I noted (with pleasure) Tuesday’s Chronicle report that Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance, Gail Teixeira, has disclosed that The President’s Youth Advisory Council is due to be established by the end of March with a $60 million budget to take it through its first year.

She said a Technical Co-ordinating Committee established last year has completed the Terms of Reference and President Irfaan Ali will meet the ‘youth arms’ of different political parties to encourage them to participate.

The President had himself indicated in his 2022 New Year Address: “I want to hear their (youth) views. I want to learn how they think. We should shape the future of our ‘One Guyana’. I want to dialogue with them about the kind of country they wish to inherit and how they will advance it. The next generation must be better than this one. If not, our country will regress, not progress.”

You rarely hear Heads of Government speaking of youth in such glowing terms, except when addressing youth rallies or conferences, especially ahead of national elections.

But the establishment of the President’s Council is a manifesto promise of the PPP/C during the 2020 election campaign — and the administration having put money where the President’s mouth has spoken, it can be expected this will be more than just words.

The fact that the initiative will involve bringing together the youth arms of opposing political parties sent me waltzing down memory lane over four decades ago when the PPP’s Progressive Youth Organisation (PYO) and the PNC’s Young Socialist Movement (YSM), together but separately represented Guyana at regional or international youth conferences.

One such occasion was the XI World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana in 1978, a global gathering that’s had everlasting influence on the direction of progressive politics in every Caribbean nation and territory represented – the likes of Cabinet Ministers Teixeira and Frank Anthony, as well as PNC Leader Aubrey Norton, will well remember.

Guyana’s two major parties will again have the never-too-late chance to ensure co-operation instead of competition or confrontation, to not just represent youth and students, but more importantly, to start charting the course toward A Shared Future for Today’s Majority in Tomorrow’s One Guyana.

This is an opportunity for the youth sections of the political parties to bounce-off and eventually agree on why and when the millions allocated in 2022 for initial exploration of future co-operation should become billions for the national majority.

If the President’s Youth Advisory Council is to advise him on related matters, its initial meetings will also necessarily examine how best to ensure the views, concerns and interests of non-political youth and student bodies across Guyana will also eventually be presented to and considered by the Council despite geographic disadvantages.

Entities have been created to tap the creative potential of Guyana’s youth and President Ali has assured University of Guyana graduates his government is ready to create conditions for them to choose to turn their degrees and qualified passions into paychecks at home, instead of being lured by the attractive invitations that feed the brain-drain and already drained Guyana (and the rest of CARICOM) of too many of the region’s best brains, partly because they were never attracted to stay at home and engage in nation-building as a career.

One can never overstate or underestimate the importance of youth to any nation as the ever-present majority in every sector — at school and at home, sports and work, in the disciplined and health services, among the self-employed and unemployed and as the most-skilled and least-utilised minds in the society, minds always bubbling with innovative ideas that never went beyond passing exams and winning science contests at school.

Young men and women in Guyana, like everywhere else, wake up every day looking forward to their dreams and challenges ‘one day’ turning into opportunities for a lifetime.

Helping skilled young people transform ideas from plans to projects should be among the primary aims of every government genuinely interested in bequeathing the future to the youth to whom it will belong, not when they grow up into adults, but by affording them guaranteed opportunities today to broaden their future horizons.

Every young person enabled to create at least one other job is as important to the healthy future of any economy as any other new enterprise being undertaken by a first-time or existing investor, big or small, from the ice cream vendor upgrading to a parlor and the hairdresser opening a salon, to the young start-up entrepreneurs with eyes and minds on new areas of business and the young traders-to-be looking at how best to harness the use of cryptocurrencies.

Every student successfully encouraged to channel energies into nation-building will be an encouragement to others.

Fact is, almost 90 per cent of the world’s youth live in developing countries (like Guyana and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and Latin America); and nearly one billion will enter the job-market in the next decade – and ensuring they gain meaningful economic opportunities is essential to reducing poverty and ensuring secure, stable societies.

They need to be integrated into national economies and Guyana is best placed in CARICOM today to set the example of what can be done, not only with oil and gas, but with whatever political will governments and parliamentary parties can jointly summon and deploy in the interest of the common national good.

A President taking steps to be advised directly by youth on how they see their roles in the nation’s future is a good starting point too valuable to waste and participating political parties simply cannot afford to allow this to pass as a ‘use or lose’ opportunity.

The Guyana President is also responsible for the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) and here too, the opportunity also exists to share with the region how to genuinely integrate youth into the national economy
Let the Forward March begin!