Not many moons ago a pronouncement by a high official of government seeking to ‘sell’ Guyana’s preparedness to pay serious attention to expressions of interest by potential overseas investors would have been likely to encounter a healthy measure of skepticism. Indeed, such utterances might even have been dismissed as idle cant, the reality being that, over time, government has never been able to properly promulgate and put into practice an ‘open for investment’ regimen that has worked even remotely satisfactorily. We have, for the most part, ended up with a high level of frustration among would-be investors and a failure to ‘land the big ones’, so to speak.
Potential investors have continually made various recurring criticisms of the country’s foreign investment policy, or lack thereof. First, there exists, what they say is, a frustrating dichotomy between the policy on paper and how it works in actuality. Secondly, they complain about the seeming inability of designated official functionaries to make decisions that lie within their remit; thirdly, there is the absence of the ‘one-stop’ principle that avoids unbearable logjams when expediting an investment pursuit becomes a multi-agency matter. But what potential investors have frequently said that they hate most, are those instances in which policy decisions for which clear guidelines exist, must, nonetheless, secure the final imprimatur of a suitably empowered politically functionary.
GO-Invest and its predecessors have never been properly empowered to fulfill their designated functions. There have always been questions about whether or not the serving functionaries are qualified to the extent that their responsibilities dictate. Secondly, when it has come down to the ‘brass tacks’ of reaching concrete agreements and signing on dotted lines there is always the ‘final say’ hurdle that rests in the hands of political superiors and which, frequently, has nothing to do with the laid-down criteria. One might add that nestled in that final political say are all sorts of views on how that system really works and whether or not it comes down to what one might call other considerations outside the ambit of the laid-down investment guidelines and procedures.
One might argue that President Irfaan Ali’s recent ‘open for business’ clarion call may rest on what would appear to be a somewhat more solid base than its predecessors on account of the potentially transformative impact of the country’s oil finds since 2015. The fact of oil alone has, in itself, been worth billions of dollars in global marketing and the truth is that potential foreign investors have not exactly been waiting around for official signals before they find themselves here. Put differently, the marketing of the country’s investment potential no longer rests on the high-sounding officially articulated open-for-business pronouncements, but rather, on the signals being sent by the highly visible oil recovery now in progress. This, these days, would appear to be the only open-for-business signal that potential investors need. In other words it is what the prospective investor sees arising out of the high-profile offshore pursuits of ExxonMobil and company rather than what government says about the country being ‘open for business’ that is driving the surge of interest in the country.
This, of course, is not to say that the skill and transparency with which we market and execute our investment policy does not count. Whether or not, for example, building capacity at GO-Invest will go beyond the appointment of a new CEO and be followed by the full-fledged professionalisation of the entity and its transformation into a genuine one-stop agency remains unclear. Further, it is altogether not unreasonable to assume that the regimen that assigns the last word to some political czar where investment pursuits are concerned, will remain in place, whatever happens at GO-Invest.
And then there is the highly touted plank of economic diplomacy which, insofar as public knowledge is concerned, still appears not to have budged much beyond the political noises that we have been hearing for more than ten years, Those who know, cannot be fooled about the fact the our Foreign Service, whether it be at the level of Takuba Lodge or at that of our overseas missions remains structured, for the most part, to accommodate the Ministry’s conventional diplomacy mission. Apart from the fact that MoFA, as it stands, remains ill-equipped to execute an economic diplomacy mission as we understand it, it still remains unclear as to whether the Ministry is really in or out of the loop as far as the rolling out of an economic diplomacy agenda is concerned or whether that may well be a political decision that has already been made.
“The government is ready to help private investment to ensure a decent return—a country and a market that believe inherently in the participation of the private sector,” is what the president has been quoted as saying at a recent forum. Words to that effect have been uttered by the president’s predecessors and the only lesson that has derived from the previous pronouncements is that the proof of the pudding lies in the eating.
Previous experience now places Guyana in the somewhat discomfiting position where investor response may not necessarily be triggered even by a presidential proclamation, however sincere it may seem. The way forward reposes in providing, through various concrete forms of government action, evidence that the country seriously means what the president says. Investors, it should be borne in mind, are no strangers to political undertakings that often fall at the first hurdle, neither here in Guyana nor in other countries that make similar promises.
