What else the private sector wants

Jul 16, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

It is clear that runaway capitalism has unleashed the worst in us. The poster child for this endless grasping and clutching for everything that can be had is Guyana’s business interests, its all-powerful private sector. Top tier members made the best investment in the world with money for the PPP; and they collected richly. Yet they want more. Like that favorite from Byron Lee and the Dragonaires, Guyana’s private sector wants ‘more, more, and more’ as in a financing hand.

The local private sector has already been well taken care of by the PPP Government through a flurry of sweetheart arrangements that are nothing but huge pork barrel deliveries nicely targeted. The record is there, and its ringing notes peal sweetly. Tax breaks, free this and more freeness, concessions after concessions, land and more land, partnerships, special provisions in the national budget, extraordinary last minute budget favors inserted for their profiting pleasure, and bridging the well-connected locals with foreigners to capitalize handsomely on the national oil bonanza.

In the race for the top prizes in the Guyana bank pile, the modern-day operators in the local business realm only have to ask and they get. More. The more they still ask for, the more they still get from a grateful PPP Government only too delighted to return the investment of billions (some dark money) in campaign financing during the 2020 elections season. It was the best investment of all for savvy local business operators, for they now get multiples of what they wagered on politically as their return on the bargain. It was investing a couple hundred million for a couple billion in awards and taxes and the whole heap. But the private sector, this virtual ward of the state, wants still more; it is leech and bloodsucker.

All the greedy and rapacious private sector has to do is ask. As part of its chronic dependency syndrome, the private sector now seeks loans, the working capital cash to finance its participation in the flow of opportunities to keep its members floating. It is one more subsidy called by other names. In a sense this is venture capital for vulture capitalists.

And the VP is already talking about rescuing with a ‘revolving fund.’ Where does this corporate dole stop? They already got so much corporate welfare, now they want more charity in stopgap funding, continuity money. Why not the financial system with which they have plush relationships for lines of credit? I know that we don’t have an overnight repo market, but that is what the finance man late of The Maldives should put together, where the bigger blue chips pool and participate, so that the strugglers and stragglers can get temporary funding, as customized to meet needs. He can facilitate such a program, but keep government out of it. This is how capitalism works; not in this deep-pocketed, big brother, and constantly fleeced loaded father-in-law fashion.

Considering all this wheeling and dealing, what I detect in the making are ‘soft loans’ with special terms to be finalized between colluding PPP leaders and their business cronies, while torpedoing the poverty stricken farther up the creek. It would be another slush fund drawn from the poor people treasury to bolster rich friends crying cash flow woes, and probably never fully paying back what was borrowed. This is another GNCB in the making, a financing fiasco hovering, another corruption cover and channel. It pays not to follow VICE News developments; or to say so with pretense at an honest face, so that ‘revolving fund’ developments could take center stage.

The Government of Guyana is not a Las Vegas casino, or a loan shark racket, though I question that thought. The private sector got all those gifts before. What next would they be looking for, blood? Then what, harvesting of stem cells? And after that what, body parts? Last one: What about the poverty sector scrambling to survive from day to day, how about a little something for those little, unconnected, people lacking cash to finance elections?
Sincerely,
GHK Lall

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