The lost years are lost

Jun 03, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The caption of the Ronald Sanders column in KN last Sunday (May 29) was; “Guyana: Recovering its lost years.” There can be hardly any difficulty on the part of the average person in understanding what the term “lost years” denotes.
A majority of the world’s citizens know that it means the good, enjoyable, satisfactory things that should have happened earlier in life and didn’t occur, are now taking place
One would assume that Mr. Sanders meant to employ the construct of holism in analyzing that recovery attempt. He has to. There can be no other approach. It means therefore that one has to utilize concepts in political economy and sociology when comparing the lost years to what we have today in Guyana.
Under the Forbes Burnham regime we had a total collapse. It wasn’t the destruction of the physical infrastructure or the disappearance of our balance of payment, or the complete absence of growth rates.
In the eighties Guyana lost valuable time because everything crashed. This included the rule of law, the educational system, democracy, constitutional freedoms, cultural tolerance and ethnic harmony. If Mr. Sanders is going to assess development in Guyana within the comparative context of the eighties and the 21st century, he cannot resort to economic statistics only.
If Guyana is reclaiming its lost years then the totality of life has to be under the microscope.
I am not going to expand on economic progress under Mr. Jagdeo. Three financial experts do not agree that Guyana is doing well and has been attracting impressive foreign investment. Two of them are Dr. Tarron Khemraj and Christopher Ram. The other is a person I am sure Mr. Sanders would have no quarrel with. He is Caribbean giant, Professor Clive Thomas. My position in this column is to ask some pertinent questions within the context of the so-called reclamation of our lost years. I start with the education system. The UG Vice-Chancellor’s report in April paints a university on the verge of collapse.
This is not propaganda from opposition parties. This is a document from a foreign Vice-Chancellor who drew a canvas of a financially depleted institution that is in crisis. I humbly suggest that Mr. Sanders ‘Google’ it in the Stabroek News.
Mr. Sanders does not need a lecture to know a country without a sound educational fulcrum cannot develop. All the major top public high schools have been experiencing a frightening drought of qualified teachers these past twenty-five years. If there isn’t any improvement over the time when the PNC ruled us then the situation is confusing and inexplicable, because the PNC Government didn’t have the money to sustain education delivery. The PPP Government has.
The recapture of lost years becomes deceptive when one thinks of the crime wave in Guyana. I lived in the kick-down-the-door era and life did not become the endangered thing that it is in this land in 2011. Back in the eighties, no one answered 911. In today’s Guyana with hundreds of billions of dollars at the disposal of the current cabal, 911 is still non-existent.
I wish and hope and pray that we can retrieve our lost years. President Burnham punished erring Ministers. President Hoyte was the personification of a disciplined President. Today a phantasmagoria of macabre political monsters stalks the land. A Minister, a party prince, a favoured official can commit the most unspeakable atrocity and not only remain untouched but high police officials are scared to arrest them. The statistics on migration do not support the theory of the lost years being brought back to this country. I posed a question in a previous column and I will repeat it today. It is directed to all those who see Guyana as having done better than other CARICOM states these past five years.
If we are seeing steady growth rates, if we are doing better than our Caribbean counterparts, if we are recovering our lost years, then why in April 2011 did St. Maarten, an island of 34 square miles, slap a visa requirement on Guyanese? What did we as a nation do to warrant this insult? Something had to happen.
Why if we are doing so well, do we have, per capita, maybe the highest migration rate in the world? I saw a recent report that upped the figure from 82 to 90 percent for those with a tertiary education who permanently left Guyana. So what is the meaning of the recovery of lost years when the poor were better off in the seventies and poverty was less stark.
Maybe we need to return to those years.

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The lost years are lost

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