CEO Presentation – Queenstown Commissioning August 8, 2007

The nature of this investment is very significant and infact it represents perhaps the largest contribution made by GT&T and our parent company Atlantic Tele Network and of course the government which is a 20% shareholder in this Company to a particular region and I will gave you some of the sampling of what I mean when I say that. Each one of these three sites as Mr. Holder and others pointed out, we now have six sites, three new ones, here [Queenstown], at Supernaam, and at Better Hope. Each of these sites cost approximately US$400,000 that is about US$330,000 in direct costs, meaning equipment and infrastructure, and direct costs about US$70,000. So US$400,000 x 3 is US$1.2M which at current exchange rates is $240M. Well that is a very significant injection in the region. And as Mr. Robert Young and Mr. Carl DeMattos pointed out later this year, by the third quarter, and in the fourth quarter and rolling over into next year the wireless loop hat Mr. George spoke of, the replacement for the FWA in equipment cost alone, is equivalent to US$5.2M. When you add the direct cost it comes up to approximately US$7M or $1.4B. When you add that to the GSM you are looking at $1.4 + $240M and it is a significant injection of capital into this region. There is a saying those that wait the last probably enjoys the best.

I know that Essequibo has been waiting for a very long time. Two years or just over two years ago when I was asked to come to this Company and I was getting my briefings from the staff, I was told that there were no ends of problems in Essequibo with the Fixed Wireless. As we pointed out you had line of sight problems, you had unstable electricity creating havoc with the batteries and of course it was shared. We are very happy that in September we will be rolling out the complimentary system. In other regions you have the dependency or dependence on wire line or copper here it is wireless, so you have the most up to date wireless technology available and I want to congratulate not only my staff for working acidulously, it takes time, because the technology changes you have got to make sure that the technology is appropriate for the environment in which it is going to be installed. So we had to take into account the geographical disposition of the communities and the layouts of infrastructure in this region, we had to take into account the fact that we have a fibre optic cable which connects these six sites and then the back haul is through microwave from Suddie to Georgetown.

So you have within this community the most up to date GSM in terms of mobile cellular and the most up to date wireless technology in terms of Air Span at a total cost of nearly US$8.4M.

I urge you therefore to care this equipment and use it for the purposes intended like any good business one looks at the return on investment, in other words how are you going to use this and how are the revenues are going to be generated. I am not a businessman, I like to think of myself as more of a strategic planner, but I know that my colleagues in marketing and those who are looking at the bottom line will be anxiously awaiting the return on the investment. Any it is a very substantial investment. I would like to look beyond that and in terms of what this investment means to this region in particular. While it is good that we have the cell phone as Mr. Marks pointed out, wonder if people have ear ache sometimes because their ears glued, that is good for business, so continue doing that. In reflecting on some of the things he said, we have come a long way particularly in this region and given what Mr. Holder pointed out earlier, about the significance of this month, I wonder how many people can transpose their minds to what perhaps obtained in 1834 when in August 1 the freedom bells rang out and you had people like Damon who was looking excitedly at the future, no longer were they slaves bound to the plantation and being whipped and tortured etc in order to do the masters’ bidding, the planters, but people who now had some confidence in the future and in their own judgment to chart a future, but that did not come easily.

The very next day what happened to be a Saturday, they were ordered back to the plantations to work, and they said well we are free men you can’t order us around and the planters of course found that this was very insubordinate and called out the troops. This happened on the East Coast, East Bank Demerara, West Coast and West Bank Demerara and then it got here on the 8 August which is today, and word came that free men were being ordered back to the plantation an they would have not of it here which shows something of the resilience of the ancestors particularly those who were descendents or trace their lineage back to those days as Mr. Marks pointed out. On the 9 August, the history tells us that Damon, Captain Damon and his lieu tents organized their supporters and went to the Trinity Church just down the road, and occupied the grounds of that church, ran of a flag on the steeple, and the planters were there wondering what the hell was going on, who are these people?, what do they think they are doing?. We need labour on the plantation and here it is they are refusing to come and instead occupying the grounds of the parish. So the parish priest came and said, “look you cant do this in here”, and they said, “well the plantation houses belongs to the plantation but this church belongs to the king, so therefore we have every right to be here”. So they ordered the troops to come in and the officer in command of the troops, if I recall history correctly was a chap by the name of Captain Groves, and Capt Groves being a sensible military officer decided that these people were not armed, they were not troublemakers, they were just trying to make a point and there e could not in all consciousness open fire on them much to the displeasure of the planters. So the governor himself Carmichael Smith chose to come here and Damon decided to lead his troops down to the stelling to form a guard of honour for the governor. He had no quarrel with the governor; he hoped the governor was going to come here to see justice and fair play. Little did he know that the influence of the planters was such that the governor ordered the rounding up of the ring leaders, some were put on the tread mill, which meant you had to be pushing and grinding cane in a never ending circle, or suffered lashes, and in the case of Damon he was hanged. So Damon’s cross and the Ivor Thom sculptor that you have displayed outside of Anna Regina are very symbolic of the courage and the commitment, and the sincerity and the preparedness if necessary to pay the supreme sacrifice, and I think that people tend to take these excerpts of our history very lightly, and do not tend to draw strength from them and to show what commitment is all about. It hasn’t been easy over the years and then after the end of that period of apprenticeship by I think 15 years later, 1847, there were only two sugar plantations out of 53 left on the Essequibo Coast and one of them was Anna Regina. And the planters decided no labour, prices of sugar were falling, it fell in 1920s they fell from 100lbs per ton to 20lbs per ton. And therefore it was uneconomical so the sugar estates went into disrepair and if you look at the pattern its like five years ago we were talking about the same thing, closure of sugar estates, because of perceived fall in the price of sugar and the government of the day was then asked to at least ensure that one chimney was left standing so the government bought out that plantation at knock down prices, tried to bring it around, but couldn’t because the machinery was ancient, the plantation was allowed to go to grass and they did not have the where-with-all so it was a failure……

Onderneeming, as it was then came under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Guyana, who paid many visits and I hope that that book is still being preserved somewhere because that is rich history, it speaks about the rubber plantation, and the cotton plantation, and the sugar plantation, and the coffee plantation that existed on the Essequibo Coast.

I don’t know whether persons of the caliber of Mr. Marks can identify perhaps where these were and how successful they were and whether perhaps in our diversification programme which I understand the IDB has an interest in financing, that maybe the traditional way which we approached things, we’ve always planted rice, we’ve always planted sugar and we should continue doing this, as opposed to thinking outside the box on what is possible.

I sit on the board of the National Agricultural Research Institute, and in just brushing up on some aspects of agriculture; I picked up a report over the weekend which was written in 1963. It was a study commissioned by the then government of Guyana headed by Dr. Jagan in 1962 asking the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations to do an assessment of the agricultural production levels in British Guiana and make recommendations on how agriculture could be intensified, how it could be diversified and how we could open up the interior to crops and livestock. And there was a Professor by the name of Rene Dumont who published a report, which I would urge as recommended reading for any Agriculturalist, and one of the things he said about the Essequibo Coast because he visited all of the settlements, as they were called, the land settlements, takacuma, Borasiri, Bonasika, Black Bush Polder and so on, and he said that by 1970 he hopes here will be carved out in the Takacuma area, an area about five thousand acres, to sustain 4000 head of cattle, each one of these cows producing 400 gallons of milk annually which means that for every lactation, they have to produce about 500 gallons, and that this should be done by 1970. I am not saying necessarily that we should take those and then follow them as gospel, I am just saying that it is important that we understand where we came from, where we are, and if we ignore the lessons of the past then as Sandiana said, ‘we are likely to be condemned to repeat them.’ And I hope therefore that in our approach to development we are not throwing out the baby with the bath water but opening our minds to our history, experiences of the past and how this could help to inform us to chart a way in the future. And finally, I want to urge as Mr. Baksh did, that this technology is just seen as a means of communication to download music and to have ipods, and to send text messages. Those are important, but more importantly to me as a Guyanese is how we use this technology to improve the human condition, how does it make us more competitive in our business, what type of partnerships we can stimulate between businesses in Region 2 and elsewhere. Wearing another hat, I also chair the national working group on the millennium development goals, which is a public/private partnership to see how we could stimulate not only public and private sector but also community based organizations to work hand in glove to create employment, to alleviate and remove poverty, and to do all the things that the eight millennium goals set out to do.

… the opportunities that which are going a begging whether its in tourism or in small scale enterprises in terms of getting value added fruits, right now the fruit factory at Topco is under supplied with cherries and passion fruit and so on. I know there are logistics and other issues but the men seemed to have dropped out of the productive equation, people don’t want to; they find it tedious to pick cherries, and we worked out that one person can pick 150lbs at $60 per lb per day which is $9000 per day. Sorrel is $150 per lb and they need 20,000 lbs by Christmas.

So there are may opportunities which are there that we are not fully exploiting and I hope therefore that collectively and collaboratively we could work together to use the medium of communication to keep in touch with people. In some of the Pomeroon areas I know that you have a resort; Adel’s Resort where earlier this year we put in a remote radio there to put them in contact with the world. There are three other villages that are going to benefit in August and September, Mishabo, St Denise, and St Monica; which will have communication, what we call Rural Radio and so will Buck Hall. So where you are not within the purview of the Air Span or GSM you have these stand along facilities which have a microwave link to the next higher level.

Therefore, we are doing in my view, everything that we can to integrate and to anticipate the telecommunication infrastructure in terms of the requirements for national development and people development. I don’t personally see this as a business to make money only, but more important to me and to my colleagues I am sure, is how does this transform the lives of people, how does it put our students in a competitive mode so that they can benefit from distance learning; from packaged vocational programmes that they may not have access to particularly in the remote areas. How it makes us more competitive, how we can market more efficiently and how we can advertising whatever tourism products we have. And you should be very proud of these things; we have a lot of people who came from the Essequibo Coast who are highly respected people. Politicians, I am not here to make judgments on the type of politicians they were; you know of people like Dr. Reid, and my old friend ‘Bajie’ Hopkinson, who had some little problem over here and I remembered he said Chief of Staff, send a pontoon of soldiers, he was trying to say send a platoon of soldiers, but you know ‘Bajie’, cant see the pontoon, where is the pontoon……….

Professor Harry Anamantadoo and I know the village still has a big rock there with his name, professor of surgery at the University of the West Indies, home grown people. Persons like Winston Roberts who looks very humble and insignificant at the back there, but he and Roy Geddes, I sent them to Africa at the request of President Nyrere in the 1980s, 1984 I think it was, and the two of them are responsible for steel band in Africa, because there were no steel bands in Africa. And those of you who remember Sydney Scott, who used to be at one time head of the New Opportunity Corps, his wife Doreen, when I brought President Nyrere to visit the NOC, the lunch as a principle, you only ate what you produced and because NOC had an integrated farm there was no shortage. So he asked, because at heart he was a farmer and every time I went to Tanzania I met him at his farm, what are these things I am eating please bring the raw material let me look at them. And thick leaf calaloo, they brought the thick leaf calaloo and said this is what you are eating. And he said what, we use this as a decorative house plant, people put them in pots in Dar-es-Salaam. And right there he made a decision to ask the then President Forbes Burnham to send her to Africa and he will invite other presidents in the frontline states to send their head chefs from the hotels in order to undergo training with Miss Scott and she when there and spent six month and trained up these people. They didn’t know the uses of cassava; they didn’t know how to make cassava bread so this was part of the south/south exchange. And it shows the caliber of people that you have simple people, humble people, but they can make a difference and I hope therefore that in utilizing this equipment the GSM, and when it comes here the wireless local loop, that you will not only use it for contact with your family and friends and so on, but you will also try to integrate that system into your own concept of human, and community and regional development and ultimately national development.