There has got to be a modern Guyana after the 2011 elections

Oct 19, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Two announcements that show the inferiority/superiority difference between countries came two weeks ago at the same time. The NIS announced that it is perilously close to an exhaustion of funds. At the same time, Britain announced that its mandatory retirement age of 65 has been legally scrapped. The first disclosure is about stupid leadership at the policy-making level. The second one reveals that there are countries that respond to serious structural problems by innovative leadership.
The statistical facts about the NIS are appallingly frightening. Without an outlay of those facts one sentence should sum it up all. Here it is; “An IMF report released in July (2011) warned that the mismatch between pension benefits and contributions and weak reserve management threaten the sustainability of the Scheme.”
Now read on for the beginning of that threat. For the first eight months of 2011, payouts exceeded by over half a billion dollars the contribution received by the Scheme.
Faced with massive payout of pensions and diminishing contributions, Britain has abolished mandatory retirement. The announcement came at the very time the news featured the dilemma the NIS is facing In Guyana, public servants’ mandatory exit is 55. Add those numbers to the fact that over 85 percent of people with tertiary education permanently migrate, add to that fact there are major NIS evaders and the Scheme is not only in horrible trouble but in its death throes.
We are into a national election where the winner will have the authority to make changes to the country. There can be more of the post-colonial mediocrity or the winner can demonstrate transformational leadership. The latter is what this country cries out for. In what ways, in how many ways has this country been changed to reflect modern thinking, modern values?
It has to be one of the most depraved acts of primitive thinking to make civil servants retire at age 55.
The next government that comes into being after December 2011 has to remove that mockery. We blame the colonials for all the nonsense they handed down to us. But even if that is true, they have left us behind because they have cast off the very laws they handed down to us.
They abolished them because the past from where they came is long gone and new ages which required new thinking came into being. In Guyana, a generation of leadership that took power continues to accept the foolishness they inherited from colonial rule.
Take divorce, which in a Catholic country like Italy has been modernized. In Guyana, two persons who have irreconcilable difference cannot go to a judge and ask for a dissolution. Attorney Nigel Hughes puts it this way, “Currently legislation for divorce is horrendously outdated.” (interview, KN, Nov 10, 08) Now here is where legal immorality comes in. The ancient divorce laws in Guyana virtually compel you to lie.
There are two reasons that must be cited to the courts in order to get a divorce – malicious desertion or cruelty in the marriage. In other words, you have to cite one of these two faults. But what happens if there is no desertion and no cruelty? Then you have to invent it.
Someone talked about introducing into Guyana what the rest of the world has – no fault divorce. This is a situation in which the lawyers for the couple tell a judge that they mutually agreed not to stay in the legal covenant anymore. And the legal dissolution becomes automatic.
The world is in the 21st century, but we continue to have laws on divorce that were handed down to us more than 100 years ago.
Next year the madness outside the GRA will resume. All owners of vehicles have to get a licence within a specified two-month period. It still boggles the mind to fathom why we get our road fitness certificate and our insurance at different times in the year, but only in a particular period we can access the GRA licence.
We accepted what came down to us when we were colonial subjects and we are content to live in that primitive administrative culture.
No one in power has thought of an innovative approach to this crazy situation. One is to make it a three-year document like a driver’s licence. Or compel owners to produce it when they go for their fitness certificate or their insurance.
Bruce Golding goes out shortly, but the Jamaican PM will be remembered for referring to Guyana as an international beggar. We can’t innovate, we can’t modernize. All we do is beg.

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