THE OPEN DOOR

 OPEN DOOR

On kakabellies, clogged drains, and the difference between a personality and an argument, this column opens the door to scrutiny.

By Guyana Business Journal · April 9, 2026

A column called “Peeping Tom” announces its epistemology in its title. It sees through gaps. It catches people in unguarded moments. It derives its authority from the angle — the oblique, the partially obscured, the view from outside the room looking in. There is art in that. There is also, occasionally, a limit.

No Keyhole Required

This column is called The Open Door. The name is likewise a declaration of method. We do not peer. We do not squint through keyholes at the habits of the returning diaspora, the psychology of the local professional, or the character of the politician who was educated abroad and came back loud. We open the door, walk through, sit down, and talk about the building — who designed it, why the roof leaks, what it would cost to fix it, and who is currently collecting rent.

We begin, as all inaugural columns should, with an occasion. Peeping Tom has provided one.

The April 8th column, The Return of the Kakabelly, is a pleasure to read and a frustration to think about — which is, to be fair, the precise combination that has made Peeping Tom one of the most durable presences in Guyanese public commentary. The column describes, with genuine wit and some psychological acuity, a recognizable type: the Guyanese who returns from abroad freighted with contempt, who measures Georgetown against Toronto and finds Georgetown wanting, who uses the failures of the country of their birth as a mirror in which to admire their own imagined elevation. Small fish returned to a familiar pond, puffed up, loud, and ultimately ludicrous.

The description is accurate. The type exists. Many of us can confirm this from personal experience, possibly with specific anecdotes we can share if you pour us a drink.

But here is where The Open Door must, with respect and without personal animosity toward Peeping Tom, open the door and point at something on the other side.

The kakabelly frame is a literary achievement that, when deployed politically, functions as a drain cover. It is placed, with great skill, over the opening through which accountable scrutiny might otherwise rise. The mechanism is elegant: any criticism of a system can be recast as evidence of the critic’s psychology. The person who notes that the Georgetown drainage infrastructure fails every time it rains, despite record oil revenues, is not engaging with a policy failure — they are, per the kakabelly theory, projecting their own failure onto the familiar landscape of home. The person who observes that a gas-to-energy procurement process appears to have been structured in ways that benefit particular contractors is not a concerned citizen exercising democratic muscle — they are a small fish trying to swim large.

This is not an analysis. It is immunization. And a country collecting US$761 million in oil revenue in a single quarter cannot afford the luxury of immunizing its institutions from scrutiny by diagnosing the personality of the scrutinizer.

GBJ Data Note: Guyana collected US$761 million in oil revenue in a single quarter, highlighting the country’s financial capacity and the need for institutional scrutiny.

And a country collecting US$761 million in oil revenue in a single quarter cannot afford the luxury of immunizing its institutions from scrutiny by diagnosing the personality of the scrutinizer.

Let us be precise about what the kakabelly column does and does not do.

It accurately identifies a tone problem that exists in some diaspora commentary. The returning Guyanese who has spent three decades in Mississauga and now holds forth on the civic failures of people who stayed and built lives under conditions the returnee escaped — that person has an obligation to some epistemic humility before opening their mouth. Peeping Tom is right about this. Tone matters. Manner matters. The person who arrives with a sense of superiority rather than seeking partnership has already undermined whatever useful thing they might have to offer.

What the column does not do — and what The Open Door is inaugurated precisely to do — is distinguish between tone and content. Between manner and substance. Between the kakabelly who deploys critique as self-aggrandizement and the citizen, diaspora, or local, who deploys critique because the building is structurally unsound and someone needs to say so plainly.

These are not the same person. Collapsing them is not social observation. It is political convenience.

The test is not difficult to apply. Is the critique directed at a culture, a people, a temperament — the general inadequacy of the Guyanese character, the hopeless backwardness of the tropical sensibility, the laziness or corruption that is apparently in the water? That is kakabelly. It deserves exactly the response Peeping Tom prescribes: quiet amusement, followed by strategic disregard.

Or is the critique directed at a specific system, a specific policy, a specific institutional failure with specific evidence attached? That is citizenship. And citizenship — inconveniently, necessarily, regardless of the passport the citizen holds or the city they flew in from — is the engine of a functioning democracy. Guyana, with its oil revenues, its ambitions, and its sixty-year diaspora argument still unresolved, needs more of the second kind, not less. It needs it from people at home and people abroad. It needs to be delivered with whatever level of grace the deliverer can manage, and received by institutions capable of engaging the substance rather than dismissing the source.

Citizenship — inconveniently, necessarily, regardless of the passport the citizen holds or the city they flew in from — is the engine of a functioning democracy.

Now, about those drains.

Kaieteur News — on the very same day Peeping Tom published the kakabelly column — ran stories touching on the Wales Gas-to-Energy project: a director linked to a corruption scandal in Venezuela, a government denial of an US$80 million arbitration payout, and the quarterly oil revenue figure of US$761 million. These stories did not appear because kakabellies wrote letters to the editor from their condominiums in Scarborough. They appeared because journalists exercised exactly the kind of uncomfortable, institutionally inconvenient scrutiny that the kakabelly frame, applied without care, would license us to dismiss.

This is the irony that The Open Door is obligated to name on its first day of operation: the column most likely to be cited as evidence that diaspora criticism is really just ego is published in the same newspaper that practices the most rigorous institutional accountability journalism in Guyana. Peeping Tom and the Kaieteur newsroom are not, on this question, in the same position. One writes about personality. The other writes about power. We need both. We cannot afford to let the former crowd out the latter, even elegantly, even with the word kakabelly doing its magnificent work in the headline.

One writes about personality. The other writes about power. We need both. We cannot afford to let the former crowd out the latter, even elegantly.

The Open Door will, in the weeks and months ahead, concern itself with the following questions, among others:

What does the oil money build, and for whom, and according to whose design? What is the relationship between diaspora institutional investment — the alumni associations, the STEMGuyana robotics clubs, the curriculum partnerships, the endowed chairs not yet funded — and the state’s own obligation to resource the receiving institutions? What does equitable development look like in a country where hinterland poverty reaches 74 percent while coastal Georgetown negotiates its identity as an oil capital? What is the minimum prior condition — in university funding, in faculty salaries, in governance capacity — that must be in place before diaspora brain circulation produces multipliers rather than sophisticated extraction?

These are not questions that yield to personality analysis. They require open doors, not keyholes.

To Peeping Tom, who has been doing this longer than most and better than many: this column is not your enemy. It is, in the most literal sense, your complement. You watch what people do when they think no one is looking. We will examine what the institutions do when everyone can see them plainly, and ask whether the view is acceptable.

To the kakabelly — and you know who you are, and so does everyone at the dinner party: the drain you are complaining about is real, your delivery remains insufferable, and the engineers who can fix it are, in fact, on their way, from Canada. Try to be civil when they arrive.

And to Guyana, which has survived worse than both of us: the door is open. Walk through. The conversation that matters is waiting on the other side.

GBJ Data Note: Hinterland poverty in Guyana reaches 74 percent, presenting a stark contrast to coastal Georgetown’s emerging identity as an oil capital.

What does equitable development look like in a country where hinterland poverty reaches 74 percent while coastal Georgetown negotiates its identity as an oil capital?

---

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.

Individual Supporters
Courtney Allen | All Te Networks | Corine Locke | Tony Harris | Roderick Alsopp | Dr. Michelle Luard

🇬🇾 Please support the Guyana Business Journal & Magazine today