From Imagination to the Curse

A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse

Article 2 of 12

What the oldest trap in the resource business actually is — and what it is not.

By Nabaclis Piknee · August 22, 2026

I ended my last piece standing on one acre of ground, telling you the future belongs to the collective imagination of the people, not to the politicians or the foreign investors. Somebody wrote me afterward and asked a fair question: nice words, Piknee, but what happens when that one acre is sitting on four billion US dollars of oil money? Does the imagination stay sovereign when the treasury is full?

That is the right question, and it is not new. It is the oldest trap in the resource business, and it has a name: the resource curse. Money arrives, and twenty years later the country is somehow no better off. Farms shrink. Industries never grow. The best people leave. Guyana has lived this before — with gold, with bauxite, with timber — and none of those booms left behind a country that could do more than it could before the boom started. What good is a full belly if the hand that fed you still owns the field?

This is where the sovereignty of the imagination stops being a poet’s phrase and becomes an economist’s problem — where it has to grow into what I have come to call the autonomous imagination, a mind capable of authoring its own institutions rather than simply defending ground it already holds. Lamming warned that a people can win independence and still be enslaved in their own heads. The resource curse is what that enslavement looks like on a balance sheet. A nation that cannot imagine itself differently will spend its oil money exactly the way it spent its bauxite money and its gold money — on consumption, on patronage, on the appearance of progress — because it never built the institutions, the trained people, or the habits of accountability that turn revenue into capability. The curse is not really about the resource. It is about what a people believe they are entitled to become.

The curse is not really about the resource at all. It is about what a people believe they are entitled to become.

— N.P.

So the real question is not how much Guyana earns. It is what that money turns into. Does it turn into roads that get built and then left to crumble, into a diaspora of talent that never comes home, into a public service too thin to check its own work? Or does it turn into something that outlasts any single government — trained people who stay, institutions that function no matter who wins the next election, and a citizenry with the sovereign confidence to ask hard questions of its own leaders?

That is the ground the pages that follow will walk. Where the last piece asked you to guard your one acre of ground with your mind, what comes next asks a harder thing: to guard it with your institutions, your record-keeping, and your patience — because a curse broken by accident stays broken only until the next boom, and a curse broken on purpose is the only kind that holds.

Next Wednesday: Article 3 of 12, “The Institutions That Hold.”

Beyond the Resource Curse — A GBJ Series

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