The true Guyana economy remains broken
By STABROEK STAFF | LETTERS | SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2011

Dear Editor,

After reading your newspaper’s lead story yesterday, ‘Jagdeo ‘appreciation’ draws cheers and jeers,’ and then the state-owned Guyana Chronicle’s, ‘President urges national pride, healing of wounds of the past,’ I have to say thanks for a balanced report. Of course I had a laugh at his call for healing the wounds of the past, because he has wounded many people with his remarks and actions, and his departure could only accelerate the healing process.

Anyway, about a year or so ago, there was great debate about whether the President will ever actually leave office, but ever since plans were announced for an appreciation day to thank the President for his 12 years at the helm of the government, much has been said for and against his presidency. With the appreciation day behind us, it finally appears he will demit office after this year’s pending elections.

Judging from the various letters and opinion pieces, the President is credited with restoring the Guyana economy, starting with strict adherence to creditors’ guidelines for writing off Guyana’s US$2B foreign debt the PPP inherited from the PNC regime in 1992, to investing in Guyana’s infrastructure and to overseeing mixed results on the economic performance front. But while some are loud in their praise of the President’s handling of the economy and rebuilding its infrastructure, what good are these if scheduled and unscheduled blackouts are still common after almost 40 years? Which other Caribbean capital has had this decades long curse?

For an economy on which 750,000 depend and the potential for greater results lies untapped, the trumpeters also mystifyingly refuse to publicly acknowledge that the informal economy remains about half the formal economy. I have long made the informal economy factor a point of contention to both rebuke and rebut those who keep singing the President’s praises on the economy, because these folks have been hoodwinked and are hoodwinking the gullible and naïve into believing the President is some sort of economic miracle worker. I repeat: If we eliminate monies from foreign loans and grants, foreign remittances and money laundered from narco-trafficking and other illicit underground activities, the Guyana economy will be standing on one leg.

Most of the fresh foreign loans and grants went into infrastructural projects, which the government appears to be receiving credit for executing, yet those projects were precisely what the foreign loans and grants were supposed to be spent on, and one reason why the PPP sought to govern. Regrettably, many of those projects lacked value for money and raised questions about kick-backs or rip-offs. Foreign remittances continue to be a huge win for the Guyana economy, and I am not talking about what the US reports annually, because America is not the only source of foreign remittances. Guyanese actually take varying quantities of undeclared foreign exchange when travelling from various nations to Guyana every year.

Money-laundering is undoubtedly the biggest game player in the local currency market. Because it is illegal, no one knows the exact amount of laundered money that flows or changes hands on a daily basis, but with the emergence of massive consumer-oriented businesses, well-furnished huge mansions, imported luxury cars, affluent social settings and banks sitting on billions of dollars with hardly any borrowers, it is one reason why international institutions conclude that the informal economy is between 40% and 60% of the formal economy. And the government is not keen on correcting this disturbing claim.

When we take those three financial sources and we add government’s onerous Value Added Tax (VAT), in a consumer-based economy that thrives on imported goods, we can see a Guyana economy awash in a sea of money, and that’s how the picture gets presented of a stable economy under the astute leadership of the President. That is the tricky part of Guyana’s economics I call ‘trickonomics,’ because it tricks people into thinking economy stability is based on sound economic practices. Not in Guyana’s case!

Now, even if we want to credit the President with a stable economy, how do we reconcile this claim with the fact that in 2011 Guyana can’t provide enough jobs for school leavers (secondary or tertiary) or at least good paying jobs that would allow those employed to remain and embark on a fruitful life in Guyana?

Comparably speaking, Britain is 219,000 square kilometres and has a population of 59.6 million. Guyana is 216,000 square kilometres and has a population of 750,000. The huge population disparity here is what has me wondering what exactly does Guyana need, given its untapped potential to do better economically, to make a marked difference. And if we keep losing our best brains to other nations, how can we expect to compete or match up with more developed economies?

I wish to submit to ‘all the President’s horses and all President’s men,’ that the true Guyana economy remains broken, and no matter how hard they try to put together the broken pieces with ‘their facts and figures’ and smooth over the surface with propaganda, they will continue to fool themselves as they fail to impact the people of Guyana. Editor, one does not have to be a college educated economist to know when an economy is revving up for take-off, for we all know that whenever Guyanese stop running away, or when Guyanese start returning home in droves and foreigners start showing up in droves on our shores (the way we have been doing for decades), that’s when the Guyana economy is actually stable and ready for take-off.

So, if I am ever going to join others in showing my appreciation to the President, it will not be for his (mis)handling of the economy – he sure has failed on other fronts like crime-fighting, administration of justice, control of corruption in and out of government, etc – but it will be for finally recognizing that he will be overstaying his time in office if he decides to stay on beyond 2011.

Meanwhile, voters have to wise up to the reality that, if elected, Mr Donald Ramotar will govern based on his party’s known group-think mentality that produced this President and the fake economic performance that benefits the political cabal and not the poor citizenry. It’s time Guyanese begin to appreciate themselves by voting for a break from the PPP-PNC stranglehold. Give real change a chance.

Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin

Source

The PPP should start allowing Mervin to write a column in the Chronicle to give that toilet paper roll some credibility with the people.

Emile should definitely get a column in Chronicle.

Disappointed by Sir Shridath’s tribute
By STABROEK STAFF | LETTERS | THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

Dear Editor,

On reading the Guyana Chronicle’s news story (September 20) featuring Sir Shridath Surendranath ‘Sonny’ Ramphal’s tribute to President Bharrat Jagdeo at the President’s appreciation ceremony last Friday, I couldn’t help asking myself how did I miss it in both Stabroek News and Kaieteur News. I then searched the internet to see if either newspaper carried a related story and came up empty.

That oddity aside, I really couldn’t help feeling deeply insulted and disappointed on reading Sir Shridath’s tribute that painted a one-sided bright picture of a President he felt did much to benefit Guyana and the regional community, but completely ignored the rather disturbingly dark side of the Jagdeo presidency. This is so reminiscent of Sir Shridath’s deafening silence, as he sat in the opulent confines of his London-based office at the Common-wealth Secretariat, while the late Forbes Burnham e-mbarked on his authoritarian rule, characterized by the rigging of elections to keep himself in power, followed by shocking human rights violations and a spiralling decline in our socioeconomic fortunes.

Sir Shridath never once used his good offices as Commonwealth Secretary-General to highlight the wrongs of the Burnham regime and the plight of his Guyanese brothers and sisters, whom he left behind to struggle for their lives and their livelihoods. Today, true to form, he showed absolutely no sign of remorse or sense of regret as he completely ignored the current President’s refusal to hold a commission of enquiry into the deaths of over 200 Guyanese at the hands of a drug kingpin or even his own government’s association with said drug kingpin after all the damaging testimonies from eyewitnesses and turncoat informants.

Does Sir Shridath know that the Jagdeo presidency also surpassed the Burnham presidency in the area of government corruption? Does Sir Shridath know why the World Bank is refusing to release Norway’s US$70M it is holding in its GRIF account? Does he know that Guyana has probaly achieved narco-state status despite boasts of a stable economy? And does he know that despite the President’s Champion of the Earth award, Georgetown went from Garden City to Garbage City, and all because the government refused to hold local government elections since 1994?

I did some brief research on Sir Shridath and discovered that he is being viewed internationally as an architect of regional integration in the Caribbean, and that he helped to increase the role of Guyana in world affairs. I actually remember Burnham’s impressively eloquent speeches at Commonwealth and Non-Aligned summits, among others, and this may well have been with great help from Sir Shridath’s position as Commonwealth Secretary-General. But while they did their thing up there, the Guyanese people at the bottom were not feeling it. There was such a huge disconnect. Then I had mixed feelings when I learned that Sir Shridath, who attended private schools founded by his father in Georgetown, once wrote that his father had a profound influence on his life, and that his father’s “passionate belief in the basic goodness within all men” made a deep impression on him (Answers.com).

I have no doubt that despite their abundance of deliberate mistakes that hurt many Guyanese, both Burnham and Jagdeo possessed a basic goodness, but I also have no doubt that there comes a point in one’s life when one loses the right to claim possession of such basic goodness, and that point comes after repeated public rebukes and exposures and there is no concomitant public remorse or repentance (change of direction). It is called the point of no return, and it dooms the reputations of the persons in question in the history books.

Sir Shridath does not have to share my opinion, but I am convinced beyond doubt that Mr Jagdeo is Guyana’s worst president, followed closely by Burnham. And in case Sir Shridath has any question about my belief, I want to remind him that when he retired in 1990, after fifteen years as Commonwealth SG, he did not stay in London or return home to his beautiful native land, Guyana. He chose to take up residence in the tiny jewel in the Caribbean waters, Barbados. Why Barbados and not Guyana?

That’s the same country where another Jagdeo ‘praise and worship‘ leader, Dr Rickey Singh also calls home, refusing to return to beautiful Guyana after the ignoble PNC was voted out of office in 1992 and the beloved PPP finally got to run things in Guyana. In fact, that’s the same country where over 30,000 Guyanese chose to live after concluding life was unbearable under the PPP regime and President Jagdeo. What’s more shocking, many of those 30,000 are sugar workers or people from the traditional PPP support base.

But Editor, it is Sir Shridath’s continued aloofness and failure to become a voice for ordinary Guyanese that I find disgusting and disappointing. The same source of my research did note that “some analysts have criticized Ramphal’s focus on South Africa and, in the late 1970s, white minority rule in Rhodesia, at the time when the majority of Commonwealth nations were either under one-party states or military dictatorships. For example, Ramphal declined to make public comment in 1983 when Robert Mugabe began a programme of genocide in south-west Zimbabwe.”

Sir Shridath may have come from among us, but he is definitely not one of us. He belongs to a class of international intellectuals who are disconnected from the little people that the same intellectual class which loves to preach and pretend they care. No wonder he praises President Jagdeo. Is there room in Barbados for the President? After his government’s disastrous handling of GuySuCo, I am not sure the Barbados sugar industry will be a welcome fit for him, so he and Sir Shridath and Dr Singh can sit on a beach and exchange notes.

Yours faithfully,
Emile Mervin

Editor’s note
Sir Shridath’s tribute was not delivered at the President’s Appreciation ceremony on Friday, it was published in the ‘Apreciation Magazine’, which appeared in the Guyana Times on Friday September 16, 2011 and subsequently reprinted in the Guyana Chronicle on Tuesday September 20, 2011

Source

quote:

Sir Shridath does not have to share my opinion, but I am convinced beyond doubt that Mr Jagdeo is Guyana’s worst president, followed closely by Burnham.

Apparently this fellow Mervin never lived under Burnham reign. Or maybe he did and the lack of food affected his brains.