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Our Future

Jul 05, 2009 Editorial

Last Friday, heralding the annual rite of passage for another crop of our children and our future – this year, 18,000-plus eleven-year olds – the results of the National Sixth Grade Assessment (NSGA) were announced. At the time, the 30th Heads of Government Conference of CARICOM was in full swing.
Tomorrow we observe CARICOM Day, which is a public holiday in our country. Is there a connection between these events? Well, there ought to be. In every member state of CARICOM (at least the ones that were former British colonies) the Common Entrance examination, its predecessors and successors have been emblematic of our pursuit of education as a way station to our emancipation from the poverty of our underdevelopment.
In the early days, a lucky few from outside the privileged strata were able to enter high school from where they strove to become “island scholars”. All of our leaders that led our countries to independence were products of this system.

And those same early leaders created CARIFTA in 1968 and then its successor CARICOM in 1973. They did so because they realised that “education” was only a means to an end – development in the widest sense of the word – but one that needed, at a minimum, a developed economy.
They recognised very early on, however, that the minuscule size of our individual countries placed insurmountable structural barriers to the achievement of sustainable income levels that would guarantee our people lives of dignity. CARICOM was supposed to be a synergistic vehicle to deliver the good life for all Caribbean peoples.

Thirty-six years down the line where are we? By and large, those bright-eyed youths that enter our high schools year after year after their assessment tests, still cast their eyes abroad when they are asked to envision their future. And this is the reality for all our CARICOM members, not just Guyana.
There are more citizens (and their descendants) of every one of our territories residing in the metropolitan countries that in their native lands. This is true even of Barbados, which is strutting very cockily at the moment. Their success is only relative and in any case is built on shifting sands as is evident in the present collapse of the tourist trade.
CARICOM was supposed to give us all a firmer foundation that would be based on pooling all our human and natural resources.
We do not have to repeat those benefits here. For thirty-six years, the curriculum of our primary schools has drilled them into the minds of our youths so that any of the 18,000 recent graduates of the NGSA could probably recite them from memory.

Do the leaders of CARICOM, who would have wrapped up their three-day meeting last night, appreciate the cynicism that has been created in almost two generations by their refusal to deliver the promise of our early visionary leaders? So we will have another set of declarations proclaimed. But what do they mean, when as in the past thirty-six years, none of these leaders are prepared to subsume their egos and cede some power into a governing mechanism that will have the wherewithal to implement the said declarations?
As a founding member of CARIFTA and CARICOM, home of the CARICOM Secretariat, one of only two territories to honour CARICOM with a public holiday and acceptance of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as their final court of appeal and having an open offer to other members to share in its development, Guyana does not have to prove anything about its commitment to regional integration.
But maybe, as the old song goes, one has to know “when to hold and when to fold” and consider whether we have to look at alternatives for development synergies. A continental destiny for our NSGA graduates possibly?

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