I thank the Government for the acknowledgement that I have some quality in me that could be put to use in service of my country. I was asked to be a member of the National Commemoration Commission. My understanding is that this is a body tasked with the celebratory planning of 50 years of Independence and other national events. I have mellowed with age. My response was philosophical and my vocabulary was in accordance with protocol.

I have come a long way from the time President Burnham sent to call me after I had won the President’s Medal as the best graduating student at UG in the latter stages of the seventies. I was rude to Burnham with a grammatical flow that was disrespectful. I don’t think Burnham ever forgave me. I honestly think Burnham hated me for that youthful indiscretion. But at that time I was young and the young always do away with caution. I still discard caution but I am more circumspect. Burnham decided I could not work in Guyana. I married a Wortmanville girl named Janet Mohamed, took up a Master of Philosophy scholarship at McMaster University in Canada, and left my parents and my country behind. My dad died weeks after my departure; my mom months after my return.  They never benefited from my university education.

My rejection of membership in the National Commemoration Commission has to do with my perception of the psyche of this nation. My reading of history and world politics informs me that the 20th century has produced some national tragedies some of which has remained with us. Russia is a tragic landscape. It has always been a sad and complex country. There are signs that its economic health is impacting positively on its depressed history.  The United States is fast becoming a tragedy but I think more than the Russians the Americans have it within their collective wisdom to stop dimensions of social madness and cultural decline. Cuba was always a tragedy but with the expected withering away of the Castroite decay, Cuba may acquire its share of happiness.

Guyana is one of the 20th century’s enduring Dostoyevskian landscapes. This country has been a harsh, morally barren terrain that has known few moments of emotive bliss and idyllic feelings. Even at the level of psychological normalcy the moments have been episodic. Guyana is morally irredeemable and philosophically amorphous. The rational capacity of humankind is missing from this land. If the world had heeded John Lennon’s pleas for the scrapping of borders in his famous song, “Imagine” this land would have become a ghost town where only the wind would have stayed and that was because the wind has no control over where it goes.

For those close to me, what would have been theirs if I had taken up a post that invited me to expend mental energy on commemorating 50 years of Independence? After countless columns on the nihilistic wasteland that is Guyana, how would they have judged me when I perambulated Guyana holding a glowing candle to usher in the anniversary of a fictional construct?

If you take a group of scholars from around the world and ask them to do a comparative study of Guyana and many countries in the 20th and 21st centuries, Guyana would end up being the one territory that has not journeyed into philosophy, modernity and modern ways of life and thinking. The comparison would not only be an apocalyptic lesson in Shakespearian and Kafkaesque surrealism but simple failure. Failed states come about when they fail. If they never took off then they cannot become failed states. They never started so how could they have reached the stage of failure. I think this classification vividly captures the total social topography of Guyana

Is it not both amusing and sad that as we get into the final lap of  commemorating 50 years of Independence, the University of Guyana’s School of  Medicine has lost international accreditation. A cynic could say that is a fitting birthday gift. I mentioned to my wife a front page photograph in the newspaper of the arrival of a marking machine that demarcates the lines on the highways. Guyana got one in October 2015. That technology has been around since the 1960s. It compels you to ask the question – what achievements are we celebrating?

If you take the complete picture of this country and break it down into sociology; technology; educational system; moral values, research and development; economic diversification; manufacturing, judicial system; ethnic tolerance; medical facilities, modern infrastructure, governance structure, public service and facilities; interior development; tolerance for gender and sexual differences; tax collection, labour laws, human rights environment; respect for freedom and justice, police behaviour, university education, innovative thinking, then I would say there is absolutely no reason to celebrate 50 years of Independence. I know I cannot and would not.