By Roysdale Forde S.C- In the Caribbean, Guyana has been crowned the world’s largest oil producer per capita. With production surging to a staggering 900,000 barrels per day in late 2025 – propelled by ExxonMobil’s relentless drills and the government’s fervent embrace of fossil-fueled ambition – this nation of under 800,000 people now pumps more crude per head than Kuwait or Qatar ever dreamed. President Irfaan Ali’s People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) regime hails it as a triumph of sovereignty, a “One Guyana” where black gold flows like manna from the deep.
But peel back the glossy press releases, and what emerges is not a people’s prosperity, but a petro-plutocracy: a chasm of inequality where half the population scrapes by in abject poverty, while a cabal of elites and foreign oil barons feast on the spoils. As the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.
From how many crimes, wars, and murders… might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.'” In Guyana, the impostors have struck oil, and the people’s share is but a trickle.
What does this “title” truly mean for a country where nearly 50% of citizens – some 400,000 souls – languish below the World Bank’s upper-middle-income poverty line of US$5.50 per day, a figure frozen in 2019 data but echoed in 2025 assessments? Guyana’s population hovers at 826,000, yet the oil bonanza has inflated GDP per capita to a nominal US$29,884, masking the rot beneath. The Natural Resource Fund, bloated with US$2.6 billion in 2024 revenues, promises shared wealth, but the reality is a resource curse redux: environmental devastation in the Rupununi savannas, skyrocketing living costs that devour wages, and a Gini coefficient of 0.45 signaling inequality as entrenched as the colonial plantocracy it echoes.
At least the nation grapples with malnutrition, inadequate healthcare, and child labour in gold-panning creeks, while Georgetown’s skyline sprouts luxury condos and hotels for expat executives. This is not egalitarian renaissance. In fact, it is a rigged lottery where – Exxon and its local proxies – always wins. The PPP/C’s narrative of “inclusive growth” rings hollow when oil royalties, a mere 2% plus profit shares, barely dent the poverty headcount, now estimated below 20% by regime cheerleaders but stubbornly at 48% by independent watchdogs like the World Bank. In a land of less than a million, such disparity is not progress; it is provocation, a powder keg for social unrest that history’s downtrodden have ignited from Haiti to Honduras.
Add to this the fact that, the PPP/C’s infrastructure spree, bankrolled, not by oil windfalls but by a debt binge, chains future generations to foreign lenders. Since reclaiming power in 2020, the PPP/C regime has secured loans totaling over US$1.2 billion for “transformative” projects: bridges over the Berbice River, highways snaking through the interior, and sea defenses against rising tides. But these are less public goods than political monuments, gleaming testaments to executive hubris amid fiscal recklessness. Consider the tally from the last five years:
- 2020: US$100 million from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for the Guyana Infrastructure Improvement Project, targeting roads and bridges in flood-prone regions.
- 2021: US$150 million World Bank loan for the First Oil Production Development Policy Loan, ostensibly for energy infrastructure but funneled into broader capital works.
- 2022: US$200 million IDB financing for the Sustainable Logistics and Trade Facilitation Program, enhancing port and transport corridors.
- 2023: US$250 million Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) credit for the National Drainage and Irrigation Improvement Project, amid claims of agricultural uplift.
- 2024-2025: A fresh US$156 million World Bank Integrated Transport Corridors Project, signed in October 2025, to modernise highways and bridges – bringing the five-year debt haul to US$856 million in major tranches alone, excluding smaller Eurobonds and bilateral aids.
These borrowings, averaging US$170 million annually, have ballooned Guyana’s public debt to 40% of GDP by 2025, per IMF estimates. Proponents tout them as engines of connectivity, but critics decry a patronage machine: contracts awarded to regime-linked firms, kickbacks whispered in boardrooms, and rural communities bypassed for urban vanity projects. Where is the equity in paving elite enclaves while hinterland schools crumble? This debt-fueled facade widens the rich-poor chasm, as Rousseau might lament, turning communal earth into privatised enclosures for the avaricious few.
That chasm yawns ever wider under the oil deluge. Guyana’s Gini coefficient, steady at 0.45 since 2020, belies a Palma ratio – measuring the richest 10%’s share against the poorest 40% – that has spiked 15% in five years, per World Inequality Database trends. The top decile, fattened by oil service subcontracts and real estate flips, now captures 45% of national income, up from 38% pre-boom. Meanwhile, the bottom half clings to 12%, eroded by 20% inflation in staples like rice and fuel.
Emigration surges – 39% of Guyanese live abroad – draining teachers and nurses, while remittances (US$500 million in 2024) prop up the precarious poor. In Georgetown’s squatter settlements, families huddle in zinc shacks; in Region Nine, Indigenous miners pollute rivers for scraps. Oil has minted millionaires overnight – Exxon execs and PPP/C cronies – but for the masses, it’s a gilded cage: wages stagnant at GY$100,000 monthly (US$477) on average, while elites flaunt Bentleys imported, in some cases, duty-free.
Guyana’s oil odyssey demands a reckoning. The PPP/C’s debt-laden dreams and inequality apologia betray the people’s mandate. As Rousseau implored, reclaim the common fruits – audit the loans, tax the elites, invest in human capital. Otherwise, this per capita crown is but a fool’s diadem, adorning a nation fracturing along fault lines of greed.
