UncappeD 111

Last weekend’s UncappeD event at the National Stadium blew a breath of fresh air across a section of the country’s entrepreneurial landscape that had been blighted by the Covid-19 pandemic for the preceding two years. Enterprises ranging from agro processing to craft and fashion fitted themselves into cramped cubicles at the Stadium, a circumstance which failed to do aesthetic justice to the contents of the cubicles, a reminder that the creation of a purpose-built display facility (or perhaps more than one such facility) will, hopefully, sooner rather than later, be factored into the disbursement plans for some of our petro dollars.

Still, it was easy to detect that this intrepid band of local entrepreneurs was pleased, visibly thrilled in some instances, to regain a fitting stage, even if, at least not yet, a market that can bring the recovery from the economic doldrums into which many of them had sunk in the preceding two years.

Some of them had even had the temerity, over the weekend, to promote new products and even to demonstrate that they had stepped up their packaging and labeling, weaknesses which it had long been felt, were among the factors barring their way to sustained and lucrative international markets.

This time around, it was, as much as anything else, some of the arresting stories of the womenpredominated UncappeD event, that had to do with their own fearsome battles to keep their proverbial heads above water in a business environment that had been ravaged by Covid-19 and which has left them not just out of pocket, with all the attendant consequences, but also having to deal with the fearsome thought that they might never rise again.

Over the last weekend they offered comforting glimpses of having begun to pick themselves up and to get back into the entrepreneurial race again.

Overwhelmingly, they contend that government, on the whole, had, over the years, ‘come up short’ in terms of support for their sectors, that official undertakings had been manifested almost mostly in empty promises; that when push had come to shove gestures like the Small Business Bureau, however well-meaning these might have been, were grossly insufficient in terms of the support that they offered to meet the needs of a country-wide small business sector to which politicians and bureaucrats had assigned a level of lip service which, for the most part, didn’t go much further.

Save and except the accommodation of the UncappeD event afforded by the official ‘gifting’ of the premises for the staging itself, there was no particularly marked political input there. The people and the products and the celebration and exhalation associated with the lifting of the strictures associated with the pandemic were more than sufficient to make UncappeD 111 a pleasing event.

The evidence of what was on display at the Stadium last weekend suggested that the sectors represented there in agro processing, craft and fashion, among others, had not simply locked themselves away during those uncertain preceding months. There was evidence that for some, the period of ‘quarantine’ had been used, in many instances to reset, reinvent themselves and refine their products. New ideas, new products across the disciplines were on display at Providence over the weekend. Most pleasing, perhaps, was the fact that our women entrepreneurs had not only held firm but had used the ‘lockdown’ to reinvent themselves,, to put new ideas and to revisit issues like product presentation and packaging. On the whole, UncappeD 2022 was an impressive ‘we’re back’ declaration from our micro and small businesses that had survived and come through, largely on their own.

In more ways than one the event gave government something to think about. It would have, one hopes, given rise to official reflection on promises, going back years, to create a more convivial infrastructure within which (for example) agro-processing can strive, a promise, had it been kept, would have been responsible for the likely transformation into hundreds of micro and small businesses into more lucrative undertakings, by this time. It might, as well, have given rise to sober official reflection on the seeming change in the outlook of the once much-vaunted Small Business Bureau whose procedures and conditions for providing material assistance to small businesses have become considerably unpleasing to many of those who have sought its help.

Still, the efforts of the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) to return the UncappeD ‘Show’ are to be commended, the excellence of the event and what it meant to the hundreds of enthusiastic attendees over the weekend stood out in stark contrast to the tiresomeness of the empty promises, the leaden-footedness of officialdom that has never really gotten much past ‘talking up’ those types of small businesses, aware of the political mileage that can be derived from those types of public pronouncements.

In a sense it is a matter of regret that, even up to this point, government has failed to get the point of understanding that the noise in the market is by no means indicative of brisk sales. By now, surely, it must have dawned on officialdom that the gestures that they have made up to this time are hopelessly inadequate to come even close to meeting the needs of emerging enterprises such as those that turned up at the Stadium over the weekend. Their growth will require a great deal more than what, contextually, have been, up to this time, no more than measured handouts which, in truth, bear a much closer resemblance to patronage than to any real desire for progress in a society where themes like foreign investment and its local content derivatives (which, of course are by no means unwelcome) have long superseded the development of a robust micro and small business sector in the thinking of officialdom. That has to be readjusted if we are to become known as more than simply an oil and gas economy.