Momentous 2024 could well be Guyana’s most transformative year ever

This being the last column for 2024, let me wish everyone a happy holiday, and I’m hoping that 2024 brings joy and rewards for each and every single one of us and for our country. By any standard, 2023 was a great year for Guyana, even with the Venezuelan crisis. The year 2023 sets the stage for a momentous 2024 for Guyana. In 2024, Guyana will emerge a new country, and whether we live here or are visiting, we will experience and see a different Guyana. Hopefully, the unique Guyanese hospitality we are famous for will not change. Happy New Year to all my sisters and brothers, and all visitors to Guyana.
While Guyana’s economy continues to expand at a phenomenal rate, estimated to be 40% in 2023, we expect that this rate would be duplicated in 2024, with oil production estimated to surpass an average of 500,000 barrels per day, and maintaining a pace to surpass 1.2M bpd by 2027. The non-oil economy grew at a rate of about 10% in 2023, and this is expected to be improved in 2024 with construction, sugar, rice, coconut, cash crops and mining making significant contributions. Sugar met its target for 2023, and we should expect to see further improvements in production in 2024. In 2012, we set a production target of 700,000 tons by 2020, and we almost reached that target in 2014, missing it by just 2,000 tons. But mismanagement by the new Government in 2015 saw production reduced year by year, dropping considerably by 2020. Guyana is set to surpass the 700,000 tons in 2024, and Guyana should easily surpass 1,000,000 tons by 2030.
Since 2020, Guyana has evolved into a preferred destination for international events. In 2024, Guyana is expected to host many notable international events. Some have already been scheduled, and others will inevitably emerge. For one, Guyana will again host many important matches, the semifinals and the finals of CPL. This time, Guyana will be defending its championship. If 2023 was a huge success for CPL in Guyana, then 2024 will be phenomenal. Already, thousands are planning to come to Guyana for CPL. ICC Cricket T20 World Cup is also coming to Guyana. Already bread and breakfast facilities are being booked out.
I remembered when Guyana’s Providence Stadium was built for ICC ODI World Cup, the naysayers, dooming the stadium, insisted that it would be a white elephant. Today, the Providence Stadium has emerged as one of CARICOM’s premiere cricket stadiums. But Guyana will see, in 2024, rising out of cane fields, a new stadium in Palmyra. With new football and athletics fields around the country, including in Linden and New Amsterdam, Guyana is positioning itself as the preferred destination for sports in CARICOM. While this would have been seen as a “Don Quixote building castles in the air” move a few years ago, today this is no longer a joke. No country in CARICOM will have more floodlit grounds for cricket, football and athletics competitions than our country. Guyana in 2024 will pronounce, in no uncertain terms, its readiness to be the sporting capital of CARICOM. Minister Charles Ramson is not being hyperbolic with this ambition.
The first set of more than 2,000 new hotel rooms will be ready in 2024. At least two new hotels would be opened in 2024, and several more would have extensive work already completed. In 2024, with hotels rising across Regions 2, 3, 4, and 6, the naysayers will no longer be able to argue that these are just braggadocio, because every single Guyanese will see majestic structures rising from swamps and cane fields.
No CARICOM country is attracting as much investment in hotel construction as Guyana is today. These hotel rooms will support Guyana’s ambition to be the sporting capital of CARICOM. Importantly, however, these hotel investments also recognize that Guyana is becoming the preferred destination for internal events outside of sports. In 2024, Guyana will host the third Energy Conference. Already, hotels are fully booked, and many people tell me they cannot find affordable rooms during the Energy Conference.
By December 2024, Guyana will be almost ready to commission seven new hospitals across Regions 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. These new hospitals will stand out as among the earliest glimpse of the new Guyana. More than twenty new operating rooms, including a new heart OR, more than 700 new hospital beds, seven new CTs and Guyana’s first public sector MRI will be available for improved health in Guyana. These hospitals will be first completed new ones, but 2024 will also see the beginning of construction for new hospitals in New Amsterdam, Moruka, Bartica, Kamarang, Kato, Lethem and Linden. New Allied Health Training Institutions will begin construction in New Amsterdam and Suddie and Linden.
In 2024, a brand new community, perhaps a new town, will sprout out of the cane fields APNU/AFC abandoned in 2016, creating thousands of jobs. A new airport, a hotel, a hospital, a shopping mall, a stadium, new housing schemes will change the landscape of Region 6, beckoning the new Guyana. And just to the southwest, the chimney smoke will remind everyone how President Irfaan Ali and the PPP Government transformed the whole Palmyra/Canje hub from the ruin and desolation left by David Granger and APNU/AFC into what has become the centerpiece of the new Guyana.
With thousands of new homes, hundreds of new businesses, new highways across several Regions, new bridges across the Demerara and Corentyne Rivers, new hotels and hospitals, new shopping malls, modern banks being seen by the people everywhere, President Irfaan Ali is set to be the steward of the most transformative single year ever in the history of any CARICOM country. God bless everyone.