GUYANA HAS NOT LIVED UP TO POST-INDEPENDENCE EXPECTATIONS

Dear Editor;
As Guyanese prepare to celebrate or observe or ignore the nation’s 50th anniversary of political independence, I cannot help joining others in asking the sobering question: What exactly are we celebrating or observing?
To me, political independence meant we no longer looked to Britain for guidance on any issue. We became masters of our own political destiny. However, as we look back on the road traveled the last 50 years, can we seriously say we are on the right road to our destiny? If the majority answer is no, then not only are we lost, but since we don’t know where we are going then any road we take will get us there.
Forbes Burnham, one of the two supposed fathers of Independence, wrote a book, ‘A destiny to mold’, but the road on which he took the country for 21 years clearly did not lead us to the destiny we expected or wanted after 1966.
Our national motto, on the other hand, reads, ‘One People, One Nation, One Destiny’, but 50 years after gaining political independence and judging from the manner in which our country’s politics have divided the nation along racial voting lines to gain electoral votes, we did not live up to that maxim.
As a schoolboy in then McKenzie, I vividly recall school rallies being held across Guyana as new national songs were sung (‘My Guyana, El Dorado’ was a hit with me) and the Golden Arrowhead fluttered in the tropical winds. There was a sense of a new birth, national pride and a euphoric feeling.
As an adult Guyanese, who lived through the independence era, I now firmly believe political independence for Guyana was a bust, especially if our national motto was supposed to be our guide to success. The first ten years after independence, in my opinion, may well have been the best decade we had, because one decade later, in 1976, Guyana began its descent into the political, economic and social abyss, out of which it continues to struggle to climb.
Editor, I am yet to find comparative studies and analyses that show how former British colonies, later described as Third World countries, have fared since gaining political independence to determine whether Independence for any, some or most was a bust.
But one of the expected benefits of political independence, in my layman’s view, was a sense of socioeconomic development. While Burnham tried on this front with his ‘self-sufficiency’ drive, he misjudged the reality that Guyana’s economy was not insulated but dependent on global markets, which have always been dictated by powerful nations that set both demands and prices. It also did not help Guyana’s socioeconomic interests that Burnham’s political and philosophical world view caused him to launch virulent attacks on the free market West while trying to embrace the socialist East.
By the time Burnham died in August 1985, enormous damage was done. Not even successive Presidents – Desmond Hoyte, Cheddi Jagan, Janet Jagan, Bharrat Jagdeo, Donald Ramotar and now David Granger – seemed able to put ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ Guyana back together again, as each struggled to varying extents with the idiosyncrasies of ideology, internecine racial politics and systemic corruption. Oh yes, corruption started under the PNC but worsened exponentially under the PPP.
Editor, to be fair, Hoyte did demonstrate he was capable to making changes for a better Guyana, but ethnic voting halted his efforts in1992. Cheddi and Janet Jagan appeared uncertain of how to deal with the West given the Soviet Union had collapsed, so Guyana had to wait until both Jagans died before young Bharrat Jagdeo took over and continued Hoyte’s Economic Recovery Programme, allowing Guyana to significantly reduce its foreign debt and expand its private sector evolution.
Unfortunately, Jagdeo became so enamored with political power that while he managed to reduce Guyana’s foreign debt by pursuing Hoyte’s Economic Recovery Programme, he also pursued a path of political entitlement and personal enrichment, which worsened systemic corruption in government to the extent that even this coalition government appears unwilling or unable to frontally address. Multiple audits reveal frauds but no indictments or seizures?
To the average Guyanese, whether at home or abroad, therefore, political independence has turned out to benefit a few Guyanese politicians and their corrupt associates, which may explain why almost half of the nation prefers to call some other country home. In fact, it has to be an ironic slap in the face of our so-called founding fathers of independence that after all their public vilifications of the White man as being bad for Guyana, hundreds of thousands of Guyanese currently live in ‘White man countries’.
This latter development alone could well come to define the post-independence failure of our political leaders, despite the fact Guyana is a country of83,000 square miles (216,000 square kilometers), with an abundance of natural resources in uninhabited lands and with always less than a million people.  The last fact is quite instructive, because no country can develop without human resources, and Guyana has been hemorrhaging human resources, hence it always has less than a million people.
Editor, there has been and will always be no shortage of opinions on Guyana’s political independence, but if the current and potential leaders really believe they can make a genuine difference in helping Guyana finally live up to its national motto, there has to be a three-pronged push to end ethnic voting, create jobs primarily for youths while stemming the related crime crisis, and eliminate systemic corruption in government.
As Guyanese, whether at home or abroad, celebrate or observe or ignore 50 years of political independence, I can only hope this moment in time is not spent by some getting drunk and reveling, but engaging in sober introspection on how we arrived at this perplexing juncture of our journey, and what needs to be done to get all Guyanese in one political vehicle on the road to our shared destiny of a better Guyana for all.
 Emile Mervin