The Guyanese people will fly away today as they normally do
Freddie Kissoon column
Kaieteur News
April 9, 2007
Since 2003, my Easter Monday article has been on the same theme – the flight of the Guyanese people. This year, there is no exception but what I have done here is to retain a large body of material from my last year's Easter column. Emigration out of Guyana is the most troubling dimension of life in Guyana.
I agree that we have had more than half a century of political instability that has reduced this country to one of the world's miserable spots on Planet Earth. But there are dynamics in society that can pull a country out of its precarious existence.
That has happened so many times in the final hours of the last century and continues to happen that there must be optimism in the hearts of Guyanese that a day of liberation will come. I believe it will come. The dynamics of the global village will propel Guyana into a new and better existence. You can feel it in the air since 2007 began.
No doubt contradictions are raising their heads at the moment and it dims the future, for example, the Stabroek News advertisement withdrawal, the President's lashing out at what he calls the old investors, the constant attack on the media, the state of unrestrained presidency that we have at the moment.
I believe the rebirth will have a positive impact on Guyana's future. For all we know, a positive tomorrow may be on the horizon.
Let's look at crime. Fear of crime is on everyone's mind. Just when you think it was safe to open your door after the demise of the Buxton crime wave, Guyana is a cesspool of runaway petty criminality that threatens every citizen despite class, position, privilege, wealth or status.
One can just be stationary in one's car late at night chatting and one can die by just the random stop of a car then gunfire meets you. This happened to a Kitty contractor last year March. Then last month, at one of the busiest corners in Georgetown, Hadfield Street and Louisa Row, a Chinese national was shot in his restaurant in front of patrons by teenage robbers.
Each morning, as you face the dawn of a new day, you ask yourself the question – who's next? I will analyse the raging criminality (even though there are not large groups armed with AK47s) that we are engulfed in using the same methodology as I did with political instability in the opening paragraphs of this composition.
Of course, political instability and the continuation of crime are intricately intertwined. I would advance four arguments for this theory.
First, I think the criminals in Guyana, despite whatever lack of formal education they have, see Guyana as a nation in decline where central government has lost the will, reason and motive to hold the country together. They perceive Guyana to be territory that has collapsed and hardly anyone is in charge. This has emboldened many petty criminals to act.
A most bizarre case was in Eccles outside the Shell Antilles head office last year. Some 15-year-old kids were fishing in a trench, and when a contractor for the gas company drove up, they just shot him and attempted to rob him. The assistants sitting on top of the vehicle, obscured to the gunmen, jumped off and challenged them. They ran away and left the weapon behind.
Secondly, the state of the police force contributes to the rising tides of robbery. There is the appearance that the police force is weak and lacks resources, and is unable to stem gun crimes. A policeman was the lone occupant of the Grove Police Station last week when she was allegedly assaulted by a soldier.
Thirdly, and related to the third explanation is the unbelievable low rate of crime solving in this country. What Guyanese do not know is that the horrible levels of criminal violence in Jamaica and Trinidad have a corresponding high level of success. This is what makes Guyana so frightening.
Trinidad and Jamaica do make arrests in high profile cases. Trinidad and Jamaica respectively have the FBI and Scotland Yard working with the national police forces.
Once the police get on top of crime it has a spin off effect. Young, inexperienced criminals tend to back off because they feel that the police are getting the upper hand. My contestation is that once the police's crime-solving record remains low, criminality isn't going to stop in the foreseeable future.
Fourthly, crime has got out of control because the ruling PPP played a dangerous gamble with it and it backfired. Crime deepened the fear of Indian people who saw African Guyanese as the culprits. The PPP used this for narrow political purposes; it kept the Indians from straying.
The boomerang came. Indian youths are robbing and killing people and other criminals are now unstoppable.
Still I feel crime and political instability are not permanent legacies. I believe they can be surmounted. It has reached a stage in Guyana where the society is going to impose its will on the police force and the government.
Crime will have to be confronted. If political instability is dissolved and as a result, the police force recaptures its past spirit and ingenuity, the crime rate will go down. For me, the greatest danger facing this country, in terms of the permanency of the process, is migration.
Make no mistake, migration is a global phenomenon. The UN-sponsored Global Commission on International Migration reported that there are over 200 million international migrants in 2005, a number which increased rapidly from 82 million in 1972 and 125 million in 2004. However, some countries cannot survive if their people continue to leave at a supersonic rate. This is the case with Guyana.
You see Europeans and Americans migrate all over the place. So do the Indians and Chinese. But the human resource index in those countries is superbly high. China and India produce trained people like how Guyana produces mangoes.
The trouble with Guyana is that our human resource base is so thin and narrow that it is not a question of depletion but of survival when so many people leave poor Guyana. A form of madness has taken over this country. No one wants to stay. Canada has driven the last nail in the coffin. Once you have a university degree, even if it is in how to play dominoes, Canada is taking you.
What this means is that no UG graduate is going to stay in Guyana. But this country can still fight back. It has to come up with ingenious ways of retaining its people. It can be done. Ireland did it.
Today the kites will sail away into the open skies, soon to be followed by the people who are holding the strings to which the kits are attached. Do you think Guyanese will migrate to Iraq in search of a better life?