Dear Editor,
The ‘Cilly’ (pronounced ‘silly’) season is back again. Fortunately it is not an annual celebration, but merely a selected opportunistic time when the ‘horsepowers’ of the private engine of growth, who were left braced against the tape the last time around, are now required to reverse to the starting block and re-engineer those proactive programmes of competitiveness which simmered in between seasons.
Theirs is a combined initiative that reacts only to specific stimuli – reflex creativity that is palpably manipulated.
They have totally overlooked that one of the mechanisms in the vaunted competitiveness programme, located within the Ministry of Tourism, Industry and Commerce, was to be a restructured Deeds Registry which, linked to the GRA, NIS and the beleaguered GO-INVEST, was intended to fast-track the registration and establishment of new investors, more particularly from overseas.
These ‘visionaries’ have forgotten the relevant legislation enacted since 1999, and have forgiven its studied non-implementation.
They have either ignored or have failed to acknowledge the significant material inputs into this multi-donor project funded by several donor agencies. They certainly have shown little anxiety about the fact that this cog in the engine of competitiveness remains clogged.
The occupants of high-tiered ‘private’ offices refuse to stake their bravery where their bravado is, and enquire of the General of Legal Affairs why there are no statutorily appointed incumbents of the positions of Registrar and Deputy Registrar of Deeds.
These stakeholders amongst others, like the Guyana Bar Association, seem not only to have adjusted to a long existing vacuum which may well result in the suspect legality of some of the documentation being processed in that agency, but also to have overlooked the fact that advertisement for the position of Registrar of Deeds earlier this year failed to produce any effective results for placement.
That there is absolutely no indication of interest in correcting this sad and laughable train of inertia, must mean that our businessmen do not really mean business; and that this particular invention of competitiveness is but a chimera.
Yours faithfully,
E B John