Guyana and the Singapore Way

In 1968, Singapore made a decision that Guyana has now clearly learned under President Irfaan Ali: the future is going to be built around what the country could become, not around what it inherited. While that sounds simple, it actually is not. It requires something that is notoriously short in supply in politics: the willingness to tell people that not every industry, institution, factory, plantation, or government program can be preserved indefinitely simply because it has a sentimental constituency.
Singapore had few resources. Guyana has too many. Singapore had no oil. Guyana has billions of barrels of it. Singapore had almost no room for error. Guyana has been handed an extraordinary financial opportunity. Yet the central challenge is remarkably similar: what do you do when the old economic model no longer fits the world that has arrived? Singapore chose transformation by not asking how to preserve the economy it inherited, but rather asked: how do we build the economy we need?
Take sugar with us: if it can be made competitive, modernised, and diversified, then by all means, invest in it. If land can produce greater returns through alternative agriculture, agro-processing, energy, logistics, or other productive uses, then those possibilities must be considered without political hysteria. The question should not be whether sugar is sacred. The question should be whether Guyana’s land, labour, and capital are being put to their most productive use, and the same test should be applied to every other sector.
Our country’s new petroleum wealth should make this easier, not harder, because we now possess something that generations of governments could only dream about: the financial capacity to rebuild the economic foundations of the country. However, the real purpose of oil wealth should be to make Guyana less dependent on oil, not more dependent upon government spending financed by oil.
This is where the present government deserves credit for recognising that the country requires massive investment in infrastructure, housing, education, healthcare, agriculture, energy, and connectivity. Development is new roads that lower transport costs; bridges that open markets; reliable electricity that allows factories to operate competitively; technical education that produces skilled workers; and modern ports that make Guyana a logistics hub.
Recently, President Irfaan Ali at the Baker Institute in Houston, Texas, identified data centers, advanced processing industries, and digital infrastructure as areas where Guyana can generate significant multiplier effects. Then there is industrial development at Wales using our natural gas as feedstock for a fertilizer manufacturing facility, a gas bottling plant, etc. This reorientation will inevitably raise hackles in some quarters from vested interests like trade unions. But new industries do not mean abandoning our traditional sectors; they just force them to become better. As the President has emphasized, agriculture, for example, must become more mechanised, commercial, and export-oriented.
The government is following Singapore in exploiting its geographical fortuity: here, our extraordinary geographic position is finally being treated as an economic asset rather than an accident on the map.
We sit below the Caribbean, adjoining Brazil on the Atlantic shore of northern South America. With the modern ports, roads, energy, and logistics being implemented, that geography can become enormously valuable. Like Singapore, the cumulative result of the President’s hard choices, disciplined institutions, strategic investment, and an unusually clear understanding of comparative advantage will bear fruit.
The government is using the oil revenues to dismantle the structural constraints that have kept us poor for generations to build an economy capable of surviving long after the last barrel is pumped. Unlike the Opposition’s constant calls for cash handouts simply because we had the good fortune to discover oil, the government should not suffer the misfortune of believing that spending it is the same thing as transforming the country.
The choice is still ours, but Singapore’s lesson is unforgiving: countries become prosperous not by preserving everything they have, but by having the courage to decide what is worth carrying into the future. Guyana has finally acquired the resources to make those choices. Now it needs a government and a leader with the nerve to make them.