SOL and Kit Nascimento: Two sides to country life
Kaieteur News – Mr Kit Nascimento in a comment on the 2021 national estimates stated that if the budget is described as a budget for business, what is wrong with that. It’s a practical question, with a practical answer. Put simply – what’s wrong with a budget in a small developing economy designed to facilitate investments?
The practical and pragmatic approach is that such an economy needs such a budget. You do not have to produce the national estimates that allow different classes to benefit overwhelmingly from others. Therefore, it is impractical to have a national budget where the rural and urban proletariat and the small peasantry receive tremendous concessions over other important sectors. The ancient Athenian philosophers once wrote that everything in life must be balanced.
I am a shameless advocate of governments inputting socialist economic policies into governance. My class support is with the proletariat ever. But in the context of Guyana, how it evolved, its political and sociological stress and its underdeveloped ongoing economy, we will not rush to condemn Nascimento’s statement. I would have done it when I was a university journalist, but I have grown intellectually and my ideology has since been refined and moderated.
I have been in the media for 32 years and have written many times of the admiration and sympathy I have for people who invest their money in a country, which makes it almost impossible to do business from it compared to the rest of the world. I know this from my own existence living here all my life. I have no business experience other than running my mother in law’s supermarket for six months.
Investing in Guyana is not easy. A wealthy family such as the Beharry Group of Companies complained publicly that they were still hearing from City Hall after six months on their request for a structure to accommodate a KFC outlet. Think of a huge business complex with water flowing into the building from a broken mains where fire is an obvious possibility, and GWI appears the next day. When the fire happens, the fire service comes the next day.
This columnist spent in November last year five consecutive days trying to get the office of the Ministry of Health’s veterinary and public health director to answer the phone. Nobody ever did. I tried for two consecutive weeks last November and got other people to call for me, to get the head of the Guyana Livestock Development Authority (GLDA).
Each time the secretary said he was out of town. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him.
Laparkan lost two cartons of cat food that a friend sent me. I ordered another shipment. He arrived but they missed it too. I ordered another shipment, they lost that too. Laparkan lost three loads of cat food. My contacts found two ships. Imagine investing in such a country!
There is a disadvantage to Nascimento’s theory. The theory can only work if investors pay their taxes. U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren accused Amazon of tax evasion. The richest man in the world owns Amazon. We come now to SOL, the fuel import company. According to GRA documents, the Guyana government has lost $ 1.5 billion through SOL handling its fuel import regime.
What is involved here is simple math. If SOL holds back two billion dollars from the Treasury, then that translates into poor police protection, unworked street lights, dead traffic signals, police vehicle shortages, untapped GWI , GRA, LPG, EPA, shortage of imported medical machinery, etc. Put simply – tax money runs the country. If there is no money from taxes, the country will die.
I read in the newspaper that a company will build a US $ 15 million hotel in Robb and Oronoque Streets. That exact company was fined G $ 1 million by the EPA for blocking the Pomeroon River with coconut shells from its operations. He asked the EPA for time to pay the money in installments. For more on that story see my Wednesday, July 24, 2019 column, “Coconut shells and Movie Towne: This shithole country.”
There is basically nothing wrong with observing Nascimento. What is egregious and marginalized at the expense of insanity is a situation where the business world refuses to abide by the law and pay its taxes. Those taxes that make a country viable because the state spends money to keep it alive. The Scandinavian situation is remarkable. The state uses taxes to make people happy. Wealthy people should ask themselves where the police are paid to protect them.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper).