“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Question That Will Not Rest
The question is familiar in Guyana. It has been asked, in various forms, at every political juncture since independence. It has been answered badly, repeatedly, by governments of different compositions. And it persists because the underlying conditions that generate it—historical exclusion, communal anxiety, distributive injustice—have never been adequately addressed. The question endures because we have yet to build systems that make it irrelevant.
I want to argue that the question, as typically framed, is a false binary. It forces a choice between two incomplete principles, each of which, taken alone, produces pathological outcomes. The way forward requires a more sophisticated framework—one I will call, borrowing from my own pedagogical philosophy, an “access and excellence” approach to economic development.
The Case for Merit—and Its Structural Blind Spot
The merit principle has enormous intuitive appeal. Allocate resources to those best positioned to use them productively. Reward talent, effort, and demonstrated capacity. Build an economy on the bedrock of competence rather than connection. In a country seeking to professionalize its institutions and diversify beyond petroleum, the case for meritocracy is not merely theoretical—it is an operational imperative.
Yet the merit principle contains a structural blind spot that its advocates too rarely acknowledge. Meritocracy measures outcomes—examination scores, business plans, technical credentials—without accounting for the conditions that produced those outcomes. A child educated in Georgetown’s better secondary schools arrives at the starting line of any merit-based competition with advantages that have nothing to do with innate ability and everything to do with geography, family resources, and historical accumulation. An Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) report from November 2024 reveals that over half of Guyana’s population lives in poverty, with more than 30% in extreme poverty, and that this poverty is disproportionately concentrated in rural and hinterland areas [3].
Consider an analogy from mathematics. In a well-posed optimization problem, you must specify both the objective function and the constraint set. Merit defines the objective—maximize productivity, reward excellence—but says nothing about the constraints under which individuals compete. When the constraint sets are radically different for different populations, optimizing the objective function alone produces results that are efficient in a narrow sense but unjust in a deeper one. You have found the optimum of the wrong problem.
This is not an argument against merit. It is an argument that merit, to function as a legitimate allocative principle, requires antecedent conditions of genuine equality of opportunity. Without those conditions, meritocracy becomes a laundering mechanism for inherited advantage.
The Ethnic Allocation Trap
If pure merit is insufficient, does it follow that ethnicity should serve as a corrective variable? Guyana’s own history provides the most devastating rebuttal.
Ethnic patronage—the allocation of state resources along communal lines—has been the defining pathology of Guyanese political economy since the 1960s. Under successive administrations, the logic was always the same: our people were excluded before; now it is our turn. The result, across decades, and across the ethnic divide, has been identical: institutional decay, capital flight, brain drain, and the deepening of precisely the communal divisions that patronage was meant to address. A 2011 World Bank report noted that Guyana had the world’s highest migration rate of tertiary-educated persons at a staggering 89% [4].
The mechanism is well understood by political economists. When ethnicity becomes the primary criterion for economic allocation, every policy question is refracted through a zero-sum communal lens. Infrastructure spending, contract awards, land distribution, public sector hiring—all become battlegrounds not for efficiency or need but for ethnic share. The state ceases to function as a developmental instrument and becomes a prize to be captured. The tragedy is not merely economic; it is epistemic. Citizens lose the ability to evaluate policy on its merits because every policy is coded as being “for” one group or “against” another.
Making ethnicity a material factor in economic empowerment, however well-intentioned, also commits a category error. Ethnicity is a description of identity, not a diagnosis of need. Not all members of any ethnic group in Guyana are equally disadvantaged, and the most vulnerable citizens—hinterland Indigenous communities, the rural poor of all backgrounds, single mothers in urban Georgetown—often fall outside the neat ethnic categories that patronage systems privilege. An ethnic lens is simultaneously too broad and too narrow: too broad because it aggregates the wealthy and the destitute under a single identity marker, too narrow because it excludes those whose disadvantage does not map onto the dominant communal narrative.
The Third Path: Access and Excellence
There is a third way, and it begins with a reframing. The question is not “merit or ethnicity?” but rather: “How do we build systems in which merit can function justly?”
In my work as a mathematics educator, I have spent decades wrestling with a version of this problem. The students who arrive at Medgar Evers College come from communities that have been systematically underserved by the educational system. They are not less capable—they are less prepared, which is a fundamentally different diagnosis that demands a fundamentally different intervention. The solution is not to lower the standard of mathematics to match their preparation, nor is it to select students for advancement on the basis of demographic category. The solution is to build the pedagogical scaffolding that allows students to reach the standard on their own merits.
I call this the “access and excellence” framework. Access means removing the structural barriers that prevent individuals from competing on equal terms. Excellence means maintaining standards and expecting everyone to meet them. The two principles are not in tension—they are symbiotic. Access without excellence is patronage dressed in progressive language. Excellence without access is privilege masquerading as fairness. Critically, the sequencing matters: structural investment must precede — or at minimum accompany — any invocation of merit as an allocative principle. To demand excellence before dismantling the barriers that prevent it is not meritocracy; it is the performance of fairness without its substance.
Translated into economic policy, this framework generates specific prescriptions.
From Framework to Policy
Translated into economic policy, this framework generates specific prescriptions. The shift it demands is not rhetorical but operational: the policy conversation must move from who receives opportunity to what prevents citizens from accessing it in the first place. Target barriers, not identities. The government’s empowerment strategy should identify and dismantle the specific obstacles that prevent Guyanese citizens from participating in the economy, including inadequate education, poor infrastructure, limited access to credit, information asymmetries, and geographic isolation. These barriers disproportionately affect certain communities, meaning that targeting them will disproportionately benefit those communities. But the mechanism is structural, not ethnic, and the benefits flow to anyone facing the identified obstacle regardless of communal affiliation. For instance, in 2022, only 11.2% of hinterland students earned a CSEC certificate, compared to 37.1% in Georgetown [5].
Invest in the constraint set. If meritocracy requires equal starting conditions, then the single most important investment a petroleum-rich government can make is in the infrastructure of opportunity: schools, roads, broadband, healthcare, and the institutional architecture of credit and enterprise support. The government has allocated a $183.6 billion for the Education sector in 2026, a significant increase from previous years, and has been investing in new schools, including in hinterland regions like Region 9 [6][7]. This is not redistribution—it is the construction of the preconditions for a market economy that actually works. Every dollar spent on a quality secondary school in Region Nine is a dollar invested in the legitimacy of the merit principle itself.
Build sector-specific pipelines. Guyana’s petroleum economy demands technical capacities that most Guyanese do not currently possess. A 2023 study by the Centre for Local Business Development (CLBD) projected a need for 5,828 additional workers by 2028, with a sharp rise in demand for science and engineering professionals [8]. Rather than allocating oil-sector contracts on ethnic lines—which guarantees inefficiency and resentment in equal measure—design training and credentialing pipelines that equip citizens from all backgrounds to compete for these opportunities. The goal is not ethnic quotas in the supply chain; it is a supply chain in which Guyanese firms, staffed by competent Guyanese professionals, can win contracts on demonstrated capability.
Make institutions transparent. Ethnic anxiety about economic allocation is a rational response to opaque institutions. When citizens cannot verify how contracts are awarded, how revenues are distributed, or how public sector positions are filled, they default to communal suspicion. Guyana scored 40 out of 100 on the 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index reported by Transparency International, indicating a perception of significant public sector corruption [9]. Transparency—real, auditable, institutional transparency—is the most powerful antidote to ethnic mobilization. It converts questions of identity into questions of evidence.
Measure and publish outcomes. An empowerment strategy guided by access and excellence must be accountable to data, not narrative. Disaggregate economic outcomes by region, income level, and yes, by ethnicity—not to allocate resources ethnically, but to verify that structural interventions are reaching the populations that need them. If a merit-based programme consistently fails to reach hinterland communities, that is diagnostic information about barriers that have not yet been removed, not evidence that the merit principle should be abandoned.
The Deeper Political Point
There is a theorem in the political economy of development that Guyana’s leaders would do well to internalize: ethnicity becomes less salient as a political variable when citizens have genuine economic agency. People who can feed their families, educate their children, and see a plausible path to prosperity do not need ethnic champions to negotiate with the state on their behalf. They can negotiate for themselves, as individuals, through institutions that function. Research on ethnic conflict in India, for example, has shown a strong negative correlation between economic growth and the incidence of riots [10].
The most corrosive legacy of Guyana’s post-independence political economy is not any particular policy—it is the learned helplessness that comes from decades of dependence on communal intermediaries for access to state resources. Breaking this cycle requires not ethnic balancing but the construction of impersonal, transparent, rules-based institutions through which any citizen can pursue economic opportunity.
This is hard. It is much harder than drawing up ethnic allocation formulae or convening communal consultations. It requires sustained investment in human capital, institutional capacity, and the slow, unglamorous work of building systems that function the same way regardless of who occupies the office of the president. But it is the only approach that leads somewhere worth going.
The Bridge, Not the Shortcut
In mathematics, there is a profound difference between a shortcut and an elegant solution. A shortcut avoids the difficulty; an elegant solution passes through it and emerges on the other side with something beautiful and true. Ethnic allocation is a shortcut. It avoids the hard work of building genuine equality of opportunity by substituting an identity marker for a structural diagnosis. It produces results that appear equitable in the short term and are catastrophic in the long term.
The access and excellence framework is the elegant solution. It requires Guyana to do what is genuinely difficult: build the educational, institutional, and infrastructural bridge between where its citizens are and where the economy demands they go. It holds the standard high and then invests massively in the scaffolding to reach it. It trusts that Guyanese people, given genuine opportunity, will rise to meet excellence—because they always have, whenever the system gave them half a chance.
The petroleum revenues now flowing into the treasury provide a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build this bridge. The question is whether Guyana’s leaders will have the courage to invest in systems rather than patronage, in institutions rather than intermediaries, in the long game of genuine development rather than the short game of ethnic appeasement.
My position is always access and excellence. It is the only position that respects both the dignity of the individual and the reality of structural inequality. It is the only position that builds rather than divides. And it is the only position adequate to the scale of the opportunity before us.
References
[1] Government of Guyana. (2026, January 26). Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund balance stood at US$3.25B at end of 2025. iNews Guyana. https://inewsguyana.com/guyanas-natural-resource-fund-balance-stood-at-us3-25b-at-end-of-2025/
[2] U.S. Department of State. (2025). 2025 Investment Climate Statements: Guyana. https://www.state.gov/reports/2025-investment-climate-statements/guyana
[3] Guyana Business Journal. (2025, December 14). IDB Report Reveals Stark Poverty Reality Amidst Guyana’s Economic Boom. https://guyanabusinessjournal.com/2025/12/idb-report-reveals-stark-poverty-reality-amidst-guyanas-economic-boom/
[4] The Commonwealth. (n.d.). Guyana Country Case Study. The Commonwealth iLibrary. https://www.thecommonwealth-ilibrary.org/index.php/comsec/catalog/download/777/777/6082?inline=1
[5] UNESCO IIEP. (n.d.). Transforming Education in Guyana. https://www.iiep.unesco.org/en/projects/transforming-education-guyana
[6] Department of Public Information. (2026, February 3). MP White-Griffith champions $183B education budget as investment in Guyana’s future. https://dpi.gov.gy/mp-white-griffith-champions-183b-education-budget-as-investment-in-guyanas-future/
[7] Ministry of Education. (2025, August 8). Shulinab Village to get $350M Secondary School. https://education.gov.gy/en/index.php/media2/external-news/9142-shulinab-village-to-get-350m-secondary-school
[8] Energy Magazine. (2024, November 12). Bridging the Skills Gap in Guyana’s Oil Sector. https://energyguyana.gy/index.php/2024/11/12/bridging-the-skills-gap-in-guyanas-oil-sector-stakeholders-weigh-in-on-challenges-and-suggest-solutions/
[9] Trading Economics. (n.d.). Guyana Corruption Index. https://tradingeconomics.com/guyana/corruption-index
[10] Thomas, A. (2010). Economic growth and ethnic violence: An empirical investigation of Hindu–Muslim riots in India. Journal of Peace Research, 47(5), 535–548. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343310373032
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