The tremendous creativity, energy and willpower that have been invested in the creation of micro and small businesses in various sectors by many ordinary Guyanese determined not just to fight their way out of poverty, but also to make a mark as worthwhile businessmen and women, have not, over the years benefitted from a level of support from either government or the lending sector – or the private sector as a whole – that can be considered commensurate with either their effort or with their potential to enhance the viability of the country’s economy.
It is true that there are some micro and small businesses that have grown, impressively in some instances. Some have sustained themselves by what ordinary people term “cutting and contriving” though never really demonstrating the kind of expansion that one might associate with real progress.
On the part of the lending sector, attitudes towards micro and small businesses have been informed, largely, by stereotyped value judgements that cause it, all too often, to look the other way when micro and small businesses need help. The state, on the other hand, with its preoccupation with politics, have found greater appeal in theatre, grand gestures, bedecked in rhetoric but which, in the end are sufficiently inadequate as to render them incapable of making any meaningful game-changing impact.
Two things should be made clear at this juncture. The characterisation of the private sector in Guyana has always been underpinned by the drawing of a sharp line between what we regard as big businesses and small ones. The two have always been accommodated in different living quarters, the mainstream ones armoured by tunnel-visioned Business Support Organizations, which, if anything, have done more to clearly underline the distinction between big and small than to try to find some point at which the two can meet and work together. Frankly, some of the events that have involved the mainstream business organizations and in which small and micro businesses have had a ‘look in,’ are, for the most part, examples of the kind of patronage by the BSO’s that are concerned much more with their own psychological aggrandizement than with the furtherance of the interests of micro businesses. Commercial banks, incidentally, lost in their own blinkered world of self- interest are an inherent part of that cabal.
Government, decidedly, has been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Any objective analysis of the contribution (and here we use the word contribution advisedly) that government has made to helping to keep the micro- and small-business sector afloat has been characterised by pure patronage, meagre handouts which unfailingly lack the ability to meaningfully support and sustain. Here, it should be said that the Small Business Bureau (SBB) was, from the very beginning, a victim of the meagre handout syndrome which is precisely why, for all its efforts, quite a few (we concede that the numbers are unclear here) of the enterprises under its umbrella have long fallen apart.
The likelihood of the emergence of an oil & gas industry has, among other things, accentuated the tunnel vision affliction of local big business and deepened the divide between big and small. Moreover, the latest reincarnation of the institution originally established to create a meaningful overseas investment drive – first GUYMIDA, then GO-INVEST, and now The Guyana Office of Foreign and Local Investment – appears to symbolise that familiar institutional gimmickry that is driven by the assumption that policy can be shaped through a process of mixing form with substance. The truth of the matter is, of course, that unlike some other countries in the region, Jamaica being perhaps the best example, Guyana has never possessed either the institutional framework or the specific skills sets to create a sustainable and effective foreign investment infrastructure, the embracing of the term economic diplomacy being no more than a ruse to seek to sell the notion that Foreign Service Officers, steeped in the practice of orthodox diplomacy, can suddenly and with little or any training or orientation, be made part of the frontline of our thrust to attract foreign investment.
To return to small and micro businesses, it really is a question of both government and the mainstream private sector organizations accepting that micro and small businesses have the capacity to contribute to meaningful transformative socio-economic change in the country. That, in our view, has not been accepted. Instead, one gets the impression that the ‘noises’ that are made about the importance of small and micro businesses is really a kind of political chant designed by those who have ruled over the years to help sell the myth of kinship with ordinary people seeking to make something of their lives, when the facts tell us that the tools and the opportunities to grow, to expand, to enrich the lives of families and communities are administered in dribs and drabs (here there is also the great danger of misdiagnosis and the administering of the wrong remedies) the extent of which render them woefully inadequate. Insofar as the real growth of the micro and small business sector – as an extension of the wider economy – is concerned, government has to begin to understand that, these days, elaborately choreographed gestures that go nowhere elicit no more than cynical responses from its target audiences that are, by now, well-schooled in their theatrics.
