Our society faces these three crucial, persistent problems as 2013 enters its last quarter. We faced these challenges when this year started and they persist as the year peters out.
In failing to solve the problem of local government elections, which stifles community development; in ignoring the crisis of illiteracy, which fuels a national emergency of our human capital; and in the persistent perception of widespread corruption, which provokes 
a pugnacious political playing field, we wasted this year.
Now, we see so much talk and chatter about these persistent problems that they almost become a cliché. Frustrated and fed-up, we push them from our consciousness, and continue along our passive way.
But our greatest failure lies rooted in how we see ourselves as a society, how we are being as a Guyanese nation. What do we cause? Instead of complaining of the problems, how could we cause solutions to happen? How could we generate a national ethos of optimism, where we see solutions, and work on causing inspiring results? Citizens refuse to press for solutions. We fail to cause solutions. We ourselves fail, in that we refuse to be a cause for solutions.
From members of the Opposition in Parliament, to most civic groups and private sector organizations, we tend to throw everything at the feet of our incompetent, inefficient, myopic Government, and complain that things fall apart.
We must learn to become a cause for solutions in this society.
We the citizens can, and must, cause a solution for local government elections; private entrepreneurs can, and must, initiate and cause solutions to the rotting away of our human recourse capital, and stop the creeping poison of illiteracy from killing our national mind; local community can, and must, demand and cause solutions to the perception of corruption that dogs the nation.
We can, and must, become the cause for solutions.
History records 2013 as the year when we became obsessed with a failed hydro-project. We spent so much energy, talk, money, time and acrimony dealing with the hydro-project that everything else became second priority.
Historians may look back at this year with consternation, astonished that an entire nation could expend its mind and focus on one single project – which failed.
In Parliament, through the national media, out of civic groups such as the Private Sector Commission, we became paranoid about the hydro-project, with its massive capital cost.
Now we face a wasted year.
Across this country, citizens express a helplessness in coming up with solutions. Farmers in Berbice complain that Government failed them when a hy-mac broke down. People across this country throw up their hands in despair when the Local Government Ministry installs Interim Management Committees (IMCs) of questionable merit.
When tens of thousands of our young people fail English at CXC, year after year, we turn our heads away and refuse to see the problem. The invisible crisis of illiteracy eats away at our heart and soul as a nation, and we refuse to act, to cause solutions.
Societies that become great nations learn how to be the cause for solutions, instead of sitting in passive inertia expecting someone else to make a difference.
Each Guyanese can, and must see and feel ownership for the state of our society. We must become responsible. We must feel we could cause things to happen, that we could make a difference.
Instead, most of us feel helpless, unable and small. So we refuse to take responsibility for the state of our community. We refuse to cause solutions.
This message, of course, is a familiar refrain. We know we suffer from this debilitating way of being as a people. We sit waiting to migrate, or for our overseas relatives to send the almighty remittance, and we work at jobs complaining of poor salaries and undesirable working conditions. But we fail to cause solutions, to make a difference, to come up with inspiring performance that transforms our social environs.
So pervasive is this national ethos that our young people, born into this state of being, now adopt it as a cultural thing. It’s become the Guyanese socio-cultural norm to accept things as they are – to see 20 years of community stagnation and tens of thousands failing CXC English, and do nothing about it. A whole generation grew up in this way, and now, as young adults, know no other way of being.
Talking to these young people in the villages and towns across the land shows how passively we accept the way we are, with many unable to see and feel their power, their innate human potential. It’s a sad state of affairs, especially because such a thing as a national state of being is an invisible thing, lying below the surface of the society’s consciousness. The great novelist from Trinidad and Tobago, V. S. Naipaul, dealt with this – the way we are being as a people – with deep insight. The Guyanese society, however, faced with its crisis of illiteracy, cannot see or feel the Naipaul insight: we refuse to build our society on the foundation of knowledge, literature, or good sense. We perpetuate a shallow way of being, where delving deep into who we are as a people becomes a thing of weirdness, provoking glaze-eyed boredom.
How could we aspire to be an outstanding, progressive nation, a people on the 21st century global world stage, if we refuse to embrace the essence of this Knowledge Age?
Finding solutions to the crisis of illiteracy, the problem of local community development and governance, and the widespread idea that corruption rots our nation cannot be that hard. Out of the pool of resources comprising the University of Guyana, our national media, Government, community organizations, the private sector, and citizens, how could we not have found solutions to these three emergency problems in 2013?
As the year enters its fourth quarter, we would do well to take a sober look at what we cause, what solution we generate, at how we are being this year, and commit to being a cause for solutions – willing to make the necessary sacrifices, committed to make things happen, and to generate the kind of results we desire.
