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Hundreds of thousands of Guyana citizens will receive a payout of around 370 pounds each after the country announced it was distributing its “mind boggling” oil wealth.
The money will be available to all citizens of the country that are over the age of eighteen with a valid passport or I.D. card. Guyanese citizens living abroad are eligible but must be in the country to receive the money.
Guyana’s president, Irfaan Ali who announced the move said, “Over the past week, thousands of Guyanese have engaged me and members of my cabinet, providing extremely favourable feedback on the measures announced last Thursday … several persons have indicated to my government the complications they foresee in the implementation of this much-welcomed benefit and the fear of being left out.”
The allocation also addresses the many concerns of young people who may not yet have a family but thought … that they will not benefit from the household allocations because they were not yet the head of the household.”
With a population of 800,000 living in the country and 400,000 living in the diaspora, the current arrangement is expected to result in a huge payout. The country’s economic growth has tripled in size since it started crude oil extraction in late 2019. Its GDP was for many years the lowest in the region. But after a massive oil reserve was discovered off thye country’s Atlantic coast in 2015, it has become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
A Guyanese media analyst and entrepreneur Alex Graham said, If you haven’t lived through what we lived through, you won’t understand what this mind-boggling growth means. While it is true that we still need time for this growth to translate to quality of life, we are starting to see economic growth turned into economic infrastructure, projects and systems that would allow citizens to enjoy an increasingly higher quality of life.”
Richard Rambarran, a prominent economist and executive of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry, described the cash grant as “broadly” good for Guyana, notwithstanding concerns about the potential knock-on effect on inflation.
However, Ganesh Mahipaul, an MP with Guyana’s opposition coalition party, APNU+AFC, said the payment should be the first of many, in order to fairly share the 47 billion pounds windfall in oil revenue that the government announced in 2022.
