“This Is Not Freedom” — A Youth’s Emancipation Day Reckoning

How are we supposed to build a life here? How do we save for a home when wages are so low that the cost of living outpaces every pay raise? How do we plan a future when the line at CHPA stretches for miles, and we’re told to wait, to behave, to be grateful, for what, exactly?

This system is not failing us. It was engineered against us.

Today, the country pauses to reflect on Emancipation Day, and as a young African Guyanese, I find myself struggling with the weight of hypocrisy.

Every year, the same politicians drape themselves in African print, beat drums they do not understand, and give lip service to the suffering and triumph of our ancestors. This year, like all the others, the PPP leaders stood on platforms and spoke lofty words about African liberation. But behind those carefully staged performances lies a cruel irony—the very same men who recite the words of emancipation are the architects of a modern-day system designed to demean, denigrate, and destroy African youth in this country.

Many of us, like me, do the “right thing.” We work hard. We pass our CSEC exams. We struggle through UG, taking buses at 5:30am and returning to homes where the lights sometimes don’t work and the water runs brown. We graduate, and we hope. But what awaits us?

A public sector that pays us starvation wages, where promotion has more to do with who you know than what you do. A private sector that’s either too small to absorb us or ruled by nepotism, insecurity, and leaders who treat young professionals with disdain and disrespect. Our brightest minds are being wasted, discarded, or drained by migration.

How are we supposed to build a life here? How do we save for a home when wages are so low that the cost of living outpaces every pay raise? How do we plan a future when the line at CHPA stretches for miles, and we’re told to wait, to behave, to be grateful, for what, exactly?

This system is not failing us. It was engineered against us.

It’s a system that wants to grind youth into submission—make us compliant, mendicant, docile, and worshipful of an unworthy, insecure, and often illiterate bunch of men who sit in positions of power, spewing mediocrity and calling it leadership. These are not leaders—they are caretakers of a crumbling plantation.

But I thank God for the few courageous voices—those who still dare to speak truth to power, who show us what pride looks like, what dignity sounds like, what resistance feels like. They remind us that this land was not built on silence, but on rebellion.

Forbes Burnham and Cheddie Jagan were in their twenties when  they worked together to form the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) in 1950.  They were in their thirties when they lead the nation to independence.
Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow, the father of the labor movement in Guyana, was just 21 years old when he began his struggle for the interest of waterfront workers’ wage negotiations and rights.

These men were not born into comfort. They were born into resistance.  So I ask the youth of Guyana, what about you? What are you fighting?  Are you fighting to fit in? Or are you fighting to free yourselves?
Are you fighting for likes and followers, or for dignity and justice?  Are you comfortable with performative freedom, or are you ready to demand the real thing?

We are the majority. We are the future. But we must also be the force. Don’t just wear your ancestors’ chains as fashion. Break the new ones. Organize. Mobilize. Build. Speak.  And on September 1st, and every day after, vote, act, and lead like your freedom depends on it.  Because it does.