We are entering the second full weekend since a significant resumption of trading in the city following the advent of the COVID-19-driven virtually complete shutdown of business in the capital. Even now there is a lurking awareness that we are not ‘out of the woods’ yet and that insofar as the safety factor is concerned few people would bet too heavily against the chances that the pandemic may be gathering itself for another strike.
Of course, not only is it common knowledge that some businesses continued to trade across the lockdown period, clandestinely and sometimes not so clandestinely, but that the closure of the majority of businesses created serious upheavals insofar as job retention and earnings were concerned. Some working Guyanese learnt, for the first time in their lives, what it meant to be without work, to have to face a complete loss of earnings with a mind-numbing suddenness and with no idea of just when that situation might change.
We at the Stabroek Business noted the disappearance from the high streets, in one fell swoop, of what had, over time, grown into a small army of vendors, who, in recent years and having made something of agro processing and had (in some cases for the first time in their lives) ventured out onto the streets to attract some measure of patronage. As we have said in at least one recent editorial the survival margins of some of these businesses were so wafer thin that it is unlikely that they will survive the COVID-19 onslaught. In some instances it is not just a loss of trade but a loss of will, as well.
This, of course, would mean loss or reduction of income for a number of families and one need hardly delve too deeply into what could be the consequences for those families. Truth be told there is good reason to be concerned that neither the state sector nor the Business Support Organizations (BSO’s) have, over time, done enough to help these small businesses remain buoyant and though we have received some indication that at least one of the BSO’s might make some kind of intervention (soon, we hope) the reality is that many of these now failed or now badly struggling enterprises never really received anywhere near the public or private sector support that they would have needed to have the present circumstances find them in better shape.
One recalls, for example, that, up until now, the protracted public/private sector discourses on creating a more robust infrastructural base for small scale manufacturing has realized nothing while the excessive dithering over allowing small businesses to benefit from a share of state contracts was allowed to dissolve inside a cesspool of bureaucracy. If that alone had been put in place before the advent of COVID-19 at least some small businesses that are now threatened with extinction would have been in better shape today.
One asserts, somewhat tongue in cheek, that, hopefully, experience will teach us. If, after the ravages of COVID-19 we learn no lessons then, from the standpoints of both government and private sector, it would be absurd to sit around with blank expressions on our faces, as though the meltdown that now threatens a fair chunk of the small business sector, has nothing to do with them.
We have already commented on the wafer-thin gesture of support (and there is no underpinning of ingratitude here) that has been extended to some small businesses by the Small Business Bureau (SBB) even though, as we have said before, except those grants are intended to help the recipients elevate themselves to an acceptable level of competitiveness and grow their market share, both at home and abroad, one might be inclined to think that the funds could have been better spent.
It is high time that we recognize that the vast majority of our small and micro-businesses, subsisting as they are at their present levels, under-resourced, lacking in infrastructure and by extension, productive capacity, cannot go forward. One of the issues that have simply not been dwelt on much by either the public or private sector is the extent to which the advent of an oil and gas economy can provide impetus for growth of micro and small businesses. There must surely be room for our small and micro-businesses to benefit from a measure of piggy-backing on what we continue to be told is the likely wider marketing Guyana spinoff from the global popularization of our oil and gas industry. The problem is that too many of these altruistic-sounding pronouncements continue to be lacking in follow-up.
One has to think that at some stage opinions on how to take our small business sector forward can seriously find their way into the corridors of policy-making. Frankly, if only for the sake of the small businesses, their owners and their families whose lives and livelihoods, we are acutely aware, are in some instances entirely dependent on the survival and growth of these entities, we much prefer to continue to embrace a measure of hope rather than immerse ourselves in a cesspool of despair. At some stage, sooner rather than later, we (perhaps naïvely) assume, the worm will register an energetic turn.
