By Kemol King
Guyana is getting richer. I know this because almost every economic indicator tells me so.
I see it in the construction happening around me. In the new roads, bridges, and hotels. In the billions of US dollars flowing into the Natural Resource Fund. I see it when international institutions describe an economy growing at a pace almost no other country can match.
Guyana has been the fastest growing economy in the world for the past six years. By almost any measure, this should make me enormously optimistic about where Guyana is headed. Yet I find myself less optimistic than I was a few years ago.
It is a difficult thing to admit because I have spent years being optimistic about Guyana.
I still believe many of the investments being made are necessary, and I do not subscribe to the idea that nothing is improving simply because serious problems remain.
We have been told for years that we are living through transformation, and in many ways, we are. The country looks somewhat different. Infrastructure is improving. Some journeys are easier, new opportunities have emerged, and there are improvements that I can see and feel in my own life.
But transformation sets its own expectations. The more Guyana changes, and the more resources the state has at its disposal, the harder it becomes to accept the things that remain unnecessarily difficult.
As the country develops, the things I once accepted as the status quo are harder to live with. Blackouts frustrate me more than they once did. Unreliable water and internet services feel increasingly out of place in a country changing as quickly as ours. Having access to these things is not the same as being able to depend on them, and reliability matters enormously to how people experience their quality of life.
I want government contractors to finish projects when they said they would and for those projects to last for the sake of our children.
I want to enter a government office and be treated as though the institution exists to serve me, rather than as though I should be grateful that someone agreed to do their job that day.
And I want to live in a country where getting efficient public service does not depend on who you know, who knows you, or whether somebody expects something in return. There have been improvements in this regard, but they remain too inconsistent. A public service is only as reliable as the institution, and sometimes the individual public servant you happen to encounter.
These are not extravagant expectations for an oil-producing country. Frankly, they should not be extravagant expectations for any country.
But functioning infrastructure and competent public institutions are only part of what I mean when I say I want Guyana to develop. There is another part that is much harder to measure.
What exactly are we developing into as people?
We tend to discuss development in physical and economic terms. They can make people’s lives materially better, and many already have. But a country is more than its infrastructure and its economy. Societies have to develop too.
And sometimes I am also exhausted by Guyanese society itself.
Too many people will condemn corruption, incompetence or wrongdoing when the other side does it, then suddenly discover nuance when the accused belongs to their side.
There is an anti-intellectualism that makes serious discussion unnecessarily difficult. There is casual sexism. Homophobia remains socially acceptable in spaces where other forms of prejudice would rightly cause outrage. Our attitudes towards sexual violence can be appalling.
Economic growth cannot fix these things by itself.
Economic development can coexist quite comfortably with social dysfunction. Greater wealth can improve people’s lives in profound ways, but there are things money alone cannot fix. Intolerance and the ways we treat one another require changes that cannot be measured in GDP.
Quality of life is not only about what we earn or the infrastructure available to us. It is also about the kind of society we have to navigate every day: whether people are treated with dignity, and whether our principles survive political and social tribalism.
That is why development cannot simply be something we do to the physical country. It also has to describe what happens to us.
We could build the highways and hotels and still end up with a richer version of the same dysfunctional society. All that money without wisdom and the right values can even make us worse. Perhaps that is what worries me most.
These questions increasingly shape how I think about whether Guyana is where I want to build the rest of my life.
That and also that there are places where the lights staying on is unremarkable. Where reliable water and internet are not luxuries. Where public institutions generally work without requiring a favour.
I want Guyana to become the country that makes that decision easy.
Getting richer will help us build that country. But money alone cannot determine what kind of country we are becoming.
That part depends not only on what happens to Guyana, but on what happens to Guyanese.
