There is a dangerous complacency settling over Guyana’s private sector. Flush with the optimism of an oil boom, business leaders are celebrating invitations to international conferences and signing memoranda they don’t fully understand. They see themselves as rising players on a global stage. What they fail to see is that they are being strategically maneuvered into becoming bit players in their own country’s story, as two superpowers prepare for a battle over generational wealth, with Guyana as the prize.
While the United States grapples with its own internal economic pressures and declining corporate profit margins, its corporate titans are looking for a backstop. Their gaze has settled on a target that, from a boardroom in New York or Houston, looks almost too perfect: a tiny, obscure nation with a negligible population, a government known for its malleability, and oil reserves so vast they defy comprehension. It sits a mere four-hour flight away, squarely in what they consider their backyard.
This is not an opportunity for Guyana; it is a corporate hunting ground.
The US is not coming as a benevolent partner. They are arriving with a clear-eyed, ruthless focus on shareholder value evidenced by the suffocating ‘Exxon contract’. And they are deeply annoyed. China, with its long-standing relationships in Guyana, its focus on engineering, and its bottomless purse of loan financing, has already secured a formidable foothold. Chinese companies have been smart; they’ve built infrastructure, cultivated political ties for decades, and understand the local landscape in a way that new American entrants do not. Displacing them will be difficult, and the Americans know it.
This annoyance is a profound danger for the Guyanese private sector. In the escalating US-China cold war, Guyana is not a neutral Switzerland; it is the battlefield. The local business community, flattered by invites to ABCE embassy events, is being co-opted. They are being used as local validation, a veneer of domestic partnership, while the real contracts, the ones that build the deep-water ports, the major highways, the power grids, are drafted in Washington and Beijing. The Guyanese are being manipulated into a larger geopolitical plan designed to outwit them, a task that, given the immense power disparity, is not hard to do.
But the most chilling leverage the US holds is not economic, it is informational. Make no mistake, US intelligence agencies and their corporate counterparts know exactly who they are dealing with. They have dossiers. They know which of our celebrated business leaders has a silent stake in a gold-smuggling operation. They have traced the investments in drug trafficking deals. They have mapped the networks of money laundering and identified the connections between criminals, business leaders, and government officials.
This knowledge is a sword of Damocles hanging over the Guyanese private sector. When a local conglomerate becomes inconvenient, or when a politically connected individual tries to demand too large a slice of the pie, the Americans will not bother with a court case. A discreet leak to an international financial watchdog, a quiet word to a compliance officer at a correspondent bank, and that business, and its owner, will be financially annihilated, cut off from the global banking system overnight. Everyone is at risk.
The great tragedy is that Guyana’s private sector, in its oblivious pursuit of short-term gains, is failing to see the storm clouds. They are celebrating the rain while ignoring the hurricane. They are so focused on the crumbs falling from the table of giants that they don’t realize the giants are preparing to sell the table out from under them.
The time for naive celebration is over. If the Guyanese private sector does not find the courage to forge a unified, strategic, and fiercely nationalistic front, if it does not demand technology transfer, enforce local content laws with teeth, and build its own capacity to compete, it will be reduced to a class of junior brokers and subcontractors. The generational wealth buried off Guyana’s coast will be extracted, packaged, and shipped away to fuel corporate profits and geopolitical ambitions elsewhere, leaving the people of Guyana with little more than a polluted coastline and a lesson in 21st-century neocolonialism.
The world’s superpowers are playing chess. Guyana’s private sector cannot afford to think it’s playing checkers. Its very survival depends on recognizing the game.
