When is this El Dorado coming, Sir?

Feb 22, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

A commentator has the right to his/her opinion no matter how uninformed others may think it is. Those of us who feel that the contents may be too misleading or stronger in emotions and weak on facts may feel the need to reply so that each proposition could be put in proper perspective.
It is within that context that I offer my rejection of last Sunday’s KN column of Ron Sanders, titled; “El Dorado may be in sight at last.”
That is a very optimistic, enchanting title. When one speaks of El Dorado one is thinking of a very plentiful, satisfactory society. Mr. Sanders’s hopes are not new. From the time the British colonists arrived here, this territory was seen as the richest in the British West Indies.
Since then its inhabitants have dreamed of El Dorado and have kept looking out for its arrival. Mr. Sanders may just be the latest in a long queue. My problem with Mr. Sanders’s conclusions is there must be some pieces of El Dorado visible to us here in Guyana and from that presence we can have expectations. This is where Mr. Sanders will be hard pressed to defend his thesis.
Where are the pieces? One can assume that Mr. Sanders may have submitted his Sunday
column before the announcement that Guyana will be importing mathematics and science teachers. Surely, you cannot have El Dorado without a sound educational foundation.
All sociologists, economists and social scientists will tell you, a society will never make it without a solid education system in place.
Mr. Sanders is a widely traveled person. He must have seen that foundation, especially at the tertiary level, in the CARICOM region. I say in all sincerity, I do not believe that UG can secure accreditation from the leading bodies in the world in the university business if UG resources were to be investigated.
All sociologists, all economists and all social science experts would tell you that a society cannot take off and will not sustain itself if it does not have a human resource base. Ours in Guyana is so thin that it may soon be described as non-existent.
When is this El Dorado coming and can it come and remain if the Guyanese educated class keeps leaving which brings me to Mr. Sanders’s comparison between Guyana and the rest of CARICOM?
Guyana emerged most favourably when Mr. Sanders did the comparison. And this leaves Mr. Sanders with a ticklish question. If we are so well off, why then is this constant flow out of Guyana and not the other way around?
Barbados complains of illegal migrants from other islands and Guyana. Why aren’t our neighbours coming here? Why a country like Guyana with El Dorado on the horizon is losing its people to Barbados, Suriname, Antigua and Trinidad? Now logics come in here. If Guyana is soon to become an El Dorado, surely, Vincentians should have started trickling in. We are not witnessing any discernible movement of CARICOM folks to these shores?
A fundamental error in Mr. Sanders’s argument is his reliance on statistics from official sources. He quotes the Finance Minister. But for those who live in Guyana, we know that two top class experts in finance have disputed those figures on development – Christopher Ram and Professor Clive Thomas.
Two years ago, Thomas opined that the statistics on growth could not be true when one takes sectoral performances into account. Mr. Ram, last year was devastating in his rejection of official points on growth, actually coming close to calling them lies.
There has to be a resort to the presentations of people like Ram and Thomas if we are going to offer an analysis of Guyana’s economy. Few persons in the world would question the intellectual capacity of Professor Clive Thomas as a competent and successful economist.
If and when El Dorado comes, it will be El Dorado in a primitive land. I am not sure if that is not a contradiction in terms. Can you have El Dorado in an ancient society that is not modern? Can a country become an El Dorado without electricity supply to its population?
We do not have lamps on our most important streets. Drive in the night here and you are in Naipaul’s area of darkness. Can El Dorado survive the ubiquitous squalor of Georgetown?
More importantly, how can you have El Dorado without democracy, when the rule of law is broken down, when police are the most feared people, when corruption eats away at the economy, when ethnic discrimination is a daily diet?

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When is this El Dorado coming, Sir?

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