EDITORIAL State boards
Governing any nation nowadays is not an easy task, and in the case of Guyana there are some additional complexities which are too well known to be worth enumerating. Nevertheless, such complexities have to be taken into account when those in office make decisions, more especially if they have committed to operating in a certain way before they came into government.
The present administration consists of a somewhat unstable coalition with a superfluity of ministers. The reason for the excess, it would appear, was to satisfy all the various factions, including those within APNU itself after the terms of the Cummingsburg Accord had been fulfilled. The principle of ensuring adequate representation by all sides of the coalition in cabinet, however, seems to have extended itself into other areas as well. At least, that was the impression which the public gained last week after the announcement of the membership of some of the more important state boards.
As it was, the composition of those boards set off a firestorm which took the government off guard. Minister of State Joseph Harmon was reported by this newspaper yesterday as saying he thought the criticisms both unfair and premature, going on to observe that so far the membership of less than half of the boards had been published. Presumably, citizens are to infer from this that more caution will be exercised in the case of the boards which have not yet been made public, although it might be noted that the ones which have created the furore are among the most important, covering as they do the finance and agricultural sectors.
It was its promises of inclusiveness and a punctilious adherence to the rule of law that the electorate paid attention to when the coalition came into office, and unlike in the case of its predecessors, it will not be allowed to abandon them easily. So if, therefore, it thinks that where appointments are concerned it only has to engage in dickering with its political partners to see that its own internal considerations of coalition ‘balance’ are satisfied and need not bother about anything else, it will be quickly disabused of that notion.
The major criticism comes from a direction the government obviously did not anticipate, and it relates to the international commitments of this country as well as our own constitution which requires there should be no discrimination based on gender, and that provisions should be made to ensure the equal status of men and women in every sphere of life. It was the Guyana Human Rights Association which in the first instance drew attention to the fact that only 9.4% of the chairs of the 32 state boards in the finance sector were female, and that in terms of the membership, “only 18% are females which represents 22 persons out of a possible 125; and of that figure,
The cost of production is more or less the same for each kind of timber, delivered to roadside (US$ 170/m3), mill gate (US$ 235/m3, including truck transport) or ship side (FOB US$ 300, including GRA and GFC export charges). Readers will note that FOB cost is significantly greater than the FOB values declared by exporters and recorded by the GFC. For example, between January and April 2015, the declared FOB for greenheart logs was between US$130210. The lower declared FOB results in a correspondingly lesser payment of the log export commission on greenheart
which is 20% of the FOB — a clear indication of illegal transfer pricing.
In 2006 I estimated that furniture achieved a factor 14 multiplier compared with mill-gate price. So we could have produced US$174 million of furniture in 2013 (US$ 235 x 14 x 53,000 m3), and US$319 million in 2014. Instead, using the GFC’s average FOB log export prices of US$163/m3 in 2013 and US$177/m3 in 2014, the log FOB export values of these prime timbers totalled only US$ 9 million in 2013 and US$ 17 million in 2014.
Thus Guyana would have added value of x19 in 2014 by making flooring and furniture (my conservative estimate), compared with the crude log exports. This kind of calculation should be factored into the GOInvest work on foreign direct investments, and in the insistence by Minister Raphael Trotman on in-country processing by Bai Shan Lin and VHPI, in accordance with approved national and party political policies. We look forward to firm and sustained government actions. Yours faithfully, Janette Bulkan