A Government That Cannot Learn

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INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL | GOVERNANCE & ACCOUNTABILITY

A Government That Cannot Learn

From EMBRAPA to UPI: How the Ali Administration’s pattern of politically convenient decisions over nationally optimal ones has become the defining feature of Guyanese governance — and why the cost is compounding.

By The 592 Guardian Editorial Board   |   June 2026   |   The 592 Guardian 

On a Tuesday morning in Georgetown, officials from Guyana, Brazil, and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture gathered in the Ministry of Agriculture’s boardroom to sign a Letter of Intent establishing the EMBRAPA Science, Technologies and Innovation Hub. On its face, it was one of the more prudent decisions this government has made. Brazil’s EMBRAPA is, by any credible metric, among the world’s foremost agricultural research institutions — a body that transformed a country once dependent on food imports into a global agricultural superpower within a single generation. Bringing its expertise to bear on Guyana’s tropical agriculture challenges, and anchoring a regional food security framework through it, is exactly the kind of strategic thinking that development economists would endorse.

Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha called it a game changer. He was not wrong.

But here is what the press conference did not address, and what the celebratory photographs obscured: at the very moment the Ali administration was publicly recognizing Brazil as an indispensable partner — close enough to anchor Guyana’s agricultural future, trusted enough to house a regional center of excellence on our soil — that same administration had already chosen to bypass Brazil entirely on a decision of equal or greater economic consequence.

When Guyana was ready to modernize its digital payments infrastructure, it did not look south to Brazil, whose PIX instant payment system had been live since November 2020 and had become one of the most successfully adopted financial technology platforms on earth. It looked east — all the way to India — and adopted the Unified Payments Interface instead.

One bad decision is an error. The same structural logic repeated across energy, infrastructure, procurement, and now digital finance is a governance philosophy.

That pivot, sitting directly alongside the EMBRAPA signing in the same news cycle, is not merely ironic. It is diagnostic. It tells us something precise and damning about how decisions are made in this administration — not through rigorous comparative analysis, not through a framework that consistently privileges national interest, but through a filter that sometimes, inexplicably, subordinates the obvious choice to something else entirely.

And once you see that filter at work, you cannot unsee it. Because the UPI-over-PIX decision is not an anomaly. It is the latest entry in a ledger that has been accumulating for years.

THE CASE THAT WAS NEVER MADE

Let us be precise about what was at stake in the digital payments’ decision, because the magnitude of the missed opportunity demands specificity.

Guyana and Brazil conduct over one billion dollars in bilateral trade annually. That relationship is not theoretical — it is embedded in the movement of goods, vehicles, building materials, agricultural products, and energy inputs across a shared land border. It is the economic lifeblood of Region Nine and has significant downstream effects across the country’s logistics and supply chain infrastructure.

A Guyanese digital payments system integrated with Brazil’s PIX architecture would have done something that UPI structurally cannot: it would have created the conditions for GYD-BRL convertibility at scale, reducing dollar dependency in cross-border trade, lowering friction costs for businesses and farmers operating in the bilateral corridor, and potentially seeding a broader CARICOM-anchored South American payments framework. The economic logic writes itself. More than a billion dollars in annual trade provides the liquidity base that makes currency integration viable. PIX had the infrastructure. The relationship had the volume. The geography made it obvious.

India’s UPI is an impressive platform. But Guyana does not share a land border with India. Guyana does not conduct a billion dollars in annual trade with India. The rupee has no meaningful role in Guyanese commerce, which means the dollar displacement argument — the most compelling case for any payments modernization effort — simply does not apply. What Guyana adopted was prestige technology untethered from the economic relationships that would have given it transformative value.

THE PIX CASE IN THREE LINES

Brazil: shared land border, $1B+ annual trade, PIX live since 2020, GYD-BRL corridor viable, CARICOM integration possible. India: no shared border, negligible bilateral trade, rupee irrelevant to Guyanese commerce. The comparative analysis was never published. We suspect it was never conducted.

The question that has not been answered — that no minister has been asked to answer in any public forum — is simple: was a comparative feasibility assessment conducted? Was PIX evaluated against UPI on criteria of trade volume, currency utility, geographic logic, and integration potential? If it was, where is the document? If it was not, on what basis was the decision made?

The silence is its own answer. And it rhymes with silences we have heard before.

THE LEDGER: WHEN PATTERN BECOMES POLICY

The PIX-UPI decision did not emerge from a vacuum. It emerged from an administrative culture in which consequential choices are made without published criteria, without independent review, and — critically — without consequences when the outcomes prove damaging. That culture has a documented history.

Consider the GPL-InterEnergy sole-sourced power contract. The Guyana Power and Light entered into a major energy supply arrangement through a process that bypassed competitive procurement entirely. No public tender. No comparative bid evaluation. No independent assessment of whether the terms secured reflected market value. The contract was presented as a solution; the process that produced it was presented as irrelevant. When the 592 Guardian and others pressed for justification, the administration retreated behind the language of urgency and operational necessity — the universal solvent that this government applies to dissolve procurement obligations whenever they become inconvenient.

The Karpowership episode compounded the pattern. Guyana’s engagement with the Turkish power ship company, Karadeniz, became a masterclass in contractual opacity. A country navigating an unprecedented oil windfall, with the resources to make long-term, asset-owning energy infrastructure investments, was instead negotiating short-term floating power arrangements whose terms were shielded from public scrutiny. The national interest calculus — what Guyana would own, what it would pay per kilowatt over the contract life, what exit provisions existed — was never transparently presented. The administration announced; it did not justify.

A country with Guyana’s resource windfall should not be making energy decisions in the dark. But darkness has become this government’s preferred procurement environment.

The National Drainage and Irrigation Authority audits told a different story of the same failure mode. Year after year, Guyana’s chronic flooding crisis — which displaces families, destroys crops, and disproportionately punishes the country’s most economically vulnerable communities — was attributed in part to infrastructure deficiencies within NDIA’s mandate. Year after year, audit findings documented financial irregularities, project delivery failures, and procurement anomalies within the agency. And year after year, those findings produced no meaningful accountability. No senior official faced consequence. No systemic reform was announced. The flooding returned. The audits continued. The ledger grew.

The G-Mining and Reunion Gold asset transaction exposed yet another dimension of the governance failure: not merely the absence of accountability after the fact, but the absence of protective mechanisms before it. When significant mining assets changed hands in a transaction that should have triggered scrutiny of transfer pricing, capital gains capture, and equity participation rights for the Guyanese state, the administration watched it happen without deploying the fiscal tools that resource nationalism — a doctrine this government invokes enthusiastically in its rhetoric — would demand in practice. Guyana captured none of the windfall. The foreign principals captured all of it. The government called it investment.

The Puruni River Bridge project illustrated how the failure mode extends to public infrastructure investment itself. A bridge project whose routing and specifications appeared to serve the operational interests of a foreign mining concern over the connectivity needs of the communities it ostensibly served raised fundamental questions about who public capital is actually working for in this administration. The questions were raised. They were not answered.

And then there is the Cabinet outreach program — a touring, government-funded engagement exercise conducted in the electoral calendar’s shadow, using state resources, ministerial presence, and public funds to perform constituency work that the boundaries between government and party should prohibit. It was campaigning dressed in the language of service delivery. When pressed, the administration insisted on the distinction between the two. The calendars told a different story.

THE ANATOMY OF IMPUNITY

What connects these cases is not complexity. Each individual decision, examined in isolation, can be given a narrative — urgency here, development imperative there, bilateral relationship management somewhere else. The administration is practiced at the individual justification. What it cannot justify is the aggregate.

Because when you lay the GPL contract alongside the NDIA audits alongside the Karpowership opacity alongside the G-Mining windfall failure alongside the Puruni routing alongside the UPI pivot, a structural portrait emerges that no individual explanation can account for. The portrait is of an administration that has identified, correctly, that Guyana’s oversight architecture lacks the teeth to impose real costs on consequential decisions made badly.

The Auditor General reports. Parliament debates. Civil society criticizes. The press — what remains of independent press in this country — investigates. And then nothing happens. No minister resigns. No contract is voided. No procurement officer faces sanction. No policy framework is revised. The administration absorbs the criticism, waits for the news cycle to move, and proceeds to the next decision with its risk calculus entirely unchanged.

This is not incompetence in the ordinary sense. Incompetence implies the absence of capacity. What Guyana has is the presence of a system — informal, durable, and rational from the perspective of those who benefit from it — in which the cost of a bad decision is borne by the public and the benefit of the same decision accrues to the network of relationships that the decision was designed to serve.

The administration has not failed to learn from its mistakes. It has learned precisely the right lesson: that in the absence of real consequences, the optimal strategy is to keep deciding.

That is why the UPI-over-PIX decision is not a puzzle. Once you understand the operating logic, it resolves completely. PIX would have been the correct technical choice. But the UPI decision served different imperatives — cultural alignment, diaspora politics, a preference for relationships that track ethnicity rather than economic geography. Whether those imperatives were explicit or atmospheric, conscious or reflexive, the outcome is the same: national interest, measured in trade corridor utility and currency integration potential, was subordinated to something smaller.

And no one will be asked to explain why.

BACK TO THE BOARDROOM

Let us return, then, to that signing ceremony. To the photographs of ministers and officials gathered in the Ministry of Agriculture’s boardroom, to the celebratory language about game changers and regional powerhouses, to the genuine value of the EMBRAPA partnership and what it could mean for Caribbean food security if executed with the seriousness the occasion demands.

We do not dispute the value of the initiative. We note, rather, what the initiative inadvertently demonstrates:that this administration is perfectly capable of recognizing Brazil as a partner of consequence. It knows what EMBRAPA is. It understands what the bilateral relationship represents. It can, when it chooses to, make the obvious call.

Which is precisely why the UPI decision is unforgivable. Because it was not made in ignorance of Brazil. It was made in full awareness of a relationship that this government publicly celebrates — and then, when a different sector required an analogous decision, chose to ignore.

The EMBRAPA signing is not evidence of a government finding its footing. It is evidence of a government that knows what good decisions look like, makes them selectively, and faces no pressure to explain why the selection criterion is something other than the national interest.

The 592 Guardian will continue to name the decisions that do not survive comparative scrutiny. We will continue to place them beside one another until the pattern is too legible to dismiss. And we will continue to ask the questions that the administration’s preferred interlocutors do not ask: not what was decided, but how, by whom, for whose benefit, and — most damningly of all — why no one has yet been required to answer for what was left on the table.

Guyana is not a poor country anymore. It does not have the luxury of excusing governance failure as the product of limited capacity.

It has the resources to do better. What it lacks, still, is a government that believes it must.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet focused on Guyanese governance, transparency, and public interest reporting.