Dear Editor,

MAY 26 this year marks the 50th anniversary of Guyana as an independent, sovereign nation. It provides an opportunity for the celebration of the achievements of our founding fathers, and gives occasion for pause to reflect on our achievements, while taking stock of our challenges and sharpening our focus on our goals as a nation.

Much will very likely be written about our achievements and challenges. My intention is to propose a course for the future we set ourselves — that Good Life. This necessarily involves discussion from a number of perspectives. These have been summarized into the following: Leadership and Politics, and Economics and the Role of Government.

If anything, leadership and politics remain very real and significant risks to our social and economic progress. This is so because the politics of our last fifty years did not find it expedient to identify and prepare our remarkable and talented youths for positions of leadership within our political parties. The result has been that we have lost tremendous natural talent to foreign shores, and what remains has sought to remain, for the most part, quite divorced from public life.

This is not at all unexpected, since it is a virtual impossibility for intelligent individuals to be trapped in the idiocy of racism, prevalent in our politics. Of course racism has been effective, because it appeals to ignorance — a trait which has been inculcated into our culture and utilized by the past administration as part of its central strategy of maintaining control.

Indeed, notable rebels from our major political parties have managed to hold fast to their dream of changing Guyana for the better, and break away from these mainstream political bodies to achieve the virtually unthinkable possibility of a political third force with enough political clout to change our political outcomes, and ultimately shape our economic, social and political destiny.

This is not to say that our political problem has been solved; far from it. Common to all our political parties is that none of them can claim to have one, two, five or ten persons who can appeal to, and capture the imagination, trust and goodwill of, people from across the major races. Indeed, the recent national election has seen the coalition of the PNCR and the AFC providing a platform for leaders from both major races upon which the population from both races could pin their hopes for equal and favourable representation at the national political level.

Within the context of our future, however, here looking from 2025 onwards, we need to seriously ask ourselves who among us can speak to, and win confidence and trust across our major races. Failing this, we will continue to hold ourselves to ransom, with the AFC being our political wildcard.

And an almost absolute certainty is that Guyanese will unlikely rise to such political activism at the polls as witnessed at the last elections. It is therefore absolutely essential that the hope of that Good Life, which Guyanese bought into, becomes an unmistakable reality for our citizens.

That aside, our political parties need to start forming leadership groups and imparting the necessary training to serve as politicians going into the future. In this regard, Government may wish to consider appropriating the President’s College to respond to this national interest.

As a footnote to the issue of leadership, one may be tempted to ask whether many of our Guyanese who have not benefited from a sound secondary education cannot be leaders. A preface to the answer to this question is that it is worthy to note that more than a few educated individuals have established themselves as deviations from the norm of excellence in leadership, even within their respective disciplines. They are eligible to be qualified as being affected by the disease of idiocy.

More to the point, however: every adult qualifies as a leader, since regardless of his/her academic achievements, he/she ultimately becomes responsible for his/her welfare as well as that of his/her spouse and, in particular, their children. Whether adults are employees or become self-employed, they are ultimately responsible for the welfare of their households, and for instilling in their children the qualities that bring success in today’s society; namely, good manners and access to the best education possible.

Indeed, men and women with basic secondary education who have become successful and financially viable could very well be deemed to be great leaders, since they were able to overcome greater odds than individuals with the benefit of a sound tertiary education.

The ideas presented on economics and government have been around globally, but their absence locally, to my knowledge, make them relevant for consideration in addition to alternatives. Economics and government are intertwined concepts which are essential to the crucial transitory, transformative change sought after in Guyana. The fundamental role of economics has more or less been grasped, with the clear understanding that our twin public policy priorities are employment-creation and provision of cheap, reliable energy to launch massive private investment in our industrial/manufacturing and other sectors.

A critical first start is the development of a five-year development strategy for our economy. This involves, for each economic sector, energy, health or education for example, a determination of criteria for the optimal delivery of output/service.

Also essential is the quantification of resources available to each sector, and the resource requirements necessary for achieving optimal delivery of output. For example, a target for the energy sector may be the development of 5,000 MW of capacity at a cost of US$0.09/KWH, while in education a target may be 25 students per class. The formulation of these and similar metrics will provide the basis for measuring year-on-year performance, with revisions to the targets for optimal delivery of output/service as necessary.

Effective government is necessary for the achievement of the sector targets, notably those of energy. In this regard, Government needs to ensure that the necessary technical staffing requirements are available, to deliver the quantitative evaluation as well as the criteria for optimal delivery.

The strategies for all sectors may now be combined and evaluated individually and in aggregate to appreciate the full resource requirements for achieving all sectorial targets, in addition to workgroup sessions to formulate systems of cooperation to secure success in meeting targets.

Further, ideas from the National Development Strategy, which was allowed to gather dust, may be absorbed into the new strategy.

Finally, while our government ministers, our very senior public servants, have been awarded compensation packages which allow them to live that Good Life now, they should reflect that the masses, who in the majority represent the working class low to middle income households, have suffered for close to a generation under the previous administration, and are looking forward with immediacy for improvements in the form of more and higher paying jobs. It would therefore be politically expedient to work assiduously to deliver on the promises of that Good Life to all Guyanese.

I take this opportunity to wish all Guyanese — both at home, including visiting family members, and in the Diaspora – a Happy 50th Anniversary Independence Jubilee, and may we all work together to deliver on our dreams for our country, ourselves and our families.

Yours faithfully,
CRAIG SYLVESTER