GEORGETOWN – Opposition Leader Joseph Harmon said on Wednesday that Guyana is now poised to attain economic independence.
In a message marking the country’s 55th anniversary of independence, Harmon said while political independence from “our colonial masters in 1966 introduced some freedoms…what it did not permit was economic independence”.
The Opposition Leader said that for the first time in the country’s history economic independence was a real possibility given the abundant oil and gas resources.
“This possibility however has come about when the issues of the negative global consequences of fossil fuels are a growing global concern,” he said. “The issues of climate change and the COVID 19 pandemic could not be more present nationally and beyond.
“Guyana therefore has a sharpened responsibility to ensure that we mitigate the proven downside of oil by the responsible management of its extraction and the monies garnered from it.”
Harmon said with a population of less than one million and the decades of outward migration, it is incumbent on the government in particular to offer security and a sustainable future to those Guyanese who have remained.
“This security cannot be only about elections as important as that is, but rather about wellness and well-being as a whole,” he said. “The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many fault lines in our health systems and our access to information.
“Our death rate is too high, our infection rate is too alarming, and our vaccine roll out is too slow.”
Harmon said the coalition opposition, A Partnership for National Unity and the Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) will be “redoubling our efforts and encouraging others to join our national push for increased vaccinations as we cannot afford to lose another citizen”.
Harmon said the controversial March 2 regional and general elections last year scarred the nation and once more “opened the floodgates of vitriol, distrust and unproductive racial stereotyping”.
“As disturbing as it was to witness the regrettable outpouring of hatred and intransigence, it has afforded us the opportunity to bring intolerance out of the shadows and deal with it decisively without blaming and shaming,” he said.
“Let us not sweep it back under the carpet, but rather commit at every level, personal, institutional, political, governmental, social, to consciously, resolutely and patriotically rid our society of this divisive affliction,” Harmon said.
“I cannot think of any Guyanese who does not recognise that ethnic insecurity has been the root of our historic barrier to nation building. This old colonial curse has been the mill stone to our joint and just development.”
He said that the notion of oneness must never mean “we alone” and “was not what the country’s independence heroes worked so hard to achieve in their quest for self-determination.
(CMC)
