Dear Editor,
I write in response to the “Blunt Truth” in Kaieteur News (KN) of Wednesday, April 12, 2023. KN Blunt, yuh wrong – as you have been about 80% of the time.
While I recognise your concerns that the Government is seemingly about to give away a “golden goose laying golden eggs”, there is a larger view for sustained long-term venturing, and the process of development of Guyanese and Guyana – an alternative view which must be presented.
Then-President Jagdeo’s venturing into constructing the Marriott had its worrying periods, but, on many counts, it has turned out just great – a great success story. Let us applaud him and thank him. I don’t know if he would claim to have been born with the boon of being a “see-far” man, but he has been steadily looking into our possible futures. His LCDS 2010 earned him worldwide recognition as Champion of the Earth, and set the stage for Guyanese and Guyana – and other similarly less developed peoples and countries – to earn money and other benefits from maintaining their standing forests, so that they could nevertheless get on with their development in these times of awareness of earth warming and climate change in a manner that would be win-win for all of our world and all peoples of our world.
No one ever knows how the future would turn out; so many things play into making the future. My President Jagdeo – now VP – over his twelve years as President, being desirous of, and committed to, the development of all Guyanese and Guyana (as we all were, and continue to be), ventured a number of projects based on the logic of, and faith in, development. One or two ventures have not turned out well, but that is to be expected, for nothing ventured means nothing gained.
Indeed, one of my set reading books of the late 1960s/early 1970s, “Up the Organization”, maintained that if, as a leader, you are doing better than one success in three ventures initiated, you may not be venturing enough, and are probably falling behind. The challenge is to discern in good time whether an ongoing particular venture is succeeding or not; and, if not, to adapt or end it, while salvaging and learning as much as you could. As the Gambler admonishes, you have to venture: and having ventured, you have to know when to hold, when to fold, when to walk away, when to run. The Marriott venture, acknowledging its worrying times, has turned out well.
In the third verse of “Blunt”, KN berates the VP for wanting to sell the Marriott, a golden goose; while, in the preceding verse, “Blunt” artfully derides the Marriott venture as placing billions of dollars of debt on (all) Guyanese heads. Which is it, a golden goose or a debt burden? It could not be both. We should not let KN Blunt have it both ways; indeed, Blunt should not have it either way.
This KN Blunt of Wednesday, April 12, (like the majority of its kind) creates and exploits the misconceptions, misunderstandings and confusion created when appropriate thinking for one situation is applied inappropriately to another. The Marriott venture is proceeding along the lines to its preconceived end, whether or not there was to be a discovery of oil off our shores. Of course, Exxon’s discovery of oil made that project into a sure lucky venture. We needed a new brand name hotel to improve Guyana’s attraction to visitors, particularly potential foreign investors – a new hotel that might help ignite our development.
At the time, no local or foreign individual or group was ready to venture, while there was an abundance of private liquid money in the banks that the Government had to be mopping up. Generally speaking, as in the case of the Berbice Bridge, the VP’s Government was ready to take the lead in bringing about a greatly required development by putting up the required risk-taking equity portion of capital, and thereby attract the liquid money to provide the much less risky debt portion of the capital. This is what was done to finance construction and establishment of that Marriott hotel.
The hope and expectation from the beginning was that some local or foreign investor would be emboldened to purchase the Government’s equity shares after the higher-risk period of construction and startup had been navigated successfully. There was never any intention for the Government to hold on to any equity in the Guyana Marriott hotel. The VP wanted to eventually have a sector with a number of hotels, everyone good for the money, and all competing freely for Government and other business.
Continued ownership by the Government of the equity or any shares in Marriott could have an unnecessarily unsettling effect on a sector that is becoming wide open, with many players offering a wide range of grades and prices and competition seemingly assured.
Further, in withdrawing from the hotel sector, Government has that money to venture and lead some other necessary developments.
Allow me to identify one achievement of VP Jagdeo’s venturing with the Marriott which we should acknowledge. You see the Pegasus today? President Ali recently led the glorious opening of its larger new addition. Recall the level to which the Pegasus had succumbed shortly before construction of the Marriott. The beginning of that Marriott construction sparked an elegant rehabilitation of the then existing Pegasus. There are other important achievements.
I write this article as someone who sat at his desk and, looking through his window, saw the construction of the Marriott from the beginning to the end; someone who worked at the necessary preparatory stage of site preparation in rerouting one of our major sewerage outfalls outside the proposed property; someone who saw a different type of piling being used, with holes bored into the ground and reinforced concrete pilings being cast therein. I was pretty sure that, in its mood at the time, Pegasus would have rushed to the court for an injunction against pile-driving if that hitherto unusual method of construction was to be used.
I saw local building materials – sand and stone, bulk concrete and hollow blocks – being delivered: a significant local content before there were local content laws. Even more, I learnt that the named contractor was a subsidiary of the Chinese firm established in Trinidad and Tobago. And a group of mostly Guyanese and T&T engineers from T&T called on me to say that they had been awarded the contract to design the foundation. As the VP hoped and expected, other newer technology was being introduced into Guyana, many opportunities to work were being created, and levels of skills were being lifted – and much was being learnt.
Pegasus, in the presence of all the criticisms of the Government awarding the Marriott to a construction firm from China (which was evaluated as the best choice), turned to “follow the pattern” of Government, and chose a firm headquartered in China for its own huge, magnificent addition.
We all can, and should, applaud our VP’s venture in establishing the Guyana Marriott as that venture safely and successfully comes to its intended end. KN’s “Blunt”, knowingly or unknowingly, and very wrongly, is doing very much more harm than good to our society.
Samuel A. A. Hinds
Former Prime Minister
