Latest update September 22nd, 2026 10:30 AM
Oil dollars
Editorial…
(Kaieteur News) – The PPP/C Government is having a great time with Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund. Like a man who just came into a huge inheritance, or who just won big at the lottery, it has been withdraw and spend, withdraw and spend. To top of this carnival treatment of the oil money that belongs to citizens, there has been no accounting for the billions withdrawn from the NRF.
In 2025, the NRF received total deposits of US$2.509B.From that tempting sum, the government withdrew US$2.463B.The math is simple, 98% of last year’s oil earnings grabbed and splurged on what citizens are still waiting to know. This is the most illuminating (and angering) part of the PPP/C Government’s withdrawing and spending of the nation’s oil money. To date, it has not informed citizens on how one dollar of the withdrawn funds has been spent. The government’s contemptuous handout of “national development priorities” is not good enough, can never be found acceptable. National development priorities serve as the camouflage for skullduggeries that are still to come to the surface. Where cunning is concerned, there are few better than the PPP/C Government, and when money is involved, then shenanigans and skullduggeries are guaranteed to be a part of the frame.
Today’s generation of citizens, and future generations, are staring at a grim picture. A double blow delivered to where the nation is vulnerable. Because, on the one hand, the government drained almost all the billions out of last year’s oil earnings then, on the other, it continued with irresponsible taking out of more billions in debt. Like a ravenous beast, the PPP/C Government seems to have an insatiable appetite. In the case of Guyana’s ruling political group, that appetite is for money. Billions pulled out from the NRF, and still that does not do much to ease the government’s money hunger, so there is borrowing of more billions from whoever would lend to Guyana.
The majority of this generation of citizens started out in life close to an impoverished state. The majority of them will leave this earth in that same state of need, not having those needs fulfilled. At the current rate of PPP/C Government using the NRF in the manner of a personal piggybank, and reckless bingeing on loans, future generations of Guyanese are weighed down with dismal prospects. They are statistically rich on paper. Their reality is a debt burden that could prove hard to repay, should oil prices plunge. And, next to that potential crisis, would be the NRF that is rundown, with only negligible drops of oil dollars left. Not enough to cushion oil shocks. Not enough to be that pool from which the needs of future generations could be managed at a comfortable level.
The PPP/C Government persists with the myth that it is doing what is in the best interests of all citizens. Since there is that claim, then come clean before those same citizens. Share the specifics on what and how the billions of American dollars withdrawn from the NRF have been spent. The government claims that it has been nothing less than honest in its handling of oil dollars. To reinforce that claim, it should be open, the easiest thing, to revealing to the public, the details of how oil dollars withdrawn have been spent. When a government finds it necessary to shelter behind a descriptive as broad and general as “national development priorities”, then the message that it sends is that it has not managed the people’s oil money with the highest degree of honesty and principle.
Only those given to playing the trickster’s games, feel justified in selling “national development priorities” when more than 98% of the 2025 NRF receipts was withdrawn, and then went up in smoke, or in the pockets of numerous comrades with close attachment to the PPP/C Government. If only 9% of the NRF’s 2025 collections were withdrawn by the government, national development priorities” would still have been unacceptable. When it was more than 98% withdrawn, then what the PPP/C Government is selling is a coverup that exposes more than it hides. The government is very good with propaganda. It cannot be this poor with so many billions withdrawn.
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