In the fullness of time the 2016-20 Strategic Plan unveiled by the Ministry of Business recently will, we hope, become the subject of discourse amongst various interest groups, not least business support organizations including the Private Sector Commission and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
The plan is a 100-odd page document that provides a multi-faceted insight into government’s envisaged strategic direction for business, and while all of its details cannot be covered in a single offering of this nature, some are more immediately deserving of comment and inquiry.
The first thing that should be said about the document is that its goals simply cannot be realized without stakeholder collaboration. Its ambitions are simply too wide-ranging and the hurdles that it must cross too formidable. Indeed, there is, in some instances, a lack of clarity as to just how the plan will cross those hurdles.
Before we address what the document itself concedes is probably the biggest challenge to the realization of its objectives, it is worth wondering about the extent to which its compilation would have been preceded by any sort of collaboration between the Ministry of Business and the private sector. As has already been mentioned the full and effective implementation of the plan will very much depend on the involvement of the private sector. That alone is a compelling argument for some measure of interface in the journey towards the final document.
Contextually and as an aside, it is worth pointing out that relations between government and the private sector have gone through a period of discomfiting iciness since the present administration has been in office. Indeed, the recent terse private sector media release protesting the current crime wave and demanding that government take various forms of action in order to arrest it has been one of no more than a handful of breaks in the relative silence between the two sides for many months. Can the need to work together to ensure the effective implementation of the plan now bring the two sides closer?
The Ministry of Business will probably say that its Strategic Plan is intended to provide a policy direction and that it is for the private sector to read the tea leaves, so to speak, and move to help give real meaning to the commitments set out in the plan. That being said, not much can happen if the two sides remain at arm’s length. Until there is a sitting down together to determine just how the plan will be implemented, the document will not be worth a great deal more than the paper that it is printed on.
One absolutely key consideration raised in the plan is the yawning chasm between its stated objectives, on the one hand, and the considerations that constrain the realization of those objectives, on the other. The Ministry of Business, for example, concedes the magnitude of the shortage of skills in disciplines that are critical to the successful implementation of the plan but makes no definitive mention of how those skills will be acquired.
This is not a consideration that can be put to one side. Indeed, the document points to several instances in which state run institutions whose inputs will be critical to the effective implementation of the plan simply do not possess any of the critical skills necessary to enable them to function in the manner envisaged; and while the plan talks about the need to recruit those skills it provides little detail as to where those skills are likely to come from since it is highly unlikely that all or even most of them can be recruited locally.
One of the most worrying instances of skills shortage listed in the plan is that which obtains at the Guyana Office for Investment (Go-invest). In circumstances where Go-invest has been tagged as the lead institution in investment promotion and providing critical support for the marketing of Guyana’s goods abroad, the Strategic Plan openly declares that Go-invest “does not currently have the capabilities to design policies or strategies to provide more value-added services to exporters,” which is one of the important expectations of the agency. Other important state-run entities including the Small Business Bureau, mooted as a key state institution for driving the financing of SME growth, the Departments of Commerce and Industry and the Guyana National Bureau of Standards are also victims of acute skills shortages which they will be challenged to fill satisfactorily, at least in the short term.
Where then are the skills to come from? One assumes that in the fullness of time both the public and private sectors will look to the planned School of Business and Entrepreneurship, part of Vice Chancellor Ivelaw Griffith’s broader plan for building capacity at UG, to provide at least some of the skills which the Ministry of Business says it will need in order to ensure the effective implementation of its plan. That, however, is not an immediate-term consideration so that the Ministry of Business will still have to tell us how it plans to respond to the considerable skills needs outlined in its Strategic Plan.
This, of course, raises the issue of skills recruitment challenges, not least the likely high cost of recruiting skills abroad and the issues that will arise out of the differences in terms and conditions between locally recruited personnel and those recruited from abroad.
The point about all this is that it is important that the Ministry of Business’ Strategic Plan not be allowed to languish in desk drawers in various government offices as has been so frequently the practice. The document may be full of all sorts of potentially worthwhile ideas, though there is more than sufficient evidence that there is need for some amount of thinking through some of the critical issues raised therein, including those that have to do with the garnering of skills with which to effect its implementation. It is a circumstance that creates opportunity for an interlude of constructive stakeholder discourse including engagement between government and the private sector.
