TIME TO DELIVER WHAT IS LONG OVERDUE!

May 27, 2024 Letters

---

Dear Editor,

Guyanese are observing the 58th anniversary of our country’s independence from the United Kingdom.

Just as fifty-eight years of age for a man or woman is considered to be still young, so must the age of nationhood. In relation to human and infrastructure development, Guyana as a country is better off in many respects since our gaining independence.

But our small population, and huge space within long established geographic boundaries has its advantages and disadvantages. In spite of that, as a country, we are blessed with an abundance of natural resources.

There has always been discussion over why Guyana, with such an abundance of natural resources was never been able as a nation to make a ‘Great Leap Forward.’ To this day, skeptics and cynics in our midst keep saying that our newly-found wealth will be frittered away and that the common man, woman and child will not be the beneficiaries of the resources garnered from our oil and gas resources. The constant harping and bad-talking of our country can be heard at home and abroad. Suffice it to say, we did waste a lot of time and energy parading under the slogan and experimenting ideologically with ‘Cooperative Socialism.’

In the recent past, some argued that we should have modeled ourselves to be like Malaysia and Singapore. Nowadays, we hear talk about Guyana modeling itself to be the ‘Dubai of the Caribbean.’ We need to truly recognize who we are and where exactly we ourselves want to go as a nation.

Those of us who know about life in British Guiana can, in retrospect, recognize the remarkable transformations in every facet of our political, economic and cultural life over the past 58 years.

That transformation did not come easily nor overnight. It came in the wake of the development deficit experienced by many developing countries soon after gaining independence. Compounding the development deficit was the model adopted by some leaders who chose to be mimic-men of their erstwhile colonial masters.

Notwithstanding the prevailing vicissitudes of social life, compounded by the political tug-o-wars as to who was best to administer the affairs of the country, the point is for fifty-eight years, we Guyanese have managed to hold together as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural society. A free and open press has contributed enormously to our holding together.

There is no civil war in Guyana where one ethnic group is pitched against another fighting to be integrated in the wider society, save for the political disagreements and controversies that occur from time to time within our democracy, fragile as it can be. Guyanese seem satisfied at this stage of our economic and social development to live in peace within a capitalist market economy with all the accompanying hardships, including social and economic inequalities inherent in a capitalist system. No one in Guyana has been asked to abandon nor to moderate their ethnicity or to adopt customs and mores that are alien to them. On the contrary, such negative practices are being discouraged.

In Guyana today no one needs a Baptism Certificate to reflect a change in name reflecting a change from one particular religion to another in order to be employed as it was in colonial times. Considering the fact, that there were episodes in our political evolution that sought to undermine efforts at social cohesion, the living reality is that we did not end up as either a failed, partitioned nor unrealistically a ‘Cooperative Socialist State.’

The parliamentary democracy we enjoy is based on the Westminster model. And our legal system as well as our system of local government have evolved over the years becoming as accommodative and reflective of our own national ethos as a result of their evolution, maturity and acceptability.

Culturally, the indigenous languages spoken by our Amerindian people have survived over the years. But regrettably, the tribal languages spoken by the slaves brought in chains to our shores from West Africa; the indigenous Portuguese spoken by indentured laborers from Madeira and the Hindi dialect and Urdu spoken by indentured labourers from India have either disappeared or have been assimilated in our own Creolese. Mandarin spoken by the majority of our Chinese population remains constant.

The doors of temples, mosques, churches and other places of worship remain open to worshipers and believers. And the festivals of the various religions are marked by holidays and festive, celebratory gatherings in which all ethnicities participate. Regrettably, the bogeyman of race continues to haunt the nation. It is be utilized by some who make every effort to determine how we should define and particularize each other. Fifty-eight years after Independence, we continue to have in our midst, some who try to define ethnicity in ways that suggest, wrongly, how relations between one group to another should be. This is a troublesome legacy left to us by our colonial past and to which some irresponsibly cling.

After 58 years of creating and building an education system that matches any other CARICOM country, we still need to produce a textbook about our country’s authentic history for our school children of all ages. I have no doubt that in our midst there are Guyanese who possess the intellectual skills and academic qualifications to formulate such a textbook. Of course, there will be difficulties and challenges that will face those to whom the task has been assigned but our differences in opinion, whether in politics or economics should not result in the lack of collective endeavour nor capacity to overcome whatever differences may arise in the effort to deliver an important work that is long overdue.

Yours faithfully,
Clement J. Rohee

---

---