Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Feb 22, 2015 Letters
Dear Editor,
I attended a youth-led workshop late last year and was refreshingly surprised by one of the presentations made which highlighted the youth activism of our past Presidents and other well-known Guyanese personalities. Jagan, Burnham, Critchlow, Rodney and others were all youth activists before settling into their respective professions and/or political parties. Examples of their youth activism were cited, documents showing the nature of their youth activism were referenced by the presenter. This presentation was inspiring and I believe it helped to convey a message that the youth in attendance should continue to be active citizens constantly pushing for change in this age of rapid change.
In other words, they should not see their efforts in vain or as having no or minimal impact.
Editor, there are some key variables that our national leaders and parties would do well to further investigate and factor into their respective proposals for youth development.
These include the current under 40 population which is estimated to 60 percent. Another indicator is that greater access to information has literally opened the eyes of so many of our youth who have not stepped foot out of Guyana and it is clear as day to observe that our youth are clamouring for better governance, self-development opportunities and participation at all levels of national and sectoral decision-making. Similarly, there is recognition by many Guyanese youth that they do not need to belong to any political party to affect change. Just observe the number of youth-led voluntary groups that have sprung up over the past few years in response to challenges like littering and environmental destruction, voter education, entrepreneurial development and so on. In these groupings, you find children of PPP, PNC, AFC and other national political groups working together to address shared concerns; you also find youths from different communities, some of which traditionally vote in different directions, working together.
I am happy to see Guyanese youth finding their voices, speaking and standing up not only for their rights but also their aspirations. I certainly encourage more of this, for it will benefit us now and in generations to come. From the University of Guyana students, who form part of the leadership of the efforts to transform administrative function, students’ experience, academic and teaching standards, to the youths calling for political and constitutional reform and those who are grassroots activists, to the recently established youth party contesting the May 1 polls, it is clear to see that we need to leverage and harness this collective youth movement.
To effectively leverage this energy and momentum, young people need to be guided and support by a programmatic approach to their engagement in various sectors and levels of society, from national, regional and local governance, to national development, politics, business, etc. In other words a non-negotiable component of any party’s programme and aspiration must be to facilitate and provide opportunities for meaningful youth participation and leadership cultivation.
As I mentioned to a group of politically active youths at a workshop last year, youth development is and must be treated as non-political; non-political in the sense of politics. We cannot and must not play politics with the lives of our youth, inevitably this will come back to bite us.
Our task is to engage them in meaningful brainstorming sessions and dialogue to arrive at a program that harnesses the talents, aspirations and abilities of ALL our youth in ways we our communities, Guyana and young people themselves benefit from.
In closing I would like to share a quote with your readers, “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him (or her) to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
R. Small
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