The Great Game: right around here

Oct 21, 2026 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

(Kaieteur News) – Guyana now has more than oil in its hands. Guyana has a strain of this century’s Great Game now hanging over its head. It’s not the Great Game played out by Britain and Imperial Russia almost 200 years ago for dominance in Central Asia. Wish it was that distant, and that inconsequential for Guyana. Unfortunately, today’s Great Game is right in this neighbourhood, and it is now picking up momentum.

Even more unfortunately, the news is all despairing from here. Gone are the days of cavalry and Cossacks on horseback, or lumbering junks dotting the seas. With America and China pawing the air, circling warily around each other, and an array of sophisticated armaments being lined up on each side, in this part of the hemisphere, it’s a most uncomfortable position for Guyana. To make matters infinitely worse, Guyanese are yoked to the weakest, most dreadful, leadership in its history. The situation is ripe for Guyana to be pulled left, to be dragged right, stretched thin, then steamrolled. The PPP calls this reading the situation, and bending accordingly.

Whatever America has in mind, the Chinese are sticking around. They really should be going eyeball-to-eyeball around the South China Sea and not the Straits of Georgetown. The trouble for Guyana is that nobody is going anywhere. Not with all this oil, gold, bauxite, and uranium present in Guyana; and, who knows, maybe some deposits of rare earth. Neither superpower is leaving that behind. Not with a pliable and prostrate PPP leadership that would give away all of Guyana to stay in power and steal what’s left of the national treasury.

The Chinese remember all too vividly past humiliations, when they were forced at gunpoint to surrender to the Rape of Nanjing and opium flotillas poisoning their people. The Americans see business, covet the entire neighbourhood for themselves. USA, China, or Venezuela, it’s the same Guyana impotency. Reality check. Guyana entered this century poor. Under PPP leadership, it’s set to travel through the next half-century on its knees. A ghost town with ghostly people, long stretches of roads and buildings, but always with foreigners commanding the economic heights. When leaders possess no backbone, no balls (crystal or other), check the results.

Volunteering to be suckers, helplessly trapped, the PPP leadership now has two priorities -save itself (and its accumulated wealth). Meanwhile, a battleground grows. No side is retreating. Retreating is to curbing ambitions and visions by 50 years, maybe 100. The Chinese want their piece of Guyana, a bigger one. The Americans want control over their sphere of influence, and if it isn’t now, then it may never be. The Chinese backdown now, and they will have to be backing down for decades.

I don’t envision any bargaining, any gentlemen’s handshake. Coexistence is out, and this is where Guyana is caught underfoot. At one time, all that was heard from high PPP circles was the Chinese are great. The Chinese are friends. The Chinese are brothers. A fraternity today, a lackey tomorrow. Tunes change when new friends and partners enter the picture. The new song is how long and illustrious the friendship between the PPP and the Yankees. How special the relationship between Washington and Georgetown! Would China have dumped some Uyghurs here, and still call itself an ally? Having forced the PPP Govt leadership’s hand to expel Cubans, the Americans have signalled that that the Chinese are next. Chinese ideas are different. I watch.

In today’s PPP Govt, there are some perfect patsies. Couldn’t stand for anything even if put in a straitjacket. Guyanese now stare at an unhappy future: a mountain on their heads (U.S.), a minefield ahead (Chinese), and barbwire for their best defenses. The Great Game gathers strength around Guyana. It’s the worst time for a country’s leadership to be headless, clueless, and useless.

(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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GHK Lall, Great Game, oil, PPP

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