Addressing Guyana’s social pathologies 

After five years of oil revenues flowing into our national coffers, it appears that as far as alleviating our social pathologies, there is some truth in the old folk verity, “Things will get worse before they get better.” Much of this is because the social ailments arise from deep structural, cultural, and economic factors that developed over hundreds of years. Consequently, even as programmes are unfurled across the spectrum to address them, there is not only an inevitable lag between policy, implementation and effects, but also the complex intertwining of causes and effects that may not be in sync. Change is always problematic.
Take for instance the patriarchal norms fostered after slavery and indentureship, which inculcated men into not expressing emotional “weakness” and women enduring what they “must”. This was situated within the meta plantation ethos of handling conflict through domination rather than communication. This mentality fuels domestic violence, alcohol dependence as coping and male suicide, which is the highest in the world here. As we have stressed, our rum culture was fostered by the plantation owners and is now deeply embedded in village rum shops, workplaces, social life, wakes, celebrations, and cultural events. Being comparatively cheap, widely available, and socially expected, this increases violence, road accidents, depression, chronic diseases, alcoholism, and child neglect.
While the oil revenues have made it possible for the Government to fund interventionist programmes, it has increased the cost of living and pressures for men to fill their roles as “providers”. With more women not only supplementing their wages but frequently becoming breadwinners, especially in single-parent families, the husband-wife dynamics have become fraught as traditional roles are sundered.
The question, of course, is how can we deal with these pathologies holistically? Much emphasis must be placed on education – in the widest use of the word and not just to create workers. The latter, of course, is not inconsequential since qualifications for the new higher-paying, skilled jobs can deliver the wherewithal to share in the “good life” that is now expected in the “fastest growing economy in the world”. The increase in technical training institutes and institutions by the Government is a good start which should be extended into polytechnics rather than the old-line traditional universities.
At the local level, there is much truth in the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”, but in Guyana we have to remember that our villages – even the slums of Georgetown – refract the values of the plantation. However, in one experiment starting in 1947, when the sugar planters decided to move out the workers living in the 1247 “logies” surrounding the 15 sugar factories, there was a conscious attempt to inculcate more positive values. The salutary experience was to be achieved in the new “extra-nuclear housing schemes” via a thoroughgoing “Social Welfare and Personnel Programme” run by a trained National Welfare Officer (NOW). As early as 1959, this individual had bemoaned, as we do today, “The influence of the priests and religious leaders on the younger generation had weakened, and the conflict of cultures resulted in waywardness and lack of respect for authority.”
The major innovation was the creation of community centres with varying numbers of programmes but all adjoining large playing fields catering for cricket, soccer and track-and-field activities. The advice of the NWO is still relevant: “Our job, therefore, was seen as one of reducing tensions, providing avenues for social satisfaction, channelling the abundant energies of the under-employed youth into socially acceptable patterns, initiating and giving guidance and direction to the changes which obviously had to take place, and of educating and training the people to deal with the new situations which would arise as a result of such change. In other words, it is a project in changing attitudes and teaching new skills and providing opportunities for social relationships which would result in increased satisfaction among the mass of the people.”
Each community centre had several sports clubs and the larger ones, debating clubs; musical bands; educational movies and newsreels; home economics and woodworking facilities; indoor games like table tennis; a scout troop and, very critically to the baby boomers, a library with books and magazines that opened eyes to a wider world. Land was allocated for mandirs, masjids and churches to be constructed.
The Government can do worse than adopt the successful features of the community centre approach to people’s development by resuscitating and supplementing the programmes with new ones such as substance-rehab programmes and mental-health counselling.