By Prof C. Justin Robinson
Pro Vice-Chancellor and Campus Principal, The University of the West Indies, Five Islands Campus
There is a particular sound a nation makes when it crosses the threshold from poverty to possibility. It is not the rumble of drilling rigs, nor the clink of new construction. It is quieter than that, the collective inhale of a people who have, for generations, watched prosperity remain way beyond their horizon, suddenly realizing that the horizon has shifted.
Two weeks ago, the International Monetary Fund released its latest Article IV consultation report on Guyana, and the numbers demand attention. Economic growth exceeded 19 percent in 2025, capping two previous years that averaged nearly 40 percent. Oil production surged past 900,000 barrels per day by year’s end, a 35 percent leap in a single rotation of the calendar. Unemployment fell to 6.2 percent and even the non-oil economy expanded by roughly 14 percent and the IMF’s verdict is “highly favourable.”
However, here is the uncomfortable truth about miracles, they are dazzling in the moment, and treacherous in memory. The question before Guyana is not whether it can produce wealth, it clearly can, but whether it can also produce a civilization worthy of that wealth long after the last barrel is drawn.
The discipline of abundance
In the post-colonial Caribbean, resource booms have more often been cautionary tales than success stories. From bauxite to sugar, the region’s history is littered with economies that extracted fiercely, spent recklessly, and woke to find their soils depleted and their treasuries empty. The “resource curse” is a ghost that haunts every new discovery and not an abstract economic theory in these latitudes.
Against this backdrop, Guyana’s fiscal discipline is nothing short of remarkable. The IMF’s praise is unusually effusive saying that the government has maintained “continued prudent fiscal policy,” accumulated substantial balances in its Natural Resource Fund, and holds “one of the lowest debt-to-GDP ratios in the Western Hemisphere.” In a world where petro states typically mortgage their futures for immediate gratification, Georgetown has chosen the harder path, saving while building, investing while hedging.
This is not austerity dressed in populist clothing. The administration is expanding social transfers and electricity subsidies to cushion citizens against rising costs, accepting a moderate fiscal deficit in 2026 as the price of political legitimacy. The IMF expects this deficit to narrow in 2027, once the Natural Resource Fund’s “one-year lag” withdrawal rule takes effect. It is a “prudent expansion” a phrase that sounds like an oxymoron until you recognize it as the very essence of mature governance.
Yet discipline with money is only the beginning. The IMF also notes progress on digital public services, internal audit strengthening, and a centralized e-procurement platform designed to safeguard the quality of public spending. In anti-corruption and anti-money-laundering efforts, the report detects a “comprehensive approach.” These are the unglamorous plumbing works of nation-building, unseen by the public, but catastrophic if neglected.
The shadows beneath the spotlight
Still, no report card from Washington comes without its marginalia, and the caveats here deserve more attention than the headlines. The IMF’s gentlest warning is perhaps its most consequential, the spectre of “Dutch disease.” When oil revenues flood an economy, they can inflate currencies, warp wage structures, and render every other sector, from agriculture to tourism, uncompetitive on global markets. The IMF recommends vigilant monitoring of wage growth and competitiveness indicators. It is a diplomatic way of saying that a nation cannot eat oil and must still grow food, build things, and trade with the world.
More profound, however, is the question of intergenerational equity. The IMF’s reference to the “non-oil primary balance” is a moral ledger and not mere technocratic jargon. Every dollar drawn from the Natural Resource Fund today is a dollar not available to a Guyanese child born fifty years from now. The fund is a trust and not a current account, and trusteeship, in its truest sense, requires the courage to say no and resist the political temptation to spend now what was meant to sustain later.
There is, too, the unfinished business of governance. The IMF’s commendation carries an implicit imperative “continued effort.” The 2024 Caribbean Financial Action Task Force mutual evaluation exposed gaps that remain open. Beneficial ownership transparency and enforcement mechanisms still require strengthening. Praise from international institutions is gratifying, but in the Caribbean, we have learned that legitimacy is not conferred by outsiders but is earned daily through institutions that function when no one is watching.
The longer miracle
Guyana’s story is genuinely extraordinary as in a hemisphere where small states often struggle for relevance, Georgetown has become the world’s fastest-growing economy. It has done so while maintaining a measure of fiscal sanity that eludes nations many times its size and thats no small achievement.
But the real test of leadership is not measured in GDP percentages or barrel counts. It is measured in what remains when the boom is over. Will Guyana be a nation that extracted its wealth and exported it, or one that transformed it into lasting prosperity, into education, infrastructure, institutions, and an economy diverse enough to survive the inevitable transition away from fossil fuels?
The IMF report is both a certificate of current achievement and a map of future hazards. It reminds us that prudence is not the enemy of ambition but its necessary companion. Guyana has shown the world that it can find oil beneath its seas. Now it must show something harder, that it can govern with wisdom above the ground.
The dazzling numbers will fade from the headlines. The decisions made in the quiet rooms of ministries, in the drafting of legislation, in the refusal to spend what should be saved, those will determine whether this miracle endures. And that, in the end, is the only miracle that truly matters.
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