Back in November last year the government announced that it had created a “working committee” to address the issue of putting in place arrangements for the training of Guyanese in tourism–related disciplines. Here, one assumes, that this was an indication that the present political administration was seeking to return tourism somewhere close to the sectorial front burner, successive administrations having been unable to make up their minds as to just where to place tourism in the constellation of pursuits as it pertains to the overall development direction of the country.
We may well have been somewhat taken aback by the numbers for training in Barbados (6,000) alluded to in the announcement even though one assumes that these numbers will be staggered for the purpose of training and that what the government is seeking to do here is to send a broader signal of the seriousness of its intention to take a more positive tilt at the creation of a full-fledged tourism industry than had been the case in previous years and under different political administrations.
Mind you, it is not unreasonable to assume that what now appears to be another tilt at exalted international standards is a function of government’s seeming acceptance that the new-found elevation of the country’s external profile has to be attended by a suitable response to what is likely to be exalted visitor expectations, be they investment seekers or simply visitors seeking the experience, first hand, of our oil and gas ‘miracle. Recall, of course, that up until a handful of years ago, Guyana was still being referred to in sections of the international media as one of South America’s Banana Republics.
What we need to keep in mind of course is that government has, over time, become notorious for putting distance between declared intent and actual implementation, so that we are, at this stage, left to wonder just what lies behind the announcement of the recent Barbados hospitality training initiative. Taken on its own, one can easily get the impression that this is a precursor to a serious, ‘big time’ launch into tourism as a major sector of the Guyana economy.
Tourism, one recalls, is not the only sector in which our respective governments have, historically, talked a lot but really done sorry little. That said, the thought of 6,000 persons being trained to work in the tourism sector (or any other sector for that matter) is a definite attention-getter, given the signal that it sends in terms of potential employment creation in our own high unemployment circumstance. This has to be seen, particularly, in the context of the unmistakable signs of a swelling in the ranks of the unemployed, particularly among young people in their late teens and early twenties and the deeply disturbing evidence that this is spilling over into what one might call an ‘idle hands’ syndrome. These days the pursuits of the young and the restless have gone way beyond petty crimes and have entered into the realm of shockingly violent crimes against the backdrop of evidence that law enforcement is powerless to act effectively to rein these pursuits in.
Much of this, of course, is a function of the deficiencies of a long-fractured education system rendered worse in very recent years on account of the Covid-19-related intervention that has significantly closed the door on conventional tuition for significant numbers of young men and women who would have missed out on big chunks of their secondary education. Oil or no oil, there will be consequences here.
Herein, one feels, may well lie one of our biggest challenges, going forward.
A developmental direction that is driven almost entirely by an infusion of petro dollars and the attractions of foreign investment and which shows unmistakable signs of unchanging social dislocation is bound to become threatened by derailment. What is needed beyond the incremental excitable noises that will attend successive oil finds that add to the country’s collectables are the creation of initiatives that are not just poverty-alleviating, but state undertakings that directly and meaningfully absorb Guyanese of all walks of like into the various streams of development which it falls to government to create. Here, it is not just a matter of seeking to roll back social disruption by offering ‘jobs’ to those sections of the populace deemed likely to be delinquent in order to seek to redirect their path, but to absorb them into the broader socio-economic order in such a manner as to equip them with a sense of a wider national collective purpose.
A robust hospitality sector imbued with a philosophy that is underpinned by a commitment to the highest standards of service can be a game-changer in more ways than one. It can create within those who serve the sector a sense of the significance of the wider contribution that they make to taking the country forward.
Of course, there are various other equally worthwhile pathways available to open-minded, visionary government.