Archive for category: Editorial

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Orinoco Rush and the Stabroek Warning

EDITORIAL BY: Editor— September 2026

How Venezuela’s unelected government is signing away a generation of oil before it has earned a mandate to sign anything — and why Georgetown should be watching its own contracts, not just Caracas’s

On September 2, 2026, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright stood in Miraflores Palace beside Delcy Rodríguez — Venezuela’s acting president, installed after the U.S. military removed Nicolás Maduro in January and a woman her own government’s chief diplomat once refused to call legitimate and announced a new round of oil agreements with Chevron and Eni. The same week, on the other side of the ledger, Colombia’s Gilinski family finalized its move to take majority control of NYSE-listed GeoPark Ltd., a Bogotá-based operator, in exchange for handing GeoPark a twenty-five-year Production Participation Contract over the Bare Block in Venezuela’s Orinoco Heavy Oil Belt — a field holding an estimated 15.7 billion barrels. Grupo Gilinski becomes GeoPark’s controlling shareholder, financed entirely in stock, at a moment when the contract, the government, and the country’s political future are all, by design, still unsettled.

Asked, at that same press conference, when Venezuelans might actually vote, Rodríguez offered no date — only that elections would come once the country is “ready,” on terms she alone would judge. It is worth sitting with the arithmetic. The oil contracts now being signed run for a quarter of a century.

The elections attached to them have no year, let alone a month. Sovereignty, on this timeline, is the thing to be arranged later. The wells are being arranged now.

A GOVERNMENT THAT CANNOT BIND THE FUTURE IT DOESN’T REPRESENT

The legitimacy problem here is not our editorial invention; it is the stated position of the same administration cutting the deals. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said at the time of Rodríguez’s swearing-in that he did not consider her government legitimate, because Venezuela has never held a free and fair election under it. Eight months on, his own Energy Secretary is signing that government’s name to contracts that will outlast most of the people negotiating them. Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann, reviewing the same deal, was blunter still, calling it an asset grab struck with a government that lacks the constitutional standing to make a commitment of that length — predicting, in his words, that “this announced deal will not stand.”

María Corina Machado; the exiled opposition leader whose candidate is widely understood to have won the stolen 2024 election — has made the same point from the other direction: the transition to democracy, she says, has not yet happened. Senator Ted Cruz, no critic of the deal’s economics, still calls Maduro’s successor government illegitimate and wants elections to move “rapidly.” Nobody serious is disputing that Rodríguez’s mandate is borrowed, not earned. The dispute is only over whether that should have stopped the drilling.

The order of operations is the argument. Stabilization, then resource contracts, then — eventually, undated — a vote. Everywhere that sequence appears, the contract is the part that actually happens on schedule.

 

A PATTERN THIS NEWSROOM HAS SEEN BEFORE

Readers of this newsroom’s Stabroek Surrender series will recognize the shape of this immediately, because we have spent four parts and a fifth in progress documenting its Guyanese cousin. In 2016, a government with a fraction of Rodríguez’s legitimacy problem — but facing its own institutional immaturity, an untested regulatory apparatus, and an electorate that had no meaningful opportunity to weigh in on fiscal terms before signature — locked Guyana into a Production Sharing Agreement whose stability clauses, cost-recovery ceiling, and absence of ring-fencing are still, a decade later, being defended by the current government as “sanctity of contract” — even as that same government freely concedes it did not fully enforce the audit and gas-utilization obligations inside that same contract. Sanctity, in Georgetown as in Caracas, has always been selective: binding when it protects the operator, negotiable when it inconveniences the state.

The Orinoco rush is that same mechanism running at higher speed and lower cover. Venezuela’s contracts are being signed under an outright unelected government, in full public view of officials who call that government illegitimate while signing its paperwork. Guyana’s was signed by an elected government under undisclosed terms that took years of freedom-of-information fights and independent legal analysis to surface. The end state — a resource base committed for a generation before the public that owns it had a genuine chance to negotiate the split — is the same end state. Only the packaging differs.

WHY THIS SHOULD WORRY GEORGETOWN, NOT JUST CARACAS

There are three concrete reasons this newsroom is treating the Orinoco pattern as a warning for Guyana rather than a foreign curiosity.

First, capital displaced from Venezuela’s newly reopened but still politically unstable fields does not evaporate — it reallocates regionally, and Guyana’s offshore basin, now producing under a fiscal regime already criticised as too generous, is the most obvious secondary destination for operators and financiers hedging against a Venezuelan deal that Hausmann and others expect could be renegotiated or voided by a future, legitimately elected Venezuelan government. A rush of new entrants chasing that hedge is a rush our own regulators, courts, and Parliament — sitting four to five times in 299 days, per this newsroom’s own reporting — are no better prepared to referee than they were in 2016.

Second, the Bare Block deal is a live demonstration of how quickly “transitional” arrangements calcify into permanent facts. No one signing the GeoPark-PDVSA contract expects Venezuela’s next elected government to have real leverage to unwind a twenty-five-year commitment already booked, financed, and trading on the NYSE. The same dynamic already applies to Guyana’s Stabroek Block: every cost-recovery dollar Uaru, Whiptail, and Hammerhead now draw from the same undivided pool that just finished repaying Exxon’s original $55 billion pushes the date of any real renegotiation further away, contract clause by contract clause, exactly as Christopher Ram has argued.

Third, and most directly: the rhetorical cover being used in Caracas — that the country needs foreign capital and technical capacity now, and that popular sovereignty can be reconciled with the contract later; is structurally identical to the cover President Ali has used to defend Guyana’s own refusal to reopen Stabroek’s terms. “We cannot scare off investment” and “elections will come when we are ready” are the same sentence wearing different clothes. Guyana does not need Venezuela’s coup and interim government to have Guyana’s legitimacy problem; it only needs to keep signing contracts on the logic that the public’s genuine, informed consent is a formality to be arranged once the ink is already dry.

THE STANDARD WE ARE APPLYING

This newsroom takes no position on whether removing Maduro was justified, nor on the broader geopolitics of the U.S. re-entry into Venezuelan oil. Our objection is narrower and, we think, harder to dispute: a government without a mandate to govern past the transition it was installed to manage has no mandate to sign contracts that outlive that transition by a quarter-century. The same standard applies whether the signature belongs to an acting president installed by foreign troops or an elected one who has simply declined, for years , to let the public see or revisit the terms it is bound by.

Contracts made in the dark — whether the darkness is a lack of votes or a lack of disclosure — carry the same defect. Guyana has one already. It does not need a second, and it should not need Caracas’s example to notice the pattern in its own harbor.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The View From Next Door

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What Venezuela’s Oil Surrender Should Teach Guyana

EDITORIAL◊ANALYSIS BY: Hem Kumar —September 2026

There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from watching a neighbor’s house catch fire and realizing your fence shares a boundary line with the blaze. That is the position Guyana now occupies, watching Washington and Caracas;  or what remains of governance in Caracas — carve up 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oi in a deal that Elliott Abrams, no stranger to the machinery of US Venezuela policy, has called something close to a betrayal of the very people Washington claims to be liberating.

Abrams’s analysis, published in the Washington Post, deserves to be read in Georgetown with the kind of discernment that only proximity can sharpen. He is not a hostile critic of American power in the region. He is a former Trump administration official; the special representative for Venezuela in Trump’s first term;  writing from inside the tent, and even he cannot dress this up as anything other than what it is: a hundred-year grant of a nation’s mineral wealth, negotiated with an unelected government, delivered to a businessman under a Swiss arrest warrant, with no payment to the Venezuelan people and no mandate from them either.

The paradox is not subtle. The same administration that toppled Maduro in January under the banner of restoring democracy has now pivoted to guaranteeing the permanence of his successor, Delcy Rodríguez;  installed, unelected, and by every credible polling measure deeply unpopular against opposition leader María Corina Machado. Abrams’s framing is precise: Trump wanted stability and democracy in January; six months later, he wants oil, and stability has become a euphemism for whichever government signs the paperwork.

WHY GUYANA CANNOT WATCH THIS AS A BYSTANDER

Guyana’s instinct — understandable, even sensible in the short term ; will be to treat this as a Venezuela story. It is not. It is a story about the terms on which Washington is now willing to transact for hydrocarbons in this hemisphere, and Guyana is the other petrostate in the room.

Three flags belong on Georgetown’s desk, not Caracas’s:

First, the equity-versus-royalty distinction matters more than it did a month ago. The Venezuela structure — a 35 percent US equity stake in a private company plus rights to 20 percent of output for a century, without payment  is a materially different animal from a production-sharing agreement negotiated with an elected government under its own hydrocarbons law, however imperfect that law’s terms may be. Guyana has spent years litigating, publicly and otherwise, the adequacy of the 2016 Stabroek PSA. That fight, whatever its outcomes, has occurred inside a framework of elected government and — a nominally  domestic legal process. Venezuela shows what the alternative looks like when the government signing is not accountable to anyone who can vote it out.

Second, watch who Washington is willing to sit across the table from. Abrams is explicit that officials in this administration lobbied to help Alejandro Betancourt — the businessman at the centre of the deal,  resolve a Swiss money-laundering warrant and clear his travel restrictions. That is not a detail. That is a data point about how far commercial expedience now travels inside US foreign policy when oil is the prize. A government willing to launder a crony’s legal exposure in Caracas is a government worth watching closely wherever else it is negotiating extraction rights.

Third, the elections test is the tell:  and it applies regionally, not just to Venezuela. Abrams names it directly: if Washington starts arguing that 2027 elections in Venezuela are “too difficult,” that will be proof the oil deal was the sellout it appears to be. Guyana should apply the same test to its own relationship with Washington — not because anyone is predicting an equivalent scenario here, but because the instinct to treat electoral timelines as negotiable when commercial interests are at stake is exactly the instinct this deal reveals. It is worth asking, publicly and often, whether any accountability language in Guyana’s own security and economic MoUs with the US carries teeth, or whether it is aspirational the way Trump’s January democracy pledge to Venezuela turned out to be.

THE DISTINCTION GUYANA MUST HOLD ONTO

None of this is an argument that American capital or American security cooperation is inherently corrosive to Guyana. The free flow of investment, under rule of law, is precisely what Abrams credits for Guyana’s own oil expansion;  he cites it approvingly as the model Venezuela should have followed. That is worth Georgetown’s attention too: the piece treats Guyana as the positive counterexample to what is happening in Venezuela.

But a model only holds if the underlying conditions that earned the compliment stay true — elected government, functioning legal process, deals that survive public scrutiny. Guyana’s task, watching this fire next door, is not to assume immunity because a foreign policy op-ed happened to name-check it favourably. It is to ask, with the same discernment Abrams is applying to Venezuela, whether every one of its own arrangements: port financing, security MoUs, the Stabroek PSA’s unresolved terms — would survive the same test if the names were changed.

Tread softly does not mean tread silently. It means Guyana’s institutions: parliamentary, civil society, and press  need to be doing the auditing work now, while the comparison is instructive and cheap, rather than after the fact, when it becomes merely descriptive.

THE INSTRUMENTS THAT DESERVE THE TEST, NAMED

Abstraction is easy to nod along to and easy to forget. Guyana’s own instruments should be named, not gestured at:

The air domain awareness — drone MoU (August 12, 2026). A US$2 million agreement, signed by Foreign Minister Hugh Todd and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, for unmanned aerial systems and surveillance cooperation, framed around counter-narcotics and organized crime. No public detail exists on data-sharing architecture, who controls the surveillance feed, or what operational access Washington gains in exchange. A modest dollar figure should not be mistaken for a modest arrangement — the Betancourt precedent shows Washington’s willingness to extend far more than money buys when the strategic prize is right. This MoU has never been tested publicly against the question: what does the US get, precisely, and does Guyana’s Parliament know the answer?

The Bechtel/Hess Berbice deepwater port arrangement (2025-26). A feasibility study cost-shared between the Guyanese government and Hess Corporation — itself a Stabroek Block consortium partner;  for a port whose Chinese pre-feasibility predecessor (2015, China State Construction Engineering Company) appears to have simply lapsed rather than been formally superseded. A port financed and built by the same commercial interests that hold the offshore concession is not automatically corrupt, but it is automatically a conflict worth naming, and worth asking whether the Modern Port Act contains any provision addressing foreign operational control.

The underlying Stabroek PSA itself. Years of accountability argument about the adequacy of its terms have proceeded on the assumption that the signatory government was elected and answerable. Venezuela is the demonstration of what changes when that assumption fails. Guyana’s advantage is that the assumption currently holds — which is precisely why it is worth defending rather than taking for granted.

None of these three should be read as accusations. They should be read as the specific, named list of things Georgetown’s press, Parliament, and civil society owe scrutiny to now, while the Venezuela comparison is fresh enough to be instructive rather than merely retrospective.

THE PATTERN, AND WHAT IT MAY PREVIEW

Here the Venezuela deal stops being an instructive analogy and starts being a warning. Abrams’s elections test — watch whether Washington argues 2027 is “too difficult” for Venezuela;  is not a one-off tell. It is a pattern, and patterns repeat with the players who set them.

The precedent sits uncomfortably close to home already. The Venezuela oil arrangement was made possible in part because Chinese and Russian commercial presence was displaced from the field first — the ground was cleared before the deal was cut. That sequencing is not incidental. It is close to a playbook: reduce the rival power’s footprint, then negotiate the resource access that follows.

Guyana should read its own moment through that lens rather than assume immunity. If murmurs begin circulating from within the Trump administration  officials, envoys, or surrogates encouraging or applying pressure toward the reduction of Chinese investment, infrastructure participation, or commercial presence in Guyana, that should not be read as an isolated ask. It should be read as a prompt, consistent with the pattern next door, and it raises questions Georgetown cannot afford to leave rhetorical:

What, specifically, does Washington want from Guyana in exchange for its continued strategic backing? What would the Ali administration be asked to concede — access, equity, basing rights, surveillance data, port control — and on what terms? Would such concessions be structured as genuine partnership, or would they follow the Caracas model: an arrangement that entrenches the current government’s convenience rather than the country’s long-term interest, granted in exchange for facilitation rather than earned through accountable governance? And beneath all of it, the harder question: is Washington’s interest in Guyana’s stability conditional on this particular government remaining in power indefinitely — or would it, as in Venezuela, tolerate real democratic contestation even if that contestation produced an outcome less convenient to American commercial interests?

These are not accusations either. They are the legitimate questions a country watching its neighbour’s house burn should be asking about its own wiring, before the smoke reaches this side of the fence.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Sanctity of Contract Is a Choice, Not a Clause

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 OPINION BY :Staff Writer –August 2026

Guyana confirmed this week that ExxonMobil has recovered every cent of its $55 billion cost bank. The President still won’t ask for a better deal — and the same contract he calls untouchable is quietly rewritten every time it suits the operator.

On Tuesday, President Irfaan Ali stood before reporters and delivered good news dressed as inevitability. ExxonMobil, he confirmed, has recovered the full US$55 billion it sank into the Stabroek Block. Guyana’s share of profit oil has jumped from 12.5 percent to 39.8 percent. The operation, by every measure that matters to an oil major, is now risk-free.

Asked directly whether risk-free operations might finally be grounds to renegotiate a contract that has drawn criticism since the day it was signed, the President said no. Not because the law forbids it. Not because Exxon has refused. But because, in his words, the “sanctity of contract” forecloses the conversation before it starts.

That framing does not survive contact with the contract itself, with the record of this administration’s own past statements, or with the government’s own selective conduct under the very agreement it now calls sacred.

THE CANDIDATE WHO WOULD RENEGOTIATE

Six years ago, as a presidential candidate, Irfaan Ali held a very different position on the Exxon deal his predecessors had signed.

Candidate Ali — March 2020	President Ali — August 2026
“We have made it very clear that we have to go towards, we’re looking at these contracts, renegotiating these contracts, looking at contract management and all of these things. Everything we have to relook at because we have to ensure that our country does not get the wrong end of the stick.”	“The difficulty with doing that from a legal perspective one and from the perspective of the sanctity of contract — that hasn’t changed.”

The shift is not subtle. In 2020, renegotiation was a promise. In 2026, with the single largest justification for renegotiation now sitting in the public record — full cost recovery, reduced risk, a windfall confirmed by Exxon’s own executives — renegotiation is a legal impossibility. Nothing about the contract changed in the interim. What changed is who benefits from calling it untouchable.

ARTICLE 32.1 SAYS OTHERWISE

Chartered Accountant and Attorney Christopher Ram has pointed to the specific clause the President’s framing obscures. Article 32.1 of the 2016 Petroleum Agreement does not prohibit renegotiation. It states that government shall not “require renegotiation of” the agreement without the Contractor’s prior written consent — language that permits renegotiation by mutual agreement, and simply denies Guyana the unilateral right to force it.

As Ram put it: government must “call Exxon to the table and say, look we must renegotiate this contract now.”

That is a negotiating posture, not a legal wall. Energy strategist Anthony Paul, who has advised multiple governments including Guyana’s on oil and gas policy, made the same point in blunter terms: contracts get renegotiated constantly, and companies ask for changes whenever they have, in his words, “the backbone to do so.” Paul cited Tanzania’s renegotiation of a similarly structured deal, under a similarly worded stability clause, as precedent that political will — not legal architecture — is the actual constraint here.

“Every contract presumes some level of justice — and if things have changed materially, and made it more unjust, then there may be a basis for renegotiating.”

 

— Anthony Paul, energy strategist

A CONTRACT ALREADY REWRITTEN — JUST NEVER FOR GUYANA

The government’s insistence on sanctity of contract would carry more weight if the contract had, in fact, been treated as sacred. It has not.

• Audit deadlines:  The Petroleum Agreement requires Exxon’s cost expenses to be audited within two years of being incurred. That deadline has been extended repeatedly and without public consequence — Guyana’s first cost audit, covering 1999–2017, was completed years late, and the dispute over its US$214 million in flagged overcharges remains unresolved more than five years after the report was delivered.
• The gas feasibility study:  Stakeholders have noted that the agreement’s requirement for a feasibility study on the use of Stabroek’s associated gas resources was never conducted at all — not delayed, not renegotiated, simply skipped.
• The royalty addendum:  An addendum was signed after the fact to clarify that Guyana’s 2 percent royalty would not itself be recovered by the contractor — proof that when a change favours the operator’s clarity or the state’s convenience, amending this “sacred” document is entirely possible.

Sanctity of contract, in practice, has meant sanctity for Exxon’s deadlines and Exxon’s interests. It has never once meant sanctity for Guyana’s audit rights or Guyana’s revenue protections. The doctrine is not being applied. It is being invoked — selectively, and only when the alternative would cost the operator money.

THE REAL COST OF “SANCTITY”: NO RING-FENCING

Nowhere is the price of this selective sanctity clearer than in the single structural defect Ram and others have identified as the most consequential in the entire agreement: the absence of ring-fencing.

Guyana’s Petroleum Agreement treats the Stabroek Block as one undivided cost pool. Every dollar Exxon and its partners spend — on any project, at any stage — drains into the same cost bank and is recovered from the same production stream, at up to 75 percent of monthly output, before Guyana sees its share. There is no requirement that a project’s costs be recovered only from that project’s own revenue.

There is no wall between what is finished and what is still being built.

This is precisely why the announcement that the $55 billion bank has hit zero deserves more scrutiny, not less. The bank did not close. It reset. ExxonMobil’s own Vice President for Business Services, John Colling, confirmed to reporters in June that the cost bank figure reflects spend across the entire consortium portfolio — not merely the four producing projects, but “relevant spend on projects which are being developed.” Uaru’s construction costs have already been flowing into the same pool that just emptied. Whiptail and Hammerhead are next.

Project	Status	Cost Treatment	Ring-Fenced?
Liza Phase 1	Producing= 2019	In$55B bank -recovered	NO
Liza Phase 1	Producing- 2022	In$55B bank -recovered	NO
Payara	Producing- 2024	In$55B bank -recovered	NO
Yellowtail	Producing -8/2025	In$55B bank -recovered	NO
Uaru -Errea Wittu	First -oil 2026 Q4	$12.7 B -same pool	NO
Whiptail	First -oil 2027/28	$12.7 B -same pool	NO
Hammerhead	First -oil 2029	$6.8 B -same pool	NO

Three sanctioned projects — worth a combined US$32.2 billion in announced capital commitments — are now approaching or entering that undivided pool, with no legal partition separating their costs from the profit oil Guyana was just promised. Every new well drilled on Uaru, every dollar spent finishing Whiptail’s FPSO, every cent Hammerhead’s construction requires between now and 2029, is money that can be deducted from production before Guyana’s 39.8 percent share is calculated — exactly as it was for the first four projects, and exactly as it will be until the day, if it ever comes, that this contract requires otherwise.

Ram’s proposed remedy is precise: treat each production licence as its own cost centre, recoverable only from its own output, and cut the recovery ceiling itself from 75 percent to 50 percent — a figure common across comparable producing jurisdictions.

Ring-fencing would not eliminate cost recovery. It would simply stop new developments from resetting the clock on the developments that already paid for themselves. Without it, the 50 percent profit-oil milestone the government is currently celebrating is not a plateau — it is a moving target that every future sanction pushes further away.

WHAT RENEGOTIATION WOULD ACTUALLY ASK FOR

Ram’s full renegotiation framework extends beyond ring-fencing alone, and none of it requires reopening the entire 2016 agreement from scratch:

• A time-limited tax concession:  a tax waiver with a defined sunset — a ten-year exemption running from first oil in December 2019 and expiring in December 2029, rather than the open-ended concession currently in force.
• Royalty escalation:  lifted from 2 percent to at least 6 percent, rising to 10 percent within five years.
• Ring-fencing:  each production license its own cost center, cost recovery drawn only from that project’s own output.
• A lower recovery ceiling:  cut from 75 percent to 50 percent, in line with comparable jurisdictions.
• Decommissioning security:  borne solely by the companies, expressly excluded from cost recovery, and funded in cash held in a Guyana-based account — not a paper undertaking — with guarantees issued by the ultimate parent companies rather than an unnamed affiliate.

None of these require Guyana to act unilaterally, and none require Exxon’s total surrender. Article 32.1 already contemplates exactly this kind of negotiated adjustment. What it requires is a government willing to sit down and ask — something this administration has not done in six years, through a pandemic, a war-driven price spike, three cost audits, and now the very milestone it claims validates its stewardship of the sector.

THE PATTERN THIS FITS

This is not an isolated failure of nerve. It is the same shape this Guardian has documented across the government’s petroleum governance — an audit process running years behind schedule and largely undisclosed, an announced 50 percent profit-oil milestone immediately offset by new projects entering the same undivided cost pool, and now a renegotiation clause the government insists does not exist, dressed up as legal necessity rather than acknowledged as political choice.

Guyana does not need to tear up the Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement to get a fairer share of what lies beneath it. It needs a government prepared to use the leverage the contract itself provides — and prepared to say, plainly, why it has chosen not to.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Building Fast, Paying Forever: Guyana’s Developmental Dilemma

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EDITORIAL — 592 GUARDIAN

Guyana’s construction surge is real, visible, and in many respects necessary. New highways, bridges, schools, hospitals, stadiums, hinterland facilities, housing schemes, and the ongoing modern  Silica City all project an image of a country finally breaking free from decades of infrastructural stagnation. That image has political value, but it also carries a serious fiscal and institutional warning: a country can build faster than it can maintain.

The real test begins after the cameras leave.

Every administration understands the power of a ribbon-cutting. A new road provides photographs, applause, speeches, music, food, and an immediate political message: we are delivering. A bridge becomes proof of modernity. A stadium becomes a national symbol. A new school, hospital, or housing development gives communities a concrete reason to feel seen.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Guyanese citizens have every right to demand and celebrate better public infrastructure after years of inadequate roads, drainage, public buildings, health facilities, and transportation links. Development cannot mean preserving dysfunction merely because repair and maintenance are less glamorous than a grand opening.

But government has increasingly encouraged a troubling definition of progress: if it is new, large, announced with fanfare, and physically visible, it is presumed to be successful

That is not development planning. It is development theatre unless the state can demonstrate that each project is affordable over its full life, resilient to Guyana’s climate, supported by qualified personnel, and subject to transparent maintenance and operating plans.

A highway does not end at its commissioning. A hospital is not complete when its doors open. A bridge is not a one-time expenditure. A model village is not sustainable merely because lots have been cleared, roads paved, and houses erected.

The real test begins after the cameras leave.

Oil money is not the whole story

The public conversation often treats Guyana’s current construction drive as though the country is simply spending an overflowing stream of petroleum money. That is an incomplete, and potentially dangerous, account.

Oil revenues have undoubtedly transformed the Government’s fiscal capacity. Transfers from the Natural Resource Fund have enabled expenditure on a scale that was inconceivable only a few years ago. Yet many major projects are also being financed through loans, including external borrowing from institutions and lenders such as the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the Japan International Cooperation Agency, the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, and the Caribbean Development Bank.

Borrowing is not automatically reckless. Governments commonly borrow for long-lived productive infrastructure. A well-designed bridge, road network, energy system, hospital, or port may yield public and economic benefits over decades, making it reasonable to spread the financing cost over time.

The question is not whether Guyana should borrow. The question is whether it is borrowing strategically, transparently, and within an honest assessment of future obligations.

For every loan-funded project, the country must ask:

⇒What is the full capital cost, including variations, consultancy fees, land acquisition, compensation, and contingency spending?

⇒ What are the interest rate, grace period, maturity, currency risks, and repayment schedule?

⇒ What is the annual recurrent cost after construction is finished?

⇒ Does the state have the engineers, technicians, nurses, teachers, maintenance crews, spare parts, equipment, and management systems needed to operate it?

⇒ What revenue, savings, or measurable public benefit will justify the cost?

⇒ Has Parliament and the public received sufficient information to scrutinize the terms?

⇒ What happens if oil production declines, prices fall, costs rise, or project timelines slip?

A government flush with oil revenue can create the illusion that debt no longer matters. It does. Oil income may make borrowing easier today, but it does not erase the obligation to repay tomorrow. Nor does it guarantee that the country will receive value for every dollar spent.

The maintenance trap

The greatest danger in a rapid building program is not necessarily the first cost. It is the recurring cost that follows. Infrastructure is an asset only if it remains functional. Without routine maintenance, it becomes a liability with a ribbon-cutting photograph attached.

Guyana already knows this story. Roads deteriorate because drainage is neglected. Public buildings decay because small repairs are deferred until they become major rehabilitation projects. Recreational facilities are built but not properly staffed, secured, cleaned, or programmed. Equipment sits idle because a replacement part, a trained technician, or a maintenance contract was never budgeted. New facilities are handed over without a clear agency responsible for their upkeep.

The country’s tropical climate makes the matter even more urgent. Heavy rainfall, flooding, intense heat, high humidity, saline conditions in some areas, and drainage failures can rapidly undermine roads, bridges, buildings, electrical systems, and public spaces. A maintenance regime suitable for a temperate country cannot simply be imported and expected to work here.

The question for every new asset should be straightforward: who maintains it, with what budget, under which standards, and at what frequency?

If the answer is vague, the project is not fully planned.

A new highway requires drainage clearing, resurfacing cycles, signage replacement, lighting repairs, guardrail maintenance, vegetation control, traffic enforcement, accident response, and protection against unlawful encroachment. A hospital requires not merely a building but biomedical engineers, continuous equipment servicing, reliable electricity and water, waste systems, procurement discipline, pharmaceuticals, staffing, security, cleaning, and digital records management. A stadium requires a sustainable management and revenue model, not occasional national events followed by months of underuse. These are not side issues. They are the project.

Building versus governing

The administration’s appetite for new projects may be politically understandable, but governance cannot operate on appetite alone. It requires sequencing, prioritization, institutional readiness, and measurable value.

There is a difference between a national development plan and a constantly expanding catalogue of announcements.

When projects are announced in quick succession, sometimes before the public has received satisfactory information about existing commitments, the concern is not that Guyana is building too much in some abstract sense.                                                                                    The concern is whether the state has developed the capacity to govern the construction boom:

♦ Can ministries supervise the contracts?                                                    ♦ Can procurement systems withstand the pressure? Can technical agencies evaluate designs and certify completed works independently? ♦ Can auditors trace expenditures, variations, and deliverables?              ♦ Can local authorities maintain the assets transferred to them?            ♦  Can the country prevent politically connected contractors from turning national development into private enrichment?

These questions become more pressing when capital expenditure rises rapidly. Large sums moving through weak or overstretched systems create opportunities for inflated costs, change orders, poor-quality work, delayed completion, inadequate inspection, and contracts that appear impressive on paper but deliver disappointing results on the ground.

The response cannot be, “Look at what has been built.” The public is entitled to ask whether it was properly procured, competently built, independently inspected, economically justified, and sustainably maintained.Concrete is not evidence of value for money.

Silica City and the risk of prestige planning

Silica City is perhaps the clearest illustration of the broader dilemma. A planned city can be visionary. Guyana needs thoughtful urban development, stronger internal connectivity, climate-resilient settlement planning, and alternatives to the congestion and drainage pressures of the coast.

But a city cannot be willed into success through renderings, land clearing, ceremonial launches, and political declarations.   

A viable new city requires water, sanitation, electricity, telecommunications, public transport, schools, health care, policing, jobs, commercial activity, drainage, waste management, land-use regulation, and an institutional framework for governance. Above all, it requires people who can afford and choose to live there, and economic activity strong enough to sustain it.

The country must avoid prestige planning: projects designed chiefly to announce a new era, create a visual legacy, or satisfy political timelines, but which later impose heavy operating costs on taxpayers.

Silica City should therefore be subjected to the most rigorous public scrutiny: its financing model, land allocation policies, environmental safeguards, utility plans, housing affordability, projected population, job base, governance structure, and long-term operating costs should be publicly available and continuously updated.

If it is truly a national project, it must survive public examination.

Expansion without Vision 

Expansion also carries an unavoidable demand for utilities, above all a dependable supply of electricity. Every new highway corridor, housing scheme, hospital, school, commercial centre, industrial facility, stadium, and planned community adds to the country’s energy burden. Yet the evidence to date suggests that electricity is already the weak link in Guyana’s development push. Increased demand, compounded by the effects associated with the El Niño phenomenon and stressed generation capacity, has produced recurring shortfalls that leave households and businesses grappling with daily blackouts.

The consequences are not confined to inconvenience: businesses lose productive hours, perishable goods are damaged, equipment is put at risk, families absorb the cost of backup generators and fuel, and investors confront uncertainty about whether the basic utility required to operate can be relied upon. Development cannot proceed at the speed promised in press releases when the power system is operating under strain. New communities, industries, hospitals, schools, and the ongoing Silica City cannot be sustained by ambition alone; they require generation capacity, transmission infrastructure, distribution upgrades, reserve power, skilled maintenance personnel, and credible long-term energy planning.

Otherwise, the country risks building an impressive physical landscape whose economic and social potential is repeatedly stalled by the absence of reliable electricity.

The missing maintenance architecture

Guyana needs a maintenance architecture as ambitious as its construction programme. That means treating preservation as a core budgetary responsibility rather than an afterthought left for future governments, depleted agencies, or communities already struggling to meet basic needs.

At a minimum, the Government should establish and publish a national public-assets register that identifies major infrastructure, its responsible agency, replacement value, condition, maintenance schedule, and estimated annual upkeep requirement.

Each major project should also carry a publicly disclosed lifecycle plan before construction begins. That plan should state:

⇒The total expected cost over the asset’s useful life, not merely the construction cost.

⇒ The ministry, regional authority, municipality, or agency responsible for maintenance.

⇒ The annual recurrent budget required for staffing, utilities, repairs, replacement parts, and service contracts.

⇒ The standards by which maintenance performance will be measured.

⇒ The source of financing once initial project funds are exhausted.

⇒ The independent oversight and audit arrangements governing the asset.

Parliament should insist on this information before approving substantial capital allocations and external borrowing. The Auditor General should have the resources and legal authority to conduct timely performance audits, not only financial audits, of major infrastructure projects. The Public Procurement Commission must be strong enough to scrutinise procurement before wrongdoing becomes irreversible The National Assembly should not be reduced to approving expenditure after political decisions have already been made. It must become a forum for testing the assumptions behind projects, borrowing plans, and lifetime costs.

Oil must create lasting capacity

The wisest use of Guyana’s oil wealth is not to create a permanent dependence on oil-financed construction. It is to use this temporary windfall to build institutions, human capital, diversified productive sectors, and durable public assets.

The country should not confuse expenditure with transformation.

♦ A bridge that cuts travel time and unlocks commerce can be transformational.                                                                                              ♦  A hospital that is staffed, equipped, accountable, and accessible can be transformational.                                                                                        ♦  A school that produces capable citizens and workers can be transformational.                                                                                              ♦  Roads that connect farmers and hinterland communities to markets can be transformational.

But none of these outcomes is assured by construction alone.

♦ Real development means a road remains safe and usable ten years later.                                                                                                                    ♦ It means drainage works when the rains come.                                        ♦ It means medical machinery is repaired rather than abandoned.          ♦ It means schools have teachers, hospitals have specialists, and public facilities have reliable utilities and competent management.                    ♦ It means citizens can inspect how public money was borrowed, spent, and safeguarded.

The nation should welcome development, but it must reject the notion that questioning it is opposition to progress. Scrutiny is not sabotage. Transparency is not obstruction. Maintenance is not a minor administrative detail.

They are the difference between a country that is merely building and a country that is truly developing.

Guyana is at a historic crossroads. It can use oil revenue and responsible financing to create infrastructure that serves several generations. Or it can rush into an era of grand announcements, debt-financed monuments, weak oversight, and decaying assets whose maintenance costs are left for the public to bear.

The ribbon will eventually be cut. The speeches will end. The food and drink will be gone.

What will remain is the bill, the debt, the maintenance burden—and the public’s right to demand that what was built in its name continues to work.