BUILD IS A WORD NOT A FACT:WHAT THERIOT DIDN’T SAY

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

“Build” Is a Word, Not a Fact: What Theriot Didn’t Say

United States Ambassador Nicole Theriot told a room at the Four Points by Sheraton on Thursday that American companies “are not just here to extract and leave like some other countries.” President Ali, following her to the podium, called the relationship one of “conviction rather than convenience.” Neither statement came attached to a single verifiable metric. That absence is the story.       Build what? Ambassador Theriot’s own remarks answered the question for her: sustainability, capacity-building, and institutional investment were named as design principles, not delivered outcomes.

The concrete example offered — a reorganisation of emergency medical infrastructure with Mount Sinai and Northwell Health — is a technical assistance arrangement, not capital investment. It costs relatively little and buys enormous goodwill. It is not a hospital. It is not a factory. It is not a refinery. Where is the physical plant that “build” is supposed to describe?
What 2% actually buys

Start with the number the government itself doesn’t dispute. Under the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement, Guyana receives a flat 2% royalty on gross oil production, on top of a 50/50 split of whatever remains after ExxonMobil recovers costs — and that cost recovery can consume up to 75% of annual production before any profit is split at all. In 2025, with production averaging roughly 900,000 barrels a day, that structure translated into Exxon booking approximately US$6 billion in pre-tax profit, Chevron (via Hess) US$4 billion, and CNOOC US$2.5 billion — a combined take running roughly five times what flowed into Guyana’s own accounts that year, which totaled about US$2.5 billion.

So: what can Guyana build with 2%? Two percent of gross production, before a single cost-recovery dollar is deducted, does not fund a domestic refining industry, does not fund a manufacturing base, does not fund the kind of productive, export-diversified economy that would let the country stop depending on oil revenue to prop up its own currency. It funds line items in a budget still overwhelmingly reliant on the other 98% flowing through a cost-recovery mechanism controlled by the operator’s own accounting, with full recovery of the consortium’s roughly $40 billion in cumulative costs not expected until the end of 2027.
Every year before that is a year in which the overwhelming share of “Guyana’s oil” is contractually earmarked to reimburse the extractor first.

The forex question is the tell
If U.S. capital were flowing into Guyana the way Thursday’s rhetoric implied, the country would not need the nine-point foreign exchange control regime the government imposed in September 2025 to manage what the U.S. Commerce Department’s own market report calls a chronic local shortage of U.S. dollars.
Local banks now require government verification of foreign invoices and shipping documents before releasing hard currency. Importers report two-week-minimum waits for basic forex access.
Here is the detail that should embarrass anyone repeating “build, not extract” without scrutiny: that same U.S. government report notes American companies themselves have had difficulty and delays accessing the dollars needed to repatriate profits, pay royalties, and service debt out of Guyana. The scarcity isn’t only squeezing Guyanese importers — it’s squeezing the outflow of American profit. The dollars aren’t circulating and multiplying inside the domestic economy; they’re being extracted in volumes large enough that the central bank can’t supply currency fast enough for the extractors to take their winnings home cleanly, let alone for a rice importer to clear a container at the port.
History supplied the frame Theriot used against herself
“Not here to extract and leave like some other countries” is a rhetorical move as old as the extraction relationship itself: point at a rival’s sins to obscure the pattern in your own conduct. But a pattern doesn’t move because the accent changes.
A 2% royalty. A cost-recovery ceiling that lets the operator claim three-quarters of production before profit-sharing starts. A forex shortage severe enough to constrain even the extractors’ own repatriation. This is the architecture of a relationship built to take a position, not to build a base — and it was designed that way in 2016, years before anyone stood at a podium in a U.S.-branded hotel to insist otherwise.

If the Ambassador wants “build” to mean something other than a hotel gala and a hospital consulting contract, the test is simple and falsifiable: show manufacturing capacity added, show export diversification away from crude, show the forex shortage easing as a direct, traceable result of U.S. investment rather than in spite of it.                                                                               Absent that, “build, not extract” is a phrase for the toast, not a description of the balance sheet.

Until one of those three shows up in the data, 2% is not a foundation. It’s a royalty.