Dear Editor,
Guyana’s oil wealth arrives as both promise and provocation. Beneath the glitter of GDP projections lies a quieter reckoning: a creeping erosion of labour’s perceived worth. As call centres shutter and construction businesses suffer, employers note a troubling pattern—locals are increasingly disengaging from the workforce, while migrants, many fleeing economic ruin, embrace these roles with hardened resolve. This divergence is not a moral indictment but a psychological puzzle. Why does anticipated prosperity so often dull the urgency to labour?
The answer lies partly in Nauru’s cautionary tale. Once among the world’s wealthiest nations per capita, the Pacific island leveraged phosphate riches into lavish stipends and tax-free indolence. Work became stigmatised and over 90% of technical roles were outsourced. When reserves depleted, Nauruans found themselves unemployable in a global economy that demands skill and adaptability. Obesity and despair soared as purpose evaporated. The nation now survives on foreign aid, its sovereignty mortgaged to Australian detention contracts. Nauru’s tragedy was not resource dependency but labour atrophy—the societal muscle, once neglected, could not be rehabilitated.
Venezuelans here embody the inverse principle. They understand that work isn’t just income, but it is dignity, agency and an antidote to chaos. Their ethic isn’t genetic but existential, born of knowing the cost when labour systems fail.
Critics may frame this as a clash between Guyana’s “slow life” ethos and some puritanical ideal of productivity. That misreads the tension. The slow life, with its emphasis on community and contentment, is not inherently incompatible with meaningful labour. Two of the countries ranked amongst the highest in the world for happiness, Japan’s ikigai (reason for being) and Denmark’s hygge (communal comfort) demonstrate that cultures can harmonise purpose and leisure. The peril emerges when cultural rhythms harden into complacency—when the slow life becomes a rationale to outsource the future.
Guyana’s challenge is to channel oil wealth into enabling labour rather than replacing it. This requires resisting the siren call of universal stipends and instead focusing on technical education, vocational training and infrastructure through the expanded (and now free) programmes at the University of Guyana and initiatives like GOAL. It means celebrating not just the engineer but the electrician mastering new certifications; honouring not only the entrepreneur but the cleaner saving to launch a small business.
Nauru’s fate reminds us that resource wealth, untethered from labour’s discipline, breeds collective fragility. Venezuela’s migrants illustrate how labour, even in hardship, forges resilience. Guyana need not abandon its cultural soul to avoid these extremes—it need only remember that prosperity’s deepest roots are not geological but human. Oil may fund schools and roads, but only a people committed to skilled, purposeful labour can sustain them.
As a young Guyanese who chose to build here despite opportunities abroad, I plead for clarity: let us wield this wealth not as a substitute for sweat but as a tool to make sweat count. The slow life need not die; it simply cannot afford to sleepwalk.
“He who does not work, neither shall he eat”. No rig, however deep, can pump defiance of that truth.
Yours faithfully,
A. Garnett
