George Orwell Comes Alive in Guyana

 

The Sunday Essay · Language & Power

George Orwell Comes Alive in Guyana

Precision as a Democratic Ethic

In one week: an invitation that chaperones a protest, a rulebook invoked but not opened, a salvage plan discovered by leak, and a fiscal milestone announced to Wall Street but not to Guyanese. Orwell left us a test for all of it — and a teacher with a rapidograph taught it first.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · August 9, 2026

George Orwell never visited Guyana. He did not need to. He described us in advance, with the patience of a man who had watched empires teach their subjects to speak in circles, and he left behind a single, durable test for any government’s language: does the sentence reveal, or does it conceal?

Let me be clear at the outset about what this essay is and is not. It is not an argument that this government is Orwellian; that framing is too easy, and too easily dismissed. It is an argument that every government must be subjected to Orwell’s test — this one, those before it, and whichever comes after — along with the opposition that aspires to office, the companies that pump our oil, the press that covers all of them, and, yes, this journal, which ought to submit its own sentences to the test before submitting anyone else’s. Precision is not a partisan weapon. It is a democratic ethic.

With that standard on the table, consider the evidence of seven ordinary days.

I. The Ministry of Hospitality

In Santa Rosa, protesters gathered outside a government outreach. The President’s response was an invitation: come inside respectfully; your voice matters.^[1]

Orwell would have admired the craftsmanship. In eight words, protest — the oldest form of political speech, a form our Constitution expressly protects — is converted into a matter of etiquette. The question is no longer whether the grievance is just but whether the aggrieved are polite. The state does not answer the protest; it chaperones it. Come inside, where the microphones are ours, the agenda is ours, and the minutes will be taken by us. Your voice matters — in the way that a witness’s voice matters to the attorney who called him.

The genius of the formulation is that it sounds generous. That is always the tell. Orwell warned that political language is built to make the indefensible sound respectable, and nothing sounds more respectable than an open door — provided one does not ask who controls the room behind it.

II. The Rigor That Arrived Late

Meanwhile, on the waters toward Moruca, the Coast Guard stopped a boat carrying the Leader of the Opposition, and the Guyana Defence Force defended the stop as routine: an inspection, we are told, in which the captain could not produce a valid licence or the vessel’s required documents.^[2] There is also the matter of the Amerindian Act, under which entry into a village requires the Village Council’s consent — a rule from which, as the Amerindian Peoples Association reminds us, no one is exempt, and which had not been satisfied here.^[3]

Perhaps all of this is exactly so. Indeed, let us stipulate something uncomfortable: after the Barima, no serious person in this country should argue for less enforcement of maritime law. If a vessel’s papers are not in order, stopping it is not tyranny; it is the job.

“A state that invokes the rulebook must open the rulebook.” — T.R.B.

But that is precisely why precision is more necessary here, not less. A state that invokes the rulebook must open the rulebook. Tell us which document was missing and which regulation required it. Tell us how many vessels were inspected on that stretch of water that day, and that month, and how many were detained. Tell us whether the same rigor is applied, with the same promptness, when no opposition leader happens to be aboard. The juxtaposition is almost too neat — in the very week that officials travelled into the hinterland to demonstrate the state’s accessibility, the opposition leader found his own journey interrupted by the state’s coercive arm — and neatness of that kind is dissolved only by numbers, never by assurances.

And there is a harder question beneath the procedural one, and it belongs to all of us: where was this rigor before the Barima sailed on the eighteenth of July? The nation would give a great deal to live in the country where inspections are this prompt, licences this scrutinized, documents this indispensable — provided that country existed before a ferry went down, and not merely on the day an inconvenient passenger set out for Moruca.

III. The Memory Hole Takes On Water

Then there is the matter of the salvage. Through a proposal leaked to the press — dated the twenty-eighth of July, days before the government publicly opened competitive bidding — the nation learned that a Dutch firm had been quietly invited to submit its plan for raising the MV Barima.^[4] Further reporting then uncovered that the firm’s owner and founder had previously been arrested in Italy in connection with embezzlement allegations.^[5] Note the sequence of discovery: not a ministerial statement, not a paper laid in Parliament, but a leak, and then a newsroom doing the due diligence that a procurement process exists to perform.

Every clause of that paragraph deserves its own commission of inquiry. Quietly invited: an arrangement concerning the most public tragedy in living memory, initiated in private before the public tender it preceded. If there is an innocent explanation — urgency, expertise, prior contracts — then let it be given, in the indicative mood, with dates. The vice is not necessarily the invitation. The vice is that the public learned of it sideways: by leak, after the fact, with journalists forced to reconstruct a process the state could simply have explained.

The Barima has become the great Orwellian object of our moment. The search and recovery operations have been concluded, we are told — concluded being the state’s word for the moment when it stops looking, which must never be confused with the moment when everything is found. Three crewmen sit charged with murder while the institutional chain that loaded, cleared, certified, and dispatched the vessel remains largely outside the dock.^[6] The Commission of Inquiry’s terms of reference have at last been published, and they are not nothing — they speak of safety failures, of possible prosecutions, of maritime reform.^[7] But Orwell taught us to read the tense of a promise. Recommendations will be considered. Reforms will be pursued. The future passive: the tense in which accountability goes to die.

And hovering above it all, the ready-made phrase that ends every conversation before it begins: stop politicizing the tragedy. This is our local contribution to Newspeak, and it deserves study. To ask who certified an ageing vessel is “politicizing.” To ask what the wharf loaded is “politicizing.” By this logic the only apolitical response to a mass drowning is silence — which is, of course, the point. The phrase does not describe the critic’s behaviour; it prescribes the citizen’s.

IV. The Ministry of Plenty Has No Comment

Finally, the quietest exhibit, and the most expensive. On its July thirty-first earnings call, ExxonMobil’s own leadership announced that the US$55 billion invested in the Stabroek Block, along with operating costs, has been fully recovered — nearly two years ahead of schedule, by the company’s own telling.^[8] Exxon’s country president has said that, if prices hold, Guyana’s share of the revenue — the roughly fourteen and a half percent that has been flowing into the Natural Resource Fund — will rise substantially this year.^[9]

Now, the arithmetic here is genuinely intricate, and honesty requires saying so. The fifty-fifty division itself is not new: under the 2016 agreement, whatever qualifies as profit oil has always been divided equally between Guyana and the consortium. What changes as costs are recovered is the size of the pool available to be divided. While unrecovered costs remained, as much as seventy-five percent of production could be allocated to cost oil, leaving only twenty-five percent as profit oil. As the cost bank falls, more barrels migrate from cost oil into profit oil — and Guyana’s share rises with them.^[10] New projects, continuing operating costs, and the absence of ring-fencing complicate the trajectory further. Anyone who explains the mechanics in a single sentence is simplifying, and this essay will not pretend otherwise.

“Exxon can tell Wall Street what the change means in barrels. Surely Georgetown can tell Guyanese what it means in dollars.” — T.R.B.

But that is exactly why the government’s silence is the exhibit. The difficulty of the arithmetic does not diminish the state’s obligation to explain it; it multiplies that obligation. The single most consequential inflection point in our fiscal history has been announced — by the other side of the table, to its shareholders — and the Government of Guyana, which issues a communiqué when a koker is repaired, has offered its own citizens not a statement, not a schedule, not a graph. What does full cost recovery mean for the Fund, in plain figures? What portion of each barrel now goes to Guyana that did not go to Guyana last quarter? When does the larger share begin, and how large is it? Which project costs remain, and on what timetable? Exxon can tell Wall Street what the change means in barrels. Surely Georgetown can tell Guyanese what it means in dollars. Orwell’s Ministry of Plenty announced increases in the chocolate ration that were in fact decreases. Ours has refined the method: announce nothing, and no arithmetic can embarrass you.

V. What Orwell Actually Asked of Us

It would be easy to end here, in the warm bath of irony, and irony is a bath in which whole nations have drowned. But Orwell was not a cynic, and this essay is not written in the cynic’s key. “Politics and the English Language” is, at bottom, an optimistic document. It insists that the corruption of language is reversible — that a citizen who refuses the ready-made phrase, who asks the concrete question, who says who loaded the boat instead of systemic factors, is performing an act of national maintenance.^[11]

I learned this before I read Orwell. I learned it in 1979, in Form 1A at Queen’s College, from a form master named Gregory Shanks, who put a Staedtler rapidograph in my hand and showed me that a line in India ink is an unforgiving thing. It does not blur. It cannot be talked around. It goes where your hand sends it, and if your hand is dishonest, the page will say so forever. I still have mathematical papers written in that ink, in that discipline. Shanksey died this past week, and it occurs to me that everything he taught an eleven-year-old about drawing is what Orwell tried to teach the twentieth century about writing, and what Guyana must now teach itself about governing: precision is a form of honesty, and honesty is a form of respect for the people who must live with your lines.

“Precision is a form of honesty, and honesty is a form of respect for the people who must live with your lines.” — T.R.B.

So here is the modest proposal of this essay. Let us retire the passive voice from public life. Let ministers say I decided rather than it was determined. Let the Commission name names, fix dates, and assign responsibility, so that accountability has subjects, verbs, and objects. Let the government tell us, in plain figures, what happens to Guyana’s share now that US$55 billion has been recovered. Let those who stop boats publish the rulebook they invoke. And let every citizen treat the phrase “stop politicizing” as what it is — not an argument, but an alarm, ringing to tell us we have asked exactly the right question.

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Orwell comes alive in Guyana whenever officialdom speaks in fog. But he also comes alive — he is most alive — whenever one of us answers in ink.

Vale, Shanksey. The lines you taught us to draw are still holding.

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References

1. News Room, “Ali tells Region One protesters: ‘Come inside respectfully, your voice matters,'” August 5, 2026. newsroom.gy
2. Demerara Waves, “GDF defends stopping of Moruca-bound boat with Opposition Leader,” August 5, 2026. demerarawaves.com. See also iNews Guyana, “Boat captain transporting Opposition Leader failed to produce required licences and certification – GDF,” August 6, 2026. inewsguyana.com
3. Guyana Chronicle, “No one exempt from Amerindian Act’s consent rule — APA Executive Director,” August 5, 2026. guyanachronicle.com
4. Kaieteur News, “Govt. secretly invited Dutch firm to raise MV Barima long before issuing tender – well-placed sources,” August 5, 2026. kaieteurnewsonline.com
5. Kaieteur News, “Italian police arrested Dutch salvage firm owner secretly invited by Govt. for MV Barima recovery,” August 7, 2026. kaieteurnewsonline.com
6. Reuters, “Captain, crew members in deadly Guyana ferry accident charged with murder,” July 28, 2026. reuters.com
7. Guyana Chronicle, “MV Barima CoI empowered to probe safety failures, recommend prosecutions, maritime reforms –ToRs outline,” August 4, 2026. guyanachronicle.com
8. Reuters, “Guyana set for bigger oil profits as ExxonMobil recoups initial costs,” July 31, 2026. reuters.com
9. Kaieteur News, “ExxonMobil confirms US$55B investment in Guyana recovered,” August 7, 2026. kaieteurnewsonline.com
10. Stabroek News, “How can Guyana receive a fair share of revenue from its oil?” February 17, 2026. stabroeknews.com
11. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946). The Orwell Foundation. orwellfoundation.com

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