Just before the curtains came down on Day One of the 2026 Guyana Energy Conference and Supply Chain Expo yesterday, Senior Minister in the Office of the President with Responsibility for Finance Dr. Ashni Singh said government strongly believes in the importance of partnership and had travelled a long journey of strong policy effort to build up credible and strong institutions of State to enhance Guyana and to establish Guyana as an attractive destination for investment during the country’s pre-oil period, in order to get the country to where it is now where there is trust by its partners to invest in Guyana. The Minister was responding to questions by Ambassador Carlos Pascual, Senior Vice President, Global Energy, S&P Global during the day’s closing discussion. Previously, during the morning, the annual Conference and Expo, which is celebrating its fifth anniversary, was opened by President Irfaan Ali and other officials with the day’s sessions including a number of panel discussions and an exhibition at the Marriott Hotel in Georgetown.
Asked why there was trust in Guyana that brought in investment partners following the discovery of oil, Dr. Singh explained that there was a time when Guyana was in a very different place economically and went through three decades of absence of democracy and State domination prior to 1992.
“It was essentially a dictatorship but then there was a restoration of democracy in 1992 and the commencement of an effort to liberalise the economy, to restore Guyana to a place of economic viability as a State and ultimately to a position of fiscal solvency,” Minister Singh further explained.
“At that time we were spending more than 100 percent of government revenue on service of debt and the sum of our debt was more than 600 percent of the size of our economy, and it took a lot of effort over about two decades from 1990 , first of all to rebuild the institutions of State, and to make us a credible member of the global community of nations and to establish Guyana as a young democracy , to put Guyana in a place where we were regarded as first a credible and then as an attractive destination for investment and to attract companies like ExxonMobil,” Dr. Singh pointed out, adding that ‘they didn’t only come because they thought oil was under the sea bed, they came too because of the effort that we made to establish Guyana as a hospitable place for foreign and direct investment and indeed as a hospitable place for domestic private investment. That took a lot of work in the pre-oil Guyana, and it was in that environment that companies like ExxonMobil came to Guyana, started exploration and ultimately would find oil’.
The finance minister emphasized that government recognized that the country cannot realize its aspirations without private capital being attracted and investors being able to invest in Guyana and generating acceptable rates of return, pointing out that this requires certain action and working with private providers of capital, working with bilateral partners to ensure a conducive and attractive environment is created.
“You’re witnessing transformation that is happening at a pace that has perhaps never been seen before. We have been moving at rates north of 40 percent per annum for the last five years we have had real economic growth on average of about 35 percent per annum and significantly that was driven not only by oil. We have also had extraordinary rates of economic growth in the non-oil economy.” He explained during the discussion adding that the country has averaged 11 percent in real terms for the last five years in the non-oil economy with much of government’s policy attention devoted to ensuring a strong, competitive and rapidly growing non-oil economy.
“That has allowed us over the space of about four years to quadruple the size of our domestic economy , it has allowed us, in fact at the very start we made the conscious decision that we would create the sovereign wealth fund which we did -the Natural Resource Fund- and not withstanding that we are ramping up heavily in investment, on the public sector side we have been able to accumulate in the sovereign wealth fund enough savings now to pay off the total external debt of the country, “ Minister Singh concluded.
