The Guyana Youth Corps was a failure

Feb 13, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The Guyana Youth Corps, established under the People’s National Congress, was a monumental failure. If after seven years all it could have shown was the training of 1200 youths, then the corps can rightly be said to be an unmitigated disaster.
There are Sunday schools out of which more persons pass through in seven years than the state-sponsored Guyana National Youth Corps.
The corps was an attempt by the Forbes Burnham regime to mobilize young people for agricultural work. It failed because it was manipulated to mobilize support for the People’s National Congress. It was eventually dissolved into the Guyana National Service. This was more than forty years ago.
Yet, we are now being told that the government is planning to reintroduce the Guyana Youth Corps. It would be interesting to learn whether Cabinet has pronounced on this issue or this is going to be yet another of the ill-conceived wildcat initiatives which are being used as a palliative to rising youth frustration with this administration.
Young people do not need organizations such as the Guyana Youth Corps. Public service trainees do not need a staff training college to help them integrate into the public service.
These organizations belong to the Soviet era when persons had to be indoctrinated. Organizations such as the Public Service Staff Training College and the Guyana Youth Corps will end up having their original functions being perverted over time. They will become filters to help ensure that party supporters are manoeuvered into public service jobs.
Palliative measures are being employed by a visionless government to help appease young people who are frustrated by the lack of opportunities. There are only so few jobs which can be created through self-employment.
There are only so few jobs which can be created by people making plantain chips. There are only so few jobs which can be created through all the other measures which the government are promoting. Those measures will not make a dent in youth employment.
What Guyana needs is investment. What Guyana needs are labour intensive industries. What Guyana needs is the establishment of factories What Guyana needs is for the government to stop crowding out the private sector. What Guyana needs are massive call-centers to be established. What Guyana needs is to assist existing businesses to expand by offering tax-breaks for reinvestment of profits. What Guyana needs is to reduce crime so that investors would be willing to expand their businesses.
But these things are not happening. Instead a whole set of initiatives are being attempted which will place burdens on the treasury. It was, precisely the establishment of military and paramilitary united such as the Guyana Peoples Militia, the National Guard, the Guyana National Service which drove Guyana into recession in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s from which the country has never recovered. The State and state-sponsored organizations became a huge burden on the treasury and had to be shed.
A lot of persons had a high experience in the National Service and therefore they support calls for its reintroduction. But the bottom line is that the National Service was never profitable and represented a huge drain of public resources. Education, health and sports suffered because of the need of government to finance those things.
It is not unusual that politicians should have a fascination with the things that were part of their growing up or with which they were associated before they entered politics. And perhaps this need to vindicate those things is what is driving APNU to make these leaps into the void.
APNU is on a mission to vindicate Burnham by reinventing what he did in the hope that it can be successful this time around. It is form of political revisionism.
Guyana needs to be putting money into our schools. It needs to be putting money into education instead of trying to relive a fantasy. The reintroduction of the Guyana Youth Corps is a bad idea and as most bad ideas it comes with a hefty price tag.
The proposed Guyana Youth Corps will fail. Young people have no time for such nonsense. It did not work forty years ago. It will not find traction with the present generation.

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The Guyana Youth Corps was a failure

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