Fri, Aug 28, 2020
There is a whole generation of young people who have grown up or were born under a Gonsalves government (2001 – 2020). This generation has seen their life opportunities diminished and many have grown up in poverty, low income households and under an appalling education system.
The poor education system offered by the ULP regime, coupled with a badly run economy, has led to a vast number of young people leaving school with little or no prospect of long-term unemployment and therefore, a life of destitution and poverty.
The knock-on effect of 19 years of ULP’s incompetence and poor governance can be seen throughout our country, and has been catastrophic for our male youth, especially.
The newspapers and television are rife with case after case of male youths being shot dead. The ULP regime has created a conveyor belt where many male youths leave school prematurely, embark on a life of crime and then end up in jail or being shot dead, all whilst they are still youths.
Rather than build a university and educate our young people, the ULP regime has focused on locking up our male youth. The big jail in North Leeward is already crowded and it is believed that 9 out of 10 males in the ULP regime jail cannot read.
A well-established research finding shows that the better a person is educated, the less chance there is that that person would enter into criminality. However, the ULP regime has starved our children of a world-class education. Too many children are leaving school before they finish primary school with any sort of certification/qualification.
The ULP regime has starved our people of employment, and too many children are forced to grow up in low income and poor households.
These two factors alone have contributed significantly to the large increase in crime and murders in SVG. These two factors have led to young people’s lives been ruined or lost, as many of our male youths are being shot dead or wasting away in the ULP regime’s jail.
SVG needs a change of government to stop the murder rate among our male youth running and to halt the conveyor belt from primary school, to criminality, to the grave or jail. This is no life for our youths.
Warrant Officer Ivan Bertie O‘Neal, BSc (Hons), MSc, MBA believes that our young people deserve hope and opportunity. They deserve a world-class education system, so that they can have a life of employment and prosperity, and not be forced into a life of poverty or criminality or an early grave.
A Green government would follow the outstanding example of Singapore and invest substantially in a world-class education system for our young people. It would be free from Pre-school to a Science and or Technology University. This strategy worked brilliantly for young people in Singapore and now Singapore has a knowledge-based economy with unemployment of less than 2%.
A Green government would give priority to creating revenue and financial competence, as these are essential to create a strong economy and thousands of new jobs, and more importantly, improving the quality of life and the standard of living for all who live in SVG.