Dear Editor,
Implementation of even a modest part of Stanley Ming, Eric Phillips and Kads Khan’s Guyana 21 Plan would have created the thousands of jobs required to keep Guyanese gainfully employed right here at home in Guyana. The project would have brought about the opening up of space for housing, recreational, commercial and other activities; the establishment of a deep water harbour in the Essequibo River; a new airport; an economic processing zone; new communities whose economic base would be linked to manufacturing and industrial activities related to the deep water harbour EPZ.
Instead, the good doctor and others in government denigrated the plan referring to it as “hocus pocus.” However, government will need more than hocus-pocus to find gainful employment for those hundreds of Guyanese likely to return from Barbados later this year having failed to regularize their status in the 430 sq km island.
Of course there may be work for some of the returning Guyanese women in the hospitality industry, particularly in the hotel casinos and the businesses that support them. Several of them may find work as chambermaids or more accurately, as the French say, bonnes a tout faire, loosely translated as ‘maids who do everything.’ It will not be easy. These illegal Guyanese immigrants returning from Barbados will have their dignity and self-respect intact and well harnessed to a willingness to work hard for a fair wage and the enjoyment of a reasonable standard of living. However, Guyana’s economy cannot provide this. To compound the problem, growth expectations have been reduced. Some economic sectors like forestry, rice and sugar are laying off workers at an alarming rate. In the forestry sector alone some 5,000 to 8,000 of its 20,000 work force will lose their jobs in the next 12 months throwing some 25,000 to 40,000 dependents on the bread line. In the rice sector, if the Brazilian rice tycoon secures a 99-year lease over vast acreage for rice cultivation in Region 9, he will cross the Takutu Bridge with his own army of Brazilian rice workers. Even sugar has gone bitter and sugar workers are leaving the industry in large numbers, rather than waiting to be sent home to languish in despair. Against this grim background one is unaware of any coherent plan in government’s economic development strategy that will rescue these thousands of Guyanese citizens from the debilitating brutishness of long-term unemployment.
Whosoever has the ultimate responsibility for Guyana’s economy and the well-being of its people ought to immediately call on Ming, Phillips and Kads Khan, who handled the funding aspect of the Guyana 21 Plan and hope there exists a residual willingness to update Guyana 21 and advise government on its speedy implementation.
When those hundreds of industrious, energetic, resourceful Guyanese return from Barbados later this year and early next with their hungry families, the real “hocus-pocus” will begin.
Yours faithfully,
F. Hamley Case
