Dear Editor,
ON the occasion of International Youth Day, I’d like to congratulate the STEM Guyana Robotics team on an excellent showing at the First Global Robotics Championship. You guys have done more than placed 10th overall, you have demonstrated what the future of Guyana will look like. During the competition, I saw a group of youth — male and female from different religious backgrounds and ethnicities — working together for a better Guyana. Your effort to assist another country in rebuilding their non-functional robot was not seen as an act of wanting to win, but a sign of how as Guyanese we will be able to provide assistance to other nations and it is those simple things that make me extremely proud to be Guyanese.

Allow me to boldly state that we the youth are the solutions that the politicians seek. We are the ones to transcend racial prejudice.  We are the facilitators of social cohesion. We are the ones whose shoulders bear the saddened chair of growth and development for this nation. But for too long we have been the SILENT MAJORITY, allowing politicians to climb on our backs and ascend to office only to be sidelined until the next election.
The late Dr. Walter Rodney during his street-corner address, “History is a weapon — The struggle goes on,” posited “The tragedy of Guyanese youth, and it is a real tragedy, is that they have been shut out from politics. Even during the period of the Vietnam War, it was only the P.Y.O., the youth arm of the P.P.P., that used to make propaganda on that issue. Our youth could not even understand what was going on in as fundamental [a] struggle as Vietnam…Our youth have been kept politically uneducated. This is at the time when in the world at large, young people are setting forth new political directions in every nation.
In South Africa for example, you have heard of the Soweto uprising. Do you believe that those were adults alone in Soweto? Schoolchildren, 14, 15, and 16 years old made the Soweto revolution. And I remember certain incidents of that Soweto struggle. When the young people of Soweto were meeting, many of their elders came and said, “We do not want to rock the boat; the White man is too strong. Apartheid is too strong. Apartheid is too powerful. Take it easy.” That is what the older people were telling the youngsters. And one person from Soweto, a young man who has now left and is now in Europe, explained to me that there was a meeting in which they had to actually throw out their own parents — their own elders were thrown out of the meeting for standing in the way.
Now that was a serious development. When the elders have to be cursed by the younger people in a sense. And that is the real threat in this country today.
My belief is that we will continue to be sidelined/ignored or simply be made to settle for less if we do not make demands as a collective; we must not just speak the term “strength in numbers,” but we must demonstrate that in our advocacy for a better Guyana. We must not think self or individual organization, but rather as a collective. We can affect the positive changes we desire to see in our socio political sphere, but only if we awaken from our slumber of dependency.

Finally, President Granger, allow me to highlight a number of manifesto promises that are yet to be fulfilled. While I do not believe you have forgotten them, somewhere along the line there seems to be an unwillingness to address the affairs of youth development as stated in the manifesto. According to the coalition’s manifesto, pg 4, headlined Message from Presidential Candidate states, ‘’Our young people demand jobs not jail.’’ Mr. President, that reality still exists and it is time that your administration commence the conversation on the decriminalisation of marijuana and a study on the production for the growing lucrative world market. According to forbes.com in 2016 North American marijuana sales grew over 6 billion, which was an astonishing 30% increase. The forbes.com article went on to say that the  growth of the industry is larger and faster than even the dot-com era. During that time, GDP grew at a blistering pace of 22%, Arcview’s editor-in-chief, Tom Adams, said, “The only consumer industry categories I’ve seen reach $5 billion in annual spending and then post anything like 25% compound annual growth in the next five years are cable television (19%) in the 1990s and the broadband internet (29%) in the 2000s.”

On pg 8, point 17  of the APNU+AFC 2015 manifesto states that ‘’within the first 100 days of your administration, we should have had the convening of a national youth council, whose mandate, terms of reference and programme of action should have been produced for endorsement at a national youth conference.
On Pg 40, “Youth Policy and Development,” mention was made of fashioning policies to address the deficiencies of unemployment and lack of suitable and rewarding jobs, appointment of an inter-ministerial task force to develop programmes which should provide targeted solutions for the problems confronting youth and lastly, the establishment of a national youth council which would review and oversee the proper functioning of all youth programmes. The latter being very critical, as I believe we would have had better relations with Government and youth to date.

In closing, I do hope Mr. President that your administration on this the 12th day of August 2017 (International Youth Day)ponder the importance of youth inclusion and how as a government you can make same better by first calling upon young people and having such discussions. Meaningful engagement with the youth of this nation must be seen as a necessity as many do not know or understand your vision and if growth and development are as important as is being said, then it is time that the engine of growth and development be serviced.
Regards,
Clayon F. Halley