Micro and small businesses lack strong representation

It is altogether unnecessary for us to allow much more time to elapse before beginning to look ‘down the road’ in the direction of the likely postCOVID-19 state of the small and micro business sector in the Guyana economy.

Everything that we have seen and heard up until now tells us that many small and micro businesses in most of the sectors of the economy will emerge from the experience of the pandemic on their knees, so to speak. Some will never recover. The owners don’t see a way back and some of them have told us so.

The primary reason why our editorial pages continue to remain focussed on small and micro businesses is quite simply because their fragility as individual enterprises belie the contributions which they make to job creation and to sustaining families. If they begin to disappear in numbers, the impact of household incomes (and everything else that goes with reduced household incomes) will be enormous. The other reason (and we will not cease to say so until the situation changes) is that over time, neither the state nor the Business Support Organizations (BSO’s) have paid sufficient sustained attention to their well-being. As for banks, well, suffice it to say that the operating culture of the commercial banking sector very often suggests that micro and small businesses hardly ever cross their minds and that is despite the fact that these businesses have been, over time, required to ‘jump through hoops’ in order to get the attention of the banks.

A partial assessment of the condition in which the micro and small business ‘sector’ finds itself is alluded to in the recent GMSA business survey, though that does not set out anywhere near the ‘bottom line’ as far as the crisis afflicting these entities are concerned.

With regard to the BSO’s we repeat what we have said previously… that the occasional interventions underpinned by benevolence and patronage has to be replaced with the creation of an institutionalised and structured concern with the continued growth and development of small and micro businesses. There is no persuasive evidence of any such sustained arrangement at this time, though one acknowledges, for example, that in the instance of the GMSA, in recent times, specific efforts have been made to provide small businesses with one-off market opportunities.

Neither the state nor the banks are doing sufficient for micro and small businesses at this time, the former because there appears to be no measured policy for the meaningful growth of that sector at this time and the latter because, whatever it says to the contrary, will probably always be inclined to subsume the state of health of micro and small businesses way beneath the priorities of its shareholders.

What small and micro businesses really lack at this time is a robust sponsor with sufficient clout to secure for it the backing that it needs to realise its potential in terms of real growth and significant employment generation. To varying degrees only government, the banking sector, and the Business Support Organizations can provide that backing.

Now that the post-oil find euphoria has lifted and the voluminous pronouncements on issues like local content have subsided we have seen very little advancement on the discourses that had been ensuring on the issue of making a place for small and micro businesses at the table. Are we to assume that a place is indeed being made at the table or should we consider the earlier chatter to have been part of the periodic parcels of predictable promises that are made and afterwards dropped like proverbial ‘hot cakes?’

This editorial column will never tire of saying that over the past ten years, or so, particularly, this country’s micro and small business sector, notably the agro-processing sector has performed. Here, one must acknowledge that what it has accomplished was done with the help of the state-created Small Business Bureau. (SBB). We have said before, however, that the support mechanism provided by the SBB is inadequate. Put differently, the mandate of the Bureau is not anywhere near adequately supported by the extent of the financial allocations that

it receives. Our immediate concern is that this latest lobby for struggling small and micro business does not come at the most propitious time. The ‘bigger fish’ in the business sector have already been putting out their feelers regarding ‘COVID-19 relief.’ In this issue of the Stabroek Business, for example, we report on a recent forum co-hosted by Republic Bank in Trinidad and Tobago that allows the CEOs of big companies to have their say on COVID-19 and its impact and strategies for recovery. As far as we are aware there was no seat for small and micro businesses at that ‘table.’ While we reported on the event anyway, we were reminded that on the whole, small and micro businesses have no such lobby. That, frankly, comes as no surprise to us. The reality is that invariably, when support for the micro and small business merits a reference in the public pronouncement, such support for growth and development as materialises in those pronouncements are meagre and patronising or else (as in the instance of the 20% access to state contracts for small businesses for which provision is made in the Small Business Act) pockmarked with outrageous caveats. Ours may be a small voice but all of the evidence suggests that we will have to continue to sound it.