I GREW up in a country where underdevelopment and poverty were characteristics of the post-colonial world. In my era, sugar was our life-saver. When I was growing up, I heard people say all the time that Guyana was nothing compared to the three wealthy countries in the West Indies: Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados.

Then two tsunamis came and pushed Guyana further down the chasm of pessimism. First, there was the Burnham autocracy. Any intellectual discussion on the Forbes Burnham period in Guyana has to include the recognition that Burnham wanted a post-colonial economy away from its traditional dependence on everything imported from abroad and a country that just buys and sells.

He wanted industrialisation and manufacturing and the colossal reliance on our rich resources that Guyana was endowed with. Burnham failed because he was instinctively narcissist and inherently authoritarian and refused to allow for democratic inclusion, especially the phenomenally popular, opposition party, the PPP and its globally respected leader, Cheddi Jagan.

The second wreckage came with the arrival of globalisation and the transformation of GATT into WTO. What the WTO did was to push post-colonial economies further into underdevelopment because the new trading rules collapsed the economies of the world into one global economy without tariffs and subsidies. So preferential prices for Guyana’s sugar and Dominica’s banana were gone.

Guyana has now moved past that epoch. Guyana has discovered a resource that has global demand – oil. It is inconceivable that anyone would deny that. There is now a future that so long eluded us. When I was looking at the Bob Marley biopic and there were scenes of gun violence in Jamaica in the mid-1970s, my mind just went on oil.

As I looked at Kingston with its dilapidated houses, I thought of oil money and how Georgetown had the same appearance. Jamaica, no doubt, has moved far away from the appearances of the 1970s and so has Guyana.

Guyanese who have lived abroad for decades are stunned at the Georgetown they see in the 21st century as when they left here in the 1970s, the very time when both Jamaica and Guyana were going through terrible times.

The oil economy has transformed this country from a typical underdeveloped, post-colonial economy into a promising land. One has to be dishonest to deny that Guyana has long gone past its economic biology from 1966, the time of Independence and now has taken on the shape of a nation leaving its developing country status behind.

Today is the final session of the oil conference, which is in its third year and all the predictions from the leading experts on oil who are at that meeting, together with administrators from many other countries, is that Guyana is on its way and it is the land for investors to seek out.

Where Guyana goes from 2024 is no guessing game. The predictions are easy to make. The oil industry should provide a reliable income for the next 40+ years. I won’t be here to see what Guyana will look like in 2060, but if our economy is managed well, by that time, we would have caught up with the developed world.

I saw a little bit of what an assured income could do for a post-colonial country when I was in Trinidad for eye surgery a few years ago. I looked at Trinidad and I was amazed. It did not have the appearance of a Third World state. We will go beyond Trinidad as the years pass on.

All the signs are there that we have left the sugar era behind and that Guyana is now a brand new country. The University of Guyana will no longer be a fee-paying institution and that is one potent sign that the oil economy is going to elevate the working class.

Working class parents will no longer have to fork out almost half a million dollars over a four year period to educate their children. I know how that feels because I have been in that situation. In the field of medicine, I believe the fees are in the vicinity of a million.

In the area of pubic medicine, I can testify to improved service at the Georgetown Hospital. Hip and knee surgeries are free services offered at the Georgetown Hospital. My mother died at the Georgetown Hospital at a time when there was a shortage of everything at that institution.

As the energy conference winds down today, there is now hope and optimism in Guyana. Guyana can now offer its people a future. It is there for all to see. I end with a quote from the Caribbean genius, Bob Marley: “In the abundance of water, the fool is thirsty.”