Dear Editor,
I speak to that fore-day morning meeting called by our President: it was timely and necessary; it was a good and necessary thing. Contracting and putting in a bid, and having that contract managed and completed on time and on budget is serious business.
Time will tell whether that fore-day morning meeting was jolting enough to have been the effective wake-up call it was intended to be.
Growth and development, and the better life – what we all want – is challenging, and our rapid growth and development that is now enabled is even more so. To this time, we, Guyanese, have seen ourselves as consumers; mainly consumers with a tight budget. Our President’s fore-day morning meeting should bring home the realization that we, our Ministers, Permanent Secretaries, Engineers, Contractors and their workers – and indeed all of us, individually and collectively – are the producers and providers of that growth and development we all want, and are worthy of: the better schools and education; the better hospitals and medical services; the better roads, electricity, water supply and housing, and so on.
We are both producers and consumers. Our consumption, our desires, must drive our production; and our production provides for, enables, and sets the limit of, our consumption.
That four-day morning meeting was timely. No doubt, you would have heard concerns about “everyone making himself/herself a contractor these days”. I think I can say that conscious of where we Guyanese were, where we were coming from, and the process of growth and development, we of the PPP/C, entering Government in 1992, have been keeping entrance doors as wide open and hurdles as low as possible; thereby providing opportunities for all of our people to get into some sort of productive activity – doing and learning and getting steadily better at what we are doing. That same spirit is reflected in our local content approach, and there have been some timely warning shots there also.
I recall looking at the workers on one of our first road contracts, probably in 1993, rebuilding Main Street; and I thought that very few, if any of them, had worked at building a road before, and perhaps half of them might not have had a formal job before.
(Perhaps at that time we had to see the good possibilities in each other, because the rate of pay of foreign workers at all levels was about 100 times the rate for local workers when converted at the black-market rates).
In time, those first-timers attained good levels in road building. If we want better lives, we must become – individually and collectively – better producers and providers; all-round better people.
Let me admit that, in my time in bauxite and in Government, I might have been one of the late-arrival ones: unhappy at meeting a closed door, feeling slighted and disrespected at the apparent unreasonableness; but experience has taught me other views.
I remember, in my bauxite days, being called upon to provide, within 72 hours, an estimate of what it would take to rehabilitate our alumina plant, which at that time had been closed for about two years. That was a job for a team of twenty or more experts over many months. I went to commiserate with my younger but higher-ranking colleague, and he seemed not too sympathetic: deadlines have to be met. He taught me something, I did my best (conceptualized a different approach), and submitted my estimate within the deadline.
Critiquing our President may be easy, but getting things done particularly with our policies is not. Giving people a fish is easier, less risky, immediately more satisfying than teaching how to fish. We have redesigned projects – like the schools’ improvement project we met in 1992 – from one or two lots for which only foreign contractors could qualify into about 400-plus smaller lots (something for every school) for which more than 100 local contractors got going. We have opened doors for groups with demonstrated organizational and other skills to have opportunity to transfer those organizational and achievement skills in construction areas. We have adapted alternative concrete road/path designs from their smaller initial capital requirements, and with which the people along those streets are familiar.
Yes, there are risks in our approach, but we are better off as a nation, even if only half taken-off; and yes, times would have to come when there would be the need for jolts like that of the fore-day morning meeting of our President (in which I heard, “The man behave bad.”).
We can think of our policy of wide-open doors and lowered hurdles to get all our people in, somewhat like the parable of the Wedding Feast, but with a variation at the end. A king was giving a wedding feast, and when those who had been preferred would not, or could not, come (the pay would not have been enough, in our case), the king sent his servants to go and bring in people from the streets. But, later, the king saw many without the proper wedding dress, and threw them out. The moral of that parable is “Many are called but few are chosen.” You are invited because others would not come; but, nevertheless, you still have to come up to scratch.
In our case, contractors –many are called and let in for a time — must come to the required level before the crunch comes. We want all our people to get to the bar. That jolting fore-day morning meeting was intended to get all our contractors (and indeed all of us) to have a sharper, laser-like focus on the work to be accomplished: so that “all of us are called, all of us make the mark, and all of us are chosen” – meaning that all of us get to producing and enjoying the better life, which we are worthy of.
Samuel AA Hinds
Ambassador
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