Up until now the Four Year Strategic and Operational Plan ‘rolled out’ by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) last Wednesday is exactly what it says it is – a Plan, an ambitious and forward-looking Plan but a Plan, nonetheless; a work in progress.
The point about its current status as no more than a collection of so-far unrealized ambitions is important if only because we have become all too familiar with plans and proposals that fall flat on their faces.
The Chamber’s Strategic and Operational Plan is clearly intended to attempt to secure a reinvention of self, to cast off what its Executive Secretary has admitted has been a long period of doing very little to further the interests of the business community.
And while the business community will be loathe to admit it, much of the problem with the vibrancy of both the Chamber and the Private Sector Commission has to do with what has been an uneasy relationship between the business sector and government that has manifested itself publicly and more frequently since the introduction of the Value Added Tax at the start of 2007.
It is no secret, for example, that having supported the introduction of VAT the business sector has since mounted what has now become a muted lobby for a reduction in the VAT rate while at the same time seeking to advocate a lowering of corporate taxes; and there are at least two well-remembered occasions over the past eighteen months or so when these issues have become the subject of sharp public outbursts from President Jagdeo himself.
Just a few weeks ago at a forum on taxation and privatization organized by the Private Sector Commission, the Guyana Revenue Authority and the Guyana Office for Investment, private sector invitees declined to engage government functionaries in any real discourse on three issues – privatization, taxation and investment – that must surely be close to the top of the private sector agenda – mindful, perhaps of the now familiar controversies that usually emanate from such public discourses. That, unquestionably, was as clear an indication as is needed of the communication gap between the public and private sectors on issues that are critical to the economic good of the country.
What the prevailing environment of uncertainty in the relationship between the private sector and government has done is to seriously undermine the effectiveness of organizations like the GCCI and the PSC as advocates of private enterprise, This, to a point where the primary focus of these organizations appears to be to take great care not to offend the political administration. Indeed, the GCCI’s Strategic and Operational Plan itself refers to the ‘reactive” disposition of the Chamber and to a certain apparent indifference on the part of some members – a clear manifestation of a lack of organizational surefootedness in what is evidently a perplexing situation.
Significantly, the GCCI’s Strategic Plan returns to the controversial theme of tax reform, slating what it evidently believes is an oppressive tax regime as being responsible for eroding spending power and undermining savings. Two questions arise here. First, will the Chamber commit wholeheartedly to the undertaking given in its Strategic Plan to become a persistent advocate of tax reform? Secondly, is such advocacy likely to place the private sector on yet another collision course with government or will the two sides be able to find a modus vivendi on the issue?
Another question that arises out of the promulgation of the GCCI’s Strategic and Operational Plan is whether or not – given its own admission of its paucity of human and financial resources – it may not simply have bitten off too much. Apart from the issues which ought correctly to be at the top of the business agenda – taxation, investment, skills retention etc – the Strategic Plan also suggests that the Chamber will be seeking to insert itself into other issues like crime and security and climate change and whether or not it can muster the resources necessary to effectively pursue such a broad-based agenda through reliance on borrowed skills from the University of Guyana and technical and funding help from support agencies is probably questionable.
That notwithstanding, what is significant about the Strategic Plan is that there appears to be a body of thinking within the Chamber that recognizes the need for self-reinvention and the importance of a greater measure of assertiveness, though in the final analysis we need to remind ourselves that all the Chamber has done so far is to publicly set itself the task of realizing its plans on paper.