With a suddenness that has left the uninitiated ‘blinded’ like the deer in headlamps, the discovery of oil and the subsequent portents that the ‘find’ has for a rush of inward investment has compelled Guyana’s business community to raise its game, so to speak, to match the ‘force’ of what has become a tsunami of foreign investment interests such as the country has never before been prepared for. Since the disclosure of the discovery of ‘world class’ deposits of oil offshore Guyana, interest in the investment potential of what had previously been described as a ‘Banana Republic’ has sent ‘tremors’ through a private sector business infrastructure that has never really been prepared to shoulder the burden of what has been, in recent years, a tsunami of external interest.
It goes beyond the confines of the grouping of countries comprising the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), whose growth ambitions, up to this time, have never seriously envisaged the global flood of international investor interest evidenced in what, in recent years, has become a ‘nonstop’ inward flow of business delegations from across the world. Guyana, insofar as investment potential is concerned, is now viewed as the ‘hot spot’ of the Caribbean. It has the potential to have the country leave a million miles behind the loathed ‘Banana Republic’ tag with which western journalists had ‘tagged’ the country. Guyana, these past few years, has come to be seen as the emerging ‘bright spark’ in the region.