President Ramotar will demit office without his dream fulfilled
No leader wants to consciously say things that would make his nation laugh at him. A president has to be careful not to say outlandish things about his/her country’s achievements when the average citizen knows that the country hasn’t reached that stage as yet. While at Albion to open the Berbice Exhibition, President Ramotar took excessive semantic liberty, and “shocking” is not the adjective to use but honestly I believe the right word is “comical”.
I taught Mr. Ramotar at UG and one would like to think that in his four years spent at UG, even though UG was not in the best of health when he attended, Mr. Ramotar would be educated enough to understand a little bit of the political economy of Guyana. No one, I repeat, no one in this country that has economics at the CXC level would take the remarks of Mr. Ramotar seriously. But I believe you don’t have to be trained at the CXC level to understand that what Mr. Ramotar is hoping for in the next three years of his presidency will not happen for decades and decades to come, long after this writer and Mr. Ramotar leave this world. In other words, Mr. Ramotar was joking.
The President told his audience as quoted in this newspaper (July 30) that in the remaining three years of his presidency, he will ensure that Guyana becomes a developed country. There are serious castigations to make at the beginning of one’s analysis of this incredible task Mr. Ramotar has set himself. One is that Mr. Ramotar does not know what GDP ranking it takes for a country to reach the stage of being developed.
In 2012, with infinitesimal variations between the statistics of the World Bank and the IMF, here are the GDPs (in millions of US dollars) of four of the smallest developed nations with one of them (Singapore) being classified as a microstate. Holland, 772, 227; Belgium, 483, 709; Ireland, 210, 331 and Singapore, 274, 701. Now, Guyana’s is 2,788. Commonsense can tell us that if in three year’s time Guyana becomes a developed state then that 2 million US has to overtake the lowest in the above named list which is Ireland at 210, 331 million American dollars as the GDP.
What I left out are the dozens and dozens of poor states whose GDP is higher than Guyana. By what miracle a poor country with a GDP of 2 million US can attain the status of a developed country in twenty years much less three? Let us move away from GDP and look at life in Guyana at present and the miracle that Mr. Ramotar dreams will come to Guyana in 2016. I was part of a very intense discussion that was outside my training so all I did was listen.
Using statistics, it was shown to the group that to bring back UG to an acceptable level (mind you not a second rate or third campus but an acceptable level) it will take dozens of billions of dollars and the target date will be at the end of ten years. This is tertiary education you are talking about which is the main vehicle that European nations used to become what they are today. The Americans copied the Europeans (remember Silicone Valley?) and India copied both. In India today, universities dot the landscape.
The greatest weakness in Mr. Ramotar’s dream will be exposed when you ask him of the five years presidency, how much of that period has been used to advance the journey towards developed status. It is possible to argue that under Ramotar, since the start of 2012, we have been in reverse gear, meaning simply that we are moving in the wrong direction to catch up with Ireland etc. It is under Mr. Ramotar that UG cannot pay the NIS and tax contribution of its employees. It is under Mr. Ramotar that sugar did worse in 2012 than in previous years. It is under Mr. Ramotar that I see the spread of garbage in the city of Georgetown.
If in the next three years Mr. Ramotar is going to take Guyana right up there with Singapore, outstripping the great Jamaica, Barbados etc, then thank God, Georgetown will once again become the garden city as it was in the fifties. Surely, Mr. Ramotar must know that a developed nation cannot have a capital that looks like a war-ravished city after a tsunami destroyed it. I guess we have to wish Mr. Ramotar well in his dreams. All of us must dream. I suggest Mr. Ramotar listen to the Dionne Warwick hit; “Do you know the way to San Jose
