Oil riches won’t save a broken state

Jul 01, 2026 Letters

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Dear Editor,

South America is a laboratory of instructive contrasts. 4 countries offer Guyana lessons it would be politically costly to dismiss.

Argentina reflects Guyana’s weaknesses closely. Both relied too much on agricultural exports and failed to diversify. Both judiciaries, non-independent, with delays, corruption, and mountainous backlogs that keep ordinary people from getting justice. Argentina’s crises were the result of prioritising political favours over economic policy, keeping decisions in the hands of connected groups. Institutional weakening of governance structure evidenced by lack of judicial accountability makes self-correction impossible. These same problems are Guyana’s today. Oil revenues haven’t changed that environment but supported it on a larger scale.

Oil isn’t an institutional safeguard. It’s an accelerant amplifying good governance where it exists, amplifying patronage capture where it doesn’t. Guyana’s gleaming capital infrastructure, 2 or 3 meduim sized third world class stadiums, and Interior airports, mainly funded by borrowing from future generations’ backs, and regional distribution patterns reflecting electoral arithmetic over developmental need, follow Argentina’s template precisely. Region 10 — tens of thousands of Guyanese — is rendered stagnant-no Chair. Interior communities constantly on the Wait List for roads and secondary schools, while Georgetown transforms. This is misrepresentation made by political actors at its highest, in any assessment.

To worsen the electorate’s governance crisis, Stabroek revenues flow through accounting systems; the communities above whose geography the oil was found were never invited to audit, bringing the Whip’s role into sharp constitutional focus. Guyana currently has at least one parliamentarian rendered functionally silent in the House — a symptom of institutional failure that the Whip is constitutionally positioned to address. In functioning Commonwealth parliaments, that responsibility extends beyond party discipline to ensuring meaningful parliamentary participation, proper attendance accountability, and the protection of every member’s right to discharge their parliamentary function. Under Canada’s Parliament Act, s. 57(1), attendance deductions (CDN$120.00) are calculated monthly from members’ own statements, with the Whips on both sides rostering attendance for debates, votes, and committees. One can’t cheat the system, else jail time. In Guyana, the ones who don’t cheat the system, they are the ones sought as jail candidates, it’s a reverse psychology system, bullyism is rampant, totally dysfunctional. The underlying principle is accountability — a parliament whose members aren’t present, not engaged, and not empowered to scrutinise the executive isn’t performing its constitutional function, regardless of how many sessions it formally convenes.

Guyana’s Opposition Whip, the Honourable Tabitha Sarabo-Halley, holds precisely the institutional authority to demand that parliamentary participation — including the Walton-Desir committee service matter — be treated not as a political management question but as a constitutional obligation. This is politics. The Opposition’s accountability function depends on every validly nominated member being permitted to discharge it. A Whip is the most effective institutional check available against the procedural soft authoritarianism the current administration has demonstrated, provided she exercises that authority with the full rigour the role demands. The Tiananmen Square revolt is an example of what can happen when a bad regime creates bottlenecks, but Taiwanese are unlike Guyanese. Guyanese in 2026 are docile, irreverent, and accommodating to anything, even disproportionate crime statistics against culpability, sentencing, and convictions, e.g., rape, which could simply mean that the Director of Public Prosecutions Chambers, or the Offices of the Police Legal Advisor have been compromised, or the police have stymied the situation by their blatant corrupt modus operandi. It is obvious the Chancellor can’t fulfil the supervisory role that Office seeks.

Guyana’s free press — Kiskadee Watch and Kaieteur News — provide meaningful accountability but is financially outweighed by the state media’s capacity, as the March 2026, episode at Stabroek News confirmed. One of its journalists has courageously described Guyana’s population as “a citizenry yoked to poverty” — a precise and damning characterisation of the regime’s policy failures. Whether sanctions follow that candour is, given this administration’s demonstrated modus operandi, an outcome as foreseeable as it’s indefensible. Where the press is financially outgunned, the institutional correctives that remain — a vigorous Whip, a united Opposition coalition, and an engaged electorate — must bear the accountability burden the press alone cannot.

Brazil’s Lava Jato scandal demonstrated what happens when political patronage and commercial interest become structurally indistinguishable. Public trust collapsed. Recovery has been partial and exhausting. Guyana’s procurement irregularities, ministerial conflicts of interest, and judicial pressures suggest a trajectory uncomfortably close to Brazil’s pre-crisis condition.

Chile shows what good governance can achieve and how rapidly social progress unravels when inequality is left structurally unaddressed. Forty years of democratic governance could not prevent the 2019 protests that revealed concentrated growth had generated deep social dissatisfaction no GDP figure had captured. Oil revenues announced at press conferences and distributed through patronage networks do not constitute shared prosperity; they constitute a pressure cooker. Pressure cookers release. The argument that a President holding a doctorate in Urban Planning ensures that everything will therefore turn out well for the populace is, with respect, advocacy of the most unconvincing kind.

Colombia under President Petro navigates structural reform against entrenched conservative opposition while confronting a justice system riddled with inefficiency and corruption at the highest governmental levels — a description that maps with near-perfect accuracy onto Guyana’s present institutional condition.

Without genuine judicial independence, transparent procurement, inclusive resource distribution, and a decisive break from the patronage model that both the PPP and PNC have practised, Guyana’s oil wealth will produce a more capitalised version of the same structural inequality — better roads leading to the same unequal destination.

On a positive note, the democratic realignment that Guyana’s body politic urgently requires is already underway — and its momentum is structural, not merely electoral.

Over seventy-five percent of the PNC’s traditional leadership base has either migrated to WIN, FGM, ALP, and ANUG, or has exited the active political stage entirely with a corresponding percentage of its grass-root supporters. This is not ordinary political attrition. It is the organisational collapse of a party whose governance record has rendered it institutionally incredible to the very communities it historically claimed to represent. Two prominent former PNC figures now lead FGM and ALP respectively — carrying with them the institutional knowledge, regional credibility, and community networks that the PNC squandered through decades of ethnic patronage and democratic drift, which soon will be the fate of the PPP regime. The ALP’s leader, whose calibre is beyond reasonable dispute, has yet to earn her rightful parliamentary seat — a democratic deficit that the 2030 electoral cycle must correct. The PNC’s parliamentary representation, currently twelve seats, faces decline to potentially fewer than six. In contemporary political science terms, this is what scholars of party system change call dealignment followed by realignment — the collapse of inherited loyalty structures and their reconstitution around formations that better reflect the electorate’s actual interests and aspirations.

WIN, FGM, and ANUG are positioned to constitute the largest opposition bloc and, on the trajectory the evidence consistently supports, the governing coalition of the next electoral cycle. FGM’s proposal for a tripartite Opposition Front is not merely tactically sound — it is the logical organisational expression of the realignment already occurring at the grassroots level, where communities that once voted along ethnic lines are increasingly voting along governance and interest lines. This is precisely the transition that mature multi-ethnic democracies undergo when resource wealth raises the stakes of political exclusion to levels that inherited party loyalty can no longer contain.

In this context, any reluctance by the LOTO to engage seriously with FGM’s tripartite proposal isn’t merely a tactical error. It is a failure of the objectivity that the historical moment demands. The evidence is unambiguous: no single opposition formation commands sufficient parliamentary weight to displace the current administration alone. The coalition mathematics work only in combination. A leader who understands the constitutional imperative of cooperative governance — and Mohamed has built his entire political project on precisely that understanding — cannot in good conscience apply that principle to cabinet composition while resisting it in Opposition alliance architecture. The argument for objectivity is not a political preference. It is the same constitutional logic applied one level higher. FGM’s proposal deserves not merely consideration but urgent, formal, and public embrace.

The South American comparisons teach 1 main lesson: the window between resource discovery and institutional capture is narrow. Countries that build transparent, rule-of-law governance frameworks before that window closes become Chile at its best. Countries that don’t become Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia at their worst.

Guyana is still inside the window. The question is what Guyanese are prepared to do with the time that remains.

Regards,

M. Shabeer Zafar

Barrister-at-Law

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• broken state, Laboratory, Letters, oil riches

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