The Mirror Doesn’t Lie Either Way

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 The Mirror Doesn’t Lie Either Way

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

An outside diagnosis of Western self-deception turns out to describe, almost point for point, the mechanics of state self-deception we have spent this year documenting at home.

Kishore Mahbubani–former President of UN Security Council; published an essay this month arguing that the West has engineered its own downfall — not through defeat, but through a refusal to see itself as the 88 percent of the world outside it actually sees it. The West, he writes, looks in the mirror and sees a virtuous civilization generously improving the world. The rest of the world looks at the same reflection and sees a state that photographs its own atrocities as liberation and its rivals’ as war crimes, that narrates every external intervention as necessity and every domestic failure as someone else’s problem.

We are not publishing this editorial to relitigate Mahbubani’s case against Washington and Brussels. We are publishing it because the mechanism he describes — a governing culture that narrates its own conduct in one register and has it experienced in another — is not a uniquely Western pathology. It is the operating logic of the Guyanese state, and we have spent this year documenting it one thread at a time without needing Mahbubani’s help to see it.

His essay did not hand us this thesis. It corroborated one we already had the receipts for.  

THE DIPLOMACY OF THE UNSTATED MOU

Mahbubani’s sharpest point is not about bombs. It is about language — specifically, the word “unprovoked,” which Western leaders reached for reflexively to describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while offering no equivalent vocabulary for Gaza. The word does work. It forecloses the question of context before anyone can ask it. Mahbubani’s argument is that most of the world watched this happen and drew the obvious conclusion: the West was not describing events, it was managing a narrative, and everyone outside the room could tell the difference.

We made a structurally identical argument about Guyana’s own posture between Washington and Beijing in our recent series, “The Grammar of Non-Alignment.” Georgetown has never publicly reconciled the 2015 China State Construction pre-feasibility MoU for the Berbice deepwater port with the port’s quiet migration toward Bechtel and Hess. It has never addressed, in the same breath, Huawei’s entrenched position in the country’s regional surveillance architecture and the new US-funded air-domain-awareness and drone-monitoring MoU signed in August. Both tracks exist. Neither has been narrated against the other. The public is left to infer a foreign policy from the gaps between announcements — which is precisely the “diplomacy of the unstated MoU” we named in that series months before Mahbubani’s essay ran.

Mahbubani reads this kind of silence, at the level of the Global South generally, as a coherent and even defensible strategic posture — small states declining to be conscripted into a binary they did not choose. He may be right about the intent behind it elsewhere. But intent is not what a citizenry can audit. What we can audit is whether the public ever gets an accounting, and in Guyana’s case, it does not.

Mahbubani’s own standard that a civilization which cannot see how it is perceived is engaged in self-deception — applies with equal force to a government that has trained its public to stop expecting an accounting at all.

SELECTIVE OUTRAGE, OURS AND THEIRS

The second engine of Mahbubani’s essay is the Ukraine —Gaza asymmetry: the same leaders, using the same vocabulary of atrocity, applying it only where politically convenient. He does not need to argue this. He assembles it from their own quotations and lets the contradiction convict itself.

That is a method, not just an argument, and it is one we recognize because it is the same method behind nearly everything we categorize as a “bite with no teeth” — a government that announces a standard, receives credit for the announcement, and is never held to the standard again. The AI-misinformation penalty review announced and then left to sit. The noise-nuisance task force that re-announced measures first floated years earlier with no evidence either round was enforced. The hinterland airline “ultimatum” issued publicly against operators who had already cut fares years before the ultimatum existed. In each case, the government’s stated commitment and its actual conduct diverge, and the divergence survives because no one is forced to reconcile the two in public. That is Mahbubani’s Ukraine —Gaza mechanism, run at domestic scale: moral language deployed for its announcement value, detached from any obligation to apply it consistently.

Moral language deployed for its announcement value, detached from any obligation to apply it consistently.

EXTRACTION ABROAD, EXTRACTION AT HOME

Where Mahbubani’s essay is most useful to us is where it is least transferable — and the gap is worth stating precisely, because it sharpens rather than weakens our own case.

His argument about the West’s internal condition is that empire abroad hollowed out the middle class at home: productivity nearly doubled while wages crept up by a third, and the surplus went to capital rather than to the people who produced it. Case and Deaton’s “deaths of despair” data is his evidence that this hollowing has a body count. The moral center of that argument is neglect — a state that spent its resources and attention elsewhere and let its own population fray.

Guyana’s condition is not neglect. It is a live, ongoing act of construction. This is not a historically wealthy country whose returns are being siphoned abroad and whose middle class is eroding as a byproduct. It is a country with a historically flat, working-class social structure — the closest thing this hemisphere has had to an accidental egalitarianism; that is now watching a distinct wealthy class be built in real time, in the oil era, for the first time in its national history, out of wealth that never left the country at all. Mahbubani’s West failed to share gains it was still generating from elsewhere.

Guyana’s state is failing to share gains it is generating, right now, from underneath its own citizens’ feet. That is a harder case to make than his, not an echo of it, and we intend to make it in full elsewhere in these pages.

WHAT WE ARE NOT BORROWING

We want to be exact about what Mahbubani’s essay licenses and what it does not.

It does not license the conclusion that because the West has behaved badly, any government positioning itself against the West, or hedging between it and China, is thereby vindicated. That is the trap built into his own argument — he asks searching questions of Washington’s conduct in the Global South and asks none of Beijing’s, even though our own reporting on Chinese state-linked construction, quarrying, and equipment transfers in this country gives us no reason to believe Chinese conduct here has earned a pass any more than American conduct has. An accountability press that borrowed his blind spot along with his method would not be doing its job.

What we are borrowing is narrower and, we think, sound: the observation that a governing culture’s self-narration and its lived effect can diverge for years without correction, because the people best positioned to notice the divergence are the ones with the least power to compel an accounting — and that when an outside observer, working from entirely different material, arrives independently at a pattern we have been documenting story by story, that convergence is itself a form of evidence.

Mahbubani was not writing about Guyana. He did not need to be. The mechanism he found in Washington and Brussels is the same mechanism we have been finding, months at a time, in Georgetown.

— The Board

Fiscal Accountability, Part II: Cash Grants, Public Enterprises and the Cost of the State

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Fiscal Accountability, Part II: Cash Grants, Public Enterprises and the Cost of the State

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

Guyana is receiving unprecedented oil income while public expenditure, public debt, transfers, infrastructure allocations, and cash-grant programs are expanding rapidly.  This two-part series examines the unanswered questions inside the Government’s mid-year fiscal report—not to allege wrongdoing, but to establish what the public needs to see in order to verify that every dollar is properly accounted for.

That framing is important: transparency alone does not prove accountability, but public disclosure makes meaningful scrutiny possible Billions are being spent through cash grants, transfers, public enterprises and capital projects. Where is the public-facing record that allows citizens to follow the money?

Guyana’s fiscal expansion is moving at remarkable speed. Total Central Government expenditure reached G$599.8 billion in the first half of 2026, while the non-financial public sector recorded a deficit of G$108.9 billion.

The Government attributes the increase to accelerated program implementation, public-sector employment costs, social programs, cash grants, infrastructure and investment in power generation. Those may all be legitimate policy choices. But large public programs require equally large public disclosures.

The public must be able to determine who received money, which projects were funded, which contracts were awarded, what was delivered, and whether the results match the claims.

The G$42.5 billion cash-grant question

The report states that G$42.5 billion was spent in the first half of 2026 under the G$100,000 cash-grant program for persons aged 18 and older.

That amount is equivalent to approximately 425,000 payments of G$100,000 each. The Government should state precisely how many people were approved, how many were paid, how many remain unpaid, how many applications were rejected, and how many duplicate or ineligible claims were detected.

The issue is not whether citizens should receive assistance. The issue is whether a program of this scale has a transparent, auditable payment trail.

Questions on the cash grant

1.How many people were eligible for the G$100,000 grant?

2.How many were approved and paid as of June 30, 2026?

3.How many claims were rejected, duplicated, suspended or flagged for verification?

4.How many payments went by cash, cheque, bank transfer or other channel?

5.Which agencies, contractors, banks or payment providers administered the programme?

6.What were their service fees and administrative costs?

7.What controls prevented payments to deceased persons, duplicate applicants, non-residents or persons falsely claiming eligibility?

8.Will an anonymized regional payment register and an independent audit be published?

Public enterprises: G$53.6 billion in transfers

Transfers from Central Government to public enterprises reached G$53.6 billion in the first half of 2026, up from G$33.2 billion in the first half of 2025. The report identifies increased fuel-acquisition costs at Guyoil and rising generation and capital expenditure at GPL as key drivers. GPL’s capital program alone reportedly rose by G$24.7 billion compared with the corresponding period in 2025.

Those figures require more than a narrative explanation. Guyanese need audited accounts, procurement records, fuel-purchase information, capital-project details, vendor names, contract values, variations, payment schedules and performance reports.

Questions for GPL and Guyoil

1.What caused Guyoil’s fuel-acquisition costs to increase, measured by volume, supplier, product type and price?

2.Which companies supplied fuel to Guyoil, through what procurement method, and at what landed cost?

3.How much of GPL’s increased expenditure went to fuel, generation, transmission, maintenance, consultants, emergency works and capital projects?

4.Which projects comprise GPL’s additional G$24.7 billion capital program?

5.What contracts were awarded, to whom, and under what procurement method?

6.What payments have been made, what work has been completed, and what remains outstanding?

7.What are GPL’s technical and commercial losses, accounts receivable, subsidy requirements and debt obligations?

8.What portion of the G$53.6 billion in transfers is recurrent support versus capital financing?

The enlarged capital program

The Public Sector Investment Program was revised upward from G$779.6 billion to G$829.7 billion—an increase of G$50.1 billion—largely for power, housing and public infrastructure.

Capital spending can create necessary public assets. But it is also the area in which overruns, contract variations, delayed completion, weak supervision and emergency procurement can quickly consume public funds.

The public should not have to wait years for an audit to learn the cost, contractor, status and delivery record of projects funded in its name. Strong fiscal reporting should connect expenditure to policy areas, performance and usable underlying data.

Questions on infrastructure and PSIP spending

1.Which projects account for the G$50.1 billion PSIP revision?

2.What was each project’s original budget, revised budget and reason for revision?

3.Who are the contractors, consultants and supervising firms?

4.Were the contracts competitively tendered, single-sourced, negotiated or awarded through emergency procedures?

5.How much has been paid to each contractor as of June 30, 2026?

6.What percentage of each project is physically complete?

7.What contract variations, extensions or claims have been approved?

8.Which foreign-funded projects slowed or underperformed while domestic spending increased?

9.Has any project been moved from foreign financing to domestic financing, and if so, why?

Debt and exchange-rate accountability

Government reports public and publicly guaranteed debt of US$8.5731 billion at the end of June 2026, with domestic debt representing 61.4 percent of the total. Treasury bills make up about 84.4 percent of domestic PPG debt.

At the same time, the official exchange rate remained G$208.50 to US$1, while the reported market mid-rate moved to G$223.70. This difference should not be treated as a technical footnote. A persistent gap raises legitimate questions about access to foreign currency, the allocation of official-rate foreign exchange, and who bears the economic cost of the disparity.

Questions on debt and foreign exchange

1.What is the creditor-by-creditor breakdown of the US$8.5731 billion PPG debt?

2.What are the interest rates, maturity dates, grace periods, project purposes and repayment schedules for each new borrowing?

3.Which entities hold the Treasury bills, and what proportion is held by commercial banks, state-linked bodies, pension funds or other investors?

4.Were Treasury-bill auctions fully subscribed, and what were the bid-to-cover ratios?

5.What explains the widening gap between the official exchange rate and market mid-rate?

6.Who receives US dollars at the official rate, in what volumes, and under what allocation criteria?

7.What is the fiscal and economic impact of maintaining the official rate while the market rate moves higher?

Closing

The largest test of fiscal policy is not the budget speech, the half-year report or the headline number. It is whether the public can follow the money from appropriation to contract, payment, delivery and outcome.

Guyana has entered an era in which billions can move through oil revenues, cash grants, public enterprises, debt-financed projects and the national budget in a matter of months. That makes public verification non-negotiable.

The demand is straightforward: publish the ledgers, the contracts, the beneficiary reconciliations, the project reports, the debt schedules and the audit findings. Public funds must be publicly traceable.

The Vacuum Where Vetting Should Be

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 The Vacuum Where Vetting Should Be

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

The third-country deportee agreement was never legislated, never vetted by a named authority, and never tabled in Parliament.  Former Pres.Ramotar is right to demand it be made public.

Former President Donald Ramotar wants the third-country deportee agreement made public. He has called it, in terms that will not please the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, an attempt to re-colonize Latin America and the Caribbean. Strip away the rhetoric and what remains is a narrower, harder question the government has spent six weeks declining to answer: on what legal basis, and by what named authority, were the six people who arrived on September 4 actually screened?      

The honest answer is that the question may not be answerable, because the apparatus it presupposes does not exist

Guyana is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. There is no national asylum law. There is no statute defining who qualifies for protection, what a fear-of-persecution claim looks like in a Guyanese proceeding, or which institution has jurisdiction to hear one. When the Government’s September 5 statement invoked a “right to seek international protection,” it invoked a right that exists nowhere in Guyana’s own codified law. It borrowed the vocabulary of a framework the country never adopted.

This is not a technicality. It is the whole of the problem.

A vetting claim requires three things to be checkable: a standard, a process, and a name. Minister Persaud has offered the first, informally; non-criminal, “highly skilled” — in a January interview, months before the framework existed in any public form. No government statement since has named the second. No official document, briefing, or press release has named the third. Not Immigration. Not the Guyana Police Force. Not a joint mechanism with the Department of Homeland Security. Six weeks after arrival, the public does not know who looked at these files, against what checklist, or whether anyone did.

Ramotar’s call for disclosure is not a partisan gesture. It is the only available mechanism left for establishing whether any standard was applied at all — because no domestic legal standard exists independently of whatever sits inside that undisclosed diplomatic note.

Release the agreement, and the country can at least assess what Guyana agreed to. Withhold it, and there is nothing to measure the vetting claim against, because the government has not built the ruler

The United States side of this arrangement fares no better on examination. On September 18, the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that the Department of Homeland Security’s standard third-country removal procedure; the guidance under which these transfers are generally carried out — fails to guarantee migrants effective notice or a meaningful opportunity to raise a fear-of-persecution claim before removal. This was not a finding about one case. It was a class-wide ruling about the process itself, brought and decided as a challenge to DHS’s guidance rather than to any single removal. Courts do not typically adjudicate the individual paperwork of thousands of migrants one file at a time; they rule on the policy that governs all of them. The reasonable inference — not proof of any individual case, but a sound inference about a standardized bureaucratic process — is that the deficiency the court identified was not confined to the plaintiffs in that courtroom.

Put the two halves together and the picture is not ambiguous. On the sending side, a process the courts have now found procedurally deficient. On the receiving side, no legislation, no named vettor, no disclosed criteria, and no parliamentary record.

Two governments, each capable of pointing to the other’s silence as sufficient reassurance, and neither required to produce anything in writing.

This newsroom has documented the pattern before: framework announced by press release, never tabled in the National Assembly, no Hansard record, no ministry willing to speak to specifics. What is different about Ramotar’s intervention is that it reframes disclosure as a matter of self-determination rather than only accountability — the question of whether a small state can set its own terms for who crosses its border, or whether it simply processes what a larger power sends.

Whatever one makes of that framing, the underlying demand is not extraordinary. It is the minimum a country owes itself before absorbing people it has never screened, under a law it has never written, through a process no official will name.

Publish the agreement. Name the vetting authority. Table the instrument in Parliament. Until one of those three things happens, “vetted” is not a fact about these arrivals. It is a word the government has asked the country to accept on faith, in the continued absence of anything to check it against.

— The Board

Guyana must not confuse access to Trump with protection from Trump

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Guyana must not confuse access to Trump with protection from Trump

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026 

Trump’s UN threat against Iran exposes the peril of diplomacy by domination

Donald Trump’s appearance at the United Nations was not an argument for diplomacy so much as a demonstration of its inversion. From a podium built for the language of peace, cooperation and international law, the US president presented Iran with a choice: accept terms set in Washington or face national destruction.

The provocation matters not only because of its target, but because of its setting. The UN general assembly is often dismissed as ceremonial theatre, yet its central premise remains that even bitter adversaries must be addressed through rules, negotiation and mutual restraint. Trump’s message suggested something very different: that military supremacy confers the right to decide which states may survive, prosper or rebuild.

President Irfaan Ali may believe that closeness to Donald Trump offers Guyana strategic cover at a perilous time. With Venezuela’s claim to the Essequibo still unresolved, a larger US security presence can appear not merely useful, but essential. Guyana has every right to pursue defence partnerships, protect its territorial integrity and seek international backing against Venezuelan aggression.

But Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly should caution Georgetown against mistaking proximity to American power for safety from it.

 Donald Trump came to the United Nations with a message that inverted the purpose of the institution whose podium he occupied.  

“I have a big decision to make,” Trump told the General Assembly. Iran, he said, could be permitted to rebuild into a “far greater country” — or the United States could destroy the Islamic republic before it had another chance to threaten its neighbours.

It was a remarkable formulation even by Trump’s standards. The General Assembly is a forum created from the ruins of world war, designed to give states, large and small, a place to settle disputes without submitting them to force. Yet the most powerful military leader in the room used its stage to speak of erasing another country.

At the world body’s principal stage, Trump reduced Iran’s future to a decision he alone would make. Iran, he said, could enter a deal that let it rebuild on US terms, or it could be annihilated.

That does not make the Iranian government beyond criticism. Tehran’s repression at home, its treatment of women and dissidents, and its role in armed conflicts across the region have rightly drawn international condemnation. But a US president’s threat to drive an entire nation “into hell with no chance of survival” is not a strategy for protecting civilians or securing peace. It is collective punishment dressed up as resolve.

Trump’s speech also revealed a world view in which power is both the instrument and the reward of foreign policy. While presenting Iran’s future as a choice to be granted or denied by Washington. The language is transactional, but its logic is imperial: resources, security and sovereignty are treated as possessions to be bargained over by the strongest state.

He celebrated American military action in Venezuela as a means of expanding US access and control over that country’s oil reserves. He hailed himself as a peacemaker in Gaza even as Gaza remains shattered and the political conditions for a durable settlement remain absent.

The message was unmistakable. In Trump’s world, sovereignty is not an inviolable principle. It is conditional. It belongs most securely to nations able to defend it themselves—or to those whose interests happen, for the moment, to align with Washington’s.

That approach carries consequences well beyond Tehran. America’s allies have long tolerated; and at times enabled — Washington’s inconsistencies. But Trump’s open embrace of coercion poses a more fundamental question: whether the United States can still be relied upon as a partner bound by commitments, rules and predictable interests, rather than the personal impulses of its president.

That should trouble Guyana.

Guyana’s case against Venezuela’s claim to the Essequibo is rooted in law, history and the 1899  Arbitral Award. It is before the International Court of Justice, and Guyana should continue to insist that the border controversy be settled through international law, not intimidation, military threat or political theatre. The country needs friends. It needs defence capacity. It needs intelligence cooperation, regional solidarity and an unmistakable deterrent to adventurism.

Yet Guyana must be careful about the kind of friendship it embraces, and the price that may eventually be demanded for it.

The United States has strategic interests in Guyana that go beyond defending democratic values or supporting the rule of law. Guyana possesses rapidly expanding offshore oil production, sits on Venezuela’s eastern flank, and has become an important piece on the strategic map of the Caribbean and northern South America. Those interests may overlap with Guyana’s own security needs. They do not automatically become identical to them.

Trump’s glorification of US control over Venezuelan oil should be read in Georgetown not as a distant episode, but as a warning.

If access to another country’s resources can be presented as the fruit of military intervention, then oil-rich small states must ask hard questions about the character of the power whose support they seek.

A country may welcome investment, security assistance and diplomatic solidarity while still guarding against dependency, unequal bargains and arrangements that erode national control over its wealth.

Guyana cannot afford a foreign policy built on flattery, photo opportunities or personal warmth between leaders. It needs a policy grounded in national interests, parliamentary scrutiny and clear limits. Any security agreement with Washington must preserve Guyanese command of Guyanese territory, safeguard the country’s decision-making authority and be disclosed sufficiently for citizens to know what commitments their government is making.

This is especially urgent because the boundary controversy is real. Venezuela’s threats cannot be waved away. President Nicolás Maduro’s government has repeatedly sought to use the Essequibo controversy for domestic mobilisation and geopolitical advantage. Guyana’s government is right to demand international support and to strengthen its defences. CARICOM, the Commonwealth, the Organisation of American States and Guyana’s international partners have all played important roles in reinforcing the principle that borders cannot be altered by force.

But partnership must not become subordination.

A small state survives in a dangerous neighborhood by widening its circle of friends, not by placing its fate in the hands of a single powerful patron.

Guyana should deepen ties with CARICOM, Brazil, the Commonwealth, Canada, European partners, the United Nations and countries across the global south. It should sustain relations with the United States, but not make Washington the sole pillar of its security or diplomatic strategy.

There is also a larger moral issue. Guyana cannot credibly invoke international law to defend the Essequibo while remaining silent when powerful states threaten to destroy weaker ones, seize their resources or bend sovereignty to their will. The rules that protect Guyana are the same rules Trump mocked in his threats against Iran and his celebration of US power in Venezuela.

The Ali administration should remember that a handshake from a superpower is not a guarantee. Today’s strategic partner can become tomorrow’s demanding patron; today’s security commitment can become tomorrow’s leverage over oil, contracts, ports, airspace or foreign policy.

Guyana should engage the United States confidently, respectfully and pragmatically. But it must never confuse being useful to Washington with being safe from Washington.

 

The Remittance Paradox: Why Guyana’s Chinese Diaspora Won’t Go Home

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The Remittance Paradox: Why Guyana’s Chinese Diaspora Won’t Go Home — But Keeps Sending Money There

OPINION BY :Hem Kumar September 2026

Ask a Chinese national living in Guyana why they don’t return home, and the answer rarely comes wrapped in ideology. It comes as a shrug, a pause, sometimes a flat “it’s better here.” What is rarely said outright; but is increasingly legible when read against what Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor (CDM) has documented about life inside China; is that the reluctance to return is not really about Guyana at all. It is about what has been left behind.

That reluctance sits alongside something that looks, at first glance, like a contradiction: the same diaspora that has no interest in returning continues, often faithfully, to send money back. Remittances flow toward a system many have quietly chosen not to live under again. Understanding why requires separating two different questions that get collapsed into one — do you want to go back, and do you still have people and obligations there — and recognizing that the CCP’s own domestic record supplies the answer to the first without touching the second.

What people are actually leaving

CDM’s most recent findings describe a domestic climate in China defined less by prosperity than by pressure. The “lying flat”  phenomenon; a quiet, widespread rejection of the expectation that citizens strive endlessly for material and national advancement — emerged as a response to punishing “996” work norms, and has become significant enough that state security services blamed it on foreign interference rather than acknowledge it as domestic exhaustion. When Chinese citizens online mocked that framing, the mockery itself was censored.

That pattern — grievance, followed by an official narrative that displaces blame outward, followed by suppression of the correction — recurs across the material CDM has documented. A sluggish economy has produced rising protest activity tied to unpaid wages, unfinished housing, and land disputes. New surveillance directives aim specifically at monitoring migrant workers who might be “idling in their hometowns,” which is a fairly direct admission that idle, disaffected people are seen as a stability risk rather than simply an economic one.

For someone who has already left that environment, none of this reads as abstract. It reads as confirmation.

Why leaving isn’t the same as disengaging

Where the paradox actually dissolves is in recognizing that emigration and repatriation of funds are not answers to the same question. Choosing not to return addresses one’s own daily life — the work culture, the surveillance, the narrowing space for dissent that CDM’s protest data (5,343 documented dissent events in 2025 alone, a 44 percent rise year over year) makes concrete rather than anecdotal. Sending money back addresses something else entirely: family still living inside that system, aging parents, property, social obligation, or simply the practical reality that the two countries’ financial systems remain connected regardless of where one has chosen to live.

It is possible — common, even — to reject a system for yourself while still being financially bound to the people it still governs.

That is not hypocrisy. It is what diaspora economics generally look like, in Guyana’s Chinese community as much as anywhere else.

What this means for Guyana

The relevance here isn’t abstract for Guyana. A diaspora that has concluded, however quietly, that returning means re-entering a system it has already priced as not worth living under is a diaspora whose long-term orientation is toward wherever it has landed, not toward where it came from.

 That has implications for how Chinese-owned businesses, family networks, and remittance patterns in Guyana should be understood — not as temporary arrangements awaiting an eventual return, but as something closer to permanent settlement dressed in the language of “for now.”

Guyana’s own numbers point the same way: naturalization applications, property acquisitions, and new business registrations by Chinese nationals have all visibly increased in recent years.

That is not the profile of a temporary presence. It is the profile of people settling in.

Yet settlement has not been matched by integration, and the two are not the same thing. Business activity — restaurants, shops, wholesale trade — has long been the primary point of contact between Chinese nationals and the rest of Guyanese society. Beyond that, contact is thin. Social life runs largely through its own venues and events, self-contained rather than shared, with little visible adaptation toward the wider society it now has a growing legal and economic stake in. That is not necessarily a criticism of the community itself — self-organized social life is a normal feature of any diaspora, and no group is obligated to assimilate on someone else’s timeline.

But it does mean the burden of building an actual bridge has fallen to no one in particular, because it has fallen to no policy at all.

That is the gap. Guyana has, in effect, made it administratively easy to become Guyanese on paper — citizenship, property title, a business license — without ever building a policy framework that treats a fast-growing, self-contained community as something the state should actively fold in: no dedicated integration programming, no civic-participation pathway beyond the ballot box, no institutional effort to connect naturalized Chinese residents to the demographic groups they now live alongside. The state has processed the paperwork of arrival without doing any of the work of belonging.

The remittance paradox, in the end, is the smaller story. 

Guyana’s institutions have not, to date, done much thinking about what that means — for how state-to-state relationships with Beijing intersect with the lived experience of Chinese nationals who have already made their choice about which system they’d rather live under.

The larger one is a settlement pattern accelerating without any policy architecture built to receive it — and a state that has shown far more urgency about registering Chinese capital than about asking what Chinese residency in Guyana is actually going to look like a decade from now.

A DEAL SHROUDED IN SECRECY

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A DEAL SHROUDED IN SECRECY

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Guyana’s Third-Country Migrants and the Silence That Surrounds Them

On September 4, six migrants — Cuban and Afghan nationals — landed in Guyana under a newly finalized migration cooperation framework with the United States. The Government of Guyana confirmed their arrival the following day, in a press statement carried in full by local media. What the statement did not say has since become the more important story.

No vetting authority has been named. No accommodation site has been disclosed. No legal basis under Guyanese or international refugee law has been cited, because none exists: Guyana is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, and has no domestic asylum legislation. And the framework itself — the instrument governing who arrives, under what conditions, for how long — was never brought before the National Assembly. There is no Hansard record. There was no debate.

This is not a story about six people. It is a story about a government that entered a binding arrangement with a foreign power, over the movement and custody of human beings onto Guyanese soil, without informing the institution constitutionally charged with scrutinizing it.

WHAT WAS CONFIRMED 

Senior officials have, when pressed by wire services, offered fragments. A 12-month initial term. A cap of 12 persons per month, with no roll-over. Costs of “receiving, housing and supporting” arrivals borne by the International Organization for Migration. Assurances — offered, not demonstrated — that only non-criminal, “highly skilled” individuals denied asylum in the US would be accepted, and that Guyana retains a right of refusal.

None of this appeared in a treaty. None of it was tabled, gazetted, or subjected to parliamentary question. The underlying instrument is understood to be a diplomatic note; a category of agreement that, by design, bypasses the ratification scrutiny a treaty would require. That is not an incidental detail. It is the mechanism by which an arrangement of this consequence was kept outside the reach of elected oversight.

THE GUARDIAN’S INVESTIGATION

The scale of what Guyana has joined only becomes legible in wider context. A joint investigation by the Guardian and 23 other media organisations — coordinated by Paris-based Forbidden Stories under the banner of the Deportation Project — has tracked more than 100 flights carrying migrants and asylum seekers to 28 countries under the Trump administration’s third-country removal programme.

More than 25,000 people have been deported to countries that are not their own; over 5,000 of them to nations in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and central Asia to which they have no prior connection

Human rights lawyers describe the practice as a “show of force” — a deterrent theatre staged at the expense of people whose claims to protection had, in many cases, already been recognised by US immigration judges. One Iranian woman interviewed by the Guardian, granted “withholding of removal” after fleeing political persecution, was rearrested within two weeks of her release and flown to the Central African Republic — a country the US State Department itself warns its own citizens not to enter.

The pattern the investigation documents is not unique to Guyana. Peruvians and Colombians have been sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Cubans, a Brazilian and a Cameroonian who refused to disembark in Liberia were redirected to Equatorial Guinea instead. Documents reviewed by the Washington Post as part of the project show that a majority of the 35 countries that have signed third-country agreements with Washington stipulated they would not accept migrants with violent criminal records — the same non-criminal framing Guyanese officials have offered the public, suggesting this is boilerplate language attached to the entire cohort of agreements, not a bespoke Guyanese safeguard.

A RULING THAT SHOULD CONCERN GEORGETOWN

On Friday, a US federal appeals court ruled that third-country removals of the kind that brought six people to Guyana are unlawful, on the grounds that individuals are not given adequate notice to mount a legal challenge before being sent to a country that is not their own. The Trump administration is expected to appeal and to continue the program regardless.

The ruling does not change what has already happened in Guyana. But it confirms, from within the US legal system itself, the precise defect that has defined this arrangement from the Guyanese side as well: people moved, and agreements struck, without the notice — to the individuals concerned, and to the Guyanese public — that due process requires.

THE UNEXPLAINED VISIT

Six weeks before the framework was announced, IOM Director General Amy Pope visited Guyana and met with five government ministers. Every published account of that visit; IOM’s own release, its regional syndication, Guyana Chronicle’s written coverage; describes it exclusively in terms of labor migration, GDP growth, and CARICOM migration governance. None names the ministers involved beyond a group reference. None mentions a deportee framework, then under active negotiation according to Foreign Secretary Robert Persaud’s own January 2026 remarks to iNews Guyana.

No public record shows Pope meeting Guyana’s Venezuelan Ambassador — despite Venezuelans constituting the country’s largest migrant population, and despite that being the obvious counterpart for a visit genuinely centred on labour migration. Six weeks later, IOM was named the framework’s sole implementer for housing and supporting arrivals who are neither Venezuelan nor economic migrants in any sense the public visit’s stated purpose would suggest.

The 592 Guardian does not assert what was discussed behind closed doors in that meeting. What can be stated is narrower and, in its way, more damning: the public record offers no account of Pope’s visit that squares with the role IOM was assigned six weeks later, and no institution; not Cabinet, not the National Assembly, not the ministries involved — has offered one since.

WHAT IS OWED

A government that signs an arrangement determining who may be brought onto Guyanese soil, under whose custody, and at what risk to them if returned to danger, owes the public more than a press release confirming the fact after arrivals have already landed. It owes Parliament the instrument itself. It owes citizens a named vetting authority, a disclosed location, and a legal basis that either exists or is admitted not to.

None of that has been offered. What has been offered is silence — the same silence into which six people arrived, and the same silence in which the terms of their presence, and the presence of twelve  more who may follow each month, remain undisclosed.

— The Board

Fiscal Accountability: Following Guyana’s Oil Money and Public Spending

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Fiscal Accountability: Following Guyana’s Oil Money and Public Spending

OPINION BY :Hem Kumar September 2026        

Guyana is receiving unprecedented oil income while public expenditure, public debt, transfers, infrastructure allocations, and cash-grant programs are expanding rapidly. 

This two-part series examines the unanswered questions inside the Government’s mid-year fiscal report—not to allege wrongdoing, but to establish what the public needs to see in order to verify that every dollar is properly accounted for. That framing is important: transparency alone does not prove accountability, but public disclosure makes meaningful scrutiny possible.

Part I

Fiscal Accountability, Part I: Oil Money, the NRF and the Missing Public Ledger

Guyana’s projected petroleum deposits have surged, but the public still lacks the lift-by-lift, cost-by-cost records needed to independently follow oil revenues.

The first half of 2026 has produced a dramatic official revaluation of Guyana’s oil-income outlook. Government now projects petroleum deposits of US$6.4976 billion for 2026—136.8 percent above the amount projected when Budget 2026 was prepared.

It also now expects 84 Government profit-oil lifts from 326 projected Stabroek Block lifts, compared with the earlier estimate of 40 Government lifts out of 309 total lifts. That is an enormous revision in a short period. It may be explained by production growth, higher oil prices and faster cost recovery—but explanation is not the same as public verification.

The country is entitled to the documents and figures that allow citizens, journalists, economists, parliamentarians and civil-society groups to test the Government’s numbers.

The issue is not oil income alone

According to the report, Government received US$1.7786 billion from profit oil during January to June 2026 and US$218.4 million in royalties. The Natural Resource Fund balance stood at US$4.2942 billion at the end of June, after withdrawals of US$1.020 billion, and inclusive of US$66.9 million in interest income.

Those are large aggregate figures. But aggregate figures do not permit the public to trace an individual cargo of crude from offshore loading to sale, payment, deposit and eventual use in the national budget.

Fiscal transparency means more than the release of totals. It requires sufficiently complete public information on revenues, expenditure, liabilities, contracts, projections and the assumptions used to generate official claims. 

The cost-bank question

The Government says that “cost-bank desaturation,” accelerated by high crude prices and rapid development, will significantly increase Guyana’s profit-oil entitlement. Under the Stabroek PSA, contractors may recover costs up to 75 percent of gross revenue, with the remaining profit oil shared between Guyana and the co-venturers.

That makes the cost bank one of the most consequential financial records in the country. If the cost bank is declining, Guyana’s share of profit oil should rise. But the public report does not state the opening cost-bank balance, the closing balance, costs added, costs recovered, disputed costs, disallowed costs, or the monthly cost-oil percentage.

Without that underlying ledger, the public is being asked to accept an extraordinary increase in projected oil income without being shown the arithmetic.

Questions for public answer  

The following questions should be answered publicly and with source documents:

  1. What was the Stabroek Block cost-bank balance on January 1, 2026, and what was its balance on June 30, 2026?
  2. How much was added to the cost bank during the first half of 2026, broken down by project and by cost type?
  3. How much was recovered during each month from January through June 2026?
  4. What was the cost-oil percentage in each month of 2026?
  5. What costs remain under audit, dispute, review or possible disallowance?
  6. What calculations caused Government’s estimate of profit-oil lifts to move from 40 to 84?
  7. What assumptions were used for crude prices, production volumes, project costs and the One Guyana FPSO ramp-up?
  8. What was the realized sale price for every cargo of Guyana’s profit oil?
  9. Who bought each cargo, and what deductions, commissions, marketing fees, freight costs or quality differentials applied?
  10. On what date was each cargo loaded, invoiced, paid for and deposited into the NRF?

The public ledger Guyana needs

Government should publish a searchable, lift-by-lift public ledger covering:

♦FPSO and cargo identification number                                          ♦Loading date and volume in barrels                                                              ♦Buyer or trader                                                                                            ♦Benchmark crude price and realized price                                        ♦Quality differential and all deductions                                                          ♦Invoice date and payment date                                                                      ♦Deposit date into the Natural Resource Fun                                        ♦Royalty calculation                                                                                ♦Applicable cost-oil and profit-oil calculation                                              ♦ The Government’s final revenue from that lift

A government account is most useful when the public can connect money to underlying activity, contracts, outcomes and supporting records—not merely read summary totals.

Closing

Guyana does not need rumors to demand accountability. It needs records. The question is not whether the country is earning more from oil. It plainly is. The question is whether citizens can independently follow every barrel, every payment, every cost-recovery deduction and every dollar transferred into the Natural Resource Fund.

Until the detailed ledger is public, Guyana knows the headline—but not the full story behind it.

Guyana Cannot Cash-Grant Its Way Out of a Cost-of-Living Crisis

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Guyana Cannot Cash-Grant Its Way Out of a Cost-of-Living Crisis

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

When survival takes away human dignity 

Guyana is being asked to celebrate prosperity. We are told that the economy is growing, oil revenues are flowing, new projects are being announced, and billions are available for development.  

But many ordinary Guyanese are asking a simpler question: if the country is so wealthy, why is life becoming harder to afford?

The answer cannot be found only in GDP figures, international praise, glossy infrastructure announcements, or political speeches. It must be found in the market basket, the electricity bill, the minibus fare, the pharmacy receipt, the rent book, and the increasingly difficult choices families make every week.

A country may be richer on paper while its people are poorer in practical terms.

That is the contradiction Guyana must confront.

Food Prices Tell the Story

The Government’s own 2026 Mid-Year Report records that overall consumer prices rose by 4.4 percent between December 2025 and June 2026. Food prices rose even faster—by 6.7 percent. Food was responsible for most of the overall increase in the cost of living, with vegetables and vegetable products making a particularly large contribution to the rise.

That statistic is not abstract.

It means that a family spending GY$100,000 per month on groceries would need roughly GY$6,700 more each month simply to purchase the same food basket. A family spending GY$150,000 per month on food would need approximately GY$10,050 more.

And that is only food.

It does not include transportation, rent, school expenses, uniforms, books, utilities, cooking gas, medication, clothing, mobile-data charges, debt repayments, repairs, or the many emergencies that strike households with little or no savings.

For the family living from paycheck to paycheck, inflation is not a line in a report. It is a smaller bag of groceries. It is less fresh food. It is fewer vegetables, less protein, cheaper substitutes, delayed medical care, unpaid bills, borrowed money, and parents silently going without so children can eat.

That is the real economy.

A Grant Is Relief—Not Security

No reasonable person should deny that the GY$100,000 cash grant is welcome. For many citizens, especially those on low or fixed incomes, it provides immediate breathing room.

But Guyana must be honest about what it is—and what it is not.It is a one-time payment confronting a permanent and rising cost of living.

A grant can buy groceries today. It can help pay a light bill, settle a debt, purchase school items, cover medical expenses, repair a roof, or meet an urgent family obligation. But once it is spent, the household returns to the same market prices, the same bills, and the same income pressures next month.

Cash relief is not the same as economic security.

The issue is not whether citizens appreciate GY$100,000. They do. The issue is whether a household can live with dignity after that GY$100,000 is gone.

If food prices continue rising, if wages do not keep pace, if pensions remain inadequate, if rent and transportation rise, and if young people cannot find stable, decent-paying work, then periodic grants become a substitute for the structural changes families actually need.

Guyana cannot build a durable social contract around citizens waiting for the next transfer.

The Purchasing-Power Question

The GY$100,000 grant should also be examined through the lens of purchasing power.

When a government injects substantial spending into an economy, the benefits do not necessarily reach everyone at the same time or with the same effect. Those closest to large contracts, procurement, construction activity, land transactions, professional services, and expanding commercial opportunities may receive income first. Others—especially pensioners, low-wage earners, informal workers, single-parent households, and the unemployed—may encounter higher prices before their own incomes improve.

This is the distributional concern commonly described through the Cantillon effect: money does not enter an economy evenly. It reaches particular sectors and groups first, and prices can adjust unevenly before ordinary households receive comparable gains. That is why the question is not simply: Did citizens receive GY$100,000?

The deeper questions are:

♦ Who benefits first from oil-financed public expenditure?

♦  Who receives the major contracts, leases, supply opportunities, consultancies, and construction revenues?

♦ Whose wages rise before prices rise?

♦ Who can turn oil-era income into assets—land, property, businesses, imports, and investments?

♦ Who is left receiving fixed salaries, fixed pensions, public assistance, or sporadic work while the cost of living moves ahead?

For many people, the grant may not feel like GY$100,000 in real terms because it arrives in an economy where prices have already risen and where accumulated household needs are waiting to absorb it immediately.

The point is not that every grant has automatically lost 20 percent of its value. That would require careful evidence. The point is that the official inflation average may not capture the lived inflation of poor and working-class households whose spending is concentrated on food, transportation, medicine, rent, and school costs.

Their inflation is personal. It is immediate. And it is often higher than the national average.

Oil Wealth Must Reach the Kitchen Table

Guyana is now an oil-producing country with revenues that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. That fact should transform the quality of life of ordinary people.

It should mean affordable food, reliable public transport, decent housing, functioning hospitals, modern schools, clean water, better roads, greater access to jobs, stronger pensions, meaningful support for persons with disabilities, and a real path to economic independence for young people.

Instead, many citizens still ask whether they can afford a proper meal, a doctor’s visit, transportation to work, school supplies, or the basic necessities of a respectable life. This is not merely an economic contradiction. It is a moral failure of priorities.

Oil wealth must not become a story of rising land values, expanding private fortunes, expensive construction, growing import bills, and elite access—while ordinary citizens receive occasional grants and are told to be grateful. The people must see the national wealth in their daily lives.

Not only at the airport. Not only in the skyline. Not only in contract announcements. Not only in speeches about transformation. They must see it in lower household costs, stable food prices, better-paying work, secure communities, functioning public services, and the ability to live without constant anxiety.

We Need More Than Farmers’ Markets

Efforts to increase local production, reduce farmers’ costs, shorten the distance between producers and consumers, and expand farmers’ markets are worthwhile. But farmers’ markets alone cannot solve a national cost-of-living crisis.

Guyana needs a serious, coordinated affordability strategy—one that measures success not by announcements but by whether the weekly shopping basket becomes more affordable.

That strategy should include:

♦ Clear, regularly published data on the prices of essential foods in every region.

♦ Stronger support for domestic agriculture, storage, irrigation, transportation, agro-processing, and market access.

♦  Greater scrutiny of excessive mark-ups and unexplained gaps between farm-gate, wholesale, and retail prices.

♦ Better consumer protection and transparent pricing for essential goods.

♦ A living-wage strategy that keeps salaries from falling behind the cost of basic life.

♦ Pension and public-assistance levels that reflect food, medicine, utilities, and transportation costs.

♦ Targeted support for single-parent households, persons with disabilities, low-income workers, and families with children.

♦ More stable, affordable housing and transportation options.

♦ Public disclosure of how oil revenues are being converted into long-term social protection and household resilience.

The country has enough resources to do more than manage hardship. It has the resources to reduce it.

 International Influence Must Be Transparent

There is also a legitimate public-interest question about the influence of international institutions, consultants, lenders, and development agencies on Guyana’s public-finance, governance, social-protection, investment, and reform agenda. There is nothing inherently wrong with technical support or international cooperation. Guyana can benefit from expertise, financing, and global partnerships.

But the public has a right to know what advice is being accepted, what policy conditions are being recommended, and whose interests are being protected when major decisions are made.

Are policies being designed primarily around fiscal discipline, investor confidence, institutional reform, and macroeconomic targets?

Or are they being designed first around the lived realities of citizens who must feed children, pay rent, care for elderly relatives, find work, and survive rising prices?

Government should disclose the relevant agreements, policy recommendations, technical-assistance arrangements, and impact assessments that shape major reforms. Transparency is not hostility to development partners. It is respect for the people whose lives are affected by public policy.

The Measure of Success

The Government may point to growing revenues, rising investment, new roads, job statistics, grants, and major development projects.

All of these may matter. But the most important measure of success is still straightforward:

♦ Can ordinary Guyanese afford to live?

♦ Can a working parent feed a family without borrowing every month?  ♦ Can a pensioner buy medication and groceries without choosing one over the other?

♦ Can a young person find stable work that pays enough to build an independent life?

♦ Can a family cope with an emergency without falling into debt?

♦ Can citizens see a future in their own country that is not dependent on political connections, contracts, or periodic cash transfers?

If the answer remains “not for enough people,” then the celebration is premature.

Guyana does not need more lectures telling people to stretch a dollar, plant a kitchen garden, shop smarter, or be satisfied with temporary relief. Citizens are already doing everything they can to survive. What they need is an economy that works for them consistently.

The GY$100,000 grant may help. But it cannot be allowed to become the answer to every question about hardship, inequality, and declining purchasing power. The people deserve more than a cheque.

They deserve an oil-rich Guyana in which prosperity reaches the kitchen table, protects dignity, and gives every family a genuine chance to live—not merely to endure.

 

GPL Proposed Continued Power Cuts Unacceptable

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

GPL Proposed Continued Power Cuts Unacceptable

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026
Guyana is being told to wait another nine months—possibly longer, given the country’s record of delayed major projects—for relief from recurring power outages. That is an extraordinary position for a government overseeing one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.  

GPL’s claim that approximately US $800 million is being invested in generation, transmission and related infrastructure does not erase the immediate reality confronting citizens: blackouts disrupt homes, hospitals, schools, small businesses, manufacturing, construction, food storage, telecommunications and essential services. For families, the burden is physical, financial and psychological. For businesses, it means lost production, damaged equipment, higher fuel costs for standby generators, spoilage, missed deadlines and reduced confidence in expanding operations.

The problem is not simply that electricity infrastructure takes time to build. It does. The deeper issue is whether the government and GPL planned adequately for the explosive rise in demand that accompanied the oil boom, rapid housing expansion, commercial development and increased industrial activity.

Demand reportedly rose from about 125 megawatts in 2020 to a record 242.64 megawatts, while GPL’s customer base grew from roughly 204,000 to 250,000. Those figures should have triggered far earlier and more aggressive investment in firm generation capacity, reserve margins, substations, transmission lines, transformers, distribution upgrades and maintenance planning.

Instead, Guyanese are being asked to accept conservation measures, self-generation by businesses and scheduled interruptions while waiting on projects that should have been planned and sequenced years ago. It is particularly troubling that, even with added capacity from power ships and solar installations, the country remains so vulnerable to outages, equipment failures, network constraints and peak-demand pressures.

Solar additions in Berbice, Essequibo, Linden and other communities are welcome, as are transmission and distribution upgrades. But solar power does not by itself solve the evening peak between 7:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., when demand is highest and solar generation is unavailable. A reliable system requires dependable baseload and dispatchable generation, sufficient reserve capacity, modern transmission infrastructure, upgraded distribution networks, energy storage where appropriate, and transparent maintenance and contingency plans.

The gas-to-energy project may eventually provide a major improvement, but it cannot be used as a substitute for accountability over the present crisis. Citizens need more than broad assurances that conditions will be “significantly alleviated” by June 2027.

They deserve a public, independently verifiable timetable showing:

♦ The generation capacity currently available, including dependable—not merely installed—capacity.

♦ The projected demand growth through 2027 and the reserve margin needed to prevent shortages.

♦ Each transmission, substation and distribution upgrade, its cost, contractor, completion date and expected benefit.

♦ The causes of each major outage, including generation shortfalls, equipment failures, third-party damage and planned maintenance.

♦ The specific measures being taken to protect consumers and businesses until the new projects are completed.

♦ The consequences for contractors and officials when deadlines are missed or infrastructure repeatedly fails.

A nation earning unprecedented oil revenues should not be normalizing prolonged blackouts as an unavoidable growing pain. Energy reliability is not a luxury; it is the foundation for industrialization, job creation, investment, public safety and a decent quality of life.

If the promised relief is still nine months away—and perhaps longer—then the government must acknowledge that this represents a serious planning failure. Guyanese should not have to bear the cost of inadequate foresight while being asked to celebrate record economic growth.

Editor’s Note: US $800Million Is Not a Substitute for Answers

The public has been told that approximately US$800 million is being invested in Guyana’s electricity infrastructure and that blackouts should be “significantly alleviated” by mid-2027. That is not enough.

A figure of this magnitude cannot be used as a public-relations shield while households, workers and businesses continue to suffer the economic, physical and emotional strain of unreliable electricity. Guyanese are entitled to know precisely where this money is going, who is receiving it, what work is being delivered, and when the public can reasonably expect measurable improvement.

At present, the US$800 million claim raises more questions than it answers. Is this sum actual expenditure, approved funding, signed contracts, projected future spending, private-sector investment, borrowing, grants, or a mixture of all these? Does it include solar plants, transmission expansion, substations, transformers, distribution upgrades, maintenance works and emergency generation? How much is assigned to each component?

The distinction matters. A large aggregate figure can create the appearance of decisive action while concealing delayed projects, incomplete works, inflated costs, duplicated announcements or investments that will not directly address the outages now punishing consumers.

GPL and the Government must therefore publish, without delay, a complete project register for every component of the claimed US $800 million investment program. It must identify:

♦ The precise composition of the US $800 million figure, including whether each amount is spent, committed, contracted, financed or merely projected.

♦ Every generation project, its capacity in megawatts, location, contractor, contract value, financing source, commissioning date and actual delivery status.

♦ Every transmission and distribution project, including new lines, substations, transformers, feeders, control systems and network upgrades, with its location, cost, contractor, completion target and expected service benefit.

♦ The amount paid to date, outstanding commitments, cost variations, extensions of time, penalties for delays and all reported cost overruns.

♦ The procurement method used for each contract, together with the names of successful bidders and the basis on which they were selected.

♦ A clear separation between works intended to meet new demand and works needed merely to repair, replace or stabilize an overstretched existing system.

♦ Demand forecasts through 2027,the expected dependable generating capacity, the required reserve margin, and the basis for claiming that outages will be substantially reduced.

♦ A public monthly progress report showing what has been completed, what has slipped, what has changed and who is accountable.

This is neither hostility to investment nor opposition to development. It is a demand for basic stewardship of public resources and respect for electricity consumers. Every blackout has a cost: spoiled food, damaged appliances, interrupted work, lost sales, costly generator fuel, disrupted education, unsafe conditions and mounting frustration.

An oil-rich country cannot credibly ask its people to celebrate unprecedented national wealth while treating dependable electricity as a future aspiration. Nor can it ask citizens to wait quietly until mid-2027, or beyond, based solely on broad assurances and unaudited headline figures.

The public will not be comforted by another large number. It will be comforted by evidence: signed contracts, clear costs, functioning equipment, completed transmission lines, reliable power and accountable officials. Until then, the US $800 million claim remains a number in need of proof.

“The US$800 million program should now be subjected to formal parliamentary scrutiny and, where public funds, state guarantees or state entities are involved, rigorous examination by the Auditor General. Parliament must require a full accounting of the projects, contracts, financing arrangements, expenditure, delays and projected outcomes. The Auditor General must be positioned to determine whether taxpayers and electricity consumers are receiving value for money, whether procurement rules were followed, and whether cost overruns, avoidable delays or weak oversight have compounded the crisis. Guyanese have waited long enough in darkness. They are owed transparency, accountability and a power system that works.

 

The Arithmetic Ali Won’t Say Out Loud

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

ACCOUNTABILITY DESK · FISCAL GOVERNANCE

The Arithmetic Ali Won’t Say Out Loud

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

Guyana borrowed nearly a billion US dollars in six months, debt service jumped 30 percent, and the government’s own mid-year numbers point straight at the US$10.3 billion mark it announced — quietly — back in January

 The Ministry of Finance’s Mid-Year Report for 2026 is, on its face, a technical document. Tables of creditor shares, ratios of domestic to external debt, a paragraph on T-bill issuance. It is not written to be alarming. It does not need to be. The number does the work: Guyana’s Public and Publicly Guaranteed debt stood at US$8,573.1 million at the end of June 2026, up from US$7.7 billion at the close of 2025 — a jump of nearly one billion US dollars in a single half-year.

That is not a projection. It is not an opposition estimate, or a Kaieteur News calculation, or a number pulled from an IMF working paper. It is the government’s own account of its own borrowing, published by the same Finance Minister who has spent the better part of a decade telling Guyanese that debt sustainability is the one metric on which this administration cannot be faulted.

THE NUMBER NOBODY ANNOUNCED TWICE

Dr. Ashni Singh told Parliament in January, during the Budget 2026 presentation, that PPG debt had reached US$7.7 billion at the end of 2025. What he did not dwell on; and what this publication had to report separately — is that government’s own financing plan for 2026 was already designed to carry that figure to US$10.3 billion by year’s end. The IMF’s Article IV concluding statement in August confirmed the trajectory and blessed it: risk of debt distress “low,” borrowing strategy “prudent.”

Six months into the year, the mid-year numbers show the country roughly one-third of the way to that US$10.3 billion marker, on pace, arithmetically, to land close to it. Nobody in government has said so plainly. The figure exists in a budget document, in an IMF statement, and now in a mid-year report — three separate publications that, read together, describe a single line rising toward a target that was never put to the public as a number to watch.

A government that wants credit for prudence does not get to keep the total off the podium.

DEBT SERVICE OUTPACED THE DEBT ITSELF

The more telling figure in the mid-year report is not the stock of debt but the cost of carrying it. Guyana spent US$145.7 million servicing debt in the first half of 2026, against US$110 million in the same period last year — a 30 percent increase, comfortably outpacing the roughly 11 percent growth in the debt stock itself over the same stretch. External debt service alone came to US$101.5 million; domestic service added US$44.2 million.

Debt service rising faster than debt is the arithmetic of a portfolio shifting toward costlier terms, not merely a larger one. The mid-year report itself shows why: bilateral creditors’ share of external PPG debt climbed from 30.1 percent at the end of 2025 to 33.6 percent by June 2026, while the multilateral share — historically the more concessional lending Singh has told LatinFinance and the Commonwealth Secretariat he prefers — fell from 64 to 61.5 percent.

Guyana is not simply borrowing more. It is borrowing on somewhat harder terms than a year ago, even as officials continue to invoke the concessional-financing pitch as though the mix has not moved.

US$8.57B

TOTAL PPG DEBT

end of June 2026

 ≈US$0.9B

H1 DEBT GROWTH

vs. US$7.7B, Dec 2025

 +30%

DEBT SERVICE, H1

US$145.7M vs US$110M

THE SUSTAINABILITY SCRIPT, ON REPEAT

None of this is being denied by government — it is simply not being framed as a single, continuous story. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has followed Singh’s public accounting of debt since his earliest budget presentations: the debt-to-GDP ratio, always cited against 1991’s catastrophic 600-plus percent, always improving in relative terms even as the absolute dollar figure climbs. It is true, and it has been true for over a decade, that Guyana’s debt burden looks nothing like it did in 1992.

It is also true that comparing today’s borrowing to a collapsed economy from thirty-four years ago tells the public almost nothing about whether this year’s US$1 billion increase, or next year’s push toward US$10.3 billion, is being spent, allocated, and governed with the discipline the word

The IDB’s own Caribbean Economics Quarterly, cited approvingly by government this year, is more precise than the government’s own messaging: Guyana’s total debt ratio rose from 24.3 percent in 2024 to 28.6 percent in 2025, external debt’s share of that total climbed to 56.3 percent, and — the detail that tends not to make it into press releases — capital expenditure as a share of GDP fell for the first time since oil production began, from 11.5 to 10.2 percent.

Debt is rising. Capital spending, the thing borrowing is nominally for, is not rising with it.—(read again)

WHAT THE REPORT DOES NOT ANSWER

A mid-year report is an accounting instrument, not an accountability instrument. It tells readers what was borrowed and from whom, in aggregate. It does not tell them which specific projects the new billion dollars financed, whether procurement on those projects followed the disclosure standards this publication has had to demand project by project — the Development Bank Bill’s unchecked ministerial discretion, the Kimbia facility’s unverified anchor producer, the Wales Gas-to-Energy overruns; or whether the debt ceiling Parliament raised to accommodate this borrowing was debated with the scrutiny US$40 billion, or US$10 billion, or any of these figures deserve.

Guyana is entitled to borrow. Oil-backed states borrow against future revenue as a matter of course, and multilateral lenders would not extend concessional financing to a country they judged reckless. The complaint here is not that the government is borrowing. It is that the government wants the public to hear “sustainable” and “prudent” on a loop, while the year-over-year arithmetic — a billion in six months, debt service up 30 percent, the concessional share shrinking — is left to Kaieteur, to the Ministry’s own quarterly filings, and now to this publication, to assemble into a single picture.

— The Board