There has never been a time in our post-independence history when we have ever been able to seriously embrace the slogan ‘Sport as a Nation Builder.’ The notion had been a political contrivance in the first place, which has never been able to get much beyond the stage of wishful thinking. Sport has never been able, in our instance, to play a really meaningful role in nation-building since the political ‘noises’ have never really been supported by evidence of any serious official intent, in terms of either the articulation of policies or in the extent of official preparedness to make the requisite material investment.
In those earlier post-independence years a lot of what we did in order to try to fit sport into a politically defined context was attended by a kind of much ado but nothing approach that tended to magnify little things as though, for example, the staging of a tournament in any sports discipline amounted to a great deal more than it actually was. One might add that even back then, this practice departed sharply from the much more deliberate efforts of other countries in the region, Jamaica being the standout example here, to treat sport as a tool that could bring the country global recognition, which is exactly how it has turned out for our sister Caribbean country.
In Guyana’s instance the administration of sport has always appeared to derive from the notion that chatter could be employed to bring about the hoped-for outcomes, never mind the fact that we have had access to evidence that other nations were deriving results from the genuine infusion of sport into their wider nation-building pursuits. In our instance sport has always been a tenuous appendage to be patronized in spurts of political high-spiritedness. This, in large measure, remains the case to this day,
Here again it is apposite to cite the instance of Jamaica which fellow CARICOM member country has been seriously ‘walking the walk’ with outstanding success even as we continue to do no more than ‘talk up’ our pursuits in the sport arena. One might add that while we in Guyana have become fervent admirers of the accomplishments of Jamaica’s track superstars we never appeared to give much thought to conceptually taking a leaf out of our CARICOM partner’s book in terms of preparation for success. Here, one wonders whether we may not, by now, have reached a point of ‘indoctrination’ that has altogether removed from us the ability to distinguish the wood from the trees.
First staged in 1967 the Inter-Guianas Games was underpinned by the pursuit of an initiative to press sport into service to build bridges among the Guianas…Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. The extent to which the Games’ bridge-building pursuits have succeeded is clearly questionable. What is not in question is the failure of the Inter-Guianas Games to go anywhere in terms of enhancing the standing of any of the three participating countries in the global sports arena.
For us in Guyana, however, specifically, the concept of sport as nation-builder has never really worked since, rather than deriving from a clear conceptual plan that was part of a studied national development agenda, it appeared to arise out of the skewed ‘logic’ of the day that subscribed to the view that if an idea could be repeated sufficiently and with a certain level of boisterousness then it would eventually come to be accepted even if not altogether believed. It was a question of not really knowing – or caring for that matter – just where sport fitted into the broader nation-building agenda.
Here, it would be altogether unjust not to separate cricket from the clutter. The ordinary origins of the game in backyards and pastures, employing as it did some of the earlier crude tools of the trade and hemmed in by no restrictions beyond the enthusiasm of the game’s disciples had meant that it had escaped the clutches of the sport-as-a-nation-building crowd. Cricket required no overarching political validation. It found its way into the mainstream sports arena pretty much on its own terms. It is for that reason that, over time, it has prospered as a national sport and has been able, with much less difficulty, to parade to the rest of the world the best – in terms of sport – of what Guyana has had to offer.
If the organizers might have felt ‘hurried’ by the President’s promise last year that the Inter- Guianas Games would have been revived, they cannot excuse themselves the brevity of the period of preparation for the event, a circumstance that caused the Games to attract a less than deserved measure of public support. The event, it seemed, might also have been compromised by inclement weather.
The organizers, surely, would have been better advised to allow themselves more time for both a higher standard of competition and for a more generous measure of public support, even though one makes this point unsure as to whether the timetable for the staging of the Games might not have been politically dictated.
That the Games came and went seemingly without benefitting from the kind of prior preparation by the young athletes that might have made the experience far more worthwhile whilst affording the spectacle a more generous measure of public support raises the question as to whether the event had benefitted from sufficient prior time-tabling. Those are not questions to which we are likely to get satisfactory answers even though the manner in which the event ‘played out’ provided sorry little inclination of a serious preparedness to depart from what has obtained – and has manifestly not worked – from time immemorial.
