Panelists at a highly anticipated public symposium on Guyana’s constitutional reform process were faced last evening with questions over the lack of engagement by young people with the subject.
The symposium, hosted by the Carter Center and supported by the UK High Commission in Guyana, was held at the University of Guyana’s Turkeyen Campus, where there was a paltry turn out, despite wide publicity.
“I see a lot of veterans in the room… which is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it would have been very lifting if we had a lot more students here to ask the kind of searching questions…,” Gino Persaud, one of the panelists, told those gathered.
Persaud is an attorney and a founding member and past president of the Transparency Institute of Guyana as well as a member of the Steering Committee on Constitutional Reform (SCCR) which was established by government in August, 2015, as the issue was one of its campaign manifesto priorities.
Aside from Persaud, none of the other panelists took issue with the lack of youth participation, including the paucity of university students.