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60 years
(Kaieteur News) – Sixty years is a long time for a nation, a people, to continue being its own worst enemy. Guyanese have lurched forward from one decade to another. Despite claiming to be free, there is still an abject season of dependence on, of being subject to, the manipulations and dictates of others. Our English masters were content to yield to more powerful American masters, happy to play the role of second fiddle in the years before 1966. Sixty years later, both still function as masters of Guyana’s environment, overlords deciding the destiny of the peoples of this rich land. Guyana is free on paper. In reality, in practice, not much has changed beneath the surface observations and celebrations.
A country this rich should never be so bowed, from neck to knee. A people so rich should not be seeking to run away and take up residence elsewhere. To turn face and back from the many great gifts of this sovereign nation amounts almost to betrayal. One of the curses of this rich and supposedly independent country is that betrayals have been written into its DNA. Government after government has sold its promise out. Leader after leader has savaged the aspirations of its peoples. Great hope is inevitably followed by greater disappointment. Guyana is a country primed with promise, loaded with potential. Sixty years after Independence it is still trapped helplessly in unfilled visions of potential.
Guyana’s leaders, in one long, ragged, unbroken procession have been very good at talking up potential. It is part of the performance at which they are so skilled. It’s what comes from long study and longer practice. How to make fools of the people, with words that have no substance, because they lack truth. We at this paper are forced to highlight ‘sanctity of contract.’ There is a scheme to keep this country and its people enslaved. Not in physical chains, but in an economic straightjacket that is far more controlling and effective than shackles and whips. The beauty of this gutting and limiting arrangement is that the perennial foreign masters get to enjoy the concealment of the shadows, and watch the native-born slavedrivers do their dirty jobs for them.
After sixty years of Independence, Guyana should be one of the proudest holders of national sovereignty in the world. The discovery of oil to the tune of billions of barrels, and more billions probably stuck in layers of trickeries, confirms a disaster and a horror. It is the Guyana tragedy of a sovereignty without a crown. With oil, every Guyanese has the assets in their hands to make them live like lords and ladies, the envy of the world. With the cowardly vileness of ‘sanctity of contract’ most Guyanese are forced to live the life of serfs and paupers, which makes them a laughingstock everywhere. Six decades after Independence, one of this nation’s most remarkable products is a company of leaders with the mentality of slaves.
Sixty years beyond May 26, 1966, there are gleaming towers, long bridges, many more kilometers of roads, and new buildings all over. The emblems of progress, of a free nation on the move, many would say. We say that when towers and bridges and roads and building increase in numbers, the conditions of the people should be far better, must precede the priority given to the erection of those physical works. More and more of the rich jewelry of Guyana catching the eye, yet many are so hungry, so knowing of poverty. Like the slaves of yore, poor and tired Guyanese of all colors can identify with that searing line from the great American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar: “I know why the caged bird sings…”
Sixty years post-Independence, all citizens should be singing a sweet song. The delicious experience of true freedom tasted and savored. The rich life of people who know real liberty and live in its warm embrace. This is a country with treacherous leaders. They bargain the wealth that belongs to citizens, born and unborn, for power for themselves. Independence has freed them to enslave the people and enrich themselves. Leaders sell themselves, then they sell the national birthright. They are too much the willing slave, the proudly enslaved. National sovereignty bartered. When leaders lose courage, they lose their way in grasping at the benefits of freedom. Theirs is the plantation slave mentality, the one inside the house. When they sold Independence and sold national sovereignty, they sold all Guyanese to a slave’s existence. Of this they boast: those who celebrate, those who condone, refuse to challenge.
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Congratulations on reaching 60 years of Independence! Guyana is rich in oil and soil. Guyana should be leading CARICOM by example. Barbados is happy to share these celebrations!!!!!