Guyana an investors’ paradise

Jul 19, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Guyana’s President, Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali, is right: Guyana is an investors’ paradise. Let there be no doubt in any quarter of this country that it is so, indeed, given where this country finds itself situated. The opportunities to make money abound in Guyana, and such could be in copious amounts. The need is there, the ground is rich, and any investor with a product or service that has merit will find that the selling power is there, as in right here in Guyana.

It was a packed to capacity audience that heard about this investors’ paradise that is the Guyana of now, most probably for some considerable time to come. We have the natural resources to cultivate, but we don’t have the human resources and the corporate prowess to capitalize as we should on this nation’s great bounties. It is difficult to contemplate a needier environment in the world, with the right investors sure to find the territory in Guyana, the equivalent of a suction pump. It grabs and devours what comes in the form of cash investments, manpower skills, and systems and technology, and so on. Guyana has a long way to go before it would be ready with its own people and resource infrastructures to make a dent in today’s reality. It is that same reality that provides such mouthwatering openings, what the president called the investors’ paradise to be found here and that is begging for the taking. It was one of America’s premier writers, Mark Twain who gave the world a saying that fits Guyana to a tee: ‘there’s gold in them thar hills.’ Twain reportedly lifted that nugget from another American, assayer Dr. Matthew Fleming Stephenson. The reality in the Guyana of nowadays is that no investor must travel to the remote hinterlands of Guyana to hit it big. The hills and the gold are right in the streets of Georgetown and the not-too-distant outskirts, so abundant the harvest that is waiting to be reaped.

But somberness intrudes on this rosy picture of Guyana: there is a heavy cloud hovering over this investors’ paradise. In the middle and across the entire circumference of the local investors’ paradise, there are those large pockets of Guyanese who live just shy of economic purgatory. Considering their ongoing circumstances, it is more proper to say that they just manage to survive, when the conditions in which they live are considered. It is part of the paradox of Guyana. There is this investors’ paradise, of which there is no disagreement. But there is also this purgatory, this hell, in which many of the inhabitants of this country find themselves. It is the contradiction that expands under his watch, but about which Guyana’s president has little passion, less patience, and the least time to recognize and accept, and then do the right things to resolve.

President Ali’s has pampered himself to deny the stark economic plights of the many Guyanese on the outside of his investors’ paradise. More inexplicably, and more disastrously, Guyana’s president prefers to lash and smash at the few local messengers who report on the real Guyana. Those who implore him to do what is constructive, in the policies and practices that would make a difference find themselves objects of his wrath or targeted by other means by some of his own people. In his haste to bury his head in the sand on the traumas of Guyanese, President Ali links arms with those in his inner circle who are what has been damaging to this country and its citizens. The rich gleams of Guyana are sold with great fanfare to outsiders, while the poor and punishing are dismissed as of no consequence. The PPP/C Government and its close-to-four years-seasoned president give the shortest thrift, the scantiest slice of the national pie, to Guyanese stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder. But for every packed conference hall of locals and foreigners listening rapturously to how Guyana is an investors’ paradise, there is that huge backyard populated by the local struggling. That backyard is pushed to the side of consciousness, camouflaged. It still exists and in this investors’ paradise, it is Guyana’s social shame, its economic purgatory.

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Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali, Guyana, human, Paradise, President

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