Archive for category: Accountability

 Two Nominees, Two Other Jobs

OPINION BY : Staff Writer– August 2026

The President’s picks for the Judicial Service Commission and the Public Service Commission each already hold a second post close enough to the first to demand an answer before confirmation, not after.

T wo of the President’s nominees to Guyana’s constitutional commissions arrive already carrying another job — and in both cases, the second job sits close enough to the first to raise the kind of question that ought to be answered before either appointment is finalised, not after.

Retired Justice Carl Singh has been proposed for reappointment to the Judicial Service Commission, the body that expired on July 13 and that the President is now moving to reconstitute under Article 198(2). Singh is a natural pick on paper — a former Chancellor of the Judiciary, credentialed and well known to the institution.

“He is also, at this moment, the sitting Chairman of the Constitutional Reform Commission, appointed to that post by President Ali and sworn in alongside seventeen other commissioners in April 2024.”

The overlap is not cosmetic. The JSC’s own composition is built around the Chancellorship: by constitutional design, the Chancellor chairs the Commission, the Chief Justice sits on it, and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission sits on it as well.

A retired Chancellor joining that body is not an outsider being added to an unrelated panel — he is stepping into the specific institutional lineage the JSC was built to run through. That alone might be unremarkable, given Singh’s background. What makes it worth a second look is that Singh simultaneously chairs the body Guyana convened specifically to review and recommend changes to the machinery of constitutional appointments — including, potentially, the very judicial appointment provisions the JSC operates under. One man sitting at the head of both the commission that might reform the rules and the commission that operates under them is not evidence of wrongdoing.

It is, at minimum, a structural question about whether reform recommendations touching judicial appointments can be seen as arriving independently of the people who currently sit inside that system.

The Constitutional Reform Commission has itself struggled for legitimacy on unrelated grounds — the Guyana Human Rights Association called for Singh and the full membership to resign last September, citing the commission’s inertia and the shifted political landscape since its 2024 swearing-in. Singh has publicly acknowledged the commission’s sluggish pace, attributing it to administrative delay rather than institutional design.

Whatever the merits of that defence, it does not touch the separate question raised by his JSC nomination: whether the same person should simultaneously hold the chairmanship of the body reviewing the constitutional order and a seat inside the judicial body that order currently produces.

The second nomination raises a cleaner conflict. Maurice Gajadhar has been proposed for the Public Service Commission, the body responsible under Article 200 for appointments, discipline and removal across Guyana’s public service. Gajadhar is also, and has been since 2020, Chairman of the Board of Guyana Power and Light — a state-owned corporation, and not a small one.

That chairmanship already produced a public conflict-of-interest controversy on Gajadhar’s watch. In 2021, GPL purchased two vehicles from Rudisa Motor Company Guyana Inc., a company for which Gajadhar serves as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Former-Public Infrastructure Minister David Patterson called it plainly: “That is a clear conflict of interest.” GPL’s response at the time did not deny the transaction — it defended the purchase as having gone through a National Competitive Bidding Process, which addresses the procurement mechanics without addressing the more basic problem: a state corporation buying vehicles from a company run by its own board chairman is a conflict irrespective of how the invoice was generated. Gajadhar was still chairing the GPL board as recently as February of this year, when he led a board inspection of the utility’s new National Control Centre.

To be precise about the shape of the concern: the Public Service Commission does not regulate GPL directly. Its Article 200 jurisdiction runs to the public service — the civil service proper — not to the governance of state-owned commercial entities, so this is not a case of Gajadhar being asked to police his own corporation from a new perch. The more grounded question is one of fitness. The PSC exists to safeguard the integrity of appointments and discipline across the public service; it is difficult to square that mandate with elevating a nominee whose own record as a public-corporation chairman includes a documented, publicly contested instance of exactly the kind of self-dealing the Commission is meant to guard against elsewhere in the state.

Neither of these facts, on its own, disqualifies either man. Guyana is a small country with a shallow bench of people credentialed enough to fill these seats, and some overlap between public roles is close to unavoidable. But “unavoidable in general” is not the same as “unexamined in this instance,” and nothing in the correspondence between Minister Teixeira and Opposition Leader Mohamed — nor in the Opposition’s brief, non-committal acknowledgments of the nominees — indicates that either overlap was raised, let alone resolved, before the names went forward.

The Opposition Leader’s responses to date have noted the nominees and their curricula vitae without expressly endorsing or objecting to either. That may still be the right posture while the record is incomplete. But it should not be the final posture.

Before Mohamed’s office signs off on Singh for the JSC or Gajadhar for the PSC, both men’s dual roles deserve a direct question, asked and answered on the record: what happens to the other seat if this one is confirmed. A commission built to guard against exactly this kind of overlap should not be the one asking Guyanese to take it on faith.

— The Board

A Recognition Gap: What the Record Shows About Fisher and Mohamed

OPINION BY: Staff Writer –August 2026

Sometime in early June 2026 — within his first two months as British High Commissioner to Guyana — Joseph Fisher sat for a photograph with a delegation from A Partnership for National Unity. It has the look of a standard early courtesy call: new envoy, opposition party, flags either side, the kind of introduction most incoming high commissioners work through in their first weeks. Around the same period, Fisher was photographed separately with Amanza Walton-Desir, leader of the Forward Guyana Movement, in a one-on-one portrait rather than a group shot.

There is no equivalent photograph, and no documented meeting of any kind, between Fisher and Azruddin Mohamed — or between Fisher and We Invest in Nationhood as a party. This is despite WIN holding sixteen seats in the National Assembly, more than APNU and Forward Guyana combined, and despite Mohamed having held the constitutionally recognised office of Leader of the Opposition since January 2026.

The timing complicates the obvious explanation

The APNU meeting falls in early June — before the Caribbean Court of Justice dismissed Mohamed’s extradition appeal on July 29, and well before his legal team’s mid-August campaign accusing CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson of bias, a campaign the Guyana Chronicle described as a coordinated effort spanning multiple WIN-linked social media platforms.

Whatever explains the absence of a Fisher–Mohamed meeting, it cannot be explained by conduct that had not yet happened. If Fisher’s early courtesy rounds reached the smaller opposition parties within his first eight weeks and did not reach the largest one, that gap predates the events most likely to be cited in its defence.

This does not resolve the question. It narrows it.

The precedent Fisher inherited

Fisher’s predecessor, Jane Miller, did not treat Mohamed’s US indictment as a reason for diplomatic distance. In January 2026, as the government and the Speaker of the National Assembly delayed the swearing-in of an Opposition Leader, Miller told Stabroek News on the record that the election of a Leader of the Opposition should proceed “without delay,” explicitly naming a functioning legislature as the priority — a position she took alongside the US, Canadian and EU missions, all of whom pressed for Mohamed’s confirmation despite his legal position being, by then, already public and unresolved.

Miller went further than neutrality; she used her office’s public voice to support the institutional recognition Mohamed was seeking.

Whatever the current posture reflects, it did not begin as British diplomatic orthodoxy in Guyana. It is, at minimum, a change from the position the previous High Commissioner staked out in writing.

Two explanations, neither proven

There are two honest ways to read the gap, and the record does not yet allow a confident choice between them.

“The first is that something shifted in the UK’s posture independent of Mohamed’s conduct — a judgment call by Fisher, made early and for reasons not publicly stated, to keep the largest opposition party at arm’s length while extending ordinary courtesy to the smaller ones.”

The second is that Mohamed’s own position made him progressively harder to engage — an indicted politician contesting extradition through the courts is a different diplomatic proposition than one merely facing an unresolved case, and a politician whose legal team is publicly attacking the integrity of the region’s highest court is a different proposition again.

On this reading, the calculus may simply have hardened as 2026 went on, even if it was not yet fully formed in June.

The honest difficulty is that the documented timeline fits neither story cleanly. The absence predates the CCJ campaign, which weakens the second explanation as a complete account. But Miller’s precedent shows the indictment alone was not, on the UK’s own recent conduct, treated as disqualifying — which weakens the idea that Mohamed’s legal jeopardy in isolation explains everything either.

Something in between is more likely than either extreme, and this publication is not in a position to assert which.

What this means for the appeals now underway

What can be said without speculation is this: Mohamed has, over recent months, written directly to Fisher on the Region 10 impasse, seeking his intervention with the same posture he has brought to letters addressed to President Ali and to the CCJ Registrar — treating the recipient as a good-faith channel whose engagement can reasonably be expected. The documented record does not support that assumption in Fisher’s case. It shows a High Commissioner who found time for Mohamed’s smaller rivals and, so far as this publication has been able to establish, none for him.

That gap may be snub. It may be consequence. It may be some combination that changed over the course of the year. What it is not, on the evidence available, is a settled diplomatic relationship capable of delivering the intervention Mohamed’s letters ask for.

Continuing to write as though it is one is, at best, an appeal to an audience whose willingness to listen has not been demonstrated — and, at worst, another entry in a pattern this news outlet has now traced across GECOM, Region 10 and the CCJ: letters addressed with confidence to authorities whose capacity or willingness to act on them remains, on the public record, unproven.

The Stopgap That Never Closed the Gap: Guyana’s Solar Billions and the Blackouts That Won’t Stop

OPINION BY : Staff Writer  August 2026 

Solar farms were sold to the public as the fix for Guyana’s power shortfalls. Months and years after commissioning, the shortfalls are still here — and no one in government has published the numbers to explain why.

Guyana’s electricity grid failed again this month. Not in a remote hinterland outpost waiting on infrastructure that has not yet arrived, but in Linden — a town where the government has been promising a 15-megawatt solar solution for years, and where residents are now enduring rolling blackouts while they wait for it to switch on. The Linden Electricity Company confirmed the outages stem from a straightforward supply shortfall: demand has outgrown the 14.5 MW available from Bosai, the solar farms meant to close that gap remain under construction, and the government has been forced back to the negotiating table with the same bauxite company whose limits triggered the crisis in the first place.

This is not an isolated embarrassment. It is the clearest illustration yet of the question APNU parliamentarian Ganesh Mahipaul has now put to the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, the Guyana Energy Agency, and Guyana Power and Light: if hundreds of millions — and in some cases billions — of taxpayer dollars have gone into solar infrastructure explicitly framed as an urgent fix for Guyana’s power reliability problems, why does the reliability problem persist?

A STOPGAP BY DESIGN, NOT YET A FIX IN PRACTICE

The solar programme was never pitched to the public as a long-horizon decarbonisation project on a fifteen-year timeline. It was pitched, repeatedly and specifically, as an immediate answer to diesel dependency, generation shortfalls, and the reliability failures that have plagued the Guyana Power and Light network and isolated hinterland systems alike.

That framing is precisely what makes the current moment so difficult to explain away. Linden’s own case makes the point without any need for interpretation: the government’s own public messaging around the Linden solar project describes it as the intended remedy for a demand surge that has now arrived before the fix did — leaving residents on rolling blackouts while the solution sits half-built.

Guyana Power and Light’s own numbers, meanwhile, show a national system running close to its edge. As of mid-August, GPL reported available generation capacity of roughly 266 megawatts against peak demand ranging between 235 and 240 megawatts — a reserve margin of about 26 megawatts on a system that has separately been described as recording its highest-ever demand reading this year. A country that has spent years and tens of billions of dollars building solar capacity should not still be operating this close to the margin. If the installed solar capacity that Mahipaul has catalogued were reliably feeding the grid at anything close to its rated output, that reserve margin should look very different.

WHAT HAS ACTUALLY BEEN SPENT

Mahipaul’s letter assembles, for the first time in one place, the individual price tags behind Guyana’s solar buildout. The figures span both hinterland stand-alone systems and the larger grid-connected GUYSOL program:

Individually, each of these numbers might be defensible. Solar infrastructure is capital-intensive, hinterland logistics are expensive, and battery storage adds real cost. Collectively, they represent a sum large enough that the public is owed more than installed-capacity press releases — it is owed operating data.

CAPACITY IS NOT THE SAME AS DELIVERY

This is the distinction Mahipaul’s letter turns on, and it is the correct one. A solar farm’s rated capacity — its megawatts or megawatt-peak figure — describes what it could theoretically generate under ideal irradiance conditions. It says nothing about actual output over a year, nothing about downtime, nothing about how much of that output ever reaches a consumer’s meter rather than being curtailed, stored, or lost.

The government’s own projections for two of the completed GUYSOL sites illustrate why the distinction matters: Onderneeming is projected to generate approximately 7,700 megawatt-hours annually, saving an estimated G$447 million a year in avoided fossil-fuel costs; Charity is projected at roughly 4,600 megawatt-hours annually, worth an estimated G$267 million.

These are meaningful numbers — if they are being realised. The government has published the projections. It has not published a single quarter of actual generation data to show whether those projections are holding, falling short, or being exceeded.

Mahipaul’s letter also raises a technical point that deserves more attention than it has received: connection to a local distribution network is not the same as export to the national interconnected grid. GUYSOL facilities connect to 13.8-kilovolt distribution networks in their respective areas, and several hinterland installations operate on isolated systems entirely separate from the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System. A solar farm described in a press release as “connected to the grid” may in practice be feeding a small local network with no meaningful bearing on the national reliability picture that ministers invoke when defending the programme’s cost.

The public has been given capacity figures. It has not been told, facility by facility, where the electricity generated actually goes.

THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN UNANSWERED

Mahipaul’s demand is specific and, on its face, unobjectionable for a government that maintains its solar investments are performing as promised: publish, for every facility, the total expenditure and how it compares to the original contract price; the contractor and procurement record; monthly generation figures; diesel volumes actually displaced; realised financial savings against fossil-fuel-cost projections; battery storage performance; and operational status including downtime and maintenance history.

“Guyana cannot simply count solar panels and call that energy transformation.”

That is the crux of it. Guyana has, over several years now, been shown ribbon-cuttings, capacity announcements, and projected-savings press releases. It has not been shown a single consolidated account of what these facilities have actually produced, what they have actually saved, and what has happened when demand outpaced supply in the very communities the solar farms were built to serve.                    Linden is not a hypothetical test of that gap. It is the test, running in real time, right now.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE BALANCE SHEET

Guyana’s oil revenues have created the fiscal space to make investments of this scale without the immediate budgetary strain such spending would once have imposed. That is precisely why the accounting standard should rise, not fall. Money that is easy to spend is not thereby immune from scrutiny — if anything, the ease of spending is the reason scrutiny becomes more necessary, not less.

A government sitting on record oil revenue has fewer excuses, not more, for leaving a reserve margin this thin, a hinterland town on rolling blackouts, and a national solar programme’s actual output undisclosed years into its rollout.

The Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, the Guyana Energy Agency, and Guyana Power and Light have the generation data. Smart meters, inverters, and battery management systems on modern solar installations record output automatically; this is not information that would need to be reconstructed from scratch. If the political message accompanying each commissioning — that this facility would ease the shortfall, cut diesel costs, and strengthen reliability — was accurate, the underlying data will bear that out and the disclosure costs the government nothing but the paperwork.

If it will not bear that out, Guyanese taxpayers who have funded hundreds of millions and, cumulatively, billions of dollars in solar infrastructure are entitled to know why — and who signed off on projects that did not deliver what they were sold as delivering.

The stopgap was supposed to close the gap. Linden’s blackouts this month are the clearest evidence yet that, on the government’s own timeline and its own terms, it has not. The figures exist to settle the question either way. The government’s continued silence on them is itself an answer of a kind.

— The Board

The Tap, Not the Tax: How Guyana Inverted the Redistribution Debate

BOARD EDITORIAL

State Wealth, Discretionary Dispersal, and the Erosion of an Independent Civil Society

Every recent American argument against redistribution begins from the same premise: wealth is born dispersed, in private hands, and the state’s task is to gather it up. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani want the state to do more of the gathering. Their critics, invoking Friedrich Hayek and pointing to fortunes that financed abolitionism and suffrage and even Karl Marx’s own writing desk, warn that the gathering itself is the danger — that authority migrates from citizens and civil society to the centre, one tax return at a time.

Guyana does not have this problem. Guyana has the opposite one.

WEALTH THAT NEVER LEFT THE STATE

In the American frame, private wealth is the baseline and the state is the intruder. In Guyana, the state is the baseline. Petroleum revenue arrives already concentrated in government hands through the Natural Resource Fund and the terms of the Stabroek Block production-sharing arrangement, before a single dollar has touched a private ledger.

There was no antecedent class of dispersed owners for the state to expropriate, because the wealth in question was never dispersed to begin with.

The moral hazard the American essayists worry about — a government that acquires what belonged to someone else — does not describe Guyana’s condition. The government here is not acquiring resources it must first take from citizens. It is sitting on resources it already holds and deciding, at its own discretion, who gets a share and on what terms.

This is not a semantic distinction. It changes where the danger sits. Redistribution, in the classic critique, is dangerous because it transfers authority from the private sphere to the state. In Guyana the authority was never in the private sphere. The live question is not whether the state should take. It is whether the state, having already taken, will ever let go — and on what terms it chooses to.

DISPERSAL WITHOUT RELINQUISHMENT

The state can hand out money without ever giving up the authority to decide who deserves it.

This is where patronage enters, and where it must be distinguished sharply from redistribution proper. A genuine dispersal of state-held wealth back into private hands would look like a rule: a published formula, a transparent eligibility test, an entitlement a citizen could claim without asking anyone’s permission.

Guyana’s Development Bank Bill, passed without debate on July 27, 2026, was pitched publicly as interest-free and collateral-free lending for ordinary Guyanese. Its actual text tells a different story: Section 5(2) preserves discretionary collateral and interest terms, Section 23 carries no citizenship-eligibility requirement, and the board of up to forty billion dollars in disbursement authority answers to no one but the Finance Minister, who alone appoints every director. There is no opposition seat, no civil-society nominee, no published criteria.

Within days of the Bill’s passage, the pattern that discretion invites was already visible. At a Model Village consultation in Rose Hall, the President instructed bar and entertainment-venue owners to draw on Development Bank financing to soundproof their premises against noise complaints — this from a bank that, at the time of the remarks, had no application process, no disbursement portal, and had not yet held its formal launch.

The lending priority existed before the lending mechanism did. That sequence only makes sense if the money was never intended to move by rule. It was always going to move by instruction.

This is dispersal without relinquishment. The state hands out access to its wealth, but it never hands over the authority to decide who receives it, when, or why.

A citizen with a rule-bound entitlement does not need to stay in anyone’s good graces to keep it. A citizen or business dependent on discretionary allocation does.

That dependency is the entire point, and it is the opposite of what the American redistribution debate assumes redistribution produces.

THE VILLAGE AS THE UNIT OF PATRONAGE

The Model Village Initiative supplies the clearest illustration of the mechanism at village scale. Launched August 3, 2026, as a multi-region consultation tour, it was scheduled on weekday daytimes — structurally excluding the working residents it claimed to be consulting — and delivered polished concept renders (a gateway sign, a landscaped park with splash pad and gazebos) with no attached funding, procurement process, or delivery date. Over forty individual village plans were produced within the tour’s first week, a volume of cabinet-level coordination that does not happen in three weeks and was, on the evidence, substantially pre-planned rather than assembled in response to public pressure.

The tour’s own security posture undercuts the consultation framing further. In Buxton/Foulis, the local NDC chairman — holding a personal invitation — was barricaded out of the very meeting convened to hear him, and threatened with arrest for asking why young women were being moved along near the venue. In Koberimo, placard-holding women met a flak-jacketed police presence. A boat bound for a Moruca consultation was intercepted by the Coast Guard.

A government engaged in genuine damage control de-escalates. A government staging a pre-scripted electioneering tour polices its own audience.

None of this is redistribution in the sense the American essayists mean. No wealth tax was levied; no private fortune was seized. But the effect the essayists fear — citizens taught to see their material circumstances as something dispensed from above rather than built through their own initiative — is being produced anyway, and produced more directly, because the wealth was concentrated at the source and the dispersal itself is being timed to an electoral calendar rather than a citizen’s claim of right.

WHAT THE ESSAY GETS RIGHT, READ BACKWARDS

The American case against redistribution rests on an empirical claim: that dispersed private wealth finances things governments will not — dissent, unpopular causes, independent institutions, art and scholarship hostile to the prevailing order. Friedrich Engels’ textile profits paid for the writing of Capital.

Private fortunes, in the American telling, bankrolled abolitionism and suffrage years before either enjoyed public approval.

Guyana’s civil society and independent press have no equivalent financial base to draw on. There is no class of private petroleum wealth in domestic hands sitting parallel to the state’s share, available to fund criticism the state finds inconvenient. What independent institutions exist are financed by advertisers with state-linked interests, by foreign donors, or not at all.

The essay’s own safeguard against centralised authority — a dispersed private sector wealthy enough to fund its own critics — is close to absent here. That is not an argument for redistribution in the American sense. It is an argument that Guyana’s civil society is more exposed to the concentration-of-authority risk the essay describes than the American essayists’ own country is, because it lacks the very buffer their argument assumes every modern state still has.

The essay closes by quoting Hayek: that a minimum of food, shelter, and clothing can be assured to everybody, but that it does not follow that the state should become the standing manager of incomes, opportunities, and social life. Guyana’s government has reversed the order of that sentence. It has not assured a minimum through any rule a citizen can claim.

It has made itself the standing manager first, and left the assurance of a minimum to whichever village gets a roadshow stop, whichever bar owner gets a soundproofing loan, and whichever chairman is let past the barricade.

THE ACTUAL REMEDY

If the essay’s warning has any purchase in Guyana, it points toward the opposite of what its American authors intended. The problem is not that too much wealth might be redistributed by rule. It is that too little is. A transparent, formula-bound Natural Resource Fund withdrawal schedule; a published, contestable Development Bank lending criterion; procurement records a citizen can inspect without a court order — these are the dispersal mechanisms that would actually return authority from the centre to individuals, the very outcome the American essayists claim to want and fear losing.

Guyana does not need to be warned off redistribution. It needs redistribution conducted by rule instead of by favour — the thing patronage is built to resemble without ever becoming.

— The Board

Charity Police Station And The Costly Myth Of “World-Class” Governance

OPINION BY: Staff Writer —August 2026

One year ago, the government stood at Charity and declared a victory. The reconstructed Charity Police Station, commissioned at a cost of $ 62.7 million, was branded modern, “futuristic” and “world‑class” – the template, we were told, for citizen‑friendly policing infrastructure across Guyana. Twelve months later, the same facility is back on the tender board, this time with an engineer’s estimate of $ 66.8 million for “external waiting area, infrastructural works and rehab” – almost matching the original reconstruction cost.

If that does not immediately raise red flags about planning, procurement discipline, and honest governance, nothing will.

When “additional works” rival the original project

The Ministry of Home Affairs has invited bids for the new round of works at Charity, with 23 contractors responding. The engineer’s estimate: $66,810,150. Bids range from $ 47.9 million to $ 87 million. This comes after an earlier tender, for a perimeter fence alone, carried an eye‑popping government estimate of $ 74 million – more than the reconstruction of the station itself.

Guyanese taxpayers must now ask:

How did a “complete” and “futuristic” station, commissioned in July 2025, suddenly demand rehabilitation and an external waiting area barely a year later?

⇒ Why is an external waiting area, routine civil works and “infrastructural rehab” valued in the same bracket as an entire station’s reconstruction?

⇒What exactly was covered in the original $ 62.7 million scope, and what was left out – by design or by incompetence?

We are not talking about unforeseen structural damage, a natural disaster, or a radical change in policing needs. The ministry’s own description – “construction of external waiting area, infrastructural works and rehab” – reads like housekeeping that any competent project design should have anticipated and included from day one.

The culture of half‑done, over‑priced projects

At Charity, the numbers tell a familiar story in Guyana’s public sector:

⇒ Original reconstruction: $ 62.7 million.

⇒ Fence estimate: $ 74 million.

⇒Additional works one year later: $ 66.8 million.

In other words, the “extras” – a fence and now “external waiting area and rehab” – are poised to outstrip the core reconstruction. This is not modern project management; it is the old culture of fragmenting public works into multiple contracts, multiplying costs, and blurring accountability.

Some hard questions demand public answers:

⇒Was the original design incomplete, and if so, who signed off on it?

⇒ Did the engineer’s estimates fully capture the functional requirements of a modern police station – including external waiting facilities – or were key elements deliberately postponed?

⇒ Which officials within the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Guyana Police Force reviewed and endorsed the original scope of works?

⇒ Has there been any independent evaluation of whether the first    $ 62.7 million was prudently spent and delivered according to standards?

Guyana has seen this pattern in schools, health centers, roads and wharves: the fanfare of commissioning, the ribbon‑cutting, the promise of “world‑class” this and “state‑of‑the‑art” that – followed by a steady drip of add‑ons, variations and “rehab” that quietly doubles the public bill.

 “Futuristic” talk, pre‑modern practice

At the time of commissioning, Charity was held up as one of the most modern, responsive stations in Region Two: upgraded male, female and juvenile lockups; witness and ID parade room; marine and immigration offices; CID and traffic departments; officers’ accommodation; a child‑friendly area and a domestic violence unit.

That is exactly why this new tender is so troubling. You do not proclaim a facility to be “futuristic” and “world‑class” and then return within a year to fix basic infrastructure, build an external waiting area, and undertake rehab. Either the original claims were exaggerated political marketing, or the project management was fundamentally deficient.

In a world where policing infrastructure is being designed around community engagement, trauma‑informed spaces, accessibility and digital systems, Guyana’s version of “futuristic” appears to move at a break‑neck crawl. The world is racing toward integrated justice campuses and smart, flexible public buildings; we are still retrofitting waiting areas after commissioning.

This gap between the rhetoric and the reality is not a technical issue. It is a governance problem.

Procurement opacity and the engineer’s estimate

The NPTAB opening on August 4 showed bids stretching from $ 47.9 million to $ 87 million. That spread alone prompts serious scrutiny of the engineer’s estimate and the procurement process:

⇒ Why is the engineer’s estimate so close to several mid‑range bidders, but almost $ 19 million above the lowest bid?

⇒ What is the detailed bill of quantities behind the $.66.8 million estimate?

⇒ Has the Ministry published any justification for this cost to the public, or are taxpayers expected to accept the figure on faith?

The engineer’s estimate is not a private internal number; it is the benchmark against which NPTAB and the Ministry will adjudicate bids. When such estimates repeatedly hover at the higher end of the spectrum, Guyanese citizens have every right to question whether the system structurally favors more expensive outcomes.

Where is the oversight?

Key institutions ought to be asking questions today:

⇒ The Auditor General’s Office should be looking at the full Charity station portfolio – reconstruction, fence, and these new works – as a single project with cumulative cost, not as isolated tenders.

⇒ The Public Procurement Commission, still struggling to assert relevance, should insist on transparency for the scope and cost drivers of these add‑on works.

⇒ Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee should demand explanations from the Ministry of Home Affairs about planning failures and cumulative spending on a single station over a short period.

A simple, concrete example: if a rural health centre were rebuilt at   $ 60 million and, within a year, required another $ 65 million for “external works and rehab,” citizens would cry foul. Charity is no different. Policemen and women deserve decent facilities; citizens deserve safe and humane spaces.

But taxpayers also deserve evidence that their money is being spent with foresight, competence and integrity.

Citizens should not accept “business as usual”

This is not about one station in Region Two. It is about the norms we are silently accepting:

⇒ Grandiose language at commissioning, minimal transparency afterward.

⇒ Multiple tenders for a single facility, each inflating the cumulative cost.

⇒A political system that equates concrete and steel with governance, while ignoring planning rigor and financial discipline.

The government cannot continue to market every building as “world‑class” while operating with pre‑modern project control.      If Charity is truly a model station, then the public deserves a full breakdown of:

⇒ The original design and cost.

⇒ The scope and justification for the fence and new “external waiting area and rehab.”

⇒ The total projected lifetime cost of the facility to the public purse.

Until then, Guyanese should treat every “futuristic” ribbon‑cutting with skepticism. Modern governance is not what you say at the podium; it is how you plan, procure, and account for every dollar long after the cameras leave.

Charity Police Station is now a test case. Will this government confront the hard questions about over‑fragmented, over‑priced public works, or will it simply add another line item to the national budget and hope nobody connects the dots?