The PPP was always likely to constrict freedom

May 05, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – There is a habit, which we have developed with a certain skill in Guyana. That habit is the borrowing large words from abroad and using them to explain local developments.

One such phrase “the resource curse.” It has the sound of intellectualism. But before we surrender to such language, we ought to ask what it means, and more importantly, what it does not mean. The resource curse describes a paradox. Countries endowed with abundant natural wealth—oil, minerals, gas, often fail to translate that wealth into broad development. Instead, they may experience economic distortion, institutional decay, or political instability.

Easy revenues replace the discipline of taxation. Governments, no longer dependent on the consent of the governed, drift away from accountability. Productive sectors wither as currencies appreciate, and attention narrows. In some cases, the consequence of resource control is conflict. These are the outlines of the curse. But the phrase is a description of tendencies, not a law of nature. Crucially, for the term to have any seriousness, the outcomes it purports to explain must be shown to arise from the resource itself—its extraction, its revenues, its distortions. Otherwise, the phrase becomes a convenience, a way of avoiding the more difficult and uncomfortable task of examining political conduct and historical habit.

It is therefore not necessary that all the classic symptoms, slow growth, weak democracy, volatility, appear together for one to speak of a resource curse. A country may exhibit one or two of these features and still fall within the pattern. But whichever feature is identified must be traced to the development of the resource. If, for example, we say that democracy has weakened since the advent of oil, we must show how oil has brought about that weakening, through corruption, through the concentration of power over revenues, through the erosion of institutional checks. Without that chain of causation, the argument dissolves into assertion.

In the present case, there is a temptation to attribute much that is troubling in public life to the arrival of oil. It is an attractive explanation. It absolves; it suggests that what is happening is not entirely of our own making. But this is to misunderstand both the country and the concept. The difficulties now visible in Guyana’s political life, the narrowing of democratic space, the consolidation of authority, the impatience with scrutiny did not begin with oil. They have deeper roots, in the character of political organisation and in the habits formed over decades.

The governing PPP party, long dominant and now more assured than ever, has evolved into something more monolithic. Within it, there appears to have emerged a kind of internal leviathan: a concentration of influence that has overridden whatever limited democratic instincts once existed. This is not the work of petroleum; it is the work of men and structures.

Parliamentary democracy, already fragile, shows signs of strain. Debate is diminished; oversight becomes ritual rather than substance. But the erosion is not confined to the chamber. Political freedoms more broadly appear constricted. The press, which in small societies carries a particular burden, finds itself operating in an atmosphere of distance and, at times, hostility. Ministers are frequently inaccessible. Information is not readily given; it must be prised out, if it can be obtained at all. Press conferences are undertaken only sparingly, and are often met not by engagement but by deflection or intimidation.

There are subtler pressures as well. State advertising, restored in form, is withheld in substance when payments are delayed inordinately. This is a quiet method of control, difficult to prove in any single instance but effective over time. Independent media, already operating on narrow margins, are left exposed. Institutions that should sustain public discourse instead become instruments of strain upon it. Ask Stabroek News.

During elections, the pattern becomes more visible. Elections observers have confirmed the use of state resources in partisan ways, of misinformation, of the deployment of agencies in manners that suggest political purpose rather than neutral function. These are not the symptoms of a curse descending from beneath the seabed. They are the expressions of a political culture that has found new confidence.

To attribute all this to oil is to mistake coincidence for causation. Oil may amplify certain tendencies; it may provide the resources that make consolidation easier. But it does not create the tendencies themselves. A government inclined toward centralisation will centralise with or without petroleum. A party that has not cultivated internal democracy will not discover it because of hydrocarbons.

The danger of misusing the term “resource curse” is that it allows responsibility to drift. It suggests that what we are witnessing is inevitable, that it belongs to a category of misfortune rather than to the realm of choice and conduct. It encourages a fatalism that is both inaccurate and disabling. Words, especially borrowed ones, should be handled with care. If we are to speak of a curse, we must first be certain of its source. Otherwise, we risk obscuring the very realities we claim to describe.

(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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• Freedom, gas, minerals, oil, Peeping Tom, PPP

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