Dear Editor
WRITING a letter that thousands may read should be composed with a sense of responsibility. I have viewed letters from Craig Sylvester, Nigel Hinds and Harry B and cannot help but ponder whether the intention is to be frivolous and appeal to social frustrations and political petulance, or are these writers politically ambitious and really have no substance to actually make sensible contributions to their own profiles, much less to inform readers on the topics they assume to address.

Nigel Hinds, I am told, is promised the PPP’s Prime Minister of the future and he does match the last Sam Hinds in respect to staying to the PPP’s shallow promotional script. Craig Sylvester is described as the party leader of DNC, and he also fits into a PPP infiltrating method of creating sudden Political commentators with parties. Sudden because both of the latter mentioned were invisible in the era under the PPP which the World Bank described as a ‘crisis of governance’ in 2003, and Sam Hinds recently confirmed in alluding to ‘The Counter Force’ in reference to the PPP-Roger Khan marriage of shared criminal financial interests.

Now let’s embrace national issues in Guyana. The APNU-AFC have sound policies; they have in 2-1/2 years reshaped the physical environment of Georgetown, and have reformed the Ministry of Public Health with a cadre of nurses that can limit the death toll from that period that a Doctor told me ‘you could die from a nail stick here with those people Ramsammy have employed. Education requires a resurrection, and I’m confident they’re aware and working at it. The world changes, regardless of our politics. British Guiana to Guyana has never been a first world country. We were a colony and were always plagued by housing, health and employment woes. At independence, the roads to McKenzie and to Rosignol were sand roads, and they became highways after 1966, under the PNC government.

In Georgetown from the 1900’s, the main single employer was the ‘Waterfront’. That never changed until modernisation of merchant marine shipping terminated those jobs in the early 80’s; arson at GRB in 1977 began that process though the methods were unconnected. The dilemma of employment in Guyana is complex, driven by forces we are not in control of. When the schools started giving children assignments that required internet research, many homes did not have computers, and money had to be scraped for Internet cafes. Government can no longer employ all our graduates, not within the economy we have and will have, with computers biting into the human work force, and inadequate training in diverse areas, but they can build a platform for niche industries, and it’s an uphill task to revolutionise its own bureaucracy and public service to meet those challenges.

The USA now has 30 million home-run businesses–technology permits that; the modes of employment have changed. We have a large amount of barely literate young citizens, products of the troubled times, when inner city unemployed and village young men were recruited as body guards, assassins and thugs of the criminal-politically connected ‘Big Man dem’.

Most of the critics today were silent then; the ‘Big Man dem’ have dumped them, thus, our gun toting crime wave. The PPP implemented a system of ‘No child left behind’ that resulted in a multitude of young people passing through the school system with no skills and lacking in literacy. Our main technical workforce, during the ethnic and political cleansing of the PPP to facilitate shifting of hundreds of millions towards favourite, fled our shores, including teachers, left for the Caribbean, Suriname, Venezuela, Brazil, African countries and the first world. Their remittances sustained this country. Those countries are not economically the same today, remittances have dried up, people are back home in a global economic crunch.

This is where we’re at. Any letter writer can write a list of hypercritical directives as Sylvester Craig did in Kaieteur, April, 2, as a formula to take Guyana towards ‘Utopia’, but in the real world we have to work with what we have. I suggest that letter writers with political ambitions read our History from at least post-emancipation to remove your perceptions from the asinine-curve and commit a letter of consequence to posterity.
On March 20, 2018 Kaieteur News, a letter writer named Harry B of Ontario, Canada, possibly a pseudonym, compared Guyana’s political management to that of Tanzania, referring to Guyana in administrative proportion as ‘The Rich and Useless’. Well, Tanzania is a country of over 33 million, with a National Assembly of 324 seats, in a country divided into 31 regions, of 99 districts peopled by 114 councils governed by Tribal, Islamic and British Common law, that preside over 11 ethnic groups, including the island nation of Zanzibar. Its cabinet might be smaller than Guyana’s but its paid administrative structure doubles the CARICOM group, including Haiti and Cuba, exposing the true intent of this foolish letter.

Finally, readers must understand that there are no oil experts in Guyana. There’s reference to Trinidad; Trinidad was oil effective in 1913, they became Independent in 1962. Nigeria had a petroleum industry in 1956, they became Independent in 1960. To use these countries in 2018 without clarifying these facts is implying that we’re referring to current history. The first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania, USA in 1859. That they had time to hone their hoodwinking skills is obvious. The objective here is that we will benefit to restructure our economy, that there is room for further negotiations towards infrastructural development and to the contract, and most of all that we will bring some closure to this tormenting border issue with Venezuela, enabling us to explore other areas of our natural wealth. A geologist that has participated in oil negotiations over the past weekend illustrated their methods of bargaining–psychological and tactical. All of these daily critics would have been chewed up. Our national ignorance of the Oil Industry is allowing a political propaganda campaign of half truths to invade our consciousness. It must cease; we must identify the truths, understand the fictions and unmask and publicise their true intentions.

Regards
Barrington Braithwaite