Sunday Essay · Diaspora & Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sixty-Year Cycle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sixty-Year Record

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

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

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

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

The Plantation Reflex

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

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

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

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

Investment vs. Identity: The Correction

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Architecture Already Exists

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

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

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

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

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

The Altruism Question

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

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

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

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

The Harder Conversation: Regional Equity

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

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

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

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

The Compound Cost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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Infrastructure | Analysis

The Hourly Intensity Problem: A Data-Driven Approach to Flood Management in Georgetown

By Guyana Business Journal Data Desk
|
Guyana Business Journal
|
March 30, 2026

Georgetown does not flood because it rains too much. It floods because rain falls too fast.

The capital city of Guyana occupies a highly vulnerable position on a flat alluvial coastal plain, with an average elevation of approximately 5.9 feet above Chart Datum [1]. At the highest astronomical tide, the city surface sits about 5.2 feet below sea level, relying entirely on a complex network of seawalls, earthen dikes, sluices, and pumps to prevent inundation [1]. This drainage infrastructure, originally designed during the colonial era to service sugar plantations, has been increasingly strained by rapid urban expansion and the compounding effects of global climate change [1]. Consequently, managing flood risk in Georgetown requires a fundamental change of variables in national thinking: a shift from measuring aggregate quantities, such as daily rainfall totals, to measuring rates, specifically hourly intensity. Flooding is governed not by accumulation, but by rate. We must transition from a static model of flood management to a dynamic one.

An analysis of meteorological records from the Bureau of Statistics and the Hydrometeorological Service of Guyana between 2020 and 2026 reveals a pattern of increasingly severe rainfall events that consistently overwhelm the city’s defenses [4]. The long-term average annual rainfall for Georgetown is 91.4 inches [4]. However, recent years have demonstrated significant volatility, most notably in 2021, when the city recorded 139.4 inches of rainfall—a fifty-three percent increase over the historical average [4]. This unprecedented precipitation triggered a national disaster declaration, with floodwaters affecting over 48,720 households across the country [5]. While subsequent years saw below-average annual totals, the frequency of short-duration, high-intensity storms has intensified, leading to severe localized flooding even during otherwise drier years [4].

To understand this dynamic, we must formalize the mechanics of inundation. Flooding occurs whenever rainfall intensity exceeds drainage capacity. It is governed by a simple mathematical inequality: accumulation is inevitable whenever R(t) > D, where R(t) represents rainfall intensity and D represents the maximum drainage rate. A March 2026 study published in the International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology quantified Georgetown’s total gravity drainage capacity from its ten sluices at approximately 0.10 inches per hour [1]. When combined with the city’s twelve drainage pumps, the maximum theoretical capacity, D, increases to 0.22 inches per hour under ideal conditions [1]. This establishes a definitive threshold. Yet, contemporary storms frequently produce intensities of 0.59 to 0.98 inches per hour. For example, on February 2026, Georgetown received 3.8 inches of rain in four hours—an intensity of 0.95 inches per hour, nearly four and a half times the system’s maximum capacity [1]. Under these conditions, flooding was mathematically unavoidable, even under optimal operation.

Even a perfectly maintained system will flood when rainfall intensity exceeds 0.22 inches per hour. We must decouple flooding from failure.

This reality necessitates a profound shift in the public narrative, which often equates flooding directly with mismanagement. While blocked canals and maintenance deficiencies certainly exacerbate the problem, the primary driver is a structural mismatch between inflow and outflow. The socioeconomic impacts of these recurring floods are profound, with a 2026 urban flood resilience assessment revealing that economic resilience is the lowest performing dimension across the city [6]. Historically, the economic cost of climate-related disasters in Guyana has been estimated at 9.2 percent of the Gross Domestic Product annually [7]. While the Government of Guyana has directed over 240 billion Guyanese dollars toward flood management between 2020 and 2025, including the installation of high-capacity infrastructure like the “Bullet” pump at Liliendaal—capable of removing 152 cubic feet of water per second—flooding persists during peak intensity storms because the physical limits of the system are still being exceeded [10] [11].

To achieve sustainable flood resilience, policymakers must translate this dynamic model into operational policy. First, early warning systems must shift to real-time intensity monitoring rather than tracking daily totals. Second, pump scheduling must be tied directly to forecasted peak intensities rather than reactive operation. Third, engineering redesign standards must be based on peak hourly loads rather than aggregate historical averages. While expanding pump capacity is necessary to counter the effects of sea-level rise on gravity drainage, these structural measures must be paired with strict enforcement of zoning laws to prevent further encroachment on drainage reserves [1] [11]. By shifting our analytical framework from static totals to dynamic rates, Georgetown can transition from a cycle of perpetual flood recovery toward long-term climate resilience.

References
[1] Hackett, M. L. (2026). Drainage Capacity and Flood Risk Assessment of Georgetown, Guyana. International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology, 11(3).
[2] Climate Tracker Caribbean. (2023). Will Guyana’s capital city, Georgetown, sink by 2030?
[3] NPR. (2021). How a poor country imperiled by climate change is betting on oil.
[4] Bureau of Statistics Guyana. (2026). Monthly Amount of Rainfall for Coastal Regions, Guyana: 1981 to 2025.
[5] CDEMA. (2021). Flooding in Guyana – Situation Report No. 3.
[6] Renville, D., et al. (2026). Assessing Urban Flood Resilience in the Low-Elevation Capital, Georgetown, Guyana: A Principal Component Analysis-Driven Census-Based Index. Land, 15(3), 467.
[7] World Bank. (2014). Managing Flood Risk in Guyana.
[8] Kaieteur News. (2021). Climate Change impacts could cost oil rich Guyana US$800M.
[9] Berkeley. (n.d.). Guyana Case Study | Climate Refugees.
[10] Ministry of Agriculture / National Drainage and Irrigation Authority Budget Reports (2020–2025).
[11] World Bank. (2025). The ‘Bullet’ Pump: Modernizing Flood Management in Guyana.
[12] Stabroek News. (2025). Audit office finds lack of accountability, poor documentation at NDIA for 2021 to 2024.

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Sunday Essay  ·  Education & Society

In the era of oil, what is Guyana teaching its children about their own worth?

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D.  ·  March 30, 2026

Brooklyn, New York — Let us begin, as James Baldwin began, with an acknowledgment of danger.

We are living through a dangerous time. Not the danger of external threat alone — not the missiles over the Gulf, not the crude oil price that climbs on someone else’s catastrophe — but the interior danger that Baldwin named in 1963 and that no amount of GDP growth has yet resolved: the danger of a society that does not know itself, and that is therefore teaching its children the wrong things about who they are.

Baldwin spoke to American teachers. I am writing to Guyanese ones. But the paradox he named belongs to every society that has organized itself around a lie.

The question I want to put before us this Sunday is deceptively simple: in the era of oil, in the nation that ExxonMobil is remaking every quarter, what is Guyana teaching its children about their own worth?

Baldwin’s central argument is this. The purpose of education is to produce a person capable of examining the society in which he lives — capable of asking questions, making his own decisions, deciding for himself what is true. But no society genuinely wants that person. What societies want, rather, is a citizenry that will obey. The paradox of education is therefore the paradox of consciousness itself: to be truly educated is to be, in some sense, at war with the world that educated you. The teacher who understands this — who accepts the full weight of the task — must be prepared, as Baldwin puts it, to “go for broke.”

The Guyanese child stands at the intersection of at least three lies, each dressed as a celebration.

The Lie of the Oil Miracle

The first is the lie of the oil miracle. She is told — in national speeches, in budget documents, in the language of Brand Guyana — that Guyana is being transformed. That a new era is here. That the wells offshore will make her whole. The numbers are undeniably staggering: production in the Stabroek Block reached 900,000 barrels per day in November 2025, driving a real GDP growth rate of 43.6% in 2024 ^{[1] [2]}.

Yet, in the same week that these milestones are announced, her government cancels more than US$3.1 million from a World Bank loan designed to build the institutional capacity that would allow Guyana to negotiate with ExxonMobil as something approaching an equal ^[3]. The fiscal management component of that loan — the part that would have strengthened oversight of how the oil money flows — was dropped at the government’s own request ^[3].

The World Bank said it plainly in its project documentation: without this capacity, Guyana cannot improve its “bargaining power vis-à-vis investors in situations of negotiations, oversight, and enforcement.” The transformation is real; the question is who it is transforming things for.

The Lie of Inclusion

The second lie is the lie of inclusion. The cash grants, the new bridges, the roads percentages-complete — these are the grammar of a social contract being negotiated at the ATM. But a grant is not a guarantee. A transfer is not a transformation. The mathematics here is not complicated: a nonzero term added to a function that has not changed does not change the function.

If the structural conditions that determine a child’s life chances — the quality of her school, the credentials of her teachers, her access to a curriculum that tells the truth about the world — remain unchanged, then the grant is pacification, not liberation. While the 2026 education budget has increased, Guyana’s historical spending on education as a percentage of GDP has lagged behind other resource-rich nations that successfully avoided the resource curse, such as Norway and Botswana ^{[4] [5]}.

“Baldwin’s distinction applies with full force: the society that wants obedient citizens offers the porter a raise. The society that wants free citizens builds him a school.”

The Lie of History

The third lie is the lie of history. This one runs deepest. Guyana is a post-colonial society that has not yet fully reckoned with what colonialism actually did. It divided the laboring classes by race — African and Indian against each other — so that neither would organize against the structures of extraction. It told each group a story about the other group that served the interests of neither. Walter Rodney spent his life naming this mechanism. He did not survive the naming. And we have not, as a nation, built the curricular infrastructure to ensure that every Guyanese child knows Rodney’s name, understands his argument, and inherits his analytical courage. We have not taught the child the shape of the conspiracy against her. And therefore we have not given her the weapon she needs to refuse it.

Baldwin’s most radical claim is also his most precise. He says: if the child suspects his own worth, he has already begun to attack the entire power structure. This is why the power structure cannot afford for the child to know his worth. The erasure of Black history in America was not neglect — it was architecture. It was built to do a specific job.

I want to apply that precision to our moment.

In mathematics, we speak of existence proofs. You do not need to solve a problem in general to demonstrate that a solution exists. You need one example — rigorous, reproducible, undeniable — and the paradigm shifts. My “Beyond a Googol” project named ninety-plus Black mathematicians not as a diversity gesture but as an epistemological intervention. The absence of these names from the standard curriculum is not an oversight. It is a form of governance. In 2022, African Americans earned only 1.2 percent of all mathematics and statistics doctorates in the United States ^[6].

When a student at Medgar Evers College cannot imagine herself at the Institute for Advanced Study, it is not because she lacks the capacity. It is because she has been given no existence proof that the path is real. The curriculum is the conspiracy.

This is Baldwin’s argument, rendered in the language of my discipline.

And here is what makes the Guyanese moment so urgent: Guyana is currently writing its curriculum. Not metaphorically — literally. The oil revenues are reshaping what the state can build, what it chooses to build, and therefore what it is teaching the next generation about what is possible and for whom. The question is not whether Guyana will invest in education. The question is what kind of education. Will it be education that produces — as Baldwin demands — citizens capable of examining the society being built around them? Or will it produce what every extractive economy has historically produced: a skilled technical class that services the industry, and a credentialed managerial class that administers the contracts, and a broad citizenry that is told the transformation is happening for its benefit and is expected to be grateful?

The Collapse of Epistemic Infrastructure

I have been thinking about the closure of Stabroek News.

For thirty-nine years, that newspaper was one of the mechanisms by which Guyanese society looked at itself honestly. Its founders understood what they were doing. They were building epistemic infrastructure — the kind of institution that a democracy requires not as a luxury but as a precondition. The state understood this too, which is why it withheld advertising revenue in a pattern that the de Caires family described, with characteristic Guyanese understatement, as “a rather crude attempt to muzzle the free press.”

The impact of such actions is measurable. While Guyana ranks 73rd overall in the 2025 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, its score on the political indicator — which measures the degree of political pressure and control over the media — sits at a dismal 111th out of 180 countries ^[7].

Baldwin told his teachers: I would teach the child that the press he reads is not as free as it says it is — and that he can do something about that, too.

The press is gone. What the child does about that is now the question.

The Guyana Business Journal exists, in part, to hold this ground. The webinars, the Sunday Essays, the analytical series on the Natural Resource Fund, on electoral integrity, on gender equity, on Amerindian language — these are not journalism in the traditional sense. They are something closer to what Baldwin was describing: an insistence that the society examine itself, that the questions remain in circulation, that the mechanisms of accountability not fall silent simply because one of the institutions designed to sustain them has closed its doors.

But let us not be romantic about this. One journal does not replace a newspaper. The void is real. And a society that cannot sustain independent press is not suffering a media failure — it is suffering a crisis of self-knowledge. It does not know what it thinks. And a society that does not know what it thinks is teaching its children, by example, that thinking is optional.

What the Child Decides

So: what does the child decide?

Baldwin’s answer is unambiguous. The child — the Black child in America, the Guyanese child in the oil era, any child whose society has organized itself around a partial truth — has exactly two choices. She can accept the society’s verdict about what she is worth, swallow the inarticulate rage, and become the porter who tells you it’s raining when you ask about the sun. Or she can decide — early, deliberately, against the evidence of everything around her — that a mistake has been made somewhere, and that she is not what she has been told she is.

That decision is not merely psychological. It is political. It is the foundational act of citizenship. And it is the thing that education, properly understood, is supposed to facilitate.

My students at Medgar Evers College make this decision every semester. They arrive having been told, in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that mathematics is not for them — that rigor is the enemy of access, that the IAS seminar room belongs to someone else. My “MEC to MIT” philosophy is not a slogan. It is a structural argument about what the curriculum owes the student. It owes her the existence proof. It owes her the full weight of the mathematical tradition — not a simplified version designed to confirm what the society has already decided about her capacity — and it owes her the pedagogical environment in which her own capacity can become legible to her.

This is Baldwin’s task, translated into the language of mathematics education. The teacher who goes for broke is not the teacher who makes the material easier. She is the teacher who refuses to accept the society’s verdict about what the student can bear.

Guyana is at a threshold. Not the threshold we usually describe — the one measured in barrels per day, in GDP growth, in infrastructure kilometers. The deeper threshold. The one that asks: what kind of people will the oil era produce?

The answer is being written now, in every classroom where a teacher decides whether to tell the child the truth about her history. In every budget line that chooses a cash transfer over a school. In every governance reform that is cancelled because the state has decided that knowing what it is worth is too costly. In every newsroom that falls silent.

What the child decides depends, in the first instance, on what we decide. On whether the teachers go for broke. On whether the institutions hold. On whether we — diaspora and domestic, scholars and editors and civil society — insist on building the epistemic architecture that makes honest self-examination possible.

Baldwin closed by warning that if the country does not find a way to use the child’s energy, it will be destroyed by that energy. The warning was for America. It travels.

The project before us in Guyana is nothing less than this: to build, in the era of oil, a society that teaches its children they are worth examining the world they will inherit. Not managing it for someone else. Not servicing its infrastructure. Examining it. Changing it. Deciding, against every verdict the old architecture has delivered, that a mistake has been made somewhere — and that they are the ones who will correct it.

That is what a genuine education produces. That is what we owe the child.

And that is the only argument worth making in this moment.

References

1. ExxonMobil. Daily oil production hits 900,000 barrels in Guyana’s Stabroek block (November 12, 2025). corporate.exxonmobil.com
2. Reuters. Oil output, exports drove Guyana economy’s growth of 43.6% in 2024 (January 17, 2025). reuters.com
3. World Bank Group. Disclosable Restructuring Paper – Guyana Petroleum Resources Governance and Management Project – P166730 (December 24, 2025). documents.worldbank.org
4. World Bank. Government expenditure on education, total (% of GDP) – Guyana. data.worldbank.org
5. Global Partnership for Education. Education in Guyana (2022). globalpartnership.org
6. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE). Academic Fields Where Blacks Earned Few or No Doctoral Degrees in 2022 (February 19, 2024). jbhe.com
7. Reporters Without Borders (RSF). World Press Freedom Index: Guyana (2025). rsf.org

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Social Policy | Analysis

The Diaspora Is Not the Problem: On Citizenship, Belonging, and the Architecture of Oil-Era Benefit Policy

By Terrence R. Blackman, Ph.D.
|
Guyana Business Journal
|
March 23, 2026

The recent “Peeping Tom” column published in the Kaieteur News, questioning whether overseas-based Guyanese should qualify for the cash grant, raises real concerns about the integrity of Guyana’s social benefit distribution systems. It deserves a serious response, and honest scrutiny. Because embedded in a legitimate administrative problem is a framing that, if left unchallenged, could do lasting damage to the relationship between Guyana and its diaspora: one of the country’s most durable and undervalued economic assets.

The column’s central empirical claim is that approximately 600,000 persons registered for the cash grant—a figure it implies exceeds the total adult population of Guyana—and that this anomaly is explained primarily by overseas-based Guyanese flooding the system. This is presented as obvious. It is not.

Guyana’s population, according to the preliminary 2022 census count, stands at 878,674, with an adult population reasonably projected in the range of 550,000 to 600,000. The discrepancy between that figure and 600,000 registrants is real but modest—and it admits multiple explanations: duplicate registrations by residents, registration by newly eligible 18-year-olds, and administrative carry-overs from prior cycles.

The column offers no disaggregated breakdown of how many registrants are actually overseas-based. It asserts the connection. That is not analysis; it is attribution. Before we design exclusionary policy on this basis, we need the data. How many registrants have overseas addresses? How many registered through foreign IP addresses? How many claimed the grant remotely versus in person? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the minimum evidentiary threshold for a policy claim of this magnitude.

The Arithmetic of Belonging

The column frames overseas-based Guyanese—and their children—as opportunists drawn by oil wealth, driven in many cases by sudden “patriotic fervour” tied to financial gain. This characterization deserves to be measured against the historical record. For decades before the first oil barrel was lifted, the Guyanese diaspora was transferring wealth into Guyana, not extracting it. World Bank data consistently recorded Guyana’s remittance inflows at between 8 and 14 percent of GDP in the years leading up to the oil era—among the highest ratios in the Western Hemisphere. In absolute terms, remittances to Guyana regularly exceeded foreign direct investment.

For decades before the first oil barrel was lifted, the Guyanese diaspora was transferring wealth into Guyana, not extracting it.

The families in Berbice, Linden, and Bartica, who were sustained by barrels and wire transfers from New York and Toronto, did not experience their overseas relatives as extractors. They experienced them as lifelines. The column does not mention this. It cannot afford to, because it disrupts the narrative.

The diaspora has been, net of everything, a contributor to Guyana’s economy and social fabric—not a drain on it. To reframe them, at the very moment Guyana’s fortunes improve, as a threat to be blocked is not data-driven analysis. It is a kind of moral arithmetic that only works if you selectively choose which contributions to count.

Citizenship vs. Residency

There is a legitimate policy question buried in this debate, and it deserves honest engagement. Should social benefit programs designed for Guyanese residents be accessible to non-residents?

That is a reasonable question with defensible answers. Most countries draw exactly this distinction: citizenship confers political membership and a set of fundamental rights; residency determines eligibility for certain social programs. These are different categories, and conflating them produces confused policy.

Citizenship confers political membership and a set of fundamental rights; residency determines eligibility for certain social programs.

The old-age pension concern is the strongest of these cases. If the eligibility criterion is residency in Guyana, and persons are fraudulently misrepresenting their residency to claim benefits, that is a systems-integrity problem that warrants a systems-integrity solution—better identity verification, cross-referencing of immigration records, and residency attestation requirements. That is an argument for competent administration, not for blocking citizens from citizenship.

The house lot question is more complex: land policy in Guyana has always had to balance competing claims, and those tensions predate oil. The cash grant is a different instrument again, and if the government determines it should be limited to persons resident in Guyana, that is a defensible position—provided it is applied consistently, transparently, and with a clear definition of residency that does not serve as a proxy for something else.

The Architecture of Inclusion

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this discourse concerns the children of overseas-based Guyanese—many of whom were born overseas and hold foreign citizenship—who are asserting their right to Guyanese citizenship through their parents. The narrative treats this as part of the threat. It is not. It is the normal, healthy, globally standard operation of citizenship by descent. Ireland does it. India does it. Jamaica does it. Every country with a significant diaspora that takes its relationship with that diaspora seriously does it.

These young people—Guyanese by blood, by family history, and by cultural inheritance—are not gaming a system. They are asserting a legal right. The question of whether they should be eligible for resident-based social benefits is a separate and answerable question. But to frame their very citizenship claims as part of a suspicious “rush” is to tell them, at the moment Guyana comes into its own, that they are not really Guyanese. That is a wound we should be very careful about inflicting.

Guyana’s oil-era challenge is not that too many people want to be Guyanese. That is, if anything, a sign of the country’s growing strength. The challenge is to build benefit systems robust enough to serve those who are genuinely eligible, and honest enough to exclude those who are not—on the basis of clear, consistent, publicly stated criteria.

That means investing in digital identity infrastructure. It means requiring residency verification for residency-based benefits. It means cross-referencing immigration records for pension claims. It means designing the cash grant distribution with appropriate verification standards—not as a tool to exclude citizens, but as a tool to serve the right ones. These are tractable engineering and policy problems. They do not require us to treat the diaspora as an adversary.

The project of building an inclusive, well-governed oil-era Guyana is hard enough without manufacturing divisions we do not need.

The language of exclusion is a shortcut that does real harm. It substitutes a clear-cut enemy for a complex administrative challenge. It risks alienating hundreds of thousands of Guyanese abroad whose remittances, networks, skills, and moral investment in their homeland remain among the country’s most significant non-oil assets. And it sets a precedent—that Guyanese citizenship has conditions of convenience, applied or withdrawn depending on whether Guyana is struggling or prospering—that will not be forgotten. We can do better. We must do better. The project of building an inclusive, well-governed oil-era Guyana is hard enough without manufacturing divisions we do not need.

Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair, Department of Mathematics, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, and Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal.

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