Dear Editor,
National Reform Governance: Reconciliation and the sharing of responsibilities and decision-making are necessary to successfully design and implement national strategies that would include social, economic and constitutional reforms for inclusiveness and for a level-playing-field to end unfair ethnic and class competition in Guyana.
We need national reform governance mechanisms to address the concerns, fears and needs of all ethnic communities. Firstly, the participation of political parties in the inclusive governance process must be based on the 2020 results of the recounted votes. Secondly, elected civil society organizations must be welcomed as equal actors on the “inclusive governance stage”. Thirdly, there must be the full involvement of leaders from the working class, the poor, women and youth from each ethnic community.
Leadership is key: National reform governance will require fairness, patience, compromise and listening with respect to diverse political views. For success, all the participants must have an equal status; all participants must cooperate to achieve common goals that would be supported by state and non-state institutions.
We must heed the advice of international leaders on negotiations and governance.
“I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I would still be in a kind of prison”.
“We must judge our nation not by how we treat our highest citizens, but its lowest ones”.
Martin Luther King Jr.:
“One of the things I learned when I was negotiating was that until I changed myself, I could not change others”.
“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus”.
Mahathir Mohamad, long-time elected leader of Malaysia:
“You have to lead. You should be sensitive to what your followers think. But if you do exactly what they want, you are not a leader”.
The implementation of an Action Programme is essential: The priority for national reform governance should be the simultaneous implementation of an agreed package of social, economic and constitutional reforms and strategies such as: creating of a new Elections Commission based on the experiences of other countries; reducing poverty across and within ethnic communities in the urban, rural and hinterland areas; reducing corruption; removing unfair class and ethnic competition and provide equal opportunities for workers, the middle class, business people, the poor, women and young people from all ethnic communities; implementing a National Development Plan to raise productivity and growing the non-oil sectors such as value-added Agriculture, Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Transportation, Engineering and Tourism; supporting the expansion of the private sector; and implementing an export marketing programme to increase the export of a diversity of value-added products and services to current and new markets.
Without national reform governance, Guyana will drift into a deeper cycle of poverty, and unfair ethnic and class competition will continue between the ethnic communities, with all the obvious grave consequences.
Yours faithfully,
Geoffrey Da Silva
Former Chief Executive Officer of the Guyana Office for Investment
Former Guyana Ambassador to Venezuela
