By Roysdale Forde, S.C. In the sweltering heat of Guyana’s coastal plains and the shadowed depths of its hinterland, a stark truth unfolds: an oil-rich paradise where the black gold flows like a river, yet poverty clings to the people like damp rot on forgotten timber. Guyana, with a population hovering just under a million people, boasts one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, fueled by ExxonMobil’s gushers in the Stabroek Block.
Yet, according to the World Bank’s Systematic Country Diagnostic, a staggering 43.4 percent of Guyanese – over 400,000 individuals – languish in poverty, scraping by below the national line. This is not mere misfortune; it is the engineered outcome of a People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government that has squandered our patrimony on elite whims, leaving the masses to drown in inequality.
The signs are everywhere: unchecked withdrawals from our Natural Resource Fund (NRF), a chasm in living standards between glittering Georgetown and the forsaken rural outposts, and a frantic scramble to auction off our sovereignty to foreign oil barons. These fractures are not cracks in the foundation; they are the tremors heralding the regime’s collapse. It is just a matter of time.
Consider the NRF, that sacred vault meant to safeguard our oil windfall for generations. Enacted in 2021 amid promises of transparency, it has instead become a piggy bank for the PPP/C’s patronage machine. In 2024 alone, Parliament approved a colossal US$1.586 billion withdrawal – equivalent to G$329.9 billion – plucked straight from the fund’s coffers to fatten the Consolidated Fund. By August, US$850 million had already been siphoned, with another US$736 million earmarked for the year’s end, leaving the NRF teetering at US$2.94 billion despite record inflows. This is no prudent fiscal housekeeping; it is plunder disguised as policy.
As international jurist and anti-corruption expert Susan Rose-Ackerman warns in her seminal work on governance, “Corruption diverts resources from the poor to the rich, leads to a culture of bribes, and distorts public expenditures, deterring foreign investors and hampering economic growth.” Guyana’s leaders preach intergenerational equity while bleeding the fund dry, ensuring that today’s rural child starves so tomorrow’s minister can afford another yacht.
Worse still is the yawning gulf between urban opulence and rural despair, a divide that mocks the PPP/C’s hollow boasts of “shared prosperity.” In Georgetown and its environs, where a mere 27 percent of Guyanese reside, shiny malls sprout like weeds, fueled by oil-tainted contracts and imported luxuries.
Yet venture inland – where 73 percent of our people toil – and the reality bites: UNICEF reports that rural and hinterland communities endure “comparatively poorer” conditions, with hinterland poverty rates eclipsing 48 percent, compounded by crumbling infrastructure, spotty healthcare, and schools without books. Extreme poverty clusters in these interior regions, where families subsist on subsistence farming amid floods and fevers, while urban elites sip lattes in air-conditioned enclaves.
The World Bank’s data lays bare the betrayal: despite oil’s bounty, poverty dipped only modestly from 60.9 percent in 2006 to 48.4 percent in 2019 (using the US$5.50/day line), and recent figures show no meaningful reversal. This urban-rural schism is not geography; it is deliberate neglect, a governance failure that echoes the words of former UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston: “Corruption… deprives the state of resources in an ‘inequitable’ way… embezzlement and insufficient measures against embezzlement divert funds from social budgets.”
And then there is the crown jewel of PPP/C folly: the rush to giveaway our national patrimony to multinational vampires. From the lopsided 2016 Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil – locking in a paltry 2 percent royalty and 75 percent cost recovery ceiling – to the shadowy 2015 oil block handouts under then-President Donald Ramotar, the government has treated Guyana’s subsurface treasures as bargain-bin trinkets.
Critics, including the Natural Resource Governance Institute, decry these deals as “lopsided” and riddled with “corruption red flags,” from opaque bidding to third-party intermediaries that shield elite beneficiaries. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo himself admitted the PPP’s pre-oil “giveaway” of blocks, shrugging it off as a time when “we had a lot of blocks but no takers.”
Now, with discoveries de-risking the basin, the PPP/C clings to these sweetheart contracts, forgoing billions in potential royalties while indigenous communities and coastal villagers see not a drop. As economist and resource governance expert Joseph E. Stiglitz observes, “Of the hundreds of millions of citizens living on under $2 a day in resource-rich nations, 85 percent live in very poorly governed countries – countries which… rate very poorly in corruption control.” Guyana fits this tragic mould: abundance for the few, austerity for the many.
The PPP/C’s edifice of deceit cannot endure. As Kenyan activist and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai proclaimed, “When we see that our problem is bad enough and we suffer enough and we don’t like things, we are willing to change… to become activists.” The Guyanese people – urban youth scrolling through empty promises, rural mothers rationing rice for their children – are awakening.
Protests simmer, opposition swells, and the international spotlight burns hotter on this petro-state farce. Echoing Maathai’s fire, the cancer of corruption and poverty festers unchecked, but the will to excise it grows. The regime’s collapse is not a question of if, but when. And when it comes, let it be swift – a reckoning that rebuilds Guyana not for the Jagdeos and Ramotars, but for the forgotten 43.4 percent who deserve their birthright: a nation where oil lifts all boats, not just the yachts of the corrupt. It is just a matter of time.
