IT was General George Patton who said – “lead me, follow me or get out of the way”.

On the question of jobs and poverty in Guyana, for the longest while we had – unfortunately – very poor leadership at the highest levels and thus it was most pleasing to finally see the Guyanese people tell those who failed at the task of creating jobs and alleviating poverty for the masses to ‘get out of the way’.

At this point in time (July 2015), there is much hope in the society that these two difficult questions will be addressed by the incoming Administration.

Where there is no vision, hard empirical data and a national plan, the working class will always perish. Based on the performance of the pre-April 2015 authorities in the Ministry of Finance, there was poor vision, unacceptable poverty and employment data and a deficient national plan.
Thus, I welcomed the statement from the new Minister of Finance to rebuild the Bureau of Statistics after his discovery that it was “…severely emasculated…”
My personal experience from using the data from the Bureau of Statistics found them out of date and at times questionable.

The CDB estimated youth unemployment in Guyana at 41%. According to that study, the data set reflect persons available to join the labour force between the ages of 15-29 years old. This information is quite unsettling and the prognosis is that if we do not act with much haste on this issue all the social indicators will come under greater stress – higher crime rates, higher suicide rates, more cases of rape and so on. This is a clear and present danger to the nation.

A group of us in the Diaspora formulated an idea calling for the re-establishment of the Ayangana Construction Company (ACC) to partially address this issue of youth unemployment.
Guyana once owned State-owned corporations like Hinterland Road Construction Company (HRCCL), Construction Management Combine Company (CMCCL) and Ayangana Construction Company (ACC). These organisations did valuable work in hinterland road construction, engineering supervision and actual construction services. But they all failed. They failed mainly because their respective revenue models were deficient and at the time of their failure, Guyana had great economic imbalances as a result of weak performance in the traditional export sectors. But Guyana is in a better macro-economic position today but with the same old problems – too much unemployment and poverty.

The ACC is critical as a policy tool to partially address three of the many developmental challenges left by the previous Administration in May 2015 – failure to create enough jobs, failure to adequately alleviate poverty for the single parent families and failure to secure better value for money for services offered to the State.

The rational for this project is as follows:
· Low income homes in communities for single parents in a more cost efficient manner;
· Cash neutrality;
· Apprenticeship, skills transfer, job creation, future entrepreneurs.

The first objective is to fulfill the promise of constructing homes in housing scheme in a more cost effective manner for eligible single parent families using INEXPENSIVE apprentice labour resources. This will lower the per unit cost per home since the single parent beneficiary will only have to fund materials and the salaries of the trainers (skilled craftsmen who are supervising the project). They shall not pay for the labour cost of the apprentices. This opportunity shall take many single parent families out rental apartments into their own homes with real equity and on the highway out of poverty.

Secondly, how do we maintain cash neutrality? ACC shall earn market value from the State for approximately 30% of the maintenance services needed by the respective Government Departments. The Government of Guyana (GoG) spent some G$2.1 billion in 2013 and 2014 on “Maintenance of Buildings”. According to the preliminary budget we have prepared, the income earned for carrying out these works, is more than adequate to fund the entire operational cost of ACC including the stipend and tools for the apprentices.

If one is to read the Auditor General’s Report over the years, one can easily recognise that the private sector has under-served the Public Sector Investment Programme (PSIP), which is funded mainly by Capital Expenditure from the National Budget. The primary reason for this situation is that good contractors are too thinly stretched, creating opportunities for shabby contractors to infiltrate the market place.

The objective is to allow the good private contractors to focus on the “big ticket” and more complex capital projects (approximately G$45 billion annually) funded by the capital budget.

This situation will allow the State to build its own in-house capacity in a manageable way to focus on the less complex maintenance projects funded by the current budget.

The third objective is a mass scale apprentice scheme in all 10 Regions that will train on average 4,000 youths between now to 2020 in the fine art of carpentry, welding, masonry, air conditioning, plumbing, electrical installation and so on.
These apprentices will be under the supervision of experienced craftsmen and technicians like retired members of the GDF Engineering Corp. These apprentices will be paid a stipend (below market value) for 12 months for their labour but their intangible gains are – a real skill, official certification from ACC in conjunction with the technical institutes, once successfully certified – access to job fairs to help them seek placement in the private sector and finally a free tool bag with their very own basic set of tools. The graduates even have the option of using their newly earned skills to opening their own business.

THE BUSINESS
ACC can be subdivided into two Departments – the House Construction Department and the Public Maintenance Department. The House Construction Department shall train apprentices who will work under experienced supervisors to constructing low cost housing schemes for single parents in all 10 Regions. The Public Maintenance Department shall earn income from maintenance jobs on state properties with manpower from the apprentices under supervision of experienced craftsmen.

CONCLUSION
As I said before, we are now at the dawn of our 50th Independence Anniversary with many significant challenges. This idea can clearly start the ball rolling on three of them – job creation, skills transfer and poverty alleviation. This isn’t someone else’s problem. It is ours to fix.

Next time I shall be sharing some ideas on why at this time it is absolutely necessary to update the National Development Strategy and an associated Poverty Alleviation Programme and use it to build a 10-year plan for Guyana.

By Sase Singh, in Washington DC