BILLIONS SPENT, FLOODING STILL A PROBLEM

BILLIONS SPENT, DRAINS STILL BROKEN: THE NDIA ACCOUNTABILITY CRISIS.

592 Guardian Editorial Board♦ GUYANA’S WATCHDOG

When floodwaters swallow Guyanese communities, the government’s answer is always the same: blame the rain. But the Auditor General’s latest report on the National Drainage and Irrigation Authority has demolished that alibi — and replaced it with something far more damning.

Between January 2021 and June 2024, NDIA spent G$6.674 billions of public money on asset maintenance. Billion. Not a rounding error. Not a budget line that slipped through the cracks. Six point six seven four billion dollars. And yet, when auditors arrived, they found no structured maintenance system, no comprehensive planning framework, and no reliable way to verify nearly half of the sampled expenditure. The money went somewhere. The accountability did not follow it. 

A LEADERSHIP VACUUM AT THE TOP 

You cannot run a national infrastructure authority without leaders. NDIA tried. For every year from 2021 to 2024, the Authority carried more than 30 vacancies — not junior vacancies, but the kind that determine whether an institution functions at all. The CEO post was vacant. The Deputy CEO post was vacant. The Manager of Operations and Maintenance — the person whose entire job is to ensure drainage systems are kept — was not there. Mechanical Engineers, Engineering Technicians, an Internal Auditor: all absent. By September 2024, those posts remained unfilled.

This is not a staffing inconvenience. This is the deliberate underpowering of a public institution. When no one is accountable for maintenance, maintenance does not happen in any systematic way. When no one is accountable for auditing internal processes, public money moves without scrutiny. The flooding is not a natural disaster. It is the foreseeable consequence of a hollow agency.

G$1.188 BILLION: UNVERIFIED AND UNEXPLAINED 

The audit selected 99 assets valued at G$2.314 billion for review. NDIA could produce vouchers for G$1.126 billion of that figure. The remaining G$1.188 billion — 51 percent of the sample — could not be verified. There were no supporting documents. No paper trail. No accountability.

In any serious governance environment, that finding alone would trigger an investigation. In Guyana’s oil-boom economy, where the government routinely touts its capacity for “transformational” infrastructure spending, it should provoke public outrage. Instead, it sits in an audit report, clinical and numbered, waiting for a press cycle that may never come. 

Equally revealing: NDIA’s budget documents did not explain how maintenance needs were calculated. There was no methodology. Financial reports were too vague to show which category of maintenance received what allocation. The Authority could not produce its asset management policy. It could not support claims about a multi-year strategic plan. There was no training needs assessment. No training plan. The institution responsible for keeping Guyana’s drainage infrastructure functioning had, in practice, no functioning institutional memory.

AN ASSET REGISTER THAT REGISTERS NOTHING

NDIA maintains — or claims to maintain — a register of over 500 assets. The audit found that register to be, in essential respects, useless. Asset locations were missing. Serial numbers were absent. Identification numbers were not recorded. Transfer records did not exist. Proof of ownership for most of those 500-plus assets was not provided. And auditors found 10 pieces of heavy-duty equipment, motor vehicles, and cycles in the field that did not appear in the register at all. 

Equipment that exists but is unrecorded can be used without authorization, transferred without documentation, or simply disappear. That is not an administrative technicality. It is the architecture of unaccountability.

                                                                                                                 THE COST OF LOOKING AWAY

The government has, in recent years, spoken extensively about Guyana’s infrastructure transformation. It has pointed to spending numbers as proof of commitment. But the NDIA audit exposes the gap between money appropriated and systems built. Spending is not governance. Disbursement is not delivery. A billion-dollar line item in a budget means nothing if the institution spending it lacks the staff, the records, the plans, and the oversight to ensure that money produces results.

Guyanese communities that flooded in 2021 flooded again in 2022. And 2023. And 2024. The weather did not fail them. An institution did. And that institution was given billions of dollars and left, year after year, to operate without the basic administrative scaffolding that any competent government would demand.

The rain will come again. The question is whether anyone in authority will answer for what happens when it does.

The 592 Guardian is an independent Guyanese publication committed to accountability journalism.