify the link between the PRSP and the PPP/C’s Budget policies. For all intents and purposes, the PRSP was not taken seriously even by its architects within the PPP/C.
There has been no attempt since the production of the PRSP to measure the reduction in poverty in Guyana. And when the United Nations decided on Millennium Development Goals, there was constant rhetoric about mainstreaming these goals in national development.
Then at the turn of the first decade of the 21st century, the PPP/C launched into another adventure, called the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS). But there was mismatch between the projects in that strategy and the planned low carbon economy.
The APNU+AFC came in and Granger came up with the idea of a Green State. It was a simple and sound concept. But the mistake, which his government made, was to invite the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to write the Green State Development Strategy. The resulting document destroyed the concept of a green state and was so voluminous that it became unwieldy and unworkable.
The PPP/C returned to power in 2020 and said that it was resurrecting the LCDS. It said it would revise the LCDS to include environmental services, water resources management, climate resilience, biodiversity, and the Blue economy.
Now, the PPP/C is back to its well-honed ways of making up things as its goes along. Instead of the revised LCDS, we are learning about a medium term strategy for spending the oil revenues, including on major infrastructural projects.
The PPP/C clearly does not need any help in identifying such projects. It did not need any help to decide to locate the gas-to-shore project at Wales and for the major road works, which it is undertaking. Even without any engineering studies, it is planning to spend billions on four major drainage canals. It is back to its ways of plucking projects out of thin air.
It has now handed the task to the IDB. Of the four components of the proposed support, which the IDB is examining, two will require having to hire economic experts. Component 2 requires the hiring of a strategic advisor on economic development. Component 3 will see the hiring of an advisor on public-private partnerships. Indeed, the prime motivation for this loan application appears to be to create high-paying consultancies for consultants whom the PPP/C will favour. We call its high-paying jobs for the boys and gals.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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