Top regional performers

Feb 13, 2023 Editorial

Editorial…

Kaieteur News – Once again, the top tier of our CSEC and CAPE students has performed with distinction in the region. We again hail them for their outstanding achievements, their awards, and their peers who did very well, but not as well to make the cut to the highest level. Again, we applaud their parents for providing the proper home environment and resources, their teachers for tireless dedication, and the Ministry of Education for spearheading what makes their recognition possible. Using our highflying students’ successes, we revisit some other students of Guyana’s soil and their passage through Guyanese life, especially in the public glare to make some points.

We have had students of science occupying senior posts in Guyana, with one at the top, in the news forever, even now that he is no longer around. Cheddi Jagan was a dentist, a Guyanese political warrior of regional and international impressiveness, and a respected Guyanese leader. Whether one was for him or against him, he came out of the local school system, and rose to the heights. He came back to government, did the best that he could for his people, the poor from which he came. There was Forbes Burnham, a man admired and vilified, but one who no Guyanese in their right mind, and a fair one, would not recognize as being a patriot of the first water. He, too, was a product of our educational system, and one who made it all the way to the top.

Over the years, we have had Ministers of Health who have been doctors, and had to have had rigorous training in the science subjects, such as biology and chemistry. One leader of more recent record, Vice President Bharat Jagdeo, a former head-of-state, has an economics background. While still another former head-of-state whose main area of concentration, outside of the military, was history, is David Granger. The point is whether hard sciences, or the so-called ‘softer’ sciences, such as business, humanities, and other fields of study, Guyana’s young students have grown into men and women, who have stepped up, been recognized for their presences and contributions to this nation. Some have lauded them, some have little use for their efforts, but they left a footprint of some meaning, depending on who is polled.

The students of today, the regional eagles and their peers of slightly lesser academic brightness, must envision themselves as our leaders of tomorrow. It is in what they bring back, what they give back, what they do in time to come that proves how much they have their fellow citizens’ backs. CSEC and CAPE results, in outstanding and pleasing fashions are a start, the stepping stones, for the road ahead, where we need strong young men and women of Guyana to travel, and carry others with them. That is, towards the kind of sparkling nationhood that has always eluded us, despite this great concentration of natural resource wealth.

As we salute the current crop of inspiring and exciting young students, we emphasize that leaders, governors, decision makers, patriots, ethicists, and men and women of principle are most urgently needed to pave the way for a better Guyana, one that we have always longed-for, but has never really had. They are our latest hope in this the flowering of Guyana’s coming age of oil. They must be up to the great tasks ahead, wrap their minds and hands around the many greater challenges, and carve out some way to lift the peoples of this nation out from where they are stuck. To articulate the known, our present cohort of leaders has been glaring in their chronic failures, their individual weaknesses.

Our youthful students can turn out to be very good doctors, legal luminaries, and business overachievers, but their best contributions could be in public service to a society that yearns for a kind that always escapes it clutching grasp. We need a better caliber of public servants, have the most use for a different breed of leaders and other elected officials. May the youngsters of the last decade, the coming one, do us proud in these aspects. How Guyanese need the different, the better, the cleaner, leading the way forward.

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CAPE, Cheddi Jagan, CSEC, Guyanese, highflying students, successes, Vice President Bharat Jagdeo

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