Archive for category: Featured

GPL Proposed Continued Power Cuts Unacceptable

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026
Guyana is being told to wait another nine months—possibly longer, given the country’s record of delayed major projects—for relief from recurring power outages. That is an extraordinary position for a government overseeing one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.  

GPL’s claim that approximately US $800 million is being invested in generation, transmission and related infrastructure does not erase the immediate reality confronting citizens: blackouts disrupt homes, hospitals, schools, small businesses, manufacturing, construction, food storage, telecommunications and essential services. For families, the burden is physical, financial and psychological. For businesses, it means lost production, damaged equipment, higher fuel costs for standby generators, spoilage, missed deadlines and reduced confidence in expanding operations.

The problem is not simply that electricity infrastructure takes time to build. It does. The deeper issue is whether the government and GPL planned adequately for the explosive rise in demand that accompanied the oil boom, rapid housing expansion, commercial development and increased industrial activity.

Demand reportedly rose from about 125 megawatts in 2020 to a record 242.64 megawatts, while GPL’s customer base grew from roughly 204,000 to 250,000. Those figures should have triggered far earlier and more aggressive investment in firm generation capacity, reserve margins, substations, transmission lines, transformers, distribution upgrades and maintenance planning.

Instead, Guyanese are being asked to accept conservation measures, self-generation by businesses and scheduled interruptions while waiting on projects that should have been planned and sequenced years ago. It is particularly troubling that, even with added capacity from power ships and solar installations, the country remains so vulnerable to outages, equipment failures, network constraints and peak-demand pressures.

Solar additions in Berbice, Essequibo, Linden and other communities are welcome, as are transmission and distribution upgrades. But solar power does not by itself solve the evening peak between 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., when demand is highest and solar generation is unavailable. A reliable system requires dependable baseload and dispatchable generation, sufficient reserve capacity, modern transmission infrastructure, upgraded distribution networks, energy storage where appropriate, and transparent maintenance and contingency plans.

The gas-to-energy project may eventually provide a major improvement, but it cannot be used as a substitute for accountability over the present crisis. Citizens need more than broad assurances that conditions will be “significantly alleviated” by June 2027.

They deserve a public, independently verifiable timetable showing:

♦ The generation capacity currently available, including dependable—not merely installed—capacity.

♦ The projected demand growth through 2027 and the reserve margin needed to prevent shortages.

♦ Each transmission, substation and distribution upgrade, its cost, contractor, completion date and expected benefit.

♦ The causes of each major outage, including generation shortfalls, equipment failures, third-party damage and planned maintenance.

♦ The specific measures being taken to protect consumers and businesses until the new projects are completed.

♦ The consequences for contractors and officials when deadlines are missed or infrastructure repeatedly fails.

A nation earning unprecedented oil revenues should not be normalizing prolonged blackouts as an unavoidable growing pain. Energy reliability is not a luxury; it is the foundation for industrialization, job creation, investment, public safety and a decent quality of life.

If the promised relief is still nine months away—and perhaps longer—then the government must acknowledge that this represents a serious planning failure. Guyanese should not have to bear the cost of inadequate foresight while being asked to celebrate record economic growth.

Editor’s Note: US $800Million Is Not a Substitute for Answers

The public has been told that approximately US$800 million is being invested in Guyana’s electricity infrastructure and that blackouts should be “significantly alleviated” by mid-2027. That is not enough.

A figure of this magnitude cannot be used as a public-relations shield while households, workers and businesses continue to suffer the economic, physical and emotional strain of unreliable electricity. Guyanese are entitled to know precisely where this money is going, who is receiving it, what work is being delivered, and when the public can reasonably expect measurable improvement.

At present, the US$800 million claim raises more questions than it answers. Is this sum actual expenditure, approved funding, signed contracts, projected future spending, private-sector investment, borrowing, grants, or a mixture of all these? Does it include solar plants, transmission expansion, substations, transformers, distribution upgrades, maintenance works and emergency generation? How much is assigned to each component?

The distinction matters. A large aggregate figure can create the appearance of decisive action while concealing delayed projects, incomplete works, inflated costs, duplicated announcements or investments that will not directly address the outages now punishing consumers.

GPL and the Government must therefore publish, without delay, a complete project register for every component of the claimed US $800 million investment program. It must identify:

♦ The precise composition of the US $800 million figure, including whether each amount is spent, committed, contracted, financed or merely projected.

♦ Every generation project, its capacity in megawatts, location, contractor, contract value, financing source, commissioning date and actual delivery status.

♦ Every transmission and distribution project, including new lines, substations, transformers, feeders, control systems and network upgrades, with its location, cost, contractor, completion target and expected service benefit.

♦ The amount paid to date, outstanding commitments, cost variations, extensions of time, penalties for delays and all reported cost overruns.

♦ The procurement method used for each contract, together with the names of successful bidders and the basis on which they were selected.

♦ A clear separation between works intended to meet new demand and works needed merely to repair, replace or stabilize an overstretched existing system.

♦ Demand forecasts through 2027,the expected dependable generating capacity, the required reserve margin, and the basis for claiming that outages will be substantially reduced.

♦ A public monthly progress report showing what has been completed, what has slipped, what has changed and who is accountable.

This is neither hostility to investment nor opposition to development. It is a demand for basic stewardship of public resources and respect for electricity consumers. Every blackout has a cost: spoiled food, damaged appliances, interrupted work, lost sales, costly generator fuel, disrupted education, unsafe conditions and mounting frustration.

An oil-rich country cannot credibly ask its people to celebrate unprecedented national wealth while treating dependable electricity as a future aspiration. Nor can it ask citizens to wait quietly until mid-2027, or beyond, based solely on broad assurances and unaudited headline figures.

The public will not be comforted by another large number. It will be comforted by evidence: signed contracts, clear costs, functioning equipment, completed transmission lines, reliable power and accountable officials. Until then, the US $800 million claim remains a number in need of proof.

“The US$800 million program should now be subjected to formal parliamentary scrutiny and, where public funds, state guarantees or state entities are involved, rigorous examination by the Auditor General. Parliament must require a full accounting of the projects, contracts, financing arrangements, expenditure, delays and projected outcomes. The Auditor General must be positioned to determine whether taxpayers and electricity consumers are receiving value for money, whether procurement rules were followed, and whether cost overruns, avoidable delays or weak oversight have compounded the crisis. Guyanese have waited long enough in darkness. They are owed transparency, accountability and a power system that works.

 THE GRAMMAR OF NON-ALIGNMENT, CONTINUED

The Foothold and the Field

Why $13 Billion in Chinese Investment Is Still the Smaller Number

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Thursday evening, at a reception marking the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Prime Minister Mark Phillips delivered the kind of speech Georgetown has grown practiced at giving: warm, forward-looking, thick with the vocabulary of partnership. Guyana’s exports to China, he said, reached US$501 million in 2025 — the country’s strongest performance to date, enough to make China the 8th-largest destination for Guyanese goods. Chinese Ambassador Yang Yang went further, placing cumulative Chinese investment in Guyana at roughly US$13 billion, and cataloguing the tangible evidence: the US$260 million Demerara River Bridge, the US$100 million Aurora Solar Farm, Bosai’s recent donation of generators to a power-starved Linden.

Those are real numbers, and this publication has tracked the positioning they represent — the slow drift of Guyana’s infrastructure and security relationships between two competing patrons, documented across this series. But read against the government’s own budget figures, released the same season, the China numbers reveal less about Beijing’s foothold in Guyana than about how small a foothold looks next to the country’s actual patrimony.

Guyana’s crude oil exports alone generated an estimated US$17.8 billion in 2025 — more than the Chinese Ambassador’s entire multi-year investment tally, in a single year, from a single commodity.

— 2026 national budget figures, as reported by OilNOW

A RANKING THAT UNDERCOUNTS THE REAL RELATIONSHIP

The 8th-place ranking Prime Minister Phillips cited is accurate as far as it goes — but it measures Guyana’s non-oil export relationship with China, not the totality of the country’s trade. Crude oil, which does not figure in that ranking at all, accounted for more than 85 percent of Guyana’s total export receipts in 2025, on total export earnings of roughly US$20.1 billion. Oil is not a footnote to Guyana’s trade profile; it is nearly the whole of it.

And on oil, the picture tilts decisively toward Washington, not Beijing. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration data cited by OilNOW, U.S. net crude imports from Guyana averaged nearly 200,000 barrels per day through the first ten months of 2025 — up from 176,000 bpd in 2024, 98,000 bpd in 2023, and just 27,000 bpd in 2020, Guyana’s first year as an oil exporter. In October alone, the U.S. took in 216,000 barrels a day from Guyana, trailing only Canada, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia — placing this country of under a million people fourth among all suppliers to the world’s largest economy, for that month, ahead of the entire Gulf and West African oil-producing world.

Because Guyana imports no crude oil from the United States, that net figure is also, in effect, the gross figure — a rare instance of clean data in a trade relationship usually obscured by two-way flows. There is no comparable Chinese figure of that scale. China did take a direct crude shipment from Guyana in 2025, its first in three years; but crude sales to China remain occasional cargoes, not a structural relationship. The Ambassador’s $13 billion is a cumulative investment total, built up since 2015; the crude relationship with U.S. refiners is a current, compounding annual flow now worth many multiples of that figure every year. The comparison Thursday’s reception invited — trade destination rankings — was, whether by design or convenience, the wrong one to make.

THE REVELATION UNDERNEATH THE COMPARISON

But sitting with the $17.8 billion figure raises a harder question than which foreign power holds the stronger position in Guyana — it raises the question of how much of that patrimony ever reaches Guyana at all.

Of the US$17.8 billion in crude export earnings recorded in 2025, Guyana’s own revenue; from the sale of its profit-oil share, plus royalty runs to roughly 14.5 percent of the total, a rate the Ministry of Natural Resources has itself repeatedly confirmed as the structural outcome of the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement: 75 percent of all revenue reserved for contractor cost recovery, the remaining 25 percent split evenly between government and consortium, plus a 2 percent royalty paid to the state out of the consortium’s share. Measured against the top-line $17.8 billion figure, that leaves the country that owns the resource collecting a share smaller than what the Chinese Ambassador cited as this country’s total accumulated benefit from a decade of Belt-and-Road-adjacent investment — every single year.

The question this publication has asked before, in other contexts, applies here with unusual force: where else in the world does a nation’s ownership of its own resource yield so comparatively meagre a return?

— The Board

WHERE ELSE — A COMPARATIVE RECORD

The government has, at various points, defended the Stabroek terms as internationally competitive. The public record does not fully support that defense, and in one important respect; Guyana’s own subsequent conduct — appears to contradict it outright.

Figures compiled from OilNOW reporting on Ministry of Natural Resources statements, IDB Technical Note (Aug. 2020), Global Witness/Rystad Energy exchange (2020), and VP Jagdeo’s 2022 model PSA announcement.

The 51-60 percent range cited by the IDB and by Rystad Energy uses a broader methodology than the government’s own 14.5 percent headline figure; an average effective tax rate accounting for the full life of a project, not a single year’s fiscal split — and the two are not strictly comparable on their face. But the gap between them is itself instructive: even the more generous of two independent outside assessments, produced by a firm that pushed back on Global Witness’s harsher number, still placed Guyana below what it judged appropriate for “a mature producer” like Brazil. Global Witness, for its part, put a dollar figure on the shortfall — estimating in 2020 that Guyana stood to lose in the order of US$55 billion over the life of the agreement.

The most damning comparator, however, is not an outside estimate at all. It is Georgetown’s own. When Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo announced the terms of the government’s revised model production-sharing agreement in 2022 — the template now applied to new blocks, though pointedly not to Stabroek itself; the royalty rate more than quintupled, from 2 percent to 10 percent. The cost-recovery ceiling, which determines how much revenue contractors can claim before any profit-sharing begins, was cut from 75 percent to 65 percent. And a 10 percent corporate tax was introduced where none had existed before.

A government does not rewrite its own template this drastically unless it has concluded, in practice if not in public rhetoric, that the original template gave away more than it should have.

THE FOOTHOLD REFRAMED

None of this diminishes the substance of what Ambassador Yang described Thursday evening. Thirteen billion dollars in cumulative investment, a doubled trade relationship, a bridge, a solar farm, a donation of generators to a region the state itself has struggled to keep lit — these are not trivial facts, and this publication has covered the strategic logic behind each of them elsewhere in this series. China’s position in Guyana is real, and it is growing.

But Thursday’s framing — an export ranking, a multi-year investment total, offered as the measure of a foreign power’s stake in Guyana’s future — obscures more than it reveals when set beside the country’s actual patrimony. The crude flowing to Houston and the Gulf Coast refineries dwarfs, in a single year, what a decade of Chinese investment has accumulated. And the government’s own revenue from that crude — the thing Guyana is actually left holding, after the contractor’s cost recovery and profit share are taken — is smaller, as a share of the resource’s value, than almost any independent assessment of comparable agreements elsewhere in the world, and smaller than Georgetown’s own revised terms suggest it should be.  Assistant Secretary Segura’s remarks, expected shortly, will presumably make the American case for the country’s economic significance in the manner these occasions typically call for.

The more consequential figure will remain the one that hasn’t yet been the subject of a reception: not who ranks 8th, but what happens to the other 85.5 percent.

Sourcing: PM Phillips and Ambassador Yang remarks per event coverage (Sept. 18, 2026); crude export and revenue figures per Guyana 2026 national budget as reported by OilNOW; U.S. import data per EIA, via OilNOW; PSA fiscal terms per Ministry of Natural Resources public statements; comparative government-take estimates per IDB Technical Note (Aug. 2020) and the Global Witness/Rystad Energy public exchange (2020).

 The Success Story They Didn’t Think We’d Read Twice

Record Feedstock, Imported Chicken, and the Question of Who Actually Benefits

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Copies of import documents issued to Royal Chicken for feedstock

The Ministry of Finance’s 2026 Midyear Report, released Monday, tells a clean story: 7,800 acres of soya bean and 1,316 acres of corn cultivated in the first half of the year; 3,450 tonnes of soya bean and 4,008 tonnes of corn produced — a combined 7,458 tonnes of feedstock the Government credits with delivering “a major boost to the livestock industry.” A drying and storage facility at Ebini, the first of its kind in the country, is offered as the physical proof: three silos at 3,000 tonnes each, an 80-tonne-per-hour drying tower, over 40 kilometres of new road into the Berbice River interior.

It is, on its face, a success story. It was written to be read once, as one.

WHAT THE DOCUMENTS SHOW

On January 26, 2026, the Guyana Customs & Excise Department’s Lethem Branch Office recorded a Single Administrative Document for 100 metric tons of crude, non-degummed soyabean oil, imported from North Link Brazil Ltda of Boa Vista, Roraima, consigned to Royal Chicken Inc. at Lot 60, Garden of Eden, East Bank Demerara. Customs value: GY$29,815,500.

Two weeks later, on February 9, 2026, the Guyana Revenue Authority approved a tax exemption for Royal Chicken Inc. covering 1,500 tons of soyabean meal, against Commercial Invoice No. 003/2026, from the same Brazilian exporter. The letter — addressed to General Manager Rasheed Baksh and signed for the Commissioner-General by Gavin Low; was copied to the Comptroller of Customs, Excise & Trade Operations, the Deputy Commissioner of Law Enforcement & Investigation, and the Auditor General.

Royal Chicken Inc. is not a bystander to Guyana’s domestic feedstock programme. It is a named member of the Tacama Gold Incorporated consortium — the same public-private structure, chaired by Bounty Farm’s David Fernandes, that received the same order of government infrastructure investment this newsroom  has tracked since 2023, built on the same justification now repeated in the Midyear Report: reducing Guyana’s roughly US$25-30 million annual poultry feed import bill.

This news desk  reported the contradiction in real time. “Subsidised Soya, Exported Feed, Imported Chicken,” published April 30, 2026, laid out what the Brazil shipments meant: a company sitting inside the domestic-production consortium was simultaneously importing the very input that consortium’s silos exist to supply.

Five months later, on September 7, this news desk  reported a second, related anomaly: the Guyana Marketing Corporation — a statutory body whose own mandate, by its own website, has been confined since 1985 to market facilitation, research, and export development for Guyanese producers, not buying and selling — was documented distributing imported Brazilian chicken to Guyanese consumers. The packaging carried no English label, in apparent conflict with the Food and Drug Regulations’ Regulation 18 and with the labelling standards cited in the U.S. International Trade Administration’s own Guyana market guidance. The imported product was reported selling below the price of the local chicken it was nominally meant to supplement. GMC’s involvement was never explained as anything other than an unspecified “temporary” intervention to “stabilize prices,” with no stated duration and no stated safeguard for local producers.

The Midyear Report, published a week and a half later, does not mention either finding. It reports the tonnage. It does not report who used it, who didn’t, why a consortium member was buying 1,600 tons of Brazilian soya product in the same window the domestic programme was supposedly ramping toward the harvest it now claims, or why the country’s own agricultural marketing corporation was simultaneously retailing the imported end product that programme exists to displace.

THE ARITHMETIC THE REPORT LEAVES OUT

Put the government’s own numbers next to each other:

— Domestic feedstock produced, H1 2026 (Ministry of Finance): 7,458 tonnes (3,450t soya + 4,008t corn)

— Feedstock imported by a consortium member, Jan–Feb 2026 alone (GRA/Customs): approximately 1,600 tons (1,500 tons soyabean meal + 100 metric tons soyabean oil)

— Chicken currently being imported (per this newsroom’s ongoing market reporting): 300,000 lbs weekly

— Imported chicken publicly documented moving through a state marketing agency (this newsroom , Sept. 7, 2026): unlabelled, Brazilian-sourced, priced below local product

The Government’s framing asks readers to accept that a record domestic harvest, a purpose-built storage-and-drying facility, and a consortium of established poultry producers have together boosted “the livestock industry”;

If the domestic programme is working as described, neither the feedstock import nor the GMC chicken distribution was necessary. If it is not working as described, the Midyear Report’s production figures are not being converted into the meat supply they are credited with supporting — and the state’s own marketing corporation has been quietly filling the gap with the exact imported product the programme was built to eliminate.

Either reading contradicts the report as published. Neither was addressed in it.

On August 11, 2026, the Department of Public Information reported Minister Zulfikar Mustapha meeting with the Private Sector Commission on a “poultry market stabilisation measure” — an acknowledgment, however indirect, that the poultry market required stabilising at all. That meeting came three months after this newsroom  had published the feedstock import documentation, four weeks before this publication  published the GMC findings, and five weeks before the Ministry of Finance would publish a harvest tonnage it now credits with resolving the problem.

WHO BENEFITED

The public investment in this programme is not in dispute: infrastructure at Ebini and Tacama Landing, over 40 kilometres of road, a drying and storage facility described as the first of its kind in Guyana, all funded and built to the same figure — $1.2 billion — that recurs across the Ministry’s agro-processing announcements. The stated beneficiary of that investment was always the same: Guyanese consumers, through lower feed costs and, eventually, lower meat prices.

The documentary record this newsroom  holds shows a different beneficiary in at least two instances — a consortium member permitted to import its raw material tax-exempt from Brazil, and a state marketing corporation caught retailing imported Brazilian chicken below the local price, while the government’s own report credits the domestic programme’s footprint with a record harvest. The chicken on the shelf did not get cheaper across the board. The 300,000 lbs arriving weekly did not stop.

And the institution mandated to build markets for Guyanese produce was, by its own conduct, building one for someone else’s.

The Ministry published tonnage. It did not publish where that tonnage went, who processed it, what it fed, why the consortium built to end feed imports was, by its own government’s paperwork, still running them in the same half-year the report now presents as vindication, or why GMC’s own retail operation was moving the imported product that same programme exists to make unnecessary.

This newsroom  is submitting formal queries to the Ministry of Agriculture, the Guyana Revenue Authority, the Guyana Marketing Corporation, and Royal Chicken Inc. asking:

What became of the 7,458 tons credited to the first half of 2026; whether any of it reached Royal Chicken or another Tacama consortium member?

Why a tax exemption for Brazilian soya inputs was granted to a company positioned, on paper, to draw from a domestic supply the Government says it was simultaneously producing?

Under what authority, and for how long, GMC’s mandate has extended to the retail distribution of un-labelled imported chicken?

They published a success story assuming no one would check the receipts against it. The receipts — customs declarations, tax exemption letters, and a photograph of Portuguese packaging on a Guyanese shelf — say otherwise.

The 592 Guardian has published the underlying GRA exemption letter, Customs import declaration, and GMC imported-chicken findings referenced in this piece. Queries to the Ministry of Agriculture, GRA, GMC, and Royal Chicken Inc. were outstanding at time of publication; responses will be published in full when received.

The Forgotten Ledger

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar– September 2026

Who Guyana’s New Social Contract Is Actually For

 An essay circulated recently by Open Society under the title “Africa’s Democratic Awakening” makes an observation that ought to unsettle anyone paying honest attention to Guyana. The essay’s argument is structural: across much of Africa, the people who govern and the people who are governed belong, increasingly, to different generations, different economic realities, and different political imaginations entirely. The gap is not incidental. It is, the essay argues, the mechanism by which democracy stops delivering and starts merely presiding.

Guyana does not have Africa’s gerontocracy problem in its literal form. Our ruling class is not, on the whole, elderly relative to the population it governs. But the underlying diagnosis transfers with uncomfortable precision once the axis is shifted from age to access.

The divide here is not primarily who is old and who is young — it is who has been permitted a claim on the nation’s new wealth, and who has been quietly instructed, through years of accumulated disappointment, to expect nothing.

 A WEALTH BOOM WITH NO BOTTOM RUNG

This publication has documented, in its ongoing examination of the new bourgeoisie forming around Guyana’s oil economy, a phenomenon without precedent in the nation’s history: the creation — within a single decade of a distinct, visible, politically adjacent wealthy class, layered atop a social structure that had been, since the colonial era, functionally flat. Guyana was a working nation. Whatever else could be said of the hardship built into that history, it did not, until now, produce a domestic aristocracy of the kind now consolidating around party hierarchy, favored contractors, and their extended circles.

The point of that investigation was never simply that some individuals had grown wealthy while the resource boom unfolded around them — wealth accumulation during a boom is not, on its own, an accountability story. The point was distributional: that the enabling conditions of the boom — access to permits, contracts, financing, land, and the state’s discretionary machinery — were made available to a narrow band of the politically connected, while the working population whose historical claim on the nation is oldest and deepest was offered growth statistics in place of a share.

The system’s incapacity to verify how this wealth was acquired is not a footnote to the story. It is the story.

That framing — the system’s incapacity to verify, rather than a direct allegation of theft; remains the more defensible claim, and the more damning one.

A state that cannot or will not produce the disclosure trail for how its favored class acquired what it holds is a state that has already decided whose accumulation gets scrutinized and whose does not.

THE CLASS OPEN SOCIETY’S ESSAY ASKS US TO REMEMBER

What the Open Society essay gets right — and what ought to reorient the conversation here — is its insistence that the answer to elite capture is not better elites.

It is the deliberate, structural inclusion of the class of people who have been treated as peripheral to politics entirely: the market vendor, the rural farmer, the hinterland resident, the informal-sector worker, the young person with no party card and no family name that opens doors

The essay calls this constituency into the center of its argument precisely because every other account of democratic renewal tends to leave them out — as beneficiaries, perhaps, someday, but never as authors of the terms.

This is the demographic Guyana’s own political discourse has almost entirely forgotten. Budget speeches gesture at them. Ministerial visits photograph them. But the architecture of opportunity — the financing instruments, the procurement pipelines, the land allocations, the permitting decisions; routes around them as a matter of course, not as a matter of malice so much as habit.

They were never expected to be participants in the new economy. They were expected to be its audience.

A genuine bottom-up approach would mean something more specific than the language of “inclusion” that now decorates every government communiqué. It would mean deliberately re-engineering access: financing structures a market vendor or small farmer could actually qualify for; procurement set-asides that survive contact with the discretionary machinery this publication has documented elsewhere; land and resource allocation processes that do not require a political relationship to navigate. Ubuntu, the philosophy the Open Society essay invokes — I am because you are — is not a slogan available only to African contexts.

It is a direct rebuke to a Guyanese oil economy organized, so far, on the opposite premise: that the nation’s new wealth belongs first to those already positioned to receive it

RESIGNATION IS THE REAL OBSTACLE

But structural exclusion is only half of what needs naming. The other half is quieter and, in some respects, more corrosive: the resignation that has settled over the excluded class itself. Guyana’s forgotten demographic is not, for the most part, in open revolt against its exclusion.

It has, in large measure, stopped expecting anything different. That is a distinct and more dangerous condition than anger. Anger organizes. Resignation dissolves.

This quiet acceptance did not arrive by accident. It is the accumulated residue of decades in which promises of inclusion were made and not kept, in which each new administration’s version of a “new direction” produced the same distributional pattern as the last, and in which the working population learned, reasonably, that its expectations were the variable most likely to be disappointed. Despair of this kind is rational. It is also, from the standpoint of anyone who benefits from the current arrangement, extremely convenient.

A population that has stopped asking does not need to be denied. It denies itself the trouble of asking.

If there is a democratic awakening available to Guyana in the sense the Open Society essay describes elsewhere on the continent, it will not begin with another ministry initiative or another glossy consultation roadshow of the kind this publication has already catalogued and found wanting. It will begin with the much harder work of persuading a demoralized population that its claim on the nation’s wealth is legitimate, current, and worth asserting again — and it will require political and civic actors willing to build the access structures that make that assertion actionable rather than symbolic.

The forgotten ledger this editorial takes its title from is not a metaphor for missing financial records, though those exist too, and this publication has spent considerable effort trying to locate them.

It is the ledger of who was counted in when Guyana’s oil wealth began to be distributed, and who was quietly left off the page. Closing that gap — not managing it, not photographing it, closing it — is the precondition for any social contract Guyana might credibly call new.

— The Board