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The forgotten thousands must seize the day
Dear Editor,
There are more than 100,000 men and women of working age in Guyana who have been officially unemployed for over a year. As their numbers are swollen by people losing work with the induced contraction in the forestry, mining and agriculture sectors, Guyana will rank only above Haiti as having the highest proportion of long-term unemployed.
This dubious honour comes despite having an abundance of natural resources, an environment that claims to favour free market economics and a 2% growth rate in 2009 to build on.
Notwithstanding the daily drumbeat of insistence that Guyana is being visited by more tourists than ever before, that the industrialized countries are lining up to pay good money for trees once they are kept standing in the forest, the brutal facts tell otherwise. Far from our economic system working, it continues to malfunction.
To be out of work for more than a year, especially for the young, is desolate beyond most people’s imagination. Some take to their beds (if they have one) for most of the day; some lime and smoke themselves into stupefaction; many withdraw from social life altogether.
They get locked in a rhythm of idleness which stretches endlessly before them. They are the forgotten, and a standing condemnation of the supposedly caring, moral community in which we live. In fact they are only the forgotten until society’s better off citizens criticise them for being idle.
We are told that young people between the ages of 18 and 35 will make up in the region of 60% of the voting public at the general elections in 2011 or before. The forgotten will have their day. Soon they will be given a choice to remain as and how they are or to embrace change – change that will bring training and employment of the long-term jobless.
When the time comes the forgotten thousands must seize the day.
F. Hamley Case
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