COME next week, we want to cultivate ourselves being a world class 21st century society, thinking and talking about such things as originality of ideas, our innovative Guyanese spirit, our place in the global village in this Knowledge Age. We want a national servant-leader who makes that happen.We want to farm our national mind into a fertile ferment, generating a global Guyanese conversation that sees us rising above the frays and factions and pettiness that caused us such grief during the time of the 10th Parliament.
No more should our Guyanese social landscape be subjected to pettiness and a national conversation lacking inspiration, motivation and the uplifting of our national mind.
Instead, we’ll design the Guyanese public square whereby we energize the heart and soul of every Guyanese citizen, at home and in the diaspora, with a sound, harmonious vision of where we’re going, what we’re accomplishing, why we’re progressing along the path we choose, embracing the full depth and breadth of the Guyanese human resource capital, looking to Guyana 2020 as a benchmark for our development goals, flexible and open as to how we achieve what we set out to accomplish.
This is why President Donald Ramotar makes the defining difference for us at this hour. His leadership style and Presidential personality work well in cultivating the kind of national social landscape that is open, real and authentic, reaching out across divides to embrace anybody genuinely interested in moving us forward as a nation.
President Ramotar holds no qualms in taking on ideas, visions and initiatives that others suggest to him. So humble and open is he, that he readily accepts suggestions, ideas and progressive initiatives. In other words, President Ramotar is open for business, believing in the democratic ideal and the creation of an open playing field, where every Guyanese could come to the party, bringing our innovative spirit, our original ideas, our unique visions for national progress, and our professional integrity to the development table.
He’s come to embrace the Low Carbon Development Strategy initiative of former President Bharat Jagdeo, and this week reported to the nation the great news that we’ve received eight billion dollars from our innovative forest deal with Norway.
President Ramotar also embraces another groundbreaking initiative of Mr Jagdeo, in the Amaila hydroelectric project. The President reported to us that Government secured US$80 million, which sits waiting in a bank account in Washington, DC, in the US, for the hydro project to get off the ground.
The President reaches out to outstanding national leaders like Elisabeth Harper, Clinton Urling, Peter Ramsaroop, and a host of others, to cull together the best and brightest Guyanese stalwarts in the task of moving us forward, in this effort of ensuring that where we go from here is to a positive place, a cultivated national atmosphere.
We face an immense challenge to overcome our national dearth of skills and expertise and professional performance and to inculcate a national culture of lifelong learning. What most devastated Guyana during the dictatorship period was the national brain drain, with Guyana holding the unenviable world record for brain drain.
Our President understands these things, and with his humble style, lacking any ego, we would see a transformed national effort to inculcate across our villages, towns and communities a renewed, energized, focused effort to build solid community relations, to cultivate an information highway whereby every citizen feels important and a part of the process of development, being able to contribute ideas, experience, knowledge and solutions to the task of our moving forward.
This information flow system, with citizens able to contribute up the chain of authority our ideas, experience and knowledge, with the State able to transmit to every ordinary working Guyanese its visions and programmes and plans and projects, becomes an absolutely crucial infrastructure, and we’ve got to cultivate and build and maintain it, involving the State media, Government communications organs, and the national media fraternity.
It would make a transformational difference in how we, being a Guyanese nation, were to design and shape the national conversation in such a way that we tap into the human resource capital of every Guyanese. This national capital asset forms our knowledge pool, our talent base, our creative playpen, and our origination of innovative, new ideas and entrepreneurial projects and groundbreaking insights.
It takes a President like Donald Ramotar, a man of no ego, a man so humble and open to the human possibility inherent in each person, each Guyanese, that he’s willing to govern as President while we create the Guyanese society that works for us. In President Ramotar, we don’t harbor a top-down, command-style leadership, but an open, free, engaging leadership style. Such a style frees up the national space for the flowering of personal initiative, individual talent, and professional integrity.
No one fears the President. Instead, in the last three years, we’ve come to hold him in profound respect, seeing him as a father-figure, a servant-leader, a man of integrity with an open, engaging attitude. He listens to the public voice. He acts when he needs to, making tough decisions when he has to, allowing his compassion and good conscience to guide him, strong enough to admit what he feels about those actions.
Such a man, at such an hour as this, our nation does well with as Head-of-State. We’ve come to know him over the past three years of his Presidency. Before that he was unknown, never serving beyond the walls of Freedom House. Today, we know the man, we see his heart and hard work and immense energy as he traverses every community across Guyana. President Ramotar stands open, ready, confident, a Guyanese household name, a revelation to us of exactly the kind of leadership we aspire to at this time of our making as a world class 21st century knowledge society.
by Shaun Michael Samaroo