The Ones Who Left - Guyana Business Journal & Magazine
# The Ones Who Left
written by Nabaclis Piknee September 19, 2026
The airport gate, the remittances, and the capability that never came home.
By Nabaclis Piknee · September 19, 2026
This essay is part of the twelve-part series “Beyond the Resource Curse.” Read the foreword, “The Autonomous Imagination.”
#### In this essay
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I have buried more friendships at Timehri than I have buried people in the cemetery, and I mean that the way it sounds. Watching someone board a flight out of this country for good does something to a friendship that distance alone cannot explain. You keep writing for a year, maybe two. Then the letters get shorter, and one day you realize the person you grew up beside now belongs more to Brooklyn or Toronto or London than to the street you both learned to walk on. I have stood at that airport gate more times than I can count, and every single time, some part of the country left with the person going through it.
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The ones who went first, in the years right after independence and through the difficult decades that followed, were often the very people the new nation needed most to keep. Teachers. Engineers. The doctors who had trained hard and could have trained others. I watched a whole generation of capable, credentialed Guyanese decide, one family at a time, that the country asking for their skill could not offer them a life to match it. Political instability in the 1970s and 1980s, currency controls, food shortages, a governing style that rewarded loyalty over competence — I described some of this already in the piece about the morning after independence, and it is the same current that pulled people toward the airport.
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Here is what stung the most, and still does:
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of the people who left were
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. They were exactly the citizens a nation trying to escape a
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it somewhere else,
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I am not going to pretend the diaspora has given nothing back, because that would be dishonest and it would insult people I love. The remittances kept whole villages afloat during years when the state could not. Money sent home built houses, paid school fees, kept families fed through droughts of a different kind than the ones that hit the rice fields. That is real, and it deserves respect, not dismissal.
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Here is what troubles me now, in my seventies, watching this newest chapter unfold. I had allowed myself to hope that oil wealth might finally reverse the pattern — that a country suddenly flush with resources could offer its trained people enough reason to stay, or even pull some of the diaspora home. Some of that is happening, in small and encouraging ways. But I also watch young Guyanese with real skill still weighing offers from Canada and the United States and the Gulf against what is available here, and too often still choosing to go. Oil money has raised salaries in some sectors. It has not yet built the kind of institutions, the kind of long-term career paths, the kind of confidence in stable governance that makes a talented twenty-five-year-old choose to build a whole life here rather than just visit for the holidays.
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This is why the university this series keeps returning to cannot simply be a factory that produces graduates for the local job market as it exists today. It has to be part of a larger answer to the question every one of those young people is quietly asking themselves at the airport gate: if I stay, what am I staying for? A vault that holds the money is necessary but not sufficient. A country also has to hold its people, and that requires something the fund alone cannot buy — an autonomous imagination made visible in real institutions, real opportunity, and real trust, giving a talented young Guyanese an actual reason to choose Guyana when the whole world is offering an exit.
Upon arrival at the Rochester airport, the four men walked to Gerbino’s automobile, located in the airport parking lot. Once inside the automobile, Silvestro asked to see the heroin. Yagih, at Nazih’s instructions, opened the case and examined the vest. Yagih reported, through Nazih’s translation, that the vest was intact. The undercover agents then sought to arrest Yagih and Nazih. Nazih resisted apprehension and was killed in a gun fight.
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Yagih’s defense at his trial on federal charges was that he was “duped” by his cousin Nazih. He testified that he had no knowledge that the attache case contained a smuggler’s vest loaded with heroin. Yag-ih’s version commences in June of 1981, when Nazih traveled to Lebanon. Yagih testified that, in the hope of securing medical treatment for his two deaf children, he accepted Nazih’s suggestion that he make his first visit to the United States. Nazih offered to help Yagih obtain employment and medical assistance. At Nazih’s request for a “souvenir” Yagih gave Nazih a passport-size photograph of himself.
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Subsequently, as Yagih was about to board his flight from Beirut, Yagih was intercepted by Nazih’s brother, Pierre. Pierre asked Yagih to deliver an attache case, which he said Nazih had mistakenly left in Lebanon, to a friend of Nazih’s who would meet Yagih at Kennedy Airport. Pierre indicated that Nazih’s friend would present Yagih with the passport-size photograph of himself he had given to Nazih. To facilitate identification, Yagih was to wear a blue T-shirt.
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Yagih testified that he first opened the attache case just prior to landing in New York when, without inspecting its. contents, he placed his toiletries and two magazines inside the case. Yagih testified that Nazih first informed him of the contraband cargo upon arrival in New York, when Nazih advised him that the case contained hashish and that Gerbino and Silvestro were affiliated with the Mafia. Yagih denied ever speaking with Officer Gerbino while en route to Rochester. He did admit that he inspected the smuggler’s vest at the Rochester airport but maintained he did so at Nazih’s instruction.
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3. Finally, Yagih claims that the District Court improperly excluded as irrele vant evidence tending to corroborate Yag-ih’s defense that he was unwittingly “duped” into transporting contraband by his co-conspirator cousins, Nazih and Pierre Aboumoussallem. Yagih offered to prove that five and a half months prior to his arrest Nazih and Pierre similarly duped Wendy Golding into transporting hashish oil from Lebanon into the United States. Golding had been arrested on March 1,1981, after a Customs examination at Kennedy Airport uncovered 8 kilograms of hashish oil concealed inside 8 cigarette cartons. She would have testified that Pierre Aboumoussallem controlled her baggage for several hours prior to her departure from Beirut airport and that, without her knowledge, he placed the hashish oil in her luggage. Another witness, Sam Mina, would have confirmed Golding’s testimony. He would have testified that on the day of Golding’s arrest Nazih informed him that Golding was innocent and that “my people set it up and we duped her to bring it in.” Yagih offered this evidence, pursuant to Fed.R.Evid. 404(b), as prior similar acts evidencing a common plan to import narcotics from Lebanon using innocent dupes.
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We disagree with the District Court
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the extent it excluded the proposed testimony as irrelevant or as inadmissible under Rule 404(
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). The proffered evidence satisfies the
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relevancy standard of the Federal Rules of Evidence
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to make the existence of a consequential fact
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’s knowledge,
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that Nazih and Pierre had a plan to import narcotics from Lebanon into the United States using
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ed couriers. The existence of such a plan would lend
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support to the inference that Yagih was duped and thereby bolster his defense of lack of knowledge. 6
Some of Carter’s greatest achievements were in his post-Presidency as head of the Carter Center that he and his wife founded in which he helped to restore democracy in several Latin, African, and Caribbean countries, including our own Guyana. The former President played a most significant and important role in the 1992 and 2015 elections. Carter (and on a few occasions with his wife) visited Guyana multiple times. His first visit in 1991 set the stage for the return of free and fair elections after the last one being in colonial Guyana in December 1964. Several Guyanese in USA, including this writer lobbied the Bush presidency and prior to him the Reagan and Carter presidencies to pressure the Burnham and Hoyte dictatorships to end human rights abuses and restore democratic governance but of no avail. A few of us tried to convince Washington with intense lobbying through a variety of means (including multiple trips to DC) to help bring about political change in Guyana but without much success. Washington communicated clearly to us that it was not interested in replacing an opportunistic socialist with a hard-core communist aligned with USSR. Things would change a decade later because of Carter’s connection with the Guyanese advocates of democracy in NY.
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An Asian American fundraiser, coordinated by Yashpaul Soi was held in Manhattan for Carter’s re-election in 1980; a few Indian Guyanese were in attendance. Roslyn was the Chief Guest as the President had to campaign elsewhere. The President communicated his gratitude. Yashpaul and a few Guyanese (including the late Hassan Rahman, Baytoram Ramharack, Ravi Dev, Ramesh Kalicharran, me and others) and our role in Global Org of People of Indian Origin would use the Carter connection to help set up an appointment for Cheddi Jagan to meet with the Carter Center in August 1989. The former President Carter expressed concerns about fraudulent elections in Guyana and would become deeply involved in and supportive of the Guyanese diaspora struggle (in America) for FFE in Guyana. Guyanese groups in USA persisted with their lobbying of the Bush administration and Congress to pressure the Hoyte regime to democratize the country.
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Communism collapsed and with it the USSR that would help to usher in democracy in Guyana. It was reported that Presidents Bush and Gorbachev reached an agreement in which they would use their influence in Guyana and Nicaragua respectively to have both nations hold free and fair elections. Bush warned of consequences if democracy was not restored in Guyana including the holding of FFE. Our group lobbied Members of Congress, including Ted Kennedy, brother of President John who toppled Cheddi Jagan from office, also demanded FFE in Guyana. It was never publicly reported what role Gorbachev played in FFE in Nicaragua; communists never announced certain policies especially on matters pertaining to democracy. Carter was assigned the role of negotiator and arbitrator for free and fair elections in Guyana. Carter Center was closely involved in a variety of activities, including training and support to GECOM as well as to civil society organizations to monitor elections. Eventually, Carter also became ‘Chief Observer’ and ‘Chief Guarantor’ of FFE in both Nicaragua and Guyana and other states as well that were emerging out of authoritarian rule. And both nations held relatively free and fair elections. Since then, the Carter Center, the President himself, engaged leaders of Guyana to have inclusive government and constitutional reform in which no party or race dominate government.
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In Guyana,
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credited for brokering an agreement that usher in
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and restoration of full democratic governance (with
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aspects of high-
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that stands till
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day. Ched
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intervention, would
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been restored in Guyana and
by: V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies Harveen Sachdeva Mann Dolly Zulakha Hassan . V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies. New York: Lang, 1989. 376 pp. $52.95. The second study of Naipaul by a Caribbean critic to appear in as many years, Dolly Hassan's V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies offers an ideological counterpoint to Selwyn Cudjoe's 1988 book, V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading. Whereas Cudjoe, an African-Trinidadian, labels Naipaul a "crude racist," a "hysterical," "irresponsible" "apocalyptist of the Third World," Hassan, an East Indian-Guyanese expatriate, interprets Naipaul's "seeming contempt" of the West Indies (and by extension of the Third World) as the "disguised concern" of an "honest commentator [End Page 590] upon a tenuously rooted colonial society." Thus the familiar political divergence in Naipaul scholarship—between First World approbation and Third World censure of his writings—takes on a new guise, predicated upon a racial and ethnic rift between African-West Indians and East Indian-West Indians. Having in common with Naipaul and his East Indian characters many of the social, cultural, and political experiences documented in his West Indian fiction and nonfiction, Hassan defends him from charges of racism, Eurocentrism, and contempt levied by such Black critics as Cudjoe, George Lamming, Gordon Rohlehr, and Derek Walcott. Although she declares that Naipaul is too often subjected to political rather than literary judgment by African-West Indian commentators, Hassan herself indulges in this practice, despite her claims to the contrary. To account for Naipaul's temperamental and geographical exile from what he sees as his culturally sterile and racially split homeland, Hassan uses two introductory chapters to explicate the historical, political, and sociological problems of Trinidad. The chapters that follow examine Naipaul's West Indian books chronologically and in rather predictable fashion. Protracted plot summaries of the texts with nominal commentary by Hassan are succeeded by analyses of West Indian—and, by way of contrast, of Western—critical response in support of her thesis that Naipaul, more than most writers, is judged on ideological rather than literary grounds. An appendix considers Naipaul's Indian works (except the 1990 travel book, India: A Million Mutinies Now) to demonstrate an analogous negative reception of these writings among Indian critics. Although Naipaul offers no solutions to the postindependence plight of the Third World, Hassan contends that his censure of these lands arises from the satirist's professed aim of effecting change by conducting what he admits is the "most brutal sort of analysis." Acknowledging that his provocative pronouncements about what he dubs "the Third World's third world" are partially responsible for antagonistic responses to Naipaul's works, Hassan nonetheless admires his fidelity to his vision, bleak and uncompromising though it sometimes is. Her related question—whether only Blacks can criticize Blacks, Indians other Indians, Muslims other Muslims—foregrounds the significance of issues of race, ethnicity, and religion not only in Naipaul criticism but also in contemporary critical theory and practice more generally. Drawing upon hard-to-obtain materials from Caribbean and Indian newspapers and periodicals, from historians, economists, social scientists, and psychologists, V. S. Naipaul and the West Indies is thoroughly researched and meticulously documented. But as a revision of Hassan's dissertation, the book exhibits some familiar limitations: it lacks an index; it fails to address recently published critical books on Naipaul by Peggy Nightingale, John Thieme, and Cudjoe; and it neglects Naipaul's later works, The Enigma oj Arrival and A Turn in the South. Its omissions notwithstanding, Hassan's text is a valuable research tool for the Naipaul scholar. Polemical in its ideological assessments of the author, it is sure to play a key role in
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