Mr. President, the People Are Still Waiting

Eight years of oil. Sixty years of independence. And more than half the country still lives in poverty. No speech, however soaring, can paper over that arithmetic.

THE EDITORS · OPINION

There is a particular cruelty to eloquence deployed in the presence of deprivation. President Dr. Irfaan Ali’s address on the eve of Guyana’s 60th Independence Anniversary was, by the standards of political oratory, a polished performance. It had rhythm. It had poetry. It had the grand architecture of a speech designed to be quoted, clipped, and circulated. What it did not have — what it conspicuously, almost defiantly, lacked — was an honest reckoning with the country it was delivered in.

The oil beneath Guyana’s waters is, as the President declared, the property of the people. He is right about that. Which is precisely why the people deserve a government that speaks to them plainly about why, after eight years of oil production and historic revenue windfalls, the majority of Guyanese remain poor.

58%

POVERTY RATE — AFTER 8 YEARS OF OIL

Guyana became a major oil producer in 2016. By any credible measurement, the majority of its citizens have yet to feel that transformation in their daily lives. This is not a statistic to be dismissed with a road metaphor.

Let us grant the President his roads and bridges. Infrastructure is real. Construction is visible. Progress can be photographed and inaugurated. But a road that connects a community still mired in poverty, still without reliable electricity, still without clean running water, still without a functioning primary health care system — that road does not connect destinies. It connects misery to more misery, only faster.

The President told Guyanese that schools “teach children to dream.” But dreams require a foundation. They require a teacher who is paid on time and trained well. They require a school building that does not Nood in the rainy season. They require a child who arrived that morning having eaten. The gap between the rhetoric of dreaming and the reality of classrooms in the hinterland and poor coastal communities is not a gap that poetic language can bridge.

Hospitals, the President, “affirmed that every Guyanese life has worth“. A beautiful sentiment. And yet Guyanese continue to travel abroad for procedures unavailable at home. The chronically ill navigate a public health system stretched beyond its limits. Maternal mortality remains a scandal. Drug shortages are routine. If hospitals affirm the worth of lives, someone should tell the hospitals.

The US$100 million STEM program announced in partnership with ExxonMobil deserves scrutiny, not celebration. A knowledge economy built in partnership with the very extractive corporation profiting most handsomely from Guyana’s resources is not a bold vision of sovereignty — it is a continuation of dependency, dressed in the language of innovation. Who negotiated those terms? What does Guyana own of that pro gramme? These are not hostile questions; they are the minimum due diligence a nation owes itself.

“One Guyana does not mean we are all the same — it means we are all equal.” If equality is the standard, Mr. President, then the standard has not been met“.

The President’s “One Guyana” formulation is ideologically convenient precisely because it asks nothing of those in power. It asks citizens to look past ethnic division, past regional disparity, past historical grievance — and to trust that the government is building toward something better.

But unity without accountability is not unity. It is compliance. And the test of whether a government is governing “for all” is not the number of projects announced, but the number of lives materially improved.

THE LITANY THE SPEECH DID NOT ADDRESS

01 Poverty at 58% after eight years of oil revenue

No policy explanation. No timeline for reduction. No accountability for why transformation has not reached the majority of citizens who were promised it would.

02 Cost of living crushing ordinary households

Food prices, fuel costs, and basic necessities continue to strain families whose wages have not kept pace with the oil economy’s growth. The GDP numbers do not eat breakfast.

03 Corruption and procurement opacity

Billions in oil revenue flow through government contracting processes with limited independent oversight. The question of who benefits — and who awards the contracts — demands a direct answer, not a sermon about collective patrimony.

04 Healthcare infrastructure in crisis

Beyond the ribbon-cutting of new hospital buildings, the functional capacity of Guyana’s health system — staffing, medication supply chains, specialist availability — remains critically deficient for most citizens outside Georgetown.

05 Hinterland and interior communities left behind

The President’s vision of a child in any region having the same opportunity is belied by the stark reality of Indigenous and interior communities who lack basic services that coastal Guyanese take for granted. Equal rights require equal investment, not equal rhetoric.

06 Oil contract transparency and sovereign wealth management

The terms of Guyana’s production-sharing agreements remain poorly understood by the public. “Spending with purpose and saving with discipline” are phrases — not policies. Where are the independent audits? The parliamentary oversight? The citizen dashboards?

None of this is to say that Guyana has not built things. It has. None of it suggests that government is without genuine intent. Perhaps it has intent in abundance. The problem is not intent — it is delivery. It is the distance between the podium and the yard, between the micro phone and the market stall, between the speech and the school that still floods.

At sixty years of independence, Guyana deserves a leader who will stand before its people not with poetry, but with plans. Not with vision, but with verifiable targets. Not with the confidence of someone who believes the oil has already won, but with the humility of someone who knows the work has barely started. The test of independence is not whether a president can deliver a stirring address. It is whether the people he addresses can afford to eat, to heal, to educate their children, and to believe — on evidence, not faith — that tomorrow will be better than today.

The oil is the peoples. Mr. President so is the reckoning.