TheEconomistFebruary 29th 2020 331A
t election time, it is easy to tell which
ethnic group dominates each of the vil-
lages strung out along Guyana’s Atlantic
coast even without looking at the people.
Where Afro-Guyanese are the main group,
the green-and-yellow banners of the ruling
coalition flutter. In Indo-Guyanese vil-
lages, it’s the red, gold and black of the op-
position People’s Progressive Party (ppp).
Voting in Guyana’s general election, due to
be held on March 2nd, is likely to follow
ethnic lines, as it has done for decades.
This year the stakes are unusually high.
That is because Guyana, South America’s
third-poorest country, is about to be trans-
formed by the petroleum that has begun to
flow from vast offshore reservoirs.
Oil could change Guyana as radically as
did sugar, which brought African slaves in
the 18th century and indentured labourers
from India in the 19th. By 2024 it could lift
income per person from $5,000 to $19,000,
nearly the same as in Poland. The imfex-
pects the economy to grow by 85% this
year. By 2030 the government’s share of
earnings from oil could reach $10bn in real
terms, more than double last year’s gdp.
This could “change us once and for all into
a Singapore kind of country,” says the fi-
nance minister, Winston Jordan. Which-
ever party takes charge of the bounty could
govern for decades. Mr Jordan calls the vote
“the mother of all elections”.
Guyana, which has just 780,000 inhab-
itants, is better known for its problems
than its successes. It has the world’s third-
highest suicide rate and the highest rate of
maternal mortality in South America. One
reason is that it loses talent, including doc-
tors and nurses. Its diaspora is nearly as
large as its population. At least four-fifths
of its university graduates leave the coun-
try. Children spend 12 years in school on av-
erage, but education is so poor they learnless than seven years’ worth of material.
Most of the population, including that of
Georgetown, the capital, is on the low-ly-
ing coast that is vulnerable to flooding.
Two-fifths live on less than $5.50 a day.
Oil riches could make life much better,
but most Guyanese do not feel as if they
have hit the jackpot. “We don’t know when
oil comes whether we will get it or not,”
says Hasser Bacchus, who lost his job cut-
ting cane for GuySuCo, the state-owned
sugar producer, which in 2017 shut down
four estates and sacked 7,000 workers. He
now ekes out a living plucking razor grass
from abandoned sugar-cane fields in
Wales, alongside the Demerara river, which
he sells for bird seed at 200 Guyanese dol-
lars (96 cents) a bundle. Alex Paul Singh, a
former sugar worker who sells chickens by
a roadside, thinks “oil could help Guyana a
lot.” But if it’s not properly managed Guy-
ana could become “like Nigeria or Venezu-
ela”, whose oil-rich economies are subvert-
ed by corruption. Almost every Guyanese
seems to be aware that, like a downpour on
parched ground, a torrent of oil money
could bring destruction rather than relief.
That worry makes Guyana’s polarised
politics even more rancorous, which in
turn increases the risk that the money will
be misspent. The election is a delayed reac-
tion to a vote of no-confidence in the gov-
ernment in 2018. That was caused by the
defection of an Indo-Guyanese mpwho be-
longed to the Alliance for Change (afc), theGuyana
An opportunity to score
GEORGETOWN
As oil begins to flow, the country holds a decisive election
The Americas
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