In a piercing interview on NationWatch with host Eden Corbin, former Prime Minister and Mayor of Georgetown, Hamilton Green delivered one of the most candid and searing reflections on the state of Guyana’s politics and governance since independence. At ninety-one, Green remains a living archive of the nation’s history, and his words landed like thunderclaps against the current generation of leaders whom he accused of “surrendering our vast resources” and betraying the vision of self-reliance that guided Guyana’s first decades of nationhood.
Responding to Corbin’s question about the most transformative infrastructural project of his era, Green insisted that Guyana’s post-independence years under Forbes Burnham must be understood within the context of the Cold War, a time when small nations were pawns in the struggle between global powers. Yet, he said, Burnham refused to remain a pawn.
“When we got independence under Forbes Burnham,” Green explained, “he sought to make independence more than a flag and an anthem. He wanted to ensure we moved out of the colonial mindset.”
To achieve that, Burnham established what Green described as an “Institute of Decolonization”—a national effort to educate citizens about the significance of independence and to transform colonial mentalities into self-confident, productive nationhood.
Green recalled that one of Burnham’s earliest moves was to make education free from nursery to university, a policy designed to “ensure that all of our people, from the hinterland to the coast, from west to east, got an opportunity to make full use of their potential.”
This was not symbolic policy, it was the backbone of nation-building. Burnham, he said, recognized that the new republic could not flourish with “teachers who were mere instructors.” The government therefore launched an aggressive teacher retraining program to create educators “capable of shaping citizens for an independent society.”
Even then, the struggle was steep. “We had around us those with a slave mentality,” Green said. “They saw independence as no more than an anthem.” And as if ideological resistance was not enough, external forces compounded the hardship: the oil crisis of the 1970s doubled the price of fuel, crippling Guyana’s export earnings and forcing the government into extraordinary measures of survival.
Despite this, Burnham persisted with his program to “feed, clothe, and house the nation”, traveling on horseback to distribute seedlings and encourage citizens to grow food on their parapets. “He wanted independence to mean something real,” Green said. “He was determined to make it a reality.”
The Collapse of Ideology
When Corbin asked whether the politics of the 1970s and 1980s differed significantly from today, Green didn’t hesitate. “The answer is yes,” he said sharply. “Today you have a group of politicians who either don’t understand or appreciate the meaning of independence in a very complex world.”
His indictment was scathing. “Instead of harmonizing our resources and speaking as proud, independent people,” he said, “we have and continue to surrender our vast, vast resources. Look at the resources we have—oil, gas, diamond, timber, gold. That is more than enough to make every Guyanese happy, prosperous, and free from poverty.”
Green revealed that in recent weeks he and a group of colleagues analyzed Guyana’s resource wealth and concluded that if managed wisely, “there is no need to harvest our gold now”—that the country should preserve it until Guyanese youth acquire the technology and skills to mine it themselves. “Gold does not rust,” he said. “It will always be valuable.”
The tragedy, in Green’s view, is that successive leaders have abandoned Burnham’s ethic of delayed gratification and self-reliance for what he called the ‘easy route of surrender.’ “We had a philosophy of deferred gratification,” he said. “We were prepared to sacrifice. But today, we have a generation that wants everything now.”
Green used a personal anecdote to illustrate how this “instant gratification” culture has eaten away at the country’s self-worth. He recalled a visit to the United States years ago with his children, who grew up eating only local fruits—mangoes, guavas, and sapodillas. A relative proudly offered them imported apples. His young daughter bit into one, then turned to ask, “Don’t you have any sapodillas?”
“That was a powerful lesson to me,” Green said. “When they brought these imported foods, my children’s palates told them our local foods were better.”
He lamented that this sense of national pride and self-sufficiency has been eroded by what he described as “brainwashing”—a cultural conditioning that makes Guyanese believe imported goods are superior and that foreign loans and partnerships are inevitable.
“How can we have all this oil and gold,” he asked, “and yet our exchange rate remains 210 to one? In the 1980s, we kept it at ten to one. Something is wrong.”
Education as the Path to Redemption
When pressed by Corbin about how Guyana could reverse this moral and economic dependency, Green was clear: “We need to retool completely our educational system.”
Education, he said, must go beyond “the three R’s—reading, writing, and reporting.” It must reach into communities, churches, mosques, and mandirs. “We have to begin conversations within the communities, among the young people, because, through no fault of their own, they’re lost,” he said.
He called for a national movement of mentorship, where professionals devote an hour a day to teaching youth about the sacrifices of their ancestors and the meaning of independence. “Unless you know where you came from,” he warned, “you will have difficulty striding into the future.”
“We Are Down But Not Out”
In closing, Green issued a challenge to the opposition and to the younger generation, “We are down, but not out.” Comparing the political struggle to a boxing match, he said Guyana’s opposition can rise again—but only through discipline, unity, and courage.
“We’ve got to retake our place in society as a credible opposition and then government,” he said. “This government practices the old master’s technique—give a few people here a job there, and hold that up as progress. We don’t need tokens. We need real authority, real distribution of power, and leadership that makes the small man a real man.”
Hamilton Green’s words cut deep because they come from a man who helped build the nation he now mourns. His interview with Eden Corbin was not nostalgia, it was a warning. He called for a moral and political revolution of consciousness, one that restores pride in local production, discipline in public life, and courage in governance. “We must study,” he said. “We must know our history. Because if you don’t know your place in history, you will be displaced, disfigured, and forgotten.”
In his voice echoed the spirit of a generation that believed independence was not a prize handed down, but a responsibility earned every day.
