PRESIDENT Donald Ramotar yesterday at Unicomer New Distribution Centre asserted that with investments such as this one, “The whole idea is to make Guyana a modern and developed country.”Speaking at the official opening of the Unicomer Distribution Centre located in Eccles, President of Guyana, Donald Ramotar stressed: “As I have said before, although I am no spring chicken any longer I still believe I have enough in me left to witness Guyana moving from a middle- income developing country as it is so described to being in the not-too-distant future as a developed country.”
He noted that for the country to achieve such a status it has to be a joint effort: “This project itself is a grand partnership among the Government, private sector and other stakeholders to work together to make us a modern society.” Noting too that the development of people is essential, since achieving this is heavily dependent on people’s development. “This is what we have been doing, we have invested heavily over the years in our people, since we wanted to provide investors with a work force that is highly educated.”
He urged persons to peruse the Government’s budget and see for themselves that “most of our budget is placed in the social sector; we place emphasis on this sector and education takes the biggest bite. With this investment done over the years, we are able to see that this is having a positive impact on our economy as a whole. Over the last 20 years only 30% of our children were able to attend secondary school and obtain an education, today we are almost, after achieving universal primary education, on the verge of achieving universal secondary education,” the President boasted.
Noting that there needs to be greater improvement in the education sector, especially in our interior locations, since this can become one of the major areas of development, he said. The President related that the Government is currently working with the University of Guyana to put some of the courses online, so as to remove some of the impediments of remoteness that the interiors locations face.
The Head of State explained that “We have also been spending a lot of money on technical education too; we now have institutes in many parts of the country that we never had before and this is what we have been planning for, so that we can give our people more skills in the anticipation that we were close to having cheap energy.”
President Ramotar explained that it is very well known that this is one of the most important factors that have not allowed Guyana to go forward as fast as it could have and “the fact is that we don’t have cheap energy in our society.” He added that despite the recent setback with the Amaila Falls Hydro Project, “we are still determined that we will have that project built here in Guyana so that we can provide cheap energy for the development of a strong industrial manufacturing sector and a strong processing sector.” Noting, however, that with this achievement we can have our agricultural sector soar. “We have a progressing agricultural sector and we can easily develop an agro- industrial complex,” he said.
“We need to connect the north and south of our country with all-weather roads, we need to have a paved highway from Linden to Lethem so that we can take advantage of the huge South American market that is just close to us, but we need more than that and infrastructure is expensive,” the President posited. He also stressed that we have seen it manifested that Guyana has really become a bridge between the Caribbean and South America.
The Head of State also emphasised that the country is in need of a deep-water harbour, noting that with this in place our country can then export our products in bulk and also take advantage of other avenues that will open up to Guyana. “We also need another very expensive infrastructure that we have to invest in and that is the deep-water harbour; with the expansion of the Panama Canal this will revolutionise maritime trade and we therefore have to be prepared to take advantage of it,” he stated.
Tourism, he noted, itself has such huge possibilities: “This product we have here is second to none and if we develop this product it can be a major contributor to this country’s economy. This is a thriving sector and if given the chance to achieve its full potential, will become the future of this country’s development.
“Let us all work together to achieve in the shortest possible time a status of a developed country,” the Head of State emphasised, as he concluded his remarks. (Rebecca Ganesh-Ally)

source: The Guyana Chronicle