International civil servant and former central executive committee member of the PNCR, Dr Richard Van West Charles proceeds on pre-retirement leave early next year and is making preparations for a return to an active community and political life within the party.
Van West Charles, a Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) Special Advisor on Partnerships with Financial Institutions based in Washington DC, told the Stabroek News during his vacation in Guyana last week that he had enough of working in the international arena. He said he now wants to participate in the country’s developmental process.
Towards this end, he said, he has established a non-governmental organisation, called ‘Partnering and Nurturing for Development in Guyana’ which has as its focus, networking to look at community based development, poverty alleviation and capacity building.
He said that his NGO along with the US-based GUYDA (Guyana Development Association) of which he is also a member is seeking to establish computerized learning centres to provide easy access to information on critical issues in communities. The objective is also to build community kiosks to improve internet access in some rural areas, particularly farming communities, as has been done in some places in India and Egypt. “This will help with information on topical issues,” he said adding that it was also, “education for democratic citizenship, to teach people their rights and responsibilities and to be involved in direct way in the decision-making process.”
He opined said that if there were more citizens’ involvement, partisan and race issues would begin to dilute because the process would be more transparent.
“No one institution,” he said, could tackle the problems that exist at the community and national levels and he stressed the need to network to bring greater value to the limited human and other resources available.
He said he felt he could contribute to Guyana’s development given his skills at the managerial level, view of global issues, understanding of the active role of the citizenry in development and decision-making, as well as understanding issues of transparency and accountability as part of efficient governance.
Van West Charles worked for the past 18 years with PAHO/WHO in various capacities in the Caribbean with responsibilities that covered Barbados and the eastern Caribbean islands, Jamaica, Cayman Islands, Bermuda, the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands before going on to Washington DC. Even though he lived overseas, he said, he kept abreast with developments taking place at home. “My experience can and will make a significant contribution in terms of human capital.”
He added that he would like to look at the inhibitory factors that are preventing Guyana from using its vast potential in natural and human resources. Asked what these factors were, he said that the main ones were clearly governance and the race issue. The latter, he said, must be addressed “or this country would not evolve. It must be dealt with at the school level right up from nursery to tertiary. There is also need for grassroots discussions, or community levels, on the issue of race because of its deep cultural underpinnings. The education system has to address it.”
Over the years, Van West Charles said, Guyana has not put the race issue on the table to address it directly. “Retrospectively, the PNC in government did not do enough,” he said, even though the government at the time did give equitable religious holidays to the Christian, Hindu and Muslim communities. There remain insecurities in different parts of the country and not only among the two major ethnic groups, East Indians and Africans, but among the Amerindian communities as well.
In response to whether the Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) was addressing the issue of race sufficiently, Van West Charles said he did not think the ERC was being proactive, but reactive.
“The political parties need to get involved,” he said. “The political parties have to make the change. People need to understand that race in the Guyanese political scenario is linked to power, economics and the political culture.”
Asked about his involvement at the political level and future involvement at that level in Guyana, Van West Charles, a son-in-law of the late PNC founder leader, said, even though he was overseas, he always maintained his membership of the party. He was present at the party’s last biennial congress and he said, “I am going to be engaged in a more direct way in the role of party in the country in the future. I will be working with others to strengthen the institution.”
Asked whether he was satisfied with Party Leader Robert Corbin’s performance, he said, “I think we need to have a more effective performance from the leader of the party.
“The leadership is all of the governance bodies of the party. However, there is room for improvement in a number of areas and one of these areas, is how we connect in a more effective way with the communities.”
The party at this stage, he said, needed to have a more dynamic system of relating to community issues, “a language that speaks directly to the community and address in a very direct way the issues of poverty and some of the social exclusion issues.”
Asked whether PNCR members were being socially excluded at various levels, Van West Charles said that was not the case since the party’s membership was about 16,000 to 18,000 and clearly many more people were involved. He said there were members of the PPP/C and other political parties and those not politically affiliated who were socially excluded but it was not a deliberate act of the government; some of it had to do with incompetence at the governance level.
He gave the example of unemployed youths without skills and the need to work with them to build their self-esteem and to convert their energy to human capital for the development of themselves, their communities and the country.