We talk of scamps, criminals and suspicious, degenerate characters so much. In the national media we find so little to inspire us, motivate us, lift our spirits. Guyanese around the world look at their nation, and feel grave sadness.
Whatever degenerate soul we became as a Guyanese people, our national social space filled with strife, dissent, cuss outs, accusations and lawsuits and scandals and character assassinations and maligning of reputations, the Guyanese nation today stands at a sad crossroad. We suspect everyone of being a scamp. We look at our leaders, in Government, business and Parliament, with grave suspicion.
We face the future talking of negative, dark things.
Is this the way we are as a people?
Guyanese today harbour a degenerate social space, despite our blessed natural landscape and peaceful resourcefulness. We don’t see and feel how great a blessing this country is, in the grand scheme of a broken world. Instead we see ourselves as pitiable, degraded, victims, lost in a wilderness of strife and verbal fights.
Now the sugar workers stay home in protest strikes, and the Opposition takes to the streets and villages in national public protest, which, hopefully, do not descend to violence.
Government failed to work to secure its democratic soul, with local government elections on hold for upwards
05 of two decades. Government’s handicap, its silent disability, is what we all suffer from in this country: that critical shortage of skills and expertise.
In fact, we see across this land a critical failure of institutions. Government, Parliament, the national media and, particularly, the education system, fail to turn around the state of this nation.
Walk in to any government ministry or state institution, including the public hospitals and health centres, and including encountering front line police officers, and the Guyanese citizen feels a sense of frustration, sadness and deep apathy: we lack skilled people, adequately-trained workers, professional expertise.
Talk to any government leader, and he or she expresses the same frustration. Getting things done in this country is a monumental challenge. From road contractors to private carpenters, to use one example, Guyanese face frustration every day.
The government ministries suffer from a critical shortage of professional personnel. Hampered by poor pay, inadequate training programmes and widespread illiteracy across the land, Guyanese face a state machinery that hobbles around, disabled and handicapped.
Our national budget, less than US$1 billion a year, we squabble and fight over. Our politicians engage in personal vendettas rather than grow the budget. The nation suffers.
And we go about our days hiding our head in the denial of our disability: we cannot build a nation with such a critical shortage of skills and expertise. We cannot exercise democracy in the media landscape with professional responsibility, using our freedom with sense and accountability, unless we have ethical, trained, professional journalists. We cannot operate Parliament with any semblance of leadership wisdom unless our Members of Parliament become trained in diplomacy, ethical leadership and bi-partisan engagement, mutual cooperation and collaborative give-and-take on national issues.
We cannot manage an efficient, visionary, forward-thinking government unless we develop our state machinery and a public service that serve the citizen with professional compassion and care.
It’s all too easy for us to fold our hands and blame Government, seeing Government as omnipotent god of the land. But the Government itself faces tremendous challenges, which everyone else in this society faces. The challenges facing the media in attracting skills and expertise and decent thinkers; the problems facing Parliament in attracting world class leaders as Members of Parliament; the challenges facing the private sector in attracting professional managers and CEOs, all these and more Government faces as well. So we’ve got to come together and work out our problems.
Today, we have absolute freedom of opinion and expression. Any citizen could say and express his or her feelings with ease and widespread reach, through the private media and social media.
We see some progress, in roads, housing, economic activity, first-world style buildings, and in how we dress, eat and exist.
But we fail in that crucial area of building a nation: our social development suffers, and the reason is simply that the Guyanese nation suffers from a world record brain drain and widespread illiteracy, and the solution lies not with Government only, but with each one of us.
Were we to engage Government, we would see Government leaders and ministers ready and willing to work to find solutions. But we’re too busy fighting and blaming to clear space for collaboration, cooperation and good sense.
Someone’s got to be different, to kick against the instinct of an illiterate society to demonize each other and to see shadows around every corner.
Where’s the light at the end of this dark tunnel, now extending beyond five decades, since we embarked on the road to strife, division and dissent?
The light lies with the individual Guyanese. Scores and scores of us lifted ourselves out of poverty, social morass and critical illiteracy, to conquer heights of immense admiration.
Our brilliant writer, Ian McDonald, wrote last week Sunday of Shivnarine Chanderpaul, whose self-development to become the premiere batsman of his generation, in the world, and one of the greatest in history, instructs us well.
Chanderpaul, born in a small village to poor parents making their living by fishing, unable to join a professional club as a boy, playing his cricket on the sandy Atlantic shore, shows us how we develop.
No matter what’s taking place in West Indies cricket as it fell into a freefall since the Clive Lloyd glory days, Chanderpaul ignores all the dark negativity, refusing to descend to the gutter, and just focuses on his self-development. Through his personal initiative, he developed himself, and took our entire nation along for the ride.
Let’s all take a leaf out of Chanderpaul’s book, and see our future through the lens of self-development, personal initiative and our own talents, skills and innate ability to conquer the obstacles to our dreams.
So many outstanding Guyanese rose from the little village life to conquer the world. The list is long and distinguished. In Clive Lloyd, Shiv Chanderpaul, and countless others, we see how we could transform our nation.
