The environment of aplomb in which the Small Business Bureau was launched at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre in October 2013 was always felt in some quarters to be a dead giveaway insofar as its likely success in bearing the weight of nurturing a robust small-business infrastructure was concerned.
The gap between trumpeted ambition and effective execution has been, over time, a seemingly incurable weakness of political administrations in Guyana.
Concern over the likely success or failure of the bureau reposed, primarily, in the fact that oversight was promptly placed in the hands of the conventional (and frustratingly cumbersome) state administrative system under the control of a government ministry. There can be no question that the responsibility for significantly strengthening the country’s micro- and small-business sector (which was the critical mission of the bureau) entitled it to an autonomous operating regime.
Ministries are usually concerned with following a trail of cumbersome procedures and practices that are not usually tailored for expediency, or efficiency, for that matter. So that what in effect happened was that, suddenly, hundreds of small- and micro-business operators, possessed of a decidedly entrepreneurial outlook became ‘prisoners’ of a bureaucracy that was driven by a vastly different operating culture.
These small business owners, in pursuit of such resources as the bureau had to offer, found themselves entangled in that all-too-familiar web of infuriating bureaucracy for which government ministries have become notorious. At a very early stage and for reasons that invariably had little to do with the efforts of the functionaries of the SBB, applicants for the Bureau’s assistance complained, not without considerable justification, that the extent of the support that was forthcoming was wildly disproportionate to the procedural hassle involved in securing that support.
There was a period too when the SBB became ensnared in a quagmire of alleged irregularities associated with issues like financial allocations for training programmes and aspects of the institution’s grants procedures. Beyond that, there was never any question that for the most part, the SBB was never afforded the institutional capacity to effectively monitor the growth of those small businesses that now fell under its umbrella or even to determine, convincingly, whether those businesses were operating with the confines of the directives articulated to them by the bureau. What is known is that there were instances in which grants were misdirected and the original beneficiaries of such grants simply disappeared.
True, there came a point in time when there were discernable attempts to ‘right the ship’ as far as practices and procedures were concerned. Such efforts, however, seemed invariably to collide with bureaucratic blockages so that such sense of urgency as was applied by some professionals within the agency in seeking to ensure that they fulfilled the Bureau’s stated purpose, continued to be frustrated by an overarching and usually decidedly counterproductive thicket of public procedures.
State-controlled projects that fall under the control of political administrations in Guyana invariably display a tendency to be concerned with form rather than substance so that interpretations of progress or otherwise, fall within the purview of the minister. Verdicts are expressed in vacuous pronouncements that benefit from amplification in the state media. There are times when the link between what gets said and the reality is hard to detect. It requires no great intellect to realise that ultimately, this kind of approach robs the institution of its real sense of purpose. What became clear too, was that the ambitions of many of the micro- and small-business owners who had signed up with the bureau simply outgrew its material capacity. This circumstance attributed, unfairly, to voluminous public criticism of the institution.
One of the more potentially uplifting eventualities in the short history of the SBB was the decision to allow for small businesses registered with the bureau to benefit from state contracts up to the value of $20 million. The procedural barriers that eventually stymied an initiative that could have positively altered the fortunes of small businesses and salvaged the reputation of the SBB will probably remain for years to come.
When one examines carefully, the prevailing state of the small- and micro-business sector, the original ambitions of the SBB that had to do with increasing employment at the level of the working class, promoting the growth of sectors that include small scale agriculture, agro-processing, and the culinary and creative sectors, one cannot help but notice that the bureau is yet to come even remotely close to achieving even its most basic objectives.
