TODAY is 57 years since we have achieved Independence. I am in my 35th year of doing newspaper columns for consecutive years since 1988. I have written, for long periods, for the Catholic Standard, Stabroek News, and the Kaieteur News. I did a series of columns for the Guyana Chronicle on the Buxton insanity. Now I am doing a daily column for the Guyana Chronicle.

I have spent around 55 years in social activism, human rights crusades, and political activities. I have spent 26 consecutive years teaching at the University of Guyana. So, 55 plus 35, plus 26 years of experience in different modalities have given me phenomenal insight into the country I have spent all my life in.

Except for post-graduate training abroad, and a short stint with the Maurice Bishop Government in Grenada, I have lived all my life on the soil named Guyana; I have not left that soil, even for a day, since a visit to Miami for eye treatment in 2020. Before you utter foolishness or asininities about my life, that hospitalisation was courtesy of my then editor of the Catholic Standard, Jesuit priest, Father Andrew Morrison.

Back then, I could not afford it, and now I still cannot afford hospitalisation in the USA. So, I know my country, given the shape of my praxis. I know the hardships this land has endured. I saw its moments of insanities, destitutions, tragedies and nightmares. I have lived through all of that.

I have endured, like countless of Guyanese, the Ancient Civilization in a modern age. I agree with Kit Nascimento when he said that the riches of Guyana have come too late for some of us. I definitely count myself as a member of that age of chagrin, where hopes died and dreams vanished.

The memories of an ancient Guyana are literally endless. Some will always stick in your mind. I will only offer two samples because of space. The Minister of Foreign Affairs Clement Rohee had invented in the ministry’s bottom flat, the Foreign Service Institute.

I had a student in my class at UG who was the administrative officer of the institute. His name was Imtyaz Mohamed. Imtyaz would give me paper to print handouts for my students. The university had no money for anything in those times; it was through Imtyaz that my students got handouts for a number of years.

The second memory was the scarcity of any place of entertainment in those days. Many Friday nights, a group of us, after lectures, would go down town to have a lime. We couldn’t find any suitable place. One night, we stopped to drink coconut water at King and Wellington Streets.

A homeless man was enraged at us for reasons we didn’t know. So, he picked up a coconut shell and pelted it at the head of one of UG’s famous lecturers, Theo Morris. Theo barely ducked the nuclear missile. Then the guy went for another shell, and all of us became faster than Usain Bolt.

That was life in Guyana back then. The economist of the 1960s, W. W. Rustow in his famous book, “The Stages of Economic Growth”, had divided the process of economic development of all societies into five stages: (1) The traditional society, (2) the preconditions for takeoff, (3) the takeoff, (4) the drive to maturity, and (5) the age of high mass consumption.

In May 2023, Guyana is at the stage of successful fulfillment. We have discovered oil. Oil has made the developed world post-modern societies. Oil has allowed the US and Europe to shape their economies into phenomenal machines. Finally, the Guyanese population can now earn what they have long been denied – money to achieve the last stage of Rustow’s model.

And we are getting there. The Minister of Natural Resources said that if we think Guyana has earned billions of dollars from oil production, the income will be amazing from 2025 onwards.
Yes, I have seen the nightmares Guyanese have lived with from the 1970s onwards. The things we are now getting from being an oil-producing economy we sincerely deserve. The government has announced 12 more hospitals, new schools are being built, and our infrastructure is expanding beyond imagination.

Years ago, I visited a school on the West Bank of Demerara. What I saw was simply incredible. The school yard was like a jungle. There was hardly any school furniture, and there were no toilet facilities. Those were images of the past.

Guyana is an oil-producing nation; we all should welcome the fantastic income from it. We all should participate in using the oil revenues to make Guyana what it should have long been – a great country with great people and great resources. Independence 2023 is a moment that we should build on.