Dear Editor,
I write in response to the headline “You can’t build roads and teachers hungry”, attributed to the GTU President. Certainly, the needs of our teachers, and all of us Guyanese, are worthy of more, and a better life. We have to develop ourselves, and create the better life for ourselves step by step. It will take time, as we learn and make ourselves and our infrastructure more capable; and our patience would be tested.
I want to share a lesson I received from a South Korean official visiting Guyana about fifteen years ago. We are all rightly impressed with goods and services out of South Korea – Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Kia, Doosan, Gangnam Style. Guyana and South Korea have a Joint Commission Agreement by which, every three years or so, teams from our two countries meet in each capital alternately to speak about things for mutual benefit. There was one such meeting in Georgetown about fifteen years ago, and I was leader of our team.
Travelling through Georgetown with the Leader of the South Korean Team, we could not help noticing the garbage all around. He said, “We (South Korea) have equipment and techniques that could help you dispose of garbage.” I concurred that equipment would be helpful, and we would need, at the same time, to develop changes in the understanding and views of our people.
He acknowledged that it was often difficult for people to imagine a changed, different future.
He recalled that when he was young, in the early 1960s, not long after the Korean War, South Korea was receiving alms, food aid from the international community; and he recalled his family taking him, joining with others in protests against the government of General Park, shouting, “We want food! Give us food, not infrastructure!” However, he said, he must say now that infrastructure was crucial in getting South Korea going on its path of rapid development to the Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Kia, Doosan, Gangnam style of these days.
I join the call for patience, even as I know that some information has been very powerful in skyrocketing our expectations. It is true that, on a per capita basis, we may have more oil than Saudi Arabia, or Qatar, but it takes time to turn potential riches to realized real riches. How much longer, how much earlier, was their oil discovered?
Our Government is in a difficult spot: it has to try to restrain pay and consumption increases to be no more than our average (non-oil) increase in production and productivity. If any group forces a large increase, all others will push for similar. We could fall into a downward runaway inflationary spiral, as happened after our independence in 1966, when great expectations were unleashed.
It took the extremely painful medicine after 1985 (huge retrenchments and shutdowns in the Public Services and state-owned enterprises) until about 1995 to stabilize things again. From 1964, rates of pay might have been increased about 100-fold, but prices rose about 500-fold. Even with big pay increases after 1964, and perhaps partly because of them, we paradoxically had less, much less. And, from 1990, we had to rebuild and restore much of what we had and lost; and then to build further out step by step.
A responsible Government and people would not want to go down that road again, and would call for the discipline which, in the not-too-long run, would bring much more to us.
Patience. The better life will come as we learn and enable ourselves to produce and share more and better goods and services. Life in the developed countries is better because they got going earlier at learning, accumulating, and improving conditions for greater production and productivity, and fairer sharing of goods and services which they produce; and knowing how they did it, we can advance much faster and catch up with them.
We can become like South Korea with Guyanese characteristics.
Sincerely,
Samuel A A Hinds
Former Prime Minister and President
Ambassador to the USA and the OAS
