The PPP / C election victory ended the plan to reintroduce national service
Kaieteur News – The APNU + AFC had plans for the reintroduction of the National Service. The launch of the National Cadet Corps was intended to pave the way for a full national eventual return.
When it was first introduced to Guyana, the Guyana National Service had little to do with national development. It was intended to indoctrinate Guyanese in socialist values. The stated aim of the National Service was to ensure that “all Guyanese are within the formal training system [education] are aware of the new values of society and understand the relationship between the new society and themselves. ”
The National Service was involved in an experiment to militarize society. One of its objectives was “to provide training in para-military and battle-ground to prepare the people for national defense.”
However, members of the public received the usual diet of nationalist sentiments. They were sold the idea that the National Service was part of the national development process. This was all part of the brainwashing.
In order to justify this unsuccessful experiment that failed the energy out of society and burdened the government with a bill it could not afford, the National Service was advertised as helping to address people’s situation young unemployed, by providing an outlet for them to learn skills, contribute to national development and create the new Guyana.
That new Guyana was never created. That new Guyana was an experiment that went awry. Whatever skills the National Service provided to the unskilled could have been much cheaper and more efficient through alternative skills development schemes. No one needs a National Service to provide skills.
The PPP has been blamed for the demise of the National Service. There are still many who are not prepared to accept that Burnham and the company did not know what they were doing when they introduced this scheme, that they had no clue about how to redirect ‘ The society was towards socialist values and in the end they were prepared to use National Service as a form of social control.
The PPP did not kill the National Service. The National Service was on its deathbed when the PPP came to power. The National Service died of financial starvation because during the Hoyte administration there was no money to keep the camps going. Instead of contributing to national revenue, the National Service became a liability. It was reduced and reduced so that by the time the PNC relinquished its power, the National Service was a skeleton of its self.
The PPP only administered the final rites. The National Service went into decline under Desmond Hoyte, but it must not be blamed because it was the National Service itself that caused its own demise. It had become an unproductive and unaffordable burden for the state.
We live in different times. The National Service can no longer be involved in dressing up, joining a platoon of groups in green uniforms, going to an inside venue to live in barracks, planting cotton peas, eating subsistence meals, and learning how to march and use a weapon.
If that is the price one has to pay to share skills for the unskilled, then Guyana is never going to develop. There are better ways to achieve the same objective.
What exactly are these skills that the National Service has turned out? And why couldn’t other ways of teaching the unemployed find the same skills without putting them in a paramilitary organization? How long have skills training required people to be forced into a form of slave service? Or expose our women to rape!
We need a new type of National Service but not the format, which we had. The best National Service is for people to become productive citizens.
A skilled, productive and earning citizen will develop Guyana’s economy. When someone contributes to productive activities and when those activities contribute rather than act as a drain on national resources which is a better form of National Service because the productive citizen contributes to the expansion of the economy.
Guyanese must first serve themselves by becoming skilled and proficient. They must do something of their lives and in doing so contribute to nation building.
The old model of National Service we practiced will not return. Those days are gone forever.
The APNU + AFC sought to restore a covert National Service through the National Cadet Corps. But Guyana’s youths were never going to be led astray like previous generations. The youths had different priorities. They were not interested in reintroducing the National Service.
University students are now paying for their education – not paying much, but still paying. No one is going to convince them that because they have received a subsidized education, they have to give something back to the state.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)