INTELLECTUAL OVERKILL
January 4, 2015 | By KNews | Filed Under Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom, Source - Kaieteur News Online
We must be very careful in the way we juxtapose facts and the generalizations that can result from such juxtapositions. Guyana has a criminal underworld, every country does. Guyana has a large informal economy; most of Latin America has an informal sector that is as much as 60% of their economies. The existence of a criminal underworld and the large size of significant informal economy do not however translate into a criminal State.
To conclude such a thing is a sure case of intellectual overkill. Guyana has it problems. But to describe the Guyanese economy as a criminal economy is disrespectful to the large numbers of Guyanese in the mining, agricultural, commercial, manufacturing and hospitality sectors who earn their bread and keep by honest and hard work.
There is an agenda at work in caricaturing the Guyanese economy as a criminal enterprise. There can be no denying that there has been progress within the Guyanese economy. There is no denying that Guyanese are far better off under the PPPC administration than at any other time in the country’s history. There is no disputing that all the economic indices are far superior than they were prior to 1992. And so there has to be some grounds upon which to criticize the government under whose tenure all this progress was achieved. And so the agenda of the critics is to attribute the success to the criminal aspects of the economy.
Only an ostrich would bury his head in the sand and not admit that there is a significant criminal economy in Guyana. But to attribute the progress in the country to the criminal underworld, to tax evasion and tax avoidance is taking things a bit too far. The sources of Guyana’s economic growth are not criminal. Indeed if more of the informal economy and the criminal economy were factored into GDP numbers, Guyana’s growth rate would have been higher. But it is not politically expedient for critics of the government to make such an admission. Instead they have to find a basis to divert attention from the obvious successes of the ruling administration.
At one time, they spun the fear that the business sector was about to collapse. It was said that many businesses could no longer afford to pay their debts and that the banks would soon become the largest property owners. At another time it was said that the banks would themselves collapse. That prophecy of imminent economic meltdown of the financial sector was also a mirage. In fact, it is the expansion of commercial credit that is driving economic growth in Guyana. This is the most underappreciated fact about Guyana’s economy. But some critics do not wish to concede this fact. Instead they argue that it is illicit proceeds that are fuelling the growth in the economy, not gold output and increased domestic and foreign direct investment.
The prophecy of the imminent collapse of the private sector was not fulfilled. A new theory therefore had to take root. And so we had the theory of Guyana being a narco-economy. The problem with this theory is that the United States, which has the greater interest in designating such a label to an economy, has never so identified the Guyanese economy.
This is not to dispute that the proceeds of narco-trafficking do find their way into economic transactions in Guyana. They do. What is instructive is that even after the so-called cartels were dismantled in Guyana and there was the prediction that the Guyana economy would be in problems, the very opposite happened. The economy continued to improve.
And so a new theory had to be found. This time it is that we have a criminal State and a criminal economy. And there is an attempt to juxtapose the fact that because there exists in Guyana a large informal sector and because of the fact that criminal proceeds have infiltrated into Guyana’s economy, we have a criminalized economy.
This is the line that is now being spun in order to explain the phenomenal success of Guyana’s economy since 1992. It is a sad indictment against those who make such generalizations. They stand condemned of the crime of intellectual overkill and extravagant theorizing.
