Guyana as playground, aka devil’s playground

Oct 25, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall

(Kaieteur News) – Guyana as playground for investors has just been beamed across the planet.  An investor playground is sure to have an appealing ring to many Guyanese.  I, however, beg to differ ever so slightly.  Playground invokes many images, ranging from competition to a fair field of play, to how the field often gets dug up and scarred, to how the lifestyle of the rich and famous taunts and haunts those who host them.

In real life a playground has groundskeepers, people to clean up the mess left behind after those who came to sample the home team’s delights have had their fun and frolic.  Think of any Guyanese post-holiday garbage.

The man from Saipem Guyana Inc., Senor Diego Vicke meant well, and was on the right track when he launched his commercial about Guyana being a playground.  His words inspires romance.  “Go a little bit further than Georgetown, 15, 20 minutes, going to the other side, to the east bank. Go and take a look at the roads, big roads, nice traffic lights. So, the government is reinvesting in all the infrastructure needed for you guys to come and make this your playground.”

Playground may be a distinguishing feature (“come and make this your playground”) that Senor Vicke may wish to walk back.  Bless his true capitalist heart.  I leave out rapacious, and focus on playground.  Guyana as playground is Guyana as a sitting duck, open to any kind of ruthless exploitation.  The preferred term would be investment.  Come and grab a piece of the rich action.  It’s all on the table, and come and be ready for the freest road to enhancing and enriching self-help.  Because I promised not to criticize the PPP Government until December, unless just has to be dealt with head-on (gold smuggling deflections for distractions via deceptions), there is no revisiting what Pres. Ali himself had touted on each occasion that was available.  Recall something to the effect of ‘Guyana is the place to be’.  I am thankful that Excellency Ali was less irrationally exuberant than Senor Vicke and avoided speaking in the language of the crew of international jetsetters.  For where there is a playground, there are sure to be playboys, playgirls.  More often than not, they have a depravedly indifferent streak in their makeup.  Except in the context of Guyana’s oil and gas sector, and the delectable opportunities overflowing from it, playboy and jetsetter are not the terms employed but innovators and explorers.

Guyanese have grown red in the face from hearing about their viscous treasures under the sea.  They have also grown green around the liver from the gnawing hunger pains in their belly, despite being the owners of those luscious, viscous marine treasures.  There is gold in the streets of Guyana.  Come and grab a wheelbarrow.  Or a shipping container.  Aye, a playground for foreigners; but a devil’s playground for short-of-food, short-of-cash, and short-of-hope Guyanese.  Naturally, it would be burdening Senor Diego Vicke of Saipem, Inc., to get too hot under the collar about such Guyanese tragedies.  As he himself said, a playground Guyana is, and the only objective it to score big.  Let the clear be said right here: I reserve a special place for investors.  But I worship before a bigger altar when Guyanese are entangled in the swirl of developments that leave worse than they were before.

Saipem’s Supply Chain skipper had on his navigational lights.  ‘Go 15, 20 minutes out of Georgetown’ and another world smiles.  Yessir!  Modern roads; stagnant, overflowing drains nonexistent; piles of rotting garbage the capital city’s reality; while sewage stays underground.  To put more sweetly, outside of GT, there is modernization, sophistication, and vision.  Whereas, inside of GT, there’s filth and squalor of a country on top of the world, so the excrement from above falls on those below.  Georgetown is the dumping ground; but 15, 20 minutes away from it, there’s the playground of which the man spoke so lushly.  Relief is in sight with city drainage targeted, and other improvements promised.

Finally, a little reminder of those “big roads, nice traffic lights” of which Senor Vicke spoke so prettily, better than many Guyanese.  Guess who is footing the bill for them (locals)?  Guess who is brukking dem up (investors)?  Guess who is borrowing more to rebuild broken ones, and build new ones (the natives)?  It is the price of progress.  Nothing put in, nothing coming out.  My problem is how is it that all this lavishness can be celebrated so riotously by the beneficiaries of Guyanese economic hospitality, while Guyanese themselves, and by the millions, are so down in the gutter.  Times are so bad, that the Cash Grant watch is on.  Thanks to Senor Vicke a little light pierced the darkness.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• devil playground, GHK Lall, investors, playground, Saipem Guyana Inc

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