The PPPC’s brilliant plan for the depopulation of Region 6

Oct 29, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – If the People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC) were running a business, it would be the only enterprise in history that celebrated losing its customers. The irony of its “development” strategy for Region 6 — that once-bustling stretch of Berbice now better known for its empty villages and migrating youth — is that it seems designed not to bring people in but to send them out. You almost suspect the party has mistaken “depopulation” for “progress.”

Let us begin with the data, or at least, the kind of data that politicians prefer not to mention at rallies. Between 1992 and 2012, the population of Region 6 declined, making it the only region in Guyana where people decided en masse than anywhere else — the city, the diaspora, or Mars — might offer better prospects. This was during the PPPC’s glorious reign, when the government was supposedly busy “transforming lives” (perhaps by moving them out of Berbice altogether).

It’s one of the great cosmic jokes of Guyanese politics that the leading man of that era, trained in rural economics no less, presided over the prolonged stagnation of what should have been a rural success story. Imagine spending years studying rural economics only to return home and specialize in producing despair. One suspects that if the PPPC had been in charge of the Garden of Eden, the serpent would have migrated to Trinidad.

But alas, the PPPC has now decided to correct its past neglect. The strategy? Build an oil and gas training institute in Berbice. And, for good measure, a hospitality institute. The logic here is breathtaking …or perhaps just oxygen-deprived. The oil and gas industry is concentrated in Region 4 and Region 3, hundreds of miles away. The hotel boom is in Georgetown. Yet, the PPPC is constructing these institutions in Region 6, as though graduates will learn how to commute via teleportation.

It’s a bit like building a ski school in Lethem. Or a space technology campus in the middle of the sugarcane fields. The graduates will indeed find employment, just not in Berbice. The region’s economic resurrection plan, it turns out, is to train its young people to leave. It’s development that is surreal, illogical, and oddly decorative.

The party, of course, insists that the real villain of Berbice’s woes is the APNU+AFC coalition, which it accuses of destroying the sugar industry. The PPPC makes this claim with such indignation that one almost forgets who actually began closing estates in the first place. In truth, more sugar estates were shuttered under the PPPC than under the coalition. This is a  historical detail that the party treats the way one treats an embarrassing old photograph: hidden deep in a drawer, preferably under the Constitution.

The reality is that Berbice needs a coherent plan, not a potpourri of poorly located institutions. The region’s problems are not mysterious. Young people leave because there are few jobs, fewer opportunities, and a sense that the government’s idea of rural development is to give speeches about it in Georgetown.

The PPPC prefers to unveil gleaming new projects that make great headlines but little economic sense. It’s as though the goal were not to develop Berbice but to give it a fresh coat of irrelevance.

So here we are: a government that has spent decades watching Berbice empty out, now investing heavily in training facilities that will accelerate the very same process. It’s almost poetic, a bureaucratic ouroboros, swallowing its own logic. Perhaps one day there will be an official opening ceremony for the new “Institute of Managed Migration,” where young Berbicians can earn diplomas in “Leaving Home with Dignity.”

One can almost hear the speech already: “Our government is proud to equip our young people with the skills to succeed — wherever else they might find themselves.” And the crowd, bless them, will cheer, because old loyalties die hard.

Someone once said that 80% of success is just showing up. For Berbice, 100% of development may soon depend on leaving. If the PPPC’s plan continues along its current trajectory, the only thing left in Region 6 will be the infrastructure — and perhaps a few government ministers giving press conferences congratulating themselves on their “investment in human capital.”

At that point, Berbice may become a model of success, the first region in Guyana to achieve full employment by exporting all its employable people. The PPPC will no doubt take a bow. After all, in its own way, it will have achieved what few governments ever do: development without people, prosperity without presence, and a region so improved that nobody lives there anymore.

Now that would be progress — PPPC-style.

(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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• depopulation, Peeping Tom, PPPC, Region 6

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