A Strategy, Finally — Two Decades and Hundreds of Billions Too Late

THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL  |  June, 2026

A Strategy, Finally — Two Decades and Hundreds of Billions Too Late

Minister Zulfikar Mustapha calls the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority’s first published strategy a historic milestone. The more urgent history is the one nobody explained at the soft launch: how an apex agency entrusted with tens of billions of dollars a year operated for two decades without a governing document — and why the man now welcoming this strategy as NDIA chairman is the same official an earlier audit found had personally breached procurement law.

At Thursday’s soft launch, Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha presented the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority’s first-ever published strategy as a watershed moment — the document through which Guyana would finally chart a path toward resilient, productive, and prosperous water management. NDIA Chairman Lionel Wordsworth called it an important roadmap for phased implementation.

 NDIA was established under the Drainage and Irrigation Act as the country’s apex authority for drainage, irrigation, and flood control more than two decades ago. For all but the final weeks of that history, it has operated, by its own minister’s admission, without a strategy.

The money that moved through that strategic vacuum was not modest. The 2023 national budget allocated $19.7 billion for drainage and irrigation works; NDIA’s capital allocation alone for pump stations, structures, and retention payments was budgeted at $6.3 billion that year, yet actual spending reached $15.3 billion — more than double the approved figure, with no published strategy to explain the overrun. In 2024, $72.3 billion of a $97.6 billion agriculture budget was directed to drainage and irrigation. In 2025, Senior Minister Dr. Ashni Singh announced a further $73.2 billion injection to complete pump stations and advance canal works.

Multiply those figures across the years NDIA has existed, and the sums entrusted to an agency operating without a published strategy run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. Against what plan were those budgets built? Against what targets were they measured?

Those are not rhetorical questions. They are the questions the Auditor General’s own office was effectively forced to ask.                     A performance audit of NDIA’s asset management, covering January 2021 to June 2024 and tabled only weeks ago, found widespread weaknesses: poor documentation, unfilled key positions, inadequate maintenance systems, and a lack of accountability for billions of dollars in public property.

The audit was triggered by NDIA’s own escalating maintenance expenditure, which rose from $1.07 billion in 2021 to $2.46 billion in 2023, and by persistent public complaints about flooding despite that spending. The total bill to maintain more than 500 pieces of NDIA equipment over the period came to $6.67 billion. Twenty-two recommendations followed. Notably absent from that list: write a strategy — because, apparently, no one in the chain of oversight thought to ask why one did not already exist.

Even that audit has been publicly challenged as insufficient. A critique published in response to the Auditor General’s findings argued that the report measured compliance, not performance: it could not tell taxpayers how many kilometers of canals were maintained, how many structures were rehabilitated, how many acres were protected from flooding, or what NDIA actually achieved with the billions it spent.

If neither the agency nor the body auditing it can answer that question, what exactly is the new strategy being launched to fix — and how would the public ever know if it worked?

The most damning fact in this story is not a figure. It is a name. Lionel Wordsworth, the NDIA chairman who stood at Thursday’s launch describing the strategy as an important roadmap, is the same Lionel Wordsworth who served as NDIA’s chief executive in 2012, when an internal audit of fuel consumption and equipment maintenance found that fraudulent acts had been committed in breach of the Procurement Act 2003 and recommended his immediate dismissal. That audit found undated, unstamped contractor quotations indicating deliberate concealment, and a senior engineer who certified payments to his own uncle without declaring the conflict. President Donald Ramotar sat on the findings for months without acting.                                                                                                                          When the coalition government took office in 2015, Wordsworth was placed on 308 days of accumulated leave and never returned to the post. In 2020 he resurfaced as a ministerial advisor to Minister Mustapha. He is now NDIA’s chairman — the man entrusted with welcoming a strategy meant to close the very governance gaps an earlier audit found him personally responsible for opening.

 None of this is new to NDIA’s file. As far back as 2013, opposition parliamentarians flagged the Auditor General’s recommendation that NDIA operate its own independent accounting body rather than have its funds run through the central ministry — a structural safeguard against precisely the undocumented, unaccountable spending the 2025 performance audit found all over again. That recommendation went unimplemented through a coalition government and is apparently still unimplemented under this one.

The pattern is not partisan. It is institutional, and it has now spanned three administrations without correction.

A strategy document, however well produced, does not retroactively account for two decades of spending without one.

The 592 Guardian calls on the Public Accounts Committee and the National Assembly to require NDIA to publish, alongside this strategy, a full reconciliation of capital and maintenance expenditure against measurable deliverables for every year since the authority’s establishment — and to explain, publicly and specifically, the continued tenure of a chairman an audit once found to have personally breached the Procurement Act.                                  Until those answers are on the record, Thursday’s soft launch was not a milestone. It was an admission, twenty years late, dressed up as one.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board