I HAVEN’T driven deep into East Bank Demerara (EBD) with my wife since 2022 when we took our daughter to the airport (we have one child – Kavita Farah Kissoon). I haven’t seen the airport since then. What I have seen is a bit disappointing but I will come to that below. Last Wednesday, my wife and I made the airport trip to collect her sister.

What I see and what I will continue to see as I make future trips to the airport will forever cause me to reflect on a changing Guyana. I find that the advocacy of leaving our oil in the ground borders on evil thoughts. All the way on the journey, as I watched the breathtaking developments up the EBD, I thought of how a changing Guyana in 2024 was never envisaged by us who worked at UG during the 80s and 90s.

As we drove deep into EBD, I played a stuck record for my wife. She lived with me in the 80s and 90s so she fully appreciated my reflections. I kept telling my wife, why what I am seeing up EBD couldn’t happen when I was teaching at UG. I asked why Guyana left people like me and my generation behind.

It was a surreal thing teaching at UG. And as you see the buildings going up, the plethora of retail establishments, the transformation of the EBD, your mind goes back to UG. I have never worked at any place in my entire life except at UG. I did a short stint as an adviser to the Maurice Bishop Government in Grenada but UG essentially was the only place I worked at.

To say that Guyana and UG were livable in 1986 when I first took the job at UG is an understatement. The results of Hoyte’s blueprint named the Economic Recovery Programme did not kick in way into the late 90s even when the PNC was out of power because those changes took time. The new PPP government was not in immediate receipt of the positive flow that the ERP would bring.

Perhaps the perfect example was public salaries. Salaries at UG were the lowest in the world simply because the structural adjustment criteria that canopied the ERP stipulated no state funds for salary increases. President Jagan did the unthinkable and increased UG salaries by 50 per cent shortly after he became president.

UG was a nightmare to work at – no books, no printing paper, no computers, no lecturers, no functioning infrastructure, no resources. Today, even the smallest private school or public school in Guyana has a functioning modern computer lab and there is no book shortage and printing material.

You look over your shoulder and age catch up with you. As I kept driving up the EBD, I asked my wife why time flew by so quickly that the new Guyana has passed us by. I always remember the words of Kit Nascimento. He marveled at the fantastic new Guyana but he said to me that it came too late for older folks like us.

Looking at what I was seeing up EBD, I cannot imagine, a Guyanese can say that we must leave the oil in the ground. Do such Guyanese have even a modicum of experience living in Guyana in the 80s and 90s? Do you know what it is like to teach at a university where the classroom resembles a house on a squatting estate? And there were absolutely no washroom facilities?

The new Guyana looks incredibly good. I will not inherit it but I hope my daughter does. I hope what my generation couldn’t get from Guyana the young people of this country will get way into the next 50 years. I end with what I saw at the arrival lounge at the airport. I don’t think what I saw could be permanent. It cannot be.

You cannot enter the arrival lounge. You have to wait outside to see passengers come out. This is 2024. About 15 years ago, my wife and I had coffee and donuts at a Bakewell café inside the arrival lounge that was separated from the arrival section. But you could sit and have coffee while gazing to see if your family members arrived.

I remember “hundreds” of times my wife and I checked the computer monitors to see the arrivals, departures and delays. You cannot enter the arrival lounge though it is now ten times bigger than 12 years ago when I was sitting with my wife and the now former Finance Minister, Winston Jordan came up to share information with me. So, I entered the lounge to check the monitors for arrivals but the security rank approached me. He said you cannot enter. I told him I needed to check on arrivals, and he said; “ask me, I will tell you.”