GUYANA’S footprint is extending well beyond our borders. That’s true not only for the arts and culture, sports and literature, but the demand for Guyana is increasing on the international political stage. The world, from all appearances, needs more of Guyana, and President Irfaan Ali is eager to oblige.
Two days ago, he nominated Guyana’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, for the position of Secretary-General of the United Nations. Rodrigues-Birkett, an accomplished diplomat who follows in the footsteps of several outstanding Guyanese diplomats, is an apt candidate.
Just over a week ago, Human Services Minister, Dr Vindhya Persaud, was elected to the executive body of the OAS Inter-American Commission of Women, placing Guyana at the centre of regional decision-making on gender policy for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century.
From spearheading a Guyana‑led Global Biodiversity Alliance that now counts the World Bank and leading universities among its partners, to utilising UN and CARICOM platforms to argue for food security, climate justice and peaceful dispute resolution, President Ali is pursuing a quiet but unmistakable internationalism that asks the world to engage with Guyana not as a client state, but as a convener.
President Ali’s internationalism is not an attempt to make Guyana bigger because we are now an oil and gas nation, nor is it to sneer at the virtues of “small”. It is, in my estimation, an attempt to secure Guyana a seat at the tables where the rules of food, energy, climate and finance are written, while still insisting that development must remain at a human scale.
That’s why, even as his foreign policy reaches for the UN Security Council, pushing a global biodiversity alliance and gaining a seat at the hemispheric gender institution, his domestic agenda remains committed to delivering the Guyana Development Bank. In other words, while the state is negotiating at the level of global systems, it is adamant on keeping finance and opportunity close enough for ordinary people and small firms to grasp. E. F. Schumacher would have recognised it as the beating heart of a humane economy.
Schumacher’s 1973 classic, “Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered,” remains a seminal text in environmentalism and alternative economics. Schumacher’s arguments about scale and human-centred economics offer a useful lens for understanding President Ali’s developmental roadmap.
While the PPP/C Administration is leveraging Guyana’s potential into global partnerships while creating opportunities for hinterland and coastal communities, Azruddin Mohamed and his We Invest in Nationhood (WIIN) party are busy investing in the politics of permanent grievance and a campaign built on repackaging the national pastime of complaining into a brand.
And then there is Aubrey Norton, leader of the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR). In a recent letter to the editor, Norton wants Guyanese to “End this nonsense about a Wismar massacre.” Norton accepts that an entire community was driven out of Wismar-Christianburg-MacKenzie, that homes were burnt, that people were beaten and killed, yet he wastes ink trying to convince us that it was not a “massacre,” but a statistical inconvenience in a wider pattern of violence.
Norton believes human suffering is only serious when it crosses an arbitrary numerical threshold. By his logic, once enough people are beaten, raped, uprooted and dispossessed without reaching some undefined body count, we must retire the word “massacre” and speak instead of “disturbances.”
It troubles me deeply that Norton knows exactly what he is doing. As a trained social scientist and former university lecturer, he understands that if you strip an event of the language that captures its moral gravity, you shrink its place in the national memory. When he declares it is “time to end this nonsense of a Wismar massacre”, he is inviting the nation to forget that an entire community was told, with fire and weapons, that they did not belong.
A man who aspires to lead a multi-ethnic nation should protect the vocabulary of mourning and not be the first to vandalise it. So, while President Ali leans into the hard work of imagining and constructing Guyana’s future, the opposition leaders seem preoccupied with filing down the rough edges of our past and turning a culture of complaining into a political platform.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.