Commentary

The Open Door

by guyanabusinessjournal April 10, 2026

written by guyanabusinessjournal

OPEN DOOR

On kakabellies, clogged drains, and the difference between a personality and an argument, this column opens the door to scrutiny.

By Guyana Business Journal · April 9, 2026

A column called “Peeping Tom” announces its epistemology in its title. It sees through gaps. It catches people in unguarded moments. It derives its authority from the angle — the oblique, the partially obscured, the view from outside the room looking in. There is art in that. There is also, occasionally, a limit.

US$761 million

Oil revenue collected by Guyana in a single quarter

74 percent

Hinterland poverty rate in Guyana, contrasting with coastal Georgetown

No Keyhole Required

This column is called The Open Door. The name is likewise a declaration of method. We do not peer. We do not squint through keyholes at the habits of the returning diaspora, the psychology of the local professional, or the character of the politician who was educated abroad and came back loud. We open the door, walk through, sit down, and talk about the building — who designed it, why the roof leaks, what it would cost to fix it, and who is currently collecting rent.

We begin, as all inaugural columns should, with an occasion. Peeping Tom has provided one.

The April 8th column, The Return of the Kakabelly, is a pleasure to read and a frustration to think about — which is, to be fair, the precise combination that has made Peeping Tom one of the most durable presences in Guyanese public commentary. The column describes, with genuine wit and some psychological acuity, a recognizable type: the Guyanese who returns from abroad freighted with contempt, who measures Georgetown against Toronto and finds Georgetown wanting, who uses the failures of the country of their birth as a mirror in which to admire their own imagined elevation. Small fish returned to a familiar pond, puffed up, loud, and ultimately ludicrous.

The description is accurate. The type exists. Many of us can confirm this from personal experience, possibly with specific anecdotes we can share if you pour us a drink.

But here is where The Open Door must, with respect and without personal animosity toward Peeping Tom, open the door and point at something on the other side.

The kakabelly frame is a literary achievement that, when deployed politically, functions as a drain cover. It is placed, with great skill, over the opening through which accountable scrutiny might otherwise rise. The mechanism is elegant: any criticism of a system can be recast as evidence of the critic’s psychology. The person who notes that the Georgetown drainage infrastructure fails every time it rains, despite record oil revenues, is not engaging with a policy failure — they are, per the kakabelly theory, projecting their own failure onto the familiar landscape of home. The person who observes that a gas-to-energy procurement process appears to have been structured in ways that benefit particular contractors is not a concerned citizen exercising democratic muscle — they are a small fish trying to swim large.

This is not an analysis. It is immunization. And a country collecting US$761 million in oil revenue in a single quarter cannot afford the luxury of immunizing its institutions from scrutiny by diagnosing the personality of the scrutinizer.

GBJ Data Note: Guyana collected US$761 million in oil revenue in a single quarter, highlighting the country’s financial capacity and the need for institutional scrutiny.

And a country collecting US$761 million in oil revenue in a single quarter cannot afford the luxury of immunizing its institutions from scrutiny by diagnosing the personality of the scrutinizer.

Let us be precise about what the kakabelly column does and does not do.

It accurately identifies a tone problem that exists in some diaspora commentary. The returning Guyanese who has spent three decades in Mississauga and now holds forth on the civic failures of people who stayed and built lives under conditions the returnee escaped — that person has an obligation to some epistemic humility before opening their mouth. Peeping Tom is right about this. Tone matters. Manner matters. The person who arrives with a sense of superiority rather than seeking partnership has already undermined whatever useful thing they might have to offer.

What the column does not do — and what The Open Door is inaugurated precisely to do — is distinguish between tone and content. Between manner and substance. Between the kakabelly who deploys critique as self-aggrandizement and the citizen, diaspora, or local, who deploys critique because the building is structurally unsound and someone needs to say so plainly.

These are not the same person. Collapsing them is not social observation. It is political convenience.

The test is not difficult to apply. Is the critique directed at a culture, a people, a temperament — the general inadequacy of the Guyanese character, the hopeless backwardness of the tropical sensibility, the laziness or corruption that is apparently in the water? That is kakabelly. It deserves exactly the response Peeping Tom prescribes: quiet amusement, followed by strategic disregard.

Or is the critique directed at a specific system, a specific policy, a specific institutional failure with specific evidence attached? That is citizenship. And citizenship — inconveniently, necessarily, regardless of the passport the citizen holds or the city they flew in from — is the engine of a functioning democracy. Guyana, with its oil revenues, its ambitions, and its sixty-year diaspora argument still unresolved, needs more of the second kind, not less. It needs it from people at home and people abroad. It needs to be delivered with whatever level of grace the deliverer can manage, and received by institutions capable of engaging the substance rather than dismissing the source.

Citizenship — inconveniently, necessarily, regardless of the passport the citizen holds or the city they flew in from — is the engine of a functioning democracy.

Now, about those drains.

Kaieteur News — on the very same day Peeping Tom published the kakabelly column — ran stories touching on the Wales Gas-to-Energy project: a director linked to a corruption scandal in Venezuela, a government denial of an US$80 million arbitration payout, and the quarterly oil revenue figure of US$761 million. These stories did not appear because kakabellies wrote letters to the editor from their condominiums in Scarborough. They appeared because journalists exercised exactly the kind of uncomfortable, institutionally inconvenient scrutiny that the kakabelly frame, applied without care, would license us to dismiss.

This is the irony that The Open Door is obligated to name on its first day of operation: the column most likely to be cited as evidence that diaspora criticism is really just ego is published in the same newspaper that practices the most rigorous institutional accountability journalism in Guyana. Peeping Tom and the Kaieteur newsroom are not, on this question, in the same position. One writes about personality. The other writes about power. We need both. We cannot afford to let the former crowd out the latter, even elegantly, even with the word kakabelly doing its magnificent work in the headline.

One writes about personality. The other writes about power. We need both. We cannot afford to let the former crowd out the latter, even elegantly.

The Open Door will, in the weeks and months ahead, concern itself with the following questions, among others:

What does the oil money build, and for whom, and according to whose design? What is the relationship between diaspora institutional investment — the alumni associations, the STEMGuyana robotics clubs, the curriculum partnerships, the endowed chairs not yet funded — and the state’s own obligation to resource the receiving institutions? What does equitable development look like in a country where hinterland poverty reaches 74 percent while coastal Georgetown negotiates its identity as an oil capital? What is the minimum prior condition — in university funding, in faculty salaries, in governance capacity — that must be in place before diaspora brain circulation produces multipliers rather than sophisticated extraction?

These are not questions that yield to personality analysis. They require open doors, not keyholes.

To Peeping Tom, who has been doing this longer than most and better than many: this column is not your enemy. It is, in the most literal sense, your complement. You watch what people do when they think no one is looking. We will examine what the institutions do when everyone can see them plainly, and ask whether the view is acceptable.

To the kakabelly — and you know who you are, and so does everyone at the dinner party: the drain you are complaining about is real, your delivery remains insufferable, and the engineers who can fix it are, in fact, on their way, from Canada. Try to be civil when they arrive.

And to Guyana, which has survived worse than both of us: the door is open. Walk through. The conversation that matters is waiting on the other side.

GBJ Data Note: Hinterland poverty in Guyana reaches 74 percent, presenting a stark contrast to coastal Georgetown’s emerging identity as an oil capital.

What does equitable development look like in a country where hinterland poverty reaches 74 percent while coastal Georgetown negotiates its identity as an oil capital?

Guyana Business Journal: The Open Door is a new column at the Guyana Business Journal that examines Guyanese political economy, institutional development, and the diaspora’s role in national transformation. It publishes fortnightly.

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April 10, 2026 0 comments

The Longest Beam: On Clarence Trotz, Keith Wilson, and the Human Capital We Keep Sending Away

by guyanabusinessjournal April 9, 2026

written by guyanabusinessjournal

The Longest Beam | Guyana Business Journal

Education & Human Capital · GBJ Webinar Report

The Longest Beam

On Clarence Trotz, Keith Wilson, and the Human Capital We Keep Sending Away

By Terrence Blackman

Guyana Business Journal · April 2026

Pencil sketch of Queen's College Georgetown Guyana — the historic timber building with clock tower, louvred windows, picket fence, and royal palms

Queen’s College, Georgetown, Guyana — where Clarence Trotz taught physics in the 1960s · GBJ Editorial Art

Age of Clarence Trotz — still teaching physics in 2026

1.5M km

Distance of first laser beam to a spacecraft in flight — Dec 1992

307M mi

Distance of NASA uplink beam to Psyche spacecraft — world record

1945

Year Trotz sat the scholarship exam from Essequibo — one of one or two places allotted

There is a photograph I keep in my mind. It is not a real photograph — no one took it — but it is as vivid to me as anything I have seen with my own eyes. It is a classroom in Georgetown, sometime in the early 1960s. A physics teacher stands at the front. He is precise, unhurried, rigorous. He is teaching his students something that most people believe cannot be taught: how to see.

The teacher’s name is Clarence Trotz.

This past week, the Guyana Business Journal hosted Mr. Trotz for a conversation as part of our ongoing series on education and human capital development. He is 92 years old. He rose that morning, as he does every morning, and performed his calisthenics in bed — stretching his legs, extending his arms, giving thanks for the privilege of another day. He is currently preparing a young man from Bartica — a young man who wants to become a surgeon — for his CAPE Unit 2 Physics examinations in May 2026. There is no one in Bartica to teach him. So Clarence Trotz, at 92, does it himself, over Microsoft Teams, without being asked, without being paid, without ceremony.

I want you to sit with that for a moment before we go anywhere else.

The Moment That Stopped the Broadcast

About forty minutes into our conversation, I did something I had not planned. Days earlier, I had received a message from a man named Keith Wilson — Dr. Keith E. Wilson, PhD, a consultant in radio frequency and optical satellite communications, writing from Evans, Georgia. He had been a student of Clarence Trotz at Queen’s College between 1963 and 1966. His sister Elizabeth had seen our announcement and passed it along to him. He wrote to say he wanted to say a few words.

I brought him onto the programme, live, unscripted. What followed was one of the most extraordinary moments in the three-year history of this platform.

“The one that touched me most was physics, and it did so because you taught it.”

— Dr. Keith E. Wilson, PhD, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (ret.), to Clarence Trotz, live on air

Keith Wilson went on to earn a doctorate in physics in 1980. He then joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where he became an optical communications engineer. In December 1992, he led a team of NASA and United States Air Force scientists and engineers to demonstrate, for the first time in human history, the propagation of a laser beam from Earth to a spacecraft in flight. The spacecraft was on its way to Jupiter. The beam travelled one and a half million kilometres. The spacecraft took a photograph of Earth from the dark side, and on that photograph you could see the spots — the actual pulsed laser dots — transmitted from the ground. Each team had pulsed at a different repetition rate, so there was no confusion about who had done what to whom.

GBJ Research Note

Twelve years after the 1992 demonstration, Keith Wilson built NASA’s first and only optical communications telescope at Table Mountain — a one-metre instrument currently used to receive transmissions from the Artemis spacecraft orbiting the Moon, and to send uplink beams to the Psyche spacecraft at 307 million miles from Earth. Both are world records in the transmission of information across the cosmos.

And at the root of it all — in the soil from which this extraordinary career grew — is a classroom in Georgetown, Guyana, in the 1960s, where a man named Trotz removed the mystique of physics and opened a boy’s eyes to the wonders of the discipline.

The Architecture of Opportunity

Mr. Trotz was himself once a “rustic.” He was born in Essequibo — the Cinderella County, he called it, with characteristic precision and characteristic wryness. In 1945, when he sat the scholarship examination, Essequibo was allotted one or two places. Demerara received fifteen or twenty. Berbice, ten to twelve. This was not an accident. It was architecture. The distribution of opportunity was itself a political choice — a structural decision about whose children would get to become.

The Scholarship Allocation — Guyana, 1945

Essequibo
1–2 places allotted · Trotz scored 63.5% — the highest in the county · received the one scholarship
Demerara
15–20 places allotted
Berbice
10–12 places allotted

Trotz had the highest percentage in Essequibo — 63.5%, a number he still remembers — and so he was the lucky one. He received the one scholarship. A rustic became a Queen’s College boy. A Queen’s College boy went to Cambridge, to Selwyn College. A Cambridge man came back and stood at the front of a classroom in Georgetown and taught physics in a way that a boy named Keith Wilson would not forget for the next sixty years.

The chain of causation here is not metaphorical. It is literal. The laser beams now travelling to the Moon and to the edge of our solar system are, in a traceable and material sense, downstream consequences of a structural decision someone made in 1945 to fund one scholarship from Essequibo. Imagine if they had funded ten.

QC and the Nation It Could Have Built

I asked Mr. Trotz a question I had been carrying for some time: is there a gap between the nation Queen’s College should have built and the nation we actually have?

He did not hesitate, though he chose his words with characteristic care.

“Queen’s College was meant to prepare men — and now women — for service, first and foremost, to their country. I am disturbed to know that there are so many who have done so well, who have not seen fit to serve Guyana in any regard for any length of time.”

— Clarence Trotz, Former Headmaster, Queen’s College of Guyana

He said he felt embarrassed about it. That was the word he used. Not angry. Not resigned. Embarrassed. The word of a man who still believes, at 92, that the obligation was real and that its non-fulfilment reflects on the institution that produced them — and on him, personally, as a steward of that institution.

I think he is right to feel it that way. And I think the rest of us should feel it too.

But I want to press on this a little, because I do not think the failure is simply one of individual character or civic loyalty. The failure is also structural. When a society produces excellence and then offers that excellence no adequate home — no institutions of sufficient quality to deploy it, no remuneration that honours it, no policy framework that values it — it should not be surprised when the excellent leave. Guyana did not only lose Keith Wilson. Guyana exported Keith Wilson, at its own expense, to NASA. And NASA, reasonably and gratefully, put him to work.

The question is not why he left. The question is what we were prepared to offer him if he had stayed.

Georgetown Need Not Be the Hub

Toward the end of our conversation, Mr. Trotz spoke about what I believe is the most urgent structural challenge in Guyanese education — and one that the current oil revenues give us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to address.

He said that every region of Guyana should have its own educational institutions: its own O-level and A-level schools, its own teacher-training capacity. He said it should not be necessary for a young person from Bartica, or from Lethem, or from the interior, to travel to Georgetown to receive an education. He invoked the American land-grant college model — institutions planted in every state, in every county, so that geography does not determine destiny.

“Every region should be seen to be independent of Georgetown. Georgetown need not be the hub.”

— Clarence Trotz

He said this not as an abstraction, but because he knows what it costs. He knew the Amerindian students who came to Queen’s College from the interior in the 1970s and 1980s. He knew how difficult it was for them — the disorientation, the social distance, the disadvantage of being far from home in a city that did not quite know what to do with them. And he has watched, for decades, as that problem has remained unaddressed.

GBJ Note

The young man in Bartica who wants to be a surgeon: there is no one there to teach him physics. So a 92-year-old man in Georgetown does it over Microsoft Teams. That is a beautiful story. It is also an indictment of every government that has held power in this country since independence.

A Personal Note

I was a student at Queen’s College during the tenure of Clarence Trotz as Headmaster. When Keith asked me — were you also a student of Mr. Trotz? — I did not take his physics course, but the answer is still yes. To be formed by an institution is to be formed by the person who holds it to a standard. The particular insistence that defined his classroom — that what you see is an impression, not a certainty; that even a fact may be 99.9% true but not 100%; that the discipline of a subject is also a discipline of thought — that insistence was in the air of the school itself. It shaped the culture in which I learned. When I speak of mathematics as a way of seeing, I am speaking a language whose grammar Trotz helped to set.

He said something extraordinary in our conversation that I do not want to pass over lightly. He said: “Physics helped me to understand that nothing that you thought was so was always so — it might have been a little different from so.” And then he pressed further: to see something, he said, is not to know it. It is to receive an impression that the brain renders as knowledge. “You see an atom? No, you’re not. You can’t see an atom. You can get the impression of an atom being there.”

This is epistemology. This is philosophy of science. This is what a trained mind does when it has spent a lifetime inside a discipline it loves: it begins to see the discipline as a lens on reality itself. And it passes that lens to its students. And those students take it to Cambridge, and to JPL, and to the Moon.

The Literacy Crisis

There is one more thing I want to say, and it is the thing Mr. Trotz said that I believe deserves the widest possible audience.

He is worried about literacy. He is worried that Queen’s College — the institution that defined itself, for over a century, by its eloquence, by its commitment to the written word, by its school magazine and its literary culture — is no longer writing. “Are we encouraging literacy?” he asked. “We are not encouraging literacy at all.” He spoke of pictures without captions, of images without context, of a visual culture that has displaced the written record. “What’s behind the pictures? You see a picture. What’s it about? You don’t know.”

He is 92, and he has just completed the fourth volume of his history of Queen’s College. He began this project because the gap between Norman Cameron’s 1951 history and the next record was, in his words, “becoming disturbingly and ridiculously large for a school as prestigious as Queen’s College.” He felt that someone had to carry the relay.

He is right about the literacy crisis. And it extends beyond Queen’s College. Across the Caribbean, we are producing a generation of young people who are extraordinarily fluent in images and extraordinarily weak in argument — who can communicate feeling with great efficiency, but who have not been trained to construct a case, to marshal evidence, to sit with a problem long enough to say something true about it.

Physics cannot save them from that. But a physics teacher who loves words, who writes history, who speaks with precision, who demands of his students that they not mistake an impression for a fact — that teacher can.

That teacher is Clarence Trotz.

After the stream ended, in the few minutes of unguarded conversation that followed, I said something I meant, and that I want to say again here, for the record:

The communication infrastructure that circles space right now — part of an architecture developed by a man who was inspired by Trotz teaching physics in Guyana in the 1960s. You cannot make it up. The talent is just so overwhelming.

You cannot make it up. And you do not need to. The story is true.

The question — the only question that matters for Guyana in this moment — is what we intend to do about it.

GBJ Series Note

The Guyana Business Journal’s “Transforming Guyana: New Voices, New Visions” webinar series continues. Mr. Trotz’s four-volume history of Queen’s College is available through the Toronto Chapter of the Queens College Alumni Association. STEM Guyana, which co-sponsored this programme, does extraordinary work across all ten regions in Guyana in moving Guyanese young people toward the sciences. Invest in them.

Dr. Terrence Blackman

Professor & Chair, Mathematics · Medgar Evers College, CUNY · Founder & Publisher, GBJ

Dr. Terrence Blackman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. He is the Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal and a member of the Caribbean Math Olympiad Network. His work sits at the intersection of mathematics, education policy, and Caribbean development.

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April 9, 2026 0 comments

The Watchdog – Home and Abroad

by guyanabusinessjournal April 6, 2026

written by guyanabusinessjournal

Commentary

The Persian Gulf conflict and rising inflation are shaping a complex economic landscape, with potential stagflation and private credit woes adding to global uncertainty.

By Scott B. MacDonald, Ph.D., Chief Economist · April 6, 2026

The Persian Gulf has yet to become background noise as did the Russo-Ukraine War and Gaza. Although the latter two conflicts were disruptive to the global economy, their impact was less broad. In the US there is concern that an extended conflict will lead to inflation and a significant economic slowdown. In this context, we believe that the Trump administration is working to redefine “victory”. Thus far Iran’s military machine has been considerably downgraded and its nuclear program badly damaged, but weapons grade uranium remains at large, the IRGC maintains a stockpile of missiles and drones, and the hardliners remain in control. A further downgrading of Iran’s economy through the destruction of critical infrastructure could be enough for the US to declare victory and walk away from the Gulf, leaving the Strait of Hormuz up to Asian and European governments to deal with. Indeed, Asia and Europe are the most at risk considering their dependence on Persian Gulf oil and natural gas, while the US is better positioned to ride through the geoeconomic fall-out. While we see inflationary pressures as problematic over the next several months, those pressures could diminish later in the year by an end to hostilities and a shift back to more normal energy markets. Looking out over a very complicated economic landscape, we are bullish on oil, short-term bearish on the economy, but not yet sitting on the edge of a major economic downturn. As one of the characters in Game of Thrones, Petyr Baelish, stated, “Chaos is a ladder.” In today’s world, there are a lot of governments and companies seeking to scramble up that ladder.

Pencil sketch illustration for: The Watchdog - Home and Abroad — Illustration: Pencil sketch commissioned for the GBJ — The Watchdog – Home and Abroad.

0.9%

Expected monthly headline CPI increase, up from 0.3% in February.

54.0%

ISM Services PMI in April, lower than expected and below February’s 56.1%.

$19 billion

Amount investors have sought to pull from private credit funds this year.

$536.3 billion

China’s exports to the US in 2022, which fell to $309.4 billion in 2025.

The week ahead

US CPI Monthly % Change Forecast. Source: Smith’s Research & Gradings, April 6, 2026

All eyes will be on the Persian Gulf and whether President Trump will up the ante by attacking Iran’s infrastructure, including power plants and road systems. At the same time, the upcoming week is a busy one for US economic data, especially in terms of inflation. This week attention will focus on CPI and PCE inflation, the latter being a focus for the Fed. The consensus forecast is for headline CPI to leap to 0.9% monthly (up from 0.3% in February). This would take the annual rate from 2.4% to a little above 3%. PCE is expected to stay unchanged at 3%. Higher numbers would probably roil markets.

GBJ Data Note: The ISM Services PMI came in on April 6 at a lower-than-expected 54.0%, below the median forecast and February’s 56.1%, signaling continued expansion but at a slower pace.

Most of the comments indicated concern over the Iran war, though it was noted that “tariff rollbacks are resulting in favorable price adjustments” (from an accommodation and food services company) and “demand for AI computer infrastructure remains incredibly resilient” (information company).

The Iran War, Fertilizer and US States

US CPI Monthly Forecast (March 2026). Source: Smith’s Research & Gradings, April 6, 2026

Most farmers face higher fertilizer costs, the most since the 2022 spike caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. According to Northern Ag Network (April 2, 2026): “Retail fertilizer prices are continuing to jump higher but recent increases have become much more pronounced with all 8 major fertilizers more expensive than a month ago. Prices tracked for the fourth week of March 2026 saw four of the fertilizers see double-digit increases from a month ago.”

The main reason for higher fertilizer prices is the Iran war, though tight supply and volatile natural gas prices play their part. More than a quarter of global nitrogen fertilizer trade and about a fifth of LNG, the essential feedstock for nitrogen production, transits the Strait of Hormuz. While many US farmers secured fertilizer before the war escalated, access to fertilizer could become a greater concern for US farmers if the Persian Gulf drama extends further. Fertilizer accounts for around 20% of grain costs. A lengthy conflict carries the risk of higher fertilizer prices feeding into grain prices. In turn, it means higher prices at the grocery store. Another factor is that China, the world’s largest producer, has put restrictions on fertilizer exports until the end of August 2026 to guarantee domestic needs.

GBJ Data Note: California is the US state most exposed to downside risk from higher fertilizer prices, spending $2.2 billion, followed by Iowa ($2.1 billion) and Illinois ($2 billion).

Higher fertilizer and fuel prices hurt, but the agricultural sector is not going underwater having demonstrated considerable resilience in the past. A long conflict could change that.

Private credit – do not look behind the curtain

US States Fertilizer Spending (2026). Source: Northern Ag Network, April 2, 2026

One of the more notable scenes in the Wizard of Oz came when Dorothy peeked behind the curtain and discovered the Wizard was an old man manipulating machinery to make himself seem powerful and intimidating. Could private credit be doing the same? Indeed, only a few days ago the private credit investment firm Blue Owl was hit with substantial increase sin redemption requests in the first quarter, with investors looking to withdraw around $5.4 billion from its flagship funds due to questions about the health of the asset class and the company’s role in the market.

While private credit chiefs are hitting the financial media with denials of any problems in their sector, investors have sought to pull $19 billion from private credit funds this year. In response to this Blue Owl’s co-president Craig Packer stated: “While we believe market perception has driven elevated tender activity, underlying credit fundamentals across our portfolio have remained resilient. We continue to observe a meaningful disconnect between the public dialogue on private credit and the underlying trends in our portfolio.” In other words, the public is ignorant of market and economic trends and don’t look behind the curtain.

GBJ Data Note: Blue Owl was hit with redemption requests totaling around $5.4 billion in the first quarter, with investors seeking to withdraw $19 billion from private credit funds this year.

Our concern is twofold: considering the relatively opaque nature of the private credit sector, it is difficult to get a complete picture of what is occurring in many portfolios and that if there is enough of a loss of confidence in the sector, pressure for redemptions will increase.

Geopolitical briefs

US States Most Exposed to High Fertilizer Costs. Source: Northern Ag Network, April 2, 2026, via Smith’s Research & Gradings

US States Most Exposed to Fertilizer Costs. Source: Smith’s Research & Gradings, April 6, 2026

China enters the talks in Islamabad. China has been critical of the US war against Iran and has remained aloof from the diplomacy taking place in Islamabad – until now. China has officially entered the talks, which also include Pakistan (the host), Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. China has a major interest is seeing the Persian Gulf return to normal as it is heavily dependent on imported oil and natural gas, with Iran being a major source of its oil. Natural gas comes from Qatar, which shut down LNG production after an Iranian attack on its facilities.

There is also a China-US angle to Beijing’s involvement in the peace talks. Simply stated, China needs a reset in its relations with the US. In 2022, China’s exports to the US stood at $536.3 billion; in 2025 Chinese exports fell to $309.4 billion. The US balance of trade deficit with China also dropped a high of $418 billion in 2018 to $202.1 billion in 2025. Tariffs implemented by both the Biden and Trump administrations have had a sting. This has left the landscape more challenging for Beijing – it needs US trade to maintain economic growth and the US could use cheaper Chinese goods to help with the affordability issue. In May, Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump hold a summit. Both countries would probably find discussions easier if the Persian Gulf was not hanging on their necks.

Suriname-US relations – Energy. The US Embassy’s Chargé d’Affaires in Suriname, Paul Watzlavick, recently spoke on US-Suriname relations, indicating that the US is looking for deeper energy and infrastructure partnerships in the Caribbean with Suriname standing out in importance. He noted: “It’s increasingly clear that this region is an essential part to the US. We want partnerships that support a strong workforce, keep our people safe and respect the sovereignty of every country.” Watzlavick also stressed energy security in the Caribbean, emphasizing the need for modern infrastructure, updated technologies and more robust systems through power generation and transmission. Watzlavick’s view on the need to upgrade power systems is right. Considering that much of the Caribbean remains heavily dependent on oil for power generation and much of the energy generation equipment is aging, there is a strong need for partnerships, including with Suriname. Suriname benefits from having its own supply of oil, which is supposed to come online in 2028 as well as hydro-power though its power sector could use an upgrade. The tough part of keeping the lights on in Suriname and the rest of the Caribbean remains financing new infrastructure, something China has done and the US has been less inclined to use public money for.

GBJ Data Note: In 2025, Chinese exports to the US fell to $309.4 billion from $536.3 billion in 2022, and the US trade deficit with China dropped to $202.1 billion from $418 billion in 2018.

Scott B. MacDonald, Ph.D., Chief Economist Scott B. MacDonald, Ph.D., is the Chief Economist at Smith’s Research & Gradings.

References

Private Credit Redemption Requests (Q1). Source: Smith’s Research & Gradings, April 6, 2026

US Private Credit Redemption Requests (Q1). Source: Smith’s Research & Gradings, April 6, 2026

China's Exports to US (Billions USD) — China’s Exports to US (Billions USD). Source: Smith’s Research & Gradings, April 6, 2026

Northern Ag Network, April 2, 2026

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China's Exports to the US — China’s Exports to the US. Source: Smith’s Research & Gradings, April 6, 2026

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April 6, 2026 0 comments

A Talent We Cannot Afford to Lose: From Linden Joseph to Kevin Sinclair

by guyanabusinessjournal April 6, 2026

written by guyanabusinessjournal

Commentary

The exclusion of Kevin Sinclair from the Guyana senior cricket team raises questions about how talent is nurtured and managed in regional sports.

By Keith Semple · April 6, 2026

As I watch the recent developments unfold surrounding the omission of one of the region’s most talented cricketers, Kevin Sinclair, from the Guyana senior cricket team for the second straight regional tournament, I feel compelled to share a few thoughts on what I have gathered so far. I feel a sense of déjà vu having lived through and witnessed from very close quarters the career of Linden Joseph, another immensely talented cricketer whose potential remained largely unfulfilled — and whose story should serve as a cautionary tale for how we handle Kevin’s situation today.

2013

The year Ben Stokes was sent home from an England Lions tour for disciplinary reasons.

Number of matches Alzarri Joseph was suspended for after an on-field dispute with his captain.

2024

Year from which infractions led to Kevin Sinclair being stripped of his Guyana franchise contract.

2,300+

First-class runs scored by Keith Semple during his career for Demerara and Guyana.

The Competitive Nature of Elite Sport

I have interacted with Kevin on a few occasions and spoken to a few people who are close to him, as well as some who are not so close but are involved in and around cricket in Guyana. My understanding is that he is a highly motivated cricketer who loves the game deeply and works extremely hard to be the best he can be. He is extremely competitive and hates losing; at times, this has led to confrontational behavior — behavior that appears to be at the heart of his perceived indiscipline and subsequent exclusion from the Guyana cricket team.

Elite sport is a highly competitive environment, and whether you are competing for your place on a team or against the opposition, it demands self-belief, mental strength, and a willingness to be confrontational — not to shy away from the fight when the going gets tough. We have seen many examples of highly successful sportspersons who carried precisely these traits.

Consider Ben Stokes, the current England captain, who was sent home from an England Lions tour for disciplinary reasons in 2013. Closer to home, Alzarri Joseph repeatedly threw tantrums during games and walked off the field in an ODI against England following a dispute with the captain, for which he was suspended for two matches. Basketball fans who have watched the documentary The Last Dance will have seen how fiercely competitive Michael Jordan was — not only in games against opposing teams but in practice sessions where he confronted and challenged teammates he perceived as soft, confrontations that sometimes escalated into physical altercations. In recent years, Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors has clashed with opposing players and, on at least one well-documented occasion, with a teammate during training.

In each of these cases, the individuals were disciplined, given time to reflect, given the help they needed, and then allowed to return to play. Due to the competitive nature of elite sport and the demands of success, some athletes — because of their personalities, backgrounds, and mental makeup — will push and overstep boundaries at times to gain an edge or fire themselves up for the contest. I am not promoting or condoning indisciplined behavior, but it is important to understand that for many elite competitors, these qualities are precisely what give them their competitive edge. If they lose that edge, they may not be as effective at what they do.

Elite sport demands self-belief, mental strength, and a willingness to be confrontational — not to shy away from the fight when the going gets tough.

The Context of Kevin Sinclair’s Situation

In some parts of the Caribbean, and particularly in Guyana, these qualities are often viewed in a negative light and can lead to players being victimized and ostracized. There is a tendency to judge people more by their shortcomings than by their strengths, more by what they cannot do than by what they can. During my time in Guyana, I saw many very talented players fail to reach their full potential because they lacked the mental strength, competitiveness, or fearlessness required to compete at the highest level. It is evident that Kevin demonstrates those qualities, as well as being extremely passionate, deeply committed to the game, and eager to contribute at all times. Such qualities should be viewed as positive attributes to be nurtured and developed so that he can maximize his potential. At times, however, they can spill over into confrontation with teammates, opposition players, or management — something Kevin has acknowledged, expressed remorse for, and has stated he is willing to work on.

While Kevin may be guilty of some of the accusations leveled at him, it is important to consider the context in which those reactions occur. Those who have observed him up close report that he is operating within a team environment in which he has been singled out during training sessions, subjected to constant derogatory remarks and unpleasant physical gestures — actions clearly intended to provoke reactions that can then be used against him. He has also referenced similar attempts during a recent intra-squad match to frustrate and goad him, which were subsequently cited as reasons for his omission. While some may argue that a professional sportsman should not allow himself to be provoked into actions that could harm his future, it is important to understand the individual’s background, including his age and other life factors, some of which were detailed in the statement he released following the GCB’s press conference. If these efforts are being orchestrated from the upper levels of the Guyana cricket structure because other players are not comfortable playing with Kevin, they are deeply disturbing — they do not reflect an organization making every effort to assist a young man in overcoming his challenges and giving him every opportunity to regain his place.

Kevin is one of the best players in Guyana at the moment, and the public outcry over his omission from the second straight regional tournament reflects how widely that view is held. He has only recently played significant roles in Guyana’s two most recent overseas Test victories, away in Australia and in Pakistan. He was also the leading run-scorer for Guyana only a couple of seasons ago. For infractions dating back to 2024, Kevin was stripped of his Guyana franchise contract and sidelined from the Guyana Amazon Warriors CPL franchise squad. The question that must now be asked publicly is: What efforts are being made to assist in his rehabilitation and reintegrate him into the Guyana franchise setup?

GBJ Data Note: For infractions dating back to 2024, Kevin Sinclair was stripped of his Guyana franchise contract and sidelined from the Guyana Amazon Warriors CPL franchise squad.

If these efforts are being orchestrated from the upper levels of the Guyana cricket structure because other players are not comfortable playing with Kevin, they are deeply disturbing.

The Role of Selectors and Fair Process

The role of chief selector carries significant power over the careers and futures of young aspiring cricketers, and it must be undertaken with a high degree of responsibility and care. It is not a role that should admit favoritism, nor one that should be wielded vindictively to settle personal scores.

Players are human beings and will make mistakes. When they transgress, there must be an open and transparent disciplinary process so that whatever punishments are imposed are seen to have been arrived at fairly and consistently. Mistakes must be assessed in their proper context, with all relevant factors considered and adjudicated as equitably as possible. Too often within Guyana’s cricket structure, players feel that selectors are looking for opportunities to exclude them — to create room for someone else — rather than giving them a fair chance to perform and remain in the team. This is especially damaging when the player in question has already demonstrated the ability to perform at the highest level.

Kevin Sinclair has his shortcomings, to which he has admitted. But above all else, he remains a hardworking, passionate, and dedicated cricketer. All efforts should be made to work with him so that he gets the help he needs to put his career back on track. It would be an absolute tragedy if he were to become yet another highly talented Guyanese cricketer lost to West Indies cricket — like Linden Joseph before him — for issues that can be addressed with a measure of compassion, institutional responsibility, and will.

The role of chief selector carries significant power over the careers and futures of young aspiring cricketers, and it is a role that must be undertaken with a high degree of responsibility and care.

Keith Semple is a former captain of the Guyana national cricket team and a West Indies international, having represented the West Indies in One Day Internationals during the 1998–99 tour of South Africa. A right-handed middle-order batsman who played his first-class cricket for Demerara and Guyana from 1990 to 2001, Semple scored over 2,300 first-class runs and was the only member of the 1989 Guyana Under-19 squad to reach the international stage.

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April 6, 2026 0 comments

The System That Breaks What It Builds: Kevin Sinclair and Guyana’s Talent Betrayal

by guyanabusinessjournal April 5, 2026

written by guyanabusinessjournal

Commentary

Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D.

Guyana’s cricketing prowess is undeniable, consistently producing world-class athletes, yet a pervasive structural flaw within the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) systematically undermines this exceptional talent. This is not merely a series of isolated incidents or personality clashes, but a profound system-level failure in development architecture and player welfare, costing the nation immeasurably in human potential and national pride. The recent controversy surrounding Kevin Sinclair, far from being an anomaly, serves as a stark illustration of this deep-seated institutional deficiency, revealing a system that, despite its claims, consistently fails to cultivate its most valuable assets.

The Kevin Sinclair Somersault

Consider the case of Kevin Sinclair, whose personal struggles offer a critical lens into the GCB’s shortcomings. While the GCB detailed a two-year history of disciplinary issues, including a missed flight and an incident at Everest Cricket Club [Guyana Cricket Board, press conference], Sinclair’s own account reveals a challenging upbringing in Cow Dam, Berbice, profound personal grief following his brother’s tragic death, and the pressures of new fatherhood [Kevin Sinclair, written statement]. More critically, he reported being struck by beamers during a net session in Trinidad while recovering from a broken hand, with no satisfactory institutional response, and struggled to process his brother’s loss amidst cruel taunts about his sibling’s sexuality.

These narratives converge on a fundamental question: what comprehensive support structure exists within the GCB to transform a gifted young man from humble beginnings into a resilient, well-supported professional athlete?

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests such a framework is conspicuously absent. The GCB itself admitted it had been attempting to secure a sports psychologist for Sinclair for two years [Guyana Cricket Board, press conference]—a profound institutional failure, not a mere oversight.

This systemic neglect is not limited to emerging talents. Christopher Barnwell, a Guyana cricketer for over a decade and a West Indies T20 international, was unceremoniously “phased out” at 35 by GCB Chairman of Selectors Ramnaresh Sarwan [GCB, press statement]. This bureaucratic euphemism offered no dignified transition or acknowledgment of his service. Barnwell’s departure highlights the GCB’s lack of a structured, humane mechanism for managing the full arc of a player’s career, particularly the critical transition phase.

This institutional indifference is particularly poignant given that Sarwan himself experienced similar neglect, losing his West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) central contract in 2010 amid public criticism [WICB, 2010], yet this experience seemingly failed to translate into a more empathetic system once he held a position of power.

Sherfane Rutherford’s journey further exposes these systemic gaps. Despite making his T20 International debut for West Indies in December 2018 after a sensational performance in Global T20 Canada [Global T20 Canada, 2018], his One Day International (ODI) debut did not occur until five years later, in December 2023 [ESPN Cricinfo]. In the interim, Rutherford largely forged his career independently across global franchise leagues [Various franchise leagues, 2019-2024]. By late 2024, he had become an ODI centurion, nominated for ICC’s ODI Player of the Year, and secured a significant IPL contract with Gujarat Titans [ICC, 2024; IPL, 2024]. Rutherford’s spectacular success was not a product of the GCB’s development framework; rather, he achieved it by identifying his own opportunities and building his professional brand across continents. The board merely identified his talent, then largely stepped aside, only to claim credit for his eventual triumphs. This illustrates a crucial distinction: a system that cultivates excellence is fundamentally different from one that merely identifies it and then issues congratulatory press releases when an individual prevails despite the system.

The recurring cycle of promise and neglect also afflicts emerging talents like Ashmead Nedd and Isai Thorne. Nedd, a leading wicket-taker for West Indies at the Under-19 World Cup in 2020 [ICC U19 World Cup, 2020], and Thorne, a genuinely fast bowler acknowledged by the GCB for “improving leaps and bounds” in November 2023 [GCB, press release, 2023], now find themselves in the precarious position common to too many Guyanese cricketers. They are praised in official statements, recalled, released, and then, between those statements, largely left to their own devices. Nedd, alongside Sinclair, has been dropped from the GCB contracted player list for 2025-26 [GCB, contract announcement, 2024]. This structural pattern affects players regardless of discipline or region, underscoring the absence of a consistent development pipeline.

Leading cricket boards globally, such as Cricket Australia, the England and Wales Cricket Board, and Cricket South Africa, have long integrated robust player welfare infrastructure into their operations as a matter of basic professional governance [Cricket Australia, ECB, Cricket South Africa, player welfare policies]. This includes contracted player welfare officers, mandatory access to psychological support, formal grievance and mediation protocols, and structured transition frameworks for players nearing retirement. These are not luxuries but essential mechanisms that convert raw talent, often from challenging backgrounds, into sustained, high-level performance, while simultaneously protecting institutions from the very crises they otherwise repeatedly encounter. The West Indies Players Association (WIPA) exists precisely because regional boards have historically under-resourced these functions, but WIPA, as a union, cannot substitute for the foundational development and welfare systems that territorial boards must provide from the outset of a player’s professional life.

The cost of this systemic neglect extends far beyond individual careers. Each time a talented player is failed, Guyana loses a vital node of social mobility. These athletes, hailing from places like Cow Dam, Linden, and Enmore, are more than just cricketers; they are living proof to young people in underserved communities that excellence is achievable. When the institution fails them, it sends a disheartening message down the pipeline to every aspiring young cricketer, signaling the precariousness of their future. Guyana’s capacity to produce extraordinary cricketing talent is undeniable, from the Chanderpauls, father and son, to Shamar Joseph, whose eight-wicket haul at the Gabba was a modern Test cricket marvel [ESPN Cricinfo]. Kevin Sinclair himself, with a composed fifty on Test debut in Adelaide, contributed to the squad that broke a 27-year West Indies losing streak in Australia [ESPN Cricinfo]. This talent is real, deep, and self-renewing. What does not renew itself is the courage required to build an institution truly worthy of it.

The GCB faces a critical choice. It can continue to manage these crises reactively, defensively, and episodically, incurring significant reputational and human costs. Or, it can make the structural investment necessary to prevent them: a properly funded player welfare framework, staffed by dedicated professionals, that supports a Guyanese cricketer from their first Harpy Eagles contract through the entirety of their career and beyond. The talent will continue to emerge from Cow Dam, Berbice, Linden, and the East Coast; it always has. But talent without infrastructure is not a development system; it is a lottery. For too long, Guyana cricket has mistakenly called itself a factory while operating as little more than a ticket booth, leaving its most precious assets to chance.

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April 5, 2026 0 comments

The Sixty-Year Argument

by guyanabusinessjournal April 2, 2026

written by guyanabusinessjournal

Sunday Essay · Diaspora & Development

Why Guyana keeps having the same diaspora conversation — and what it will take to finally stop

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · March 31, 2026

In 1987, a young Guyanese engineer named Fitzroy packed two suitcases and flew to Toronto. He was not fleeing failure. He was fleeing a country that had no use for what he could do. The Burnham economy had hollowed out the professional class so thoroughly that a qualified engineer could not find work commensurate with his training, could not purchase basic materials, could not feed his family on a state salary, as inflation had reduced it to near-fiction. Guyana lost somewhere between a quarter and a third of its educated population in those years — including an estimated 70 percent of its university-trained professionals between 1962 and 1968 alone. It was a sustained hemorrhage that gutted medicine, engineering, education, and law simultaneously. The country that remained was not simply poorer. It was structurally diminished, weakened at the precise moment it needed to be strong.

Pencil sketch illustration: a Guyanese man stands at a crossroads between the colonial skyline of Georgetown and an oil derrick on the horizon, surrounded by unfinished foundations — the compound cost of brain drain made visible. — Illustration: The figure at the crossroads — between the city that could not hold him and the country that still needs what he carries. Pencil sketch commissioned for the GBJ Sunday Essay.

89%

Tertiary-Educated
Emigration Rate
(1965–2000)

Largest Diaspora
as % of Population
(World Rank)

260k

Oil & Gas Workers
Needed by 2030
(ILO Projection)

74%

Poverty Rate
Hinterland Regions
(vs. 22% Georgetown)

Fig. 1 — Caribbean Brain Drain: Tertiary-Educated Emigration Rates · Sources: Mishra (2006); ILO Skills Needs Assessment, Guyana 2022; World Bank

GBJ Data Note: The structural hemorrhage described above is historically unmatched in the region. Between 1965 and 2000, Guyana experienced an emigration rate of approximately 89 percent among its tertiary-educated population — the highest in the Caribbean and among the highest recorded globally.

Thirty years later, Fitzroy’s daughter flew back to Georgetown with a project management certification, a network of Canadian investors, and a genuine desire to contribute to the country her father had described across three decades of diaspora longing. She was met with bureaucratic opacity, professional suspicion from colleagues who read her return as competition rather than reinforcement, and a government incentive package that — however well-intentioned — communicated to the people around her that she was considered more valuable than they were. She stayed eighteen months. Then she went back to Toronto.

This is not a story about ingratitude. It is not a story about small-mindedness. It is a story about what happens when policy design keeps colliding with history and refuses to learn from it.

The Sixty-Year Cycle

Guyana has been having the diaspora conversation for nearly six decades. The cycle did not begin with the oil boom, nor did it begin in the 1980s. It began in 1967, just one year after independence, when Prime Minister Forbes Burnham and his Finance Minister, Peter D’Aguiar, launched the first formal remigration scheme to reverse the initial wave of post-colonial brain drain. The primary mechanism of that 1967 scheme was the provision of duty-free concessions on personal effects and tools of trade. Fifty-eight years later, the cast of characters has changed. The GDP figures have changed. The rhetoric — “nation-building,” “brain gain,” “One Guyana” — refreshes with each administration. But the underlying argument remains structurally identical: the diaspora wants to come home, local professionals feel threatened, the government offers the exact same duty-free perks that inflame rather than reconcile, and the cycle resets.

The oil boom has not resolved this argument. By radically accelerating the timeline for national development, it has amplified the stakes of getting it wrong.

Guyana's Oil-Driven GDP Growth vs. Caribbean Average (2018–2024) — Fig. 2 — Guyana Real GDP Growth vs. Caribbean Average, 2018–2024 · Sources: IMF World Economic Outlook 2025; World Bank WDI

GBJ Data Note: Guyana’s real GDP growth averaged 47 percent annually from 2022 to 2024 — the fastest in the world by a significant margin. The Caribbean average over the same period was approximately 4 percent. This asymmetry exponentially raises the stakes of the diaspora debate.

We are now the fastest-growing economy in the world — a fact repeated so often it has acquired the numbness of a slogan. Nearly half of all Guyanese live outside the country, and more than half of Guyanese residents in Guyana still live in poverty.

Guyana's Diaspora: Scale and Global Context — Fig. 3 — Guyana’s Diaspora: Scale and Global Context · Sources: World Bank Migration & Remittances Data 2022; Forbes (2022); UN DESA

GBJ Data Note: Guyana ranks first globally for its diaspora as a share of total population. When accounting for undocumented migration and second-generation diaspora members, the “nearly half” framing accurately reflects the scale of the Guyanese transnational community.

This diaspora sends remittances that, in President Ali’s own words, “contributed significantly to the eradication of many social problems” and “helped us during many difficult times.” The Guyanese Diaspora are not peripheral people. They are co-authors of whatever national survival Guyana managed across fifty years of turbulence and exodus.

Guyana Remittances as Share of GDP (2000–2023) — Fig. 4 — Guyana Remittances as Share of GDP, 2000–2023 · Sources: World Bank WDI; Bank of Guyana Annual Reports

GBJ Data Note: While remittances as a percentage of GDP have mathematically declined since oil production began, this is a denominator effect caused by the rapid expansion of oil-driven GDP. Absolute remittance flows remain a critical pillar of national survival.

And yet the moment they appear at the Cheddi Jagan International airport with ambitions rather than just remittances, suspicion hardens into resentment.

The Sixty-Year Record

The history of this argument is not a footnote; it is the blueprint of our current failure. The context for Guyana’s initial remigration efforts was a period of intense demographic hemorrhage. In the early 1960s, political instability and worsening economic conditions — exacerbated by the deeply unpopular “Kaldor Budget” of 1962¹ — triggered an initial wave of emigration. This exodus was accelerated by a dual shift in international immigration policies: while the United Kingdom tightened its borders with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, the United States and Canada simultaneously opened their doors to skilled labor, redirecting the flow of Guyanese professionals to North America.

Recognizing the critical need for skilled personnel to build the newly independent state, Prime Minister Forbes Burnham launched a formal remigration scheme in 1967. The primary mechanism of this scheme was the provision of duty-free concessions on personal effects, household goods, and tools of trade. It was intended to ease the financial burden of relocation and make returning to Guyana a more attractive proposition for those who had established lives abroad.

Fig. 11 — Six Decades of Guyanese Diaspora Policy: The Unbroken Cycle · Sources: Strachan (1980); UN ECOSOC (1970); Stabroek News (2014); ILO (2022)

GBJ Data Note: The 1967 scheme established the precedent of offering duty-free concessions as the primary tool for incentivizing return — a policy mechanism that remains the cornerstone of Guyana’s modern Re-migrant Scheme, which was formalized and expanded in the 1990s.

As Guyana transitioned into a “cooperative republic” in 1970, the government actively recruited overseas Guyanese to manage newly nationalized sectors, recognizing that internal capacity was insufficient. However, the effectiveness of these early remigration schemes was continually undermined by broader economic realities. The shift toward cooperative socialism, coupled with economic stagnation, accelerated the emigration of the middle class. While the government offered duty-free concessions, these incentives were insufficient to counterbalance the declining standard of living and foreign exchange shortages. The 1967 scheme could not stem the larger tide of outward migration because the incentives were overwhelmed by the conditions.

The Plantation Reflex

To understand why, you have to resist the temptation to make this a story about personalities. It is a story about what Lloyd Best spent a career trying to name: the plantation economy’s most durable inheritance is not poverty. It is a structural reflex — the compulsive orientation of Caribbean states toward the external, the metropolitan, the certified-elsewhere. The plantation did not merely extract labor. It trained an entire social order to distrust what it produced internally and defer to what arrived from outside. Best argued that Caribbean independence changed the personnel of power without dismantling this reflex. The new postcolonial managers inherited the plantation’s orientation even as they inherited its buildings.

Walter Rodney made the analysis more devastating. Underdevelopment, in his account, was not an accident of geography or culture. It was actively produced through policy and institutional design — the daily choices states make about whose knowledge counts and whose labor is worth what. But Rodney also believed — and this is the part of his thinking most often suppressed — that the reversal was possible. Not through sentiment, not through the politics of guilt, but through the deliberate construction of what he called genuine human infrastructure: the trained people, the functioning institutions, the accumulated knowledge, and the social trust that allow a people to develop themselves rather than waiting to be developed by others.

Apply both lenses to Guyanese diaspora policy and the picture clarifies immediately. When a postcolonial state offers personal perks — tax breaks, duty concessions, subsidized housing — to returning diaspora members unavailable to local professionals of equivalent qualification, it reproduces the plantation’s foundational hierarchy: external over internal, certified-abroad over built-at-home. The resentment this generates is not petty nationalism. It is the historically informed response of a professional class that has correctly read what the state is communicating about their worth.

“Policies designed to attract talent end up destroying the trust that makes talent useful. They solve a supply problem while manufacturing a cohesion problem. And cohesion is not soft infrastructure. It is the hardest infrastructure of all.”

Investment vs. Identity: The Correction

The correction is not complicated. It is, however, politically difficult because it requires disaggregating two things conflated since 1967: incentives for investment and perks for identity.

There is a defensible argument for incentivizing specific categories of investment — agro-processing, technology, renewable energy, education, oil and gas skills development — regardless of who makes them. A Guyanese entrepreneur from Berbice who opens a dairy processing plant should enjoy the same concessions as a diaspora Guyanese who does the same. A software engineer from Linden who builds a fintech startup should access the same support as a Silicon Valley returnee. The moment incentives attach to what is being built rather than where the builder has been living, the discriminatory optics dissolve and the playing field levels.

This reorientation also has a sectoral urgency the personal perks debate obscures entirely. Guyana’s oil and gas industry will require, in the coming decade, a substantial cohort of trained geoscientists, petroleum engineers, data scientists, and environmental specialists. These are not positions that can be filled by goodwill and a returning passport. They require deliberate, structured skills pipelines of the kind the diaspora is uniquely positioned to help build — precisely because so many Guyanese professionals are working at the frontier of these disciplines in Houston, Calgary, and Aberdeen.

Guyana Oil & Gas Sector: Workforce Supply vs. Demand Gap — Fig. 5 — Oil & Gas Sector: Workforce Supply vs. Demand Gap · Sources: ILO Skills Needs Assessment, Guyana 2022; World Bank Labour Force Data

Educational Attainment of Guyana's Working-Age Population (2021) — Fig. 6 — Educational Attainment of Guyana’s Working-Age Population, 2021 · Sources: Guyana Bureau of Statistics; ILO 2022; World Bank

Skills Availability for In-Demand Oil & Gas Occupations in Guyana — Fig. 7 — Skills Availability for In-Demand Oil & Gas Occupations · Sources: ILO Skills Needs Assessment, Guyana 2022; Employer Surveys

GBJ Data Note: The arithmetic case for institutional knowledge transfer is unavoidable. The ILO projects a workforce demand of 260,000 against a potential labor force of under 40,000. With over 80 percent of the working-age population lacking tertiary education, employers report that 62 percent of required technical skills are scarce locally but available abroad — precisely the diaspora’s profile.

The question is not whether a diaspora professional deserves a duty concession on personal goods. The question is whether Guyana is building the institutional architecture — curriculum partnerships, endowed chairs at the University of Guyana, visiting scholar programs, research collaborations — that will produce the next generation of local decision-makers rather than permanently importing them.

“The diaspora’s most important contribution is not capital. It is knowledge transfer that stays. A diaspora professional who helps design a curriculum, establishes a mentorship cohort, or co-founds a training program has built something that continues working after the plane takes off.”

The Architecture Already Exists

The Amaya Milk Company story illustrates what diaspora partnership looks like when the architecture supports it. Faced with the absurdity of visiting Guyana and finding no fresh milk in a supermarket, Canada-based entrepreneur Omkaar Sharma did not wait for a government perks package. He partnered with local company Sterling Products, built a supply chain, and launched a business that created jobs on farms, reduced import dependence, and addressed a basic gap in the food economy. The motive was partly commercial. The outcome was structural. Not a handout. A handshake.

Dr. Jason Mars, the Guyanese-born AI scientist who established scholarships for University of Guyana Computer Science majors to pursue PhDs abroad while connecting local developers to projects with major international firms, arrived not performing charity but performing partnership. “The beautiful thing about Guyana,” he observed, “is that it has intellectual and energetic young people with fires in their belly to do good work.” That is not the language of a benefactor surveying the underdeveloped. It is the language of a collaborator who recognizes capacity when he sees it.

And here it is worth pausing to acknowledge that this architecture already exists — built quietly, without government incentive packages, by the diaspora itself. Scholar Lear Matthews, whose research on Caribbean transnational associations is the most sustained documentation of this phenomenon, has argued that the Guyanese diaspora’s most underestimated contribution is not the remittance wire transfer. It is the organized civil society diaspora communities have constructed across North America — hometown associations, church networks, professional guilds, and above all, the high school alumni associations that have maintained living institutional connections to specific Guyanese communities for generations.

The Queens College Alumni Association of New York is perhaps the most prominent example, but far from alone. Alumni associations representing Tutorial High School, Bishops’ High School, St. Stanislaus College, Berbice High School, and dozens of other secondary institutions have been operating in New York, Toronto, and London for decades — funding scholarships, equipping libraries and computer labs, mentoring young alumni, and sustaining the specific, place-rooted institutional loyalty that government diaspora strategies almost never manage to manufacture from above. These associations do not require a duty concession to function. They require something the state consistently underestimates: a connection deep enough to survive distance and time.

Both examples point toward what a serious diaspora engagement strategy prioritizes: the architecture of institutional connection. STEMGuyana — founded by Dr. Karen Abrams, a Guyanese diaspora scientist who returned with the explicit purpose of building something institutional rather than symbolic — embodies precisely this logic. Through robotics clubs now active in all ten regions, Dr. Abrams has given a child in Lethem the same encounter with computational thinking available to a child in Georgetown. None of these require preferential treatment of returning residents over locals. All require the state to recognize what Lear Matthews’s scholarship has been demonstrating for years: the diaspora has already built the connective tissue. The question is whether Guyana’s policy architecture is intelligent enough to work with it rather than around it.

The Altruism Question

The altruism question deserves direct examination, because it is where the public debate most consistently loses its footing.

When local observers question whether the “comebackie” is genuinely committed or merely opportunistic, they are applying a moral standard to economic actors that we apply nowhere else. We do not interrogate the motives of foreign investors entering the oil services sector. We do not require construction firms to demonstrate patriotic feeling before awarding contracts. The relevant question is never purely about motive. It is about terms: Are the terms of engagement structured to build local capacity or to extract value? Does expertise transfer to local counterparts, or stay locked inside the returning professional while locals remain subordinate?

Best would have recognized the risk immediately. The plantation’s most sophisticated modern descendant is not the foreign oil company. It is the project model: importing expertise without producing local competence, and leaving when the contract ends without leaving anything durable behind. Brain gain, in its worst forms, is a more credentialed version of the same extractive logic. We know this because we have lived it. The 1967 remigration scheme ultimately failed not because the diaspora lacked patriotism, but because individual duty-free concessions were insufficient to counterbalance a declining standard of living and a contracting economy. The incentives were overwhelmed by the conditions. The antidote — what economists now call brain circulation — is policy that allows expertise to flow without creating dependency: the visiting professor who mentors graduate students, the energy professional who co-designs curriculum at the University of Guyana, the agribusiness expert who spends a season working alongside local farmers and leaves behind both a technique and a person capable of teaching it.

Brain Drain vs. Brain Circulation: Two Policy Models for Diaspora Engagement — Fig. 8 — Brain Drain vs. Brain Circulation: Two Policy Models · Sources: ILO 2022; Saxenian (2006); Docquier & Rapoport (2012); World Bank

GBJ Data Note: Transitioning from a model of individual perks to one of institutional architecture aligns with contemporary development economics. It ensures that knowledge transfer remains embedded within local institutions, thereby building genuine human infrastructure.

The Harder Conversation: Regional Equity

There is a harder conversation underneath all of this that Guyana is not yet having clearly enough, and it concerns equity across a different axis than the diaspora-local divide.

The oil boom has concentrated its early benefits along the coast, in Georgetown, among those already positioned to capture contracts, real estate appreciation, and government adjacency. If diaspora engagement produces a more sophisticated Georgetown professional class while the Essequibo farmer and the Lethem schoolteacher remain structurally outside the conversation, we have not solved the development problem. We have upgraded its beneficiaries.

Poverty Rate by Region: The Coastal-Hinterland Divide in Guyana — Fig. 9 — Poverty Rate by Region: The Coastal-Hinterland Divide · Sources: OCHA Guyana Country Profile 2022; IDB Poverty Report 2024; World Bank; UNICEF

GBJ Data Note: The spatial inequality is stark. While the national poverty rate averages approximately 36 percent, poverty in the rural hinterland regions (1, 7, 8, and 9) reaches 74 percent. A diaspora strategy that ignores this geography will merely subsidize existing disparities.

This is why the sectoral argument carries moral weight beyond its technical merits. Incentives attached to investment in agriculture, in regional infrastructure, in education technology, in rural connectivity — rather than to the identity of the investor — carry a built-in distributional logic. Rodney understood that the geography of underdevelopment is not accidental. The interior was not left behind by neglect alone. It was left behind by a development model that, even in its progressive iterations, kept the coast as the site of value and the hinterland as the site of extraction. Any diaspora engagement strategy that does not consciously interrupt this spatial logic will reproduce it — with diaspora branding on the exterior.

The Compound Cost

Fitzroy never came back. He built a life in Toronto, raised his daughter there, and died there. His daughter, after her eighteen months, returned to Canada and has not come back since.

The tragedy is not merely the absence of one family at the dinner table. It is the absence of what they would have built. The loss is architectural. But architecture can be changed. That is, finally, the point.

Every Fitzroy who packed two suitcases was also a university department not founded, a hospital not staffed, a research program not established, a generation of students not mentored. The loss is not linear. It compounds.

Fig. 10 — The Compound Cost of Brain Drain: 60 Years of Lost Human Infrastructure · Sources: Mishra (2006); ILO 2022; World Bank; Estimated cumulative skilled emigration data

GBJ Data Note: The cumulative loss of an estimated 135,000 tertiary-educated professionals over six decades represents a staggering deficit in institutional capacity. Reversing this requires structural knowledge transfer, not just financial remittances.

Guyana has been given a window of historically singular proportion — the revenues, the attention, the developmental moment — to build the institutions that will sustain this country when the last barrel is pumped. If we get the design right: sector-based incentives, brain circulation embedded in institutional partnerships, equitable regional distribution, a posture that treats all Guyanese contribution as equally legitimate — the forty-year argument ends. Not because the tensions disappear but because the architecture no longer manufactures them.

If we get it wrong, we will be here in another decade with better GDP numbers and the same unresolved resentments. Fitzroy’s granddaughter, born in Toronto, fluent in a country she has visited but never inhabited, will carry the particular grief of the diaspora child: connected enough to mourn what was lost, distant enough to know she cannot retrieve it alone.

The question is no longer whether the diaspora matters. It is whether we are designing a country capable of using what it offers.

“Build the human infrastructure. Build it now. Build it for everyone.”

¹ The 1962 “Kaldor Budget” was a controversial fiscal plan introduced in British Guiana on January 31, 1962, by Dr. Cheddi Jagan’s PPP government, designed by Cambridge economist Nicholas Kaldor to raise funds for industrialization via increased taxes and austerity. It triggered widespread protests, leading to the Feb 16 “Black Friday” riots, looting, and political instability. ↩

Dr. Terrence Richard Blackman is Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal and Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York. He is a former Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor at MIT and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His Transforming Guyana webinar series has convened diaspora scholars, policymakers, and practitioners across North America, the Caribbean, and Europe. He writes on Guyanese political economy, mathematics education, and the political economy of the Caribbean.

References

Mishra, P. Emigration and Brain Drain: Evidence from the Caribbean. IMF Working Paper WP/06/25 (2006). imf.org
International Labour Organization. Skills Needs Assessment for the Oil and Gas Sector in Guyana, 2022–2026 (2022). ilo.org
IMF. World Economic Outlook, April 2025: Guyana Country Data. imf.org
World Bank. Migration and Remittances Data: Guyana (2022). worldbank.org
Forbes, R. Guyana Diaspora: Scale and Composition. Caribbean Development Bank Working Paper (2022). caribank.org
OCHA. Guyana Country Profile (June 2022). reliefweb.int
Inter-American Development Bank. Poverty and Inequality in Guyana Amidst Economic Boom (December 2024). iadb.org
Saxenian, A. The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Harvard University Press (2006).
Docquier, F. & Rapoport, H. “Globalization, Brain Drain, and Development.” Journal of Economic Literature, 50(3): 681–730 (2012).
Matthews, L. Caribbean Transnational Associations and Development. Caribbean Studies Series (2019).
Guyana Bureau of Statistics. Labour Force Survey 2021. statisticsguyana.gov.gy
Strachan, A.J. Government Sponsored Return Migration to Guyana (1980). Cited in: Sussex University Thesis, Exploring the potential development consequences and impact of return migration to Guyana.
UN ECOSOC. Outflow of Trained Personnel from Developing to Developed Countries (1970). United Nations Economic and Social Council.
Stabroek News. The Remigrant’s Scheme and Its Shortcomings (2014). stabroeknews.com

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