Dear Editor,
Can’t we just engage in civil discourse in this country? Mr. Rajendra Rampersaud in his classical objurgation to me in his letter captioned “Electronic commerce keeps growing, Guyana ranks among the highest internet users in the Caribbean,”(07.11.23) couldn’t resist the temptation to say that I’m arrogant because I hold a “seat of power.” I really don’t know what that paragraph had to do with the discussion at hand and even more where he got this idea that I hold a seat of power. Even if I were a vagrant and the only thing I knew how to do was how to write, I still would have posed the question, “so what if the Guyana economy is cash based at this point in time.
Mr Rampersaud writes about his own personal experience of using an international credit card and tells us that he pays no interest charges (and I presume fees) and no verification is required; he also went on to tell us about the soundness and “superiority” (this against the backdrop of the recent sub prime calamity) of the US financial system. This is where I locate the principal weakness of Mr Rampersaud’s fervent invocations. He takes the experiences of developed countries and assumes that those same realities will exist when applied to countries like Guyana. Well, my experiences have been different. Recently a local bank invited me to participate in a marketing exercise for the launching of a new credit and debit card service. During the presentation, the invitees were told of monthly charges of having the machines and applicable user fees and we were also told that we should ask the plastic-using consumer to provide some form of identification. Also, I’m the holder of a debit card from a local bank and oh yes a fee is charged for every transaction I make.
His second major blunder is his use of voluminous academic literature in order to obfuscate the argument, without attempting to make any real connection to the existing domestic and practical situation; such an approach is essentially superficial.
And this brings me to the last thing, it doesn’t matter if we rank among the highest in the Caribbean (according to some study) in terms of computer literacy (we might just be a big fish in a small pond), what should matter is whether we have the sheer largeness of numbers to justify companies investing heavily in e-commerce technology today. The other Caribbean territories mentioned might have (I’m not sure about this) lower computer literacy rates, but those economies have higher e-commerce capacity and usage because of their highly developed tourism and industrial sectors. Being in contact with large numbers of international travellers and engaging in huge international transactions will create a high demand for those services and thus justify investments in the e-commerce arena. I’m not against the introduction of e-commerce and I believe that we will eventually get there, but for now Mr Rampersaud might have been way too premature with his article.
Yours faithfully,
Clinton Urling
