The Arithmetic the Chronicle Won’t Print

The Arithmetic the Chronicle Won’t Print

EDITORIAL

A response to state media’s answer to Bloomberg Opinion’s “resource curse” assessment of Guyana

The government’s mouthpiece has taken it upon itself to answer Bloomberg Opinion columnist Juan Pablo Spinetto, who, after visiting Georgetown, concluded that Guyana displays weak state capacity, fragile institutions, labor shortages and a trajectory some analysts compare to Venezuela, Nigeria and Chad.

Rather than engage that critique, the Chronicle offers a different exercise: a column built entirely on gross figures, silent on every number that would complicate the story.

We correct the record.

WHAT THE CHRONICLE COUNTED, AND WHAT IT DIDN’T

The op-ed states, accurately, that more than US$9 billion in cumulative petroleum receipts has flowed into the Natural Resource Fund since first oil. It does not state the fund’s current balance.

That omission is not incidental — it is the entire trick.

As of end-May 2026, the Bank of Guyana reported the NRF holding approximately US$3.96 billion. Of the roughly US$9.3 billion deposited since 2020, more than US$6 billion has already been withdrawn to finance annual budgets.

Put plainly: for every nine dollars this country has earned from its oil, six are already spent. What remains in trust for a nation of fewer than 800,000 people sits under US$4 billion — roughly US$4,000 per citizen, by one recent estimate submitted directly to the National Assembly

A sovereign wealth fund that pays out two-thirds of its lifetime deposits within its first six years is not building a legacy. It is running a budget subsidy with an oil-fund label attached.

THE $60 BILLION QUESTION

The Chronicle cites, with evident pride, more than US$60 billion in contractor investment across seven sanctioned Stabroek Block projects. What it does not explain is what that investment buys the contractor — and what it leaves Guyana.

Under the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement, up to 75 percent of gross production each month is set aside as “cost oil” — revenue that returns to ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC to recover their investment before Guyana sees a cent of profit. The remaining 25 percent, “profit oil,” is split evenly: 12.5 percent to the consortium, 12.5 percent to Guyana. Add the 2 percent royalty, and the state’s confirmed take — stated by the Minister of Natural Resources himself — is approximately 14.5 percent of gross revenue.

That is not an opposition estimate. It is the government’s own defense of the deal, offered after ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC posted a combined US$12.5 billion in profit for 2025 against roughly US$2.5 billion that reached Guyana’s account — five times the state’s share, by the ministry’s own arithmetic.

Separate published analysis of the Liza 1 project estimates that the absence of ring-fencing on cost recovery alone has cost Guyana on the order of US$9.7 billionin captured revenue that a fairer contract structure would have secured for the state.

Whatever return the contractor group is realizing on its US$60 billion — and independent estimates place it well above what Guyana receives per dollar produced — it is not disclosed in the pages that celebrate the investment figure.

Scale of spending is not evidence of a fair contract. It can just as easily be evidence of a favorable one, for whoever is doing the spending.

“THE RESOURCE CURSE IS NOT INEVITABLE” — ACCORDING TO WHOM?

The Chronicle piece closes by insisting the resource curse can be avoided through “strong institutions,” “transparency” and “careful planning” — without naming a single institution currently failing to deliver any of the three.

This is the genre at its purest: solemn abstraction standing in for accounting.

The Bloomberg piece it purports to answer was considerably less generous than the Chronicle’s framing suggests. Spinetto’s reporting found Guyana falling short on transparent and competitive rights allocation, local content participation, and structuring contract terms to capture a fair share of resource value — the precise indicators the Natural Resource Charter uses to flag countries at risk.

It was not a piece about fiscal space. It was a piece questioning whether execution can match ambition.

If the Chronicle wishes to rebut that assessment, the honest way to do it is with the balance sheet — the actual NRF balance, the actual profit-oil split, the actual pace of expenditure against the actual pace of intake. Not a column that cites the top-line inflow number and stops before the number that matters: what’s left.

THE STANDARD WE’RE HOLDING THIS TO

This publication does not dispute that oil has changed what Guyana can finance. It disputes the claim, made by implication rather than argument, that spending has kept pace with wisdom.  years into a Natural Resource Fund that has already disbursed nearly two-thirds of everything it has ever received, with the state’s own minister confirming a 14.5 percent take on a resource that belongs constitutionally to the Guyanese people, it will take more than lofty prose to make this windfall outlast the wells.

We will keep publishing the numbers the state paper leaves out.

— The Board

SOURCES

Bank of Guyana, Natural Resource Fund monthly reports (April–May 2026)

Ministry of Natural Resources, public statement on Stabroek Block PSA revenue share (June 2026)

Natural Resource Fund Act 2021, Production Sharing Agreement (2016), Articles 11 and 15.6

Bloomberg Opinion, “Oil’s Resource Curse Hangs Heavy Over Guyana,” Juan Pablo Spinetto (July 29, 2026)