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Youth leadership and policy concerns

Aug 01, 2014 Editorial

That a group of youths felt constrained to mount a public advocacy initiative outside of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport, says a lot about their seriousness in wanting to play a positive role in the formation and implementation of the policies which will affect their very lives.  It did not have to come to this, but government agencies with certain public policy mandates are either unable or unwilling to engage their constituent beneficiaries unless they are pressured to do so.
Dr. Bertram Ramcharan expressed the thought succinctly when he said “We have to hope that at some time in the future, fresh minds will gain access to power in Guyana and will be looking for the best ideas to bring about national consensus and development … wanting to help assemble a good pool of policy ideas from which they might draw” (SN August 22, 2009).
Now why did those young people feel that an appropriate move to get the attention of officialdom was to expose themselves to the potential backlash that certain actions attract as a matter of course in this country?
Ramcharan hits the point squarely when he says that “… in Guyana, we have been blessed or cursed by our political leadership,” loc. cit.  It is not as if the ministry is being rushed into formulating a youth policy; nothing could be furthest from the truth.  A National Youth Policy has been in the making since 1992, but the players at this time seem to be in a state of hibernation.
With the involvement of the Commonwealth Youth Programme Caribbean Centre (CYPCC), and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) we would have thought that some significant progress would have been made towards the realization of a youth policy.  However, that has not been the case, since there seems to be a marked lack of urgency attending policy formulation at the official level.
One remarkable factor in the equation is the fact that those young activists have not provided the quasi-professional letter-writers with grist for their propaganda mill.  The resolve of the youths is to be admired, and therefore it is in the interest of all stakeholders to support their commendable efforts to move the process beyond the production of documents which are seemingly stuck at the draft stage.
To cite Ramcharan again, “I have found from my academic career that young people will look for the best thinking … and hold on to it,” loc. cit.  What lessons are the young expected to learn from an abundance of rhetoric in an environment characterized by an acute lack of forward motion?
Over the past three weeks, Guyanese have learnt of the formation of a new non-governmental organization calling itself the Guyana National Council on Public Policy (GNCPP).  But the fact that we have been overwhelmed by the emergence of various entities and organisations begs the question, why should we accept that the GNCPP will not go the way of previous unsustainable initiatives?
Well for one thing the principal mover and shaker Dr. Phillip Mozart Thomas seems imbued with a sincerity and passion that has not been our experience in quite a while.  The prospect of a non-partisan public policy organization in the form as envisaged by Dr. Bertram Ramcharan since his Public Policy Institute formation a few years ago is welcome news.  The problem is how to keep Thomas’ vision unsullied by fringe and mainstream political elements.
The current stalemate that the young people are experiencing in moving forward the NYP process provides the GNCPP with a golden opportunity for involvement, albeit in a benign non-combative role.  After all, that public policy body must contain as part of its mandate an element which has a focus on youth issues, and therefore the organization is best placed to provide the kind of technical guidance that would be required if the youth are to achieve their objectives.
Youth leadership must remain committed to the goal of representing policy concerns by engaging players at the highest level.  Let’s work together to contradict Dr. Ramcharan’s “We have so far not been successful in having as a leader someone who can help us transcend our divisions and bring us together.”

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