At its 26th anniversary gala in New York, the Health and Educational Relief Organization (H.E.R.O.) kept silence for the lives lost on the MV Barima, remembered co-founder Dr. Collie Oudkerk, and honoured five people who carry its medical and educational missions to Guyana. Terrence Blackman reflects on an institution that began among student friends and now reproduces itself.
Guyana has never had more ways to transmit and fewer places to encounter one another. With Stabroek News gone and oil decisions compounding, the national question is not only who gets to speak. It is who is required to listen.
The authors of the 64/80 paradox answer Rory Fraser, Errol Benn and the readers who pressed them on why the failures they measured outlast governments — and argue that an independent audit body is a political device, not a technocratic one.
Rory Fraser’s study of land tenure, forestry enforcement and the public service reaches the same conclusion as Gampat and Mahabir’s 64/80 paradox by a different road, and asks why the failures they measure outlast changes of government.
Drawing on a book-length comparative study of eighteen countries, Ramesh Gampat and Minakshi Mahabir document what they call the 64/80 paradox: Guyana out-invests 64 per cent of its comparators in health and education, yet 80 per cent of them obtain better human capital outcomes. Efficiency deficits, inequality and governance failure explain the gap — and the oil window for closing it will not stay open for ever.
Nearly seventy-five years after Martin Carter first refused to still his voice, the closing line of “Looking at Your Hands” has become a national slogan. This Sunday Essay asks what it would mean to treat it instead as a standard, and to hold the M/V Barima inquiry, the closure of Stabroek News, and the institutions of the oil era answerable to the poem.
A boy in Form 1A looked out of a classroom window on the Thomas Road side and saw the light coming off the Atlantic. That west wing is gone, and the building that replaced it satisfies eight directives and answers no question. A Sunday essay on the enduring importance of the aesthetic, and on what a school teaches when nobody is teaching.
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Oil Sector Policy · Analysis The Empty Rig Floor What ExxonMobil’s Permian Automation May Mean for Guyana’s Next Oil Decade A contractor in West Texas now moves two-thousand-pound drill…
GBJ Commentary · Trade & Investment A Trade Centre Is Not Yet Trade What the WTC Georgetown Conference Should Be Measured By Five days in Kingston, a first anniversary,…