Dutch Disease Avoided. The Resource Curse Has Arrived.

May 03, 2026 News

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Road to First Oil: Every Man, Woman and Child Must become Oil Minded – May 2, 2026 – Column 183 

By Christopher Ram

(Kaieteur News) – The Thirteenth Parliament of Guyana, elected on 1^st September 2025, has held three business sessions in eight months. And that figure is generous. It includes the Budget and two formalities. On any honest reckoning, the Thirteenth Parliament has transacted one piece of real legislative business since the country went to the polls. That is the lowest level of parliamentary activity in this country since 1966. President Ali, in his second term, has made history of a kind no head of government should want. The slide is dangerous – for democracy, for accountability, and for everyone except the President himself.

Sadly, with the noise and distractions and the weakening of the press, the average citizen will miss the danger signs. In fact, the official narrative runs in the opposite direction. Higher oil prices, driven by hostility led by Israel, America and Iran, are presented as a windfall for oil producing countries such as ours. Just as an aside, we produce crude and import the refined product, and fertiliser, and most of what passes through a Guyanese kitchen – meaning that the benefit from a higher crude price is partly offset by the higher cost of everything else we must buy back from the world market.

Against this background it might be useful to consider two phenomena associated with resource-rich, rapidly developing and poorly managed countries – the Dutch disease and the Resource Curse.

By the narrowest of definitions, the Dutch disease has been contained. The exchange rate has been managed even as it made foreign currency scarce, subsidies and handouts have masked a real cost of living still out of reach for tens of thousands, and the minimum wage has been frozen while foreign labour is imported – some say trafficked – to do the work Guyanese find unacceptable at such miserly rates. Yet the President tells workers about wealth-creation opportunities through his government’s much-touted investment opportunities. And only this week, a rice subsidy of three billion dollars was announced – by no less than the President himself.

The exchange-rate stability, the subsidies and the headline numbers on traditional sectors project an image of competent stewardship – that we have kept the Dutch disease at bay. But they tell us nothing about the strength of the institutions responsible for managing the wealth. It is precisely in that gap – between visible macroeconomic stability and invisible institutional decay – that the resource curse has taken root.

The evidence sits in the National Assembly. Successive Parliaments since Independence have, in the eight months following each general election, sat many times more than the Thirteenth – by factors ranging up to six times. Even during our most constrained transitions, post-1992 and post-1997, the National Assembly met several times more. How much real legislative business each of those Parliaments transacted is a separate question requiring sitting-by-sitting examination. What is not in question is that they met, that they convened their committees, that they discharged the deliberative function. The blighted Thirteenth has done none of those things.

In the process, the Ali Parliament has made all its predecessors look like democrats and constitutionalists – even those that were neither.

He has effectively suspended the deliberative function of the legislature at the precise moment when oil revenues and public expenditure are accelerating, and major fiscal commitments are being announced by executive declaration. The consequences cascade. The Standing Orders provide for about a dozen committees: the Public Accounts Committee, the Constitution Reform Committee, the Committee on Appointments, the Parliamentary Management Committee, the four Sectoral Committees on Natural Resources, Economic Services, Foreign Relations and Social Services, and the Sessional Select Committees. Because Parliament has not properly convened, none of them has been appointed. There is no accountability or democracy in any sense.

This is not an oversight. It is by presidential design.

Even those bodies that exist are dysfunctional. The expensive and top-heavy Constitutional Reform Commission has been silent. The Commissioner of Information remains in place because a do-nothing post is what the President seems comfortable with. The Public Accounts Committee, by tradition and by Standing Order chaired by a member of the main Opposition, has not been appointed and cannot meet. It is therefore unable to examine years of Auditor General reports covering public expenditure in the range US$4 billion to US$5 billion between 2020 and 2025. It is also unable to examine whether the current Auditor General is beyond the legally permissible age for the office.

There is a further structural problem at the apex of the public finance system. The Office of the Auditor General is constitutionally required to audit every Ministry, Department and government-owned or controlled entity, including the Ministry of Finance. It is a matter of public knowledge that there is spousal overlap. The conflict is not theoretical. It is structural, permanent, and deliberate. Meanwhile, boards across the State are stacked with yes-men and yes-women under carefully choreographed chairs.

None of this would be sustainable without external acquiescence. It has been granted in full. The British and the Canadians, vocal monitors of Guyana’s electoral standards only months ago, have conveniently forgotten the ruling party’s abuse of state resources to secure President Ali his second term. The Americans have gone further. The United States Ambassador is publicly pressing the country to abandon its decades-old relationships with Cuba and China, while a representative of that same government refers to Guyana as occupying America’s backyard.

The watchdogs – domestic and foreign – have become lobbyists and supporters. Where Western capitals and domestic professionals once raised institutional standards, they now have other priorities. Oil, gold, forestry and money are far better choices than democracy in some backyard country. Jobs and revenue back home are far more important than some esoteric principle.

Meanwhile, to confirm the resource curse, the President goes solo – speaking on every topic and for every Minister. His advisory Cabinet has been reduced to an audience of convenience. Policy is announced publicly before it is approved at Cabinet – without a whisper, because it has already been announced. This is how the resource curse arrives – whether in Hungary or in some poorly led countries. Not by leaps, but by gradual steps. Until one day, you wake up and it’s gone.

This column first appeared on chrisram.net and is reproduced with the kind courtesy of the author.

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• Christopher Ram, Dutch Disease, Oil-minded, resource curse

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