Annual Vernley Ward Bursary Dinner and Dance

Remarks by 2008 Honoree

Dr. Laurence Clarke

In Quest of Change for Guyana

New York, May 31, 2008

Thank you Karen (Ms Karen Wharton-Assistant Secretary, NY Chapter) for that wonderful introduction and moving accompanying slide show, covering important aspects of my life from birth to my professional sojourn up to today. You sure brought back some emotional moments, especially of my wonderful days at Queen's College and my formative days in Plaisance/Sparendaam Village.

My dear colleagues and friends, I am most delighted to be here in New York this evening as your honoree for the 2008 Vernley Ward Memorial Benefit. A few of you know that my favorite scripture in the Bible is Ecclesiastes Ch. 3, that talks about a "season", a "reason" and a "time" for everything. In a few earlier years past Presidents of this Association, especially the tireless Gordon Wilson, had invited me to receive this award, but I felt it was not the correct time or season for me to do so. More practically, time also did not so permit me to do. I thank them and you all nevertheless for such sustained confidence, by inviting me once again this year to receive such an honor. As it turns out, and as Karen noted, this year, my 30th year in the field of global development, may be more appropriate for accepting such a thoughtful and special honor.

Friends, although professionally I evolved in the study of economics, in reality, deep in my core, I remain a student of the classics. And so, as I began seriously thinking of what I should to say this evening, I could not help but recall the famous Roman maximist Publilius Syrus, who, writing in his Sententiae in the first century BC, opined: "Honor honestum declarat; inhonestum notat" (Honor should be bestowed on the deserving/honest ;but it would stain the undeserving/dishonest). Put in our own Guyanese jargon - "If you cuffufle someone and get an award, you sins gone catch up wid you one day eventually." Tonight, it is my hope that this honor by fellow alumni of New York, is truly deserved and that you will all be proud for a long time to come for having made it to me. For me, this honor is particularly special as it is largely from peers from High School. As such, it is special recognition accorded by potentially some of one's harshest critics - one's peers; colleagues with whom one grew up in all sorts of friendly and even at times not so friendly competition! Folk who would know all one's previous tricks and childhood ruses. I am therefore truly delighted, humbly accept and sincerely thank President Louis Kilkenny and his New York Chapter, for this honor.

Fellow Alumni and friends, as the wonderful slide show earlier evidenced, this honor is a stark reminder of my own humble beginnings. For me, thanks and deep personal gratitude are due to so many helpful and truly committed folk along my journey to wherever I am today. First, to my late parents, especially my mother, and to my sisters and brothers, aunts, uncles, godparents, lifelong close friends, and of course my own family. Many of that wider family are here tonight. I thank them all. The people of Plaisance/Sparendaam Village, to whom I owe so much and whom really I would never be able to fully repay for their unstinting support and assistance over my formative years in particular. And their's were often small but invaluable things-a meal, some pine drink, some mauby, a mango, a piece of salara, or white-eye; or allowing me to keep the guava or genip in my pocket once I am caught in the act stealing their fruit as a little kid. People in a village that really took it as their collective duty and responsibility to raise me and many of my kraal.

This honor also has its source in my teachers all levels - in St Paul's Anglican School in Plaisance where I started; in Comenius Moravian School in Queenstown, where teachers must have seen some little spark, to skip me 2 to three classes en route from Kindergarten to Common Entrance, between 1958 and 1962. And equally importantly, this honor is for several teachers at Queen's College, who always understood the need to help and earnestly encourage me along-the late Pryor Jonas, who thought me the reality and way to win today and lose tomorrow - fundamental tenets for the rest of my life; my Form Master in my first and last years at Queen's, Claude "Patches" Yearwood, with whom I spoke today and whom I will see shortly; the late Charlie Nathaniel Agard, Clem "Balance" Yhap, and Sheik "Bandit" Insanally, merely to name a few. Without them all, I would have been a much lesser person tonight. I thank them all for being there at critical junctures of my life.

Queen's College and Change
My dear alumni, colleagues and friends, the leap year 2008 is already shaping up as one characterized by oceanic, sea changes. Here in the United States later this month, one way or the other a political change of an historic nature will crystallize. Later this very year, we may well see change of an earth quaking nature unfold right before our eyes; likely change undreamt of forty or even many less years ago. Already in recent years we have all lived through unbelievable change globally, be it in South Africa, in China, in Rwanda, in Liberia, in former Yugoslavia, in Angola, or in Eastern Europe.

Galvanized by that reality that all change is possible, I wish to speak with you this evening a bit more about change that must come, change that is imperative, and that is no longer debatable, for our own dear Guyana. For you see, in our Guyana of today, and for many years now, "ting na regula." And since "goat na bite we" as a people, we have to confront this national reality, as matter of urgency. "Betta must come, it must come; it must come." Fundamental change must come for Guyana.

And Queen's College must play its role, to wit a leading role, in catalyzing this vital quest for change in today's Guyana.

Dear friends, for the catalytic and leadership roles in this crucial quest for change, which I am tonight advocating, history is squarely on the side of Queen's College as a national institution. Since its creation in 1844 by its first Principal Bishop William Percy Austin, partly out of monies allocated by the British Government to her planter citizens as compensation for the abolition of slavery -and not to the more deserving African ex-slaves- Queen's College has led in structural change and transformation in our society. So it was little surprise that when compulsory primary education was introduced three decades later in British Guiana in 1876, then QC Principal Oxley Percival and other prominent members of the QC staff and alumni had played leading roles in effecting fundamental change towards greater and wider access by the "creoles" to this already top school in the then colony. Queen's was at the helm of that important societal change. Just over half a century later, one hundred years after the society was beginning to forget and undervalue the vicious experiences of slavery and the positive role African Guyanese had played in building the foundation of our nation, a leading and outstanding former QC student and Master by then, the late Norman "Nebou" Cameron challenged the status quo and produced the second of two seminal volumes entitled "The Evolution of the Negro in British Guiana." For its time, this was undoubtedly a courageous piece that reasserted (Book 2 of Vol. 2, 1934) the importance of the continuing contribution by African Guyanese to national development. It was also firm reminder to the colonial status quo that Guyana was multi-ethnic and multi-cultural in character, with no place for their "divide and rule".

When British colonialism was still waxing in the 1940s, a young dentist returning from dental school in the US, Cheddi Jagan, a QC alumnus, aggressively and courageously with other QC alumni and other principled Guyanese, took on the Empire, and led the anti- colonial struggle in earnest through the 1940s and the 1950s. When Guyana was again agitating fully for Independence after setbacks in the 1950s, yet another ex-QC student Forbes Burnham led the country to Independence in 1966.

But QC's leadership was not always about change in Guyana alone. It was also about change on the global stage. Burnham and Fred Wills, two QC alumni, later led the charge in the Commonwealth against sporting links with apartheid South Africa, resulting in the Gleneagles Sporting Agreement of 1977. Earlier Burnham and Wills played important roles in the seminal dispatch of the first of many annual checks of US$50,000 to the Southern Africa freedom fighters, all under threat at that time by the evil apartheid regime in Pretoria.

And just after Africa struggled to secure its own independence from Britain and France, and needed to re-educate its people about what damage colonialism had done to them, QC alumnus Walter Rodney, brought them the timeless masterpiece "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa"- still a compulsory reference book in and outside of Africa, that opened the eyes of Africans and the rest of the world to the realities of their inheritances. That book also laid the philosophical foundation for fundamental change in many post-Independence African societies. Rodney's later work "Grounding with My Brothers" -with his Rastafarian and other brothers in the Caribbean -did equally impact and induce fundamental change in the Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.

Finally, when in the late 1970s negotiations for Zimbabwe's Independence from Britain looked stalled and deadlocked, Shridath "Sonny" Ramphal, a QC alumnus, again brokered a successful deal at Lancaster House that paved the way for Zimbabwe's freedom in 1980.

And so, as it was in the past, so must it be in the present and the future for Queen's College.It is incumbent upon us today as alumni and present day students and faculty of QC, to sustain that well established legacy of leadership for change by QC. We must continue to lead that continuing Quest for Change that is now an imperative for our Guyana of today.

Mis-governance in Guyana
For you see, my dear brothers and sisters, if ever there was need for such bold and unequivocal leadership toward fundamental change in Guyana, it is now. Guyana has been among the most misgoverned nation on earth over the last half. While just before Independence in the mid-1960's Guyana's level of economic development was almost on par with that of today's East Asian Tigers- Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand - fifty years later, we are among the poorest in the Western Hemisphere and no way near those Tigers. This, by any indicator of development-education, health, industrial production, or overall measure of development and economic activity. Thirty years ago Guyana was well ahead of Mauritius, the Gambia, Botswana, with almost similar populations of around a million. Today not only have these countries grown in net population terms. While Guyana has regressed, they are today all far more economically dynamic than they were decades ago.

The reason for Guyana's sustained decline -perpetual social incohesiveness and lack of inclusiveness, driven largely by ethnic tensions; massive brain drain; major capital flight, serious criminalization of economic activity, massive slumps in labor productivity, virtually no new external resource mobilization. In short, economic stagnation and retrogression. Guyana is now one of the worst places in the Caribbean to do business, one of the worst governed according to standard global economic and governance indicators, and with continued prognosis of slipping even further down the totem pole.

Folk, we therefore have a crisis of politics. But more importantly we have a crisis of development. For that reason change must come, and it must come fast. Or we will all sink. The Westminster model of governance has failed us. We need a new more inclusive model for managing ourselves and our national economy. We have to swallow hard and take the bitter medicine of sharing political, economic, social power. And this must not only be at the level of our central Government, but equally at local, village and other levels, as we were wont to have decades ago. This necessary quantum and structural change will require exceptional political will, exceptional national leadership, and exceptional commitment to inclusiveness. But it is possible.

"Ex-Africa, bonum (not nihil)"
For this exceptional change we Guyanese can today turn to the wider world for guidance and precept ; we do not have to reinvent the wheel. We can in particular, draw on some striking examples from modern day Africa, the continent which gave mankind its civilization. There was once a euro-centric view that everything from Africa was bad (Ex Africa nihil)("Nothing good comes from Africa"). Tonight I am suggesting that "ex Africa, bonum" ("Out of Africa, we can find much good"). Today's Africa can teach us in Guyana, inter alia, how from sustained and debilitating conflict, failed or quasi-failed nations, through fundamental change to shared governance and governments of national unity, countries could once again thrive as livable polities. Just to name a few:

• South Africa - racist apartheid in place since the early twentieth century (minority whites vs. majority blacks )- tens of thousands died- apartheid dismantled in 1994-interim constitutional Government of National Unity sharing power in place from 1994 (3 main parties) until elections held in 1997-Interim Constitution lapsed in 1999 but minor parties continued to hold seats in Government until 2004 -peace has held since apartheid dismantled.

• Angola - severe ethnic tensions and conflicts inherited from colonial times following its independence from Portugal in 1975-27 years of almost unchecked civil war, fueled later by natural resources (oil vs. diamonds)-over 500,000 dead-military victory by MPLA in 2002, Government of National Unity at all central, provincial and local levels, from 1997 still in force; elections in 2008 and 2009 - peace and stability persist.

• Rwanda - severe ethnic tensions inherited from colonial time-(Hutus vs. Tutsis) -several deadly episodes of ethnic tensions and conflicts culminating in a genocide in 1994-1 million dead in mere 100 days - Government of National Unity installed in 1994; elections held in 2003 - new Government installed but with constitutionally enshrined power sharing now; e.g. ruling party cannot have more than 50% of Cabinet, speaker must be from Opposition ranks etc. - steady peace holding.

• Liberia - Century old classist struggle (Americo-Liberians vs. indigenous Liberians) - bloody coup in 1980- 25 years of instability including 14 years of deadly civil war)-700 000 dead-international intervention in 2003-new Government under Africa's first elected female President-effective power sharing at all levels - Pres has mere 25% of Cabinet from her Party - peace has since held; country on roll again.

• Sudan - age old religious/ethnic conflict (Arab vs. African), further fueled since Independence from Britain in 1956-40 plus years of civil war, one million odd dead-ending by international brokered Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 - Government of National Unity (17 parties) -one Government, two systems with full autonomy to 10 Southern States; national elections in 2009, referendum for South self- determination in 2011- truce and peace broadly holding.

So my dear friends, the above few examples confirm that sea change is possible. It can be done, despite our own stresses and strains as a nation. Fortunately Guyana has not yet gone through anything near to what all of the above countries in Africa, or many other conflict - affected ones outside of Africa, have experienced, or continue to experience (former Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, Iraq). But we are surely on such a path and trajectory. And if we do not veer from that path, we will be yet another conflict-affected and fragile country, sooner rather than later.

For that reason, tonight my brothers and sisters I call on Queen's College, its alumni, its current students and staff to lead decisively, to avert such a catastrophe or eventuality for our nation. But what does this mean in concrete terms for all of us tonight? As we seek to answer this, let's remember what another Roman tragic-dramatist Seneca told us in his Epistulae Morales around the first century AD "Iter est longum per praecepta, breve et effifax per exempla ("A journey is always longer when we give advice, but shorter and more efficient when we do it by example"). So let us embark concretely on the road for change tonight.

A Quest for Change Fund
In doing so, I therefore challenge this distinguished New York Alumni Chapter of Queen's College, well known for its dynamism and leadership to strike out and mobilize others in quest of the change that is crucial for our Guyana today. Specifically, I challenge New York to take the lead in the structuring and mobilizing a Quest for Change Fund. Such a Fund make an important contribution towards expediting and catalyzing that necessary change towards shared governance for Guyana, as soon as possible. I am personally now firmly committing tonight to make a seed contribution in both financial and other terms, towards such a Fund, and will shortly convey the details of my own personal seed contributions to the New York Chapter for this specific purpose.

It is my hope that our six QC Alumni Chapters in particular would lead the way in lustily and boldly following, matching and surpassing my own seed funding, thus ensuring the mobilization of a core pool of funding for the launch and implementation of a program of action.

More concretely, I envisage the QC Alumni in New York Chapter taking a firm lead in coming weeks and months in organizing a dedicated Forum first of all Queen's College International Alumni Associations, to specifically consider how we can structure such a Fund and the nature and modalities of such an effort. Such a Forum might carve out an initial Agenda for Action that would lead to a comprehensive road map for assisting in progressing a serious process towards a national agenda for shared governance for Guyana over a defined time frame.

Such an initial Agenda of Action might "inter alia" also identify a process by which QC Alumni Associations in every area where we have a presence, might in turn mobilize support from other Alumni Associations for other Guyanese Schools, as well as from other national umbrella Guyanese Associations in global capitals, in and out of Guyana.

Such an Agenda must pay special attention to actively involving our youth, both at home in Guyana and in our international Guyanese diaspora - through literary and dramatic involvement, through the media of music; through other cultural and youth-friendly activities etc.

Our proposed Quest for Change Fund, once mobilized, should recognize the role of, and enlist and join with, other actors in wider civil society and Guyana's donor community, both of which groups will have stakeholder interests in the fundamental transformation we are seeking to embark upon for Guyana.

My dear friends, I have no illusions about the seriousness and the magnitude of the spark that I am challenging New York to light - a spark for fundamental change in the way our nation will govern itself and do business, in the years ahead. But the Chinese have always reminded us that the longest journey starts with the first step; and that is what I am challenging colleagues, fellow alumni and friends in NY to do this evening. And if anybody can take that first step, light that first spark, it will be the QC New York Alumni Chapter.

Yes, I am aware that for the attainment of serious shared governance, even if only for a transitional /cooling off period of tensions of say 5 to 10 years for our country, will require nothing but coordinated strategic leadership and sustained herculean effort by all Guyanese and other stakeholders. In addition, timeless lessons I have learnt from my own involvement in school community life at QC in the 1960s, have for the rest of my life instilled in me the critical importance of collective responsibility in whatever endeavor or enterprise that may claim one's interest. In the context of our quest for national and enduring change, the message here is that, as Guyanese, we are all involved here, and will all be consumed if we do not act decisively and in a timely manner.

But I learnt another lesson from Queen's. And it that the pursuit of major social change, such as we are tonight positing for our country, demands mutual respect by all of us-"coolie-man, black-man, chinee-man, puttagee-man, buck-man, red-man/douglah-man" (and of course woman!). But for this to happen, we each have to first understand ourselves as individual ethnic groups, and be respectfully allowed to seek and deepen that individual understanding. At a minimum this behooves each of us to understand our historical, cultural and religious roots and traditions, as a basis for better understanding and tolerance as to who we are, as six distinct national ethnic groups. This is fundamental to our quest for one truly Guyanese nation, rather than two or more "pre-nations", as we evidence today. This way, the Gandhi Cultural Organization; or the Maha Sabha Cultural Organization; or the African Cultural and Development Association (ACDA); or the Chinese or other ethnic, religious or cultural associations, must all have key pedagogical, nurturing and unifying roles in our society. Each should be encouraged, none should be seen as a threat to the other, or as a basis for ethnic or racial insecurity in any segment in our society. We all have roots in the origins and development of Guyana.

As senior national statesman Bro Eusi Kwayana has consistently reminded us for so long - no ethnic group in our society has a right a prior or primordial right to rule another. We simply have to learn to coexist in unity and within our diversity. To do so, we have to share the levers of power in our society, at all levels, sooner rather than later. And tonight we all here have to do our part to embolden and facilitate that vital structural change in our society; we simply have to break with our national past.

So New York Chapter, let us boldly take up the challenges before us, our nation and our future generations. Let us lead the way and do whatever we could in mobilizing our society towards that change that has to come. Let us recall that at Queen's College we were all taught to Query and Challenge; Question and Critique; and to be always in Quest of Change. I therefore ask you to continue to draw strength from these precepts and lessons of our past, tonight and in the months ahead, or whatever it takes us to create a new Guyana - a better, more inclusive, less confrontational and developmentally progressive one.

In just over a year in August 5, 2009 Queen's College becomes 165 years old. Let us use that as natural milestone for mobilizing our Quest for Change Fund, and in setting our course firmly towards supporting a Guyana, where power will be better diffuse, and governance better shared. Let us make the first move toward creating the Fund, say by the start of that 165th year of our schools' existence by August 5, 2008. And give ourselves one full year to define out an unstoppable framework and a clear road map.(See some concrete suggestions at QFC.) This way, when Guyana goes to its next polls by 2011, it would do so on a clear, inclusive and non-conflictual platform of shared governance /shared power at all levels of our society. As other nations under stress have so successfully done.

Dear Alumni, friends and colleagues, as I close this lovely evening, permit me to revert to where I started, by again drawing on the classics. This time I will draw on a remarkable African from Ancient Egyptian Civilization, named Imothep ("I bring you peace"). He lived around 2900 BC in what was then known as Kemet, now Egypt. Imothep, it is now grudgingly being finally accepted even by the West, was the world's first veritable medical scholar. It is finally being conceded that Hippocrates learnt the basics of medicine 2000 years later from Imothep. The Hippocratic oath that today's physicians take is basically from Imothep. Imothep, was an architect - he built the famous step pyramids, which still survives today. He was a high priest; political thinker and strategist all in one. Above all, he was a philosopher well before his time. And one of the philosophical gems he has left for us is that we must always remember "to drink, eat and be merry today - for tomorrow we will all die".

So I commend Imothep's words to you all this evening, even as I urge you to remember the central message of my remarks. Let us all go out there from tonight "in urgent quest for change" for our dear land of Guyana.

I thank you all again for the kind and thoughtful honor, and for your very warm presence this evening.

LCC/
05/31/08