Voices in the Wilderness
Friday saw the commissioning of the Digicel cellular site at the hinterland mining outpost of Kwakwani, this coming roughly a week after the company’s rival GT&T launched its own cellular site there.

With the battle for subscribers perhaps mellowing on the heavily populated coastal areas, the two cell phone companies have ventured out to compete for voices in the lush wilderness of Guyana’s interior. This is a good thing.

Telecommunication is absolutely vital to development, within any geographical context, urban or rural. When it comes to the areas that people inhabit, albeit in scarce numbers, which are themselves scarcely definable as even rural, development without advanced communication technology is itself scarcely definable as development. To not be integrated into the global information and communication technology infrastructure is to risk obsolescence.

The fundamental economic impact of cellular phone entry into the interior of Guyana is clear. Whereas one minute on the average radio-telephone linkup would cost a resident of a hinterland community upwards of one hundred dollars, the basic cellular rate for both companies is less than half that; and businessmen are no longer held hostage to the whims of the weather in ensuring that the trade in goods and services between hinterland and urban communities runs smoothly.

A proper telephone infrastructure means better management of goods and capital both between urban and remote centres, and within and among the remote centres themselves.

Still, all this notwithstanding, it is hard to put an exact dollar value on placing a working cellular phone in the hands of a resident of Mahdia or Kwakwani or any of the other far-flung locations scheduled for their own cellular sites in the upcoming year.

In addition to the convenience it brings to doing business, telephone service in these locations, as has happened everywhere since Alexander Bell’s invention took off, promises to revolutionise in many ways the very social machinery of these places. Cellular phone service means that parents, in these communities that possess a reputation for lechery, can now more effectively monitor their children and supervise their development.

Cellular service also comes with its corollary of internet services, in regions starving for connections with the outside world.

The social benefits are incalculable. GT&T’s partnership in Mahdia, for example, saw the provision of cellular service to the regional administration, the offices of which are based in that township.

Residents can now call for ambulance pickups instead of trying to transport their sick and injured inadequately by foot or private transportation. At this point, precisely because of the foray into the interior by GT&T and Digicel, we may be standing at the cusp of something that may even change the demographic landscape of Guyana in the long term.

GT&T’s CEO, Brigadier General (rtd) Joseph Singh, put it best in his excellent speech delivered at the Commissioning of the Mahdia cell site.

“We have, in my opinion,” stated Mr. Singh, “the conditions which can allow for the strategic vision of previous generations, as reflected in the words of the Hon Hubert Jack, to be realized if we consult, plan in an integrated manner, and with creative, out of the box thinking, see Mahdia, in the same way as Brazil saw Brasilia, Belize saw Belize City -- a potential inland township, which can be a focal point for rapid development.

It is in this context and with such a vision that we must see the commissioning of this GSM facility as another facilitating step in developing the connectivity that will create opportunities for enterprise development, investments in a diversification programme outside of natural resources extraction--in agriculture crops and livestock, agro processing, tourism, and of expanding settlements equipped with the facilities and services, that can be catalysts for demographic shifts in our population towards the hinterland.”

With more voices in the wilderness, that change may likely come sooner than later.

Kudos to both GT&T and Digicel for making this possible.