Our 47th anniversary of political Independence from Britain, observed last Sunday, saw most Guyanese shrug their shoulders in resigned abandon.
Very few Guyanese feel a sense of celebration after 47 years of the Guyanese people and nation gracing the annals of human history.
With the two political parties – the People’s National Congress and the People’s Progressive Party – dominating the nation for those 47 years, the Guyanese citizen stands feeling helpless and unable to impact the nation in any significant way.
Politics define who we are as a people. Our Guyanese culture, economic progress, national harmony, literacy development and social advancement all become subjected to the political diktat of an over-powerful State machinery.
Scattered far and wide across the global village, our nation spans the world.
Speaking English, the international language, and with outstanding Guyanese achievers everywhere on the planet, we at 47 years old should be basking in the sun of national achievement.
We started out badly, of course, with riots and ethnic violence shaping the first decade of the ‘60’s. But we got on track in the ‘70’s, albeit with the visionary leadership of Forbes Burnham suffering from unrealistic socialist ideals.
The leadership of the Jagans left much to be desired, with their communist agenda.
Today, our nation straddles two demographics: pre- and post-Independence generations, those older than 47, and those younger, born after the late ‘60’s.
Our current Government failed over the past 20 years to generate a national vision, plunging the nation into its worst literacy crisis in its history, and stagnating our human resource capital base, despite macro-economic growth springing off the pillars of land distribution, international aid and loans, remittances and organized crime.
Before this government wrestled and grabbed the reins of power, championing free and fair elections, we had Desmond Hoyte with his free market agenda that freed us from the strangulating misfortunes of the late ‘80’s.
Before Hoyte, Burnham’s nationalist socialism forced mass migration of the society’s elites.
Now, we see our Government lacking imaginative minds or creative sense, managing us with dour dullness. Educated in communist dogma, at universities in the now dead USSR and Czechoslovakia, these leaders fail to see the post-Independence generation as a new resource base.
How do we design a social space for our young people to advance this nation?
We saw how the old hands ran us aground. Our 47 years of history reveal that the pre-Independence generation lacks what it takes to make us rise to our true potential.
Even today, they bicker and fight and scream insults at each other in Parliament.
Yet, among those old heads who failed us as a nation, we find even the new young leaders, mentored and coached under a system of gross incompetence, lacking what it takes.
For example, the Parliamentarians of the post-Independence generation display as much questionable public behaviour as the old die-hards of a by-gone era.
Compounding the dilemma, our national literacy rate plunge leaves us in a nasty quandary.
Last Sunday, no one articulated even a three-year national vision so that when we turn 50, we could look back and say well done, Guyana. We drift about aimless and without visionary anchor.
In this scenario, our gifted young seek either to migrate, or to become subservient to the old thinking. New, innovative, original thinking becomes suspicious and distrusted.
How do we inspire our young people?
How do we design their development so that they take this nation ahead, like South Korea and Taiwan and Barbados and Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago?
How do we show our post-Independence generation that Georgetown once qualified as the friendliest city in the world, and the Garden City of the Americas, and the Breadbasket of the Caribbean?
Leaders such as Bharrat Jagdeo and President Donald Ramotar, who both harangued our ears with divisive and juvenile language at Babu John, cannot see what we mean when we talk of nobleness of leadership.
They seem blind to such concepts, unable to grasp the essence of building a great nation.
So what do we do? How could we transform the social space that is our nation so that our young people not only dream a Guyana Dream, but develop the courage, confidence, desire, passion, skills and education for the task?
When we budget one billion US dollars to the education sector over two decades, and see lavish contracts handed out to questionable characters to build school buildings, but fail to pay literacy teachers the pittance that is their wage, where is the character of the Minister of Education to take responsibility for such injustice?
Where is our good conscience as a nation?
At 47 years old, our leaders failed us. Those who seek and gain power lord it over us with such disdain that very many Guyanese citizens long for the British to come back and make us a colony again.
Despite what officialdom would propagate and try to stimulate in terms of celebrating our Independence, the average citizen talks of this massive gap between what we know we could be as a nation, and where we’re actually at.
The few who benefited from Independence, whether in wealth or power or both, could celebrate Independence, but for most Guyanese, at home and overseas, Independence brought only pain and anguish.
The reason is simple: the two political parties that dominate our nation strangle our vision, potential and resources.
At Freedom House, for example, selecting leaders happens behind closed doors by secret ballot, leaving those who care, like Khemraj Ramjattan and Moses Nagamootoo, out in the wilderness.
Over at Congress Place, we see Raphael Trotman and Richard Van West Charles thrown out.
The few who took control over our destiny would not let go, until we design the young to shape our nation with vision and purpose.
Guyanese younger than 47 years old, of the post-Independence generation, must take responsibility for the future, for the role we must play in shaping the 21st century global village, for the place we must carve for ourselves in the history of the human race.
The old failed and lost; the young must succeed and win. This task confronts us with profound urgency.
