OH BEAUTIFUL GUYANA
Oh my lovely native land
More dear to me than all the world
Thy sun-washed, sun-kissed strand
Or down upon the borders
Looking out upon the deep
The great Atlantic
Blown into a fury or asleep
At morn, at noon – or better
In the crimson sunset’s glow
I love thee, Oh I love thee.
This year is our “Jubilee Year” – fiftieth year since we achieved independence from Britain. There are many who, with good reason, may say we should be further along the road to prosperity than we are now. But there is nothing we can do about the past, save facing it honestly to discern whether there are still forces from that past lingering in the present, making it so much more difficult to achieve the dream that all Guyana share: to make our beautiful native land reach that pinnacle of glory we know it can.
And we can start by literally making those hamlets, villages and towns of Guyana where we live as beautiful as the original pristine parts we glorify in the national song above. The new government has kicked off the effort by expending much capital – human and material – to transform our national capital back into a town of which we can all be proud. At independence in 1966, even though its downtown area had been razed by fires set by foreign agents, Georgetown was still the “Garden City” of the Caribbean.
Its canal-bisected streets and tropical flora provided the perfect canvass on which the jalousied wooden houses were painted in the colours of the rainbow. Only the Bank of Guyana building, built in 1965, “spoiled” the placid ambiance of the tropical wonderland that was Georgetown. In the countryside – augmented in the previous decade by the largest housing development in the Caribbean on our sugar plantations with 12,000 homes built – the villages competed each year for the “Best Village” competition. Citizens had pride of ownership of their surroundings and of the communities with which they identified.
Unfortunately, in the following decades, the city, along with the rest of the communities across the country, deteriorated as the economy floundered to place Guyana by 1989 only above Haiti in the Western Hemisphere by most development standards. What was worse than the physical deterioration, however, was the psychological one in the inner landscape of the minds of the populace. It would seem that citizens stopped caring about the appearance of their surroundings as they scavenged for survival.
After 1992, the economic decline was gradually reversed but to a large extent, the psychological decline did not follow suit – or at least to the same extent. While Guyana’s housing stock increased by over 30,000 units, and we acquired at least six new towns and countless new villages along with enormously enlarged others, we seemed to have not regained that joie de vivre – zest for life – expressed in our surroundings. Yes there are bigger houses; but while the individual ones may be well adorned, we have neglected the collective public space that connects us as a people.
We have just completed the first Local Government Elections in 23 years, supposedly to return autonomy to the local levels. In addition to funding the cleanup of Georgetown, the government has just announced a $5 million grant to Linden: $3 million to construct a float for the Independence parade in Georgetown on May 26 and $2 million for cleaning the town. What we would like to suggest is for the government to allocate $5 million to each of the Neighbourhood Democratic Councils and the Towns across the land.
The funds should be used to initiate a movement to make all of Guyana’s public spaces beautiful as they once were – like Georgetown. The regions and towns and even villages can be encouraged to create their own floats in civic pride in this beautiful land. This should not have to be sponsored by the state.
