On the two equilibria of Guyana’s opposition, and the development project that could break the deadlock

 

Sunday Essay · Opposition Coordination & Sovereign Wealth

On the two equilibria of Guyana’s opposition, and the development project that could break the deadlock.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · June 7, 2026

I. The Wealth and the Precondition

At the end of April 2026, the Natural Resource Fund crossed four billion United States dollars for the first time.^[1] Production offshore, which averaged some seven hundred thousand barrels a day through 2025, has since pushed past nine hundred thousand^[2] and is climbing toward one and a quarter million by late 2026;^[3] the 2026 budget, at one and a half trillion Guyana dollars, draws very nearly two and a half billion United States dollars from the Fund to finance roughly a third of its spending.^[4] These are not the figures of a poor country. They are the figures of a country that has, almost overnight, acquired the means to answer questions it has been asking since 1966 — and the only remaining question of consequence is who will be trusted to answer them, and how. The question of who governs that wealth, and under what constraints, is ultimately a question of institutional design — and it is one the opposition’s structural fragmentation makes harder to answer.

A democracy is not only a procedure for choosing those who govern. It is also a mechanism for keeping them honest, and that second function rests on a quiet precondition we seldom name: the standing presence of a credible alternative. A government that faces no plausible successor is not disciplined by the prospect of replacement, and a citizenry that perceives no alternative learns, slowly, to expect less of the men and women who hold its wealth in trust. In the third year of the oil transformation, the health of that alternative is not a parochial concern of the parties. It is a national-development question, and we ought to treat it as one.

II. The New Arithmetic and Its Cost

It is, at present, an unhealthy alternative.

The September 2025 elections returned the People’s Progressive Party/Civic to office and, in the same stroke, redrew the opposition beyond recognition.^[5] A party three months old, We Invest in Nationhood, became the principal opposition with sixteen seats.^[6] The People’s National Congress Reform, anchor of the A Partnership for National Unity alliance, fell to twelve and surrendered Linden — Region Ten, Upper Demerara-Berbice, a seat thought as immovable as anything in our politics.^[5] The Alliance For Change, partner in the coalition that governed between 2015 and 2020, lost its place in Parliament entirely.^[5] By January, the new arithmetic had hardened into open estrangement: when the National Assembly convened to elect a Leader of the Opposition, the APNU members rose and left the chamber rather than endorse the man the numbers had chosen. The opposition, in plain terms, cannot at present agree even on who speaks for it.

The dysfunction is not abstract. It now reaches into the machinery of representation itself. The reconstitution of the Guyana Elections Commission has become entangled in the unresolved question of opposition representation: the three commissioners aligned with the old opposition — Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin, Desmond Trotman — were nominated under a parliamentary configuration that no longer exists, yet maintain that their appointments are permanent, and they have declined to discuss their own replacement with the new Leader of the Opposition;^[7] the Chairman, Claudette Singh, presides over a body whose representativeness is itself now in question.^[8] Local Government Elections are due this year and funded in the budget, but the commission that must run them is frozen by the very fragmentation we are describing. The cost of disunity, in other words, is no longer hypothetical. It is being paid in the currency of constitutional function.

III. The Rules and the Coordination Game

We are tempted to read all of this as a story of personalities, and the personalities are real enough. But the more useful reading is structural, and it begins with the rules.

Here it helps to think as a mathematician for a moment. Guyana’s system allocates seats in the Assembly proportionally, but it awards the presidency to the candidate atop whichever single list polls the most votes.^[9] The consequence is precise and unforgiving. Fragmentation costs the opposition almost nothing in seats — divided, each fragment still occupies its proportional share of the benches. But fragmentation costs it the executive absolutely, because no fragment, standing alone, outpolls the governing party. The opposition thus sits in what Thomas Schelling would have recognized at once as a coordination game with two equilibria:^[10] one in which the parties scatter and the incumbent holds the executive in perpetuity, and one in which they coordinate and the executive becomes contestable. Both are stable. The difficulty is that the parties are lodged in the first, and no actor will move toward the second without assurance that the others will move with him. This is not a failure of character. It is the logic of the game.

IV. Why Coronation Fails

It is also why the familiar word — unity — has so often failed us.

When we say unity, we tend to mean merger: one list, one banner, one leader anointed above the rest. But merger is precisely the move the game makes hardest, for it asks the parties to settle the leadership question first, before any trust exists with which to settle it. The 2023 collapse of the APNU+AFC coalition is the cautionary text, and the 2025 result is its sentence carried out: the coalition splintered, its largest component re-entrenched, the smaller partner was driven below the parliamentary threshold, and the disaffected vote did not come home to either — it went to a vehicle that had not existed a season earlier.^[5] A unity built as a coronation — a contest over who wears the crown — founders on the very rivalries it was meant to transcend, and it tends to take its partners down together. If unity means coronation, the opposition will not achieve it; and on the evidence of the last decade, it should perhaps be glad.

So let us ask a different set of questions. Not who should lead the opposition, but: What would an opposition do if it took Guyana’s development seriously? What could it build before it ever won an election? And what would coordination — as distinct from coronation — actually require of it?

V. Three Commitments from Outside Power

Three commitments would change the picture, and not one of them requires that anyone be crowned.

Each has an important feature in common: it can be built from outside government, which means the opposition need not wait for power to begin creating public value.

The first is to become the trusted accountant of the oil. The most consequential question in Guyanese life is no longer who holds office but where the money goes — and that question is, in its nature, non-partisan, for numbers have no ethnicity. Consider how much of our present argument is conducted in the dark. The Natural Resource Fund Act prescribes a withdrawal formula; the government drew roughly two and a half billion United States dollars from the Fund in 2025 and plans a comparable sum in 2026, which is to say it now spends very nearly the whole of each year’s oil receipts as they arrive.^[4] The 2016 Production Sharing Agreement grants the country a two percent royalty and a profit share throttled by a cost-recovery ceiling that lets the contractor recover up to three-quarters of gross revenue before the larger national share begins to flow.^[11] Each of these facts is contested precisely because no neutral, continuous, public reckoning of them exists. The opposition’s own finance lead in the Assembly, Dr. Terrence Campbell, has gone to court to compel transparency on withdrawals he tallies at some two and a half billion United States dollars over three years^[12] — which tells us that the appetite for this work is already present, but lodged in litigation rather than in an institution.

A reader should be able to picture what such an institution would actually publish: a quarterly NRF audit reconciling every deposit and withdrawal against the formula prescribed by the Act; a production reconciliation matching each lift against the contractor’s reported volumes; a cost-recovery tracker showing, line by line, what has been claimed against the seventy-five percent ceiling and what has been disallowed; a project-delivery dashboard mapping capital spending against announced commitments in health, education, and infrastructure; and a procurement-monitoring register covering every contract above a material threshold. None of this requires legislative authority. It requires only the will to do the work and the expertise to do it credibly.

An opposition that published, quarterly and to audit standard, an independent accounting of every dollar entering and leaving the Fund — every lift, every cost-recovery claim, every contract term, every flare — would make itself indispensable to the national conversation without firing a single partisan shot. It would convert Campbell’s lawsuit into a standing capability. It is work that can be done from outside power, today, with the help of a diaspora that holds more relevant expertise than the resident parties can presently deploy. And it is, not incidentally, coordinative: a shared ledger is a project rivals can build together precisely because authorship of it confers no crown.

The second is to govern before winning — to treat the territory the opposition already holds not as a consolation prize but as an existence proof. The opposition controls Region Ten and a number of neighbourhood councils outright; the local elections due this year offer a dozen more such platforms. An opposition that runs the councils and regions it holds with conspicuous probity — published budgets, open procurement, measurable delivery in the hinterland communities of Regions One, Seven, Eight and Nine where the development gap is widest — argues its case in the one language the electorate cannot dismiss: demonstration. And an opposition that named a government-in-waiting composed not of party bosses but of credible technocrats — an energy economist, a hinterland-development specialist, a public-health planner — would answer the oldest charge against it, that it can oppose but cannot govern, while quietly defusing the leadership war, since a shadow cabinet of experts requires no single face above it. The local elections are the natural proving ground: a place to demonstrate that the parties can decline to split one another’s vote without dissolving into one another.

VI. The Dividend: Gift vs. Right

The third is to fly a flag the whole country can stand under, and the most promising candidate is a rule-based citizen’s dividend — a universal, equal, per-person share of the oil wealth, paid by formula rather than by favour. Here the argument must be made carefully, because the government has not been idle on distribution. It has paid a one-off grant of one hundred thousand dollars to every adult, a measure now in its second phase, administered through a registration portal and disbursed first to public servants;^[13] it pays each schoolchild fifty-five thousand dollars a year under the Because We Care programme;^[14] it has added newborn grants, transport grants, a doubled pension. These are real transfers and they have reached real households, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

But notice their form. Each is a gift — announced from a podium, branded to the giver, renewed at the government’s pleasure and timed, with some regularity, to its advantage. A gift is not a right. The Vice President has said plainly that several such grants will be distributed while the party holds office,^[20] which is the language of patronage, not of entitlement: the citizen receives, but as a beneficiary of discretion, not as a holder of a claim. The dividend inverts this. It is colour-blind by construction — every Guyanese receives the identical sum, which is to say it cannot be made an instrument of one community against another. It is permanent and formulaic, which is to say no government can switch it off, brand it, or schedule it around an election. It answers the citizen’s question — where is my share of this wealth — without requiring him to ask it of a patron. The opposition need not invent the idea; Alaska has paid such a dividend from its oil for four decades.^[15] It need only have the imagination to claim it, and the discipline to insist on the difference between a gift and a right. The obvious objection — that universal cash in a high-poverty, undiversified economy invites inflation and dependency — is serious, but answerable: a dividend sized to a prudent draw on the Fund’s annual returns rather than its principal, and set beside the capital projects the budget already funds, distributes ownership without forfeiting development. The choice is not cash against hospitals; it is whether the citizen’s share is a right he can count upon or a favour for which he must be grateful.

Coordination of this kind still needs a way out of the trust trap, and here the parties might be braver than their history. They might bind themselves with a genuine commitment device — a pact whose breach carries a forfeitable, public cost — rather than another communiqué of good intentions. They might agree that any coalition shall be a sunset coalition, written to dissolve once the executive is won and the constitution reformed, so that no party need fear the permanent absorption that has killed every prior attempt. And they might settle the leadership not in a back room but through an open, externally administered primary, so that whoever emerges carries a mandate no rival can contest. None of this is fanciful. In 2018 a broad, multi-ethnic coalition in Malaysia unseated a patronage-rich party that had governed since independence, by agreeing on one candidate and one minimal programme while otherwise leaving its members intact.^[16] Its members did not merge; they coordinated around a minimal programme and a temporary objective — coordination, not coronation. The structural resemblance is close enough to retire the claim that it cannot be done here.

VII. Dismantling the Plantation Logic

Honesty requires naming the hazards plainly. The largest opposition party is led by a man under United States sanction and facing extradition — a fact that is not a slur but a structural risk to any vehicle built around him, and one the opposition must reason about soberly rather than wish away.^[6][21] The government, for its part, can point to genuine delivery: free tuition at the University of Guyana, the Gas-to-Energy works at Wales, an expansion of roads and bridges and hospitals that no fair observer denies. An opposition that pretends none of this is happening forfeits its credibility before it speaks. And the cross-ethnic breakthrough that delivered Linden in 2025 — support drawn across the very seam that has organized our politics since before independence — is the single most valuable asset the opposition possesses, and precisely the asset a clumsy, crown-first unity could squander.^[5]

For beneath the arithmetic lies the older wound. Walter Rodney’s deepest argument was not simply that colonialism extracted wealth; it was that it manufactured the categories through which the extracted people understood themselves.^[19] Percy Hintzen showed how that manufacture persisted into independence: the postcolonial state in Guyana was built on the mobilization of racial blocs, each taught to read a conflict of class and power as a conflict of origin.^[17] Lloyd Best named the structural residue — the plantation economy’s habit of organizing labour, loyalty, and reward along lines that served the proprietor rather than the worker.^[18] The genius of that arrangement, as all three taught in their different registers, was its self-perpetuation: a people schooled to read class conflict as racial conflict will reproduce the division even after the colonizer has departed, because the categories have been internalized. A dividend that pays the Berbice cane-cutter and the Linden bauxite worker and the Lethem rancher the same sum; a ledger that serves no tribe; a coalition that competes for the common wealth rather than guards the common wound — these are not merely electoral tactics. They are attempts to dismantle the apparatus itself, to make the old categories legible as the colonial instruments they always were. That, and not the unseating of any one party, is the emancipatory work Rodney would have recognized, and the work the diaspora — stakeholder, not spectator — is well placed to underwrite.

The project before us, then, is not the defeat of a government. It is the construction of a politics organized around what the oil could build rather than around whom the history has divided. That is a harder thing than a merger, and a worthier one. The opposition’s leaders are owed no deference until they attempt it. The question is not whether they can agree on a crown. The question is whether they can agree on a country — and prove, by what they are willing to build before they ever hold power, that they deserve to be trusted with it.

— T.R.B.

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References

1. Brazil Energy Insight (May 2026). “Guyana oil fund surpasses US$4 billion for first time.”
2. ExxonMobil Guyana (Nov 2025). “Daily oil production hits 900,000 barrels in Guyana’s Stabroek block.”
3. OilNow.gy (Dec 2025). “Guyana Oil & Gas: What to look forward to in 2026.”
4. NCB Capital Markets (Jan 2026). “Guyana’s oil revenues to fund 32% of the 2026 budget as spending expands.”
5. Wikipedia. “2025 Guyanese general election.”
6. Wikipedia. “We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) Political Party.”
7. Stabroek News (Sep 16, 2025). “GECOM commissioners’ appointments permanent as per the Constitution – Alexander.”
8. Guyana Standard (Oct 21, 2025). “GECOM Chair has cast opposition nominated commissioners to the curb – Alexander.”
9. IFES Election Guide. “Guyana National Assembly Electoral System.”
10. Schelling, T.C. (1960). “The Strategy of Conflict.” Harvard University Press.
11. IEEFA (May 2022). “Summary of 2016 Petroleum Agreement Between Guyana and ExxonMobil.”
12. Village Voice News (Feb 21, 2025). “Terrence Campbell Files Legal Challenge Over Transparency in Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund Management.”
13. The Guardian (Nov 2024). “Guyana citizens to receive payouts from oil wealth.”
14. Ministry of Education, Government of Guyana (Jun 2025). ““Because We Care” 2025 Grant Wraps Up.”
15. Alaska Department of Revenue, Permanent Fund Dividend Division. “Summary of Dividend Applications & Payments.”
16. Wikipedia. “2018 Malaysian general election and Pakatan Harapan victory.”
17. Hintzen, P.C. (1989). “The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad.” Cambridge University Press.
18. Best, L. and Levitt, K.P. (2009). “Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy.” University of the West Indies Press.
19. Rodney, W. (1981). “A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905.” Johns Hopkins University Press.
20. News Room Guyana (Oct 2, 2025). “‘Several cash grants’ to be distributed while PPP in office – Jagdeo.”
21. AP News (Jan 27, 2026). “Guyanese businessman facing US extradition elected opposition leader.”

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