The country has to plan what it wants out of the integration of Guyana and Northern Brazil, lest the feared invasion by the Brazilians becomes a reality.

This is the view expressed by Paul Hardy, leader of the Guyana Action Party (GAP), in an interview with the Stabroek News last week at his party’s Queenstown headquarters.

“Once we are not prepared and geared well, then we are going to be trampled on, and we will have no one but ourselves to blame,” Hardy commented.

The GAP leader, whose party came into being to contest the March 2001 elections in an alliance with the Working People’s Alliance, believes that the country can meet this demand for skills if it begins to invest in its youth.

According to Hardy, planning for the development that would come in the wake of the road link is crucial and he does not think that government should detain itself with the politically irrelevant discussion as to the location of a deep-water harbour. He says that decision, be it in the Demerara or Berbice River, will be driven by the economic momentum.

For Hardy, the discussion which should be engaging the nation, is the kind of skills the country will need to handle the development that will come from the integration process. “How many bilingual interpreters are we going to need? How many trained accountants are we going to need? How many lawyers? These are things we have to be looking at now instead of this possible Brazilian invasion!”

Hardy has lived and worked in Brazil for a number of years and is unphased by the prospect of such an invasion. He explained that over the last fifteen years the government of Roraima had offered all sorts of incentives to Brazilians living in southern and north-eastern Brazil to move there, all to no avail. According to Hardy, Brazilians living outside of Roraima still consider it cowboy country.

The incentives include free land, free homes, electricity, water. Together they have failed to entice Brazilians to stay in Boa Vista as “people don’t want to give up the little they have in other parts of the country to come to Roraima which they consider a very difficult place to live.”

While he does not feel that the Lethem-Linden road will bring in its wake the feared invasion, Hardy believes that Guyana has been attracting a certain class of Brazilians because the country has no immigration policy. “We should have a selective immigration policy. Immigrants are the ones that really pushed Brazil to what it is today. America, Canada, Australia, these countries all had a plan, a vision of where they wanted to be twenty, thirty years down the road and they geared up towards that.”

“In Guyana we don’t do that and that is what we need. So all these checks and balances, we as a nation are responsible for putting them up; if not, whatever comes in we just have to swallow and that is not the idea in a planned society.”

About the human resources capacity to meet the challenges of the integration process, Hardy believes that notwithstanding the brain drain, once there is the commitment to invest in our young people we could produce all the engineers, accountants, lawyers and the other skills that are needed to run the country.

He accepts that the best and brightest have left for Canada, the USA and other parts of South America but contends that the only difference between them and the unemployed, marginalised youths in Guyana is those who have left had four meals a day and didn’t have to worry about selling sweets at street corners to earn a living. “They had their lives geared up for them so all they had to do was study.”

He asserts, “We as a nation have to invest in all those youths you see out there today. We have to invest in these people because they will turn out to be identical to the `top notches’ that we have out there. If we remain only talking about the brain drain we had and are still having for the rest of our lives, we will still be talking about the brain drain and our children’s children will be talking about the brain drain and we will continue to have marginalised youths in Guyana.”

Hardy says the society turns a blind eye to the problem, refusing to accept that it is of its own making and prefers to describe emigres as “lost.”

He accepts that his party is not in a position to offer assistance. But it is consolidating so that it can be in a position to exercise the sort of political clout that would enable any effort it makes to address the needs of these youths, a successful outcome.