Dear Editor,
I absorbed Minister Edghill’s comment on diaspora expectations, and how its members need to manage those better. Apparently, there is a considerable gap between what overseas Guyanese expect from a burgeoning oil economy, versus Guyana’s realities. I lump this under the broad band of ‘incentive.’ In doing so, there is recognition that incentive is a package with many embedded components including land, labour, cash, concessions, and more, with cash equivalents as king throughout. I pondered why Bishop Edghill would be ensnared in the insoluble conflict surrounding diaspora ideas, and Guyana’s pockets. “Ask not what your country…”
The appreciation came swiftly that with all those roads and other projects (including that Chinese-Guyanese cash cow, aka the airport expansion black hole) prompt urgent need for drafters, planners, builders, counters, and checkers, among an army of others with special skills. By my uneducated guess, there should be thousands of Guyanese in the far-flung diaspora, who dream of returning here, and hitting it big. It is a fair position, given that oil is the biggest thing by far to touch this country. Foreign locals should be first in line to sample the sweetness of the sweet crude that is theirs (mine too). The big trouble is that the big ideas and big dreams of Guyanese diaspora members collide with a bigger problem. This is with a bow to rich oil returns sloshing around domestically in torrents. It involves one word only: money.
Of course, everyone could respond with ‘tell the nation something that it does not know.’ Be careful with what is asked for, it is often unpleasant. Any engineer of any kind (civil, mechanical, systems and, of course, petroleum), any accountant or auditor, any computer man or woman of skill, any scientific or academic mind, considering here, has to be thinking of a pay package (pay only) of US$150,000 at the very minimum. I squeeze in that that number is on the lowest of the low end, and dirt cheap. Because if any of those professions I identified has some respectable skills, with credentials and track record to complement, then US$150,000 per annum is nothing but chicken feed in the compensation pen.
After a rough conversion from American to Guyanese dollars, this translates to a monthly paycheck of GY$2.5 million for a diaspora member worth his or her salt. Considering that alone, the local wage and salary bank was just busted wide open. All local scales would be bent silly, tumbled around in disarray. To ensure full appreciation, the GY$2.5 million a month would not cover any onetime signing bonus, ongoing health and retirement costs, and the total expenditures for possibly housing and many other sweeteners (incentives).
Minister Edghill had it right when he spoke of managing expectations, due to the havoc that would be wreaked here. But there is the other side of the same three-headed coin, which is the mystery and challenge of how to obtain the direly needed skills and capacity for this ballooning oil country. If there is one instance in which the man of scripture spoke gospel, it was on this occasion. The jarring reality is that there is Guyana’s reality and there is that of the diaspora. I do not foresee droves of Guyanese diaspora cousins, with the requisite resume, abandoning Uncle Sam to join hands with the gov’t for peanuts. It was Vice President Jagdeo, Guyana’s oil commissar, who said that more money to the people could trigger inflationary pressures.
Hence, imagine thousands of returning Guyanese doing their patriotic (and self-enhancing) bit, but at what would be super salaries in the local arena. What would be basic, as in ground level, for those Guyanese would be superrich, as in astronomical, for the people here. This is the third side of the coin I had mentioned before. To accommodate overseas Guyanese coming back to give back (more like get out), a whole new class of Guyanese could be in the making, with the locals left back, and the new arrivals at the top of the food chain. As a practical matter, the foreign oil companies, and their supporting networks, have to be paying their people of caliber at rates commensurate with their conditions, and within touching distance to what I lay on the table. Thus, in ways direct and indirect, there is some of what Guyanese in the diaspora expect already at work here. Clearly, the PPP Government, any government, has its hands tied in this disconnect between where the diaspora stands and what it expects versus where Guyana is, and what the territory here can hold. Best wishes.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
