Fixing Guyana

Last Friday, the country completed 20 years of governance under a PPP/ C government. It is as good a time as any to review the trajectory our country and society have travelled during those two decades. As with individuals, it is important to know from whence the country came to understand where we have arrived and where we might be going. This look of retrospection is not intended to castigate but merely to acknowledge that, as Faulkner pointed out, the past may still be with us.
Take the charges of “corruption”; hurled daily at the government or its various organs. As the president pointed out recently, corruption of one sort or another will be present in any social institution, including government. But the PNC’s takeover of the ‘commanding heights of the economy’ – amounting to 80 per cent of economic activity in the 1970’ s – and the issuance of licences to conduct the remainder, placed every citizen at the mercy of one bureaucrat or another.
One survival mechanism to the new, constricted dispensation, as in all the other commandantist economies, was bribery and ‘lines’. When such a pattern of behaviour has been ingrained over 28 years, it is not surprising that even after 20 years of a more open governance in which the economy has been almost completely liberalised, there are stubborn pockets of corruption remaining. It is still the reflex action of many officials, when interacting with the public, to place a hand under the table and for the citizen to have a wad of cash already ready for a transfer. The president, while committed to the continuation of efforts to eradicate such practices is adamant that its extent has been magnified.
Then there is the complaint that we are still a very poor country. This may be true relatively of some neighbouring countries but compared to where we were in 1992, can anyone say with a clear conscience that we have not made tremendous strides? Let us give Jack – in this case the PPP – his jacket about stabilising and then rebuilding the economy since 1992. There are some that point out the economy grew by almost seven per cent annually in 1990-1992 after the IMF programme of 1989 kicked in. This however, is tantamount to boasting that after breaking a very sick patient’s legs, he progressed from being comatose to walking gingerly.
The PNC had destroyed the economy; we were an international basket case and critical poverty had reached 46 per cent. Under the IMF Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) the PNC instituted the infamous 10:1 devaluation, which plunged the people into poverty and the economy into a tailspin. The so-called dramatic ‘growth’ was actually a bounce back to the production potential frontier achieved in the 1960’s. It was not until the Bharrat Jagdeo administration removed the onerous US$ 2.1 billion debt that had been a millstone on our necks, that the economy could be guided into a real growth trajectory.
This is an achievement that has not been properly appreciated. It was not just a matter of maintaining the macro-economic fundamentals such as low inflation and budget deficits, etc, which was difficult enough, but of struggling against the PNC, now in the opposition, that had vowed to remove the government through the violent strategy of ‘slow fyaah; ‘mo fyaah’. The political instability engendered by the widespread killings, arson and robberies ensured that direct foreign investment was always problematical.
Today, against a bleak tide of slow or no growth in the regional economies, the PPP has yet maintained a positive growth rate. The opposition, which took control of the legislature at the last elections, are obviously determined to use this new contingency for their short-term political gain rather than the long term structural benefit for the entire country. It is our hope that after 20 years of obdurate negativity, they will join the government in fixing the disaster the PPP inherited.