Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Mar 25, 2021 Editorial
Kaieteur News – We offer our congratulations to our young students at the University of Guyana for successfully achieving a major academic milestone in life. Our recognition goes out to those who rose to the top, the valedictorians, the best graduating students, and all the rest of the graduates. Whether two years or four years later, or otherwise, it is a time and a point in the journey of life to be treasured.
But as we join our hands with other Guyanese to applaud today, we say that our graduates must be about more. They must be much more than a moment in time under the sun and before the flashing of cameras. They must be more than a piece of parchment that is a part of the scroll of their lives. Unlike scrolls, which are usually furled and carefully put away, the lives of our graduates must be unfurled in the diligence of their efforts, the quality of the service that they bring before their fellow citizens.
Our graduates, past and present, must find it in themselves to be more than a piece of paper proudly placed on the wall for all who come near or pass by to admire. At the individual levels, their lives must be a cause for a certain kind of ongoing commentary. It is that strain of commentary, which speaks so much of what they heard and absorbed, learned and retained, and what they must bring to the fore, because they are determined to be difference makers, they have visions of being contributors, and they harbour ideas that could stir their contemporaries, break down barriers and overcome all challenges.
If they are going to serve this country with character, and with distinction, then they must resolve themselves to be rid of the poisons that plague this society. Of necessity, their first look begins deep within themselves, then beyond the prevailing culture, last over the heads of all resistance to the noble things that they stand for, the constructive disagreements that come from the visions of how this society should be. They can continue to carry the ancient baggage indifferently; or they can say differently and be just that, and nothing else.
The priorities are sure to number taking their places in society that is believed to be well deserving and due. But, as we look at what went before with the great majority of our graduates, we say: please stay, don’t go! And as we look still more closely, and most critically this time, at most of those who came from our academic halls of learning, we say do not let it be just about the money and the position and the power that comes from both. We have had too much of those, which has failed us many times before, and now when we need it like never before.
We need our young men and women, our thrilled graduates, to rise above the political partisanship, though; it may be some of that relationship that got them there. We need, and so urge, our graduating citizens coming from all corners of this country, to be about the sprawling uplifting universal and not the narrow self-defeating racial, which must not be the spectacles through which they see the world, this sharply torn and deeply wounded world of Guyana.
What we need today is for our graduates – the overachievers, the underachievers, the average, and all of them – to soar in this society in their manifestations of a different spirit. That they will not be part of that which divides; if they don’t, then it can be said that, for all their learning, they have learned and know not anything. That they will not be part and parcel, in any form whatsoever, in those practices that are of the same self-fulfilling grabbing from the people, the same dirty corruptions that contaminate all and distress fewer and fewer.
Today we need our young graduates, in whatever field that they singled out as their calling, to excel in the trenches. They must deliver quietly and cleanly to their fellow citizens, who come to them, or look to them, or hope in them. Should they embrace our nasty sickening politics, then all we can insist of them is: do it well, involve self in it honestly and with the best of intentions. That is, serve the people, hold them dear, and give them what is due to them. Deliver those, and we can ask for nothing more. Best of luck, make us proud!
Where is the BETTER MANAGEMENT/RENEGOTIATION OF THE OIL CONTRACTS you promised Jagdeo?
Apr 19, 2024
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