GEORGETOWN, Guyana — The numbers that usually accompany a modern economic miracle are dazzling; triple-digit growth rates, a sovereign wealth fund swelling and deflating faster than almost any other on earth, coupled with a desperate need for more foreign direct investment by leaders eager to bolster their technology aspirations before the global investment community. Guyana, a country of mangrove swamps and rain forest the size of Idaho, is on pace to produce more oil per capita than Saudi Arabia by 2027. The only number the government seems reluctant to share, however, is the most basic one of all; how many Guyanese actually live in Guyana.
Three years have passed since enumerators fanned out across the hinterland and coastal towns to conduct the 2022 Population and Housing Census. The exercise cost taxpayers nearly $2 billion Guyanese dollars and was, by all accounts, the most ambitious count in the country’s history. Yet the results remain locked away. No press conference. No preliminary bulletin. Not even a single page of tables while the Finance minister, a man known for micromanaging his department’s functions have now claimed that he will have to check with the Bureau of Statistics for an “update”.
In the vacuum, the rest of the world has been forced to guess. The United Nations says 835,986 people lived here in mid-2025. The World Bank prefers 831,087. A different U.N. database still lists 821,637. That is not the difference between rounding errors; it is the population of a midsize city. For a country that likes to boast it is “the fastest-growing economy on the planet,” the government cannot tell you, within tens of thousands, who is doing the growing.
Investors, ordinarily happy to suspend disbelief when returns are this spectacular, are discovering that disbelief has limits. You can price oil at $80 a barrel or $120, but you cannot price a consumer market, a labor pool, or an electoral register when the denominator is a shrug. One private-equity partner who recently passed on a $100 million retail project in Georgetown told me, only half-joking, “We model everything down to the number of shopping bags per household. Right now we’re modeling shopping bags per ghost population.”
The silence is especially deafening because so much else in Guyana is suddenly loud. ExxonMobil’s drillships gleam on the horizon. New hotels rise on what was cattle pasture a year ago. The government advertises “Limitless Guyana” on billboards from Singapore to Toronto. Yet when asked about the census, officials offer the same practiced deflection; the data are being “validated.” Three years of validation for a head count is, in the polite language of diplomacy, unusual.
There are, of course, less polite explanations. A census that shows heavy emigration of skilled Guyanese — doctors, teachers, engineers — would puncture the narrative of a youthful, expanding workforce ready to staff the next wave of offshore platforms and processing plants. The prevailing theory is that the PPP has lost its ethnic advantage and is desperate to shore up it’s support numbers through a new embrace of the Black community, the registration of foreign nationals and a fight for full control of the indigenous population. Additionally, a census that reveals how many Venezuelan, Cuban, and Haitian migrants have crossed the border would force uncomfortable conversations about housing, schools, hospitals, and, inevitably, the voters’ list. Guyana’s politics have always been a contact sport; an accurate count risks turning it into a blood sport.
The European Union’s election observers were blunt after the 2020 contest; without fresh census data, the voter roll that grew by 15 percent in five years “lacks credibility.” The census delay, they wrote, “constitutes a serious concern for electoral risk.” In a country that came within a handful of disputed ballots of constitutional crisis five years ago, those are not academic words.
None of this is to suggest that Guyana’s oil boom is a mirage. The hydrocarbons are real, the production curves are real, and the money flooding into the treasury is very real. But miracles built on sand tend to tilt. Investors who once asked only “How fast can we get in?” are now asking “How fast can we get out if the numbers turn out to be wrong?” Investors are looking for their returns in the short run. Long term investors outside of the oil and gas industry are simply nonexistent.
Good governance; it is often said, is not charity; it is infrastructure. Reliable statistics are the rebar inside the concrete of modern markets. When a government withholds them, it is not merely being coy, it is raising the cost of capital for every hospital, factory, and housing development that might otherwise be built.
Guyana has every right to celebrate its black-gold windfall. But celebrations ring hollow when the host refuses to tell the guests how many chairs are in the room.
Until the Bureau of Statistics opens its vault and releases the 2022 census, unedited and unredacted, on time, and online for all to see, the rest of the world will continue to invest in a country whose most important statistic is listed, in every international database, as “estimated.
In the oil business, they call that exploration risk. In the governance business, they call it something else.
