Gold, Bauxite, Timber: Three Rehearsals

A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse

Article 6 of 12

Bauxite, gold, and timber: three booms, one script.

By Nabaclis Piknee · September 12, 2026

By the time oil started talking, I had already watched this play three times. Different actors, different scenery, same script. I am going to walk you through all three the way I lived them, because a young person reading about oil today needs to understand this is not Guyana’s first boom. It is Guyana’s fourth. And the first three should have taught us everything we needed to know, if only we had been willing students. Easy lesson good for dunce, them who can’t learn must feel.

Bauxite: The One I Grew Up Inside

I have already told you about bauxite from the inside — the company town, the nationalization, the gap between owning the mine and knowing how to run it. What I have not told you is how it ended, because that part matters just as much as how it began.

By the 1980s and into the 1990s, the industry I grew up next to was in serious decline. Global prices fell. The state corporation that had inherited the operations struggled with underinvestment, ageing equipment, and the same shortage of deep technical expertise that had haunted it from the day of nationalization. Linden, the town that had once felt like the beating industrial heart of the country, became a byword for economic hardship instead. The resource did not run out. The capacity to keep extracting it competitively did. That is a different kind of curse than people usually imagine, and it is the one I watched happen with my own eyes to the town I half grew up in.

Gold: The One With No Company Town At All

Gold taught a different lesson, and in some ways a harder one, because gold in Guyana was never organized the way bauxite was. There was no single company, no fenced-off club, no manager’s house on the hill to resent. Gold was small-scale, scattered across the interior, dug by thousands of individual miners and dredges working the rivers and creeks. This should have made it more democratic. In some narrow sense it was — more Guyanese hands touched gold money directly than ever touched bauxite money.

But scattered extraction with weak oversight produces its own curse. Mercury poisoned rivers that Indigenous communities had fished for generations. Forest was cleared with no reclamation plan behind it. The state’s ability to tax and monitor an industry spread across hundreds of remote sites was, and largely remains, thin. Gold showed us that a resource curse does not require a single foreign company to blame. It can happen just as easily when the state is too weak to govern its own citizens extracting their own resource, and the wealth that comes out of the ground never gets converted into anything that outlasts the mining itself.

Timber: The Quiet One

Timber never had bauxite’s drama or gold’s chaos, and maybe that is exactly why it is the most instructive of the three. I spent real years of my working life around forest policy, and what I watched happen to Guyana’s timber sector was slower and quieter than the other two, but the shape was the same. Concessions granted to foreign and local operators alike, a regulatory body stretched too thin to properly monitor logging practices across a vast and difficult terrain, and a pattern where raw log exports dominated over the value-added processing that would have kept more of the money and more of the jobs inside the country. We exported trees and imported furniture. Think about what that sentence actually means for a country covered in eighty-five percent forest.

We exported trees and imported furniture. Think about what that sentence actually means for a country covered in eighty-five percent forest.

— N.P.

The Pattern, Named Plainly

Three different resources. Three different ownership structures — one corporate and centralized, one scattered and informal, one concession-based and regulatory. And yet the outcome rhymes each time: wealth extracted, a portion captured by the state or by individuals, very little of it converted into durable, broad-based capability. No sovereign wealth institution worth the name. No sustained technical class trained faster than the departing expertise walked out the door. No processing industry built up around the raw resource strong enough to capture real value at home.

The Fourth Rehearsal

I am not telling you this history to depress you. I am telling you because oil is now doing, at a scale the other three combined could never touch, exactly what this series has been describing all along: does the money turn into capability, or does it turn into consumption. That question has already been answered three times in my own lifetime, and answered wrong three times — three rehearsals for a mind that never got the chance to become autonomous before the next boom arrived and asked the same question again. The fourth rehearsal is not a rehearsal anymore. It is the real performance, and there may not be a fifth chance to get it right.

Next Wednesday: Article 7 of 12, “The Ones Who Left.”

Beyond the Resource Curse — A GBJ Series

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