The Ones Who Left

A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse

Article 7 of 12

The airport gate, the remittances, and the capability that never came home.

By Nabaclis Piknee · September 19, 2026

I have buried more friendships at Timehri than I have buried people in the cemetery, and I mean that the way it sounds. Watching someone board a flight out of this country for good does something to a friendship that distance alone cannot explain. You keep writing for a year, maybe two. Then the letters get shorter, and one day you realize the person you grew up beside now belongs more to Brooklyn or Toronto or London than to the street you both learned to walk on. I have stood at that airport gate more times than I can count, and every single time, some part of the country left with the person going through it.

The First Wave I Watched

The ones who went first, in the years right after independence and through the difficult decades that followed, were often the very people the new nation needed most to keep. Teachers. Engineers. The doctors who had trained hard and could have trained others. I watched a whole generation of capable, credentialed Guyanese decide, one family at a time, that the country asking for their skill could not offer them a life to match it. Political instability in the 1970s and 1980s, currency controls, food shortages, a governing style that rewarded loyalty over competence — I described some of this already in the piece about the morning after independence, and it is the same current that pulled people toward the airport.

Here is what stung the most, and still does: many of the people who left were not disloyal. They were exactly the citizens a nation trying to escape a resource curse needs most — people who had built real capability and wanted to use it. The country that trained them could not or would not give them a place to use it in. So they went and used it somewhere else, and somewhere else got the benefit of a Guyanese education paid for, in no small part, by Guyanese resources.

What the Remittances Could Never Replace

I am not going to pretend the diaspora has given nothing back, because that would be dishonest and it would insult people I love. The remittances kept whole villages afloat during years when the state could not. Money sent home built houses, paid school fees, kept families fed through droughts of a different kind than the ones that hit the rice fields. That is real, and it deserves respect, not dismissal.

But remittance money is not the same thing as the person. A doctor sending money home is not the same as a doctor treating patients at home. An engineer wiring funds for a nephew’s tuition is not the same as an engineer building the roads and the power grid this country still badly needs. We kept the money. We lost the capability. And capability, not cash, is what a nation actually needs to escape a resource curse. Yuh can send bread from foreign, but yuh cyaan send de baking.

We kept the money. We lost the capability.

— N.P.

Watching It Happen Again, With Oil in the Picture

Here is what troubles me now, in my seventies, watching this newest chapter unfold. I had allowed myself to hope that oil wealth might finally reverse the pattern — that a country suddenly flush with resources could offer its trained people enough reason to stay, or even pull some of the diaspora home. Some of that is happening, in small and encouraging ways. But I also watch young Guyanese with real skill still weighing offers from Canada and the United States and the Gulf against what is available here, and too often still choosing to go. Oil money has raised salaries in some sectors. It has not yet built the kind of institutions, the kind of long-term career paths, the kind of confidence in stable governance that makes a talented twenty-five-year-old choose to build a whole life here rather than just visit for the holidays.

This is why the university this series keeps returning to cannot simply be a factory that produces graduates for the local job market as it exists today. It has to be part of a larger answer to the question every one of those young people is quietly asking themselves at the airport gate: if I stay, what am I staying for? A vault that holds the money is necessary but not sufficient. A country also has to hold its people, and that requires something the fund alone cannot buy — an autonomous imagination made visible in real institutions, real opportunity, and real trust, giving a talented young Guyanese an actual reason to choose Guyana when the whole world is offering an exit.

Next Wednesday: Article 8 of 12, “What the Forest Knows.”

Beyond the Resource Curse — A GBJ Series

The Guyana Business Journal is supported by:

…and by individual supporters of independent Guyanese analysis: Courtney Noel | All Te Networks | Corine Locke | Tony Harris | Roderick Alsopp | Dr. Michelle Luard | Clarence Bone

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