Watching the comings and goings of potential investors, all reacting to the opportunities opened up by the country’s ‘oil bonanza’ and their interaction with Guyanese Local Content aspirants offers some interesting insights into the direction in which this country’s development trajectory might be heading.
If you visit any of the city’s prominent hotels and other suitably appointed places in the city these days, you are more likely than not to catch glimpses of groups that include wealthy expatriate entrepreneurs and animated local businessmen, huddled around tables, in groups, presumably trying to hammer out the ‘nuts and bolts’ of one collaborative arrangement or another that might allow the local counterpart to secure some Local Content windfall. Everything, it seems, that has to do with the wider, more holistic development of the country’s mainstream business infrastructure would appear to have become subsumed beneath the expatriate investor surge and the attendant Local Content ‘hustle,’ to the extent where, it seems, the leadership of the country’s mainstream Business Support Organizations (BSOs) appears to have shifted gears in the direction of self-interest.
One hastens to add, of course, that there is nothing at all irregular or undesirable about businesses making decisions in their own interest, except that in our particular circumstances it raises tough questions once their personal preoccupations threaten the overall functioning of the umbrella Business Support Organizations (BSOs) which they manage. It could become a question of just where their loyalties lie.
If that mainstream business community appears, these days, to live solely to extract its Local Content ‘pound of flesh’ from what the overseas investor surge has to offer, then we are likely to end up with nothing more than a somewhat upgraded them and us business environment that would have failed to seize the opportunity which the environment allows for a symmetrical growth across the business sector as a whole. Here again this is not to say that all of the beneficiaries will benefit equally. At least, however, what will occur is an across-the-board raising of the bar that will leave all of the beneficiaries better off than where they had been previously.
To say that the advent of the Small Business Bureau (SBB) has failed to match its originally envisaged, hugely exalted aspirations is to indulge in an enormous understatement. At best, it has provided timely but decidedly modest subsidies to micro and small businesses, many of which operate at subsistence level. The SBB might have been a sound idea, in principle though it has to be said that there was never a realistic correlation between its ambitions and the resources that have been made available by the state up to this time.
If there is any redemption for the SBB it will have to repose in a thorough evaluation of the state of health of all of the businesses affiliated to it. The process will have to include an evaluation of those enterprises that are still viable, and those that might not be, followed by a ‘retiring’ of those who simply will not make it. Meanwhile and crucially, government’s ‘cents and pennies’ attitude towards funding the SBB will have to change to take into account that what we seek is not an official small business resting place, but an environment in which those businesses stand a realistic chance of growing, even prospering.
