Breaking the Cycle: How Mathematics Can Help Guyana Escape Predictable Political and Economic Traps

Breaking the Cycle: How Mathematics Can Help Guyana Escape Predictable Political and Economic Traps

In September 2020, Guyanese voters watched with weary familiarity as yet another election turned into weeks of political uncertainty. Promises of unity gave way to ethnic mobilization, mistrust deepened, and hope once again slipped into resignation.

What if this wasn’t random? What if Guyana’s political turmoil, economic struggles, and social divisions followed predictable mathematical patterns—cycles that can be mapped, understood, and reshaped?

At the NAM 2024 Faculty Conference on Research and Teaching Excellence, mathematician Bourama Toni presented a framework that helps us identify these patterns. He argued that societies evolve like dynamic games, where strategic interactions create recurring loops of stability and disruption. For Guyana in 2025, this lens offers both a diagnosis and a roadmap for escape.

Guyana’s politics is a textbook example of what mathematicians call a repeated game. Two dominant parties, the PPP and APNU+AFC, repeatedly employ the same strategies. Coalition-building occurs before elections, followed by ethnic mobilization to secure votes, which inevitably leads to zero-sum electoral battles that divide rather than unite the population. The upcoming September 2025 elections reflect this same pattern. Six parties—PPP/C, APNU, AFC, Assembly of Liberty and Prosperity, Forward Guyana Movement, and We Invest in Nationhood—are all vying for power. New parties and emerging coalitions promise fresh alternatives, but history tells us what often happens next.

When the opposition fragments, it unintentionally strengthens the incumbents. This “spoiler effect” is well-known in game theory: smaller players shift the balance without winning themselves. After the election, dissatisfaction resurfaces, calls for unity grow louder, but the next cycle begins exactly the same way. This is not simply a political failure. It is a predictable loop—what Dr. Toni calls “predictable instability.” Unless the rules of the political game change, Guyana remains stuck in this cycle.

The same pattern appears in Guyana’s oil economy, our highest-stakes “subgame.” The government frames oil as a development windfall, promising infrastructure, social programs, and energy security. Opposition parties point to the asymmetric ExxonMobil contracts and push for renegotiation. Meanwhile, global actors such as international banks, Chinese infrastructure firms, and U.S. security advisors pursue their own interests, influencing how Guyana’s leaders respond.

Recent developments, such as ExxonMobil’s July 2025 arbitration loss to Hess Corporation over preemption rights in the Stabroek Block, demonstrate how external legal and corporate strategies continue to shape the field. But here’s the critical insight: when information is opaque, mistrust grows. Guyana’s lack of transparent, real-time oil revenue reporting leaves citizens in the dark. Politicians fill the gap with competing narratives, fueling another cycle: hope leads to suspicion, suspicion leads to protest, protest fades into resignation, and resignation eventually gives rise to hope again. Until information asymmetry is eliminated, this cycle will continue to repeat.

Diaspora engagement suffers from a related problem. It is a coordination trap. When diaspora investors believe the rule of law is strong, they send remittances, launch businesses, and advocate for Guyana abroad. When they sense instability or corruption, they withhold engagement, waiting for signals of trust. This creates a stalemate—a Nash equilibrium in game theory—where no single diaspora actor will take the first step unless others do too. That’s why efforts like a diaspora bond have struggled. It’s not just about financial structures; it’s about trust, governance, and credible guarantees. Without trusted institutions, engagement remains far below what it could be.

Dr. Toni’s research emphasizes an encouraging truth: limit cycles aren’t destiny. They can be disrupted with deliberate changes to the system’s design. For Guyana, this means making strategic interventions that alter the incentives behind recurring behaviors. Electoral reforms could mitigate the spoiler effect and encourage coalition-building rather than fragmentation. Transparency could become what mathematicians call an isochron—a shared timeline that aligns different parts of a system. In Guyana, real-time oil revenue dashboards, clear contract summaries, and public expenditure tracking would synchronize citizen expectations and reduce rumor-driven instability.

Breaking the diaspora coordination trap would require reducing the risk for first movers. A multilateral-backed Diaspora Investment Guarantee Fund could shift the equilibrium by making it easier for initial investors to act confidently. And perhaps most importantly, political leaders must face incentives that make ethnic mobilization and disinformation campaigns less rewarding than cooperation and collaboration. This requires not just new laws but new enforcement mechanisms that increase the cost of destructive short-term strategies and reward choices that benefit everyone across multiple electoral cycles.

If we map Guyana’s current feedback loop, it appears as follows: oil wealth generates political competition, which leads to ethnic mobilization, followed by public mistrust, then diaspora hesitancy, and ultimately, economic dependency, before reverting to oil wealth. But a positive cycle is also possible. Transparent oil management can lead to cross-party cooperation, which in turn fosters public trust, enhances diaspora confidence, diversifies investment, promotes sustainable development, and reinforces stability. This is what mathematicians call a positive equilibrium—a self-reinforcing system where today’s cooperative choices lead to tomorrow’s shared gains.

Guyana is not trapped by fate. It is caught in patterns. Political fragmentation, mistrust in oil governance, and diaspora hesitancy are not isolated failures but predictable outcomes of our current strategic structures. The good news is that patterns can be changed. By redesigning institutions, making payoffs transparent, and creating credible guarantees, Guyana can break free from destructive cycles and foster self-reinforcing progress.

The oil era is a game of unprecedented stakes, but it’s also an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the system. Mathematics teaches us one thing very clearly: the future isn’t random. It’s patterned. And those patterns can be reshaped. The real question for Guyana in 2025 is whether we are ready to think differently, not just about individual policies or political battles, but about the rules of the game itself.

Guyana’s future depends on whether we continue to cycle through predictable instability or consciously design a system that rewards cooperation and builds lasting trust. The choice is ours.

Guyana Business Journal Editorial Board