One continues to be shocked and dismayed at the departure of friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Everyday one hears new names. The reasons are broadly the same, the crime situation and the presence of men with violent agendas, economic difficulties, complaints about education (though the private schools have made some difference), and a general unhappiness with the unstable politics.

As one man put it, why should myself and my wife put up with this if there is an alternative. It is hard to argue against that. There is a deep weariness with the violence, the prevailing mediocrity, the shallow, opportunist politics, the childishness and immaturity of much in public life, the mind-numbing banality of ethnic strife. It is easy for anyone to conclude that it can’t be this bad elsewhere.

Think for a moment of the amount of suffering the people of this country have undergone in the last fifty years. Hundreds of thousands have emigrated. They have uprooted themselves and their families, sold their homes (where they had them) and gone into exile. Many have gone in their forties or fifties, they have had to pull up their roots and start over, with all the dislocation that entails. Often, the culture shock they have suffered in their new countries has been considerable. They have had to adapt, often painfully, and learn to survive. Some have done well eventually, others have not.

As a nation we should all be in sackcloth and ashes, mourning our collective shame. By our combined efforts, or lack of them, we have created a country in which over the years a large percentage of our citizens have been deeply unhappy and wanted to leave. It started with the far left politics in the early fifties which terrified the old middle and upper classes, making them feel irrelevant or a threatened species. Many left for Canada and elsewhere, though a few like Peter d’Aguiar felt that they should fight for their rights. The next wave of emigration started in the early sixties with the political upheaval, culminating in some level of foreign intervention. The resulting ethnic strife and the rigged elections in 1968 which introduced a government that could no longer be changed by democratic means led to increasing despair. For most Guyanese the seventies and eighties were years of unmitigated apprehension and fear when the continued rigging of elections and the militarisation of society seemed to change the very basis of everything they had believed in, in the interest of a narrow and unproductive new elite. The return of socialist policies, a series of nationalisations and the miniaturisation of the remaining local business class were the final nails in the coffin. The old Guyana had been well and truly destroyed but what had emerged in its place was broadly unacceptable to its own citizens, who continued to leave in droves.

The return of democratic elections in 1992 was significant but the opposition has engaged in confrontational politics and the country has not had a chance to catch its breath. Recovery was never going to be easy or short term given all that had happened but this has made it doubly difficult, if not impossible. And so, the exodus continues.

We have failed so far to make our country livable. Many still here would leave if they had the chance. This is a very sad state of affairs.

What we must hope is that there will emerge out of all this pain and failure a new level of maturity and understanding on the part of those still left. Political and social change was inevitable and desirable with the end of colonialism but it has not produced this kind of trauma in other West Indian territories. Surely a few lessons can be learnt, one being that the old practices have got us nowhere. One has recently seen young politicians on both sides show some level of insight and courage, though their initiatives have been brief and hesitant. We should ponder as a people on our failure and see what we can learn from it. All the bright promises, the rhetoric has so far been in vain. The future will demand much higher levels of personal and political responsibility if we are to keep our citizens from leaving.