Ruminations extend Happy New Year greetings to all Guyanese, at home and in the diaspora. At the same time, we pray for people, and especially children, in Gaza and in other troubled areas of the world. With no sign that the world has an appetite to end the 2024 barbarity in Gaza, we continue to hold out hopes that sanity would prevail and end the genocide in Gaza in 2025.
Ruminations express, too, our profound sympathy to the Government and people of America, and to the family of President Jimmy Carter who passed away last Sunday.
As 2024 was coming to an end, the President of the US EXIM Bank informed President Irfaan Ali that the Bank has formally approved a US$526M loan to bankroll Guyana’s Gas-to-Energy project, capping a phenomenal year for Guyana. While EXXON would have invested far more than this on the Stabroek Block so far, the GtE Project is far-and-away the largest single infrastructural investment ever in our country, maybe until we complete the Amaila Hydroelectricity Project before 2030.
This real game-changer would significantly cut Guyana’s fossil fuel use, reducing carbon emissions by about 420M tons annually. This project is likely to cut electricity costs by 50% for every family, every business, in Guyana. In the last five years, the Government has been able to more than double the amount of electricity generated. With this project, generation would be doubled again. GPL would have no excuse for blackouts by insisting that Guyana does not have enough generation capacity.
The Opposition had claimed that no development bank would support the project, because it is not a viable project. When VP Bharrat Jagdeo announced that the US EXIM Bank found the project viable and gave its preliminary approval about a month ago, one of the PNC-led APNU/AFC MPs and a leader of the AFC, David Patterson, boldly declared that VP Jagdeo was lying. In spite of the efforts of PNC and AFC leaders to spread misinformation and to give the impression that VP Jagdeo was lying, a US under-secretary (a kind of deputy-minister in America) announced that the EXIM Bank indeed had given preliminary approval for the loan. Now we have the final approval and go-ahead for the US EXIM Bank to provide a loan of US$526M for the project. The decent thing for the Opposition members to do is admit they were wrong. But we should not hold our breath.
By any standard, 2024 was an incredible year for Guyana. Guyana’s GDP growth in the first half of 2024 was almost 50%. The country that was 2nd in GDP growth in the first half of 2024 was just about 11%. As part of this growth, rice had a phenomenal year, with a production of almost 720,000 tons. In 2014, the last full year that the PPP government was in office, before the PNC-led APNU/AFC took over, production had hit 698,000 tons. In the first crop of 2015, production was close to 380,000 tons, and yet the PNC-led APNU/AFC government failed to reach the 700,000 tons. In fact, between 2015 and 2020, Guyana dropped to below 600,000 toms. The rice farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Government have done an incredible job in reaching the 700,000 tons of rice production in 2024, with an expectation of significant increase in 2025. Meanwhile, aquaculture production has increased by more than 100% in 2024.
In 2025, the new high-rise Demerara River Bridge will be commissioned. This more-than- US$200M investment would bring great relief to commuters, but would also change the landscape, transforming the look of the country, reconciling the way we look with our new status as a high-middle-income developing country. At the same time, construction of the Wismar-Mackenzie Bridge across the Demerara River should also be coming to an end, transforming travelling into Guyana’s hinterland and how Linden looks. By the end of 2025, construction of the new Corentyne River Bridge, the Highway to Lethem, and other major highways in Guyana should also be quite advanced.
In 2025, a new stadium and new airport, shopping center, hotel, private hospital would be completed or be in advanced construction in Palmyra, creating a whole new, modern town in Berbice. Region 6 should also see development through the Deepwater Harbour and construction of an oil refinery. The new Technology Institute in Port Mourant, together with the Hospitality Institute, would transform Port Mourant.
By the end of 2025, the Paediatric and Maternal Hospital, one of the most advanced hospitals in CARICOM, built at a cost of US$161M, should be ready for commissioning. By the end of May, six new, modern, regional hospitals, built at a cost of US$180M, would be commissioned in Regions 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. By the end of 2025, construction of new regional hospitals in Regions 1, 7, 8, 9 and 10, at a cost of about US$150M, should be in advanced stages. A new public hospital at a cost of US$161M in New Amsterdam should be in advanced construction.
In 2025, new, iconic health projects would be started: construction of a new GPHC, the biggest ever health project in CARICOM, and Guyana’s first cancer centre. Not to be outdone, similar transformation is taking place in the education sector. More than twenty new schools are to be commissioned or be in advanced construction in 2025.
With thousands of community roads and streets that have already been either upgraded or newly constructed, and hundreds more to be done in 2025; with thousands of new homes in dozens of new housing schemes, and new businesses, the landscape in Guyana is truly being transformed. The very next generation coming up will find stories of the old Guyana with its shacks and mud dams, with its dilapidated hospitals, schools, police stations, hard to believe. The talk of the Dubai of the Americas might be hyperbole for now, but for sure a bright new spot in the Americas has emerged.
Happy New Year!