Governance and Transparency

Secretary of State Marco Rubio flew overnight from the State of the Union to address CARICOM in Basseterre — the first such visit in a decade. What he said mattered. What he chose not to say may matter more.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Basseterre yesterday on less than four hours of sleep, having flown directly from the State of the Union address. He was in good humor. He joked about colleagues doubting that St. Kitts and Nevis constituted a “work trip,” and acknowledged, with practiced self-deprecation, that it had been a decade since a secretary of state had shown up at a CARICOM heads of government meeting.^[1] He then laid out an agenda that Caribbean leaders would do well to parse carefully — not only for what it contained, but for what it conspicuously omitted.

The Three Pillars

Rubio’s address to the 50th Regular Meeting of the Conference of CARICOM Heads of Government rested on three explicit pillars: transnational security, energy partnership, and regional economic investment. Each deserves scrutiny.^[1]

On security, Rubio was emphatic and detailed. He named the threat — transnational criminal organizations whose funding and firepower “rival if not exceed that of many of the nation-states that they threaten.” He acknowledged, importantly, that the weapons fueling Caribbean violence are largely purchased in the United States. He pointed to the Mexican cartels’ increasingly militarized posture as a cautionary model. This was not mere diplomatic courtesy. This was a secretary of state who understands that the Caribbean’s security architecture is fragile, and who appears to recognize that American culpability in the arms pipeline is part of the equation.

On energy, Rubio was inviting but vague. He spoke of “extraordinary opportunities” and affirmed that the United States wants to be a partner in responsible energy development. For Guyana, sitting atop what may be the most significant offshore petroleum discovery of the twenty-first century, this language is simultaneously welcoming and watchful. The question is not whether Washington wants to partner with the Caribbean on energy. The question is: partnership on whose terms?

On economic investment, the rhetoric was warm: the stronger and more prosperous the CARICOM nations are, the stronger and more prosperous the United States will be. This is the kind of sentiment that reads well in a communiqué. Whether it translates into reduced trade barriers, expanded market access, investment in Caribbean infrastructure, or meaningful technology transfer remains to be seen. Caribbean leaders have heard versions of this promise before. The shelf life of American attention to the region tends to be short.

The Venezuela Subtext

The most revealing section of Rubio’s address concerned Venezuela. He was unapologetic. He described the post-Maduro situation in terms that would have been “unimaginable” two months ago: the release of political prisoners, the closure of the Helicoide detention facility, oil revenues finally flowing toward public services. He credited the interim authorities, led by Delcy Rodríguez, with concrete progress. And he argued — this is significant — that a stable, prosperous, and eventually democratic Venezuela would be “an extraordinary partner and asset” to CARICOM nations, particularly on energy.^[1]

This framing is doing heavy diplomatic work. Rubio is asking Caribbean leaders, many of whom have deep reservations about the January 3 operation, to look past the means and evaluate the results. It is a pragmatist’s argument. It is also, for several CARICOM members, an uncomfortable one — not because the results are unwelcome, but because the precedent of unilateral military intervention in a sovereign Western Hemisphere state sits uneasily with the founding principles of the Caribbean community itself.

For Guyana, the Venezuela calculus is uniquely layered. Georgetown has spent decades managing the existential territorial claim that Caracas maintains over Essequibo — a claim that Maduro escalated with alarming theatrics in late 2023 and into 2024. A weakened, internally focused Venezuela is, in the short term, a Venezuela less likely to press that claim. But a Venezuela whose political trajectory is shaped by Washington’s preferences is not automatically a Venezuela that respects the International Court of Justice process that Guyana has championed. President Ali, who was present in Basseterre, will know this arithmetic better than anyone.

But the Venezuela conversation cannot be separated from its most devastating downstream consequence, which brings us to what may be the most significant absence in Rubio’s address.

The Crisis He Would Not Name: Cuba

On the same day that Rubio stood in Basseterre speaking of partnership and shared prosperity, the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Havana, Francisco Pichón, was warning from his office that Cuba faces “acute humanitarian risks” and potential “collapse” as its fuel reserves continue to fall.^[2] This was not coincidence. It was context. And Rubio’s refusal to address it substantively was the most conspicuous silence of his remarks.

The facts are stark. Since the January 3 seizure of Maduro, the United States has exercised near-total control over Venezuelan oil exports and has used that control to sever Cuba’s primary fuel lifeline. Executive Order 14380, signed on January 29, declared a national emergency and authorized tariffs against any nation that supplies oil to Cuba.^[3] Mexico, which had been providing roughly 44 percent of Cuba’s imports, suspended shipments under pressure — though Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum described the decision as a “sovereign” one not made under US direction.^[4] The result, according to crisis analysts, is a reduction of approximately 90 percent in Cuban fuel imports.^[5]

The humanitarian consequences are not hypothetical. They are unfolding now, in real time, ninety miles from Florida and squarely within the Caribbean basin that Rubio claims to prioritize. Blackouts in Havana now stretch for hours; outside the capital, they last up to twenty hours a day.^[6] Hospitals are running on fumes — in some cases, literally, with ambulances unable to find fuel to respond to emergencies.^[7] Havana’s international airport can no longer refuel outbound aircraft, severing one of the last supply routes for medicine and humanitarian cargo. Garbage collection has halted in parts of the capital because trucks are out of diesel. The annual Festival del Habano, a cigar festival that brings hard currency to the island, was postponed indefinitely in February due to what organizers described as “the complex economic situation.”^[8] 

The UN Secretary-General has used the word “collapse.”^[2] UN human rights experts have called the fuel blockade “a serious violation of international law” and warned that deliberately creating shortages of essential goods may constitute collective punishment of civilians. Canada has pledged C$8 million (approximately US$6.7 million) in food aid.^[9] Russia is discussing emergency fuel deliveries. Mexico, caught between solidarity and self-preservation, sent two ships of humanitarian supplies while its president insisted the decision to halt oil was “sovereign.”^[4] Meanwhile, on the same day as Rubio’s address, four Cuban nationals were killed in a confrontation with Cuban border troops after a Florida-registered speedboat attempted to approach the island’s northern coast — a grim indication of how rapidly the situation is militarizing.^[10]

Rubio said nothing about any of this. He spoke at length about energy as an “extraordinary opportunity” for the Caribbean. He praised Venezuela’s progress. He did not mention that the instrument of American leverage over Venezuela — control of its oil exports — is being simultaneously wielded as a weapon of deprivation against eleven million Cuban civilians. He did not mention that the stated objective of U.S. policy, confirmed by administration officials, is regime change in Havana by the end of 2026.

Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who was in the room, had urged CARICOM the day before Rubio’s address to address the humanitarian crisis in Cuba “with clarity and courage.”^[11] It was a direct, measured rebuke — the kind of statement Caribbean leaders make when the gap between a visiting dignitary’s rhetoric and the region’s reality has grown too wide to politely ignore.

For the Caribbean, Cuba is not an abstraction. It is a neighbor. Cuba has sent doctors to CARICOM nations for decades — training physicians, staffing rural clinics, providing healthcare capacity that many small island states could not otherwise afford. Whatever one’s view of the Cuban government, the deliberate strangulation of an island’s fuel supply — with full knowledge that it will cripple hospitals, halt food distribution, and plunge millions into darkness — is not a policy that any Caribbean leader can observe in silence and retain moral standing. That Rubio offered partnership in one breath while presiding over a policy of engineered humanitarian crisis in the next is a contradiction that CARICOM must name plainly.

What Else Was Not Said

Rubio did not mention climate change. He did not mention sea-level rise. For an audience of Caribbean heads of government, many of whom lead nations whose very existence is threatened by climate disruption this century, this silence is no oversight. It is a policy signal. The current administration’s posture on climate is well known. But the Caribbean cannot afford to let its most urgent existential concern be treated as an ideological preference in Washington. The physics of atmospheric carbon does not observe partisan boundaries.

Rubio did not mention Haiti in substantive terms, despite the fact that Haiti’s crisis — political, humanitarian, and security — represents CARICOM’s most acute collective challenge. He alluded to Haiti only glancingly, under the umbrella of transnational criminal organizations. For a region that has been calling for sustained international engagement on Haiti for years, this was thin.

Rubio did not mention the deportation flights that have strained relations between Washington and several Caribbean governments. He did not mention the reports of U.S. interdiction operations in Caribbean waters that have resulted in the deaths of fishermen. He spoke of partnership and shared prosperity, but he did not address the policies that, from the Caribbean side of the table, look more like imposition than partnership.

And Rubio did not mention China, though Beijing’s growing economic footprint in the Caribbean — in infrastructure, telecommunications, and development finance — is one of the principal reasons Washington has rediscovered its interest in the region. The omission was diplomatic, but the subtext was legible. When a secretary of state flies overnight from the State of the Union to address CARICOM, one of the unstated reasons is that the United States has noticed it has competition in its own hemisphere.

What the Caribbean Must Do

Rubio closed by describing U.S.-Caribbean relations as something he intends to “reinvigorate” rather than “reset.” The distinction is welcome. It implies continuity and deepening rather than the condescension of starting over. But the Caribbean must bring its own agenda to this reinvigoration, rather than simply receiving Washington’s.

That agenda should include, at a minimum: binding commitments on climate finance, not aspirational language; concrete market access for Caribbean goods and services in the U.S. economy; respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of CARICOM member states, including Guyana’s; and a Haiti strategy that goes beyond counternarcotics to address governance, food security, and democratic restoration.

Rubio’s visit was significant. A secretary of state showing up matters. The gesture communicates priority, and priority creates leverage. But leverage is only useful if it is exercised. The Caribbean’s challenge now is to convert the symbolism of Rubio’s overnight flight into durable structural commitments. The region has been here before. The warm words came. The follow-through did not. This time, CARICOM must ensure that the conversation does not end when the secretary’s plane lifts off from Robert L. Bradshaw International Airport.

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Terrence R. Blackman, Ph.D., is Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal and Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. He is a former Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Mathematics at MIT and a former Member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

ExxonMobil’s decade-long, US$100 million commitment to STEM education in Guyana is one of the most significant private-sector investments in Caribbean human capital. It deserves unreserved welcome — and rigorous, constructive scrutiny in equal measure.

The announcement by ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods of a US$100 million, decade-long STEM education initiative for Guyana is, by any fair measure, one of the most significant private sector commitments to human capital development in the English-speaking Caribbean.^[1] It deserves to be recognized as such. It also deserves the kind of rigorous, constructive engagement that ensures it becomes more than a generous headline — that it becomes a generational inflection point. The Guyana Business Journal welcomes this initiative unreservedly and offers the following analysis and constructive guidance in the spirit of seeing it succeed beyond expectation.

There is much that is right about this initiative, beginning with its architecture. The three-pillar structure — teacher training, expanded student STEM opportunities, and college-and-career pathways — reflects what decades of education research have confirmed: that sustainable STEM capacity requires simultaneous investment at multiple points in the pipeline.^[2] You cannot build a workforce by training students alone if the teachers who instruct them lack preparation. You cannot prepare teachers effectively if the students they produce have no clear pathway into professional careers. ExxonMobil and its Foundation partners appear to understand this deeply.

The partnership model is equally credible. Bringing together the Ministry of Education, the University of Guyana, and the University of Houston creates a triangulation of local institutional knowledge, national policy authority, and international pedagogical expertise.^[3] The University of Houston, in particular, brings significant experience in STEM teacher preparation for diverse and underserved populations — a direct analog for Guyana’s own educational landscape.^[4] The commitment to geographic reach is essential and welcome as well. The plan to establish STEM centres in all ten administrative regions, beginning with a flagship at UG’s Turkeyen campus but extending into the hinterland, signals an understanding that national capacity cannot be built from Georgetown alone.^[2] The children of Region One and Region Nine are as entitled to the STEM future as those on the coast.

It is also worth noting that ExxonMobil’s initiative does not enter in a vacuum. STEM Guyana, founded in 2016, has spent nearly a decade building precisely the kind of grassroots infrastructure this initiative envisions — after-school STEM clubs, learning pods in underserved communities across all ten regions, AI and technology curricula, and a certified coach training pipeline that has reached thousands of students. Supported by partners including the IDB Lab, STEM Guyana represents homegrown institutional knowledge and community trust that no new initiative, however well-funded, can easily replicate. The ExxonMobil STEM Initiative should deliberately seek to amplify and build upon this existing foundation rather than construct parallel structures that risk duplicating effort or displacing local capacity. And the sheer scale matters. At US$100 million over ten years, this is not a CSR footnote or a photo-opportunity grant. It is an investment large enough, if managed well, to create systemic and measurable change.

While acknowledging the significance of this commitment, the Guyana Business Journal urges all parties — ExxonMobil, the Government of Guyana, the University of Guyana, and civil society — to attend carefully to several priorities that will determine whether this initiative fulfills its extraordinary promise.

I. Governance and Transparency Must Be Non-Negotiable

A US$100 million program over a decade requires its own governance architecture. Guyana should insist — and ExxonMobil should welcome — the establishment of an independent oversight board with representation from academia, the private sector, and civil society. Annual public reporting on expenditures, milestones, and outcomes should be non-negotiable. The worst outcome would be for this initiative to become opaque, with funds disbursed according to schedules and criteria that the public cannot scrutinize. Transparency here is not a burden — it is the mechanism by which trust is deepened and the initiative’s credibility is sustained over a full decade.

II. Mathematics Must Be at the Core, Not the Margin

There is a persistent tendency in STEM initiatives globally — and in the Caribbean especially — to gravitate toward the “T” and the “E” while treating mathematics as a prerequisite to be endured rather than a discipline to be cultivated. This would be a serious mistake. Mathematics is the foundational grammar of every STEM field.  Without a dramatic improvement in secondary mathematics instruction in Guyana, no amount of gleaming new laboratories, state-of-the-art equipment, or branded learning centres will produce the engineers and scientists this initiative envisions.

The data is sobering. Guyana’s CSEC mathematics pass rate improved from 27% in 2024 to 32% in 2025 — a meaningful gain, but one that still leaves more than two-thirds of candidates below the standard required for STEM progression.^[5] The teacher training component should prioritize mathematics pedagogy with the same urgency and resources devoted to applied science and technology. The GBJ recommends that ExxonMobil and UG consider establishing a dedicated Mathematics Teaching Excellence Centre within the broader initiative, with explicit targets for improving mathematics outcomes at the secondary level.

III. The Pipeline Must Serve the Nation, Not Just the Sector

The Bloomberg reporting around this announcement frames the initiative partly in terms of ExxonMobil’s global strategy — using Guyana’s success to negotiate better terms elsewhere, and addressing the labor shortage that constrains its own operations.^[6] This is understandable commercial logic, and there is nothing wrong with it. But Guyana must ensure that the STEM pipeline being built serves the breadth of the national economy — agriculture, healthcare, digital technology, environmental management, and manufacturing — not merely the oil and gas sector.

The curriculum design, career pathway programming, and mentorship structures should be deliberately diversified so that a young Guyanese who passes through these centres can aspire to lead in bioinformatics, climate adaptation science, or fintech, not only in petroleum engineering. President Ali’s broader economic diversification agenda depends on this distinction being maintained.^[7]

IV. UG Must Be a Partner, Not a Venue

The decision to establish the first STEM centre at UG’s Turkeyen campus is symbolically and practically important, but there is a risk that UG becomes a venue rather than a genuine partner — that the centre operates as an ExxonMobil Foundation program that happens to sit on UG’s grounds, rather than an integrated component of UG’s academic mission. The better outcome is for this initiative to catalyze a genuine strengthening of UG’s own STEM faculties: upgraded laboratories, enhanced faculty development, new graduate programs in STEM education, and expanded research capacity. UG should negotiate for institutional capacity-building as a core deliverable, not merely a secondary benefit.

V. Measurement Must Be Rigorous and Public

The initiative should also commit from its inception to rigorous, independent evaluation. What are the baseline metrics for secondary STEM performance today? What targets will be set for teacher effectiveness, student outcomes, and career placement at years three, five, and ten? How will the hinterland centres be assessed relative to the Georgetown flagship? Education investments without measurable outcomes and public accountability become, over time, difficult to distinguish from expenditures. ExxonMobil’s own culture of engineering precision should be brought to bear on the measurement framework, and the results should be made public — including where progress falls short.

VI. The Sovereign Responsibility That Cannot Be Outsourced

There is a broader point that the Guyanese public and its leaders should not lose sight of. This initiative, however welcome, represents roughly one-tenth of one percent of the revenues that Guyana’s oil resources will generate over the next decade.^[8] It is a meaningful corporate social investment, but it is not a substitute for the Government of Guyana’s own responsibility to dramatically increase and reform public spending on education. The sovereign wealth fund, the Natural Resource Fund, closed 2025 at US$3.25 billion.^[9] The national budget has quadrupled since 2021, reaching approximately US$7.5 billion in 2026.^[10]

The Government’s own education spending should be rising commensurately — not merely in capital expenditure on school buildings, but in the quality of teacher compensation, the rigor of curriculum standards, and the independence of educational assessment.^[11] ExxonMobil is doing what a responsible corporate partner should do. The Government of Guyana must do what only a sovereign government can do: build an education system worthy of the country’s extraordinary moment in history.

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The ExxonMobil Guyana STEM Initiative is a serious, well-structured, and genuinely significant investment in Guyana’s human capital. It deserves support, engagement, and constructive scrutiny in equal measure. If governed transparently, designed with breadth, implemented with mathematical rigor at its core, and measured against clear outcomes, it has the potential to be one of the defining contributions to Guyana’s post-oil future.

The pipeline metaphor that ExxonMobil itself has used is apt: the most important pipeline for Guyana’s future will indeed carry talent. The task now is to ensure that pipeline is built with the same engineering discipline that ExxonMobil brings to its operations offshore — and that it delivers its benefits to every region and every child in this nation.

Terrence Blackman is Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal and Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. He is a former Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor of Mathematics at MIT and a former Member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

The Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson, Sr., who died this morning at the age of eighty-four, was many things to many people: a Baptist minister of volcanic eloquence, a protégé of Martin Luther King Jr. who was present on that Memphis balcony the day before the assassination, a two-time presidential candidate who remade the Democratic Party’s demographic imagination, and a diplomat who extracted American hostages from Syria, Cuba, and Yugoslavia when official channels had failed. But for those of us who think seriously about the intersection of racial justice and economic transformation—and for a publication like the Guyana Business Journal, which devotes itself to precisely that intersection in the Caribbean context—it is Jackson’s economic philosophy that deserves the most sustained and careful reflection.

That philosophy was, in its essence, deceptively simple: markets are not neutral. Access is not automatic. And the most consequential form of segregation in the post–Civil Rights era is not the segregation of lunch counters but the segregation of capital.

Jackson’s economic vision did not emerge from a seminar room. It was forged in the streets of Chicago in the late 1960s, when, as a twenty-five-year-old seminary student, he was appointed by Dr. King to direct the Chicago chapter of Operation Breadbasket. The method was straightforward and devastating in its logic: identify corporations that profited enormously from Black consumers yet employed virtually no Black workers, stocked no products from Black-owned suppliers, and banked at no Black-owned institutions—and then organize boycotts until those corporations changed. In a little over a year, Jackson secured more than two thousand jobs for Black Chicagoans through Breadbasket’s campaigns. The model—research, education, negotiation, reconciliation, and failing all of those, direct economic action—would define his approach for the rest of his life.

When Jackson founded Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) in 1971 and later the National Rainbow Coalition in 1984, he carried the Breadbasket methodology into wider arenas. The boycott of Anheuser-Busch, which gained national prominence in 1982, challenged the nation’s largest brewer to account for the vast gap between its revenues from Black consumers and its investment in Black distributorships. By 1996, when PUSH and the Rainbow Coalition merged, Jackson was ready for what he called “the fourth stage of our struggle”: the campaign for access to capital itself. The Wall Street Project, launched on Dr. King’s birthday in January 1997, represented Jackson’s most ambitious and, in some ways, most intellectually sophisticated intervention. It recognized that in a financialized global economy, the commanding heights were no longer the factory floor or the retail counter but the trading desk, the boardroom, and the venture capital fund.

Jackson’s framing was characteristically vivid: Corporate America, he argued, maintained a “multi-billion dollar trade deficit” with minority communities. The language was deliberate. By using the vocabulary of international trade—balance of trade, open markets, fair competition—Jackson was insisting that the relationship between corporations and communities of color be understood as an economic relationship between parties with mutual obligations, not a charitable one between benefactors and supplicants. “Those who have been locked out from access to opportunity,” he declared, “want the same from Corporate America that Corporate America wants from U.S. and foreign markets: balance of trade, open trade, and uninhibited access.”

The Rainbow Coalition is often remembered as a cultural metaphor—a poetic gesture toward multiracial harmony. That reading, while not incorrect, is incomplete. Jackson’s Rainbow was, at its core, an economic argument. It was the proposition that the diverse constituencies of American life—Black, White, Latino, Asian American, Native American, LGBTQ, rural poor, urban working class—constituted not merely a moral coalition but an economic one, a coalition of the dispossessed whose combined market power, labor power, and electoral power could restructure the terms on which American capitalism distributed its rewards.

This was the real radicalism of Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns—not merely that a Black man was running for president, but that he was running on a platform which argued that Reaganomics had created a common enemy across racial lines. Industrial layoffs, plant closings, farm foreclosures, the defunding of urban infrastructure—these were not, Jackson insisted, separate problems afflicting separate constituencies. They were the predictable consequences of an economic philosophy that concentrated wealth upward while disinvesting from the communities that produced it. “Our flag is red, white and blue,” he famously declared, “but our nation is a rainbow—red, yellow, brown, Black and White—and we’re all precious in God’s sight.” The theological register was deliberate: Jackson was asserting that economic exclusion was not merely inefficient but sinful.

The 1988 campaign, in which Jackson won 6.9 million votes, building on the 3.3 million he received in 1984, demonstrated the coalition’s potential. He won the Michigan caucuses. He finished second in delegate count. He successfully fought to change the Democratic Party’s delegate allocation from winner-take-all to proportional representation—a structural reform that would later benefit candidates from Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders. David Masciotra, author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters, has argued persuasively that “a Democratic party that now represents a multicultural America and has someone like Kamala Harris as the Vice President and Obama as the former President began in many ways with those Jackson campaigns.” The Rainbow was not merely a slogan. It was a blueprint.

The Guyana Business Journal reflects on Jackson’s legacy with particular attentiveness because his central preoccupations—the equitable distribution of resource wealth, the democratization of access to capital, the insistence that economic growth without inclusion is merely extraction by another name—are precisely the questions that define Guyana’s present moment.

Guyana is today the world’s fastest-growing economy, propelled by offshore oil revenues that have already deposited billions into the Natural Resource Fund. The question that Jackson spent his life asking of Corporate America is the question Guyana must now ask of its own transformation: Who benefits? Who decides? And what institutional architecture ensures that the wealth generated from a shared national resource flows equitably to all of the nation’s people—not merely to those with proximity to power or capital?

Jackson’s Breadbasket model—his insistence on conducting rigorous research into corporate practices, educating communities about their leverage, negotiating from a position of informed strength, and organizing collective action when negotiation fails—offers a template that translates directly to the challenges of petrostate governance. The Wall Street Project’s demand for transparency in corporate hiring, procurement, and capital allocation is, at its analytical core, no different from the demand that Guyanese citizens and civil society organizations have been making regarding the transparency of oil contracts, the composition of regulatory boards, and the investment priorities of the Natural Resource Fund.

Jackson understood something that too many development economists still resist: economic inclusion is not a downstream consequence of growth. It is a precondition for sustainable growth. Communities that are excluded from the productive economy do not merely suffer injustice—they represent squandered potential, unrealized markets, and latent instability. “African-Americans and Latinos offer far greater potential for American business than any foreign market,” Jackson argued. “We consume more and have more resources. We are better-trained and better-educated. We are more accessible.” The developing world’s version of this argument is no less urgent: a nation’s own citizens, adequately educated, capitalized, and empowered, are its most valuable economic asset—more valuable than any barrel of crude.

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging that Jackson’s economic legacy is not without contradiction. Critics, including scholars like Thomas Sowell and entrepreneurs like Tony Brown, argued that the Breadbasket and PUSH model of corporate pressure, for all its tactical effectiveness, could veer into a politics of patronage rather than genuine entrepreneurship—that demanding inclusion in someone else’s enterprise is not the same as building one’s own. The controversy surrounding the 1998 purchase of a Chicago-based Anheuser-Busch distribution franchise by Jackson’s sons raised uncomfortable questions about the line between institutional advocacy and personal benefit.

These critiques are not trivial. In the context of oil-rich developing nations, the danger is especially acute: the politics of access can become the politics of rent-seeking if not disciplined by robust institutions, competitive markets, and an independent press. Jackson himself seemed to recognize this tension. His later career increasingly emphasized financial literacy, homeownership, and entrepreneurship—the John Hope Bryant “Silver Rights” agenda that Jackson’s Wall Street Project eventually championed. The evolution was significant: from demanding a seat at someone else’s table to building tables of one’s own.

Yet even Jackson’s critics must concede the fundamental validity of his structural diagnosis. The playing field was not level. Access was not equal. And the market, left to its own devices, reproduced the inequalities that history had created. Whatever the limitations of his particular remedies, Jackson’s insistence that economic justice required intentional institutional intervention—not merely the absence of formal barriers—has been vindicated by decades of research on the racial wealth gap, by the persistence of occupational segregation long after the passage of civil rights legislation, and by the stubborn reality that capital flows to where capital already exists.

Jesse Jackson died this morning in Chicago, the city where he built his life’s work, surrounded by his family. He died during Black History Month, a coincidence that feels less like accident than completion. He was eighty-four years old. He had lived with progressive supranuclear palsy for more than a decade and with Parkinson’s disease since 2017. His body, like the movement he led, had been battered but never fully stilled.

The family’s statement said he was “a servant leader—not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world.” That is a fair epitaph. But for those of us who write about economies and governance and the distribution of wealth in young nations finding their footing in an unforgiving global order, perhaps the most useful thing to say about Jesse Jackson is this: he understood, before most of his contemporaries, that civil rights without economic rights is an empty promissory note. He understood that diversity is not decoration but infrastructure. And he understood that the struggle for a just economy is never won; it is only, and always, continued.

At the Guyana Business Journal, we honor that understanding. We recognize in Jackson’s lifelong campaign the same conviction that animates our own work: that economic analysis must serve justice, that journalism must serve accountability, and that no nation—however blessed its resources—can afford to leave its people behind.

Rest in power, Reverend Jackson. The rainbow endures.

Supported By

We are grateful for the partnership and support of individuals and organizations committed to advancing Guyanese and Caribbean development and human capital investment.

Metallica Commodities Corporation

For over two decades, MCC has operated at the intersection of natural resource extraction and global logistics, trading all non-ferrous metals, including copper, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt, gold, and other precious metals across continents. With representative offices in Peru, Canada, Tanzania, and Guyana, MCC has witnessed firsthand how institutional quality determines whether resource revenues generate broad-based prosperity or concentrated advantage. The company’s experience in jurisdictions where oil and mineral wealth have transformed budgets—sometimes strengthening democratic governance, sometimes undermining it—informs their understanding that critical institutional conversations matter. As Guyana navigates its own resource-driven fiscal expansion, MCC recognizes that the frameworks governing how these unprecedented revenues are debated, allocated, and overseen will shape outcomes for decades. We’re grateful for their support of these critical institutional questions.

The GBJ Sunday Essay is sponsored by MCC and not written on its behalf. The views expressed are those of the author.

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On the eve of Guyana’s fifth annual Energy Conference, the Guyana Business Journal convened a conversation that cut through the promotional veneer to examine what this marquee event—and the governance structure it represents—actually delivers for the nation. Dr. Vincent Adams, former EPA Director with decades of US Department of Energy experience, joined me for an unflinching assessment that moved far beyond conference logistics to interrogate the fundamental architecture of how Guyana manages its oil wealth. What emerged was not merely a critique of an event, but a diagnostic of governance capture, institutional abandonment, and the dangerous gap between rhetoric and reality in Guyana’s energy sector.

The Conference as Symptom

The 2026 Energy Conference promises impressive credentials: ten thousand attendees, two hundred exhibitors, speakers including President Ali and regional heads of state, all gathered under the aspirational banner of “Building Tomorrow’s Future Today.” The graphics are beautiful, the sponsorship packages expensive—ExxonMobil and Chevron each contributing $150,000 as platinum sponsors—and the topics sound cutting-edge: artificial intelligence in oil and gas, supply chain resilience, digital transformation, carbon capture.

Yet Dr. Adams identified something striking in his initial assessment: “Not a single member of the opposition was invited to this conference.” This exclusion carries particular weight given the conference theme. As he observed, “I thought that the members of parliament, all of the opposition, was part by constitution of that government that would be building this future today, but none of them—even though a lot of foreigners were invited—not a single one of them were invited.” When half the constitutional government is systematically excluded from the country’s premier energy forum, the question becomes unavoidable: whose future is actually being built?

The exclusion extends beyond political representation to economic accessibility. Small businesses face entry costs of US$4,600 plus transportation and hotels—totaling one to two million Guyanese dollars per attendee. General admission runs US$400. Dr. Adams put it plainly: “Those small businesses cannot afford it. The ordinary citizen, the John Public who would like to come and attend and listen and learn—they’re basically locked out or priced out. So we’ve got a conference that does not have participants from the local community, which is to me counter to the whole intent of such a very important and critical conference.”

The result is a conference funded by the companies it should be scrutinizing, inaccessible to the citizens whose resources are being extracted, and closed to half the constitutional government. This is not mere oversight. It is structural design that reveals who actually sets Guyana’s energy agenda.

Corporate Capture of the National Agenda

Dr. Adams articulated what the conference structure makes explicit: “Who is setting that agenda for tomorrow except that it is being set by these major companies?” When ExxonMobil contributes $150,000 in sponsorship, it purchases more than booth space and speaking slots. It purchases influence over what gets discussed and what remains conspicuously absent from the agenda.

The conference topics—AI, digital transformation, carbon capture—sound sophisticated. But as Dr. Adams noted, sophistication without foundation is dangerous: “We’re putting stuff on autopilot without even learning to fly yet.” Guyana lacks basic regulatory capacity, has conducted no baseline environmental studies, maintains no adequate oil spill response plan, and employs zero EPA staff with petroleum engineering training. Yet the conference invites attendees to marvel at artificial intelligence applications while these fundamentals remain unaddressed.

I asked Dr. Adams what he found wrong with discussing advanced technologies. His response cut to the core: “It’s not a problem really, all of that sounds good, but we’re putting the cart before the horse because we have not even taken care of the basic issues. Fifty-eight percent of Guyana live in poverty. We’ve got corruption at the highest level. Child malnutrition is very high. So who is really setting the future agenda? These companies are basically setting the conference, setting up the agenda, and they will not want anything on that agenda that is not totally or almost totally in their interest.”

The corporate interest is straightforward: “Pump as much oil as possible, make as much profit as possible, and as quickly as possible.” This is not villainy—it is fiduciary duty to shareholders. The failure lies not with ExxonMobil for pursuing its mandate, but with Guyana’s government for ceding its own. As Dr. Adams emphasized repeatedly, “I’ve always said I’ve never been mad at Exxon. Exxon is doing what they’re supposed to be doing—to make a bigger bottom line as possible. However, we are not performing our responsibility in the best interest of our people.”

The Basics Still Missing

What should be on the conference agenda but isn’t? Dr. Adams laid out the fundamentals with the precision of someone who has actually built regulatory frameworks in the world’s most demanding energy jurisdiction. His first priority: “Capacity building. One of the things severely lacking in Guyana—especially in a new country that is so limited in its resources—is to share lessons learned and experiences, bad, good and indifferent. What has been successful, what has been pitfalls throughout the world.”

The regulatory infrastructure remains skeletal at best, dangerously absent at worst. The EPA, responsible for authorizing all offshore oil and gas operations, “does not have a single person, not a single person at that organization, with even five minutes of training in petroleum engineering or petroleum science or anything to do with petroleum.” This is not hyperbole for effect. Dr. Adams was director of that agency and established, with World Bank support, a petroleum expertise unit to remedy this gap. It was cancelled when the administration changed.

Similarly cancelled: the University of Guyana petroleum engineering program, developed in partnership with UWI and the University of Trinidad and Tobago, which would have produced graduates one to two years ago. Also abandoned: a seventeen-institution technical training consortium designed to build skilled workforce capacity across regions. Also eliminated: the requirement for on-site government monitoring of operations twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

Dr. Adams described his philosophy when heading the EPA: “Our mantra was to make sure that we always had more firepower in terms of expertise than the contractor.” The current approach represents “the complete opposite.” When I asked about the shift, he was direct: “There was a difference when people like myself were there and now. Exxon understood and was reasonable enough to accept what we’ve got to give in the interest of the country of Guyana. But now things have shifted in the opposite direction where Exxon is controlling everything.”

Environmental Governance in Retreat

The environmental implications of this institutional retreat are not theoretical. Dr. Adams detailed operational practices that violate Guyana’s own environmental regulations with apparent impunity. Gas flaring, prohibited except for emergencies under the Environmental Impact Assessment, now proceeds with minimal fines serving as de facto licensing fees. The principle of environmental protection has been “put on its head—because that flared gas has over two hundred contaminants, toxic chemicals in it, and it goes up there and forms acid rain that falls back and damages the entire environment, water and everything else.”

More fundamentally, operators are reinjecting clean ocean water into reservoirs while dumping produced toxic radioactive hot water into the ocean. This practice, cheaper than the required reinjection of produced water and gas, results in the destruction of “millions of eggs, fish eggs” through water intake systems. No baseline environmental study exists to measure the impact. The baseline study was in the 2020 EPA budget but never executed.

Should any of this be discussed at an energy conference themed “Building Tomorrow’s Future Today”? Dr. Adams thought so: “How to develop a safe and environmentally sound culture—that’s every single conference, engineering and otherwise, you go to anything to do with engineering all over the world. The most important topic is how do you develop a safe and environmentally sound culture.” Yet the 2026 agenda addresses none of it.

The Decommissioning Time Bomb

Perhaps most troubling was Dr. Adams’ discussion of what he called “the big elephant in the room that nobody is paying attention to”: decommissioning. Guyana is paying ExxonMobil billions of dollars upfront, before projects even begin, for eventual decommissioning of facilities that will be left on the seafloor. The problem is that plugged wells worldwide have proven to leak again over time. In California and elsewhere, major companies have addressed this liability by selling aging fields to shell companies with no assets, leaving cleanup costs to the public.

“When they pack up and gone and they said they’d clean up,” Dr. Adams warned, “there is no coming back for us when those wells are leaking at the bottom of the ocean. We’ve got no technical expertise to certify proper decommissioning. They pack up and leave, and maybe the day after, something happens and those wells blow. We got oil coming from the bottom of the ocean. There is no guardrails against that.”

This is not speculation about distant future problems. It is predictable consequence based on documented experience elsewhere. Yet decommissioning technology, liability frameworks, long-term monitoring requirements, and financial guarantees receive no conference attention. The reason is straightforward: these topics do not serve corporate interests in maximizing near-term extraction while minimizing long-term liability.

Local Content: The Gap Between Law and Reality

I asked Dr. Adams about local content requirements, given Guyana’s legislation setting targets for Guyanese ownership and employment. His response was unsparing: “The government brags about we’ve done a local content legislation. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just stuff on paper that you brag about.”

The documented reality includes Guyanese workers paid below minimum wage, eating leftover food after others finished—issues that made newspaper headlines with minimal official response. Eighty to ninety percent of spending flows to foreign companies. Most high-skilled jobs go to expatriates. Local firms struggle with qualification standards that “seem designed to exclude them,” while foreign companies receive waivers for not meeting requirements.

Dr. Adams offered an alternative model from his US Department of Energy experience: the mentor-protégé program. Contractors in disadvantaged areas had to demonstrate that fifty percent of spending would benefit local communities. When contractors protested lack of qualified local workers, the solution was mandated training programs: “You’re going to hire them anyway, and we’re going to give you three years for you to bring them up. Within three years they’re going to be ready for whatever contracts you have in the future.” Award fees were tied to performance with strict reporting requirements.

“When you just leave it loose with a handshake,” he observed, “there’s no enforcement.” Guyana has the handshake. It lacks the enforcement.

The National Resource Fund Debate

Our conversation took an unexpected turn when I asked about the National Resource Fund. Dr. Adams offered a contrarian perspective: “I’m not a big fan of an NRF.” His reasoning drew on household economics: “You’re not going to go invest if your family doesn’t have food on the table or you can’t pay your rent. You invest what is extra.”

He then corrected widespread misunderstanding of the Norway model that Guyana claims to follow. Norway legislated its sovereign wealth fund twenty-one years after oil discovery. The first withdrawal came forty-seven years after first oil. What did Norway do with oil revenues during those decades? “Made sure that you become a rich country first. Invest in your people.” The fund now holds two trillion dollars, but only after building comprehensive national capacity.

This represents a fundamental challenge to current policy, which prioritizes foreign portfolio investment while fifty-eight percent of Guyanese live in poverty and child malnutrition remains high.

The counterargument Dr. Adams encountered when raising this position years ago was revealing: officials claimed that keeping money in the general fund would invite “massive corruption.” His response captured the absurdity: “Could you imagine making policies because we are afraid of people being corrupt?” The solution to corruption is not to park resources offshore, but to build institutions that prevent and prosecute it.

What Changed and Why

A pattern emerged throughout our conversation: initiatives that were underway during Dr. Adams’ EPA tenure were systematically cancelled after the administration change in 2020. The petroleum expertise unit at EPA. The University of Guyana engineering program. The technical institute consortium. The mentor-protégé contractor requirements. The on-site government monitoring. The environmental enforcement regime.

Dr. Adams’ assessment of the difference was stark: “Things have shifted in the opposite direction where Exxon is controlling everything. They’re doing everything as cheaply as possible so that they can have their maximum profits.” When I suggested this seemed concerning, he elaborated: “All of that has been cancelled. So that is what it is. I would say not in defense of Exxon—that’s their job. They’re there to make money. I would say that it’s our responsibility as government to exercise power.”

This represented more than policy disagreement between administrations. It reflected a fundamental choice about who governs Guyana’s oil sector: the constitutional government of Guyana, or the corporations extracting its resources. Dr. Adams recounted that when he was at EPA, he told ExxonMobil directly: “We will not accept anything less than what you have to abide with in the US.” Their response? “Okay, that’s fine with us.”

The implication is unavoidable. ExxonMobil will comply with rigorous standards when required to do so. The current government chooses not to require compliance. As Dr. Adams observed, “These major companies, they’re going to go as far as they can get away with. And when you bring it to their attention, they’re reasonable companies and they’re going to back off and do what is reasonable. But if you allow them to, they’re going to take everything.”

The Politics of Division

When audience member Cosford Robertson asked about mechanisms to heal Guyana’s ethnic and political divisions, Dr. Adams connected this directly to the conference: “Because when the PPP leader is in power, the PNC people—and it’s always about fifty-fifty—fifty percent are not going to trust or support you, and vice versa. So we could never have unity until we decide to heal that. And this conference is showing there’s no intention of healing when you do not invite a single member of the opposition to the most important sector that you showcase to the world.”

The exclusion sends a message that transcends conference invitations. It signals that political opponents are not legitimate stakeholders in national resource management. This guarantees that when power shifts—as it inevitably does in democracies—the incoming administration will view the current framework as illegitimate and requiring replacement. The result is policy instability, institutional discontinuity, and recurring destruction of capacity-building initiatives that take years to establish.

Dr. Adams proposed an institutional solution: an Inspector General’s office modeled on US practice. Such an office would be independent of government, appointed by civic society rather than political leadership, with authority to investigate and file charges. “We had a hotline,” he recalled from his US experience. “We could not even take a soda from a contractor because somebody is going to see and call that hotline, and the next thing you know you’ve got twelve inspector generals investigating. You’re in serious trouble if that is the case.”

The key requirement is independence. Technical committees must be staffed by qualified professionals, not politicians, and they must be “accountable to an independent organization” rather than the government of the day. Without this structural independence, any commission or oversight body will simply become another site of political contestation rather than a mechanism for professional governance.

The Venezuela Factor

One issue that did warrant conference attention but received none: the implications of potential Venezuela sanctions relief under the Trump administration. Dr. Adams offered a prediction: Trump’s “drill baby drill” policy, combined with Venezuela already adding hundreds of thousands of barrels to global supply and Russian oil returning when the Ukraine war ends, would create an oil glut driving prices down. This would satisfy America’s interest in lower domestic prices while directly impacting Guyana’s revenue projections.

“That should be part of that planning,” he noted, “the sovereign wealth fund and everything else.” Yet the conference agenda included no serious stress-testing of revenue assumptions, no scenario planning for price volatility, no discussion of how to manage expectations and budgets in a lower-price environment. These are precisely the conversations a genuine policy forum would facilitate. Their absence confirms the conference’s primary function as promotional rather than analytical.

A Conference That Could Have Been

Dr. Adams painted an alternative vision of what an energy conference genuinely serving Guyana’s interests would look like. Lessons learned sessions examining both successes and failures from oil-producing nations worldwide. Capacity building frameworks showing concrete pathways from current deficits to functional expertise. Environmental safety culture development drawing on global best practices. Decommissioning technology and liability discussions preparing for end-of-field-life realities. Local content enforcement mechanisms with teeth. Emergency response planning with regional coordination. Transparency protocols and independent auditing standards.

“Here’s what’s interesting,” he observed. “If I was on the government side, this here would have been good cover for me. Because if I’ve got the Terrence Blackmans and the rest of the experts in the world coming to this conference and saying, ‘Hey, you know what, we think this is what should be done,’ that would be providing cover for me if I’m the government not wanting to face Exxon. Then I could tell Exxon, ‘Here are what our experts are saying. You can’t put me in that bind where I could go against them.'”

Instead, the government has chosen to avoid expert scrutiny entirely, to price local stakeholders out of participation, and to exclude constitutional opposition from the conversation. The result is a conference that serves corporate public relations objectives while systematically avoiding the substantive governance questions on which Guyana’s long-term prosperity depends.

What We Did Not Discuss

Even in a conversation that extended well beyond the scheduled hour, critical issues remained only partially addressed or unexamined. We did not fully explore the implications of Guyana having no real-time production monitoring, relying instead on operator-reported data. We touched only briefly on the University of Guyana’s marginalization from the conference despite being the logical institutional anchor for petroleum expertise development. We did not examine the regional opportunity to position Guyana as a Caribbean petroleum education hub, serving the six million people across CXC-exam countries and potentially building Aberdeen-style global expertise capacity.

The question of contract renegotiation received only passing mention, though Dr. Adams noted it was “one of the things that has been cancelled.” The specifics of what was negotiable, what leverage Guyana possessed, and what terms might have been achievable remained unexplored. Similarly, while we discussed the National Resource Fund’s questionable prioritization, we did not detail what specific education, healthcare, and infrastructure investments should take precedence, what their costs would be, or what timelines would be realistic.

These gaps reflect not conversational failure but topic vastness. Guyana’s energy governance challenges are comprehensive, touching everything from technical engineering standards to constitutional power-sharing arrangements. That a two-hour conversation with the country’s most credentialed energy professional could only scratch the surface suggests the scale of work required.

The Path Forward

As our conversation drew to a close, I attempted to synthesize what had emerged. The 2026 Energy Conference is primarily a commercial and promotional event rather than a policy development forum. Its theme of “Building Tomorrow’s Future Today” offers broadly aspirational rhetoric without operational specifics. The business model creates subtle but real constraints on content through corporate sponsorship dependence. Critical topics—environmental oversight, local content enforcement, decommissioning frameworks, regulatory capacity building—remain conspicuously absent from the agenda.

Dr. Adams agreed with this summary, emphasizing: “The most important thing to me is strong institutions to govern this. And the other thing is this conference is supposed to be sharing knowledge and information to inform the decision-making of the nation, and all the decision-makers in parliament—the opposition, which is part of the constitutional government—should have been part of here.”

He concluded with the decommissioning warning: “That is the big elephant in the room that nobody is paying attention to. And that should be part of the conference in terms of what technologies are being developed and what resources do we need to start developing our plan for it.”

Beyond Partisan Politics

In my closing remarks, I tried to articulate what the Guyana Business Journal seeks to accomplish through conversations like this one. We aim to move beyond partisan logic—the endless contest of APNU versus PPP versus WIN—to recognize that all these entities are subsets of Guyana. If Guyana survives and prospers, these political formations will survive. But the reverse is not true: these entities can persist and even thrive while Guyana as a cohesive nation fails.

The conference poses but does not answer a fundamental question: whose future is being built, and for whom? Until Guyana’s people, through their full constitutional representation, can genuinely participate in answering that question, tomorrow’s future will remain someone else’s property.

For those attending the conference, I offered simple advice: “Ask some hard questions and don’t let the uncomfortable silence shut down the topics. It’s always important when you’re participating in something not just to go along to get along, but to ask the questions and engage your parliamentary representatives.”

For the broader public, I proposed tracking mechanisms: a six-month and one-year follow-up assessing what conference commitments actually materialized, and an “energy governance scorecard” evaluating performance across key dimensions. These tools would provide accountability beyond the promotional moment, measuring outcomes against rhetoric.

The Sponsorship Question

One final note on the webinar’s sponsor, Metallica Commodities Corp. I emphasized at the outset that while MCC sponsored the event, it was not done on behalf of MCC, and the company had not interfered with editorial prerogatives. This distinction matters. Corporate sponsorship of public discourse is inevitable and often necessary. What determines its legitimacy is whether sponsors demand editorial control or respect journalistic independence.

MCC’s experience in jurisdictions where resource wealth has both strengthened and undermined democratic governance gives the company particular insight into “the necessity for critical conversations.” Their willingness to support such conversations without demanding friendly coverage represents a model of corporate responsibility worth acknowledging. It stands in sharp contrast to conference sponsorships that purchase agenda control and topic exclusion.

Similarly, I thanked Caribbean International Shipping Services for thirty years of reliable logistics work and support for substantive dialogue. These acknowledgments are not mere courtesy. They signal that critical analysis need not exist in commercial isolation, that businesses can support independent journalism without corrupting it, and that Guyana’s private sector includes actors who understand that genuine national development serves everyone’s long-term interests.

The Spectacle and the Substance

The 2026 Energy Conference will proceed tomorrow with or without this critique. It will feature impressive speakers, expensive exhibits, networking receptions, and professionally produced proceedings. President Ali will deliver remarks. Regional heads of state will attend. The theme of “Building Tomorrow’s Future Today” will be invoked repeatedly. Participants will leave with business cards, photographs, and perhaps some new contacts.

What the conference will not do—what it is structurally designed not to do—is address the fundamental questions on which Guyana’s energy future actually depends. It will not examine why the EPA lacks petroleum expertise or how to rapidly build that capacity. It will not scrutinize environmental enforcement retreat or discuss restoring rigorous oversight. It will not develop local content mechanisms with teeth or establish frameworks for verified skills transfer. It will not plan for decommissioning liabilities or stress-test revenue assumptions against oil price volatility.

It will not do these things because addressing them seriously would require acknowledging that Guyana’s current governance approach serves corporate extraction interests more than national development needs. It would require including voices—opposition politicians, independent experts, excluded local businesses—that might question comfortable arrangements. It would require moving beyond promotional performance to substantive policy debate.

Dr. Adams expressed this with characteristic directness: “We welcome investment, but it has to be on fair terms. These major companies, believe it or not, they’re going to go as far as they can get away with. And when you bring it to their attention, they’re reasonable companies and they’re going to back off and do what is reasonable. But if you allow them to, they’re going to take everything.”

Guyana is currently allowing them to take everything. Not through force or fraud, but through willing abdication of governmental responsibility to set and enforce standards. The energy conference, with its corporate-funded agenda and systematic exclusion of accountability voices, simply makes this abdication visible.

The prescription remains clear even if politically difficult. Build institutions first—EPA capacity, regulatory independence, oversight mechanisms with real authority. Invest in people today through education, training, and healthcare rather than parking resources in foreign portfolios while citizens live in poverty. Include all stakeholders in energy governance, transcending political divisions to recognize that oil wealth either benefits all Guyanese or threatens all Guyanese. Demand transparency in contracts, revenues, environmental data, and enforcement actions. Plan for the end by establishing decommissioning standards and post-oil economic foundations now.

None of this will emerge from a conference whose sponsors profit from the current arrangement and whose agenda excludes those who might challenge it. Change will require political courage to prioritize national interest over corporate accommodation, civic pressure to make energy governance a defining issue, and institutional construction that outlasts election cycles.

As I told Dr. Adams in closing, “We’re speaking in a national interest rather than in the partisan political interest.” That remains the work. The conference will showcase Guyana to the world. But the substance of energy governance—the unglamorous construction of regulatory capacity, the patient building of technical expertise, the disciplined enforcement of environmental standards, the inclusive development of policy frameworks that serve citizens rather than corporations—happens elsewhere, if it happens at all.

Supported By

We are grateful for the partnership and support of individuals and organizations committed to advancing Guyanese and Caribbean development and human capital investment.

Metallica Commodities Corporation

For over two decades, MCC has operated at the intersection of natural resource extraction and global logistics, trading all non-ferrous metals, including copper, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt, gold, and other precious metals across continents. With representative offices in Peru, Canada, Tanzania, and Guyana, MCC has witnessed firsthand how institutional quality determines whether resource revenues generate broad-based prosperity or concentrated advantage. The company’s experience in jurisdictions where oil and mineral wealth have transformed budgets—sometimes strengthening democratic governance, sometimes undermining it—informs their understanding that critical institutional conversations matter. As Guyana navigates its own resource-driven fiscal expansion, MCC recognizes that the frameworks governing how these unprecedented revenues are debated, allocated, and overseen will shape outcomes for decades. We’re grateful for their support of these critical institutional questions.

The GBJ Sunday Essay is sponsored by MCC and not written on its behalf. The views expressed are those of the author.

Caribbean International Shipping Services

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Courtney Allen | All Te Networks | Corine Locke | Tony Harris | Roderick Alsopp

📖 Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

There is a particular species of magical thinking that afflicts governments suddenly wealthy: the belief that pouring concrete creates prosperity, that physical infrastructure automatically generates economic activity, that building roads is synonymous with building futures. This thinking is especially seductive in nations emerging from poverty, where the absence of roads has long symbolized underdevelopment, where potholed laterite tracks embody governmental failure, and where the dream of smooth asphalt represents arrival at modernity’s table.

This represents 55.4% of all infrastructure spending, centered on the Linden-Lethem Corridor.

Guyana’s 2026 budget allocates $196.1 billion to road construction—55.4% of all infrastructure spending—in pursuit of this dream. The centerpiece Linden-Lethem Corridor promises to transform the nation from a coastal strip into a continental gateway, opening the Amazon interior to development and connecting Guyana to Brazilian markets through 280 miles of two-lane highway cutting through rainforest and savannah. The rhetoric is familiar: roads bring development, development brings prosperity, prosperity validates the roads. It is a circular logic that sounds profound until you examine what roads actually do.

Roads do not create economies. They redistribute them. They do not generate wealth. They enable its extraction. They do not build communities. They often destroy them. And most critically, roads optimized for one era’s economic geography become stranded assets when that geography shifts—yet their maintenance costs persist regardless of utility.

This is not an argument against all roads. It is a critique of road-first, road-only development strategies that treat asphalt as a universal solvent for underdevelopment, that assume highways automatically catalyze the economic transformations their builders imagine, and that ignores the substantial body of evidence demonstrating when roads work, when they fail, and why the difference matters.

The Road to Nowhere: What Transportation Infrastructure Actually Does

Transportation infrastructure serves three economic functions, each with distinct requirements and very different implications for the national development strategy.

First, roads provide access. They connect previously isolated locations to markets, services, and opportunities. This is roads at their most straightforward and least controversial. The village that can now reach a hospital, the farmer who can transport crops to market, the child who can attend school without fording rivers—these represent genuine welfare improvements that justify public investment. Access roads are characterized by low traffic volumes, modest construction standards, and maintenance requirements proportional to use. Their economic justification is primarily social: enabling basic participation in national life regardless of commercial viability.

Guyana needs such roads. The hinterland communities accessible only by air or river during the dry season, the Amerindian villages whose isolation perpetuates poverty, the resource-rich regions where extraction costs exceed value because transport is prohibitive—these locations warrant road access. But access roads are local infrastructure, relatively inexpensive, and can be built and maintained within normal budgetary constraints. They do not require $196 billion. They certainly don’t require highways through uninhabited rainforest.

Second, roads enable commerce. They move goods between producers and consumers at costs lower than alternatives. This is where road investment becomes economically complex, because roads compete with rail, river, pipeline, and ocean transport—each optimized for different cargo types, distances, and volumes. Roads excel at short-haul, time-sensitive, variable-route logistics: the delivery van, the taxi, the ambulance, the dump truck serving a construction site. They perform poorly in bulk commodity transport over long distances, where unit costs per ton-mile are 5 to 10 times higher than rail or barge [1][2].

Guyana’s geography suggests river and rail should dominate freight logistics. The Essequibo, Demerara, Berbice, and Corentyne Rivers are natural highways requiring dredging and terminals rather than roadbed construction through swamp and forest. Bauxite from Linden, timber from the interior, agricultural products from the Rupununi—these are bulk commodities moving predictable routes at regular intervals, precisely the freight profile that makes rail and river transport economically superior to trucking. Yet the budget allocates seventeen times more to roads ($196.1 billion) than to river transport ($11.2 billion), and nothing to rail. This is not optimization. It is ideology.

Third, roads structure settlement patterns. They determine where people live, where businesses locate, and how cities grow or decline. This function is the most consequential and least understood. Roads do not merely serve existing settlement patterns—they alter them, often in ways that undermine the economic rationale that justified the road in the first place.

Consider American interstate highways. Built in the 1950s to connect cities, they instead enabled suburban sprawl that hollowed out those cities, creating low-density development that cannot generate tax revenue sufficient to maintain the roads serving it. Sixty years later, American suburbs built around highway access are fiscally insolvent, unable to afford the infrastructure repairs that their very existence demands. The roads that promised prosperity delivered bankruptcy.

The Linden-Lethem Corridor will structure Guyana’s interior settlement for generations. But toward what end? The highway does not connect existing dense settlements—there are few settlements along the route. It does not serve demonstrated freight demand—current traffic on the Brazilian side suggests 2,000 vehicles daily, mostly local. Instead, it promises to create settlements where none exist, generate demand where none is demonstrated, and catalyze development whose nature and sustainability remain unspecified. This is not planning. It is a wish.

The Maintenance Trap: The Infrastructure That Eats Its Children

The most dangerous delusion in infrastructure policy is the assumption that maintenance is a future problem. It is not. Maintenance begins the moment construction ends, and its costs are not discretionary. Defer maintenance, and infrastructure deteriorates at an accelerating rate, requiring reconstruction at multiples of timely repair costs. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the United States faces a $2.6 trillion infrastructure maintenance backlog—roads, bridges, and water systems built decades ago that are now crumbling because successive governments chose visible new construction over invisible maintenance [3].

Tropical environments accelerate this dynamic. Heat, humidity, and seasonal flooding degrade asphalt and concrete far faster than in temperate climates. Road maintenance in equatorial regions typically costs 3-5% of construction costs annually, not as an occasional necessity but as a permanent operational requirement. A $50 billion highway requires $1.5-2.5 billion per year in maintenance. Forever.

Guyana’s entire 2026 road maintenance budget is $50.2 billion for all roads nationwide. The Linden-Lethem Corridor alone, if built to the standards its promoters envision, will consume 3-5% of national road maintenance capacity. This leaves existing coastal roads—which actually carry traffic and serve economic activity—competing for shrinking maintenance budgets. The predictable result: both new highways and existing roads deteriorate simultaneously, creating a maintenance crisis that consumes an increasing share of government budgets while delivering lower infrastructure quality.

This is not theoretical. It is the documented experience of nations across the developing world that built road networks during commodity booms, then watched them crumble when revenues declined, and maintenance budgets evaporated. Indonesia built 25,000 kilometers of rural roads during its oil boom in the 1970s. By the 1990s, 60% were impassable, not because of initial quality but because of systematic underfunding of maintenance [6]. Nigeria’s road network expanded dramatically during oil wealth surges, then collapsed into disrepair, now costing the economy an estimated 2% of GDP annually in vehicle damage, time loss, and foregone economic activity. Zambia built highways to copper mines during high commodity prices, then watched them crater when copper revenues fell and road budgets contracted.

Guyana proposes to replicate this pattern during an oil boom whose duration is uncertain and whose revenues are volatile. When oil prices fall—and they will—when production plateaus—and it must—when the fiscal space for infrastructure spending contracts—and it shall—the Linden-Lethem Corridor will still require $1.5-2.5 billion in annual maintenance. That money will come from somewhere. The question is whether it comes from schools, hospitals, or other roads.

The Induced Demand Fallacy: Why Building Roads Creates Traffic

Transportation planning contains a paradox: building roads to reduce congestion often increases it. This phenomenon, called “induced demand,” reflects three mechanisms that road builders consistently underestimate.

Latent demand: People who previously didn’t travel because the cost was too high now travel because the road makes it cheaper. The improved Linden highway makes weekend trips from Georgetown feasible; traffic increases.

Route switching: Travelers who used alternative routes or modes shift to the new road. The ferry across the Berbice becomes obsolete; all traffic shifts to the bridge; bridge traffic exceeds design capacity.

Land use changes: Development follows roads, creating trip origins and destinations that didn’t previously exist. The highway to Lethem opens land to settlement; new communities generate traffic; the road, designed for through traffic, becomes a local commuter route; congestion returns.

Los Angeles has spent seventy years adding highway lanes to reduce congestion. Congestion is worse than ever because every lane added induces demand that fills it. The Katy Freeway in Houston was widened to 23 lanes in 2011 at a cost of $2.8 billion. Travel times increased because induced demand filled the new capacity faster than construction could expand it [4].

The implication for Guyana: the Linden-Lethem Corridor will not move predictable volumes along a static route. It will generate traffic, alter settlement patterns, and create demands that cascade in ways the initial cost-benefit analysis—if one exists—cannot anticipate. This is not necessarily bad, but it requires acknowledging that roads are not neutral infrastructure serving predetermined demand. They are active agents reshaping economic geography, and that reshaping may or may not align with national development goals.

The Opportunity Cost: What Roads Prevent Us From Building

Every dollar allocated to roads is a dollar unavailable for alternatives. In nations with unlimited capital, this might not matter—build everything. But Guyana faces hard budget constraints even during an oil boom. The $196.1 billion for roads means $196.1 billion is not available for rail, river transport, ports, telecommunications, water systems, or any other infrastructure competing for capital.

This matters because different infrastructure types have radically different economic profiles. Roads have high maintenance costs, relatively low capacity, environmental externalities (pollution, habitat fragmentation, induced settlement), and limited network effects (one road does not make other roads more valuable). Rail has high initial costs but low maintenance costs, very high capacity, minimal environmental impact per ton-mile, and strong network effects (each rail line increases the value of connected lines). River transport has minimal construction costs (nature provides the waterway), low maintenance costs (dredging and terminals), extremely high capacity, zero emissions, but requires navigable waterways and terminals at origin/destination points.

Guyana possesses extraordinary river infrastructure that nature has provided free of charge. The Essequibo River system is navigable for 600+ miles into the interior, providing access to territory no road could reach economically. The Demerara, Berbice, and Corentyne Rivers provide natural freight corridors along the coast. Yet Guyana is spending $196 billion to build what nature has not provided (roads) while allocating only $11 billion to optimize what nature has gifted (rivers). This is economically perverse.

The comparison becomes starker when examining freight capacity. A two-lane highway can move perhaps 10,000 vehicles per day at capacity, with average payload of 5-10 tons per truck—total daily capacity of 50,000-100,000 tons. A single-track railway can move 20-30 trains per day, each carrying 1,000-2,000 tons—total daily capacity of 20,000-60,000 tons with two people operating each train rather than thousands driving trucks. A river barge system can move 10,000-ton loads with a single tug—capacity limited only by dredging depth and terminal handling.

Yet roads receive 95% of connectivity infrastructure spending. This is not an analysis. It is faith.

The Environmental Catastrophe: Roads as Deforestation Infrastructure

Roads through primary rainforest are not merely transportation infrastructure. They are deforestation infrastructure, opening previously inaccessible forest to logging, mining, and agricultural conversion that transforms one-time ecosystem value into short-term commodity revenue.

The mechanism is well-documented across the Amazon basin. Initial road construction opens the forest edge to legal and illegal logging. Loggers build side roads to access valuable timber. Those side roads enable land speculators to claim forest as agricultural land. Small-scale farmers follow, clearing forest for subsistence crops. Cattle ranchers displace small farmers and convert forests to pasture. Within 20-30 years, a 280-mile highway creates a deforestation corridor 30-50 kilometers wide —total area affected: 16,800-28,000 square kilometers.

At current forest carbon values ($15-30 per ton CO2) and typical forest carbon stocks (150-200 tons CO2 per hectare), the environmental cost of Linden-Lethem corridor-induced deforestation ranges from $3.8 billion to $16.8 billion. These are not costs that appear in the budget. They are externalities—harms that the economy bears but the project budget ignores.

The economic value forests provide—climate regulation, water cycling, biodiversity preservation, pharmaceutical compounds, genetic resources for future agriculture—exceeds the extractive value of the timber, minerals, and agricultural land that deforestation yields. Brazil learned this through bitter experience. The Trans-Amazonian Highway, built in the 1970s as a development corridor, became a deforestation corridor that cost the Brazilian economy more in lost ecosystem services than it generated in economic activity along its route [5]. The road remains, the forest is gone, and Brazil now spends billions attempting to restore what the highway destroyed.

Guyana is about to replicate this mistake. The Linden-Lethem Corridor will open a forest whose value as a standing ecosystem exceeds its value as cleared agricultural land. But budgets recognize timber sales and land conversion; they do not recognize the ecosystem services that forests provide until those services disappear and their absence creates costs (flooding, drought, soil erosion) that dwarf the revenue logging generates.

The Chinese Alternative: What High-Volume Trade Corridors Actually Require

China has built more roads in the past two decades than any nation in history—5.5 million kilometers, including 177,000 kilometers of expressways. But China did not build roads in anticipation of development. It built roads in response to demonstrated demand, and it did so as one component of integrated multimodal transport networks that include the world’s largest high-speed rail system, extensive inland waterways, and port infrastructure connecting to global shipping.

The Chinese approach: identify demonstrated freight flows and passenger demand, evaluate all transport modes for that specific traffic, invest in the mode or combination of modes that minimizes total logistics costs, integrate across modes through transshipment hubs and coordinated scheduling, and maintain ruthlessly to preserve asset value.

This is not romanticism about Chinese planning—China has built plenty of underutilized infrastructure during its construction boom. But even China’s mistakes provide instructive lessons: roads work when they serve demonstrated demand, connect existing economic centers, integrate with complementary transport modes, and receive maintenance proportional to their economic value. Roads fail when they run through empty territory, hoping a settlement will materialize, when they duplicate or compete with superior alternatives, or when they consume maintenance budgets that cannot be sustained.

The Linden-Lethem Corridor fails every Chinese criterion. It does not serve demonstrated demand—current cross-border traffic is minimal. It does not connect major economic centers—the route passes through sparsely inhabited savannah and forest. It does not integrate with complementary transport—there is no rail to move bulk freight, no river ports to transship cargo. It consumes maintenance budgets that Guyana cannot sustain when oil revenues decline.

If China were planning Guyana’s infrastructure with Chinese rigor, the allocation would look nothing like the current budget. High-capacity rail from Georgetown through Linden would move the bauxite that actually exists. River transport on the Essequibo would provide access to the interior that roads cannot economically reach. Roads would serve local access and last-mile delivery, not long-haul freight through the rainforest.

The Singapore Model: Small Nations, Big Efficiency

Singapore offers an alternative model: a small nation that built world-class infrastructure not through scale but through ruthless efficiency, multi-modal integration, and maintenance discipline. Singapore’s road network is excellent, but roads serve their primary function—short-haul urban logistics—while rail, ports, and integrated planning optimize the overall transport system.

The Singaporean approach starts with recognizing that small nations cannot afford waste. Every infrastructure dollar must justify itself through demonstrated utility, not hoped-for development. This produces several principles applicable to Guyana’s situation.

Maintain before expanding. Singapore’s roads are in excellent condition because maintenance receives priority over new construction. Roads deteriorate on a schedule determined by physics, not politics. Defer maintenance, and the asset value declines at rates that exceed the budget savings from deferral. Singapore maintains ruthlessly because the math is unforgiving: $1 in timely maintenance prevents $4-7 in future reconstruction costs.

Guyana’s budget allocates $50.2 billion to road maintenance and $196.1 billion to new roads—a 4:1 ratio of construction to maintenance. Singapore’s ratio is closer to 1:1, recognizing that unmaintained new roads become liabilities faster than maintained old roads deteriorate. The Linden-Lethem Corridor will add 280 miles to Guyana’s road network, requiring annual maintenance costs of $1.5-2.5 billion. Where will this money come from when the existing network already exceeds maintenance budgets?

Integrate modes ruthlessly. Singapore’s Changi Airport connects to rail, roads, and shipping through coordinated scheduling and shared terminals. The port of Singapore handles 37 million TEUs annually, not because it has the most berths but because rail, road, and warehousing integrate seamlessly, minimizing dwell time and maximizing throughput. Infrastructure value comes not from individual assets but from system efficiency.

Guyana’s infrastructure planning shows no evidence of modal integration. Roads are planned without reference to rivers. River transport receives funding without coordination with rail. Ports modernize without connecting to inland logistics. The result will be infrastructure that competes rather than complements, duplicating capacity in some corridors while leaving gaps in others.

Plan for utilization, not capacity. Singapore builds infrastructure scaled to demonstrated demand plus modest growth projections, not aspirational development scenarios. This produces roads that carry traffic close to design capacity, rail systems that run frequent service because ridership justifies it, and ports that process cargo efficiently because volumes support optimal operations.

The Linden-Lethem Corridor has no demonstrated demand justifying its capacity. The Brazilian highway it connects to carries 2,000 vehicles daily—primarily local traffic and mining trucks. Where will the additional 8,000 vehicles per day (the minimum to justify a two-lane highway) originate? What will they carry? To whom will they deliver it? These questions appear unanswered in public documentation.

Measure performance relentlessly. Singapore’s Land Transport Authority publishes quarterly metrics on road congestion, public transit ridership, accident rates, and maintenance backlogs. Performance that deviates from targets triggers investigation and corrective action. Infrastructure agencies operate with private-sector accountability because every dollar of underperformance is a dollar unavailable for education, healthcare, or other public goods.

Guyana’s infrastructure agencies appear to lack comparable performance frameworks. How will the Linden-Lethem Corridor’s success be measured? Traffic volumes? Economic activity along the route? Environmental impact? Maintenance cost compliance? Without explicit metrics and accountability mechanisms, the project becomes a political symbol rather than an economic infrastructure—valued for what it represents rather than what it delivers.

The Counterfactual: What $196 Billion Could Build

Infrastructure decisions are opportunity costs made concrete. The $196.1 billion allocated to roads forecloses alternative uses of that capital, some of which might deliver superior development outcomes. Consider three alternative scenarios that each require the same total infrastructure spending ($354.2 billion) but allocate it differently across modes.

Scenario A: River-Rail Priority
– $80 billion: Coastal road modernization (East Bank, West Coast corridors carrying actual traffic)
– $60 billion: Georgetown-Linden-Lethem railway (single track, diesel, 40-50 mph freight priority)
– $50 billion: Essequibo-Demerara-Berbice river transport infrastructure (dredging, terminals, vessels)
– $40 billion: Multi-modal hubs (Georgetown port, Linden transshipment, Lethem border terminal)
– $30 billion: Linden-Lethem access road (single lane, all-weather, 30 mph design speed)
– $94.2 billion: All other infrastructure (aviation, telecommunications, drainage, housing)

Scenario B: Coastal Intensification
– $120 billion: Coastal corridor development (Georgetown-Parika-Timehri-Linden premium highway)
– $50 billion: Georgetown-New Amsterdam bridge and connector
– $40 billion: Coastal rail (Georgetown-Rosignol, passenger and freight)
– $40 billion: River transport (focusing on Essequibo-Demerara connectivity)
– $30 billion: Interior access roads (connecting existing communities to river/rail)
– $74.2 billion: All other infrastructure

This scenario assumes that Guyana’s economy will continue to concentrate on the coast for decades. It invests where people, businesses, and economic activity actually exist, rather than where planners hope they will materialize. It uses interior roads for access rather than as catalysts for development.

Scenario C: Balanced Multi-Modal
– $90 billion: Road network (60% coastal upgrade, 30% interior access, 10% new corridors)
– $60 billion: Rail (Georgetown-Linden freight, coastal passenger, Lethem option if demand materializes)
– $60 billion: River transport (Essequibo system, Demerara corridor, Berbice navigation)
– $50 billion: Multi-modal integration (terminals, transshipment facilities, last-mile connectivity)
– $94.2 billion: All other infrastructure

This scenario treats no single mode as dominant; instead, it optimizes each for what it does best. Roads serve access and flexible logistics. Rail moves predictable bulk freight. Rivers handle commodities where waterways exist. Integration maximizes system efficiency.

None of these scenarios is necessarily superior to the current budget—I lack the detailed traffic studies, engineering assessments, and economic analyses that should inform such decisions. But each demonstrates that $196 billion for roads is a choice, not an inevitability, and that alternative allocations might better serve Guyana’s development needs while remaining within the same fiscal envelope.

The question is whether that choice reflects rigorous analysis of transport demand, modal efficiency, maintenance sustainability, and environmental impact—or whether it reflects the simpler political logic that roads are visible, railways are complex, rivers seem primitive, and highways symbolize modernity in ways that dredged waterways never will.

What Success Would Require: The Conditions Under Which Roads Work

This essay is not an argument against roads. It is a critique of road-first development strategies that ignore the conditions under which road investment delivers returns rather than destroys capital. Roads work under specific, predictable, and measurable circumstances, but are largely absent in Guyana’s hinterland.

Condition 1: Demonstrated demand. Successful road investment serves traffic that already exists or can be reliably projected from observable trends. The US Interstate Highway System worked because it connected cities, allowing traffic to flow on inadequate two-lane roads. The system didn’t create demand—it served demand that pre-existed and was demonstrably underserved. Speculative roads through empty territory, hoping demand will materialize, have an abysmal track record. Brazil’s Trans-Amazonian Highway was supposed to generate settlement and agricultural development. Sixty years later, most of the route remains sparsely populated, the road is poorly maintained, and the economic activity it was meant to catalyze never materialized at scale [5].

Condition 2: Modal appropriateness. Roads excel at flexible, variable-route, time-sensitive transport over short to medium distances. They are expensive and inefficient for bulk commodity transport over long distances, where rail or water can serve. The most successful road systems recognize this and integrate with rail and river transport rather than competing with them.

Guyana’s commodity export profile—bauxite, timber, sugar, rice, gold—consists primarily of bulk goods where weight matters more than speed. These commodities favor rail and river transport. The Linden-Lethem Corridor will move mixed cargo at truck costs ($0.20-0.40 per ton-mile), where rail could move bulk freight at $0.03-0.07 per ton-mile [1][2]. Over 280 miles, this cost differential determines whether interior resources can profitably reach markets or remain stranded because transport eats the margin.

Condition 3: Maintenance capacity. Roads deteriorate on schedules determined by traffic, climate, and construction quality—not by budget availability. Successful road systems match construction ambition to maintenance capacity, building only what can be sustained through economic cycles. Failed road systems built during booms and watch infrastructure crumble during busts.

Guyana’s oil revenues are volatile and finite. Production will plateau, prices will cycle, and fiscal space will contract. The Linden-Lethem Corridor requires $1.5-2.5 billion annually in maintenance regardless of oil prices or government revenues. Is this sustainable when the 2026 total road maintenance budget for the entire national network is $50.2 billion? What gets deferred when maintenance demand exceeds budget capacity?

Condition 4: Environmental sustainability. Roads through primary ecosystems create deforestation corridors whose economic and environmental costs can exceed the value of development the road enables. Successful roads minimize environmental impact through route selection, enforcement against illegal clearing, and integration with conservation areas. Failed roads become deforestation vectors that destroy asset value (standing forest) faster than they create it (developed land).

The Linden-Lethem Corridor runs through ecosystems whose value as carbon stores, water regulators, and biodiversity reservoirs likely exceeds the present value of extractive development the road would enable. Without rigorous environmental accounting and enforcement mechanisms to prevent corridor deforestation, the road risks destroying more value than it creates.

Condition 5: Integration with complementary infrastructure. Roads deliver maximum value when they connect to ports, rail terminals, river transport, and other modes that extend reach beyond the road network. Dead-end roads or duplicate superior alternatives waste capital.

The Lethem border crossing connects to Brazil’s BR-174 highway, which itself sees limited traffic and links to poorly maintained Brazilian road networks that compete with superior river and rail alternatives for moving commodities. The road from Linden to Georgetown duplicates the existing road network and competes with a potential rail that could move freight more efficiently. Without clear integration with complementary transport modes, the corridor risks becoming expensive redundancy rather than network enhancement.

If the Linden-Lethem Corridor met all five conditions—demonstrated demand, modal appropriateness, maintenance capacity, environmental sustainability, and multi-modal integration—it would be justifiable infrastructure. It meets none. This doesn’t make it worthless, but it raises the question of whether $196 billion in road spending represents optimal allocation of scarce capital during Guyana’s brief window of oil wealth.

The Political Economy of Road-Building: Why Governments Love Asphalt

Roads are politically irresistible for reasons that have little to do with economic efficiency. Understanding this political economy helps explain why road-first budgets persist despite evidence that alternative allocations might better serve development.

Visibility. Roads are visible monuments to governmental action. A ribbon-cutting ceremony on a new highway generates media coverage, political credit, and voter gratitude in ways that dredging a river channel or maintaining existing infrastructure never will. The politician inaugurating a bridge gets reelected. The official funding for boring but essential drainage maintenance does not.

Speed. Road construction is faster than rail building or port development. Two-lane highways can be completed in 2-3 years. Railways require 5-7 years for route planning, land acquisition, and track installation. River transport requires dredging schedules that span seasons. Politicians facing election cycles favor projects that finish before voters go to the polls.

Simplicity. Roads are conceptually simple: point A to point B, asphalt in between. Rail requires complex scheduling, signaling, and the procurement of rolling stock. River transport requires coordinating dredging, terminals, and vessel acquisition. Multi-modal integration demands planning across agencies and jurisdictions. Roads require none of this complexity—just contractors, asphalt, and political will.

Diffuse benefits, concentrated costs. Road spending distributes contracts across regions, companies, and constituencies, creating diffuse political support. The costs—deferred maintenance, environmental damage, opportunity costs of foregone alternatives—are temporally distant and politically invisible. Future governments inherit maintenance backlogs; the current government claims credit for construction.

Ideological resonance. Roads symbolize modernity, progress, and connectivity in ways that resonate across political divides. Conservatives embrace roads as enabling commerce. Progressives see roads as social inclusion. Nationalists view roads as territorial integration. No mode of transport carries the same symbolic weight across the political spectrum.

These political factors help explain why Guyana’s budget allocates $196 billion to roads despite geographic, economic, and environmental factors suggesting alternative modes might serve better. Roads are not being chosen for optimal efficiency—they’re being chosen because, politically, roads work in ways that rivers, rail, and fiscal prudence cannot.

But political convenience is not economic wisdom. Infrastructure built for ribbon-cuttings rather than long-term utility becomes a burden on future budgets, constraining the fiscal space for education, healthcare, and genuine development. The most expensive infrastructure is not the infrastructure that costs the most to build, but the infrastructure that delivers the least value relative to its lifecycle costs.

The Choice Guyana Faces

Guyana stands at a junction—both literally and metaphorically. The $354.2 billion infrastructure budget represents the largest capital allocation in the nation’s history, a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build the physical foundation for long-term prosperity. The question is not whether Guyana should build infrastructure. The question is what infrastructure to build, in what sequence, with what allocation across competing modes.

The current budget answers: roads first, roads primarily, roads overwhelmingly. This is a choice, not an inevitability. It reflects assumptions about what development looks like, how prosperity arrives, and what the future requires. Those assumptions deserve scrutiny.

Roads do not automatically create development. They redistribute existing economic activity, sometimes productively, often wastefully. Roads through empty territory, hoping a settlement will materialize, have a track record of failure stretching across continents and decades. Roads that cannot be maintained become liabilities faster than assets appreciate. Roads built in lieu of superior alternatives (rail, river, multi-modal integration) waste capital that small nations cannot afford to squander.

Europe’s infrastructure success comes not from choosing one mode over others, but from sustained investment in appropriate modes integrated into coherent networks maintained to exacting standards. America’s infrastructure failure stems from highway-first policies that ignored alternatives, deferred maintenance, and created sprawl that cannot sustain itself. Guyana can learn from both.

The Linden-Lethem Corridor symbolizes this choice. A $50+ billion highway through the Amazon interior promises transformation but demonstrates minimal existing demand, competes with potentially superior alternatives, requires maintenance budgets that may exceed capacity, and risks environmental destruction whose costs exceed developmental benefits. Is this optimal allocation of scarce capital? Would $50 billion in river transport, coastal rail, and multi-modal integration deliver greater sustained value?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the policy choices that will determine whether Guyana’s oil wealth builds enduring prosperity or leaves behind stranded infrastructure, maintenance liabilities, and deforested corridors that burden future generations.

The budget has been announced. Contracts will be awarded. Construction will begin. But budgets can be amended. Allocations can be reconsidered. Choices can change. The infrastructure Guyana builds in 2026 will shape the nation in 2076. That fifty-year horizon demands rigorous analysis, not political convenience. It requires asking hard questions about what works, what fails, and why.

Roads are not development. They are tools that sometimes enable development under specific, measurable, and predictable conditions largely absent from Guyana’s hinterland. Treating roads as universal development catalysts wastes capital that could be better deployed in modes and projects that match Guyana’s geographic reality, fiscal constraints, and long-term development needs.

This is the choice Guyana faces: build infrastructure that serves the nation we are, or build monuments to the nation we imagine ourselves to become. The former requires analysis, discipline, and political courage to choose efficiency over visibility. The latter requires only asphalt and ambition.

History suggests that one choice leads to prosperity, while the other leads to maintenance backlogs, environmental destruction, and regret. The question is whether Guyana will heed history’s lessons or insist on learning them anew at costs the nation can ill afford.

The road to Lethem awaits. So do the alternatives. The choice is ours to make.

References

[1] Arkansas Waterways Commission. “Why Waterways?” Accessed February 8, 2026. https://waterways.arkansas.gov/education/why-waterways/

[2] American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. “AASHTO Freight Rail Study Support Services.” 2018. https://transportation.org/rail/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2024/07/2018-Freight-Rail-Report.pdf

[3] American Society of Civil Engineers. “2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.” 2021. https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

[4] Cortright, J. “Reducing congestion: Katy didn’t.” City Observatory, December 16, 2015. https://cityobservatory.org/reducing-congestion-katy-didnt/

[5] Vilela, T., et al. “A better Amazon road network for people and the environment.” *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* 117, no. 13 (2020): 7095-7102. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910853117

[6] Gertler, P., et al. “Road Maintenance and Local Economic Development: Evidence from Indonesia’s Highways.” NBER Working Paper 30454, 2022. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30454

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📖 Estimated reading time: 10 minutes | 💌 A Valentine’s Day meditation

Today is Valentine’s Day. Across the world, love is being declared in the customary currencies—flowers purchased at inflated prices, chocolates wrapped in red foil, cards bearing sentiments their senders could not quite compose themselves. Love, we are told, is best expressed through affirmation. Through warmth. Through the soft language of reassurance.

But anyone who has loved deeply—a partner, a child, a friend—knows that love’s most demanding expression is not the valentine. It is the difficult conversation. It is the willingness to say what needs to be said when silence would be more comfortable. It is the refusal to pretend that everything is fine when the person you love is making choices that will cost them dearly.

So let this be a love letter to Guyana. Not the kind that flatters. The kind that tells the truth.

The Easy Love

It is easy to love Guyana. Anyone who has stood at the Stabroek Market at dawn, watching the light break over the Demerara River, knows this. Anyone who has eaten cook-up rice on a Sunday morning on your way home from a Saturday night party, or heard the kiskadee’s insistent call from a guava tree, or plunged into the “blacker” (the Lamaha canal water) after riding a punt in a canefield, or navigated the sublime chaos of a Georgetown afternoon—the minibuses, the sweetie vendors, or participated in Rum Shop arguments that are half-quarrel and half-theatre—knows that Guyana is a country that gets into your blood and stays there.

From Brooklyn, where many of us carry the country inside us like a second heartbeat, the love is perhaps even sharper for being exercised at a distance. We follow the news. We send barrels. We argue in group chats about politics with the ferocity of people who care too much, not too little. The diaspora’s love for Guyana is not theoretical. It is wired monthly through Western Union. It is felt in the ache of every phone call home, in every WhatsApp voice note, every Facebook message.

The largest budget in Guyana’s history—a measure of unprecedented fiscal capacity and unprecedented responsibility.

And now, in 2026, there is more reason than ever for pride. Guyana’s oil production has made it one of the fastest-growing economies on the planet. The Natural Resource Fund holds approximately US$3.5 billion. A GYD 1.558 trillion budget—the largest in the nation’s history—promises transformative investments in infrastructure, education, and health. International conferences draw thousands of delegates to Georgetown. Presidents of multinational corporations fly in to deliver keynotes at the Marriott. The world, at last, is paying attention.

This is the easy love: the love that celebrates. The love that waves the flag. The love that shares GDP growth statistics in the family WhatsApp group. And this love is real. It should not be dismissed.

But it is not enough.

The Hard Love

The harder love—the love that matters—asks uncomfortable questions. It does not accept slogans as substitutes for strategy. It does not confuse spectacle with substance. It insists that the people you love deserve not merely prosperity but the institutional architecture to sustain it, not merely roads but a transportation philosophy that serves communities rather than contractors, not merely budgets but a budget process that invites genuine democratic participation.

From over 40 countries—impressive production values, but will the hard questions be asked?

Consider the 2026 Guyana Energy Conference, which this week will bring together presidents, oil executives, and diplomats in Georgetown under the banner “Building Tomorrow’s Future Today.” Ten thousand attendees from over forty countries. Keynotes by ExxonMobil’s president, Chevron’s chairman, and Saudi Arabia’s climate envoy. A youth forum. A health walk. A taste of Guyana showcase. The production values are impressive. The sponsor logos are plentiful.

But love asks: What was missing from the agenda? Where is the serious, public, technically rigorous discussion of PSA optimization—not as anti-investment rhetoric but as standard international practice? Where is the independent environmental governance panel? Where is the frank assessment of whether local content requirements are being implemented with teeth or merely with good intentions? Where is the conversation about the Natural Resource Fund’s investment strategy and whether parking billions in safe but low-yield instruments while withdrawing aggressively for current spending represents prudent intergenerational stewardship?

These are not hostile questions. They are the questions that someone who loves Guyana’s future would ask. A conference that cannot accommodate them is a conference designed for courtship, not commitment.

Love as Accountability

The same principle applies across Guyana’s current transformation. Take the budget. The GYD 1.558 trillion allocation is historic, and the investments in education, health, and infrastructure are welcome. But as this journal has argued, Guyana’s budget process remains fundamentally one-directional. Parliament debates but does not substantively amend. Opposition proposals, regardless of their merit, are procedurally dead on arrival. The process produces the appearance of democratic deliberation without its substance—debate without amendment, scrutiny without consequence.

To point this out is not to oppose the budget. It is to love the democratic process enough to want to strengthen it. Independent fiscal institutions, parliamentary amendment authority within defined constraints, nonpartisan budget analysis—these are not luxuries of wealthy nations. They are the institutional foundations that determine whether wealth, once acquired, is wisely deployed.

GYD 196.1 billion allocated to road construction—is this the right transportation philosophy for Guyana’s future?

Or consider infrastructure. This journal has examined in detail the $196.1 billion allocated to road construction—55.4% of all infrastructure spending. We have compared Guyana’s transportation approach to the integrated systems of Europe, where high-speed rail connects economies, and to the road-dependent model of the United States, where trillion-dollar highway networks have produced suburban sprawl, environmental degradation, and generational maintenance liabilities. The question is not whether Guyana needs roads. Of course it does. The question is whether a nation at the earliest stage of its infrastructure development should be locking itself into the transportation philosophy of the mid-twentieth century—or whether the moment of maximum fiscal capacity is also the moment of maximum strategic opportunity.

Love does not wave the flag and look away. Love asks whether the Linden-Lethem corridor, once completed, will serve Guyanese communities or primarily facilitate resource extraction. Love asks whether digital infrastructure—universal broadband, telemedicine, distance education platforms—might deliver more transformative returns per dollar than asphalt. Love insists that climate resilience be designed into every project from the beginning, not retrofitted after the first catastrophic flood.

The Guyanese Condition

There is a particular weight to loving a small country. When nations of eight hundred thousand people make mistakes, the consequences are not abstract. They are your cousin who cannot afford the rising cost of living despite record GDP growth. They are the village that floods because sea defenses were deprioritized. They are graduates who leave because the professional opportunities promised by development rhetoric have not materialized into actual careers.

In a nation this small, every policy decision affects someone you know. The stakes are personal, not abstract.

Guyana’s history makes this love even more complicated. In a society still marked by the legacies of ethnic division and political polarization, critique is too often heard as disloyalty, and dissent is too easily reframed as sabotage. The accusation is familiar to anyone who has written a critical word about any government’s performance: you don’t love the country. You are working for the other side. You want Guyana to fail.

This is perhaps the most corrosive myth in Guyanese public life: that patriotism requires cheerleading. To love the country is to celebrate its leaders. That criticism and loyalty cannot coexist in the same sentence.

The opposite is true. The people who love Guyana most are the ones who refuse to accept mediocrity on its behalf. The teacher who holds students to standards they did not know they could reach is not being cruel. She is expressing the deepest form of belief in their capacity. The journalist who investigates procurement irregularities is not tearing down the country. She is trying to protect its future from those who would squander it. The policy analyst who argues that the NRF’s investment strategy could generate billions more for future generations is not opposing development. He is demanding that development serve more than the current electoral cycle.

What My Students Taught Me About Love

I teach mathematics at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, where many of my students come from the Caribbean, including Guyana. For over thirty years I have practiced what I call the “MEC to MIT” philosophy: meeting students exactly where they are while refusing to lower the ceiling on where they can go. This means telling a student that their current preparation is insufficient and that they are capable of extraordinary achievement. It means being honest about the gap between where they are and where they need to be—not to discourage them, but because closing that gap is the entire point.

The students who thank me years later—the ones who went on to graduate programs, to careers in engineering and data science and finance—never thank me for telling them they were doing great when they weren’t. They thank me for refusing to accept less than their best. They thank me for the hard love.

A nation is not so different from a student. Guyana is brilliant, resilient, and blessed with resources—natural, cultural, and human—that most countries can only envy. Its people have survived colonialism, ethnic strife, dictatorship, brain drain, and economic stagnation. They deserve an honest assessment of where the country stands and a rigorous vision for where it can go. They do not need cheerleaders. They need educators, analysts, and institutions committed to the hard work of building something that lasts.

A Valentine for Guyana

So here is my valentine, written from a cold Brooklyn Victorian on a February morning, with the Demerara three thousand miles away but never far from mind.

I love Guyana enough to say that a US$3.5 billion Natural Resource Fund, while impressive, could have been US$18 billion or more under a disciplined investment strategy—and that the difference between those two numbers is the measure of an opportunity we are not yet seizing. I love Guyana enough to argue that the 2026 budget should be debated and amended in a parliament where opposition proposals receive genuine consideration, not ritual dismissal. I love Guyana enough to insist that an energy conference worth the name should include independent critics alongside industry executives, that governance panels should be as prominent as investment panels, and that the voices asking hard questions deserve microphones as powerful as those amplifying corporate commitments.

I love Guyana enough to say that roads are not development, that asphalt is not progress, and that the Linden-Lethem corridor must be evaluated not by the ribbon-cutting it produces but by the communities it serves and the economic integration it enables. I love Guyana enough to worry about the children who will inherit whatever we build or fail to build—and to insist that intergenerational equity is not an abstract principle but a moral obligation we are either honoring or betraying with every withdrawal from the Natural Resource Fund.

And I love Guyana enough to believe that its people can handle the truth. That they are not so fragile that honest analysis will break their spirit, not so naive that they cannot distinguish between criticism and hostility, not so divided that they cannot find common ground in the shared ambition of building a country worthy of their sacrifices and their children’s hopes.

The easy Valentine says: You are beautiful and everything is wonderful.

The hard Valentine says: You are extraordinary, and you deserve better than what you are settling for.

Guyana, on this Valentine’s Day: you are extraordinary. And you deserve better than what you are settling for.

That is not the statement of a critic. It is the confession of someone who loves you.

💌 From Brooklyn, With Love

This Valentine’s Day meditation comes from the diaspora—from those of us who carry Guyana in our hearts across oceans and time zones, who wire remittances and send barrels and argue in group chats with the ferocity of people who care too much, not too little.

We love Guyana enough to tell the truth. We love it enough to ask uncomfortable questions. We love it enough to believe that its people deserve not merely prosperity but the institutional architecture to sustain it, not merely growth but governance worthy of that growth, not merely oil wealth but the wisdom to deploy it for generations yet unborn.

That is the hard love. That is the love that matters. That is the love Guyana deserves.

—

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We are grateful for the partnership and support of individuals and organizations committed to advancing Guyanese and Caribbean development and human capital investment.

Metallica Commodities Corporation

For over two decades, MCC has operated at the intersection of natural resource extraction and global logistics, trading all non-ferrous metals, including copper, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt, gold, and other precious metals across continents. With representative offices in Peru, Canada, Tanzania, and Guyana, MCC has witnessed firsthand how institutional quality determines whether resource revenues generate broad-based prosperity or concentrated advantage. The company’s experience in jurisdictions where oil and mineral wealth have transformed budgets—sometimes strengthening democratic governance, sometimes undermining it—informs their understanding that budget processes matter as much as budget size. As Guyana navigates its own resource-driven fiscal expansion, MCC recognizes that the frameworks governing how these unprecedented revenues are debated, allocated, and overseen will shape outcomes for decades. We’re grateful for their support of these critical institutional questions.

The GBJ Sunday Essay is sponsored by MCC and not written on its behalf. The views expressed are those of the author.

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📖 Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

There is a maxim that Amerindian communities of Guyana have long carried with them, passed from elder to younger across generations without the aid of any written curriculum or government program: the four elements of true life are fresh air, pure water, sunlight, and common sense — without which nothing survives. Three years ago, writing with former Minister of Indigenous Affairs Sydney Allicock and Dr. Carolyn Walcott, I chose to close with that maxim. Today, on the occasion of International Mother Language Day 2026, I return to it with a question that is not rhetorical but urgently practical: in what language was that wisdom first spoken? And what happens to the wisdom when the language that carries it disappears?

This Saturday, the world observes International Mother Language Day under UNESCO’s theme “Youth voices on multilingual education.” In Guyana — a nation of six peoples, nine Amerindian languages, and an oil economy that has promised to transform everything — this observance demands more than ceremony. It demands a reckoning with a contradiction at the heart of our national development story.

The Contradiction of Wealth

Guyana’s economic transformation since the first major oil discovery in 2015 is staggering. Before oil, the nation’s GDP stood at approximately US$3.6 billion; by 2024, it had swelled to US$24.7 billion, with the IMF projecting it to reach nearly US$30 billion in 2025. [1][7] This growth, the fastest in the world, is fueled by an exponential rise in oil production, which surged from a nominal start in late 2019 to 900,000 barrels per day by the end of 2025. [4] As of November 2025, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Natural Resource Fund (NRF), held a balance of US$3.64 billion. [3]

This rapid escalation in production has fundamentally altered Guyana’s fiscal capacity, making previously impossible investments now feasible.

Yet, as this new wealth flows in, a foundational form of national capital is flowing out. In 2023, I joined my co-authors in examining the structural challenges facing Amerindian communities as this fossil fuel economy accelerated around them. We noted that Guyana’s carbon credit transaction with Hess Corporation—at the time the most visible intersection of oil wealth and indigenous life—had directed fifteen percent of proceeds to indigenous communities. We noted, too, the honest skepticism of indigenous stakeholders about whether those resources would translate into genuine capacity. Florence Alexi La Rose, a consultant on indigenous development, put it plainly: members of indigenous communities risk exclusion from opportunities due to a lack of awareness, and linguistic barriers only compound the situation.

We treated language, in that essay, primarily as a barrier—something to be bridged so that Amerindian communities could more fully access the oil economy’s opportunities. I want to revise that framing today. Not abandon it—the access problem is real—but deepen it. Because what Guyana is allowing to erode in its nine Amerindian languages is not merely a cultural amenity or a historical artifact. It is operational knowledge. It is, in the most precise economic sense, capital.

The Forest’s Instruction Manual

Macushi, Wapichan, Akawaio, Patamona, Wai-Wai, Lokono, Carib, Warao, and Arekuna—these nine languages are the accumulated product of centuries of co-evolution between human communities and the interior rainforest and savannah of Guyana. They are also all under threat. While comprehensive data is lacking—a policy failure in itself—available estimates paint a grim picture. The Lokono (Arawak) and Carib (Kari’nja) languages each have fewer than 2,000 speakers, most of them elderly. [9][11] Others, like Mawayana and Taruma, are on the verge of extinction with only a handful of speakers remaining. [10]

These languages encode what no satellite, no algorithm, and no consultant report can reconstruct: precise taxonomic knowledge of plant species, animal behavior, water cycles, soil variation, and ecological interdependence that has no equivalent in English. The words themselves are not simply labels. They are compressed theories about how the living world works.

Guyana is currently selling—at increasing volume and price—the environmental services of the forests that Amerindian communities have tended, named, and sustained across those same centuries. Our carbon credit market, our REDD+ participation, our green economy brand: all of these rest on the ecological integrity of landscapes that indigenous stewardship has maintained. The landmark US$750 million deal with Hess Corporation for 37.5 million carbon credits is a prime example. [14]

We are, in effect, monetizing knowledge systems while allowing the languages through which those knowledge systems are transmitted to atrophy. This is not a metaphor. It is a structural problem with direct economic consequences. A landmark 2021 study in the *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* found that in the Northwest Amazonian region, which includes Guyana, a staggering 91% of all medicinal plant knowledge is unique to a single language. Globally, the study found that where languages are threatened, so is the knowledge they hold; in the Americas, between 86% and 100% of unique medicinal knowledge is stewarded by threatened languages. [26]

When the last fluent speaker of a language dies, what is lost is not a sentimental artifact but an irreplaceable body of ecological intelligence. A development model that sells the forest while it allows the forest’s instruction manual to disappear is not a sustainable model. It is a liquidation.

Doing Work in the Dark

Against this backdrop, a small team at the University of Guyana has been doing work of extraordinary importance with resources that are, by any honest measure, grossly inadequate to the scale of the challenge. Charlene Wilkinson, Coordinator of the Guyanese Languages Unit (GLU), has spent decades as a language activist, a creative writer, and an institution builder. The GLU she has helped build is not a passive archive. It is a working unit that has sent students on field trips to conduct revitalization surveys, convened workshops bringing together native speakers, and produced bilingual translators—a human resource of incalculable value that the state has largely failed to properly employ.

When nineteen children died in the Mahdia dormitory fire in May 2023, the GLU’s response was telling. The victims were predominantly from Patamona-speaking communities in Region 8, and the English-speaking intervention teams faced an immediate communication barrier. [19] Wilkinson and her colleagues immediately initiated an Emergency Language Facilitation workshop, training bilingual Patamuna-English speakers so that communities could receive culturally sensitive support. [20] The fact that such a capacity had to be assembled in crisis—that Guyana had no standing emergency language infrastructure for its indigenous communities despite years of oil revenues—is a policy failure of the first order. That this failure occurred while the Auditor General was citing the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs for mismanaging the Amerindian Purposes Fund only underscores that the problem is one of priority, not capacity. [27]

The Feasibility of Revival

There is nothing exotic about proposing a robust, state-funded language revitalization program. Countries far less wealthy than the Guyana of 2026 have accomplished it. New Zealand’s Māori language immersion schools (*kura kaupapa Māori*), established in the 1980s when fewer than 20% of Māori were native speakers, have produced a generation of fluent young speakers. By 2023, the number of speakers had grown to 213,849, a 15% increase since 2018. [21][22] Wales, facing a decline in Welsh speakers to just 19% of the population by 2011, implemented a national strategy, *Cymraeg 2050*, backed by a dedicated annual budget of over £53 million (approx. US$68 million). The decline has been arrested, with 538,000 speakers recorded in 2021 and a national goal of reaching one million. [23][24][25]

The Investment Case

The difference is political will, and political will, in Guyana’s case, has a new enabler: money. The investment required is a rounding error in the national accounts. An annual investment benchmarked to the Welsh program would represent less than 3% of Guyana’s projected 2025 oil revenues. The failure to make this investment is a choice, not a necessity.

Benchmarked against the successful Welsh program, a comprehensive national language revitalization initiative in Guyana would cost a fraction of annual oil and carbon revenues.

A Call for Institutional Reform

The specific asks are these. First, the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs, the Ministry of Education, and the University of Guyana should establish a formal Center for Indigenous Languages and Ecological Knowledge—giving institutional permanence and a dedicated budget to the work that the GLU has been doing on goodwill alone. Second, Guyana should fully leverage the international partnerships available to it through UNESCO, the UN, and development banks. Third, the allocation of carbon credit proceeds to indigenous communities must include a dedicated stream for language documentation and transmission programs.

None of this requires new legislation. It requires prioritization. And it requires Guyana’s leadership to understand that a green economy is not simply a marketing label. It is a compact with the communities and ecosystems that make the label credible.

I return, as I must, to where I began. Fresh air. Pure water. Sunlight. Common sense. The Amerindian maxim is a theory of life that is also, in its way, a theory of development: the things that matter most are not purchased or extracted but held in common and maintained together. Common sense, in its deepest meaning, is common *language*—the sense that is shared, passed down through words that name the world in ways that other words cannot replicate.

Guyana stands at a genuinely historic crossroads today. The oil wealth is real. The transformation is underway. But the country that emerges from this transformation will be defined not only by what it builds but by what it chooses to preserve. Oil is a resource that depletes. A language—tended, taught, celebrated, and carried forward by young voices—is a resource that compounds. Guyana cannot afford, in any sense of that word, to let its oldest knowledge systems disappear while it chases the newest ones.

International Mother Language Day is observed. What remains to be seen is whether it is also heeded.

—

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Caribbean International Shipping Services

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Individual Supporters

Courtney Allen | All Te Networks | Corine Locke | Tony Harris | Roderick Alsopp

Brooklyn, New York

February 3, 2026

Recent analysis of ExxonMobil’s regional strategy brings into focus a consequential geopolitical and economic reality for the Caribbean and northern South America: the company is deliberately anchoring its near-term growth in Guyana’s light oil, while treating Venezuela’s vast heavy-oil reserves as long-term optionality—valuable in theory, constrained in practice. This distinction, highlighted in recent investor commentary and conference calls, is not merely technical. It sits at the intersection of asset quality, geopolitics, and sovereign strategy, with profound implications for Guyana’s development trajectory.

Since Exxon’s offshore discoveries in 2015 and first oil in 2019, Guyana has moved from speculative frontier to one of the most attractive new petroleum provinces in the world. The Stabroek Block—now estimated to hold more than 11 billion barrels of recoverable resources—has drawn tens of billions of dollars in investment and solidified a partnership structure involving ExxonMobil, Chevron (through its acquisition of Hess), and China’s CNOOC. Guyana’s crude is light and sweet: cheaper to produce, easier to refine, and commanding a premium in global markets. In a capital-disciplined energy industry, those attributes matter.

Venezuela’s oil story, by contrast, is one of scale constrained by complexity. The country sits atop some of the world’s largest hydrocarbon reserves, but much of it is extra-heavy crude—technically demanding, capital-intensive, and discounted. Extraction often requires dilution or upgrading, refining capacity is limited, and the broader investment climate remains clouded by political uncertainty, sanctions regimes, and weak institutional guarantees. ExxonMobil has acknowledged that it possesses the technical expertise to operate in Venezuela, but its posture has been unmistakably cautious: re-entry is conditional on structural reforms, legal clarity, and credible incentives.

This divergence in asset quality helps explain both Exxon’s capital allocation choices and the sharpening geopolitical tensions in the region. Guyana’s emergence as a low-cost, high-value producer has raised the strategic stakes of Venezuela’s territorial claim over the Essequibo region. The controversy is no longer abstract history; it now intersects directly with offshore acreage, production timelines, and investor confidence. A portion of the Stabroek Block remains under force majeure, freezing exploration activity and effectively placing some of Guyana’s prospective wealth on hold. For Exxon, this is not a theoretical risk—it is an operational constraint.

Yet Exxon’s approach is not one of withdrawal. Rather, it reflects a broader calculus common to U.S. energy majors today: prioritize jurisdictions where geology, governance, and global markets align; preserve optionality where resources are vast but conditions are unsettled. Chevron’s more active posture in Venezuela under limited U.S. licensing underscores that firms can arrive at different risk tolerances. Exxon’s choice, however, signals confidence in Guyana’s fundamentals—and an expectation that Venezuela’s oil future remains contingent rather than imminent.

For Guyana, this dual emphasis presents both opportunity and warning. On the one hand, Exxon’s sustained investment affirms the durability of the country’s oil platform. Production is poised to rise sharply over the next several years, positioning Guyana as a significant global supplier despite its small population. On the other hand, the reliance on foreign corporate strategy exposes a deeper truth: oil wealth alone does not guarantee national prosperity. Despite record output and revenues, many Guyanese have yet to experience tangible improvements in livelihoods, employment pathways, or economic diversification.

This gap between production success and lived benefit underscores the central policy challenge of Guyana’s oil era. Exxon can bring capital, technology, and operational excellence—but it cannot substitute for sovereign decision-making. Choices around local content enforcement, revenue management through the Natural Resource Fund, investment in education and skills, and the creation of non-oil growth sectors will determine whether Guyana converts its moment into lasting development or replicates familiar patterns of extractive dependence.

At the regional level, Exxon’s strategy reflects a broader geopolitical reality. Energy investment today is shaped as much by institutional trust and political risk as by geology. Guyana’s light oil gives it leverage—but leverage must be exercised through diplomacy, legal strategy, and domestic governance capable of withstanding external pressure. Venezuela’s heavy oil gives it scale—but scale without reform limits immediacy.

The lesson for Guyana and the wider Caribbean is sobering but clarifying: the benefits of oil are never automatic. They are negotiated through contracts, institutions, and policy choices made under pressure. ExxonMobil’s balancing act between Guyana and Venezuela is a reminder that global capital will always pursue advantage. The responsibility of sovereign states is to ensure that such an advantage aligns, as closely as possible, with the national interest.

The question now facing Guyana is not whether Exxon believes in its oil future—it clearly does. The question is whether Guyana’s institutions are prepared to ensure that belief translates into sustained, inclusive, and resilient prosperity long after the last barrel is lifted.

Terrence Richard Blackman is the Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal and Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.

Views expressed are the author’s own.

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Brooklyn, New York

February 2, 2026

There is a temptation, when a scandal of this magnitude erupts on the other side of the Atlantic, to treat it as someone else’s problem. Jeffrey Epstein was an American financier. His network was rooted in American institutions. The failures of accountability that sustained him for decades belonged, one might argue, to American courts, American regulators, American media. That temptation should be resisted.

Guyana is not America. But Guyana is something arguably more vulnerable: a nation in the act of becoming wealthy, at precisely the moment when the institutions that are supposed to govern that wealth are still being built. The Epstein affair did not create a new problem. It revealed the anatomy of an old one — and that anatomy maps, with uncomfortable precision, onto the structural challenges we face right now.

Strip away the sensationalism, the celebrity names, and the partisan theater, and what remains is a case study in how wealth insulates itself from consequence. Epstein maintained access to the most powerful circles in the world not because he was the smartest man in any room, but because he made himself structurally useful to those with the power to look away. Banks processed his transfers. Lawyers shielded his finances. Prosecutors offered him sweetheart deals. Institutions that should have sounded alarms instead looked the other way. The system did not fail Epstein’s victims because of a single bad actor. It failed them because it was never designed, at a structural level, to constrain someone like him. This is the lesson that matters for us. Not the identity of the individuals caught in his web, but the architecture — or rather, the absence of architecture — that made the web possible.

Epstein’s financial empire was built, in significant part, on the exploitation of offshore jurisdictions. He relocated his financial operations to the US Virgin Islands, where he could reduce his federal tax burden by 90% while remaining within the American banking system. His wealth was deliberately obscured across shell companies, offshore accounts, and opaque financial vehicles. Years later, prosecutors could not even determine his net worth. Guyana is not an offshore tax haven. But Guyana is a nation whose single most consequential financial instrument — the Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil and its partners — has been criticized for its lack of transparency. The terms under which this nation’s oil wealth is being divided between the sovereign and the international operator are not fully visible to the public. The questions have gone largely unanswered.

If the Epstein affair teaches us anything about financial opacity, it is this: the moment you allow the architecture of money to become invisible to the public, you have created the preconditions for capture. That is not a prediction. It is a pattern.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the Epstein revelations is not that powerful people participated in his crimes. It is that institutions which were duty-bound to stop him chose, in effect, not to look. Universities accepted his philanthropy. Financial regulators did not ask hard questions. Media organizations declined to pursue stories that were, in many cases, already on record. These were not acts of conspiracy. They were acts of institutional inertia — the quiet, bureaucratic choice to let someone else’s problem remain someone else’s problem. Every ministry, every regulatory body, every oversight committee in Guyana that processes oil wealth faces the same quiet choice. The question is not whether any individual official intends to enable corruption. The question is whether the system is designed so that looking away is the path of least resistance.

The 2021 amendments to the Natural Resource Fund Act, which eliminated the Macroeconomic Committee and transferred oversight responsibilities to the NRF’s Board of Directors, were defended by the government as necessary for fiscal efficiency. Critics argued they weakened independent oversight at precisely the moment when the fund was accumulating billions of dollars. That debate is not over. And given what the Epstein files have taught us about how institutions lose their capacity to check power, it deserves to be revisited with far greater urgency than it has received.

The Epstein story was already known in many cases. Reporters had filed stories. Allegations had been made public. And yet the story did not achieve critical mass for years — because the media ecosystem in which it existed was not designed to challenge the interests of the people it implicated. Guyana’s media landscape is small. Press ownership is concentrated. The space available for investigative journalism — the kind of journalism that asks uncomfortable questions about where the money goes and who benefits — is narrow. This is not an accusation. It is a structural observation. A democracy that depends on oil wealth for its fiscal foundation cannot afford a media sector that is too close to the interests it is supposed to scrutinize.

Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida resulted in a plea deal that legal scholars have since described as a sweetheart arrangement — one that would have been inconceivable for an ordinary defendant. It reflected a system in which wealth and political connections could effectively purchase a different quality of justice. Guyana’s judiciary is, by constitutional design, independent. But independence on paper and independence in practice are two different things. In a nation where the executive controls the fiscal pipeline — where contracts, procurement, and investment decisions flow from a single center of power — the question of whether the courts, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Attorney General can function as genuine counterweights is not theoretical. It is the most consequential governance question this country faces in the next decade.

Perhaps the most important insight from the Epstein affair is one that is rarely articulated clearly: the window for building accountability structures is narrow, and it closes faster than most people expect. Epstein’s network did not become entrenched overnight. It was built incrementally, transaction by transaction, relationship by relationship, over years in which each individual step seemed small and manageable. By the time the full scope of what had been constructed became visible, dismantling it was extraordinarily difficult.

Guyana is producing approximately 900,000 barrels of oil per day. Annual oil revenue is projected to exceed three billion dollars in 2026. Production could reach 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030. The wealth is arriving faster than the institutions designed to govern it are being built. That gap — between the speed of the money and the speed of the oversight — is precisely where the Epstein lesson lives.

The Epstein affair is not, ultimately, a story about one man’s depravity. It is a story about what happens when a society decides — consciously or by default — that certain people are too important, too useful, or too wealthy to be held to the same standards as everyone else. Guyana has not made that decision. But decisions of this kind are rarely made all at once. They are made incrementally: in the decision to weaken an oversight committee; in the reluctance to fund investigative journalism; in the quiet acceptance that certain questions will not be asked and certain answers will not be given.

The corrective is not a moral exhortation. It is structural. It requires full public access to Natural Resource Fund accounts and withdrawal schedules. It requires procurement processes that are transparent, competitive, and auditable. It requires an independent judiciary that is structurally insulated from political pressure. It requires a media sector with the space and resources to do its work. It requires that unanswered questions be answered — publicly, completely, and promptly. None of this is radical. All of it is available. The question is whether there is political will to build it before the money makes the choice for us.

Terrence Richard Blackman is the Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal and Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.

Views expressed are the author’s own.

📢 Please support the Guyana Business Journal & Magazine today 

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• All Te Networks
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• Roderick Alsopp
• Metallica Commodities Corporation
• Caribbean International Shipping Services

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PRESENTED BY METALLICA COMMODITIES CORPORATION

This Sunday Essay is presented by Metallica Commodities Corporation. For over two decades, MCC’s global logistics network has connected mining operations across continents to destination markets in Asia—a daily reminder that infrastructure choices determine whether resources become wealth or remain potential. As traders in all non-ferrous metals, including copper, lead, zinc, nickel, cobalt, gold, and other precious metals, MCC trades the exact commodities that depend on the infrastructure decisions this essay examines. With representative offices spanning Peru, Canada, Tanzania, and Guyana, MCC understands both the promise and the peril of infrastructure decisions in resource-rich developing economies. The company’s experience moving complex concentrates through challenging terrain—where roads compete with rivers and rail for scarce capital—makes MCC’s support of this analysis particularly fitting. We’re grateful for their partnership in fostering informed dialogue about Guyana’s infrastructure future.

January 30, 2026

Boston, Massachusetts

Rome’s Termini Station

The journey began on January 7, 2026, at Rome’s Termini Station, a soaring fascist-era monument to rail transport reimagined for the 21st century. The station concourse gleams with marble and steel, shops selling Lavazza coffee and Prada luggage, electronic boards announcing departures to Milano, Firenze, Napoli, and beyond. This is not merely a train station—it is a cathedral to mobility, a public space that affirms rail travel as essential to modern European civilization.

I board Trenitalia’s Frecciarossa 9420 at 12:36 PM, a sleek red arrow of engineering precision manufactured by Bombardier and AnsaldoBreda. The train interior features leather seats, individual power outlets, reliable Wi-Fi, and a silence that spoke to meticulous maintenance and sound insulation. We glided from the platform with the quiet authority of a system that has invested €10 billion in high-speed rail infrastructure over the past two decades.

The Italian landscape unspooled through panoramic windows: the ancient aqueducts near Rome giving way to Umbrian hills, the medieval towers of Bologna, the Po River plain spreading toward the Adriatic, and, finally, the Venetian lagoon shimmering in winter light. The train reached 300 km/h—186 mph—on a dedicated high-speed track between Rome and Bologna, maintained to tolerances measured in millimeters. The journey from Roma Termini to Venezia Santa Lucia takes 3 hours and 58 minutes, arriving at 16:34 (4:34 PM). We covered 394 miles at an average speed of 99 mph. The same trip by car requires 5.5 hours of motorway monotony. A flight, factoring in airport transfers and security, offers no time advantage and costs significantly more. Trenitalia operates this route not as a social service to be subsidized, but as a profitable business competing with low-cost airlines.

New York’s Moynihan Train Hall

Three weeks later, on January 29, 2026, I stand in New York’s Moynihan Train Hall, the gleaming 2021 addition to Penn Station that attempts to restore dignity to America’s busiest rail hub. Soaring ceilings, natural light through a steel-and-glass skylight, and marble floors represent a $1.6 billion investment in architectural redemption—a gilded entrance to infrastructure that, beneath the cosmetics, remains fundamentally inadequate.

I board Amtrak’s Northeast Regional at 7:50 PM on this Thursday evening—the last train from New York that can get you to Boston close to midnight. Settling into a seat in the cafe car has become my routine for this journey. The cafe car offers a small table, slightly better lighting than the coaches, and the random company of travelers who prefer conversation and coffee to sleep. The car has the worn intimacy of a familiar third space, where the journey itself becomes the destination. The train—consisting of silver Amfleet coaches dating from the Carter administration—lurches into motion with the mechanical groan of aging infrastructure. We descend into the tunnel beneath Madison Square Garden (the old Penn Station still exists down here, a brutalist cavern that Moynihan’s grandeur cannot erase), then emerge into the darkness of a January evening, the Manhattan skyline receding behind us as lights from New Jersey chemical plants and shipping terminals reflect off the Hackensack River like industrial constellations from a different era of American capitalism.

The Northeast Corridor is America’s closest approximation to European-style passenger rail: 457 miles of track connecting Washington, D.C., to Boston through the densest, wealthiest megalopolis in the Western Hemisphere. This is where Amtrak makes what little profit it can claim, where Acela Express trains reach 150 mph on select stretches, where the promise of American rail transport clings to life like kudzu on an abandoned factory. Yet even here, in America’s most favorable rail geography, the infrastructure tells a story of delayed ambitions and deferred maintenance. As we creep through Connecticut in the darkness, the cafe car’s fluorescent lights reflecting off the window turn the landscape into a dim mirror, and I can sense more than see the ancient infrastructure beneath us. The track—much of it laid during the New Deal—forces frequent speed restrictions that I feel as much as hear, the train slowing inexplicably, then accelerating, then slowing again. We share these rails with freight trains, commuter services, and the institutional inertia of a nation that chose highways and airlines over steel rails.

The journey from Moynihan Train Hall to Boston’s Back Bay Station takes 4 hours and 15 minutes, covering 215 miles at an average speed of 51 mph. Through the cafe car windows, I watch Connecticut darkness punctuated by station lights—New Haven, Old Saybrook, New London—each stop a brief interruption in the rhythm of inadequate track and aging equipment. A car on I-95, enduring the same traffic and tolls, takes roughly the same time. A flight, including security and airport transit, offers marginal time savings at triple the cost. Amtrak serves this corridor not because it’s excellent, but because the alternatives are merely terrible. Back Bay Station, when I arrive just after midnight, tells the same story as Moynihan: a renovated facade (the historic Richardson Romanesque headhouse beautifully restored) masking century-old track infrastructure operating at the limits of capacity. The station serves 6,000 daily passengers through platforms that haven’t fundamentally changed since the New Haven Railroad laid them in 1899. At this late hour, the platform is nearly empty, the overhead lights casting long shadows across the track that predates both world wars.

The contrast with my journey three weeks earlier on Frecciarossa 9420 could not be starker. Both trips took roughly four hours. Both covered similar distances through comparable economic landscapes. But one journey represented the dividends of sustained infrastructure investment; the other, the costs of chronic neglect.

The difference between these two journeys is not merely one of speed or comfort—it reflects fundamentally different conceptions of public infrastructure, collective investment, and national priorities. European passenger rail succeeds because Europe has made three commitments that America has not.

First, sustained capital investment. Italy has spent €10 billion on high-speed rail since 2000. France has invested €45 billion in its TGV network since 1976. Spain has built 2,500 miles of high-speed track since 1992, more than any country except China. These are multi-decade investments premised on the assumption that infrastructure serves generations, not election cycles. America, by contrast, has chronically underfunded Amtrak since its creation in 1971. The Northeast Corridor alone requires an estimated $52 billion in repairs and improvements to achieve state-of-good-repair, with an additional $150 billion needed for true high-speed service. Congress has never appropriated such sums. The infrastructure bill passed in 2021 allocated $66 billion for rail nationwide over five years, less than half of what the Northeast Corridor alone requires.

Second, institutional coherence. European rail benefits from dedicated infrastructure managed by entities such as Italy’s RFI (Rete Ferroviaria Italiana) or France’s SNCF Réseau, which own and maintain the track to exacting standards. Passenger operators—whether state-owned Trenitalia or private competitors like Italo—run trains on infrastructure optimized for speed and reliability. America’s Northeast Corridor, by comparison, is a jurisdictional nightmare. Amtrak owns only 363 of the 457 miles of track. The rest belongs to freight railroads, state commuter agencies, and other entities, each with different priorities, maintenance standards, and capital budgets. Upgrading such fragmented infrastructure requires coordinating dozens of stakeholders across eight states and the District of Columbia—a recipe for paralysis.

Third, ideological commitment to public goods. Europeans view passenger rail as essential infrastructure worthy of subsidy, much like highways or airports. This is not a sentimental attachment to trains, but recognition that mobility infrastructure shapes economic geography, environmental outcomes, and social equity. High-speed rail connects secondary cities to major hubs, redistributes economic activity beyond coastal megalopolises, and provides low-carbon alternatives to short-haul flights. Americans, by contrast, have largely abandoned passenger rail to market forces while subsidizing highways and aviation through taxes, land grants, and direct appropriations that dwarf Amtrak’s budget. The federal government spends $50 billion annually on highway construction and $18 billion on the Federal Aviation Administration. Amtrak receives $2 billion. This is not market neutrality—it is a subsidy by other means.

Which brings us to Georgetown, where Guyana’s 2026 National Budget allocates $354.2 billion—22.7% of total spending—to connectivity and logistics infrastructure, the largest infrastructure program in the nation’s history. The centerpiece is the Linden-Lethem Corridor: 280 miles of two-lane highway cutting through the Amazon interior to the Brazilian border, along with new bridges across the Berbice and Corentyne Rivers. The stated goal is to transform Guyana from a coastal strip into a continental gateway, opening hinterland resources to development and connecting the country to South American markets through Brazil’s road network.

This is a road-first, road-only vision of connectivity. There is no mention of rail. No consideration of river transport beyond port facilities. No assessment of whether $196.1 billion in road investment represents the optimal allocation of scarce capital. And here, the lessons from America and Europe become acute.

America’s decision to prioritize highways over rail in the 1950s—enshrined in the Interstate Highway System—was not merely a transportation choice. It was a fundamental restructuring of American economic geography that hollowed out urban centers as middle-class flight followed highways to suburbs, locked the nation into automobile dependence and fossil fuel consumption, created patterns of sprawl that are expensive to maintain and impossible to serve with public transit, and concentrated economic activity in highway-accessible locations while isolating communities without car access.

Sixty years later, American cities are spending billions to build the rail systems they demolished for highways. Los Angeles, the city that invented car culture, is now building the nation’s largest rail transit expansion. Houston, the oil capital, is investing in light rail. These investments come too late and at vastly higher cost than if rail had been preserved or expanded in the first place. The interstate highway system cost $129 billion in 1991 dollars. Maintaining those roads costs $170 billion annually—more than the original construction. America’s highway infrastructure is now in a state of deferred maintenance so severe that the American Society of Civil Engineers gives it a grade of D+. Guyana is proposing to replicate this model with the Linden-Lethem Corridor: build roads first, worry about maintenance later, assume economic development will materialize because asphalt exists.

Europe’s transportation success, by contrast, stems not from choosing rail over roads but from integrating multiple modes into coherent networks. High-speed rail connects major cities. Regional rail serves smaller towns. Highways handle freight and rural access. Rivers and canals move bulk commodities. Each mode does what it does best, supported by infrastructure investments calibrated to long-term demand. Italy’s Frecciarossa doesn’t merely compete with airlines—it enables them by serving intermediate cities too small for frequent air service. The Rome-Florence rail creates a unified labor market. Milan-Bologna connectivity allows businesses to locate where costs are lowest while accessing talent across the region.

Guyana’s budget allocates $11.2 billion to river transport modernization—a fraction of road spending—yet Guyana’s geography is defined by rivers. The Essequibo, Demerara, Berbice, and Corentyne Rivers are natural highways cutting through terrain where road construction is geologically difficult and economically questionable. Colonial planters understood this; they built plantations along rivers because water transport was cheaper and more reliable than roads through the swamp and rainforest. The Parika-Bartica route on the Essequibo River could move freight at a fraction of truck costs if river infrastructure were properly developed. The Demerara River could serve as a logistics backbone for the coastal corridor if dredging and terminals received investment proportional to their economic potential. Instead, Guyana is spending $196 billion to build roads where rivers would serve better.

This pie chart illustrates the current allocation of Guyana’s historic $354.2 billion infrastructure budget, highlighting the road-first approach. Key Insights: • Roads receive $196.1 billion (55.4% of total infrastructure spending) • River transport receives only $11.2 billion (3.2% of total) • The allocation reflects a road-first, road-only vision • This imbalance occurs despite Guyana’s geography being defined by rivers • The disparity is 17.5:1 in favor of roads over river transport

Let us examine the Linden-Lethem Corridor with the same rigor we applied to Amtrak and Trenitalia. The distance from Linden to Lethem is 280 miles. The current condition: partially paved near Linden, dirt road through most of the interior, impassable in the rainy season. The proposed solution: a two-lane paved highway with all-weather capability. The estimated cost: not publicly disclosed, but likely $50+ billion given terrain and distance. The projected economic impact is unspecified but framed as transformative.

Now consider the operational realities. Maintenance costs in tropical environments average 3-5% of construction costs annually. A $50 billion road requires $1.5-2.5 billion per year just to maintain. Guyana’s entire 2026 road maintenance budget is $50.2 billion—for all roads nationwide. How will the Lethem highway be maintained when the money to preserve existing coastal roads barely exists?

Traffic volumes required to justify such an investment are not trivial. A two-lane highway can carry about 10,000 vehicles per day at capacity. Brazil’s BR-174, the highway the Lethem road would connect to, carries roughly 2,000 vehicles daily near the border—mostly local traffic and ore trucks from Venezuelan mines. Where will the additional 8,000 daily vehicles come from? What cargo will they carry? To whom will they deliver it?

Environmental costs of cutting a highway through the Amazon are substantial but unquantified in the budget. The road will open forest to logging, mining, and agricultural conversion—generating short-term revenue while destroying assets (biodiversity, carbon storage, water regulation) whose value exceeds timber and mineral extraction. Alternative modes receive minimal consideration. A railway from Georgetown to Linden to Lethem—following roughly the same route—would cost more initially but carry far greater freight volumes with lower operational costs and environmental impact. Rail moves commodities (bauxite, timber, agricultural products) more efficiently over long distances than trucks do. Guyana operated a rail system until 1972, abandoned due to deferred maintenance and motor vehicle competition—the same pattern that devastated American rail.

The budget provides no cost-benefit analysis comparing road-to-rail or multi-modal approaches to road-only solutions. The decision appears to have been made: roads are modern, rails are obsolete, rivers are primitive. This is ideology, not analysis.

Infrastructure does not merely connect places—it shapes what happens in those places. The Linden-Lethem Corridor will not simply move vehicles; it will alter settlement patterns, economic activity, and environmental systems in ways the budget does not acknowledge. American experience with highway-led development offers sobering lessons. Induced demand means building roads increases traffic by making car travel more attractive than alternatives. Los Angeles has spent 70 years adding highway lanes; congestion has worsened as each expansion induces more driving. Guyana’s coastal highways show the same pattern—improved roads fill with vehicles until congestion returns to previous levels. Spatial inefficiency follows because road-based development sprawls as land far from centers becomes accessible. This creates tax bases insufficient to maintain the infrastructure serving them. American suburbs built in the 1960s are now fiscally insolvent because road maintenance costs exceed tax revenues from low-density development. Guyana proposes to extend this model into the Amazon interior. Lock-in effects emerge because once roads structure economic geography, alternatives become unviable. Rail requires density to justify stations; sprawl makes density impossible. River transport requires terminals and warehouses; truck logistics eliminates the need for them. Each mile of highway makes non-road investments less attractive, locking the nation into road dependence regardless of long-term costs. Maintenance backlog accumulates inevitably. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates a $435 billion backlog in bridge repairs nationwide and $786 billion in road maintenance needs. These are roads built 50-70 years ago, now crumbling faster than budgets can repair them. Guyana is building roads in more difficult terrain with less technical capacity and assuming future budgets will maintain them. This is not planning—it is faith.

This horizontal bar chart exposes the dramatic imbalance in US federal transportation spending, challenging the notion that rail fails due to “market forces.” Key Insights: • Highways receive $50 billion annually in federal spending • Aviation (FAA) receives $18 billion annually • Rail (Amtrak) receives only $2 billion annually • The highway subsidy is 25 times larger than rail funding • This contradicts claims of “market neutrality” in transportation policy

The Amtrak Northeast Regional teaches us that infrastructure built without adequate investment and maintenance becomes a monument to squandered potential. The corridor has the ridership, the density, the economic geography to support world-class rail—and instead limps along on century-old track because America chose highways. The Rome-Venice Frecciarossa teaches us that sustained investment in appropriate infrastructure transforms economic possibilities. Italy is not richer than America, nor is it more technologically advanced—but it has consistently allocated capital to rail because rail better serves Italian geography than highways do.

Guyana must decide which model to follow. The 2026 budget allocates $196.1 billion to roads and $11.2 billion to river transport. This is a choice—not inevitable, not optimal, but chosen. It reflects an ideological commitment to road-first development despite geography that favors multi-modal transport.

A different vision might allocate resources thus: $80 billion to coastal road modernization—the East Bank-West Coast corridors where traffic actually exists and economic activity concentrates, roads that generate tax revenue justifying maintenance costs. $50 billion to Georgetown-Linden rail—moving bauxite, timber, and agricultural products more efficiently than trucks while providing passenger service competitive with the current minibus system that kills 100+ people annually in accidents. $40 billion to river transport infrastructure—dredging, terminals, and vessel acquisition to move freight on waterways nature has provided. The Essequibo-Mazaruni-Cuyuni river system accesses more interior territory than any road could economically serve. $20 billion to Linden-Lethem road (single-lane, all-weather)—sufficient for the modest traffic volumes that realistically exist, maintainable within likely budgets, expandable if demand materializes. $6.2 billion remaining to multi-modal hubs—integrating road, rail, river, and air transport at strategic locations (Georgetown port, Linden transshipment hub, Lethem border crossing) to maximize efficiency of each mode.

This allocation serves the same connectivity goals while maintaining fiscal sustainability, environmental integrity, and flexibility to adapt as conditions change. But it requires abandoning the ideology that roads equal development, that bigger is better, that America’s highway model is worth replicating despite its manifest failures.

This side-by-side comparison presents the current road-first model against the proposed multi-modal alternative, making the policy choice concrete and actionable.

Infrastructure investments create path dependencies that persist for generations. The decisions Guyana makes in 2026 will shape the nation’s economic geography in 2076. America’s interstate highway system, built from 1956 to 1972, determined where cities grew and declined, which regions prospered and which hollowed out, how much carbon the nation would emit, and how dependent on automobiles its citizens would become. Those decisions cannot now be unmade; they can only be corrected at costs far exceeding the original investment.

Europe’s rail investments, made over similar timeframes, created different path dependencies: dense urban centers, integrated regional economies, lower carbon emissions, and resilient transportation networks that function when oil prices spike or pandemics ground airlines. Guyana is at such a moment. The $354.2 billion infrastructure budget will create facts on the ground that endure beyond this government, this generation, this commodity cycle.

If that investment flows primarily into roads that cannot be maintained, serve limited traffic, and foreclose superior alternatives—Guyana will have squandered oil wealth on infrastructure that burdens rather than enables future prosperity. If that investment creates multi-modal networks integrated with the nation’s geography (coastal concentration, river access, Amazon interior), maintained within sustainable fiscal parameters, and flexible enough to accommodate changing technologies—then Guyana’s infrastructure will serve as the platform for genuine diversification and resilience.

I have now made both journeys: Roma Termini to Venezia Santa Lucia on January 7, 2026 (Frecciarossa 9420, departing 12:36, arriving 16:34), and Moynihan Train Hall to Back Bay Station on January 29, 2026. One took four hours through infrastructure that works as designed. The other took four hours through infrastructure that barely functions despite cosmetic renovations. Both serve similar distances, similar densities, and similar economic functions. The difference is not geography or wealth, but choices made decades ago about how to invest public capital.

Guyana stands at the beginning of its own infrastructure journey, with oil revenues finally providing the capital to transform the nation’s physical foundation. The 2026 budget allocates $354.2 billion to this transformation—more money than the country has ever had available for public investment. The question is not whether Guyana can afford this investment. The question is whether Guyana can afford to invest poorly.

Every dollar spent on roads that cannot be maintained is a dollar not spent on river transport that could move freight more cheaply. Every mile of highway through the Amazon is a mile of track not built, a river not dredged, a port not modernized. Infrastructure choices are not merely additive—they are competitive. Choosing roads means not choosing alternatives, and those alternatives may be superior.

The American journey teaches us the costs of choosing poorly: a Northeast Corridor that should be world-class but barely functions because roads were prioritized over rail. The European journey teaches us the dividends of choosing wisely: a Rome-Venice corridor that works because rail received the investment it required. Guyana’s journey has not yet been determined. The Linden-Lethem Corridor remains mostly mud and ambition. The $354.2 billion has not yet been spent. The path dependencies have not yet been created.

This is Guyana’s moment of maximum optionality—when the nation can still choose infrastructure that serves its geography, sustains its fiscal capacity, and endures beyond the oil boom. The choice between the Northeast Regional (Moynihan to Back Bay, 4:15, struggling) and the Frecciarossa 9420 (Roma Termini to Venezia Santa Lucia, 3:58, thriving) is not merely technical. It is philosophical: Do we build infrastructure to serve short-term political narratives or long-term national needs? Do we replicate American mistakes or learn from European successes? Do we plan for the Guyana we want to become, or the Guyana we fear we might remain?

The budget has been presented. The projects have been announced. But budgets can be amended. Projects can be redesigned. Choices can be reconsidered. The journey to Lethem need not replicate the journey from Moynihan Train Hall to Back Bay Station—beautiful stations concealing decrepit infrastructure. It could, instead, follow the path of Frecciarossa 9420 from Roma Termini to Venezia Santa Lucia: sustained investment in appropriate infrastructure, integrated across modes, maintained to exacting standards, serving the nation for generations.

But only if Guyana chooses to learn the right lessons from the journeys others have already made.

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Dr. Terrence Richard Blackman is Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, and Founder/Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal. He holds a PhD in mathematics and conducts research in number theory, quaternion algebras, and mathematical education.

The Guyana Business Journal Editorial Board welcomes reflections and submissions at terrence.blackman@guyanabusinessjournal.com*

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