Access & Excellence

The merit principle has enormous intuitive appeal. Allocate resources to those best positioned to use them productively. Reward talent, effort, and demonstrated capacity. Build an economy on the bedrock of competence rather than connection. In a country seeking to professionalize its institutions and diversify beyond petroleum, the case for meritocracy is not merely theoretical — it is an operational imperative.

Yet the merit principle contains a structural blind spot that its advocates too rarely acknowledge. Meritocracy measures outcomes — examination scores, business plans, technical credentials — without accounting for the conditions that produced those outcomes. A child educated in Georgetown's better secondary schools arrives at the starting line of any merit-based competition with advantages that have nothing to do with innate ability and everything to do with geography, family resources, and historical accumulation. An Inter-American Development Bank report from November 2024 reveals that over 58% in poverty — with more than 30% in extreme poverty — and that this poverty is disproportionately concentrated in rural and hinterland areas.

Consider an analogy from mathematics. In a well-posed optimization problem, you must specify both the objective function and the constraint set. Merit defines the objective — maximize productivity, reward excellence — but says nothing about the constraints under which individuals compete. When the constraint sets are radically different for different populations, optimizing the objective function alone produces results that are efficient in a narrow sense but unjust in a deeper one. You have found the optimum of the wrong problem.

If pure merit is insufficient, does it follow that ethnicity should serve as a corrective variable? Guyana's own history provides the most devastating rebuttal.

Ethnic patronage — the allocation of state resources along communal lines — has been the defining pathology of Guyanese political economy since the 1960s. Under successive administrations, the logic was always the same: our people were excluded before; now it is our turn. The result, across decades and across the ethnic divide, has been identical: institutional decay, capital flight, brain drain, and the deepening of precisely the communal divisions that patronage was meant to address. A 2011 World Bank report noted that Guyana had the world's highest migration rate of tertiary-educated persons at a staggering 89%.

The mechanism is well understood by political economists. When ethnicity becomes the primary criterion for economic allocation, every policy question is refracted through a zero-sum communal lens. Infrastructure spending, contract awards, land distribution, public sector hiring — all become battlegrounds not for efficiency or need but for ethnic share. The state ceases to function as a developmental instrument and becomes a prize to be captured.

An ethnic lens is simultaneously too broad and too narrow: too broad because it aggregates the wealthy and the destitute under a single identity marker, too narrow because it excludes those whose disadvantage does not map onto the dominant communal narrative.

There is a third way, and it begins with a reframing. The question is not "merit or ethnicity?" but rather: "How do we build systems in which merit can function justly?"

In my work as a mathematics educator, I have spent decades wrestling with a version of this problem. The students who arrive at Medgar Evers College come from communities that have been systematically underserved by the educational system. They are not less capable — they are less prepared, which is a fundamentally different diagnosis that demands a fundamentally different intervention.

Translated into economic policy, the access and excellence framework generates five specific prescriptions. Explore each one below.

There is a theorem in the political economy of development that Guyana's leaders would do well to internalize: ethnicity becomes less salient as a political variable when citizens have genuine economic agency. People who can feed their families, educate their children, and see a plausible path to prosperity do not need ethnic champions to negotiate with the state on their behalf. Research on ethnic conflict in India has shown a strong negative correlation between economic growth and the incidence of riots.

Breaking this cycle requires not ethnic balancing but the construction of impersonal, transparent, rules-based institutions through which any citizen can pursue economic opportunity. This is hard. It is much harder than drawing up ethnic allocation formulae or convening communal consultations. It requires sustained investment in human capital, institutional capacity, and the slow, unglamorous work of building systems that function the same way regardless of who occupies the office of the president.