Opinion  /  Independence at 60

Flags, Flags
Everywhere —
But Whose
Nation Is This?

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“Sixty years after Britain lowered the Union Jack, Guyana remains ensnared in a new colonialism — one dressed not in pith helmets, but in production-sharing agreements, Washington points, and the comfortable silence of leaders who long ago confused personal interest with national sovereignty.”

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Every year on May 26, we are invited to celebrate. We are told to wave the Golden Arrowhead, to sing of one people and one nation, to feel something warm and unambiguous about what it means to be Guyanese. And every year, the honest among us feel the same quiet discomfort — the nagging sense that the ceremony is performing something that does not yet fully exist.

A colleague recently asked, in these very pages, whether sixty years on we have become a nation. It is a fair and searching question. He pointed, rightly, to our unresolved ethnic narratives — the competing claims of suffering, arrival, and contribution that keep our six peoples orbiting one another with wary eyes rather than drawing closer. He suggested that what we need is a shared story, a modus viv end i, a national narrative we can all inhabit.

He is not wrong. But he has diagnosed only half the illness. The other half — the half that makes the first half so intractable — is that Guyana has never been permitted to be sovereign in the fullest sense of that word. And until we reckon with that truth, no amount of narrative-crafting will save us.

The Poisoned Chalice of 1966

Let us begin where the original sin lies. The Independence that Burnham accepted on May 26, 1966 was not wrested from empire through the moral force of a unified people. It was a managed transition, engineered in no small part by Washington and London to ensure that Cheddi Jagan — the man who had actually won democratic elections — would not be the one holding the flag.

The CIA’s role in destabilising Jagan’s government throughout the early 1960s is not conspiracy theory. It is documented history. The United States deemed a democratically elected socialist too dangerous for their hemisphere, and so they broke him — through covert funding of strikes, through racial polarisation, through the quiet elevation of Forbes Burnham as a more manageable alternative. The man who received independence on our behalf had been, in a very real sense, selected for us by a foreign power.

This is the founding trauma that our national narrative must eventually absorb — not merely the date chosen to forever remind Indian Guyanese of Wismar’s violence, but the deeper wound: that our independence was a gift from the same hands that had spent centuries extracting everything of value from this land. Gifts from such hands come with strings. They always have.

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“Our independence was a gift from the same hands that had spent centuries extracting everything of value from this land. Gifts from such hands come with strings. They always have.”

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When Oil Was Supposed to Change Everything

When ExxonMobil announced the Liza discovery in 2015, something shifted in the Guyanese imagination. Here, finally, was the material basis for genuine sovereignty. Here was the lever by which a small nation of fewer than a million people could demand — and receive — a seat at the table of its own future.

What we got instead was the Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement — widely regarded by independent oil economists as among the most disadvantageous resource contracts signed by any developing nation in the modern era. A contract negotiated in secret, the terms of which our own citizens were not permitted to scrutinise until civil society and the press forced partial disclosure. A contract that, by its cost-recovery provisions, ensures that ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC can recoup virtually all operating costs before Guyana sees its full share of profit oil.

The government will tell you that revenues are flowing, that roads are being built, that per-capita income statistics are rising impressively. All of this is true. None of it answers the fundamental question: on whose terms is this prosperity being constructed? When the contract cannot be renegotiated; when the dispute resolution mechanism sits in a foreign jurisdiction; when the corporation’s annual revenue dwarfs Guyana’s entire GDP — in what meaningful sense is the nation sovereign over its own primary resource?

The Washington Alignment and the Illusion of Friendship

Observe, in recent years, how reflexively our leadership has oriented itself toward Washington’s preferences — in its posture toward Venezuela, in its silence on matters where American interests and Guyanese interests do not align, in the speed with which senior officials travel to conferences, summits, and bilateral meetings to signal their reliability as partners.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having relationships with powerful nations. Small states must navigate the world as it is, not as they might wish it to be. But there is a difference between strategic engagement and dependency — and there is a difference between partnership and performance. What we too often witness is performance: the performance of alignment, the performance of shared values, the performance of being a good neighbour in a neighbourhood whose rules were written entirely by one party.

Lord Palmerston’s observation, made in the British Parliament in 1848, has lost none of its force in the intervening century and three-quarters: nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. The United States’ current warmth toward Georgetown is a function of geography, oil, and the Monroe Doctrine applied to a twenty-first century where China and Russia are seeking footholds in the hemisphere. When those calculations change — and they will — so will the warmth. The question our leaders should be asking is not “how do we deepen this friendship?” but “what protections have we built for when it cools?”

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“The United States’ warmth toward Georgetown is a function of geography, oil, and a Monroe Doctrine applied to a century where China and Russia seek footholds in the hemisphere. When those calculations change — and they will — so will the warmth.”

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The Nation We Have Not Yet Chosen to Build

The unresolved ethnic tensions in Guyana are real and serious and demand engagement. But they have also served, whether by accident or design, as a permanent distraction — keeping our eyes fixed on one another rather than on the structures above us both. Every political cycle in which the primary narrative is “which group controls the state” is a cycle in which the deeper question — “who controls the state’s resources, and on whose terms?” — goes unasked.

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𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.