HOW we see ourselves, how we write and design the Guyanese story, that’s what matters for us to design the future of our nation. And we’ve already embarked on that futuristic road.Since we gained independence five decades ago, our nation experienced two phases: first, we saw a catastrophic national experiment crush crucial ideas like democracy, development and the design of our national institutions, an experiment that left us devastated in our socio-economic well-being.
We fought and sacrificed enormously, including the tragic political assassination of Dr. Walter Rodney and several of our outstanding citizens, to re-align ourselves to the true meaning of these ideas of democracy, development and designing our State structure to serve citizens.
Since we gained free and fair elections, the second phase of our Guyanese nation’s coming into being started with real effort, in a massive repairing and recovery drive that we now see bearing real fruits.
Although former late President Desmond Hoyte launched the Economic Recovery Program (ERP) in 1985 after the demise of President Forbes Burnham, Guyanese could not re-align ourselves to the real meaning of democracy and development until we had repaired the broken political structure of Government, with free and fair elections.
Carl Greenidge, as Finance Minister who managed the ERP, saw how devastated Guyana had become by 1985, and reported thus to Parliament. Under Greenidge’s macro-management, we saw the divestment of high-profile State assets under reports of rotten, questionable deals, and even foreign investments, like the Omai gold enterprise and the Barama timber deal smelled of gross irregularities.
In fact, the new daily newspaper, Stabroek News, reported extensively on the State corruption so rampant under Greenidge’s tenure. Such corruption saw Greenidge’s Ministry okay the purchasing of a power barge from Miami for around US$2 million. However, the actual cost of the barge, which never worked after docking at Garden-of-Eden, was closer to US$100,000. This sort of wild corruption explains why Guyana had plunged to total bankruptcy, under a severe debt burden, by 1985.
Greenidge officiated as Finance Minister when massive corruption clouded Guyana’s gold sales, whereby a Canadian-Guyanese businessman got monopoly rights to buy all the gold, refine it and forward revenue to foreign missions.
Such stories show how far we’ve come as a nation, how much rottenness we had to eradicate and how much of the broken structures we’ve had to repair, such repairing taking over two decades, with more to be done.
Under Greenidge’s management, reports abounded of several State businesses that got sold off to friends and influential persons of the Hoyte Administration, in deals that stank of rotten corruption, and grotesque accounting practices.
Under the massive liberalisation programme of Greenidge and Hoyte, corruption ran rampant across the society, with the secretive nature of corruption under the Burnham regime coming out in the open, and we saw the Police Force, the Private Sector and the Public Sector exhibit blatant corruption. Corruption, our nation realised, had become an entrenched socio-economic culture, with the cross-border smuggling of two pounds of flour mushrooming into a massive national crisis, where enterprising “business” people smuggled everything.
When the free and fair Government took office in 1992, new President Dr Cheddi Jagan set out to heal our society of the chronic devastation that had crippled our national soul.
But Government’s effort to clean up Customs, where corruption drained State coffers of vital revenue, and to clean up the Police Force and the Public Sector met with hostile and aggressive push-back: the corruption culture had become too entrenched, too embedded.
In high-profile court cases, the corruption that had eaten into the heart of the Justice system turned ugly, with corrupt officials who got dismissed not only reinstated into their positions to continue their corrupt practices with immunity, but these unconscientious beasts sued the State and were rewarded millions of dollars.
Government saw this first effort broken in its first big push to repair the long fall our nation took from independence to 1992. After rigged national and regional elections, socio-economic experimentation, and party paramountcy, whereby the People’s National Congress (PNC) ran Guyana like their own toy-house, Guyanese were happy to see the back of Greenidge and his seven-year experiment with the ERP.
And irony upon irony, our nation saw that five-year rigged Government extend itself for two years, as against the cutting short of the freely and fairly elected Government of President. Such ironies relate a telling story, of how we resort to our default way of being, to self-destruct, rather than create the path forward that really works.
We turned an important corner, with free and fair elections.
Where that leaves us today becomes a matter for profound contemplation.
We cannot allow our nation to fall back into the socio-economic culture that cripples the Guyanese soul.
We must write our future, design our way forward, create the path that would take us to the Guyana Dream, our national potential, invent the Guyanese way of being that immunes us from what happened to us when that long fall started in 1964.
Whoever forms the next Guyanese Government after May 11 next, we citizens must guard these ideas – democracy, development, the design of our public space – with sober reflection, always remembering our history, even as we design the future.
We face two possible futures as a Guyanese nation: a default future, where we keep repeating our history; or a created future, where we write and design into being the Guyanese nation we aspire to and dream of and that aligns with our noble potential, a potential so legendary it goes back in literature to Sir Walter Raleigh’s idea of El Dorado.
Today, we stand at a beautiful place in our Guyanese history. With President Donald Ramotar, we know we harbour a President of utmost humility and service to the nation. His heart of service is second to none in the political arena at this hour.
We’ve repaired a huge portion of our socio-economic structural alignment, and we’ve cultivated a national atmosphere where every Guyanese owns his or her life. We’re a full-blown meritocracy, open to the world, with full freedom of thought and freedom of expression and freedom of movement.
We connect to the global village with smartphones and wifi and internet access. We’ve become a global nation, with a far-flung Diaspora showing keen interest in the homeland.
Here we stand today, and the future is wide open for us to write and design and build.
We want to see today our leaders rise up as visionaries, dreamers, enlightening our consciousness with what’s possible for the Guyanese nation in the 21st century.
We want to hear from our Parliamentarians and artists and writers and thinkers and university professors and scholars and academics and our sons and daughters in the Diaspora, ideas, concepts, blueprints for how we could elevate ourselves as a people to the pinnacle of our potential.
We want to write and design our future.
We must be radically careful that we don’t fall back into our default future. Our default future saw us divided, with a wall wedged between us, perpetuating a stifling dichotomy in how we understand critical ideas like democracy, development and the design of our social landscape.
Where do we go from here? We write a new national vision, design a new Guyanese blueprint, build on the foundation we’ve laid down over the period of our recovery over the recent decades.
We’ve got to be sober-minded about these two phases our nation experienced since independence. We cannot afford to fall back into our default schism of division and breaking away, as happened when Forbes Burnham pulled away from the People’s Progressive Party (PPP). Instead, we must continue to build on the road we embarked upon since we started respecting free and fair national elections, collaborating with each other, cultivating a spirit of participatory democracy, forging this solid political-civic cooperation pact as we together write the future of the Guyanese nation.
Opposition folks perpetuate a Guyanese landscape that sounds depressing and demoralising, because the story these folks write of us is filled with negativity and pessimism. When we re-write such a national consciousness, they call it propaganda and Government public relations stunts, as they did with the Rodney Commission.
Thankfully, today we see the Government of Guyana open and willing to write a different story of our nation: a story filled with promise, hope, magnanimous dreams and ground-breaking projects like the Amaila Falls hydro-project and a 21st century international airport.
by Shaun Michael Samaroo