A nightmare faces investors over this opaqueness. It is sickening.

May 25, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News- Recently, two ministries – Natural Resources and Foreign Affairs – held a seminar under the theme, “Opportunities for the Diaspora in Guyana’s New Economy”. A diaspora investor got up and lamented on a terrible vexation in Guyana that maybe school children know about.
He used the word “backward” in describing bank operations here. The answer he received from the head table has now generated some confusion. The businessman was told that the government has no control over the system and that the banks have to be in compliance with the anti-money laundering act. The businessman was told that even Guyanese are fed up with the stringency the banks pursue.
This response is a revelation and the Cabinet has to explain this inexplicability immediately. To my mind we are asking investors to do what the gods asked Sisyphus to do in Greek mythology – push a stone uphill. How can investments become actuality if the backward banking system is a deterrent? It calls into question the very raison d’être of the seminar that was just held.
So you have a banking system that frustrates investors, then why are they going to invest? It means Guyana is doomed – the diaspora will be deterred and will go elsewhere. But elsewhere has the same anti-money laundering laws that Guyana has and banking is not that sadistic in other countries.
It is a nightmare to open a small account here. This can be deemed the oppression of low-income people. This is cruel class oppression. My daughter went to the UK to study and faced not even an ounce of hassle in opening her account. She mentions that ease to me all the time.
If you take that same amount she had and try opening an account as a local at a bank, you will get a stroke. There are two misleading dimensions of that statement from the head table at the seminar. One is that not everything in society comes under the watchful eye of the state.
No private organisation can just do what they want in society because it is a private enterprise. Private schools, private hospitals, private airline industry, private security firms are regulated by the state. For example, a private school rejected the Indigenous wear of a school kid and the government read the Riot Act. State supervision of society’s contents has been a feature of the world for thousands of years now. Mini-buses are instructed to adhere to certain routes and they can’t condone excessive decibels. Why are commercial banks beyond the reach of the state?
The second dimension of that statement is that the banks do not understand the anti-money laundering act, misinterpret it and could not be bothered with their excessive unreasonableness. For example, the Act stipulates how much you can bank without having to fill out required papers. The banks ignore that. The Act says any reasonable proof of address. The bank rejects certificate of vehicular fitness from the police as proof of address. That is wrong.
If the archaic banking system is a formidable hindrance to diaspora capital and the state cannot intervene then we are living in a mirage in Guyana and we are going nowhere and will get nowhere. It is commonsensical. If you cannot be facilitated by the banking system as an investor, then Guyana cannot have a competing economy.
The pressing question is this; can this situation be fixed? The answer is yes. The banks have to be flexible and the government must insist that the banks be accommodating. Why only in Guyana you endure a headache with bank facilitation and not in other countries?
The diaspora folks that are coming here to invest live in other countries so they make a comparison with the difficulty one encounters doing business here and in other nations. I get emails all the time and the lamentation is the same – “Freddie this does not happen in the country where I live.” As a columnist I get complaints all the time from people abroad about the sadistic run-around in getting things done here.
The American Ambassador made the same lamentation last year. The ambassador pointed out that in the World Bank report for 2018, Guyana’s position on the ease of doing business here dropped from 126 in 2017 to 143 in 2018. It simply means we are going backward. I think a great legacy is waiting for the President if he can extirpate this carcinogenic tumour that has been tearing away at Guyana for decades. It is simply sickening to get things done in Guyana. These things are easily obtained in other countries. Tomorrow, I will analyse Guyana after 56 years of Independence.
(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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