Money transfer agencies are Jagdeo’s legacy in rural Guyana

Apr 30, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Guyana’s Second Vice President has set out on another jaunt. This time it is to West Coast Berbice.
Meetings were scheduled last Wednesday in areas considered as strongholds of the PPP/C – Dundee, Mahaicony and Bath Settlement. And, of course the bourgeois government had to schedule a meeting with the business community at the Berbice River Bridge office at D’ Edward Village.
The President has already dismissed any ideas of government taking ownership of the bridge. The former APNU+AFC had taken over the operations of the Bridge Company following demands for a steep tariff increase in keeping with the Bridge Agreement signed under Jagdeo’s Presidency.
The business community is reluctant to pay increased bridge tolls. In fact, they are pressing for a reduction, and would most likely favour a government takeover of the ownership of the bridge.
However, the financial structure of the bridge is as such that private investors have a heavy stake in the bridge even though a great deal of the money ploughed into that project emanated from the state, including the National Insurance Scheme.
The West Berbice outreach has not been the first and it will not be the last. It appears that every time the President goes overseas, Jagdeo goes on one of these outreaches. But he has also held outreaches when the President was in the country, so it could hardly be a case whereby he is seeking to outflank the Head of State.
The primary message in all of these outreaches is the same: the government will be creating temporary low-level jobs for persons who are the sole breadwinners in their families. This qualification reduces considerably the number of eligible applicants.
What is not being revealed is where are the jobs and what are they paying. We are told it is low-level jobs and could provide at least four days’ work per week. But as is well known GuySuCo is finding problems in attracting sufficient persons to work as cane harvesters, weeders and other labourers.
The PPP/C government was naïve to believe that it could reopen the closed sugar estates. It is now facing the reality that this is a mission impossible.
The PPP/C did not have any well-thought out plans for the sugar industry. It presumed that it could reopen the closed estates. But it had to also have been aware that the terminal decline in the sugar industry began under the Jagdeo administration and worsened under the Ramotar presidency.
The PPP/C has never had a rural development strategy. Jagdeo likes to draw a false equivalence between a strategy and having projects. For him, you cannot have a strategy without projects. In the case of rural Guyana, his government has neither viable projects nor a viable strategy.
The Public Sector Investment Programme (PSIP) – the government’s capital programme – serves the interest of the contracting class. It does not create massive employment in rural Guyana.
PPP/C projects tend to be capital intensive. The spending on the construction of roads and bridges and on drainage and irrigation ends up mainly in the hands of contractors and foreign suppliers. When you build a road in Berbice, Suriname carves out part of the profit by supplying materials. Does Jagdeo even know that road-building materials are imported from Suriname?
In the meantime, able-bodied men and women in Regions Five and Six are struggling to find jobs. And long lines can be seen every day – not every month alone but every day – at the money transfer agencies. Families, particularly in the more populated East Berbice Region are being propped up by remittances.
This is the legacy which Jagdeo left when de departed the Presidency in 2011. If after 12 years as President, the situation with rural employment became worse, why should he be trusted to reverse it this time around?
The Vice President would want us to believe that the government will meet its target of creating 50,000 new jobs. But where are these jobs? Once again, a false equivalence is being drawn between the demand for workers, by contractors, and the claim that jobs are being created.
The official figures indicate that there are 41,992 persons unemployed – that is, persons who are out of work but actively seeking employment. If the PPP/C is saying that it is meeting its manifesto target of creating 50,000 new jobs, then there is no need for Jagdeo to be offering part-time employment to thousands of Guyanese. In fact, given the unemployment numbers, we should have a labour shortage instead.
If the jobs are there, the problem has to be the takers. And this is why instead of engaging in patchwork economics, Jagdeo and his government should get down to the task of economic planning.
If the Singaporeans could have been brought in to develop the design for Silica City (Sue Town), then what is wrong with bringing development planners in to help create the types of jobs which are suited to the skills-set of the rural unemployed?
(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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