The Willing Participants

The Willing Participants

EDITORIAL BY: Hem Kumar— September 2026

How Guyana’s Resource Curse Gets Built, One Unanswered Question at a Time

Christopher Ram has, in his 198th column on Guyana’s oil economy, given the country a diagnosis it has been resisting for a decade: the Resource Curse is no longer a risk on the horizon. It is a condition already present, and its symptoms are everywhere Ram points — G$4.19 trillion in central government spending between 2021 and 2025 un-audited by a Public Accounts Committee still working through 2016; a Public Procurement Commission that has had no sitting commissioners since July 2025, a vacancy that was foreseeable three years out and was allowed to happen anyway; an Integrity Commission whose composition Ram calls a textbook case of loyalty over competence; and a presidency trailed by questions;  about an academic record, about Pradoville 2, about a farm — that have never been answered so much as outlasted.

Ram is careful, and this newsroom  intends to be equally careful in extending his argument. He does not accuse. He asks why the machinery built to answer these questions keeps failing to run. That is the right frame, and it is the one this editorial applies to two files The 592 Guardian has spent months building ; one on the contracts that has flowed toward a company employing the President’s brother, and one on the farm the President has never definitively explained.

AN INSTITUTIONAL DIAGNOSIS, CONFIRMED FROM THE GROUND UP

Our own reporting has spent the better part of this year tracing the same disease Ram diagnoses from the top down, from the bottom up. The Stabroek Surrender series examined the 2016 ExxonMobil Production Sharing Agreement and found a state that had bargained away ring-fencing — the one structural safeguard that would have kept new, cheaper-to-produce fields from resetting the cost-recovery clock on the whole contract area. The result, as we reported in “More Money, Weaker Guardrails,” is that the newly reached 50% profit-share milestone means less than it appears to: Uaru, Whiptail and Hammerhead, worth a combined $32.2 billion, now enter the same undivided pool the $55 billion cost bank just emptied from. Ram’s framing and ours converge on the same point from different directions — the problem was never only the split. It was the absence of the institutional architecture, ring-fencing among it, that would have made the split durable.

This is what Ram means, in blunter terms, by “institutions unable or unwilling to keep pace.” A Petroleum Commission proposed nearly a decade ago still does not exist. The Ministry of Natural Resources still leans on the same oil companies it is meant to regulate for technical direction and basic sector information.

And when a state cannot independently verify what its own regulated industry tells it, the same failure of verification tends to show up everywhere else government contracts money.

THE SIGMA CONTRADICTION

It shows up, for instance, in the case of Sigma Engineers Ltd Inc, a company incorporated in Guyana on October 6, 2022; and awarded its first government contract seven days later. Since then, Sigma has been the beneficiary of at least five Guyana Water Inc. contracts this newsroom has independently documented and priced: the Region Four Lot 3 plants at Caledonia, Cummings Lodge and Bachelor’s Adventure ($3.95 billion, amended); the Hope Plant ($3.57 billion); the CDB-funded Leguan/Wakenaam project ($1.49 billion); well-drilling works ($411.6 million); and the Shelter Belt rehabilitation ($2.44 billion). That subtotal, just above $11.8 billion, sits close to the $12.3 billion figure Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has publicly alleged.

Mohamed’s allegations named a second fact Sigma itself has since confirmed rather than denied: Mohamed Aqtar Ali, the President’s brother, is engaged by Sigma as a “senior technical consultant.” Sigma disputes the allegation’s framing and has threatened legal action over what it calls misrepresentation; but the substance of its rebuttal is not a denial that it received these contracts. It is a claim that the locally incorporated entity, specifically, received only one contract, awarded in 2026.

That claim runs directly into the paper record: the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board’s own approval letter for the Shelter Belt contract is dated December 31, 2025, and the original Region Four contract carries a signed date of October 13, 2022;  a week after incorporation. GWI’s own chief executive, for his part, has stated the utility was unaware of any Aqtar Ali involvement in procurement at all.

A company did not deny receiving billions in state contracts. It disputed the count — and the paper trail disputes it back.

This is precisely the gap Ram’s column names: not proof of wrongdoing, but the absence of a body capable of resolving the contradiction. A functioning Public Procurement Commission;  the one that has sat without commissioners since last July; exists for exactly this purpose.

In its absence, the public is left comparing a company’s legal letter against a regulator’s own paperwork, one contradicting the other, with no independent referee in sight.

 

THE QUESTION THAT OUTLASTS THE NEWS CYCLE

The same pattern holds for Long Creek. This publication has obtained and published a 2011 State Lands lease naming Bharrat Jagdeo as lessor and a lessee recorded as “Mohamed Ali,” covering roughly 20 acres later measured by satellite trace at closer to 155 acres than the sub-75-acre figure implied publicly. We have been careful, as Ram is careful with the allegations he catalogues, to hold the lessee’s identity as an open question rather than a settled one. What is not open to question is that the President has had ample opportunity to close that question himself, and has not. Ram’s own words on this apply without alteration: “presidential denial is not independent investigation either.” Neither, this newsroom would add, is silence.

A PATTERN, NOT A COINCIDENCE

None of this, taken piece by piece, proves capture. A brother’s consulting arrangement is not, by itself, corruption. A disputed contract count is not, by itself, fraud. An unresolved lease is not, by itself, evidence of anything beyond what it shows on its face. But Ram’s larger point is that the Resource Curse does not require a single smoking gun — it requires a pattern of institutional non-response, repeated often enough and across enough fronts that the absence of an answer becomes the answer. A Public Accounts Committee seven years behind. A Procurement Commission with no one sitting on it. A GWI contract history that contradicts a contractor’s own sworn account of itself. A presidential lease whose named lessee has never been publicly confirmed or denied by the one person positioned to end the question in a sentence.

Guyana is not cursed by its oil. It is being un-built, quietly, by the accumulating cost of questions nobody in a position of authority is required to answer. That is the grip Ram describes tightening. It tightens because, at every level examined here, someone with the power to loosen it has instead chosen not to.

— The Board