Things A New Government Should Be Considering ... 52

Bringing Guyana Into the 21st Century

What happened when the PPP came into government was that it recognized that Guyana had been bound to the Structural Adjustment framework policies agreed to with the IMF and realized that there was very little it could do without raising concerns from Guyana’s international financial partners. While parroting capitalism to the international community and the public, the PPP privately clung to its socialist/communist dogma. The PPP did its best to control private sector investment, as evidenced from the poor numbers on international investment and the bureaucratic foot-dragging of GO-Invest. Instead of being an open channel for investment, GO-Invest became a bottleneck and a means of controlling/limiting foreign/private sector investment in Guyana. Under socialism, private entrepreneurship and ownership is inimical to the wider society. And so Guyana continued for about a decade or so with poor investment from both local and foreign players, with the consequential return of comparatively poor economic growth in the late nineties to about the middle of the last decade.

As a socialist economist, the former president recognized that there was nothing to be done about the private sector he literally grew up with, so he sought to control it and bend it to accomplish his grand ideas. The privatization process, which removed production from state control, opposed to his socialist economics, turned out to be a blessing in disguise for him, since with the creation of NICIL, the money from the sale of all of the state public companies and other assets fell under his control.

He surely must have been gleeful about the entire affair, since through the Chairman of NICIL, his perfect stamp, he waved his hand and did whatever he cared with the state’s, and taxpayers’ money. Of course, this was all ‘for the good of the country’ (Jagdeonomics). The Low Carbon Development Strategy was a fine idea indeed. In fact it was a masterpiece in economics aimed at getting foreign finance while strangling private sector initiative in the background. The gentleman was nevertheless rightly credited with at least one honorary doctorate for his efforts.

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