Twenty-year-old Monelle Alexis’s eloquent but unexpected rebuke ruffled the easygoing pro forma proceedings of the Caribbean Community heads of government ‘Special Summit on Youth Development’ in Paramaribo last week. Ms Alexis’s courageous gesture could not have been better timed or more accurately aimed at the architects of the region’s policies.
Ms Alexis – Dean of the Caricom Youth Ambassador Corps – expressed “profound disappointment” that the majority of heads of government who mandated the young people of the region to prepare a report on matters affecting them could not bother to attend the summit to receive it. Only three heads – Dominica’s Roosevelt Skerrit, the current Caricom Chairman, Suriname’s Ronald Venetiaan the lead head of government on youth affairs and Guyana’s Bharrat Jagdeo – condescended to attend the quasi-summit. The entire corps of regional youth ambassadors stood up for nine minutes in protest – one minute each for every million young people of the region.
One task of the summit was to receive the report of the Caricom Commission on Youth Development – ‘Eye on the Future: Invest in Youth Now for the Community Tomorrow.’ The report noted, among other things, that the primary education dropout rate was “at a staggering height.” Worse, at an average of 23 per cent, joblessness among young people in the Caribbean Community was higher than many other developed and developing countries. Murder rates in the Caribbean, at 30 per 100,000 annually, are higher than any other region of the world and youths are the primary perpetrators and victims of criminal violence.
The report pointed, also, to the economic costs of juvenile crime. These include the “direct financial costs related to public expenditure on security, policing, judicial processing and incarceration, as well as indirect costs, linked to the foregone earnings of the criminal and to the losses in tourism revenues.” The nexus between joblessness and juvenile crime is unquestionable.
The central issue affecting young people in Guyana as elsewhere in the Caribbean is unemployment. But, despite its awareness of this reality, the Government of Guyana resorted to a bewildering hotchpotch of superficial remedies. The administration promulgated a ‘National Youth Policy,’ established a National Youth Commission and convened a National Youth Parliament over which Kwame McKoy was appointed chairman. The President also launched the President’s Youth Choice Initiative which he placed it in the hands of Odinga Lumumba.
The administration abolished the Guyana National Service, adopted the Duke of Edinburgh Award renaming it the President’s Youth Award: Republic of Guyana Programme, established the National Training Programme for Youth Empowerment and considered creating a Youth Development and Empowerment Programme. Yet, thousands of semi-literate, unemployable youths drop out or leave school every year. Judging from the recently-released Caricom report, no significant impact seems to have been made in Guyana or anywhere else in the Caribbean on the problems of joblessness facing these young people.
There have been lots of paper projects but little practical progress. Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport Dr Frank Anthony, soon after he was appointed in 2006, according to the Government Information Agency, publicly announced that the National Youth Policy which had been promulgated since the early 1990s should be reviewed. Until there is serious change, serious youth education and employment problems will persist. Students will continue to drop out or leave school unprepared to participate gainfully in the mainstream economy. Many young persons in urban, rural and hinterland will turn to crime.
It is a pity that there are not young people in Guyana like Monelle Alexis to let this administration know just how disastrous its youth policy has been after seventeen years.
