GUYANESE today wake up to face their future with tremendous optimism, zeal, and a feeling of motivated energy, all because of a document that the Government of Guyana wrote out and implements with solid integrity, daily lining up the promises of that written document with the practice of how they go about rolling out macroeconomic and far-reaching social progress all across this land. That document comes enshrined in the party manifesto that the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) wrote and presented to the nation for national and regional elections. The PPP/C went to the electorate with their wrote-out manifesto blueprint for national development, for a progressive and prosperous Guyana, at the time just a written document on paper, a blueprint for what the country’s future could possibly look like, and after winning the elections, the government committed with heart and soul to implement those promises it made to the people. The PPP/C thus differs in a crucial way from the previous government.

There is a significant and important reason why the Coalition regime failed so miserably from 2015 to 2020, and why this PPP/C government is succeeding with spectacular achievements today, and it is worthwhile to examine this reason, both to glean valuable lessons for Guyana’s future, and to gain some insight out of hindsight examination, into how the nation conducts its governance process. What is this vital reason? It is that the Coalition governed completely out of integrity, becoming misaligned with their inner values, which Guyanese saw with stark and vivid shock. They said one thing at elections time on the campaign trail in 2015, and they did something completely different in office. The Coalition never presented the policies, plans and programmes that they implemented in government, to the electorate in their elections manifesto in 2015.

As a government, the Coalition ingloriously shut down the historical sugar industry and fired 5,000 GuySuCo workers with wanton disregard for their welfare and family well-being, and imposed 200 hard taxes on senior citizens, the middle class, and Public Service workers, and implemented policies for only the well-off, such as banning used motor vehicle tyres and allowing only expensive, brand new tyres to be imported. None of these major moves showed up in the Coalition’s manifesto. The Coalition got into government and threw away whatever they had promised in their elections manifesto. Hence, they lacked a blueprint for governance, because they disregarded the value of a written document as the guidebook and roadmap to the development process. It seems the leaders of the Coalition expected that the programmes, policies and plans that would form their governance would drop from the sky. They winged it, and sought to operate without a written guidebook. They suffered the consequences with a rude awakening to their own shortsightedness and lack of wisdom, even though they comfort themselves in opposition with an ingenious, inauthentic, ineffective exercising of the scapegoating phenomenon.

What could the nation learn from this hard lesson? When Guyanese look at the fact that the PPP/C government is working in absolute alignment with the written word they presented and promised to the people, showing integrity to keep their written promises to the people, as opposed to the Coalition’s ignoring and disdain of their own manifesto that they presented to the nation in 2015, to instead implement ad hoc, hair-brained policies as a government, one clear lesson jumps out: the Guyanese nation must write out their future first, and proceed to implement that written plan with total lining up of the intent and promise and practice, full and absolute alignment, which is integrity at work.

The PPP/C imagined a world-class, developed Guyana, and researched the ramifications of the big dreams and magnificent vision that President’s government is setting out to achieve, and then supplied the nation with a written plan that paints the picture of this future of the Guyanese nation. Guyanese believed the written plan would work, and elected the party, and today citizens are satisfied and enrolled in that visionary future.
One laments the failure of the Guyana Prize for Literature lacking this kind of impact on the national sensibility over the time of its operation, in being unable to raise up a national cadre of literary writers, creative thought-leaders, and imaginative thinkers who are Guyanese literary visionaries, originators, futurists, and designers of the future of Guyana. The Guyana Prize did not care about such things, only focusing on a parochial and narrow comprehension of ‘Guyanese literature’, including a limited preference for colloquial sentimentality. With their political lenses, the PPP/C has found within its ranks the enlightenment to bridge that vision gap, able to write the future of Guyana with visionary practicality.

The country would do well to cultivate writers of the future, including authors for national speeches that leaders deliver at special occasions, that awaken the Guyanese heart to new heights of feeling, thinking, and believing in new Guyanese possibilities.
The nation ought to always remember that it is visionary, original writings that have carved out the nation’s heroes, such as Dr Cheddi Jagan with his many books and that globally loved document that the United Nations embraced for a new global human order. And then there is the written Constitution of the country that Sir Shridat Ramphal led in writing, and the speeches of Forbes Burnham that found a ready audience among oratory pundits, and the writings of Dr Walter Rodney, and also the international recognition of this country in the great novelist residing in England, Wilson Harris.
Writers make society, both here at home and all over the world. It is a human truism. Guyana would do well to cultivate, even within government, but nationally also, a crop of writers of the future to craft futuristic speeches, tell the unfolding Guyana story, and design the evolving historical Guyanese record.
The writers of the PPP/C 2020 elections manifesto are the real architects of Guyana’s future today.