Beyond Polite Suggestions

THE 592 GUARDIAN

EDITORIAL  |  JUNE, 2026

Beyond Polite Suggestions: Guyana Needs Open Data by Law, Not by Goodwill

A recent commentary on inter-agency coordination identifies the right problem — and then systematically avoids the solution. We will not be so cautious.

A letter published recently in Stabroek News by Emille Giddings offers a thoughtful — and carefully circumscribed — meditation on Guyana’s crisis of institutional information-sharing. The author frames his concern in the language of administrative philosophy: silos, coordination culture, the tension between information as a public good and information as a political instrument. He asks the right questions. He arrives at no demands. We understand why. We do not share his constraints.

Let us state plainly what the letter gestures toward but does not reach: Guyana has no enforceable legal framework requiring its public agencies to produce, validate, and share data with the public. None.

The coordination failures the author describes are not accidents of organisational culture. They are the predictable output of a system in which agencies are rewarded for secrecy and penalised for nothing when they withhold. Until we fix that structural reality, no amount of appeals to cooperation will change anything.

The Problem Is Not Culture. It Is Architecture.

Giddings writes that the failure to share data is “sometimes out of pride, sometimes rivalry, sometimes caution.” That observation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The more precise explanation is that Guyana has never legislated open data as a civic right. There is no Freedom of Information Act with teeth. There is no statutory mandate for machine-readable datasets from public agencies on a regular publication schedule. There is no enforcement mechanism, no independent oversight body, no penalty structure for non-disclosure.

In the absence of those structures, the default condition is opacity, and opacity serves those in power. That is not an accident; it is a design. When ministers can choose which figures to release and when, when procurement data is not public by default, when audit findings take years to surface — that is not a coordination problem. That is a governance problem, and it will not be resolved by encouraging agencies to be more collegial with one another.

The author’s example of an energy planner needing data from housing, customs, transport and income agencies to forecast demand is entirely correct. What he stops short of saying is that in a properly governed democracy, most of that data would already be publicly available on a government data portal, downloadable, structured and regularly updated. The planner would not need to make requests across institutional boundaries. The data would be there, because the law would require it to be.

Open Data Is Not a Technical Project. It Is a Transparency Obligation.

The 592 Guardian has long argued for a national open data architecture — not because it will make planners more efficient, though it will — but because public data produced by public agencies using public money belongs to the public. Full stop. The government of Guyana spends billions of dollars every year. The Guyanese citizenry, the academic community, independent journalists, civil society organisations, and ordinary residents have an unconditional right to the data that describes how that money moves and what it produces.

What would this look like in practice? It means a statutory Open Data Act, with a clear schedule of datasets that every public agency must publish in machine-readable formats on a public-facing portal — procurement records, budget execution reports, environmental compliance filings, infrastructure project progress data, land titling, licensing approvals, revenue collection figures and more. It means regular, automated publication — not annual tabling in a Parliament that rarely sits. It means an independent regulator with the authority to compel disclosure and impose sanctions for non-compliance.

None of this is radical. It is standard democratic governance in 2026. What is radical — what should be treated as a scandal — is that Guyana is awash in oil revenues and still does not have a functioning open government data infrastructure.

The Data Protection Commission: An Irony Worth Naming

The letter’s author is himself the brother of Aneal Giddings, who is — or until recently was — the sole staff member of Guyana’s Data Protection Commission. We raise this not to impugn the letter writer, whose observations stand or fall on their merits, but because it illustrates precisely the institutional dysfunction his letter describes.

Guyana’s Data Protection Commission, established under legislation, has operated for its entire existence as a one-person office. One officer. One person charged with overseeing data protection across the entire public and private sectors of a country undergoing one of the most rapid economic transformations in the hemisphere. The Commission has not been resourced. It has not been empowered. It has been, in effect, a statutory obligation fulfilled on paper and ignored in practice.

Aneal Giddings is now, by all available evidence, no longer in Guyana. He appears to have emigrated — while simultaneously serving as the only staff member of a statutory body and as a witness in the elections fraud trial. The Commission’s mandate sits in legislative limbo. No one has been appointed to replace him. No statement has been issued by the Minister responsible. Parliament has asked no questions. The press has largely moved on.

This is the ecosystem Emille Giddings is asking to coordinate more effectively. It is a reasonable ask. It is also, given the above, a somewhat optimistic one.

What Needs to Happen

The 592 Guardian calls for the following, specifically and without qualification:

→First, the immediate tabling of an Open Data Bill in the National Assembly, establishing a legal right of public access to government datasets, a mandatory publication schedule for covered agencies, and an independent enforcement mechanism with real powers of sanction.

→Second, the immediate reconstitution of the Data Protection Commission with adequate staffing, a published budget, and a board that includes civil society representation — not as a patronage exercise, but as a governance requirement.

→Third, the immediate launch of a public-facing national data portal, centrally maintained, with structured machine-readable datasets from the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Guyana Revenue Authority, the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board, and the major state-owned enterprises. This portal should be updated on a rolling basis, not annually.

→Fourth, a statutory requirement that all future contracts for infrastructure and extractive industry projects above a defined threshold include data transparency clauses — requiring contractors and the relevant agencies to report progress metrics and financial disbursements to the public portal on a quarterly basis.

None of these proposals require new technology. They require political will. They require a government that genuinely believes the public has a right to know what is being done in its name, with its resources, on its land.

The Silence That Costs Us

Giddings ends his letter with a series of rhetorical questions — do we want planning systems that depend on improvisation, do we believe Guyana can build institutions that think across boundaries, do enough of us believe in a Guyana that can become more coherent and serious? These are good questions. They deserve an honest answer.

The answer is that we will not get there through appeals to better coordination culture. We will get there when the law requires transparency, when institutions are penalised for secrecy, when citizens can access the data that is rightfully theirs without submitting requests that go unanswered, without relying on leaks, without needing to know someone who knows someone inside the agency.

The author was careful. He had reasons to be. We have no such reasons.

Guyana’s information architecture is broken. It is broken by design and sustained by convenience. The answer is not better collegial habits among agencies. The answer is open data by law, transparently administered, publicly accessible, and enforceable. Anything less is a conversation about the symptoms while the disease continues to spread.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board