Keeping… a shoddy reputation

As your Eyewitness knows from bitter experience, the phrase “Made in China” carries a notorious reputation!! It means cheap toys, questionable electronics, watches that stopped working before the warranty expired, and household appliances that came with the useful feature of becoming obsolete not long after purchase!! In today’s Guyana you take your life in your hands if you buy tools from the hundreds of Chinese hardware shops springing up everywhere like Jumbie Umbrellas!
But China has apparently decided the world deserves something bigger – “Made-in-China” infrastructure – and Guyana was selected as one of the regional testing grounds!! The US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs just pointed out what our Guyanese motorists and air travellers have long discovered the hard way – when Chinese state-owned companies undertake major infrastructure projects in our neck of the woods, a “completion date” can be treated less as a contractual obligation and more as a philosophical suggestion!!
Take the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, which was supposed to be a modern gateway to Guyana and onto the rest of South America!! Instead, it became a gateway to Chinese construction philosophy – where projects would take years longer than promised, cost overruns could multiply, and even after completion, one would still encounter leaking roofs, defective tiling, non-working toilets, malfunctioning systems, and airbridges apparently waiting for their moment of retirement before ever entering service!!
Then came portions of Heroes Highway and the East Bank road – the latter leading from the CJIA – and, as such, is the first impression visitors get when coming into the fastest-growing economy in the world!! It’s being executed by the China Road and Bridge Corporation and has made trips to the airport a test of fortitude – where sometimes passengers have to get out of taxis and lug their luggage for miles so as not to miss flights!! The President had to haul the contractors to State House and read them the riot act!!
Not that it has helped much since it’s clear that the Chinese construction calendar operates according to a different timeframe – one calibrated to building the Great Wall of China, which took over TWO THOUSAND YEARS!! Even their showpiece into which they poured all their efforts – the Bharrat Jagdeo Demerara River Bridge – was a year delayed!! Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Chinese companies building infrastructure – they’ve demonstrated they can construct enormous bridges, railways, ports, and skyscrapers domestically at remarkable speed!!

The problem is the export version of Chinese infrastructure comes with a different quality-control setting under the slogan “Made in China, assembled elsewhere, delayed everywhere, and maintained by somebody else!!”
Going forward with ALL contractors, we gotta insist – build it properly, on time, and for the price agreed!! This ain’t anti-China.
It’s called getting value for money!!

…Desperate Delcy
Devious Delcy’s desperate struggle to remain in power added a new twist to her socialist “principles” – what’s yours is yours, unless Washington wants a majority share!! She just offered US control over a colossal Venezuelan oil bonanza, reportedly more than 65 billion barrels!! In revolutionary language, that clearly means “Please don’t let me lose my job!!”
But the really interesting part ain’t what America’s getting – it’s who ain’t rushing in!! If Venezuela were such an irresistible oil paradise, where are the oil majors? Why aren’t ExxonMobil and the other giants lining up to pour billions into the world’s “largest oil reserves”?
Well, they ain’t stupid!! They’ve EXPERIENCED Venezuela’s political instability, expropriations, sanctions, contract uncertainty and collapsing institutions and decided that 65 billion barrels can wait!! And that’s where we provide Devious Delcy with an inconvenient comparison!!
ExxonMobil didn’t need no political rescue package to come to Guyana – it came, invested billions, took enormous exploration risks and continues investing ’cause we offer what Devious Delcy can’t – stability and confidence that the rules gonna still exist tomorrow.

…on divided
Amazingly, Opposition worthies WIN and APNU still got no agreement on substantive matters – they can’t even establish teams to develop “guidelines” for future cooperation!!
What wankers!!