Archive for category: Featured

 Guyana’s oil wealth: learning to read reality between expectation and frustration

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

The question is not whether people expected too much. It is whether the expectations encouraged by political promises are being matched by measurable improvements in everyday life.

The central issue is distribution: how national wealth becomes household well-being, who benefits first, who waits, and who risks being left behind.

A richer country is not necessarily a more secure household

The scale of Guyana’s economic transformation is real. The World Bank reports that real GDP grew by 43.8 percent in 2024 and another 19.3 percent in 2025. Growth also extended beyond petroleum: the non-oil economy expanded by 14.3 percent in 2025. These figures establish that the boom is substantial, not imaginary. They do not establish that its benefits are reaching households evenly.

That distinction must anchor any honest discussion of expectations.

GDP measures economic production. It is not a payslip, a pension statement or a household budget. A growing economy and a financially strained family are not contradictory realities. Both can exist at the same time.

For the citizen, the meaningful questions are more immediate: Does my income cover essential expenses? Can I afford suitable housing? Can my children obtain a good education? Does the health service work when I need it? Can my small business compete fairly? Is my future becoming more secure?

The World Bank itself frames the challenge in these terms: poverty reduction will depend on translating rapid economic growth into stronger purchasing power for poor and vulnerable households and sustained job creation in the non-oil economy.

In other words, the transformation does not complete itself. Policy must make it happen.

When expectations become frustration

The argument in the supplied essay applies powerfully to Guyana: hope becomes fragile when promises outrun demonstrable results.

If citizens are repeatedly told that they live in an exceptionally prosperous economy, yet struggle to meet ordinary expenses, the distance between the public narrative and their private experience becomes politically consequential.

That does not mean every grievance proves that development has failed. It means that national success cannot be established simply by asking people to disregard their circumstances.

Food prices illustrate the problem. The World Bank reports that inflation picked up between March and June 2026, driven mainly by higher food prices amid weather-related supply disruptions, with fuel and transport pressures also contributing. It notes that higher food prices disproportionately affect poor and vulnerable households because food consumes a larger share of their budgets.

A household can therefore hear that the country is becoming richer while experiencing a tighter daily budget. Dismissing that tension as impatience does not resolve it.

Nor should “manage your expectations” become a polite instruction to accept exclusion. Realistic expectations require honesty from citizens, but they also require honesty from those exercising power.

Examine inequality—do not merely assert it

The concern that Guyana’s wealth gap is widening deserves serious investigation. However, a responsible editorial must distinguish between visible disparities, citizens’ experiences and a statistically demonstrated increase in inequality.

The World Bank has acknowledged the shortage of recent poverty data in its assessment of Guyana. That limits how confidently anyone can describe the precise distributional results of the oil boom.

The strongest argument is therefore not to substitute one unsupported certainty for another. It is to insist that a government presiding over extraordinary growth must demonstrate who is benefiting.

Visible prosperity at the top does not, by itself, measure the national wealth gap. Equally, impressive GDP figures do not disprove hardship below.

Guyana needs regularly published evidence showing:

• How household incomes are changing after inflation.
• Whether poverty is falling, and where deprivation persists.
• How benefits differ across regions and income groups.
• Who receives public contracts and how competitive those awards are.
• Whether public spending produces reliable services rather than merely completed structures.
• Whether small businesses and workers gain durable opportunities beyond temporary expenditure.

Without that evidence, debate becomes a contest between celebration and resentment rather than an examination of results.

A grant is not the same as a transformation

Fair analysis must acknowledge that the government has directed oil revenues toward public investment and household assistance. Its own explanation of the Natural Resource Fund identifies infrastructure, human-capital programs and cash grants among the uses of petroleum revenues.

These measures should be assessed, not dismissed. But announcing expenditure is different from demonstrating its effectiveness.

A cash grant may provide valuable immediate relief. The longer-term test is whether households become less dependent on relief because their earnings, services and economic opportunities improve.

Likewise, infrastructure can support development without automatically guaranteeing equitable development. The accountability questions remain: What problem does a project solve? At what cost? Who benefits? Who maintains it? What improvement can citizens verify?

A bridge should be assessed not only as a completed asset, but also by the access and opportunities it creates. A hospital should be judged not only by its building, but by the care patients can reliably receive.

That is the difference between spending wealth and converting wealth into well-being.

Hope requires a credible route from revenue to results

A more credible national conversation would connect each major promise to a baseline, a funded plan, a responsible institution, a timetable and a publicly reported result. Where progress is delayed, the explanation should be specific. Where a policy fails, correction should matter more than defending the announcement.

Citizens, for their part, should not have to choose between acknowledging economic growth and questioning its distribution. They can recognize genuine progress while demanding a fairer share of its benefits.

The government’s task is not merely to persuade Guyanese that prosperity is coming. It is to demonstrate, household by household and community by community, how prosperity is arriving.

The King Comes to Guyana. He Must Not Leave Without Answering for Slavery.

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

As Prince of Wales in February 2000, his  the last trip to Guyana

These engagements deserve civility. Guyana should receive the King as a guest. But Guyana should not receive him as though history were a finished chapter, conveniently closed before dessert.

The question that must follow Charles from State House to the seawall is simple: Will Britain apologize for slavery, and will it pay reparations?

Acknowledgment Is Not Apology

Buckingham Palace has said the King will “not shy away” from “the darkest days of our past.” But it has also made clear that he will not issue a formal apology for Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. The British government, meanwhile, has ruled out reparations.

This is the central evasion.

Charles has expressed “personal sorrow.” He has called slavery an “atrocity which forever stains our history.” He has acknowledged that its “most painful aspects” continue to resonate. These are carefully calibrated phrases: morally polished, historically distant, and institutionally safe.

Acknowledgment says: This happened.
Apology says: We did this, and we are responsible.
Reparations say: Responsibility requires repair.

Charles is prepared to offer the first. He refuses the second and third. That is not moral leadership. It is the management of embarrassment.

The Excuse Does Not Excuse Him

The Palace says the King cannot apologize because he acts on the advice of his ministers, and the British government has not advised him to apologize or offer reparations.

That may explain his constitutional position. It does not absolve him of moral agency.

Instead, the Palace frames slavery as “a matter for governments,” while the government treats it as a matter not to be addressed. That is not neutrality. It is a mutually convenient arrangement: the Crown preserves its dignity; the state preserves its wealth; the descendants of the enslaved are asked to accept remembrance without repair.

Britain Paid the Slave Owners

The refusal is especially obscene against Britain’s own historical record.

When Britain abolished slavery in the 1830s, it compensated slave owners—not the enslaved. The payout, equivalent to roughly £17 billion today, helped preserve fortunes built on human bondage. The people whose labor was stolen, whose children were sold, whose bodies were brutalized, and whose descendants still inherit the consequences received nothing.

Britain transported an estimated 3.2 million African people across the Atlantic. Its empire extracted labor, land, resources, and political sovereignty from the Caribbean and beyond. The Crown stood at the symbolic center of that imperial order.

Reparations are not charity. They are not “payback.” They are a debt.

Ali Has Named the Next Step

President Ali has not left the issue to diplomatic innuendo. Before Charles’s arrival, he said the King’s recognition of slavery as “the darkest days” was only the “first step.” Then he added: “Now, moving to the apology is the next step.

Ali has also stated the historical charge without euphemism: Britain “exploited the region,” “destroyed lives,” and “created underdevelopment.” That is not hostility toward Britain. It is an honest account of colonial extraction and its continuing effects.

His proposed approach is development-centered reparatory justice: concessional financing, debt relief, and investment in education, health care, technology, human capacity, and climate resilience. This is a serious framework. It recognizes that the damage of slavery cannot be repaired by a single payment—but neither can it be erased by calling reparations “aid.”

The Danger of a Polite Silence

Ali will almost certainly raise the issue privately when Charles sits with him at State House. He should. But the test is whether the demand survives the reception.

State visits are built for protocol. There will be flags, toasts, photographs, and carefully worded communiqués. There will be talk of partnership, investment, biodiversity, and the future. All of that has value. But none of it excuses silence about the past.

Guyana must not allow the King’s environmental agenda to become a substitute for historical accountability. He may admire the rainforest, praise mangroves, meet young climate activists, and discuss Iwokrama. He should also be asked why the country whose forests he praises must still negotiate for the resources needed to overcome underdevelopment created by the empire his ancestors presided over.

If President Ali raises slavery only to bury it beneath talk of investment and goodwill, he will have turned a historic opportunity into a photo opportunity. If he tells Guyanese citizens exactly what was requested—an apology, reparations, and concrete redress—he will have used the visit as it should be used.

What Guyana Should Demand

Guyana’s demand should be clear, dignified, and non-negotiable:

♦ A formal British apology for slavery, colonialism, and their enduring harms.

♦ A reparations framework developed with Caribbean governments and descendants of enslaved Africans.

♦ Debt relief and concessional financing for affected nations.

♦ Investment in education, health care, mental health, technology, and climate resilience.

♦ Full access to British and royal archives documenting slavery and colonial rule.

♦ A commitment that reparations will not be disguised as ordinary development assistance or new debt.

These measures align with President Ali’s stated framework, but they must remain explicitly tied to slavery. Reparations must not be diluted into a general development agenda that allows Britain to fund roads, clinics, or climate projects while quietly refusing to name the crime that made such redress necessary.

The Seawall Test

Charles’s final engagement in Guyana is scheduled for the Georgetown seawall, where he will meet participants in the Commonwealth Sustainable Cities Initiative Dialogue and hear about urban resilience and mangrove restoration.

The setting is symbolically perfect—and politically dangerous.

Guyana’s coastline faces erosion, flooding, and climate vulnerability. Those pressures are intensified by global systems of extraction that enriched colonial powers while leaving formerly colonized nations with weaker institutions, narrower fiscal space, and greater exposure to environmental shocks.

The King should not stand on that seawall and speak only of the future. He should be asked to confront the past that helped determine who has wealth, who has debt, who is vulnerable to climate disaster, and who must plead for adaptation financing.

Respect Requires Accountability

Guyana does not need Charles to perform grief. It needs Britain to accept responsibility.

The King may come to Guyana to celebrate sixty years of bilateral relations. But those relations cannot be fully celebrated while Britain refuses to confront the centuries of exploitation that preceded them. An apology would not erase slavery. Reparations would not restore stolen lives. But together, they would acknowledge a truth Britain has long preferred to manage rather than confront: that its prosperity was built partly on the suffering of Africans and Indians through the underdevelopment of their descendants.

Until Britain accepts that responsibility, its regret will remain what it has too often been: eloquent, polished, and unpaid.

Did the State Create a Maritime Hazard—Then Neglect to Fix It?

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

The latest disclosure is extraordinary. Georgetown’s Lighthouse Department—the body associated with maritime communications and the historic navigational beacon at the entrance to the Demerara Channel—reportedly operates from a single room atop the Marriott Hotel.

Yet the attendant who gave evidence could not say whether the original Water Street lighthouse remained functional. Nor could he say whether a navigational beacon existed at the Marriott location.

That should not be treated as a minor administrative curiosity. It is a grave public-safety question.

A lighthouse attendant ought not to be uncertain about whether the beacon for which his department is known—and which mariners may rely on for safe navigation—is operating, where it is located, what its light characteristics are, or who is responsible for maintaining it. If this uncertainty exists at the operational level, the Commission must establish what, precisely, has been happening at the level of management, ministerial responsibility, procurement, oversight, and regulation.

The inquiry must now ask a hard and unavoidable question: did the State permit the construction of a high-rise hotel that obstructed, impaired, or compromised the light of an existing navigational facility, commit itself to a replacement safety system, spend public money to implement that solution, and then fail to ensure the solution was properly completed, certified, maintained, and operated?

If that is what occurred, this is not merely a lapse. It is a self-created public-risk problem compounded by official neglect.

 A Problem Foreseen Years Ago

The record indicates that the risk was not unforeseen.

Before the Marriott was constructed, concern was raised that the building’s height would obstruct the historic Georgetown Lighthouse’s navigational light. In 2008, it was reported that an environmental and social impact assessment recommended a beacon at the highest point of the hotel to compensate for that obstruction. The recommendation was apparently for a beacon with wider visibility and greater range.

By 2013, the then Works Minister, Robeson Benn, reportedly stated that an oscillating navigational light would be installed atop the Marriott. The public was told that the historic lighthouse would retain its light and continue its functions, including radio communication with vessels and vessel tracking.

Those were not casual assurances. They went directly to maritime safety.

But now, more than a decade later, the public is hearing evidence that Lighthouse Department personnel work from the hotel but cannot say whether a navigational beacon is present there. The historic lighthouse is said to no longer function as the guide for vessels entering and leaving the Demerara Channel. A former employee says she never worked from the Water Street tower, that it was not operating, and that access to it was no longer possible.

What happened between the environmental assessment, ministerial undertaking, and present-day uncertainty?

Was the replacement beacon installed? If so, when? Was it tested and commissioned? What are its light characteristics, nominal range, precise coordinates, and operational status? Does it meet the applicable standards for an aid to navigation? Was it properly recorded in official Notices to Mariners and nautical publications? Were domestic operators, pilots, fishing vessels, tug operators, commercial shippers, and international maritime authorities formally notified?

Or did Guyana permit a structure to interfere with a longstanding navigation aid without ever establishing a fully functional, transparent, and professionally managed replacement?

The Marriott Room Is Not the Issue

Let us be clear: there is nothing inherently improper about a maritime communications operation working from a modern building rather than an old lighthouse. The historic lighthouse could be preserved as a national monument while navigation is carried out through a modern light, radar, radio, automatic identification system, vessel-traffic service, or another properly regulated arrangement.

But modernization requires more—not less—clarity and accountability.

A room equipped with computers, a VHF radio, a telephone, and an antenna may be part of a functioning maritime-operation system. But the country needs evidence, not impressions.

What exactly is the function of the Marriott office? Is it a designated radio watch station? Does it operate continuously, and if so, under which watchkeeping procedures? Does it monitor specific VHF frequencies? Are transmissions logged? Who reviews those logs? Is it integrated with MARAD, the Transport and Harbors Department, port authorities, pilots, the Coast Guard, and emergency responders? What redundancy exists if the radio, electricity, antenna, internet, or telephone fails?

More fundamentally, what is the official navigational aid for entry into and exit from the Demerara Channel?

A country cannot afford to leave that answer to speculation, employee recollection, or a casual statement that the old lighthouse “is not functioning.” In a commercial river used by domestic and international traffic, safe navigation must rest on specified and verifiable aids, reliable communications, trained personnel, properly maintained equipment, and clearly assigned responsibility.

The Inquiry Must Follow the Money

The Commission should now pursue the costs factor with the same seriousness it applies to operational failures.

The Commission, Parliament, auditors, and the media should demand the records:

♦ The environmental and social impact assessment that identified the navigational risk.

♦ The development approvals, conditions, correspondence, and undertakings related to the Marriott project.

♦ The decision authorizing any relocation, modification, replacement, or decommissioning of the lighthouse function.

♦ Procurement files for beacons, lights, antennas, radios, power systems, marine communications equipment, installation works, maintenance, and security.

♦ Contracts, invoices, payment vouchers, inspection reports, acceptance certificates, warranties, and maintenance agreements.

♦ The cost of operating the Lighthouse Department from the Marriott, including rent, licenses, utilities, communications services, security, equipment, and any payments to the hotel or associated entities.

♦ Technical reports confirming whether a replacement beacon was installed and whether it remains operational.

♦ The operational manuals, duty rosters, radio logs, maintenance schedules, fault reports, and incident reports for the Lighthouse Department.

♦ Notices issued to mariners, published nautical data, and correspondence with international maritime bodies concerning the new or altered light arrangement.

These records should tell a simple story. Either government identified the risk, funded a solution, installed it, tested it, maintained it, and communicated it to mariners—or it did not.

There can be no acceptable middle ground where a vital navigational safeguard is funded on paper but uncertain in practice.

Who Was Responsible?

The inquiry must identify the officer, agency, or ministry with direct legal and operational responsibility for the system.

Was it MARAD? The Ministry of Public Works? The Transport and Harbors Department? A port authority? The developer? A contractor? Or did responsibility become scattered among multiple institutions until no one could be held answerable for the final outcome?

That is a familiar weakness in public administration: several agencies may be involved in approving a development, awarding a contract, managing infrastructure, regulating vessels, and responding to emergencies. Yet when a failure occurs, every institution claims only a limited role.

The country cannot accept that answer where navigation safety is concerned.

Someone had to ensure that a replacement beacon was installed before an obstructing structure was allowed to compromise the established light. Someone had to verify that it met the necessary standard. Someone had to ensure that maintenance was budgeted and performed. Someone had to know, at every point, whether the light was operational. Someone had to notify mariners if it was not.

If no one did, that itself is the finding.

A System Cannot Be Run by Uncertainty

The most disturbing aspect of the testimony is the impression of an essential public function existing without an intelligible operational architecture.

A lighthouse department cannot simply be a name attached to a hotel room. Its purpose must be defined. Its equipment must be known. Its personnel must understand their responsibilities. Its systems must be written down. Its records must be complete. Its management must be able to confirm, without hesitation, what lights and communications aids are operational, which are defective, who is repairing them, and when service will be restored.

The Commission’s work has exposed a succession of troubling questions about vessel operation, regulation, maintenance, supervision, emergency readiness, and official reporting. The Lighthouse Department evidence now raises another: was Guyana’s maritime-safety apparatus functioning in the manner required by law, professional standards, and common sense—or were key functions merely being carried along without serious scrutiny?

That question cannot be left hanging once the hearings conclude.

The Public Deserves Answers—and Corrective Action

The inquiry should recommend an immediate independent technical audit of all aids to navigation in the Demerara River and other major waterways. The audit should identify every operational light, beacon, buoy, radio facility, radar or monitoring system, power backup arrangement, and communication protocol; assess its condition; establish who is responsible; and publish an urgent corrective plan.

.If equipment was paid for but not delivered, installed but never commissioned, commissioned but not maintained, or allowed to become inoperable without timely replacement, those findings must be referred to the appropriate oversight and investigative bodies.

Guyana cannot wait for another maritime emergency to discover that essential safety systems were unclear, unverified, or neglected.

The question now confronting the State is stark: after allowing the Marriott development to create a foreseeable obstruction to a longstanding navigational light, did the authorities actually complete and sustain the alternative system they promised?

The Commission must demand the documentary proof. The country deserves no less.

 The Empty Chamber and the Half-Represented Nation

A Lesson in Inclusion Guyana Refuses to Learn

When We Invest in Nationhood General Secretary and MP Odessa Primus met a visiting delegation from Germany’s Bundestag, she asked a fair question: why were APNU and the Forward Guyana Movement not included? She praised the German parliamentarians for travelling as one delegation despite representing rival parties. She was right to do so.

But she stopped short of the indictment that mattered most.

Germany’s example exposed not merely the absence of two opposition parties from one meeting in Georgetown. It exposed a deeper national failure: Guyana’s democracy is increasingly performed in selective settings—diplomatic receptions, party meetings, press statements, and foreign engagements—while the institution created to make representation real, the National Assembly, is allowed to languish.

Four Sittings, One Indictment

The official record is devastating. Guyana’s Thirteenth Parliament held only four sittings in its first 299 days: November 3, 2025; January 26, 2026; February 2, 2026; and June 5, 2026. Four occasions in nearly ten months for 65 elected representatives to question ministers, debate the budget, expose corruption, defend constituents, and check executive power.

That is not a Parliament. That is a monument to avoidance.

And here lies the uncomfortable truth Primus did not confront: opposition MPs cannot credibly demand inclusion in a foreign delegation while remaining absent from the principal arena of national representation. A salary is paid to represent people, not merely to hold a title. If opposition members choose not to advocate for sittings of  the National Assembly, they must publicly state the specific grievance, the demand, and the conditions under which they will return. Anything less is not resistance. It is abdication dressed up as principle.

Resources Without a Stage

Primus also highlighted Germany’s public support for opposition parliamentary staff. Again, the point is valid. Opposition MPs need researchers, legal advisers, communications support, and administrative capacity to compete with a resourced executive.

But she framed the demand as though resources alone would enable the opposition’s “work program.” That argument collapses under its own weight. The work begins in Parliament. Staff can draft questions, motions, audits, and briefs—but only if there are sittings at which those instruments can be tabled and debated.

Asking for German-style support while Guyana’s legislature sits four times in thirteen months is like demanding a better-equipped courtroom while refusing to enter the courthouse. The first demand must be a functioning Parliament. The second is the resources to make parliamentary work effective.

The Foreign Face of Exclusion

Primus’s most serious omission, however, concerned Guyana’s own international representation. She praised the Germans for cross-party inclusion but failed to call out the fact that Guyana routinely sends delegations to international parliamentary and elected-representative forums as though the opposition does not exist.

The evidence is recent and public. Guyana’s delegation to the 153rd Inter-Parliamentary Union Assembly in Arusha, Tanzania, from October 5 to 9, 2026, was led by Speaker Manzoor Nadir and included government ministers Vindhya Persaud and Warren Kwame McCoy, along with a parliamentary official. No opposition MP was listed.

That delegation spoke for Guyana at a global assembly of nearly 700 parliamentarians from more than 130 countries—an assembly devoted to peace, democracy, human rights, and sustainable development. Yet the voters who elected WIN, APNU, and Forward Guyana Movement parliamentarians had no opposition voice in the room.

This is not representation. It is partisan monopoly wearing the national flag.

A Government Cannot Own the Nation’s Voice

A parliamentary delegation is not a PPP-C delegation. It is Guyana’s delegation. When only ruling-party MPs are selected to represent the country abroad, the government converts a national platform into a partisan reward system.

The consequences are not symbolic. International forums shape alliances, scrutiny, funding relationships, human-rights pressure, climate negotiations, and democratic norms. An opposition representative may raise issues a minister would prefer to leave unspoken: corruption, press freedom, Indigenous rights, extractive-sector accountability, judicial independence, or the hollowing out of parliamentary oversight.

Excluding opposition MPs does not merely deny them a plane ticket. It denies their constituents a channel of international representation. It tells thousands of Guyanese that their concerns are legitimate only when filtered through the governing party.

The Prosecutorial Charge

Let the charge be stated without euphemism.

The government bears primary responsibility for convening a functioning National Assembly and for ensuring that national delegations reflect the whole Parliament, not one party’s caucus. But the opposition is not without fault. If it believes Parliament is being manipulated, it must say so in the chamber, on the record, and before the public. If it believes its exclusion from international forums is unjust, it must name that exclusion whenever the opportunity arises.

Primus had that opportunity. She had German parliamentarians before her—visitors from a system where governing and opposition members share the same delegation. She could have said: “Guyana must practice at home and abroad the inclusion you have shown us today.”

She did not.

That omission matters. A parliamentarian who praises inclusion in a foreign delegation while declining to confront Guyana’s exclusionary practices—abroad and in international forums—has chosen diplomacy over duty. The public should not confuse courtesy with courage.

What Must Be Demanded

The remedy is not complicated. It requires political will and public pressure.

• The National Assembly must adopt and publish a minimum sitting calendar, with regular ordinary sittings each month.
• Opposition parties must either participate fully or publicly state the precise procedural grievance and the condition for ending their withdrawal.
• International parliamentary delegations must include all parties in the National Assembly, proportionate to their seats.
• The Speaker, not the governing party, should administer a transparent selection process for foreign delegations.
• The composition, mandate, cost, and public report of every international delegation must be published before and after travel.
• Opposition MPs must receive equitable institutional support for research, legal, communications, and constituency work, subject to audit.

The Standard Guyana Must Meet

Germany’s delegation offered Guyana a mirror. It showed that rival parties can share a national platform without surrendering their politics. It showed that opposition participation is not a favor granted by a governing party; it is a structural feature of democratic representation.

Guyana failed the test.

A Parliament that sits four times in thirteen months cannot scrutinize. Opposition MPs who absent themselves from the chamber cannot fully represent. A government that sends only its own members to international forums cannot claim to speak for the nation. And an opposition leader who sees these failures but names only the most convenient one is not practicing inclusion—she is practicing selective outrage.

The people of Guyana did not elect parliamentarians to attend receptions, collect per diems, issue statements, or praise foreign models from a distance. They elected them to work. The work begins in Parliament. It continues in international forums. And it demands that every Guyanese voter—government supporter or opposition supporter—be represented by the whole of their country, not merely by the party that happens to hold power.

—The Board