To Charrandas, or not to Charrandas? The Socio-economic & Political Forecast for Guyana 2019: Economic Growth & Political Uncertainty.

Editor’s Note — Brooklyn, New York, August 2026

We are reposting this piece, largely as it first appeared, for a reason that has nothing to do with nostalgia.

Last week, Charrandass Persaud — the parliamentarian whose single vote is the subject of this essay — spoke publicly against the murder charges brought against the captain and two crew members of the MV Barima. The Director of Public Prosecutions has advised that the prosecution proceed alongside the Commission of Inquiry rather than await it.¹ Senior members of the local bar have questioned whether a common-law murder charge, which requires an intention to kill, can be sustained on these facts at all, and whether charging the men forecloses their evidence before the Commission.²

Persaud’s re-emergence on that question sent us back to December 2018, because the essay below was never really about one man’s vote. It was about a system in which a single individual can be made to carry the weight of an institutional failure — and about a country that has not yet built the arrangements that would spread that weight where it belongs.

The essay’s claim was that Guyana’s institutions would rise to the challenges placed before them. That claim is now a question.

— T.R.B.

Readers should judge for themselves what has held and what has not. The ninety days we anticipated became fifteen months, a contested count, and the general election of March 2020. The “grand bargain” we urged did not happen; no serious attempt at one was made. The racial insecurity trap we described is intact. And in July 2026, seventy-three of our countrymen and women died aboard a state ferry that should not have been at sea, after which three employees — and no manager, no superintendent, no minister — were charged.

December 2018

This weekend the GBJ looks at the prospects for Guyana in 2019.

Two weeks ago, GBJ writer Dr. Carolyn Walcott spent a few days in Guyana taking the temperature of Christmas at home before the big day. The city was abuzz. Traffic jammed at almost every corner. We walked Regent Street from Albert to the corner of Orange Walk and found scarcely room to move: merchandise spilling onto the pavements, shoppers deluging vendors with purchases and inquiries, pedestrians and motorists merging into a single mass consumed by the hype that attends a Guyanese Christmas. There were bargains to be had, and retail, at least, was doing well.

We noted two social changes in the holiday atmosphere. Spanish is now frequently spoken by store attendants. And Chinese enterprises have permeated the fabric of the new business landscape. Business nonetheless appeared good for everyone as the season closed in.

On Thursday, December 13, the GBJ attended the University of Guyana’s press launch of its first publication, Dynamics of Caribbean Diaspora Engagement: People, Policy, Practice, an output of the June 2017 Diaspora Conference. During the discussion, the question of a business takeover by non-Guyanese surfaced as both a query and a grievance. It was addressed by Aubrey Norton of the Ministry of the Presidency, who assured the audience that Government was conscious of the phenomenon and remained committed to ensuring that Guyanese, including those abroad, received the incentives and support needed to develop and grow businesses.

We also noted the evident increase in international business interest in the country, driven largely by Guyana’s impending oil future. To gauge how far that interest had reached ordinary citizens, we held brief conversations with a range of people, particularly those in small business.

What we heard was a mix of optimism and uncertainty. Many remain unaware of how they might tap into the oil business at all; many lack the expertise, or access to expertise, to position their products and services for inbound investors and external markets. One hairdresser said that while the business environment would likely receive a significant boost, she doubted ordinary citizens would see real socioeconomic benefit. A taxi driver known to Dr. Walcott has stopped plying the Stabroek Market area altogether; he now drives ExxonMobil employees to and from a worksite daily, for substantially more than waiting for passengers ever paid him. “Life is better for me already,” he said, reporting well over GYD 200,000 a month for far less effort. An academic was less sanguine: the country would advance economically, she thought, but she doubted that basic infrastructure would be prioritized in the allocation of resources. An official in the energy sector told us the opposite — that improved education, roads, and hospitals are essential components of an emerging national strategic plan, a blueprint for forecasting and visioning not only the business environment but Guyana’s sustainable development beyond oil.

We returned to New York on December 17. As this story was being prepared, news broke on Friday, December 21, that Guyana’s APNU/AFC coalition government had fallen on a no-confidence vote in the National Assembly. A general election is expected within ninety days — nearly two years before President David A. Granger’s constitutional term is complete.

The collapse comes less than four years after the coalition, promising a new style of inclusive politics, defeated a PPP/Civic party that had held power for almost a quarter of a century. It turned on the switched allegiance of a single lawmaker: Charrandass Persaud, an Indo-Guyanese MP of the junior coalition partner, the AFC.

The coalition had indeed been slow to assemble a cohesive framework to prepare the country for first oil in 2020. Even so, the success of the motion has shocked every stakeholder and rearranged the political landscape entirely.

The Insecurity Trap

The vote is likely to exacerbate the ethnic and racial insecurities endemic to Guyana’s socioeconomic, political, and cultural life. Both major parties remain organized along racial lines — the PNC drawing its support from the descendants of Africans brought to these shores under Dutch rule, the PPP from the descendants of Indians brought under the British two centuries later.

Guyana became independent in 1966. The PNC controlled the government through the first three decades; the PPP took the upper hand in 1992 and held Parliament and the presidency until the coalition’s victory in 2015. Each period of dominance has left the excluded community convinced that it was shut out of government and business — a conviction each community has held in turn, and each with cause. Predictably, many Afro-Guyanese read this no-confidence vote as an underhanded strike against an Afro-Guyanese government, a reading amplified by its timing: the seventy-three-year-old President Granger is in Cuba receiving treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

There are deeper questions here, which future contributions to this journal will take up. How does Guyana escape its racial insecurity trap? The Afro and Indo Guyanese communities, and the Amerindian community most of all, plainly need to be more effectively integrated into the governing apparatus. At the core sits an assumption we have never challenged and never proven: that the British model of parliamentary democracy best serves developing countries in general and Guyana in particular. The literature offers scant evidence of its success in multi-racial and multi-ethnic contexts.³

Arend Lijphart observes that specialists on divided societies converge on two propositions: that deep ethnic division makes democracy markedly harder to establish and to maintain than in homogeneous societies, and that the difficulty is greatest precisely where democracy is not yet consolidated.⁴

We note that the class-based commonality that allowed Cheddi Jagan and Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham to found the PPP collapsed at its first test. The same has been true of political arrangements in Fiji, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Our own steady line of doomed third parties — essentially class-based structures — suggests that ethnic insecurity is the predominant obstacle to harmonious development, and that arrangements which decline to confront it are unlikely to succeed. Malaysia, and to a lesser extent Singapore, write ethnic considerations explicitly into constitution, institutional structure, and representation.

We are reminded here of the last “grand bargain,” rumored to have been under serious consideration between Dr. Jagan and President Burnham at the time of Burnham’s death in August 1985 — a deal that would have placed Dr. Jagan and others in a Government of National Unity for an indefinite period. For the record, Dr. Jagan had called consistently for such a government.

The Opening

The GBJ believes that the success of the no-confidence motion, its aftermath, and the emerging oil economy have together handed the key stakeholders another chance to act boldly — to seize a grand bargain that would see a genuine Government of National Unity preside over the oil economy for the next six years. The broad outlines are clear enough: a marriage of the economic, security, and environmental bonafides of the three principal ethnic communities, with the social cohesion that would follow. A movement of that kind in the political sector now would supply the impetus for robust economic growth in 2019.

In closing, we are encouraged by the many appeals for calm. Guyana’s national stability is paramount; political instability breeds an uncertainty that undermines the possibility of business growth. We believe Guyanese institutions, and its courts in particular, are strong, and that they will rise to the challenge of adjudicating the matters that will come before them in this period. We urge the leadership on both sides of the aisle to maintain a spirit of dialogue and a respect for our democratic practices and the rule of law.

And we wish you and your families a peaceful, productive, and above all prosperous 2019.

The question was never whether one man should have voted. It was why one vote could carry so much.

References

1. “Murder charges against MV Barima captain, crew members can proceed alongside Commission of Inquiry,” Guyana Chronicle, 28 July 2026. guyanachronicle.com
2. “Legal firestorm erupts over charges against MV Barima captain, crew members,” Kaieteur News, 29 July 2026. kaieteurnewsonline.com
3. Long, Andrew. Working paper, Working Group in African Political Economy, Center for Effective Global Action, University of California, Berkeley.
4. Lijphart, Arend. “The Wave of Power-Sharing Democracy,” in Andrew Reynolds, ed., The Architecture of Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 37.
5. “Guyana Government Falls After No-Confidence Vote,” The New York Times, 22 December 2018. nytimes.com

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