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In a wide-ranging interview on “The Countdown” with host Andrew Weekes, Dr. Terrence Blackman—Professor and Chair of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY, and founder of the Guyana Business Journal—delivered a sobering assessment of Guyana’s current trajectory. Speaking from Boston on the final Sunday of November 2025, Dr. Blackman articulated what he and others have termed Guyana’s “third founding moment”: a unique convergence of unprecedented oil wealth, persistent systemic challenges, and emerging existential threats that demand transformative leadership and national unity.
The conversation, spanning nearly two hours, revealed the analytical depth and moral clarity that have characterized Dr. Blackman’s engagement with Guyana’s development challenges. From the mathematics classroom to the geopolitical chessboard, his analysis connected seemingly disparate issues—educational failure, resource mismanagement, democratic deficits, and regional security threats—into a coherent narrative about a nation at a crossroads.
The Mathematics of Exclusion
Dr. Blackman began with an uncomfortable truth: Guyana’s education system is failing the majority of its children, with devastating long-term consequences. Drawing on his direct experience teaching Guyanese students at Medgar Evers College for over twenty-five years, he provided empirical evidence of a significant decline in mathematical competency. “I can chart in the work of the students the evolution of the educational effectiveness of Guyana within the context of mathematics,” he stated, “and I can say without contradiction that the quality of mathematics education has significantly declined in Guyana over the last 25 years.”
The statistics he highlighted should alarm every policymaker and parent in the nation. While the Ministry of Education has celebrated a 55% pass rate in mathematics at the CSEC level, Dr. Blackman reframed this figure: “What that says is that 45% of the students did not pass across the entire nation.” At more advanced levels, the situation grows more dire, with only 32% passing—a 68% failure rate.
But Dr. Blackman’s concern extends beyond statistics to their human implications. “If 68% of the students can’t get through a grade 12 exam in mathematics, what it means is that they’re doomed forever,” he explained. “They can’t be petroleum engineers. They can’t be accountants and financial analysts. They can’t participate meaningfully in the value chain that is being set up. Someone else will have to do that, and you will, unfortunately, become a serf in your own land.”
This is not hyperbole but mathematical reality. In Guyana’s emerging oil and gas economy, mathematical competency serves as the gateway to meaningful participation. Without it, citizens cannot access careers in petroleum engineering, geophysics, operations research, financial analysis, or the myriad technical fields that will define economic opportunity in the coming decades. The education system is thus producing a generation systematically excluded from the prosperity unfolding in their own country.
The root cause, Dr. Blackman argued, lies in teacher competency. “What we have is a situation where our teachers are not as effective in mathematics as they ought to be,” he observed, noting that he had previously reviewed the mathematics curriculum at Cyril Potter College of Education and proposed strengthening measures that were never implemented. Teachers cannot provide conceptual depth when they themselves know only the algorithms they must teach. The result is rote learning that produces students who can follow procedures but lack the deep understanding necessary for advanced work.
Dr. Blackman’s proposed solution is both straightforward and demanding: “A genuine effort aimed at improving the content knowledge of our teachers, from primary school, secondary school, and all the way up.” This means not superficial professional development conferences, but systematic upskilling that enables teachers to understand mathematics well beyond what they must teach. It means incentivizing continuous learning and rewarding demonstrated competency. It means, fundamentally, prioritizing expertise over political patronage in educational appointments.
He also called for curriculum reform, noting that the CXC examination system, while useful, “is weak” and “not globally competitive.” Having observed the Caribbean Science Olympiad, where Guyanese students consistently underperform peers from Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados, Dr. Blackman concluded that even top students lack the conceptual sophistication needed for institutions like MIT. Guyana, with its newfound wealth, has an opportunity to lead regional educational reform, establishing standards that prepare students not merely to pass examinations but to compete globally.
Perhaps most poignantly, Dr. Blackman framed educational failure as moral failure. “In a country of 800,000 people with perhaps 250,000 children in school, if 68% of the students can’t get through a grade 12 exam, we can’t sit here and say it’s okay for 68 out of 100 children to be consigned to a second-class life. It’s a moral imperative.” In a nation professing Christian, Hindu, and Islamic values, he suggested, allowing children to fail when resources exist to help them succeed represents a fundamental betrayal of those values.
The Paradox of Prosperity
In education, the conversation turned to economics, where Dr. Blackman identified a troubling paradox: Guyana boasts one of the world’s fastest growth rates—official forecasts project 10.3% GDP growth for 2025, with some estimates reaching 15.2%—yet nearly half the population lives on less than $5.50 a day. The nation possesses the highest per capita oil reserves globally, yet its citizens face rising food prices, stagnant wages, and limited access to quality healthcare.
“These things are not merely economic statistics,” Dr. Blackman insisted. “This is moral failure.” He continued: “It is a moral failure when you have billions of dollars coming into a government’s coffers and then children are going hungry. It is a moral failure when you have communities that don’t have clean water and electricity, when families do not have access to quality healthcare and education.”
The phenomenon has a name—Dutch Disease—and Guyana exhibits classic symptoms. The sudden influx of resource wealth draws investment and labor away from other industries, making the economy less diversified and less competitive. Prices rise as demand increases, but productive capacity in non-oil sectors stagnates or declines. The result is an economy paradoxically characterized by both rapid growth and widespread hardship.
Dr. Blackman pointed to his early writings on this subject, noting that years ago he advocated prioritizing agricultural diversification. “Oil was the seed money to set ourselves up,” he explained. “It’s not the money to live on, but it’s the seed money to set ourselves up.” The vision was clear: use oil revenues to modernize agriculture, invest in value-added processing, develop manufacturing capacity, and create a diversified economic base that could sustain prosperity when oil revenues eventually decline.
Instead, he observed, Guyana appears to be racing to exploit all resources simultaneously—both oil and gold—without strategic planning for sustainable development. “We’re not in a rush,” he noted. “We’re not under pressure to make a deal. We don’t have to give that away.” Guyana’s leverage lies precisely in not being desperate, in maintaining the option to partner strategically rather than selling resources at bargain prices to the first bidder.
He pointed to four nations as models: Chile, Botswana, Canada, and Norway. Each managed resource wealth effectively through different mechanisms—sovereign wealth funds, equitable revenue distribution, environmental stewardship, long-term investment strategies—and Guyana should study these cases to adopt best practices suited to the local context.
Critical to this economic vision is what Dr. Blackman termed “value chain integration”—creating pathways for ordinary Guyanese to participate in the oil and gas industry beyond menial roles. Currently, FPSOs operate 150 miles offshore, invisible to most citizens, their sophisticated operations inaccessible to local workers. “We’re not even seeing it. We don’t know what’s going on,” he observed. The local content legislation represents a start, but a more systematic architecture is needed.
Dr. Blackman envisioned regional opportunity offices where citizens could learn how to connect with emerging industries, access capital, develop relevant skills, and launch businesses serving those sectors. “In each region, the people who are in that region ought to be able to come to some place and say, ‘How can I be connected to the oil and gas industry, and what are things that I can do?'” This requires not vague exhortations to “prepare for oil” but concrete programs: loans for equipment, skills training in specific trades, incubation for small businesses, connections to procurement opportunities.
He also emphasized infrastructure that enables economic participation: roads connecting hinterland to urban markets, reliable electricity for businesses, modern telecommunications, and crucially, educational institutions like a revitalized GTI producing skilled tradespeople. His father’s trajectory—from land surveyor in Guyana to nurse in the United States after attending nursing school at age fifty—exemplified how technical education transforms family trajectories across generations.
Yet infrastructure means more than economic utilities. Dr. Blackman recalled growing up in Festival City (North Ruimveldt) in the 1970s, where his community had a library, sports fields, and spaces where “teacher X will teach us Spanish, or teacher Y will teach us math.” His grandparents’ generation “built for us a place that they understood was necessary for the world in which we’re living.” Today’s leaders, he suggested, must do likewise: build libraries, sports facilities, community centers, and educational spaces that position the next generation for the world they will inherit.
The economic challenge, ultimately, is one of distribution and inclusion. Growth statistics mean little if wealth concentrates among a small elite while the majority struggles. President Ali’s announcement of a “comprehensive national economic expansion and infrastructure integration plan” over the next five years sounds promising. Still, implementation will determine whether this moment becomes transformative or merely another missed opportunity.
Democracy Under Strain
The conversation’s most pointed critique concerned governance and democratic accountability. Dr. Blackman began with a concrete example: the boarding up of Stabroek Market vendors’ spaces in late November, just as Christmas shopping season commenced. The incident, he suggested, epitomized governance failures that extend far beyond a single market.
“That lack of consultation is a function of what you’ve just described,” he told Weekes, referring to the host’s litany of democratic deficits. “It’s this lack of consultation in this instance of people being displaced. No one knows what the project is. It’s just being done.” In a functioning democracy, major projects affecting citizens’ livelihoods would involve consultation, transparent communication of plans, and timing sensitive to economic realities. Displacing vendors at Christmas without warning or alternative arrangements suggests contempt for both democratic process and the vendors’ economic survival.
The broader pattern concerns Dr. Blackman more. “The fact that you have a 36-seat majority does not mean that you can do anything you want,” he emphasized. Democracy requires more than electoral victory; it requires robust institutions that check executive power, civil society organizations that advocate for affected communities, and leaders who see themselves as stewards rather than rulers.
“You are not the ruler of Guyana,” he stated bluntly. “You are a steward of the Guyanese patrimony, on behalf of the Guyanese people.” Stewardship implies accountability, consultation, and transparency—values that appear increasingly absent.
He noted that institutions meant to provide checks and balances—judiciary, police, military, civil service—seem to be “falling into the same kind of groupthink,” assuming that government will determine outcomes regardless of institutional logic or legal constraints. When no institution feels empowered to say “No, you should not do it that way; here are the ways to do it,” democracy withers into majoritarianism.
The opposition’s failures compound the problem. The inability of APNU and other parties to form a cohesive coalition has left governance essentially unchecked. “What is necessary in a democracy is not just one votes more than the other,” Dr. Blackman observed, “but the building up of a set of institutions, the building up of the judiciary, the building up of civil society, the building up of the PTA, the building up of various boards, the Lions Club… all of those places need to have some respect, and all of those places need to have some autonomy.”
He described conversations with young people devastated by the coalition’s collapse, who asked: “I don’t understand how these guys could do this.” The message youth receive is corrosive: if elders cannot find common ground in pursuit of national interests, why should young people believe in collective action or democratic participation?
Dr. Blackman acknowledged that fatigue may afflict some citizens, but he rejected the notion that Guyanese have lost their voice. “I know too much of the resilience,” he stated, referencing his Pomeroon roots, where ancestors purchased land post-emancipation and endured generational struggles. Guyanese will ultimately find their voice. The challenge of finding the voice has to do with the question of leadership of that voice and a vision from the leadership that allows for people to participate in that vision with some clarity and some cohesion.”
The path forward requires leaders to transcend partisan advantage and ethnic tribalism, to convene inclusive dialogues, to value expertise over loyalty, and to build consensus around a long-term national vision. It requires, in short, a maturity and humility currently in short supply.
Existential Threats on the Horizon
The interview’s most urgent section addressed regional security, specifically the situation in Venezuela. Dr. Blackman’s assessment was stark: “This is a very challenging moment.” Significant U.S. military assets surround Venezuela, suggesting possible regime change operations. President Maduro has warned that he would strike Guyana and Trinidad if the U.S. attacks Venezuela from their territories. Commercial aircraft have been warned away from Venezuelan airspace. A bombing incident in Guyana remains unexplained. Yet the government continues “business as usual,” convening no stakeholder consultations, no parliamentary committee meetings, no national dialogue on preparedness.
“At minimum, one should expect that the Maduro government will not survive long, unless there is some deal that is made at the higher power level,” Dr. Blackman assessed, noting the multi-million-dollar daily costs of U.S. military operations. The question is whether regime change will be peaceful or require military action. If the latter, Guyana’s position becomes precarious.
The geopolitical complexity runs deep. Venezuela remains a strategic partner to Russia and China, which sources petroleum there. Will Russia and China surrender strategic assets because the U.S. deploys warships? Or might great powers negotiate grand bargains—perhaps Trump, Putin, and Xi agreeing to respective spheres of influence?
Dr. Blackman suggested a possible scenario: “Maybe Trump and Putin and Xi will agree that Xi gets to take Taiwan, Putin gets to take Ukraine, and Trump gets to take Venezuela.” While speculative, the point stands: Guyana sits at the intersection of great power competition, and its leaders show little evidence of grappling with implications.
He emphasized the stark arithmetic of sovereignty: “100% of zero is zero. If there’s no Guyana, there’s no place really, and then it’s a whole different ballgame.” Partisan political victories become meaningless if the nation’s territorial integrity is compromised. This reality should compel political opponents to transcend their divisions and prioritize national survival.
Dr. Blackman recommended immediate action: convene existing parliamentary and national security infrastructure to address the crisis. He also proposed establishing a standing Committee on Sovereignty, including military representatives, government and opposition members, academics, and geopolitical experts—a permanent think tank focused on Guyana-Venezuela border issues and broader security challenges.
He credited Amanza Walton-Desir with prescient advocacy on immigration architecture, noting that she had warned years ago about the need to document Venezuelan migrants, distinguish economic migrants from returning family members, and track population movements. Post-bombing, the government essentially adopted policies she had proposed, but belatedly and reactively rather than proactively.
“We need more people thinking,” Dr. Blackman insisted, criticizing the “I syndrome—I know it all, I know everything, no one else knows anything.” In a democratic society facing existential threats, diverse expertise becomes essential. The government must engage all voices that can contribute to solving problems, moving beyond political tribalism to genuine stewardship.
He also noted economic uncertainties: What happens to oil prices amid geopolitical instability? What if Venezuelan oil returns to the market at scale? What does this mean for Guyana’s revenue projections and the social programs they fund? These questions demand sophisticated analysis, not wishful thinking.
The Diaspora Dividend
Throughout the conversation, Dr. Blackman articulated a vision for diaspora engagement that transcends occasional remittances or passive observation. The Guyanese diaspora, he argued, represents a strategic asset insufficiently leveraged for national development.
He mapped diaspora expertise geographically: Atlanta hosts extensive business ownership and entrepreneurship; Houston offers oil and gas industry connections; Washington, D.C., provides access to trade policy and government influence; New York brings business, education, and finance expertise; the United Kingdom offers international connections. Each cluster possesses knowledge and networks directly relevant to Guyana’s development challenges.
His model draws from India, specifically the Harish Chandra Institute in Allahabad, where he spent three months in 2000. There, Indian academics from around the world convened annually, bringing high school and college students to engage with cutting-edge mathematics and physics. Students in India are thus connected directly to Princeton faculty, Australian researchers, and London professors—the global frontier of their disciplines.
The Queens College Summer Math Institute, which Dr. Blackman founded in 2015-16, attempts to replicate this model. Each summer, students from Queens College and other Georgetown schools engage not with rote CXC preparation but with conceptual mathematics that “begins to orient their mind to a world of learning that is beyond that.” The program continues through his former student, Dr. Cleveland Waddell, now a researcher at Sandia National Labs.
Technology enables this engagement. “We are having this conversation, mediated by Zoom,” Dr. Blackman noted, “and I should say, for those of you who doubt, the very idea of Zoom is mediated by mathematics.” Geographic distance need not prevent collaboration when video conferencing, shared documents, and real-time communication span continents instantaneously.
Yet he observed tensions between homeland and diaspora communities: “There’s a kind of tension that emerges between folks who are at home and folks who are in the diaspora, as to questions of value and who deserves a lot and so on.” This zero-sum thinking misses the opportunity. “The issue is, what are the ways in which we can leverage our collective expertise to move our communities forward?”
The vision is practical: Guyanese in Houston engage ExxonMobil on technical standards and employment practices; those in Washington advocate for favorable trade agreements; New York-based educators share curricula and pedagogical innovations; London contacts facilitate international partnerships. Meanwhile, academics worldwide contribute through virtual seminars, curriculum review, student mentorship, and policy analysis.
Dr. Blackman’s own trajectory exemplifies this model. From his position at Medgar Evers College, he founded the Guyana Business Journal, hosts weekly interviews with international experts on Guyana-relevant topics, conducts mathematics camps, reviews curricula, and contributes policy analysis—all while maintaining his academic career and family life in the United States. It demonstrates how diaspora members can make “substantive contributions to one’s hometown, in one’s home place, regardless of where you find yourself in the world.”
But he insists on one condition: expertise must be valued. “Expertise matters. It really does matter.” Hiring based on political loyalty or ethnic affinity rather than competence produces mediocrity across critical functions. When hospitals employ nurses from the 68% who failed mathematics exams, when they can’t distinguish a tenth from a hundredth, “it will cost you your life.”
The challenge for Guyanese leadership is cultivating humility—recognizing that no individual, party, or ethnic group possesses all necessary knowledge. “If someone understands how to do something, and I allow them to work with me in the capacity that moves us both forward,” Dr. Blackman reflected, “it’s no skin off my back.”
Addressing the Exxon in the Room
Host Andrew Weeks posed a question that has circulated in some political quarters: Does ExxonMobil employ Dr. Blackman to conduct public relations favorable to the company?
“I can say on the record unequivocally that I am not working for ExxonMobil,” Dr. Blackman responded. “I hope at some point that folks will understand that you can have discussions with anyone, and I’m perfectly happy to have discussions with ExxonMobil about ways in which we can move Guyana forward.”
He contextualized this willingness: ExxonMobil operates a campus in Houston where mathematicians conduct operations research. “I think Guyanese mathematicians ought to be a part of that,” he stated. Engaging with the company to create opportunities for Guyanese participation in sophisticated technical work serves national interests.
“We have to not have this fear of being tarred in this way,” he continued, characterizing the allegation as exemplifying a broader problem: “The ability to malign and characterize individuals whom folks don’t know but perhaps might have some political difference with, so that the critique becomes not a critique of substance but a critique of personal slander.”
He took the opportunity to clarify his position on parent company guarantees for oil spill liability—another area where critics have alleged he favors ExxonMobil’s interests over Guyana’s. “I think Guyana is entirely right to do everything in its power to ensure that it has the maximum possible assurances that, above and beyond whatever insurance ExxonMobil in Guyana has, they have some assurance from the ExxonMobil parent company that an oil spill will be covered.”
He recalled attending a conference years ago that examined technical aspects of oil spills, including how ocean currents would carry contamination across the Caribbean, potentially affecting islands as distant as Barbados. “If such a thing were to happen, it would be a genuine catastrophe, and certainly one would not expect the countries that are vulnerable to bear the cost.”
“This has never been contentious for me,” he emphasized. “It’s never been in any place that I’ve written something, and I’ve written hundreds of things in the public domain. So there is my position.”
The exchange highlighted the challenges facing public intellectuals in polarized environments. Substantive engagement with complex issues—acknowledging both opportunities and risks in oil development, recognizing that companies possess expertise even as they require strict accountability—becomes caricatured as collaboration with external interests. Yet development requires precisely this nuanced engagement, neither demonizing foreign investment nor uncritically accepting corporate priorities.
A Personal Journey
Dr. Blackman’s analysis carries authority partly because of his personal trajectory—a journey from Georgetown to MIT that embodies both individual achievement and systemic insight into how educational opportunity transforms lives.
Born in Georgetown with roots in Pomeroon and Lodge, he attended Central Primary School and Queens College before emigrating to New York for university. At Brooklyn College, he initially pursued a career on Wall Street, landing a stockbroker position after graduation. His life might have followed that lucrative path but for a summer tutoring job at Kingsborough Community College.
There, he worked with single mothers on public assistance, preparing them for admission to the nursing program. At summer’s end, one woman who failed the mathematics exam came to his office and “burst into tears,” asking, “Do I have to do this? Why do I have to do this? I can’t do this.”
“It struck me that here was something that should be done, an exam that was at the level of the ninth to twelfth grade, and this mathematics exam at the level of the ninth to twelfth grade was something that would determine the lives of many, the trajectory of the lives of many people in our community,” he recalled. “At that moment, I stopped thinking about math as a kind of trick that I knew how to do, and more as something that had to do with, broadly speaking, the advancement of a community.”
He left Wall Street, pursued a doctorate at the CUNY Graduate Center, and joined Medgar Evers College in the mid-to-late 1990s. “I’ve always thought I made the biggest mistake in my life not staying on Wall Street,” he joked, but his subsequent career suggests otherwise. He co-founded Medgar Evers’ undergraduate mathematics program, served three years as Dean of the School of Science, Health and Technology, held visiting positions at MIT and the Institute for Advanced Study, and taught thousands of students—many from Guyana—across three decades.
During the interview, he noted with evident pride, the building behind him that “used to be a garbage depot.” He served on committees shaping the transformation of the School of Science, Health, and Technology into a $250 million state-of-the-art facility that now anchors the corner of Bedford and Crown in Brooklyn. “I feel very connected to it because I spent time being part of committees that would help to shape what this looks like and the kind of education that folks receive in it, and that includes many young people from Guyana.”
His father’s story also informs his perspective. Terrence Blackman Sr. worked as a land surveyor in Guyana, attended GTI, and instilled in his son an appreciation for technical education’s transformative power. Upon emigrating to the United States at around age fifty, the senior Blackman returned to school and became a nurse. At his graduation, Dr. Blackman discovered that several of the graduating nursing students were his former mathematics students. “They looked at him, and they looked at me, and they said, ‘Terrence Blackman, I now know who you are talking to.'”
The anecdote illuminates multiple themes: education as a lifelong possibility, the interconnection of seemingly separate lives, the mathematics-to-nursing pipeline that determines healthcare workforce quality, and the gender dynamics of nursing (his father exemplified male participation in a female-dominated field).
Dr. Blackman’s athletic background also shaped his leadership philosophy. As an opening batsman of Queens College’s cricket team and captain of the basketball team, he learned that “team must come first before all of the people in it” and that leaders must “elicit from all the people the various skills.” Not everyone contributes identically, but all contributions matter. Individual brilliance cannot substitute for teamwork, especially when facing institutional opponents with vastly greater resources.
This sports metaphor recurred throughout the interview. Guyana’s development challenge is “not a T10 match, it’s a test match” requiring patience, strategy, and partnerships. When a player fails on the first ball, they cannot “pack up and go home.” When facing Exxon Mobil’s institutional power and resources, “no single Guyanese can do that, no single political party in Guyana can do that,” but “Guyana can do that, the Government of Guyana carrying out the will of the Guyanese people.”
The Moral Dimension
Undergirding Dr. Blackman’s policy critiques is a consistent moral framework. Repeatedly, he characterized Guyana’s failures not merely as inefficiencies or suboptimal outcomes but as moral failures in a nation where majorities profess religious faith.
“In a country where people profess religious beliefs—Christianity, Hinduism, Islam—these are moral failures,” he stated regarding child poverty amid oil wealth. “It is a moral failure when you have billions of dollars coming into a government’s coffers and then children are going hungry.”
This framing elevates policy debates beyond cost-benefit calculations to questions of fundamental values. What does it mean to claim religious faith while tolerating preventable suffering? What does it mean to celebrate GDP growth while half the population languishes in poverty? What does it mean to invest in prestige projects while 68% of students fail mathematics exams that determine their life trajectories?
He located this moral imperative historically, referencing ancestors who “bought the lands in the Pomeroon” post-emancipation, who endured “licks in the slavery time,” who built Festival City with libraries and sports fields for their children’s benefit. “They built for us a place that they understood was necessary for the world in which we’re living. And I think that’s part of what we have to do within the context of our current economic and educational infrastructure.”
The moral test, ultimately, is intergenerational: “Our children will look back and make the judgment about what we have done and whether or not we’ve done it, and one prays that they will find us not wanting.” Current leaders hold in trust resources and opportunities unprecedented in Guyanese history. How they steward this inheritance—whether they build foundations for sustainable prosperity or squander a one-time windfall—will determine their moral legacy.
Dr. Blackman also invoked reciprocity norms embedded in traditional leadership. “We give them privileges in the community so that when times get rough, they’re supposed to stand up and defend the community. Unfortunately, what we found is that when times have gotten rough, they’ve turned around and decimated the community themselves.”
This betrayal of communal expectations—taking privileges while shirking responsibilities—explains why many citizens feel abandoned by leaders who were supposed to protect collective interests. Restoring trust requires leaders who genuinely embody stewardship, who see authority as an obligation rather than an entitlement, and who value collective welfare over personal enrichment.
The Third Founding
Dr. Blackman concluded by returning to David Hinds’ concept of Guyana’s “third founding moment.” Just as emancipation marked a first founding and independence constituted a second, the presence of oil wealth creates an opportunity to “make real the promise of Guyana.”
But founding moments are not guaranteed successes. They represent potential—potential that can be realized through wisdom, unity, and long-term vision, or squandered through shortsightedness, division, and greed. Which path Guyana takes remains undetermined.
The interview illuminated interconnections among challenges that might appear separate: educational failure produces citizens unable to participate in an emerging economy; economic mismanagement produces poverty amid wealth; governance deficits produce policy incoherence; opposition fragmentation removes democratic accountability; security threats exploit national disunity. These are not isolated problems but facets of a systemic crisis in national leadership and vision.
Yet Dr. Blackman’s analysis, while unflinching in critique, ultimately expresses faith in Guyanese resilience. “I know too much of the resilience… I’ve seen my father and mother and my grandfathers and grandmothers, and growing up in Lodge, Alexander Village, North Ruimveldt, and learning how to live.” He believes Guyanese will find their voice, though they need leadership providing a coherent vision around which to coalesce.
His own work—the Guyana Business Journal, the mathematics camps, the policy analysis, the stakeholder engagement—models how diaspora members can contribute substantively. By bringing international expertise to bear on local challenges, by facilitating conversations among experts across disciplines, and by documenting best practices and articulating alternatives to current policy, intellectuals can serve as resources for communities grappling with complex development challenges.
The conversation ended with host and guest exchanging holiday greetings, but the substantive message lingered: Guyana stands at a critical juncture. The decisions made now—about education, economic management, governance, security, diaspora engagement—will reverberate for generations. Current leaders hold extraordinary responsibility and extraordinary opportunity. Whether they prove equal to this moment will be judged not by contemporary partisan scorekeeping but by the world their children inherit.
As Dr. Blackman stated in his closing: “Our children will look back and make the judgment about what we have done and whether or not we’ve done it, and one prays that they will find us not wanting.” For Guyana’s sake, for the sake of those 68% of students currently failing mathematics exams, for the sake of families struggling on less than $5.50 daily amid unprecedented national wealth, for the sake of a nation’s sovereignty in an increasingly dangerous regional environment—one indeed prays the same.
Please see the entire interview here.
Dr. Terrence Blackman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, and founder of the Guyana Business Journal. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the CUNY Graduate Center and has held distinguished positions at MIT (as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His research focuses on number theory, quaternion algebras, and quantum computing applications, with particular emphasis on broadening participation in the mathematical sciences. Recognized by The HistoryMakers in 2023, he continues to bridge academic mathematics and community development through educational initiatives in New York and Guyana.
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Editor’s Note
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