The Architecture of Exclusion: Patronage, Oil, and the Unfinished Work of Building One People, One Nation, One Destiny

📖 Estimated reading time: 18 minutes

Every Guyanese knows the feeling. It is the recognition — sometimes sharp, sometimes slow — that the nation’s wealth is being distributed through channels that were not built with you in mind. It is the contractor who watches tenders awarded along lines he cannot name aloud but understands instinctively. It is the public servant whose union negotiations are met with indifference. It is the Amerindian village headman who learns that the carbon stored in his community’s forest has been monetized by the state and returned to him as a gift. The experiences differ. The architecture is the same.

What I am describing is not ethnic tension — that phrase has done too much work for too long, softening what it purports to name. Nor is it simply political polarization, a framing that distributes blame evenly where responsibility falls unevenly. What exists in Guyana is an architecture of exclusion: a system of ethnic stratification enforced not through legislation but through state patronage, discretionary resource allocation, and institutional capture. The Constitution prohibits discrimination. The Ethnic Relations Commission exists, at least nominally, to promote harmony. And yet, across the domains that determine life chances — government contracts, public employment, judicial appointments, resource allocation, land distribution, and access to the transformative wealth of oil — the outcomes speak a language that policy documents do not.

But naming a structure is only useful if it clarifies the path to dismantling it. And here is where I want to be precise about what this essay attempts. I am not writing a catalogue of grievance. The evidence I present is severe, and it must be faced honestly. But the purpose of facing it is not to fix our gaze on the wound. It is to understand an architecture well enough to take it apart — and to build, in its place, the institutional foundations of a Guyana that belongs to all of its people. The oil revenues now flowing into this nation are the inheritance of every Guyanese: a patrimony to be shared equitably. The question is whether we have the structures, and the political will, to ensure that they are.

The View from a Distance

When Aubrey Norton, the Opposition Leader, sat with the Guyana Business Journal for our Elections 2025 Conversation, he described growing up in Linden under what he called “semi-apartheid” — a society stratified along clear lines: the white-controlled bauxite company elite in Richmond Hill, the middle tiers in McKenzie, and his own community in Wismar/Christianburg. What Norton described in microcosm — a hierarchy not legislated but operationalized through the distribution of resources and opportunity — now operates at the national scale.

Consider the evidence. A 2022 analysis of 288 contracts awarded by the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) found clear evidence of ethnic discrimination in the award of government tenders.[1] As illustrated in Figure 1, companies owned by Indo-Guyanese, who represent 39.8% of the population according to the 2012 census,[14] were awarded 56.9% of contracts by number and a staggering 72.8% by dollar value. In stark contrast, Afro-Guyanese, who constitute 29.3% of the population, received only 10.4% of contracts, amounting to a mere 7.1% of the total value.[1] Afro-Guyanese civic organizations have put the disparity even more starkly, claiming that the government awards contractors of Indian descent some 95 percent of contracts. Even discounting for advocacy inflation, the procurement data tells its own unambiguous story.

vs. 7.1% for Afro-Guyanese firms — a 10× disparity against a population share of 39.8% vs. 29.3%. Source: Village Voice News analysis of 288 NPTAB contracts (2022); 2012 Census.[1][14]

In the public sector, allegations persist that Afro-Guyanese have been systematically overlooked for key positions in favour of Indo-Guyanese candidates. The United States State Department, in its 2023 Human Rights Report, has documented that Guyana’s political party system remains overwhelmingly race-based, with Indo-Guyanese forming most of the government and Afro-Guyanese forming the majority of the opposition as well as the civil service.[2] The judiciary has become a particular flashpoint. The case of Justice Joann Barlow — an eminently qualified criminal law expert reportedly bypassed for appointment to the Court of Appeal in favour of less experienced candidates perceived to align with the governing party’s political and ethnic interests — stands as a recent and vivid example.

In the allocation of development resources, recurring claims hold that Afro-Guyanese communities receive disproportionately less government funding compared to Indo-Guyanese areas. Organizations representing Afro-Guyanese interests have alleged that oil revenues are being channelled to infrastructure projects mainly in Indian communities, while public servants — who are predominantly Afro-Guyanese — continue to be underpaid. The sugar belt versus the bauxite belt; the coast versus the interior; Georgetown versus Linden — these are not merely geographic distinctions. They are ethnic geographies of resource and neglect.

The Academic Record

The most rigorous examination of these dynamics comes from the work of Dr. Collin Constantine, whose peer-reviewed research published in World Development provides an empirical foundation that no serious analyst can ignore.[4] Constantine’s findings demonstrate strong evidence of representational inequality: Indo-Guyanese are overrepresented in the top 10 percent of the income distribution relative to their share of the total population, while Afro-Guyanese and Mixed-Guyanese are overrepresented in the bottom 90 percent (Figure 2). This is not merely a gap. It is a structural feature.

Most striking is Constantine’s finding that the electoral turnover of 2015 — when an Afro-Guyanese-supported coalition assumed power — actually increased the dominance of Indo-Guyanese in the top income decile relative to other groups. This suggests something deeper than mere political patronage. It points to structural advantages embedded in commercial networks, access to capital, and proximity to the private sector that persist regardless of which party holds the presidency. The architecture of exclusion is not solely a function of who governs. It has roots in the colonial organization of labour, the post-independence distribution of economic assets, and the compounding effects of decades of ethnically preferential allocation.

And here is where Constantine’s work delivers its most important — and most coalitionally generative — finding: class-based inequality exceeds ethnic inequality in absolute terms (Figure 7). There are poor Indo-Guyanese who suffer under the same elite capture that excludes Afro-Guyanese more broadly. The architecture of exclusion serves ethnic elites of the governing class, not the Indian population as a whole.

This is not a reason to deny the ethnic dimension. It is a reason to build a politics that transcends it.

Oil: The Accelerant

What distinguishes the present moment from earlier periods of ethnic patronage is the sheer scale of resources at stake. When the commodity in question was sugar or bauxite, the consequences of exclusion were measured in modest livelihoods. When the commodity is oil — with revenues projected to exceed one hundred billion dollars over the coming decades — the consequences of exclusion are existential. As shown in Figure 3, Guyana’s oil production has skyrocketed from zero in 2019 to an estimated 900,000 barrels per day by the end of 2025, fueling the world’s fastest GDP growth rates — including a record 62.4% in 2022 alone.[5][6]

Up from zero in 2019. GDP growth hit a world-record 62.4% in 2022. Source: ExxonMobil Guyana (2025); IMF Article IV Consultation (2025).[5][6]

The cost of losing an election in an oil-based Guyana is categorically different from losing an election in a pre-oil Guyana. The governing party controls not only the routine functions of the state but the allocation of a resource windfall that will define the nation for generations. The Natural Resource Fund, Guyana’s sovereign wealth instrument, has been managed without opposition representation on its board — a departure from the principle that the national patrimony belongs to all Guyanese.[10] Every parliamentary seat now represents potential influence over revenue allocation, environmental oversight, and development planning. Every contract now carries the weight of oil-era magnitudes.

Oil has not created the pattern of ethnic exclusion. But it has transformed the stakes from inequity to something approaching permanence. When patronage operates over sugar revenues, the excluded community suffers deprivation. When patronage operates over petroleum revenues measured in the hundreds of billions, the excluded community faces structural marginalization that may compound across generations. This is starkly illustrated by the paradox of a nation where a 2025 Inter-American Development Bank report found that 58% of the population lives in poverty, with 32% in extreme poverty, despite its world-leading economic growth (Figure 4).[7] As Freedom House observed in its 2024 assessment, “ethnopolitical divisions have sharpened amid the influx of oil and gas revenue.”[3]

32% in extreme poverty. Source: Inter-American Development Bank Poverty Report (2025).[7]

In 2021, writing in these pages, I argued that effectively managing Guyana’s oil revenues requires “open, independent, rational, national, and objective discussions” — that the conversation is “larger than any political party or government official and requires bold ideas and broad rigorous and respectful engagement.” Four years later, the scale of the wealth has grown beyond what any of us imagined, and the architecture through which it is distributed has only become more entrenched. The discussion I called for has not materialized. What has materialized is a pattern of allocation that the data renders undeniable.

The Third Register: Indigenous Erasure

The discourse on ethnic exclusion in Guyana too often operates within a binary — Afro-Guyanese versus Indo-Guyanese, PNC versus PPP. This binary, while capturing the dominant political dynamic, obscures a third dimension that may be the architecture’s most revealing expression: the treatment of Guyana’s Amerindian peoples, who constitute 10.5% of the national population (Figure 5).[14]

The International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), in its 2025 report, described the government’s approach to Amerindian communities in terms that should alarm any democrat.[8] The state has been characterized as employing a “money tap” — villages that express open support for the governing party receive the most funding, while those less enthusiastic receive significantly less or face long delays. This is not development. It is conditional generosity deployed as political discipline. It is the architecture of exclusion at its most explicit: loyalty rewarded, independence punished.

The appropriation of forest carbon credits from titled Amerindian Village Lands — without the consent required by law — represents another dimension. The government has taken credits attributable to some 2.3 million hectares of standing rainforest on titled Indigenous lands and distributed a fraction back as largesse. As Figure 8 shows, of the revenue generated, only 23.9% was actually disbursed to the 241 villages whose lands generated the credits, with the government retaining 73.5%.[8]

Only 23.9% was disbursed to the 241 villages whose 2.3 million hectares of titled land generated the credits. Source: IWGIA, The Indigenous World 2025.[8]

Last week, on International Mother Language Day, I wrote in these pages about the threat that language loss poses to Indigenous wisdom and sustainable development. The response from readers and the wider coverage the piece received confirmed what many already sense: that the erosion of Macushi, Wapichan, Akawaio, Patamona, Wai Wai, and Lokono is not merely a cultural tragedy but a symptom of structural marginalization. Languages do not die in a vacuum. They die when the communities that speak them are deprived of the conditions that sustain them — land security, economic participation, educational investment, and political voice. They die when the state treats their speakers as electoral assets to be purchased rather than citizens to be served. They die when young people conclude that their mother tongue has no purchase in the world their government is building.

The work being done at the Bina Hill Institute in the North Rupununi — where students recite the National Pledge in Macushi, where Indigenous languages are taught formally alongside English — represents precisely the kind of intentional preservation that the state should be scaling rather than merely tolerating. That such efforts rest largely on the shoulders of community institutions rather than on the national development agenda is itself an indictment.

When we speak of the architecture of exclusion, then, we must speak not only of the Afro-Guyanese contractor denied a tender, not only of the public servant whose union is ignored, but also of the Amerindian village whose carbon is seized, whose language is dying, whose loyalty is the price of a road. The architecture operates across three registers, not two, as conceptualized in Figure 6. And the Indigenous register may be the one that history judges most harshly, because it combines economic exclusion with cultural erasure — the elimination not only of access but of identity itself.

The Watchdog That Does Not Bark

If the architecture of exclusion has an institutional accomplice, it is the Ethnic Relations Commission. Established under the Constitution with a mandate to promote ethnic harmony and to serve as a neutral arbiter against racial discrimination, the ERC has become a case study in institutional capture. Recent events have exposed a troubling pattern: contrasting treatment of individuals who made racially charged remarks, with one swiftly prosecuted and another recommended for counselling.[9] The Village Progressive Action Committee (VPAC) has publicly stated that this pattern “suggests a bias in which individuals of African descent face swift punishment, while those of [other backgrounds] are treated differently.”[9] When the very body mandated to address ethnic discrimination appears to apply differential standards along ethnic lines, it does not merely fail in its mandate — it validates the system it was created to dismantle.

The broader institutional landscape reinforces the pattern. The Guyana Elections Commission, polarized between governing and opposition appointees, has struggled to reach consensus even on minor matters. The Constitutional Reform Commission, constituted in 2024, suspended its work almost immediately over procedural questions. The Freedom House assessment for 2024 noted explicitly that “laws barring discrimination based on race, gender, and other categories are not effectively enforced.”[3] When every institution designed to check the concentration of power is either compromised, dormant, or captured, the architecture of exclusion operates without friction.

The Intellectual Honesty This Moment Requires

Any serious examination of Guyana’s architecture of exclusion must reckon with two complicating truths that partisans on both sides prefer to avoid.

The first is historical. The PNC’s record during the Burnham-Hoyte era — from the paramountcy of the party to the rigged elections, from the nationalization of private enterprise to the economic collapse of the 1980s — inflicted comparable exclusions on Indo-Guyanese. The suffering of Indians under PNC rule is neither imagined nor exaggerated. Many readers of this journal lived through it. The argument here is not that one side has clean hands. It is that the current system reproduces the same architecture under a different ethnic sign. The victims have changed. The structure has not. And it is the structure, not the ethnicity of its current beneficiaries, that must be dismantled.

The second truth is economic. As Constantine’s research demonstrates, class-based inequality exceeds ethnic inequality in absolute terms.[4] The architecture enriches ethnic elites, not ethnic populations. The Indo-Guyanese worker who watches the contractor class accumulate wealth from government tenders is not a beneficiary of the system — he is its alibi. His existence is invoked to deny the discrimination that his more powerful co-ethnics practice. His poverty is used to argue that the system cannot be ethnically biased because not all members of the favoured ethnicity benefit equally. This is the fallacy at the heart of every denial: pointing to the poor within the favoured group to obscure the systematic exclusion of the disfavoured group.

These two truths, taken together, point toward a conclusion that should unsettle every partisan: the architecture of exclusion is not the property of one party or one ethnicity. It is the default setting of the Guyanese state. It has been operated by the PNC and by the PPP. It has victimized Indians and Africans and Amerindians in different configurations across different eras. The question before this generation is not which ethnicity will next control the machinery. It is whether the machinery itself can be rebuilt.

Beyond the Red Dot: Toward the Whole Guyanese Tribe

In 2021, I invoked Susan Fowler’s use of the Troxler effect to describe the pitfalls of tribalism in Guyana: when we fix our gaze on the red dot of narrow tribal interest, the blue circle — the greater community, the shared patrimony, the whole of Guyana — disappears from view. Four years and billions of oil dollars later, the metaphor has only grown more urgent.

The architecture of exclusion will not be dismantled by a change of government alone. The PNC’s own history demonstrates that access to the state merely redirects the patronage rather than eliminating it. What is required is structural reform that makes ethnic exclusion institutionally impossible, regardless of which party holds power.

This means, at minimum: transparent and audited procurement systems with mandatory demographic reporting on contract allocation; an independent Ethnic Relations Commission with investigative and enforcement powers, appointed through a process insulated from partisan control; equitable representation in the management of the Natural Resource Fund and other institutions governing oil wealth; genuine implementation of constitutional protections for Amerindian land rights, including the right to free, prior, and informed consent over the use of resources on titled lands; and a national commitment to Indigenous language preservation and mother-tongue education as matters of development policy, not cultural sentimentality.

But structural reform, necessary as it is, will not be sufficient without a transformation in the political imagination. As I argued in 2021, Guyana’s political leadership on all sides must be challenged to foster tribal choice rather than relying on fear, threats, and power to secure cooperation. The logic of competence must subsume the narrow tribal logic that currently shapes our significant national policies. To envision Guyana and Guyanese as one multiracial and multiethnic tribe is the non-negotiable anchor needed for a stable and prosperous Guyanese nation.

This is not naïveté. It is the only politics adequate to the scale of the moment. When the patrimony at stake is measured in the hundreds of billions, the cost of ethnic patronage is not merely unjust — it is economically irrational. A nation that excludes three-fifths of its population from meaningful participation in the oil economy is wasting three-fifths of its human capital. A nation that seizes the carbon wealth of its Indigenous peoples without consent is a nation that is undermining the environmental stewardship on which its own Low Carbon Development Strategy depends. A nation whose institutions of accountability are captured by the interests they were designed to check is a nation building on sand.

Walter Rodney argued half a century ago that the real division in Guyana is not between African and Indian but between the powerful and the powerless.[11] The architecture of exclusion persists because it serves those who benefit from division. It will be dismantled only when a critical mass of Guyanese — across every ethnic community — decides that the structure is more dangerous than the discomfort of confronting it. The Indo-Guyanese rice farmer, the Afro-Guyanese teacher, and the Wapichan land rights advocate do not need to agree on everything. They need to agree on one thing: that the patronage state serves none of them, and that the oil inheritance belongs to all of them.

A Final Word

I have chosen to describe Guyana’s condition as an architecture of exclusion rather than reach for heavier language — not because the evidence would not support stronger terms, but because the purpose of this essay is construction, not indictment. To name a system as an architecture is to insist that it was built, that it was built by human decisions, and that it can be unbuilt by human decisions. It is to refuse the fatalism that says this is simply how Guyana is. It is to refuse the tribalism that says the answer is to capture the architecture for one’s own group rather than to redesign it for all.

The data in this essay is uncomfortable. It should be. But discomfort is not the destination. The destination is a Guyana whose institutions distribute the national wealth according to need, competence, and justice rather than ethnicity and political loyalty. A Guyana where the oil inheritance funds schools in Linden and roads in the Rupununi and clinics on the Essequibo Coast with equal urgency. A Guyana where a young Macushi woman, a young Indo-Guyanese man, and a young Afro-Guyanese woman can each look at the state and see an institution that was built with them in mind.

That Guyana does not yet exist. But the blueprints are available. The resources are abundant. And the architects — if they are willing to set down their tribal instruments and pick up shared ones — are already among us.

References

[1] Village Voice News. (2022, December 4). “An ethnic analysis of contracts awarded by the National Procurement and Tender Administration.” Village Voice News.

[2] U.S. Department of State. (2024). 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Guyana. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

[3] Freedom House. (2024). Freedom in the World 2024: Guyana. Washington, D.C.: Freedom House.

[4] Constantine, C. (2022/2024). “Income Inequality in Guyana: Class or Ethnicity?” ECINEQ Working Paper 2022-631; updated publication in World Development.

[5] ExxonMobil Guyana. (2025, November 12). “Daily oil production hits 900,000 barrels in Guyana’s Stabroek Block.” Press Release.

[6] International Monetary Fund. (2025, May 7). Guyana: 2025 Article IV Consultation—Press Release. IMF Press Release No. 25/132.

[7] Inter-American Development Bank. (2025). IDB Report Reveals Stark Poverty Reality Amidst Guyana’s Economic Boom. (As reported by Guyana Business Journal, December 2025).

[8] Bulkan, J., & Palmer, L. (2025). “Guyana.” In The Indigenous World 2025. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA).

[9] Village Progressive Action Committee (VPAC). (2025, November 1). “VPAC Calls Out ERC for Double Standards in Handling Offensive Behavior.” Public Statement.

[10] Stabroek News. (2024, June 28). “Opposition names Terrence Campbell to NRF Investment Committee.” Stabroek News.

[11] Rodney, W. (1981). A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

[14] Bureau of Statistics, Guyana. (2012). 2012 Census Compendium 2: Population Composition.