It has been a memorable week for the local aviation sector, for the wrong reasons. An increasingly stormy squall has erupted over who controls the Ogle International Airport facility which has been upgraded beyond recognition in recent years, an accomplishment for which the aviation sector must be applauded.
The recent available evidence, however, strongly suggests that all has not been well at Ogle. The facility has been leased from the Government of Guyana and Ogle Airport Inc is a private company that has management responsibility for the running of the facility. Incidentally, one thing that the aviators operating at Ogle appear to agree on is that from an operational standpoint the airport is well-run. It provides both a local and a regional service and as far as the movement of passengers and cargo is concerned all would appear to have gone well up until now.
There are, however, still problems at Ogle. There are claims and counter-claims about unfair competition and about one competitor ‘regulating’ the others. Those claims have been dismissed as spurious and a controversy has erupted out of which has come a new aviation body called the National Air Transport Association (NATA), most of whose members are small players in the sector who are seeking to grow.
Most of the public utterances that have been made so far in this matter have come from the Chairman of Ogle Airport Inc and Head of Trans Guyana Airways, a private operator at Ogle, Michael Correia and Captain Gerry Gouveia, one of the country’s most experienced aircraft pilots, owner of Roraima Airways, another private aviation company operating at Ogle and Vice President of the newly-formed NATA. The two men hold diametrically opposed and strongly held positions on the issue of control at Ogle. Gouveia says that as Chairman of OAI Correia is using his position to create an anti-competitive environment at Ogle. Correia insists that not only is Gouviea – as he put it in a letter to this newspaper – “grandstanding” but that on his watch as head of OAI the smaller operators have grown.
All of this, of course, is taking place when Ogle, in particular, and the country’s aviation sector as a whole, is assuming an increasing relevance. Not only is the transformation of Ogle into an international airport a noteworthy achievement for Guyana, but Ogle, from the standpoints of our commitment to the people of the hinterland, some of the country’s key economic sectors as well as our national security obligations, is one of the country’s strategically most important pieces of real estate. It should be stated too that our aviation sector has been told by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) that there is much work to be done to improve capacity and operating efficiency in the sector locally.
Perhaps surprisingly, Correia and Gouviea agree on one thing and that is that the oversight/ review group which government was to have put in place under the lease agreement with OAI has been far too long in coming. Indeed, up to this time, it has still not been set up so that even though the controversy at Ogle remains to be settled the government still does not possess a proper vehicle for intervention.
The problem, of course, is an inherited one and while one is at a loss as to why Ogle has gone for so many years without the oversight body, the present administration now has no choice but to step up to the plate.
To say, of course, that the rumblings at Ogle constitute a private matter is to ignore altogether the importance/strategic significance of the facility. If things get out of hand the government will not be able to ignore it. Accordingly, the way forward really ought to be to accelerate the process of creating a vehicle that allows for the oversight/review function (s) to proceed smoothly. Of course, one expects too, that the government has a role to play in resolving the current brouhaha between and amongst operators as to whether a level playing field obtains at Ogle. It must do so with alacrity.
