You Can Fool Some of Us Sometime: A 592 Guardian Reply to Go-Invest

FACT CHECK · FISCAL GOVERNANCE

You Can Fool Some of Us Sometime: A 592 Guardian Reply to Go-Invest

Peter Ramsaroop’s essay on escaping the resource curse reads well on a podium. It does not survive contact with the Auditor General’s numbers, the IMF’s own tables, FIFA’s Golden Handshake Is a Governance Emergency, Not an Investment Strategy or the bill Parliament passed without debate three days before he published it.

The 592 Guardian Board 

There is an old vernacular truth that predates every consultancy deck and every Go-Invest slideshow: you can fool some of us sometime, but not all of us all the time. Peter Ramsaroop, Chief Investment Officer at Go-Invest, has published an essay this week insisting Guyana is “writing a different story” than the resource-cursed petrostates of history.

He cites the Natural Resource Fund. He cites parliamentary oversight. He cites diversification, institution-building, and a people-centred development model.

We took him at his word and went to the primary sources — the Auditor General’s findings, the IMF Article IV reports, the Bank of Guyana’s own fund disclosures, and the Hansard record of what Parliament actually did this week.

What we found is not a different story. It is the same story, told with better production values.

CLAIM ONE: “PARLIAMENTARY OVERSIGHT AND TRANSPARENT REPORTING”

It is true that the Natural Resource Fund Act requires parliamentary approval before withdrawal, and that the Bank of Guyana publishes quarterly disclosures. Mr. Ramsaroop is not lying about the statute. He is simply not telling readers what independent analysts say happens after the statute is satisfied.

Stabroek News’s own Budget Focus 2026 analysis is blunt on this point: oversight mechanisms remain weak, parliamentary committees are ineffective or dormant, and the Public Accounts Committee is years behind in examining the public accounts it exists to examine.

Accountability architecture that cannot keep pace with the money flowing past it is not oversight. It is a building with the lights on and nobody inside.

More damaging to Mr. Ramsaroop’s framing: opposition parliamentarian Dr. Terrence Campbell has filed legal proceedings arguing the government’s headline NRF balance figures conceal roughly US$2.61 billion in withdrawals over three years that he says were routinely used to fund ordinary government operations rather than the national-development and emergency purposes the Act specifies.

That dispute is now before the courts. You do not litigate transparency you already have.

“Oversight that produces a lawsuit over what the numbers mean is not the safeguard the essay describes.”

CLAIM TWO: “OIL IS NOT OUR DESTINATION; IT IS OUR CATALYST”

The 2026 approved NRF withdrawal — US$2.37 billion — will finance roughly one-third of the entire national budget. Stabroek News’s fiscal analysts go further, and we agree with them: they dispute the very accounting convention of booking NRF withdrawals as current revenue at all, calling it a classification that masks how dependent the Budget already is on oil-financed transfers.

A country financing a third of its national budget from an oil fund is not treating oil as a catalyst. It is treating oil as the operating account.

CLAIM THREE: THE DIVERSIFICATION NUMBERS, READ IN FULL

Here Mr. Ramsaroop is on his firmest ground, and fairness requires us to say so plainly. The IMF’s most recent Article IV consultation found real non-oil GDP expanded over 13 percent in 2024, and projects non-oil growth averaging roughly 6.75 percent annually over the medium term — genuinely above Guyana’s pre-oil decade average.

Construction, manufacturing, and agriculture are all posting real gains.

But context is not the same as contradiction. In the same years the non-oil economy grew by low double digits, oil-sector GDP grew by 17 to 58 percent. Diversification is occurring at the margins of an economy whose center of gravity is moving further toward petroleum, not away from it.

An essay that leads with diversification and never mentions the growth differential between oil and non-oil sectors has chosen its numbers, not reported them.

THE “NEW GROWTH PILLARS”, SECTOR BY SECTOR

Mr. Ramsaroop’s essay names business process outsourcing, agriculture, and tourism as three of Guyana’s emerging growth pillars alongside oil. Each deserves its own scrutiny, because each is doing very different work than the essay claims.

Business process outsourcing is not a growth pillar. It is a retreating sector dressed as one. More than 2,000 BPO jobs were shed in Guyana within a matter of months, against a government target of 15,000 contact-centre jobs that remains nowhere in sight.

Itel — a company that had only recently announced ambitious expansion plans — shut down entirely, laying off over 400 workers and citing client losses and rising costs in Guyana. French BPO giant Teleperformance closed a facility as well. Asked directly about the sector’s health, Mr. Ramsaroop himself dismissed concerns that oil-sector poaching was driving the exodus, telling one industry outlet that call-centre workers “wouldn’t necessarily be looking to join an oil company.” That may be true, but it does not explain where the workers — or the companies — actually went.

An industry that is losing its anchor tenants is not a pillar. It is a hole in the floor with a press release taped over it.

Agriculture’s growth has nothing to do with Go-Invest. The sector is real and it is expanding — the Ministry of Agriculture reported a $106.6 billion budget allocation for 2026 and cites $7.4 billion invested in hinterland agriculture over five years. But that money moves entirely through Minister Zulfikar Mustapha’s ministry — drainage and irrigation, livestock, fisheries, rice-farmer relief grants — not through Go-Invest’s investment-attraction apparatus.

When Mr. Ramsaroop lists agriculture as evidence of his office’s diversification strategy, he is claiming credit for a ministry’s budget line his own agency does not administer.

Guyanese farmers know exactly whose office they walk into for support, and it is not the one that wrote this essay.

Tourism’s growth is real, and still tiny. Guyana closed 2025 with 453,489 visitor arrivals, a genuine 22 percent year-on-year increase, and the Guyana Tourism Authority projects 550,000 by the end of 2026. Those are honest numbers and we report them as such.

But independent tourism trackers place Guyana as the least-visited country in South America even as that growth continues — a 22 percent increase off a small base is still a small number. Presenting a percentage without its denominator is a favourite trick of every government relations office in the world, and it is the same trick at work here.

THE OMISSION THAT MATTERS MOST: DEBT

Nowhere in Mr. Ramsaroop’s essay does the word debt appear. Here is what he left out. Domestic public debt rose from G$80.0 billion in 2019 to G$1,004.3 billion in 2025 — an increase of 1,155 percent — and is projected to reach G$1,245.1 billion in 2026. External debt rose from US$1.305 billion to US$2.920 billion over the same stretch, a 124 percent increase, projected to hit US$4.355 billion in 2026, a further 49.1 percent jump in a single year.

An essay invoking “disciplined management” and “responsible leadership” while debt compounds at quadruple-digit percentage growth is not describing fiscal discipline. It is describing its absence, in the register of a press release.

CLAIM FOUR: “INSTITUTION BUILDING IS EQUALLY CENTRAL”

This is the claim that collapses fastest against our own reporting.        In the same week Mr. Ramsaroop published his essay, Parliament passed the Guyana Development Bank Bill — without debate — concentrating discretion over roughly $40 billion in lending authority in the Finance Minister’s office alone.

The Bill’s Section 5(2) quietly permits collateral and interest terms at ministerial discretion, contradicting the public pitch of “interest-free, no collateral” financing. Section 23 sets no Guyanese-citizenship eligibility requirement.

The board is appointed entirely at the Finance Minister’s discretion, with no reserved seats for opposition or civil society. And the Bill’s offence provisions criminalize borrower misconduct while specifying no offence at all for insider self-dealing among the funds it controls.

You cannot cite institution-building as evidence against the resource curse in the same week your own Parliament builds an institution with none of the institutional safeguards the resource-curse literature actually calls for.

WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SAY

OUR ASSESSMENT

Mr. Ramsaroop is not wrong that Guyana has written more safeguards into law than most first-generation petrostates managed. The Natural Resource Fund Act is a real statute with real mechanics. Non-oil growth is real. None of that is fiction.

What is fiction is the picture assembled from only the safeguards that flatter the government and none of the numbers that don’t. A resource-curse defense that omits the debt trajectory, omits the pending litigation over fund transparency, omits a $40 billion bill passed without debate in the same news cycle, and lists a collapsing BPO sector and a ministry budget it does not administer as evidence of its own strategy is not analysis.

It is advocacy wearing analysis’s clothes — and Go-Invest’s Chief Investment Officer is not a neutral narrator of Guyana’s fiscal health. He is paid to sell it.

Our readers are academics, professionals, and an informed diaspora who do not need the pitch. They need the numbers Mr. Ramsaroop left out of his own essay. We have supplied them here, sourced and citable, so that the next time this argument is made — and it will be made again — it can be made honestly, or not made at all.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian