…at commencement of Children’s Parliament
MINISTER of Culture, Youth and Sport, Dr. Frank Anthony, said children must get involved in politics, and urged young people to see the parliament as a forum for debating issues and moving them forward, despite conflicts of interest and disagreements between opposing parties.
He spoke yesterday at the opening of the Rights of the Child Commission’s Children’s Parliament at Parliament Chamber, Georgetown.
“I strongly believe that children and young people need to be involved in politics. Some people believe that it is not young people’s business to be involved in politics,” he said.
The sitting saw the tabling of a motion captioned ‘There has been a significant improvement in education over the past five years’, which members of parliament had to debate and adopt. The young parliamentarians came from the eleven education districts of Guyana.
The minister added that in any given organisation or entity, every single person will have his own points of view and interests. “These interests sometimes come in conflict with each other. And therefore we need to find a medium by which we could get the majority, so that we could move the issue forward. Many times we will not have agreement and that is fine. You don’t have to get everyone to agree on everything,” the minister said.
“In a healthy society, there is need for debate. People must be allowed to express their point of view. They must be given a forum to express those issues. We must not be stymied,” Anthony said.
“There will always be conflicts of interest, but we must find ways of regulating this and moving issues forward, and parliament allows this,” he said.
“In this parliament we have very strong traditions, we have a rich history,” he said.
“I want to congratulate the Rights of the Child Commission for putting this parliament together. As you know, the Government feels strongly that the children of our country are very important. And because of that, we have a number of institutions specially set up and dedicated to the welfare of children. We have a Ministry of Human Services and part of its mandate – a very large part of its mandate – is about children,” the minister said.
“Over the life of the last parliament – for the last five years – you would have seen that we passed a significant amount of legislation dealing with the welfare of children. In fact, some of those pieces of legislation would have helped to establish new agencies to protect the rights of children in our country,” he said.
The minister called the Children’s Parliament very important and the topic of yesterday’s debate very interesting.
Speaking at the opening, Chairperson of the Rights of the Child Commission, Aleema Nasir, said that in its interest of promoting the rights and interests of children, and in respecting the views of children, the Commission thought it wise to organise the forum yesterday.
“The Commission believes that a Children’s Parliament will help to create a developing society with a high sense of responsibility, of which children are a part, with adults as partners,” Nasir said.
She said that through the Children’s Parliament, the outcomes would be used by the Rights of the Child Commission to lobby or advise Government and its agencies responsible for law-making, and to fast track policies that would improve the rights and welfare of children and young people.
The Chairperson of the Rights of the Child Commission said that has a dual function. “It provides a viable mouthpiece [for] children, and it serves as an introduction to the work being done regarding children and young persons in Guyana.