Dear Editor,
Lincoln Lewis asks a serious question — who is building, and for whom? — but answers it from a premise that is itself historically incomplete, and in places, dangerously so.
Mr. Lewis opens by identifying himself and his constituency as “the rightful heirs of this soil.” One must pause here. Before any PPP government, before any PNC administration, before the 1966 flag was raised, this soil had heirs. The Lokono, the Wapichan, the Macushi, the Pemon, the Wai Wai — they held this land across centuries that predate Lincoln Lewis, Bharrat Jagdeo, Forbes Burnham, and Cheddi Jagan combined. If we are going to invoke the language of sovereign ownership and rightful inheritance, the conversation cannot begin in 1966, or 1992, or 2020. It must begin before 1763. Mr. Lewis’s letter, to its discredit, contains no such acknowledgment.
This matters not merely as a point of historical courtesy. It matters because it exposes the internal contradiction at the heart of his argument. Mr. Lewis is concerned — legitimately — about unplanned migration altering the demographic character of Guyana and about land being allocated without transparency. These are valid governance concerns. But the population that has faced precisely this fate — dispossession of land, erasure of demographic presence, governance without consent — has been Indigenous Guyanese, for over three centuries. If Mr. Lewis is now discovering the language of land sovereignty and demographic protection, one hopes he will apply it consistently, not selectively.
Now let us turn to history nearer in time.
Mr. Lewis is a veteran activist associated with the labour movement and the broader political tradition that includes the People’s National Congress. He is therefore the inheritor of a period that must be named plainly: the Burnham years, 1964 to 1985, and their aftermath under Desmond Hoyte. This was not merely an era of “governance challenges.” It was twenty-eight years of economic destruction so thorough that Guyana became, by the mid-1980s, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. The cooperative socialism of that era nationalised industries and then ran them into the ground. The bauxite industry was wrecked. Rice and sugar were mismanaged into decline. Capital fled. The professional class emigrated in waves that permanently reshaped the Guyanese diaspora in North America and the Caribbean. The very depopulation that constrains Guyana’s labour force today — the structural factor that makes large-scale migration both tempting policy and genuine risk — was seeded in those decades.
If Lincoln Lewis is asking where the coastal land went, and why population projections appear strained against known demographic trends, part of that answer lives in the structural wreckage of the economy he never fully reckonings with in public.
This is not a defence of the PPP or of President Ali’s governance record. The questions Mr. Lewis raises about census reliability, land allocation transparency, and the pace and composition of inward migration deserve rigorous parliamentary scrutiny and independent verification. He is right to demand accountability. An audit of land distribution reviewed at the highest level is not only reasonable — it is necessary. A national population and migration policy with clear criteria, timelines, and legislative grounding is overdue. On these specifics, Mr. Lewis is asking the right questions.
But he is asking them in the wrong register — one that traffics in demographic anxiety without naming it precisely, invokes sovereignty without acknowledging its full history, and positions itself as the voice of a victimised nation without accounting for the decades in which his own political tradition held power and, by many measures, victimised that same nation economically and institutionally.
Guyana in 2026 is at an extraordinary inflection point. The oil revenues are real. The governance gaps are real. The risks of elite capture, unplanned demographic change, and institutional underdevelopment are real. There is serious analytical work to be done — work that requires historical honesty, institutional rigor, and a willingness to hold all actors, across all political traditions, to the same standard of scrutiny.
Lincoln Lewis is a senior voice in Guyanese civil society. He has decades of experience and genuine standing. The question is whether he will bring that standing to bear as a genuinely independent analytical force — one that scrutinises all power, including the power his own tradition has exercised — or whether he will remain a relic of a Cold War-era political alignment that Guyana can no longer afford.
The country is building. The more urgent question is whether its public intellectuals are?