HOW we see ourselves as the Guyanese people makes or breaks our nation. How do we see ourselves? We could get an idea of our self-esteem as a people, of our confidence to rise to be a noble people, of our ability to get along and build Guyana, from how we engage in conversation in the public square.

Our land is supremely blessed, so peaceful and pastoral. We don’t suffer from natural disasters of any kind, except occasional light flooding in the low coastal communities. No longer are we poor and bedraggled, as much of Haiti remains. Compared to Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, our crime rate remains remarkably low. Even in road fatalities, we’ve made progress, with stats showing a close to 100 percent reduction in people dying on our roadways over the past decade. Our economy hums, growing year after year. Investor confidence in Guyana is at the highest its ever been in our history. Our commercial banks are doing bright business. We now house, feed and clothe ourselves with ease and comfort.
Yet, we refuse to celebrate our successes, instead bashing ourselves and carrying on a national conversation lacking any sense of how far we’ve come as a unified Guyanese people.
So much we’ve got to be thankful for, but of course we cannot just sit back and expect development to magically happen. We’ve got to work hard, exercise discipline and sense, and, most of all, engage with each other as fellow Guyanese, the way we rub shoulders in school and in our neighbourhoods and among our friends. We rank high on the global stage as a society for tolerance, freedom of religion, freedom of the media, and as a decent place to live.
However, much of our blessings go either unnoticed, or we refuse to talk about ourselves in a positive way. We twist the Guyanese story into a grotesque monster, seeing ourselves battling dark clouds.
We have not yet learned how to tell the Guyanese story, either to ourselves, or to the world.
What we tell ourselves is that we’re poor, corrupt and incompetent, and we place this cross on our Government. And we walk around beating ourselves up, berating ourselves with vague negative generalities and unspecific accusations and criticisms.
Like any individual person, to develop and grow and live with confidence and self-belief, the Guyanese nation needs to learn to talk to itself with healthy language, with an inspiring story, with a constant knowing of our privileged place among the nations of the earth.
What really is there for the Guyanese citizen to complain about? Of course, our nation is not utopia, or heaven. Like every human society, we’ve got issues and problems to sort out. Our biggest obstacle is the political quagmire, but we’re slowly realising that this problem cries out for urgent solution. We’ll get there. But we must keep encouraging each other, and believing in each other, and trusting each other. We must make that choice.
Yet, we take this one issue, our political challenge, and proceed to politicise our entire nation, seeing our society only through the eyes of politics. But, first and foremost, we’re a nation of human beings, with hearts beating and with dreams and with aspirations and with personal goals. And that’s what’s important: what kind of human society are we being? Given our peaceful, pastoral, progressive society, we’re actually blessed among the nations of the world, co-existing and living and rubbing shoulders with each other with loud laughter and light banter.
But we don’t take this attitude to the public platforms. In our national conversations, we become intense and blame each other for every imaginary wrong under the sun.
As much as we’ve got lots of work to advance ourselves and our nation, as does any society anywhere in the world; we’ve come a long way. Our foreparents had to emerge from slavery and indentureship and colonialism and imperialism and the Cold War and a poor, undeveloped Guyana to bring us where we are today.
Yet, when we listen to ourselves carry on our public conversations, we hear so much that’s wrong with us. Much of this negative way of being falls on our national media, now with untrained reporters and poor journalists. Today, filled with all types of media, the Guyanese society suffers a daily inundating of poorly written, badly designed and terribly thought-out content. Our newspapers fail us daily, and overseas Guyanese who read news of their homeland online see an image of Guyana riddled with vicious crime, and where everywhere is unsafe and bad.
Yet, the people who publish such terrible stuff live well here, in big fancy houses and drive nice cars and travel overseas for vacation. But, stunted in vision and lacking the ability to inspire our nation and impact people with the real Guyanese story, they go about daily demoralising the Guyanese people.
So we’ve got a national media landscape that insists on telling a Guyanese story of us being an awful nation. In this atmosphere, where our national conversations impact our minds, our morale, our sense of self-belief and self-confidence as a people, even the freely and fairly elected Government, falls victim to the swirling negativity of language that plays out daily in this society.
So the newspapers and websites and TV stations fail us, and the people cuss their Government, and we perpetuate a Guyanese national atmosphere filled with a bad story of us.
Let’s take two current stories swirling about us, demoralising us and reducing us to a negative cauldron of fights and quarrels.
We see the protest at the University of Guyana generating a lot of media attention, and, of course, politics became the centre of focus. Then we have our capital city, Georgetown, in a state of immense disrepair, with even the City Hall building falling apart. Minister of Youth, Sport and Culture, Dr. Frank Anthony is working to restore the historic building, but even that story, we push to a tiny corner of the back page.
How do we handle these two stories, so that we accomplish the goal of inspiring and lifting the nation, instead of demoralising and depressing our people?
The unthinking media practitioners would say the facts of the case are that UG is in a bad state, and Georgetown has already fallen apart.
But is that the real story?
Our UG should be a place of restlessness, of students, these new thinkers emerging from their classroom with bright new ideas and innovative solutions, wanting to transform the status quo. We should celebrate the fact that they want to see improvement to the national university. But how do we engage them? Instead of politicising the whole affair, we need to go into UG, talk to the students and the professors and the administration staff, and develop human stories of what’s it like for Guyanese to own and operate our own university, and our own medical school and pre-law school and place of intellectual development.
Let’s engage with UG to see its Adult Learning and digital classrooms become instituted nationally. The protest at UG is a wake-up call to all of us, that we start a national conversation about UG and its role in our nation, instead of looking to satisfy the demands of a few discontents and malcontents, who resort to politics to make UG a playfield for political football.
We should be engaging in conversations, with realistic information, to expand Government’s success in its national housing programme, to tertiary education, where we have universal tertiary education, and where every Guyanese citizen is entitled to a first degree, with UG working hand-in-hand with the technical institutes and other trade schools. This is the kind of conversation the UG protest should be generating in our media and among our leaders.
Then, with the Georgetown fiasco, we see the media blaming Government, ignoring the gross incompetency of the Mayor and Town Council, for lack of local government elections.
As much as Government and the state media failed to make the case that the system of local government elections needs serious work before it could be effective, those who regurgitate the contemporary story of Georgetown fail to inspire us, motivate us. Instead, whenever the state of Georgetown comes up, we become demoralised, depressed, down: our capital city stinks, we feel, and shrug our shoulders in helplessness. Such an attitude ripples across the rest of our lives, affecting how we see ourselves as a Guyanese people.
We should instead be talking of building a national conversation around how to energise and reform the administration of our cities, towns and local communities. Such a national conversation would do wonders for the morale, confidence and self-esteem of the Guyanese citizen, because it would engage everyone in the discusion.
We saw this happen after we won free and fair elections in 1992. The Neighbourhood Democratic Councils were a reforming of the old order that had failed us for three decades. Excited, inspired, motivated, the entire nation got a great lift of its spirit with a new system, and many folks rolled up their sleeves and tackled local development with zeal and gusto.
But the national brain-drain kicked in, and we saw a dire lack of skilled managers and leaders across the country. Our devastated, gutted national skills pool affects the quality of leadership in local communities. This circles back to the UG situation, and so we could easily tie the two together to bring about an innovation solution, twinning UG with local communities, to fuel literacy, local leadership, Adult Continuing Learning, and a national, mutually beneficial relationship between UG and every local community across the nation. We see this work so well in Berbice.
It’s possible to offer scholarships to first degree students at UG, in exchange for practicum as community service in local villages and communities, for example. For Georgetown, it’s possible to engage local farmers to cultivate roses on a large scale to decorate the parapets of the city with pots of fresh scents and fine aroma and an inspiring sights of nature’s colours.
This is the way we need to be, instead of rowing and fighting in constant strife and dissent. We cannot let discontents and malcontents among us dictate the national conversation. We cannot allow these people to use vague generalisations and unspecific accusations to politicise our lives.
We’ve got to take leadership in building the Guyanese story so that the Guyanese citizen wakes up in the morning, feeling inspired, motivated and loving their nation.
Some of this is starting to happen on national radio, with the morning programmes making an authentic effort to inspire listeners.
We’re a beautiful people. We are blessed with such a peaceful, prosperous, progressive society. We live and laugh and delight in sharing our lives with each other. We eat fresh vegetables and fruits and cook fine food and go out to restaurants and exercise and educate ourselves and shop and build.
Such is the Guyanese story, of a modern society living and existing in the 21st century, rich in nature and culture and personal relations. Ours is a lavish land, full of beauty and a people with a big heart.
Such a little, simple thing, as how we build our national conversations, how we tell the Guyanese story, first to ourselves, and then to the world, makes the world of difference.
Our first task is to re-engineer how we see ourselves as the Guyanese nation, how we look at ourselves. And how we talk about ourselves to ourselves.