IN the coming days, Minister of Finance Winston Jordan will present the 2019 budget estimates, which will outline how much we intend to spend on our various sectors. Government would make its case, and the opposition would try to dismantle that case later during the budget debate.

We will hear a lot of numbers and money-talk. There will be blaming and counter-blaming as the politicians have their say. But what we are not likely to hear much about is the overall condition of our country. Yet, as we talk about the budget, it is perhaps a good time for us to reflect on the socio-economic condition of our country. Since independence, Guyana — like most post-colonial societies — has had to grapple with the realities of a world that was not created for us. The Washington Consensus or the New World Order, which was crafted by the superpowers at the end of the Second World War, did not cater for the countries which would emerge after its launch.

Emerging from the bowels of colonialism, replete with its sole emphasis on exploitation of labour and natural resources for the expansion of wealth for the coloniser, countries such as Guyana have been consistently fighting to move beyond the crippling legacy of plantationhood. Saddled with monocultural economies that are geared towards producing for others, the challenge has been how to simultaneously survive and develop in a world that has militated against self-determination.

The initial attempts at economic and political independence, which were grounded in a desire to improve the condition of the masses of people, were quickly smashed by a global economic model that disliked such initiatives. So, 50 years after gaining independence, we still contend with many of the ills we faced at the beginning. Poverty among the majority of our citizens is still as prevalent today as it was in May 1966. And this has remained the biggest obstacle to genuine development.

The gains in the area of education obtained in the first decades of independence have been compromised by our failure to rise above the state of dependency we inherited. From the 1980s to this present time, we have been fed a diet of marketisation that has structurally adjusted us backwards. Much effort and resources have been expended on trying to attract investments, particularly foreign investments. The hope and promise are that such investments would generate the necessary wealth needed to extricate our country out of post-plantationhood into the age of modernisation and development. Yet, here we are in 2018 still dependent on a shrinking economic base that looks the same as it did five decades ago.

Sugar, for example, which enslaved and colonised us, is still sucking the energy out of our economic being, and causing us to go after each other as if we were historical enemies. The promised investments have generally not materialised; and when they did, they came at a price that we could not sustain.

In the final analysis, we have not invested in our people in any real and meaningful way. Our first question continues to be this: how will this or that initiative benefit capital? We have convinced ourselves that there is some magic in capital and the market. Meanwhile, the condition of the poor and powerless deteriorates at an alarming rate; unemployment robs our people of dignity and livelihoods; poverty spawns a culture of despair and need; the doom varies, but the story of helplessness cuts across communities and ethnicities.

Our own deliberate and not-so-deliberate preoccupation with political domination and revenge has helped to multiply the woes referred to here. From the self-inflicted wounds of the 1950s and 1960s to the journey into political gangsterism of recent decades, we seem incapable of divorcing ourselves from the futility of small-mindedness.

So, where do we go? We have a new set of captains in charge. We must muster the energy to dream again of a new day one last time. Can we change course? The harsh global reality is still in place. Globalisation, or what Professor Rex Nettleford referred to as “a new name for an old obscenity”, is alive and waiting; nothing changes.

Can we resist enough to carve out a little space for our independence? Surely we cannot continue to live forever on the margins. If we are to conquer the scourge of collective social death in the form of mental illness, crime and violence, and under-education, then we have to find another path.