Even before the extraction of one barrel of oil from its offshore discovery that is said to set the country on course to become ‘a regional energy powerhouse’, the former President of Suriname, Chandrika Persad Santokhi, announced ‘Royalties for Everyone’, a programme to distribute the country’s oil wealth directly into the hands of its people.
Every Surinamese is to be given an annual US$750 savings note and paid an annual interest rate of 7%. According to President Santokhi, the aim of the programme is to transform Suriname’s oil wealth into tangible benefits for its people while encouraging individual civic and economic participation, and of course development of generational wealth.
Suriname at present has a population of about 645,256 and a 2026 estimated GNI per capita of US$6,140 (Gross National Income is used as an attempt to identify the value of annual national production actually going to Suriname). The country found oil internally in the early 1980s but its first offshore discovery occurred in 2020 and recoverable oil resources are at present estimated at 2.4 billion barrels. Guyana has a population of 797,000 and a 2026 estimated GNI per capita of US$33,167. It found oil in 2015 with recoverable resources estimated at 11 billion barrels.
Both Guyana and Suriname are signatories to the 2016 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that commit governments to implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors that are a kind of universal of basic income (UBI) – ‘a basic set of essential social rights and transfers in cash and kind to provide a minimum income and livelihood security for all and to facilitate effective demand for and access to essential goods and services.’
In 2017, I noted that ‘The discovery of oil has made it possible for us to look at development and citizenship differently and begin to work towards a UBI for every citizen of Guyana. …. [and] depending on where the poverty floor is set, by permanently maintaining 10% of revenue for this purpose, this small initial grant will gradually grow and could expand towards a UBI’ (‘A universal basic income for all Guyanese’, Future Notes SN 30/08/2017).
The government of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) rejected this approach, and some have argued that Santokhi was merely attempting to win votes, but that is just the point, for at one level that is what political accountability demands. Instead, at about the same time the President of Suriname, a country that is poorer than Guyana, was making a transformative commitment, the government of Guyana was distributing one of its haphazard US$500 grants that do little to improve the economic position of the poor and thus Guyana’s great lament of poverty amid plenty.
Recently, in relation to government’s attempt to subvert the Guyana Teachers Union, the Working People Alliance (WPA) exclaimed, ‘This matter is a WPA line in the sand … You cannot ask African Guyanese for their votes while simultaneously seeking to crush organisations they belong to.’
I am surprised that the WPA has not noticed that this is precisely what the PPP believes it needs to do to compel Africans to vote for it. It has little interest in improving their general welfare but seeks instead to enhance its capacity to stay in government by impoverishing and politically demobilising the African people.
Last Monday, I encountered a similar kind of contribution from the leader of the PNC in the National Assembly, Dr. Terrence Campbell. He was complaining about the level of public servants income and was calling on the PPP government to double the minimum wages of public servants to G$200,000 per month, noting that during the period from 2015 to 2020, when the PNC was in government, they received a 77% increase in salaries (https://kiskadeewatch.com 22/09/2026).
Dr. Campbell, your kind of genteel political statement, while suitable for a democratic polity like Suriname, where votes are constitutionally and democratically properly aligned and governments are thus accountable, will get no traction under the PPP.
During the PPP’s previous term in office the United States government had to put its foot on the the party’s neck to get it to improve on its usual increases for public servants that hardly even covered the annual rate of inflation. This was despite Cheddi Jagan’s tenet that public service wages should be based on the rate of inflation plus the level of growth in the economy.
Note too, that the above and other progressive encouragement in the direction of democratic formation in Guyana drove the PPP and/or its supports to a point where the 2024 Democratic Party loss in the USA was greeted by a huge celebratory billboard in Georgetown.
The regime’s most likely response to you Dr. Campbell, will be to attempt to reduce your concern to one associated with the normal cut and trust of competitive politics by reminding you that public servants are largely your supporters, then tie you to a lengthy unproductive discourse about the experience the sugar workers under the coalition government, if you do not also associate the sugar worker’s experience with the general existence of unaccountable, exclusive governance arrangements.
Over its decades in government, the PPP’s ruthless efforts to win African support have not worked. The red wave it promised during the 2025 elections did not materialise. Indeed, the European Union elections monitoring group claimed that given the level of the regime’s pre-election manipulation it could not in fairness say that that election were free and fair!
But autocracies of its sort are relentless, and the PPP regime is at present unilaterally developing and managing a new bank that, given its history, will most likely be used to give small loans and then, much as happened in the 2025 elections period in relation to the buying of votes, the existing digital architecture will be positioned as a threat to those who, regardless of their having a loan, still have no intention of voting for the PPP.
Note that I am not making much of the dubious meanderings of President Irfaan Ali. The constitutional infrastructure allows the leader and ruling oligarchs of Guyana’s political parties, particularly if they are organised along ‘democratic centralist’ principles, to determine how the country is managed. Historically they have done and are still doing so.
The question of why and how the PPP has arrived at this catastrophic political juncture is a fascinating story that I will address another time. Only to say here that misguided though its founder leaders were, they were young and inexperienced but were guided by what many considered a liberating ideology.
But with the demise of Soviet communism and the death of Cheddi Jagan, the PPP has gradually worked its way into that category of autocracies that is rooted in personal ambition and opulence and will, therefore, always be plagued by a surfeit opportunism, incompetence, and corruption.
Furthermore, given its refusal to make the democratically required concessions to its ethnic context, it deliberately goes about seeking to recruit these very categories of persons to fill the ethnic gaps in its ranks, and thus when events like the MV Barima tragedy occur, the regime cannot legitimately find anyone but itself to blame (KN: 12/04/26).
