The 592 Guardian

 IN D E P E N D E N T• AC C O U N TA B I L I T Y J O U R N A L I S M •E D I TO R I A L ·               J U NE 2026

UN I V E R S I T Y O F

G U Y A N A                                               

G R E E N • IN S T I T U T E •

I N D E P E N D E N CE 6 0•

S U R V E Y

The Republic

Nobody Trusts

A new survey of 134 Guyanese — residents and diaspora — finds a nation hollowed out at its foundations: institutions distrusted, oil wealth captured by foreigners, and the generation that should be building the future already looking for the exit.

THE EDITORS · THE 592-GUARDIAN BASED ON UGGI INDEPENDENCE 60 SURVEY · FIELD PERIOD: 23–28 MAY2026

The survey is modest in scale — 134 respondents across the resident population and diaspora, field -tested in the final week of May 2026. But the findings are not modest. They are a rebuke. They are the quiet verdict of a people who have watched an oil windfall materialize, watched foreign companies and their local intermediaries grow visibly richer, and arrived at the considered judgment that none of it has been for them.

A Nation Without Social Glue

Only six percent of respondents trust a stranger to return a lost wallet. Pause on that figure . It is not a measure of government approval — governments can be loathed and societies can still function. It is a measure of the tissue between citizens: the informal, accumulated faith that the person beside you operates within a shared moral framework.

At six percent, that tissue is not frayed. It is absent.

Political scientists have long established that social trust — sometimes called generalized trust — is both a product of and a prerequisite for functional democracy. Countries with low institutional trust can still hold elections; countries with low social trust struggle to produce the civic cooperation that makes those elections meaningful. Guyana, as measured here, has both problems at once.

“No institution earns the public’s trust. Not the judiciary, not the GRA, not the media — and least of all the national government and foreign oil companies, which sit at the bottom of the table together.”

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The survey is explicit that no institution — none — earns the public’s trust. Not the judiciary. Not the Guyana Revenue Authority. Not the national media, whose failures of independence we have documented in these pages before. And sitting at the absolute bottom of the trust table, sharing the floor: the national government of Irfaan Ali and the foreign oil companies operating in Guyana’s waters. It is a damning colocation. The state and its most powerful commercial partners, assessed by the citizenry as equally, maximally untrustworthy.

Oil Is Repeating the Old Pattern. Guyanese Know It.

Sixty-three percent of respondents say oil is repeating the old pattern. Not producing a new Guyana. Repeating the old one — the Guyana of sugar and bauxite, in which a primary commodity generated extraordinary wealth for foreign capital and local elites, and left the broader population with roads, resentment, and emigration as their inheritance.

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Seventy-seven percent of respondents can identify who has benefitted from seven years of oil growth. It is not them. It is, in the language of the survey, “foreign companies and their local partners.” This is not ideological abstraction — it is observed reality. The luxury vehicles, the procurement contracts, the offshore structures. Guyanese are watching this in real time, and they are capable of naming it.                               

This editorial has previously documented, in granular terms, the fiscal architecture that makes such capture possible: the transfer tax exemptions on indirect share sales, the absence of enforced transfer pricing rules, the carried interest arrangements that deny the state equity in its own resources. The Ali government did not construct these mechanisms alone — many predate his administration. But the obligation to dismantle them, in the middle of a historic boom, belongs to whoever holds power now. That is the Ali government. And they have not acted.

The Generation Preparing to Leave.                                      

The most consequential finding in the UGGI report is buried in the demographic breakdowns, but it should be on the front page of every newspaper in Georgetown: among Guyanese under forty-Even, only one in three is definitely staying. Nearly as many are actively considering leaving. A third remain undecided — a knife-edge population that the survey correctly describes as “policy-responsive.” They could be retained. They could be lost. The difference lies in whether the government they observe begins to behave in ways that suggest their future is possible here.                 

This is not new. Guyana has exported its human capital for generations — to New York, to Toronto, to London, to Suriname and Trinidad — and the oil boom was supposed to reverse the logic. Five years in, with Guyana producing over 600,000 barrels per day and recording among the fastest per-capita GDP growth rates on earth, the under-45 population is still doing the math and arriving at the same answer their parents did. The numbers do not lie in their favor. The opportunity is not distributed in their direction. The civic space, according to 77 percent of all respondents, is shrinking, not expanding.

“Among under-45s, only 1 in 3 is definitely staying. Nearly as many are thinking of leaving— and a third are undecided. The policy-responsive generation is poised on a knife-edge.”            

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A country that cannot retain its own young people during an oil boom has failed at the foundational task of development. Extraction without inclusion is colonialism by another name. The flag is different, the passport is Guyanese, but if the structural logic — foreign capital extracts, local elites administer the extraction, the population provides labor and receives patchy services — remains intact, the independence being celebrated is ceremonial, not substantive.

The Democracy Question.       

That 77 percent of respondents say civic and democratic space is narrowing should alarm anyone who believes Guyana’s oil future depends on stable institutions. It should particularly alarm the international partners — the United States, the United Kingdom, the multilateral development banks — who have made democratic governance a stated prerequisite for the kind of investment partnerships they are deepening with Georgetown.     

We are not in the business of performing alarm for its own sake. But narrowing civic space, collapsing institutional trust, and a population that cannot trust each other, let alone the state, is not a stable foundation for a petro-state trying to diversify, build human capital, and negotiate with international capital from a position of sovereignty. These are the conditions that precede, historically, either authoritarian consolidation or political rupture. The UGGI survey does not predict which. It documents the conditions.

What Independence at 60 Actually Looks Like.         

President Ali’s Independence Day address spoke of transformation, of a new Guyana rising. He is not wrong that something is rising.

What the UGGI survey adds — with the cold authority of empirical measurement — is the question of rising for whom, and whether the Guyanese people believe the answer is themselves. They do not.

Six in ten say oil is repeating, not transforming. Three in four see the wealth going to foreigners and their intermediaries. Three in four say the democratic space they would need to contest this arrangement is being closed. And the generation that would have to live with these choices for the next sixty years is standing at the door, hand on the latch, undecided.                                  

The University of Guyana Green Institute has done its job. It has produced the evidence. The question now is whether the institutions of this republic — the government, the parliament, the independent agencies, the media — are capable of hearing it and responding with policy rather than ceremony. Independence Day speeches will not retain the under-45s. Transfer pricing enforcement might. A genuine carried interest mechanism in oil contracts might. A press that is free to investigate might. A judiciary that is trusted might.    Sixty years. A republic. The data says: start building it.       

E D I T O R I A L- P O S I T I O N ♦ T H E 5 9 2 G U A R D IAN      

The UGGI Independence 60 Survey is not a political document. It is, in that sense, more dangerous than one — it is evidence. This editorial calls on the Ali administration to respond to its findings not with rebuttal but with policy: publish full oil contract terms including fiscal provisions; introduce and enforce indirect transfer taxation on resource asset sales; establish an independent Citizens’ Oil Revenue Audit with public reporting; and restore the press freedom and civic space that 77 percent of Guyanese say they are already losing. The sixtieth year of independence is not a moment for ceremony. It is a moment for reckoning.

Data Source: University of Guyana Green Institute (UGGI), Independence 60 Survey: Preliminary Report. Field period: 23– 28 May 2026. N=134 (residents and diaspora). Prepared by UGGI with AI assistance. Full report including confidence intervals and demographic breakdowns available at greeninstitute@uog.edu.gy. ·

Editorial Independence: The 592 Guardian received no funding from UGGI or any party connected to this survey. Analysis and editorial positions are independent and are those of the editors alone

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ INDEPENDENT ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GEORGETOWN, GUYANA♦EDITORIAL · JUNE 2026 ♦ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED