2024 budget signals another tilt at a showpiece tourism industry

Having recorded a number of ‘false starts’ and even, at times, questioned the ‘ideological compatibility’ of a tourism industry with the country’s ‘ideological outlook’, Guyana would appear to have now fully embraced the reality that the various socio-political changes that the country has undergone over the years has now readied it for serious investment in tourism, a sector that has made its mark in most of the rest of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). In his Monday, January 15, reading of the country’s trillion dollar budget, Senior Minister in the Ministry of Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh, unveiled the government’s plans for what he says “will be a historic year in relation to developments in the tourism sector.” The Finance Minister’s disclosure comes on the back of what, in recent years, has been an aggressive initiative on the part of the state-run Guyana Tourism Authority (GTA) to infuse the notion of a fully-fledged tourism industry into the psyche of a society which, at one stage, previously, had been ‘indoctrinated’ in to accepting that there was a nexus between tourism and servility.