Stop Worshipping Yesterday While Tomorrow Is Being Stolen

 Stop Worshipping Yesterday While Tomorrow Is Being Stolen

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

This op-ed serves to sharpen the indictment of nostalgia, elite complacency, and passive public discourse, while making an explicit case for organized civic and labor action.

Guyana is in danger of becoming a country that constantly celebrates its past while surrendering its future.

But history was never meant to become a hiding place for those unwilling to confront the present.

Too many of those afforded a public voice have made political nostalgia their occupation. They endlessly rehash the greatness of former leaders, recycle old rivalries, and perform loyalty to bygone eras, while the promise of tomorrow slips away from the next generation. They speak as though recounting old victories can substitute for organizing new struggles. It cannot.

The generation before us did not merely sit around glorifying those who came before them. Our forebears studied history, understood its lessons, and then moved forward—often at considerable personal risk—to reshape the future. They did not inherit independence; they fought for it. They did not receive democratic rights as a gift; they organized, resisted, mobilized, and demanded them.

That is advocacy. That is activism. That is the real inheritance Guyanese should honor.

Today, the country is once again confronted with a moment that demands more than speeches, commemorations, Facebook posts, panel discussions, and self-congratulation. Guyana’s oil wealth is expanding, yet the power to make decisive choices over that wealth remains concentrated. National assets are being managed through arrangements that too few citizens fully understand and too few institutions adequately scrutinize. Meanwhile, many families continue to face high food prices, strained public services, inadequate infrastructure, low wages, insecure employment, and uncertainty about whether their children will have a meaningful future at home.

A country cannot call itself prosperous merely because its Gross Domestic Product rises. Progress has meaning only when ordinary people can feel it in their wages, their homes, their schools, their hospitals, their roads, their farms, and their prospects. If economic growth enriches a narrow circle while the broad population remains burdened by hardship and insecurity, then the country is not advancing together—it is deepening inequality under the banner of development.

The great danger is that Guyanese are sleepwalking back into subjugation. This time, the chains may not look like colonial rule or ballot-box manipulation. They may come dressed in the language of investment, development, national unity, party loyalty, and economic growth. They may appear in secretive decision-making, weak oversight, dependence on political favor, the capture of public institutions, and the quiet transfer of national wealth into the hands of interests that ordinary citizens cannot challenge.

That silence must end.

Guyana needs a renewal of civic courage and labor consciousness. Trade unions must reclaim their historic role as defenders not only of wages and working conditions, but of democratic accountability, social justice, and national sovereignty. Workers cannot remain divided by party affiliation, ethnicity, sector, or geography while decisions about the country’s wealth are made over their heads. The worker in the public service, the sugar industry, mining, construction, transport, retail, health care, education, agriculture, and the emerging oil-and-gas economy shares a common interest in fair wages, safe work, strong public services, and a nation whose resources benefit its people.

Civil society must also rise beyond the comfort of occasional statements and ceremonial participation. Professional bodies, community organizations, youth groups, religious leaders, environmental advocates, journalists, academics, and business associations must help build a culture of informed dissent.

They must demand public access to contracts, stronger parliamentary scrutiny, independent regulators, enforceable anti-corruption safeguards, labor protections, and a national development agenda that reaches every region and community.

This does not require violence. It requires disciplined, lawful, sustained organization: public education, community meetings, workers’ assemblies, petitions, peaceful demonstrations, strategic litigation, investigative reporting, policy advocacy, and coordinated demands that no government can dismiss as the complaint of a few individuals.

Those who possess microphones, columns, platforms, and influence should understand the responsibility that comes with them. A public voice should not be used merely for self-gratification, personal branding, recycled political warfare, or the glorification of leaders who cannot solve today’s crisis.

The people need more than nostalgia merchants. They need truth-tellers, organizers, investigators, and advocates willing to ask difficult questions of every government, every corporation, every party, and every institution.

History should inform the future—but Guyana is too often studying the wrong chronicles of history. We remember personalities and forget principles. We praise victories and ignore the organizing that produced them. We revisit old conflicts but fail to build the unity required to confront new forms of exploitation.

The task now is not to abandon history. It is to use it correctly.

Our forebears did not struggle so that we could endlessly admire their courage while lacking the courage to act ourselves. They fought so that each generation would be freer to confront its own injustices. If we allow distraction, division, and self-interest to replace civic duty, then we will have dishonored not only their sacrifices, but also the generations now waiting to inherit what we leave behind.

.The future is not secured by celebrating yesterday. It is secured by organizing today.