A Valentine’s Day meditation

📖 Estimated reading time: 10 minutes | 💌 A Valentine’s Day meditation

Today is Valentine’s Day. Across the world, love is being declared in the customary currencies—flowers purchased at inflated prices, chocolates wrapped in red foil, cards bearing sentiments their senders could not quite compose themselves. Love, we are told, is best expressed through affirmation. Through warmth. Through the soft language of reassurance.

But anyone who has loved deeply—a partner, a child, a friend—knows that love’s most demanding expression is not the valentine. It is the difficult conversation. It is the willingness to say what needs to be said when silence would be more comfortable. It is the refusal to pretend that everything is fine when the person you love is making choices that will cost them dearly.

So let this be a love letter to Guyana. Not the kind that flatters. The kind that tells the truth.

The Easy Love

It is easy to love Guyana. Anyone who has stood at the Stabroek Market at dawn, watching the light break over the Demerara River, knows this. Anyone who has eaten cook-up rice on a Sunday morning on your way home from a Saturday night party, or heard the kiskadee’s insistent call from a guava tree, or plunged into the “blacker” (the Lamaha canal water) after riding a punt in a canefield, or navigated the sublime chaos of a Georgetown afternoon—the minibuses, the sweetie vendors, or participated in Rum Shop arguments that are half-quarrel and half-theatre—knows that Guyana is a country that gets into your blood and stays there.

From Brooklyn, where many of us carry the country inside us like a second heartbeat, the love is perhaps even sharper for being exercised at a distance. We follow the news. We send barrels. We argue in group chats about politics with the ferocity of people who care too much, not too little. The diaspora’s love for Guyana is not theoretical. It is wired monthly through Western Union. It is felt in the ache of every phone call home, in every WhatsApp voice note, every Facebook message.

The largest budget in Guyana’s history—a measure of unprecedented fiscal capacity and unprecedented responsibility.

And now, in 2026, there is more reason than ever for pride. Guyana’s oil production has made it one of the fastest-growing economies on the planet. The Natural Resource Fund holds approximately US$3.5 billion. A GYD 1.558 trillion budget—the largest in the nation’s history—promises transformative investments in infrastructure, education, and health. International conferences draw thousands of delegates to Georgetown. Presidents of multinational corporations fly in to deliver keynotes at the Marriott. The world, at last, is paying attention.

This is the easy love: the love that celebrates. The love that waves the flag. The love that shares GDP growth statistics in the family WhatsApp group. And this love is real. It should not be dismissed.

But it is not enough.

The Hard Love

The harder love—the love that matters—asks uncomfortable questions. It does not accept slogans as substitutes for strategy. It does not confuse spectacle with substance. It insists that the people you love deserve not merely prosperity but the institutional architecture to sustain it, not merely roads but a transportation philosophy that serves communities rather than contractors, not merely budgets but a budget process that invites genuine democratic participation.

From over 40 countries—impressive production values, but will the hard questions be asked?

Consider the 2026 Guyana Energy Conference, which this week will bring together presidents, oil executives, and diplomats in Georgetown under the banner “Building Tomorrow’s Future Today.” Ten thousand attendees from over forty countries. Keynotes by ExxonMobil’s president, Chevron’s chairman, and Saudi Arabia’s climate envoy. A youth forum. A health walk. A taste of Guyana showcase. The production values are impressive. The sponsor logos are plentiful.

But love asks: What was missing from the agenda? Where is the serious, public, technically rigorous discussion of PSA optimization—not as anti-investment rhetoric but as standard international practice? Where is the independent environmental governance panel? Where is the frank assessment of whether local content requirements are being implemented with teeth or merely with good intentions? Where is the conversation about the Natural Resource Fund’s investment strategy and whether parking billions in safe but low-yield instruments while withdrawing aggressively for current spending represents prudent intergenerational stewardship?

These are not hostile questions. They are the questions that someone who loves Guyana’s future would ask. A conference that cannot accommodate them is a conference designed for courtship, not commitment.

Love as Accountability

The same principle applies across Guyana’s current transformation. Take the budget. The GYD 1.558 trillion allocation is historic, and the investments in education, health, and infrastructure are welcome. But as this journal has argued, Guyana’s budget process remains fundamentally one-directional. Parliament debates but does not substantively amend. Opposition proposals, regardless of their merit, are procedurally dead on arrival. The process produces the appearance of democratic deliberation without its substance—debate without amendment, scrutiny without consequence.

To point this out is not to oppose the budget. It is to love the democratic process enough to want to strengthen it. Independent fiscal institutions, parliamentary amendment authority within defined constraints, nonpartisan budget analysis—these are not luxuries of wealthy nations. They are the institutional foundations that determine whether wealth, once acquired, is wisely deployed.

GYD 196.1 billion allocated to road construction—is this the right transportation philosophy for Guyana’s future?

Or consider infrastructure. This journal has examined in detail the $196.1 billion allocated to road construction—55.4% of all infrastructure spending. We have compared Guyana’s transportation approach to the integrated systems of Europe, where high-speed rail connects economies, and to the road-dependent model of the United States, where trillion-dollar highway networks have produced suburban sprawl, environmental degradation, and generational maintenance liabilities. The question is not whether Guyana needs roads. Of course it does. The question is whether a nation at the earliest stage of its infrastructure development should be locking itself into the transportation philosophy of the mid-twentieth century—or whether the moment of maximum fiscal capacity is also the moment of maximum strategic opportunity.

Love does not wave the flag and look away. Love asks whether the Linden-Lethem corridor, once completed, will serve Guyanese communities or primarily facilitate resource extraction. Love asks whether digital infrastructure—universal broadband, telemedicine, distance education platforms—might deliver more transformative returns per dollar than asphalt. Love insists that climate resilience be designed into every project from the beginning, not retrofitted after the first catastrophic flood.

The Guyanese Condition

There is a particular weight to loving a small country. When nations of eight hundred thousand people make mistakes, the consequences are not abstract. They are your cousin who cannot afford the rising cost of living despite record GDP growth. They are the village that floods because sea defenses were deprioritized. They are graduates who leave because the professional opportunities promised by development rhetoric have not materialized into actual careers.

In a nation this small, every policy decision affects someone you know. The stakes are personal, not abstract.

Guyana’s history makes this love even more complicated. In a society still marked by the legacies of ethnic division and political polarization, critique is too often heard as disloyalty, and dissent is too easily reframed as sabotage. The accusation is familiar to anyone who has written a critical word about any government’s performance: you don’t love the country. You are working for the other side. You want Guyana to fail.

This is perhaps the most corrosive myth in Guyanese public life: that patriotism requires cheerleading. To love the country is to celebrate its leaders. That criticism and loyalty cannot coexist in the same sentence.

The opposite is true. The people who love Guyana most are the ones who refuse to accept mediocrity on its behalf. The teacher who holds students to standards they did not know they could reach is not being cruel. She is expressing the deepest form of belief in their capacity. The journalist who investigates procurement irregularities is not tearing down the country. She is trying to protect its future from those who would squander it. The policy analyst who argues that the NRF’s investment strategy could generate billions more for future generations is not opposing development. He is demanding that development serve more than the current electoral cycle.

What My Students Taught Me About Love

I teach mathematics at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, where many of my students come from the Caribbean, including Guyana. For over thirty years I have practiced what I call the “MEC to MIT” philosophy: meeting students exactly where they are while refusing to lower the ceiling on where they can go. This means telling a student that their current preparation is insufficient and that they are capable of extraordinary achievement. It means being honest about the gap between where they are and where they need to be—not to discourage them, but because closing that gap is the entire point.

The students who thank me years later—the ones who went on to graduate programs, to careers in engineering and data science and finance—never thank me for telling them they were doing great when they weren’t. They thank me for refusing to accept less than their best. They thank me for the hard love.

A nation is not so different from a student. Guyana is brilliant, resilient, and blessed with resources—natural, cultural, and human—that most countries can only envy. Its people have survived colonialism, ethnic strife, dictatorship, brain drain, and economic stagnation. They deserve an honest assessment of where the country stands and a rigorous vision for where it can go. They do not need cheerleaders. They need educators, analysts, and institutions committed to the hard work of building something that lasts.

A Valentine for Guyana

So here is my valentine, written from a cold Brooklyn Victorian on a February morning, with the Demerara three thousand miles away but never far from mind.

I love Guyana enough to say that a US$3.5 billion Natural Resource Fund, while impressive, could have been US$18 billion or more under a disciplined investment strategy—and that the difference between those two numbers is the measure of an opportunity we are not yet seizing. I love Guyana enough to argue that the 2026 budget should be debated and amended in a parliament where opposition proposals receive genuine consideration, not ritual dismissal. I love Guyana enough to insist that an energy conference worth the name should include independent critics alongside industry executives, that governance panels should be as prominent as investment panels, and that the voices asking hard questions deserve microphones as powerful as those amplifying corporate commitments.

I love Guyana enough to say that roads are not development, that asphalt is not progress, and that the Linden-Lethem corridor must be evaluated not by the ribbon-cutting it produces but by the communities it serves and the economic integration it enables. I love Guyana enough to worry about the children who will inherit whatever we build or fail to build—and to insist that intergenerational equity is not an abstract principle but a moral obligation we are either honoring or betraying with every withdrawal from the Natural Resource Fund.

And I love Guyana enough to believe that its people can handle the truth. That they are not so fragile that honest analysis will break their spirit, not so naive that they cannot distinguish between criticism and hostility, not so divided that they cannot find common ground in the shared ambition of building a country worthy of their sacrifices and their children’s hopes.

The easy Valentine says: You are beautiful and everything is wonderful.

The hard Valentine says: You are extraordinary, and you deserve better than what you are settling for.

Guyana, on this Valentine’s Day: you are extraordinary. And you deserve better than what you are settling for.

That is not the statement of a critic. It is the confession of someone who loves you.

💌 From Brooklyn, With Love

This Valentine’s Day meditation comes from the diaspora—from those of us who carry Guyana in our hearts across oceans and time zones, who wire remittances and send barrels and argue in group chats with the ferocity of people who care too much, not too little.

We love Guyana enough to tell the truth. We love it enough to ask uncomfortable questions. We love it enough to believe that its people deserve not merely prosperity but the institutional architecture to sustain it, not merely growth but governance worthy of that growth, not merely oil wealth but the wisdom to deploy it for generations yet unborn.

That is the hard love. That is the love that matters. That is the love Guyana deserves.

—

Supported By

We are grateful for the partnership and support of individuals and organizations committed to advancing Guyanese and Caribbean development and human capital investment.

Metallica Commodities Corporation

For over two decades, MCC has operated at the intersection of natural resource extraction and global logistics, trading all non-ferrous metals, including copper, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt, gold, and other precious metals across continents. With representative offices in Peru, Canada, Tanzania, and Guyana, MCC has witnessed firsthand how institutional quality determines whether resource revenues generate broad-based prosperity or concentrated advantage. The company’s experience in jurisdictions where oil and mineral wealth have transformed budgets—sometimes strengthening democratic governance, sometimes undermining it—informs their understanding that budget processes matter as much as budget size. As Guyana navigates its own resource-driven fiscal expansion, MCC recognizes that the frameworks governing how these unprecedented revenues are debated, allocated, and overseen will shape outcomes for decades. We’re grateful for their support of these critical institutional questions.

The GBJ Sunday Essay is sponsored by MCC and not written on its behalf. The views expressed are those of the author.

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