By Dr Bertrand Ramcharan
Lee Kuan Yew and Forbes Burnham became Premiers in their respective countries around the same time in the early-1960s. They were both gifted men, both national scholars, both graduates from prestigious universities, and both eloquent lawyer-statesmen. Lee had to build a nation with three ethnicities. Forbes Burnham needed to build his nation from four, African, Amerindian, Indian, Mixed, with pockets of Chinese and Portuguese.
Today, Singapore is a stable nation and an economic powerhouse. Guyana, for its part, remains a fractured society that, until the recent arrival of energy resources, was among the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere. Are there insights that might be gained from Lee Kuan Yew’s strategies of nation-building that Guyanese would do well to ponder? We think there are.
