A Bill for Themselves

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦EDITORIAL

A Bill for Themselves

How Guyana’s Political Class Is Cashing Out on Oil Wealth — and What Parliament Must Do About It

Veteran trade unionist Lincoln Lewis did not mince words. In a letter to the editor published this week, Lewis observed what many Guyanese already feel but rarely see stated so plainly: politics in this country increasingly resembles a lifetime investment plan. While workers battle rising costs, stagnant wages, and crumbling public services, Parliament is being asked to restore — and expand — a buffet of unlimited perks for former presidents. Lewis was right to raise the alarm. This editorial takes his intervention as its starting point and goes further.

The Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill is not a pension measure. It is not a matter of dignified retirement. It is, stripped of its institutional language, a wealth transfer — from the Guyanese public to a small class of individuals who have already benefited enormously from the offices they held. In a country seven years into one of the largest oil booms in the Western Hemisphere, this bill reveals, with unusual clarity, exactly who this government believes the state is for.

I. What the Bill Actually Proposes

Lewis is careful to note — and this editorial agrees — that reasonable retirement benefits for former heads of state are legitimate. The issue is not pension. The issue is the specific catalogue of entitlements this bill would codify at public expense, indefinitely and without accountability.

Each item, taken individually, might be argued on its merits. Taken together, they constitute a publicly funded lifestyle guarantee for a tiny political class — unlimited in duration, uncapped in cost, and insulated from any form of public oversight. There is no sunset clause. There is no means test. There is no accountability mechanism. There is only the entitlement itself, permanently inscribed in law.

This is not institutional dignity. This is institutional self-dealing.

II.Seven Years of Oil — and This Is the Priority

Guyana struck first oil in commercial quantities in December 2019. In the years since, the country has become one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. Offshore oil revenues have transformed the government’s fiscal position. The Natural Resource Fund has received billions. GDP has surged. The projections are extraordinary.

And yet. Seven years into the oil era, too many Guyanese still cannot afford the basic necessities of a dignified life. The power cuts continue. The roads in hinterland regions remain impassable. Public hospitals operate under chronic resource constraints. Teachers and nurses earn wages that have not kept pace with the inflation that oil-linked construction booms have seeded into the cost of living. The Demerara Harbour Bridge replacement — a project of fundamental national infrastructure — has lurched through procurement delays and cost escalations that have never been satisfactorily explained.

The question this bill forces upon the public is not whether former presidents deserve comfort. The question is: when the government decides how to spend, who is always first in line? The answer, across seven years and dozens of procurement decisions, has been consistent. It is not the nurse. It is not the cane worker. It is not the Region 7 community waiting for a functional bridge. It is the political class — and those connected to it.

III. This Bill Does Not Stand Alone

This editorial has documented, across a sustained body of investigative work, a recurring architecture of governance in Guyana under the Ali administration. Individual cases may be dismissed as isolated errors or administrative oversight. Taken together, they constitute a pattern — and patterns do not lie.

The GPL-InterEnergy sole-source contract awarded power supply arrangements without competitive tender, insulating a preferred counterparty from scrutiny. The Karpowership agreement — negotiated in opacity, with contract terms that remain only partially public — committed the Guyanese treasury to a long-term liability whose full cost the public still cannot verify. The NDIA audit failures revealed systematic weaknesses in how infrastructure funds are tracked and reported, failures that benefit those who prefer accountability not to be exercised. The G-Mining and Reunion Gold transactions involved indirect asset transfers that raised serious questions about whether the state’s resource interests were adequately protected. The Puruni bridge routing — with its curious alignment toward certain private landholdings — suggested that even physical infrastructure decisions are not immune to private interest.

Now the Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill. Add to this the Guyana Development Bank Bill — which this outlet has separately examined — with its exclusion of Bank of Guyana oversight, its absence of an independent audit mandate, and its governance structure that creates institutionalized space for patronage. Each individual bill, each individual contract, can be argued in isolation. But the aggregate tells a story that no single item can conceal: a political class systematically using state instruments to secure wealth for itself and its network, dressed in the language of governance, development, and institutional necessity.

IV.Naming the Architecture

What we are describing has a name. It is elite capture — the process by which a small political and economic class colonizes the institutions of the state and redirects their outputs toward private benefit. Elite capture does not announce itself. It does not draft legislation titled ‘A Bill to Enrich the Political Class.’ It drafts legislation that sounds reasonable, that invokes dignity and precedent, that appeals to the language of governance norms. The Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill sounds institutional. It is not. It is the latest mechanism in a long project.

The comparison with other resource-rich democracies is instructive. Botswana, often cited as a model of resource governance on the African continent, has structured its Pula Fund with explicit parliamentary oversight, published audits, and expenditure rules that link state spending to development indicators. Norway’s Government Pension Fund — the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund — operates under a statutory ethical framework that explicitly prohibits the kind of opacity that characterizes Guyana’s procurement environment. Indonesia, following the resource nationalism reforms of the 2000s, built anti-corruption institutional capacity as a deliberate counterweight to the patronage networks that had dominated the Suharto era.

None of these comparisons are perfect. But they share a common element: a deliberate decision that resource wealth belongs to the public, and that institutional design must enforce that principle against the natural gravity of elite capture. Guyana has made no such decision. Instead, it has made the opposite one — repeatedly, systematically, and now with a bill that asks the public to fund, in perpetuity, the comfort of the people who made those choices.

V.What Parliament Must Do

The 592 Guardian calls on Parliament to take the following actions, without delay and without equivocation:

1.Reject the Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill in its current form. No unlimited entitlements. No open-ended public liability. No perks package that cannot be audited and capped.

2.If retirement provisions for former heads of state are to be considered, bring a revised bill that specifies fixed ceilings on every category of expenditure, a review mechanism tied to national development benchmarks, and full transparency of cost to the public.

3.Commission an independent audit of all sole-source procurements awarded since January 2020, with findings tabled in Parliament and published in full within ninety days.

4.Amend the Guyana Development Bank Bill to restore Bank of Guyana oversight authority and mandate an independent external audit function before the institution is operationalised.

5.Establish a parliamentary select committee with cross-party composition and a public reporting mandate to review all contracts — energy, infrastructure, extractives — where competitive tender was waived.

6.Publish, in full and without redaction, the complete contractual terms of the Karpowership agreement and all GPL third-party power supply arrangements, so that the Guyanese public can assess what liabilities have been incurred in their name.

VI.The Bill Is the Message

Lincoln Lewis ended his letter with a moral observation, not a legal one. He was right to do so. The Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill is not primarily a budgetary matter, though it has budgetary implications. It is not primarily a constitutional matter, though constitutional questions surround it. It is, at its core, a statement about what this government believes the state exists to do — and who it believes the state exists to serve.

When oil revenues flow and the question is how to spend them, the answer this bill provides is: on us. On the people who already had power. On the class that already benefited from holding office. On the network that is already comfortable, and that would like to be comfortable forever, at public expense, without limit, without audit, without shame.

The Guyanese people deserve better than this. They deserve a state that invests oil wealth in nurses and roads and schools and bridges — in the infrastructure of a dignified life for ordinary citizens, not the infrastructure of permanent comfort for an extraordinary few. They deserve Parliament to look at this bill and call it what it is.

Lincoln Lewis called it greed dressed up as governance. He was right. This editorial stands with him — and demands that Parliament stand with the people.

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Accountability Journalism for Guyana