The Morning After

A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse

Article 5 of 12

Independence morning, the nationalizations, and the gap between the deed and the doing.

By Nabaclis Piknee · September 9, 2026

May 26, 1966, I stood in a crowd in Georgetown and watched a flag come down and another one go up. And I will tell you honestly, I cried. Not the polite tear either. The real thing, the kind that surprises a boy trying to look like a man in front of his friends. Plenty came after that I did not like. Still, nobody can take that morning away from me. We believed, and we were right to believe, that something enormous and overdue had finally happened.

But a flag going up is a morning. A nation is what you build in all the mornings that follow. That is where this piece has to go. The euphoria did not last as long as we needed it to, and I watched why with my own eyes.

When “Ours” Finally Meant Something

The nationalizations came a few years later. Bauxite first, in 1971, then sugar by the end of that decade. I want to be honest about what that felt like from inside a bauxite town. It was not abstract policy to us. It was personal. The company houses, the fenced-off club, the manager who was never from here. All of that was suddenly, on paper, ours. My uncle, the quiet bookkeeper, had warned me that independence would give us the company but not the knowing. Now the company handed him responsibilities nobody had ever trusted him with before. For a while, watching him walk taller, I thought maybe he had been wrong.

He had not been wrong. He had just been early.

He had not been wrong. He had just been early.

— N.P.

The Gap Between the Deed and the Doing

Here is what nobody wanted to say out loud in those years. I only had the vocabulary for it much later. Taking ownership of an extractive industry is not the same thing as knowing how to run one. The two things do not arrive on the same day just because you want them to. The technical staff understood the shipping contracts, the refining chemistry, the international markets. In large part they were the same foreign staff who had run things before. Some stayed. Many did not. The ones who left took more than their salaries. They took a body of operational knowledge the colony had never let us build for ourselves.

So the mines kept running, but they ran less well. The sugar kept getting cut, but the estates grew less efficient, not more. This was not because Guyanese hands were less capable. I want that said plainly, because it gets twisted into something ugly if you let it. A colonial economy had spent a century organizing itself so that capability stayed concentrated at the top. Nationalizing the assets did nothing, by itself, to redistribute the knowing. Yuh tek jackass to water but yuh can’t mek am drink.

Where the Politics Started to Curdle

This is also where I watched something else begin. It is something this whole series keeps circling back to: the politics of who got to benefit from “ours.” State ownership is not the same as public benefit. By the late 1970s it was becoming clear that the state doing the owning was not neutral. Party loyalty started to matter more than competence in who got which job in the newly nationalized industries. Ethnic politics had already fractured the independence movement itself. Now it hardened further, as state-controlled resources became a spoil to share out rather than a commons to manage.

I do not say this to relitigate old grievances. I say it because it is the first full demonstration, in my own lifetime, of what this series is trying to name. It is also the first proof that the mind’s occupation does not simply end when the coloniser leaves. It can change landlords.

The Gap I Watched Open

We took the ground back. We did not yet have the institutions, the trained people, or the political culture. None of that existed to convert the ground into lasting benefit for ordinary people. And a new elite learned quickly how much power sat in that gap. The morning after independence, we discovered that a flag and a deed of ownership are the easy part. Everything this series has been building toward is the answer to that gap. The autonomous imagination, the vault that has to hold, the university that has to exist. I watched that gap open with my own eyes, in real time. It opened in the years right after we thought the hardest part was behind us.

Next Wednesday: Article 6 of 12, “Gold, Bauxite, Timber: Three Rehearsals.”

Beyond the Resource Curse — A GBJ Series

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