WHEN I boarded the InterCaribbean Airline flight at Saint Lucia’s George F.L. Charles Airport for Guyana on December 17, I knew my stay would be different this time around – and looked forward to my umpteenth trip to my other Caribbean homeland.

Flying in a wheelchair with red-carpets between aircraft and airports, my movements were limited, but I’d again been moved by my chronic attraction to the edifying theatre of Guyana politics, with its real-life partisan performances defiant of any written script or planned screenplay.

It was my first visit since the oil boom transformed it from the ‘Mud Land’ that The Mighty Chalkdust warned Caribbean leaders against referring to Guyana as in 1986, warning those poking fun at the value of its currency and lack of foreign exchange that “All you have is sea water and sand…’

His words came to pass — and those still alive are eating their words.
Guyana dollars, still backed by gold, diamond , bauxite, sugar, rice and rum, is now backed by limitless oil, national earnings and expenses no longer calculated in millions, but billions…
Guyana news today is also no longer only about political, cultural and social wars driven by race, religion and culture.

Instead, headlines are about drilling and extraction, reserves and revenues, new jobs and pay hikes, new Free Zones and IT hubs, 48 new investments approved and billions worth of new contracts signed in 2021, unprecedented infrastructural development, new construction projects, equitable opportunities in economic sectors, women’s empowerment, expanding commercial activity, housing for the homeless, land for to the landless, investments in social needs, poverty reduction and tax-free bonuses for Joint Services and frontline health workers.

After two years in the extraction business, Guyana is now the fastest-growing economy in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the World Bank predicting a 43 per cent growth rate in 2022, the only country to score double-digit figures in CARICOM.

By October 2021, Guyana had already earned US$400 million from oil exports and royalties – and with estimates earnings would triple in 2022.
By the end of 2021, North American, Chinese and European oil interests, led by majors like Exxon, Hess and China’s CNOC, were digging-in deeper into and extracting more wealth from Guyana’s seemingly fathomless oil waters.

The international companies have made discoveries worth 10 billion barrels of oil and gas, GDP growth is almost doubling expectations and the country is preparing to manage revenues projected at US $130 billion over the next two decades.

But Guyana’s changes haven’t yet dawned on the average Caribbean citizen, thanks still to geography and history over time and the artificial separations created by politics of race, religion and culture through centuries of colonial and decades of post-colonial manipulation, imperial influence and external intervention.

Landing at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport (CJIA) was nothing like my first arrivals at the Timehri Airport of yesteryear. The inaugural InterCaribbean flight from Barbados that day [was] welcomed by Guyanese tourism, government and airline officials.

As a chronic chronicler of Caribbean events with permanent interest(s) in Guyana, I’ve always tried to show the world just how much it is (at the very same time) ‘very much the same as’ and ‘very different from’ CARICOM’s island-nations.

My week there (December 17-23), between wheelchair and walking stick, didn’t disallow me from following the major political and economic, cultural and social developments in the new national dispensation — and how Guyanese are again looking up and thinking positively about the future.

I learned much in those seven last days before Christmas 2021 that I’ll chronicle and share here, about what I saw and heard, there and everywhere.