This newspaper well remembers the May 2019 passage in the National Assembly of those key amendments to the 2003 Procurement Act which (we had thought) paved the way for suitably equipped small businesses to have access to 20% of state contracts. We remember the upbeat response of the Chief Executive Officer of the Small Business Bureau, Dr Lowell Porter, who, after the news had reached him, appeared to view local small businesses from an entirely different perspective. We remember too, our own ‘gyaff’ with a dozen or so small business owners who assailed us with questions all of which had to do with when the decision of the National Assembly would be actualised.
After that, it was more or less all downhill, the issues of qualifying compliances from the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) and the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) essentially torpedoing such hopes as may have been harboured regarding a relatively short-term coming into effect of what, in our view, may well have been the most significant ‘gift’ ever handed to small businesses in Guyana.
Even at that stage, it may well have been possible to salvage the situation. Having established the various other bona fides of the small businesses, government could have moved to fast track, as far as possible, the acquisition of the compliances by perhaps opening special windows within the two aforementioned agencies to allow for the expediting of the compliances. It would have been gainful image-building for the political administration as well as an unprecedented breakthrough for the small business sector in Guyana. Insofar as this newspaper is aware, no attempt was made at that point to salvage the situation, a circumstance that may well have caused the question to be raised as to why the trouble was taken, at any rate, to put the matter before the National Assembly at that time.
How much of a longer term loss this may eventually prove to be for the small business sector and for the economy as a whole, for that matter, is hard to say. We have heard nothing so far from the incumbent administration and in this context it will be recalled that it was under a Bharrat Jagdeo administration that the Small Business Act was passed into law in March 2004. The bus has arrived and left and we will just have to wait for another one to get here… at least that is how it seems.
It is not, however, anywhere near as simple as that. There can be no doubt that the full implementation of the 20% provision would have energised and almost certainly significantly grown many of the various small (an in some instances even micro) business sectors to say nothing about the incentive that it would have created for the startup of new small businesses, feeling that they would have had a chance at lucrative state contracts, to raise their game.
Even now, it is by no means too late for our Business Support Organizations – and more particularly the Private Sector Commission – to mount an energetic lobby for the 20% concession to be given the official green light and for special fast track windows to be opened in both the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) to minimise such hassle as sometimes arises in securing the requisite concessions.
In circumstances of an already high unemployment rate almost certainly accentuated by the onset of COVID-19, the immediate-term, full and effective implementation of the 20% state contract provision could be a godsend.
