H@rd Truths By GHK Lall –Diaspora expectations

Jul 25, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – I absorb Minister Edghill’s comment on diaspora expectations, and how its members need to manage those better.  Apparently, there is a considerable degree of mismatch between what overseas Guyanese expect from a burgeoning oil economy, to what the reality is in Guyana.  I take a chance and lump this under the broad band of ‘incentive.’  In doing so, there is recognition that incentive is a package with many embedded components including land, labor, cash, concessions, and others of like nature, with cash as king in each spot.

My first thought was why a fine gentleman, like Bishop Edghill, would be ensnared in the insoluble conflict surrounding diaspora ideas, and what Guyana has to offer in response.  “Ask not what your country….”  In quick time, the appreciation came that with all those roads and other projects (not to forget that Chinese and Guyanese cash cow, better known as the airport expansion black hole) have urgent need for drafters, planners, builders, counters, and checkers, among an army of others with special skills.  By my uneducated guess, there should be thousands of Guyanese in the far-flung diaspora, who dream of returning here, and hitting it big.  I think it is a fair position, given that oil is the biggest thing ever, and by far, to touch this country. Sons of the soil should be first in line to sample the sweetness of the light, sweet crude that is theirs (ours, as in mine also).

The big trouble is that the big ideas and big dreams of Guyanese diaspora members run headlong into a big problem.  This is with a bow to all the oil returns sloshing around in this country in torrential downpours.  It involves one word only, and I cut to the chase: money.  Of course, everyone would be in order to respond with ‘tell the nation something that it does not know.’  I had warned before, be careful with what is asked for, because it is often not pleasant.  Now here goes.

Any engineer of any kind (civil, mechanical, systems and, of course, petroleum), any accountant or auditor, any computer man or woman of some skill, any scientific or academic mind, hoping to come here, has to be thinking of a pay package (pay only) of US$150,000 at the very minimum.  I hasten to squeeze in that that number is on the lowest of the low end and dirt cheap.  Because if any of those professions I identified has some respectable skills, with credentials and track record to boost some more, then US$150,000 per annum is nothing but chicken feed in the compensation stock book.  After a rough conversion from American to Guyanese dollars, this translates to a monthly paycheck of GY$2.5 million for a diaspora member worth his or her salt.  Considering that alone, the local wage and salary bank was just busted wide open.  All local scales would get bent out of shape and tumble around in disarray.

To make doubly sure that this is fully appreciated, the GY$2.5 million a month would not cover any onetime signing bonus, ongoing health and retirement costs, and the total expenditures for possibly housing and many other sweeteners (incentives).  Minister Edghill had it right when he spoke of managing expectations (my subtitles), due to the havoc that would be wreaked here.  But there is the other side of the same three-headed coin, which is the mystery and challenge of how to obtain the direly needed skills and capacity for this ballooning oil country.  If there is one instance in which the man of scripture spoke gospel, it is on this occasion.

The jarring reality is that there is Guyana’s reality and there is that of the diaspora.  I do not foresee droves of Guyanese diaspora cousins, with the requisite resume, abandoning Uncle Sam to join hands with brothers Irfaan, Barry, and Juan for peanuts.  It was Vice President Jagdeo, Guyana’s wily oil commissar, who said that more money to the people could trigger inflationary pressures.  Hence, imagine thousands of returning Guyanese doing their patriotic (and self-enhancing) bit, but at what would be super salaries in the local arena.  What would be basic, as in ground level, for those Guyanese would be superrich, as in astronomical, for the people here.  This is the third side of the coin I had mentioned before.  To accommodate overseas Guyanese coming back to give back (more like get out), a whole new class of Guyanese could be in the making, with the locals left back, and the new arrivals at the top of the food chain.

As a practical matter, the foreign oil companies, and their supporting networks, have to be paying their people of caliber at rates commensurate with their conditions, and within touching distance to what I lay on the table.  Thus, in ways direct and indirect, there is some of what Guyanese in the diaspora expect already at work here.  Clearly, the PPP Government, any government, has its hands tied in this disconnect between where the diaspora stands and what it expects versus where Guyana is, and what the territory here can hold.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• Diaspora, expectations, GHK Lall, H@rd Truths, manage

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