592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

ENERGY & ACCOUNTABILITY

Three Refineries, Not One: The Case Against Guyana’s Binary Refinery Debate

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar–September 2026

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 A DEBATE BUILT ON A SHARED, UNEXAMINED PREMISE

Kaieteur News reported this week that energy expert Marta Jara;  a non-resident fellow at the Institute of the Americas, former president of Uruguay’s national oil company ANCAP, and a former Shell executive — has cautioned Guyana against President Irfaan Ali’s stated ambition for a 30,000 barrel-per-day refinery. Her advice, in essence: go big or go home. Jara argues that some studies place the economic threshold for an efficient refinery at around 100,000 barrels per day, and that if Guyana is serious about refining as a business, it should be evaluating a world-scale facility of 300,000 to 500,000 barrels per day — oriented toward export, not merely domestic supply.

Jara is not wrong on the economics she is describing. Refining behaves like a commodity business; scale genuinely is a value driver; and a small, domestically-oriented facility built purely to hedge against import dependence will carry a very different cost structure than a export-scale plant competing on global product margins. Her caution is a legitimate contribution to a debate that, until now, has mostly consisted of the President restating his intentions at press conferences without ever publishing a feasibility case.

But the argument that has taken shape in public — small versus large, 30,000 versus 300,000 — accepts a premise that nobody has actually interrogated: that Guyana’s refining capacity, whatever its ultimate scale, should be built at a single site. That premise deserves the same scrutiny Jara has brought to scale. On both cost grounds and logistics grounds, it does not hold up as the obvious choice, and there is a substantial, well-documented alternative — modular, distributed refining capacity — that neither Ali’s framing nor Jara’s rebuttal has considered in public.

THE ONE DEAL GUYANA ACTUALLY SIGNED TELLS ITS OWN STORY

It is worth being precise about what currently exists on paper, because public reporting ; including this week’s Kaieteur piece — has repeatedly blurred the distinction between a refinery and what Guyana actually contracted for. In February 2025, President Ali announced a partnership with Arkansas-based Curlew Midstream. It was never a refinery deal. It was a bulk fuel storage and trading arrangement — a facility to hold 750,000 barrels of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and heavy fuel oil, built around a “Fuel Exchange Agreement” for imported, U.S.-refined product, with an initial investment of at least US$300 million.

That deal has not closed. It missed its 2025 year-end target. Court filings in Florida, first reported by the Nashville Banner and later by Stabroek News, allege that former Tennessee Congressman Mark Green and lobbyist-attorney Marc Hebert; who had previously represented a Curlew-linked entity — used confidential information from that relationship to stand up a competing venture, Prosimos, in April 2025, around the same time the pair allegedly suggested in a Washington meeting that they could influence whether Curlew secured the agreement. A second, separate Florida suit, filed by IET Systems founder Donald Gantt against a former employee, also names Curlew Holdings and its CEO as defendants — but that case centres on a diverted Starlink communications proposal, not the fuel deal, and should not be conflated with it.

As of March 2026, President Ali told reporters discussions with Curlew were continuing through the government’s legal team; as of the most recent reporting, construction has not begun and no revised agreement has been finalized. Eighteen months after the announcement, Guyana has neither a refinery nor a functioning storage deal — and the single point of failure inherent in a one-project, one-partner strategy is no longer theoretical. It has already cost the country a year and a half.

 THE MODULAR CASE, BY THE NUMBERS

Modular refineries are an established, regulated category in the industry — not a theoretical alternative. Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Petroleum Resources, which has built the most developed regulatory framework for this technology anywhere in the hemisphere, defines a modular refinery as a facility built on skid-mounted modules ranging from roughly 5,000 to 30,000 barrels per day; anything designed above that threshold is reclassified as a conventional refinery.                       The economics, drawn from peer-reviewed analysis of Nigeria’s downstream sector, are stark when set against a single large-scale facility.

Metric	One Conventional Refinery (-100,000bpd)	Three Modular x 30,000bpd*90,000 bpd
Total Cost	USD  1.5 billion +	~ USD 750 Million (250m each)
Const.Timeline	3-8 years	18- 24 months per unit
Net Payback Time	18+ years	2-5 years
Failure Exposure	Total Supply loss on shutdown	Two thirds capacity survives a single- site  outage
Location Logic	One location serving  entire country	One each-Berbice ,Demerara, Essequibo -Decentralized

Sources: Olaniyi, “Developing Modular Refineries in the Downstream Sub-Sector of the Nigerian Petroleum Industry,” International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology, Vol. 11, Issue 3 (2022); current 2026 modular refinery vendor pricing data.

The capital comparison is the headline, but the resilience argument matters just as much for a country with Guyana’s infrastructure record. Nigeria’s own literature on this makes the case plainly: rather than having one conventional refinery meet the demand of an entire country or region, in which any shutdown — mechanical failure, force majeure, sabotage — halts the whole supply, several modular units allow the others to keep operating when one goes down.

For a country whose most recent domestic transport disaster is the still-unresolved MV Barima ferry sinking, and whose varied  construction has spent 2026 alternating between  delays  and an outright  suspension, that is not an abstract engineering preference. It is the single most concrete argument in this entire debate, and it is the one argument Jara’s centralization case cannot answer.

SIZING THE REAL QUESTION: WHAT DOES GUYANA ACTUALLY CONSUME?

Any serious siting debate has to start with demand, and here the numbers cut against both existing proposals more than either side has acknowledged. Guyana consumed an estimated 26,760 barrels per day of oil and petroleum products in 2024 — essentially flat against 2023 — split roughly across distillate fuel oil (48.2 percent), motor gasoline (26.2 percent), and residual fuel oil (18.7 percent). Gasoil made up 23 percent of 2023 petroleum imports and finished gasoline 15 percent, confirming diesel as the dominant product the country actually needs refined.

That figure is worth sitting with. Even a single 30,000 bpd facility, run at full utilization, would already exceed the entirety of Guyana’s domestic consumption. Jara’s own cited economic threshold — 100,000 bpd — is nearly four times national demand. Her recommendation, understood honestly, is not a domestic energy security proposal at all; it is an export strategy, dependent on regional and international product markets Guyana has no existing footprint in. That is a legitimate ambition, and this piece does not dismiss it. But it answers a different question than the one Ali’s 30,000 bpd figure was originally posed to answer, and the public debate has conflated the two.

Three 30,000 bpd modular units sited across the country’s three historic counties — Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo — would together total 90,000 bpd: comfortably above domestic demand, built for security and price insulation rather than export volume, distributed against the country’s actual distribution infrastructure, and, per the cost table above, achievable for roughly half the capital of a single plant at even a third of that combined capacity.

THREE SITES, WEIGHED HONESTLY

Demerara — the anchor.

A Demerara-sited unit serves the country’s largest population and industrial demand center and plugs directly into the existing retail distribution backbone. Guyana’s three major fuel distributors; Guyana Oil Company, Sol Petroleum and Rubis — already operate nationally, with GuyOil alone running more than 50 stations. This is the one leg of the model that requires no new infrastructure bet of any kind; it rides entirely on capacity that already exists.

Berbice — real domestic case, conditional cross-border upside.

A Berbice unit would serve Region 6 demand directly and speak to Region Ten’s documented and repeated power shortfalls in Linden — the same shortfall that has, this year, required the Bosai Mineral Groups Company Inc.  to donate generators to fill a gap the state itself has not closed. On its own domestic terms, this leg needs no further justification.

The cross-border trade case for this leg; the one raised in this debate as a possible extension into Suriname — is real but considerably more conditional than the Essequibo leg below, and it should be reported as such rather than assumed. Guyana currently imports US$96.2 million in refined mineral fuels and oils from Suriname, meaning the existing trade flow across the Corentyne runs in the opposite direction from what a Berbice refinery’s export ambitions would require; any near-term case here is import-substitution, not new market capture.

The physical link that would eventually make a larger cross-border case real — the proposed 3.1-kilometre Corentyne River Bridge between Moleson Creek and South Drain, a roughly US$236 million, 100-year-design-life crossing — remains unbuilt. As of mid-2026, Suriname’s government announced it would finance and build the bridge unilaterally, a claim Guyana’s Foreign Ministry formally and publicly rejected; construction has not started and no financing agreement has been finalized. In the meantime, the ferry alternative, the MV Canawaima, has been suspended since August 22, 2026 over safety deficiencies. A Berbice modular refinery is fully justified on Region 6 and Region 10 grounds alone. Its Suriname trade upside should be understood as a future option contingent on a bilateral dispute this newsroom cannot predict the resolution of — not as a pillar of the present case.

Essequibo / Rupununi — the strongest and most underreported leg.

This is the site the current public debate has entirely missed, and it is the one with the clearest evidence behind it. Guyana is building, with its own oil revenue and largely on its own initiative, a 680-kilometre highway from Georgetown to Lethem on the Brazilian border — a project industry estimates could cut freight time to the Panama Canal route by eight to ten days by giving Brazil’s northern state of Roraima a shorter path to the Atlantic than the existing Amazon River route through Manaus. Roraima’s exports to Guyana have grown from roughly US$1.6 million in 2018 to somewhere between US$36 million and US$50 million by 2024–2026, depending on the source consulted; a more than twenty-two-fold increase in six years.

In February 2026, Roraima’s state government, Guyana’s national government, and TriStar — which now manages Guyana’s new, Panamax-capable deep-water port — signed a memorandum of understanding to formalize the relationship.

A modular refinery sited to serve this corridor would not be betting on speculative demand. It would be positioning to supply the return leg of a trade relationship that is already growing rapidly in one direction — Brazilian goods flowing into Guyana — with refined fuel product as the commodity flowing back. That is a materially stronger evidentiary case than anything offered for either the 30,000 bpd or 300,000 bpd proposal currently on the table, and no public official on either side of this debate has raised it. The honest caveats: no cross-border cargo treaty yet exists to govern trade of any kind along this corridor, fuel included, and a stretch of the Guyanese side of the highway remains unpaved. Both are solvable in the same window the refinery itself would take to build.

THE HINTERLAND LEG: A PLAUSIBLE CASE THE STATE HAS NO DATA TO SUPPORT

A fourth possibility raised in the course of this newsroom’s reporting deserves an honest accounting rather than a confident claim either way. Region Seven — Cuyuni-Mazaruni — produces an estimated 70 percent of Guyana’s gold output, and Bartica, at the confluence of the Essequibo, Mazaruni and Cuyuni rivers, is the established fuel and supply chokepoint for the country’s interior mining sector, a role it has held for more than a century. The qualitative case for a hinterland-sited modular unit; proximity to an existing high-diesel-consumption industry, an established river-and-road logistics network already centered on Bartica — is genuinely plausible.

It is also, at present, entirely unquantifiable. No published data exists; not from the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, not from the Guyana Energy Agency, not from any other public source this news-media could locate — breaking down diesel or fuel consumption by the mining industry. The Guyana Energy Agency’s Energy and Energy Statistics Division tracks petroleum import volumes at the national level only. There is no regional or district disaggregation of any kind.

This news-media is not prepared to cost a fourth refinery site on a plausibility argument alone, and readers should treat this section as exactly that — a plausibility argument, not a proposal. But the absence of the data itself is worth stating in its own right: a government that has spent eighteen months unable to close a single fuel storage deal, and that has offered no feasibility study for either refinery proposal now before the public, also does not track — or at least does not publish — the basic consumption data that would let anyone outside the Ministry of Natural Resources site a fourth facility responsibly. That is not a footnote. It is the same failure of institutional capacity running underneath the entire debate.

WHAT THIS ARGUMENT IS NOT

This is not a rebuttal of Marta Jara’s underlying economics. A world-scale, export-oriented refinery of 300,000 to 500,000 barrels per day, competing on Caribbean and northern South American product markets, may well be a sound long-term ambition for a country producing close to 900,000 barrels of crude per day and rising. Nothing in the distributed model argued for here forecloses that possibility, and the two are not, in principle, mutually exclusive — a country could pursue domestic-security modular capacity now while separately evaluating an export-scale mega-project on its own timeline, its own financing, and its own feasibility study.

What this argument does reject is the framing that has dominated the public conversation since Kaieteur’s report — that Guyana’s only live choice is between one small plant and one large plant, both sited wherever the government’s negotiating partner of the moment happens to propose. On cost, on build time, on resilience, and on the actual geography of Guyana’s demand and trade relationships, that framing has never been defended. It has only been assumed.

 WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES HERE

• The Ministry of Natural Resources and the Guyana Energy Agency should publish a regional and district-level breakdown of petroleum product consumption and imports — the absence of this data is not a technical oversight; it is a precondition failure for any rational siting decision, distributed or centralized.
• Any renewed negotiation with Curlew Midstream, or any successor arrangement, should be conducted and disclosed with the transparency the current 18-month record has conspicuously lacked, given that the collapse of that single deal is now the subject of active federal litigation in the United States.
• Before either the 30,000 bpd or the 300,000–500,000 bpd proposal advances further, the government owes the public a comparative feasibility study that at minimum weighs the distributed modular alternative on its own terms — not as an afterthought to a decision effectively already made in press-conference remarks.
• The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission should be pressed, specifically, on whether it tracks — even internally — fuel consumption data for the country’s mining districts, and if so, why that data has not been made public.

None of this requires Guyana to choose smallness. It requires Guyana to choose deliberately — on the basis of where its people, its industries, and its fastest-growing trade relationships actually are, rather than on the basis of whichever number was most recently floated at a conference podium.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 The Success Story They Didn’t Think We’d Read Twice

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Record Feedstock, Imported Chicken, and the Question of Who Actually Benefits

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

The Ministry of Finance’s 2026 Midyear Report, released Monday, tells a clean story: 7,800 acres of soya bean and 1,316 acres of corn cultivated in the first half of the year; 3,450 tonnes of soya bean and 4,008 tonnes of corn produced — a combined 7,458 tonnes of feedstock the Government credits with delivering “a major boost to the livestock industry.” A drying and storage facility at Ebini, the first of its kind in the country, is offered as the physical proof: three silos at 3,000 tonnes each, an 80-tonne-per-hour drying tower, over 40 kilometres of new road into the Berbice River interior.

It is, on its face, a success story. It was written to be read once, as one.

WHAT THE DOCUMENTS SHOW

On January 26, 2026, the Guyana Customs & Excise Department’s Lethem Branch Office recorded a Single Administrative Document for 100 metric tons of crude, non-degummed soyabean oil, imported from North Link Brazil Ltda of Boa Vista, Roraima, consigned to Royal Chicken Inc. at Lot 60, Garden of Eden, East Bank Demerara. Customs value: GY$29,815,500.

Two weeks later, on February 9, 2026, the Guyana Revenue Authority approved a tax exemption for Royal Chicken Inc. covering 1,500 tons of soyabean meal, against Commercial Invoice No. 003/2026, from the same Brazilian exporter. The letter — addressed to General Manager Rasheed Baksh and signed for the Commissioner-General by Gavin Low; was copied to the Comptroller of Customs, Excise & Trade Operations, the Deputy Commissioner of Law Enforcement & Investigation, and the Auditor General.

Royal Chicken Inc. is not a bystander to Guyana’s domestic feedstock programme. It is a named member of the Tacama Gold Incorporated consortium — the same public-private structure, chaired by Bounty Farm’s David Fernandes, that received the same order of government infrastructure investment this newsroom  has tracked since 2023, built on the same justification now repeated in the Midyear Report: reducing Guyana’s roughly US$25-30 million annual poultry feed import bill.

This news desk  reported the contradiction in real time. “Subsidised Soya, Exported Feed, Imported Chicken,” published April 30, 2026, laid out what the Brazil shipments meant: a company sitting inside the domestic-production consortium was simultaneously importing the very input that consortium’s silos exist to supply.

Five months later, on September 7, this news desk  reported a second, related anomaly: the Guyana Marketing Corporation — a statutory body whose own mandate, by its own website, has been confined since 1985 to market facilitation, research, and export development for Guyanese producers, not buying and selling — was documented distributing imported Brazilian chicken to Guyanese consumers. The packaging carried no English label, in apparent conflict with the Food and Drug Regulations’ Regulation 18 and with the labelling standards cited in the U.S. International Trade Administration’s own Guyana market guidance. The imported product was reported selling below the price of the local chicken it was nominally meant to supplement. GMC’s involvement was never explained as anything other than an unspecified “temporary” intervention to “stabilize prices,” with no stated duration and no stated safeguard for local producers.

The Midyear Report, published a week and a half later, does not mention either finding. It reports the tonnage. It does not report who used it, who didn’t, why a consortium member was buying 1,600 tons of Brazilian soya product in the same window the domestic programme was supposedly ramping toward the harvest it now claims, or why the country’s own agricultural marketing corporation was simultaneously retailing the imported end product that programme exists to displace.

THE ARITHMETIC THE REPORT LEAVES OUT

Put the government’s own numbers next to each other:

— Domestic feedstock produced, H1 2026 (Ministry of Finance): 7,458 tonnes (3,450t soya + 4,008t corn)

— Feedstock imported by a consortium member, Jan–Feb 2026 alone (GRA/Customs): approximately 1,600 tons (1,500 tons soyabean meal + 100 metric tons soyabean oil)

— Chicken currently being imported (per this newsroom’s ongoing market reporting): 300,000 lbs weekly

— Imported chicken publicly documented moving through a state marketing agency (this newsroom , Sept. 7, 2026): unlabelled, Brazilian-sourced, priced below local product

The Government’s framing asks readers to accept that a record domestic harvest, a purpose-built storage-and-drying facility, and a consortium of established poultry producers have together boosted “the livestock industry”;

If the domestic programme is working as described, neither the feedstock import nor the GMC chicken distribution was necessary. If it is not working as described, the Midyear Report’s production figures are not being converted into the meat supply they are credited with supporting — and the state’s own marketing corporation has been quietly filling the gap with the exact imported product the programme was built to eliminate.

Either reading contradicts the report as published. Neither was addressed in it.

On August 11, 2026, the Department of Public Information reported Minister Zulfikar Mustapha meeting with the Private Sector Commission on a “poultry market stabilisation measure” — an acknowledgment, however indirect, that the poultry market required stabilising at all. That meeting came three months after this newsroom  had published the feedstock import documentation, four weeks before this publication  published the GMC findings, and five weeks before the Ministry of Finance would publish a harvest tonnage it now credits with resolving the problem.

WHO BENEFITED

The public investment in this programme is not in dispute: infrastructure at Ebini and Tacama Landing, over 40 kilometres of road, a drying and storage facility described as the first of its kind in Guyana, all funded and built to the same figure — $1.2 billion — that recurs across the Ministry’s agro-processing announcements. The stated beneficiary of that investment was always the same: Guyanese consumers, through lower feed costs and, eventually, lower meat prices.

The documentary record this newsroom  holds shows a different beneficiary in at least two instances — a consortium member permitted to import its raw material tax-exempt from Brazil, and a state marketing corporation caught retailing imported Brazilian chicken below the local price, while the government’s own report credits the domestic programme’s footprint with a record harvest. The chicken on the shelf did not get cheaper across the board. The 300,000 lbs arriving weekly did not stop.

And the institution mandated to build markets for Guyanese produce was, by its own conduct, building one for someone else’s.

The Ministry published tonnage. It did not publish where that tonnage went, who processed it, what it fed, why the consortium built to end feed imports was, by its own government’s paperwork, still running them in the same half-year the report now presents as vindication, or why GMC’s own retail operation was moving the imported product that same programme exists to make unnecessary.

This newsroom  is submitting formal queries to the Ministry of Agriculture, the Guyana Revenue Authority, the Guyana Marketing Corporation, and Royal Chicken Inc. asking:

What became of the 7,458 tons credited to the first half of 2026; whether any of it reached Royal Chicken or another Tacama consortium member?

Why a tax exemption for Brazilian soya inputs was granted to a company positioned, on paper, to draw from a domestic supply the Government says it was simultaneously producing?

Under what authority, and for how long, GMC’s mandate has extended to the retail distribution of un-labelled imported chicken?

They published a success story assuming no one would check the receipts against it. The receipts — customs declarations, tax exemption letters, and a photograph of Portuguese packaging on a Guyanese shelf — say otherwise.

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The 592 Guardian has published the underlying GRA exemption letter, Customs import declaration, and GMC imported-chicken findings referenced in this piece. Queries to the Ministry of Agriculture, GRA, GMC, and Royal Chicken Inc. were outstanding at time of publication; responses will be published in full when received.

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Forgotten Ledger

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OPINION BY : Hem Kumar– September 2026

Who Guyana’s New Social Contract Is Actually For

 An essay circulated recently by Open Society under the title “Africa’s Democratic Awakening” makes an observation that ought to unsettle anyone paying honest attention to Guyana. The essay’s argument is structural: across much of Africa, the people who govern and the people who are governed belong, increasingly, to different generations, different economic realities, and different political imaginations entirely. The gap is not incidental. It is, the essay argues, the mechanism by which democracy stops delivering and starts merely presiding.

Guyana does not have Africa’s gerontocracy problem in its literal form. Our ruling class is not, on the whole, elderly relative to the population it governs. But the underlying diagnosis transfers with uncomfortable precision once the axis is shifted from age to access.

The divide here is not primarily who is old and who is young — it is who has been permitted a claim on the nation’s new wealth, and who has been quietly instructed, through years of accumulated disappointment, to expect nothing.

 A WEALTH BOOM WITH NO BOTTOM RUNG

This publication has documented, in its ongoing examination of the new bourgeoisie forming around Guyana’s oil economy, a phenomenon without precedent in the nation’s history: the creation — within a single decade of a distinct, visible, politically adjacent wealthy class, layered atop a social structure that had been, since the colonial era, functionally flat. Guyana was a working nation. Whatever else could be said of the hardship built into that history, it did not, until now, produce a domestic aristocracy of the kind now consolidating around party hierarchy, favored contractors, and their extended circles.

The point of that investigation was never simply that some individuals had grown wealthy while the resource boom unfolded around them — wealth accumulation during a boom is not, on its own, an accountability story. The point was distributional: that the enabling conditions of the boom — access to permits, contracts, financing, land, and the state’s discretionary machinery — were made available to a narrow band of the politically connected, while the working population whose historical claim on the nation is oldest and deepest was offered growth statistics in place of a share.

The system’s incapacity to verify how this wealth was acquired is not a footnote to the story. It is the story.

That framing — the system’s incapacity to verify, rather than a direct allegation of theft; remains the more defensible claim, and the more damning one.

A state that cannot or will not produce the disclosure trail for how its favored class acquired what it holds is a state that has already decided whose accumulation gets scrutinized and whose does not.

THE CLASS OPEN SOCIETY’S ESSAY ASKS US TO REMEMBER

What the Open Society essay gets right — and what ought to reorient the conversation here — is its insistence that the answer to elite capture is not better elites.

It is the deliberate, structural inclusion of the class of people who have been treated as peripheral to politics entirely: the market vendor, the rural farmer, the hinterland resident, the informal-sector worker, the young person with no party card and no family name that opens doors

The essay calls this constituency into the center of its argument precisely because every other account of democratic renewal tends to leave them out — as beneficiaries, perhaps, someday, but never as authors of the terms.

This is the demographic Guyana’s own political discourse has almost entirely forgotten. Budget speeches gesture at them. Ministerial visits photograph them. But the architecture of opportunity — the financing instruments, the procurement pipelines, the land allocations, the permitting decisions; routes around them as a matter of course, not as a matter of malice so much as habit.

They were never expected to be participants in the new economy. They were expected to be its audience.

A genuine bottom-up approach would mean something more specific than the language of “inclusion” that now decorates every government communiqué. It would mean deliberately re-engineering access: financing structures a market vendor or small farmer could actually qualify for; procurement set-asides that survive contact with the discretionary machinery this publication has documented elsewhere; land and resource allocation processes that do not require a political relationship to navigate. Ubuntu, the philosophy the Open Society essay invokes — I am because you are — is not a slogan available only to African contexts.

It is a direct rebuke to a Guyanese oil economy organized, so far, on the opposite premise: that the nation’s new wealth belongs first to those already positioned to receive it

RESIGNATION IS THE REAL OBSTACLE

But structural exclusion is only half of what needs naming. The other half is quieter and, in some respects, more corrosive: the resignation that has settled over the excluded class itself. Guyana’s forgotten demographic is not, for the most part, in open revolt against its exclusion.

It has, in large measure, stopped expecting anything different. That is a distinct and more dangerous condition than anger. Anger organizes. Resignation dissolves.

This quiet acceptance did not arrive by accident. It is the accumulated residue of decades in which promises of inclusion were made and not kept, in which each new administration’s version of a “new direction” produced the same distributional pattern as the last, and in which the working population learned, reasonably, that its expectations were the variable most likely to be disappointed. Despair of this kind is rational. It is also, from the standpoint of anyone who benefits from the current arrangement, extremely convenient.

A population that has stopped asking does not need to be denied. It denies itself the trouble of asking.

If there is a democratic awakening available to Guyana in the sense the Open Society essay describes elsewhere on the continent, it will not begin with another ministry initiative or another glossy consultation roadshow of the kind this publication has already catalogued and found wanting. It will begin with the much harder work of persuading a demoralized population that its claim on the nation’s wealth is legitimate, current, and worth asserting again — and it will require political and civic actors willing to build the access structures that make that assertion actionable rather than symbolic.

The forgotten ledger this editorial takes its title from is not a metaphor for missing financial records, though those exist too, and this publication has spent considerable effort trying to locate them.

It is the ledger of who was counted in when Guyana’s oil wealth began to be distributed, and who was quietly left off the page. Closing that gap — not managing it, not photographing it, closing it — is the precondition for any social contract Guyana might credibly call new.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

  The Reversion That Wasn’t

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

How Government Paid GY$400 Million for a Bridge It Was Owed for Free

On September 12, 2026, the Official Gazette carried a notice few Guyanese will have read past the headline. Berbice Bridge Company Inc. Secretary Amarnauth Singh disclosed that the company’s members had passed a special resolution on August 21 to wind up the concessionaire. Nine days later, chartered accountant Raan Motilall was named liquidator. On Wednesday, former board chairman Paul Cheong confirmed to Demerara Waves what the paperwork had already signaled: the bridge was handed to government, and government paid GY$400 million for it.

The number deserves more scrutiny than a single confirming quote from a former chairman. This board has examined the origin of that figure, the process — or absence of one — by which it was reached, and the twenty-year record of a company whose relationship with the Guyanese state has never once been a simple story of infrastructure delivered. 

Our finding: GY$400 million is not a valuation. It is a refund in full.

AN ASSET BUILT ON OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY

The Berbice River Bridge cost approximately GY$8 billion to construct between 2006 and 2008. The capital structure behind that construction has been a matter of public record for over a decade, and has never seriously been disputed even by the deal’s defenders: private equity accounted for only GY$400 million of the total — between five and sixteen percent of financing, depending on which year’s disclosure is consulted.

The remainder was debt and preferred stock, much of it underwritten by the state’s own National Insurance Scheme.

The original GY$400 million equity register read as follows: New GPC-Ramroop Group-Queens Atlantic held 40 percent (GY$160 million); Secure International Finance Company held 20 percent (GY$80 million); the National Insurance Scheme held 20 percent (GY$80 million) in ordinary equity, separate from its far larger preferred-share exposure; Hand-in-Hand Group held 10 percent (GY$40 million); and Demerara Contractors Limited held the remaining 10 percent (GY$40 million), a stake later absorbed by government through means this board could not independently verify from the public record.

By 2015, Kaieteur News had already documented the structural peculiarity that followed from this arrangement: equity holders controlling barely five percent of the company’s total financing exercised majority control of it, through a Special Share mechanism concentrated in the hands of two entities — New GPC, whose principal Dr. Ranjisinghi “Bobby” Ramroop was reported to have close relations to then-President Bharrat Jagdeo, and Hand-in-Hand Trust Corporation. Between them, these two entities controlled fifty percent of a company financed almost entirely by public and quasi-public debt.

That same year, then-Finance Minister Winston Jordan told the National Assembly that NIS had lost GY$1.8 billion on the bridge between 2009 and 2015 alone, on top of further investment he described on the record as “reckless” and “criminal.” A Finance Minister of Guyana called this company’s financial architecture criminal in Parliament. That assessment did not originate with this board, and it did not originate with an opposition critic with an axe to grind — it came from inside government, under a different administration, years before the wind-up now under examination.

TWENTY YEARS WAS THE DEAL

The Berbice Bridge Company’s concession ran twenty-one years from June 2006, under a Build-Own-Operate-Transfer structure. The entire premise of a BOOT arrangement is the transfer: private capital tolerates the risk of construction and early operation in exchange for a defined window of toll revenue, after which the asset reverts to the public that ultimately absorbed the risk of underwriting it. Multiple accounts of the concession’s terms — including a 2024 letter to Guyana Chronicle from a technocrat who worked on the bridge’s original execution under the Jagdeo presidency — place reversion at 2027 or 2028. The company’s own public messaging has never disputed this.

In October 2018, BBCI tested the limits of that arrangement. Facing government resistance to a proposed 265 percent toll increase, the company offered a trade: withdraw the toll hike in exchange for a nineteen-year extension of the concession, effectively doubling its life to 2045. Then-Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo did not equivocate. “That bridge is supposed to come back to us — government — free of cost in twenty years,” he told a press conference. “To give it back to the shareholders for another twenty years, it’s unbelievable.” He called the extension request unjustifiable and the company’s toll increase indefensible, and he separately criticized the Patterson-era government’s unilateral seizure of bridge operations as “nothing but political” — a position that, taken as a whole, reflects a man who considered both the company’s shareholders and the government of the day capable of treating the bridge as a political instrument rather than public infrastructure.

The extension was never granted. The concession’s clock kept running.

2026: THE YEAR THE BRIDGE WAS OWED TO GUYANA

Eight years after Jagdeo insisted the bridge would revert “free of cost,” and in the very window multiple sources place as the concession’s natural expiry, his government — with Jagdeo now serving as Vice President — paid the shareholders of that same company GY$400 million rather than allow the concession to lapse.

The defense offered in advance, by government-aligned commentator Joel Bhagwandin in a February 17, 2026 letter published across Guyana Times and iNews, is instructive less for what it argues than for what it inadvertently concedes. Bhagwandin’s case for acquisition rests on a comparison between the cost of continued toll subsidy and the cost of retiring the company’s debt and settling shareholder claims. It is a defensible economic argument in the abstract. But Bhagwandin himself states, in his own letter, that he is working “without the benefit of the most recent financial statements (2024 or 2025)” — falling back instead on 2020 figures, which he acknowledges do not reflect the company’s actual recent performance. A defender of the acquisition, writing seven months before government paid a single dollar, had no current financial statements to work from.

Nor does Bhagwandin’s own arithmetic produce GY$400 million. His model contemplates retiring roughly GY$5 billion in company debt (as of the 2020 statements), settling preference shares, and negotiating a residual “terminal payment” to common shareholders whose position he describes as weakened by an accumulated deficit of some GY$1.65 billion. That is not a model that outputs a clean GY$400 million payment to shareholders. It is a model for a considerably more complicated settlement — one this board has found no public evidence was ever actually conducted.

New GPC—Ramroop’s GY$160 million, Secure International’s GY$80 million, NIS’s GY$80 million, Hand-in-Hand’s GY$40 million, and the remaining GY$40 million once held by Demerara Contractors Limited(NICIL). Eighteen years of toll revenue, extracted from Guyanese motorists at rates this newsroom’s readers will recall as the highest of any bridge crossing in the country, appear nowhere in the final number. Neither does any independent assessment of what a 1.57-kilometre floating bridge — however aged, however soon to be superseded by the new high-span crossing already under procurement — might actually be worth in 2026.

WHO WAS PAID, AND WHO DECIDED

No Cabinet paper on this transaction has been made public. No National Procurement and Tender Administration Board notice has surfaced. No independent valuator  or auditor has been named in connection with the GY$400 million figure, by government, by BBCI, or by liquidator Motilall. The formula Minister Edghill has previously described to the National Assembly — compensation “based upon their monthly operational expenses” — governed the toll subsidies paid to the company in 2025 and 2026, not the terminal wind-up payment now confirmed by Cheong. That formula, too, has never been published.

This board does not allege that any individual named in this piece acted with corrupt intent; we have not seen evidence that would support such a charge, and we do not print what we cannot support. What we can state, on the public record, is this:

The question this newsroom will continue to press, to the Ministry of Public Works, to the Ministry of Finance, and to liquidator Motilall, is the one the government has not yet answered: who decided GY$400 million was the right number, and by what method did they arrive at it?

Until that question is answered, the public is entitled to draw its own conclusion from the arithmetic government has left on the table.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Food Security Is Not Food Affordability: Government Must Explain Why Guyanese Still Cannot Afford to Eat Properly

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar– September 2026

 

Food Security Is Not Food Affordability   

 The Government has made “food security” and agricultural expansion central pillars of its public messaging. Ministers          routinely speak about increased acreage, higher output, new crops, regional food-import reduction, expanded exports, and Guyana’s role as a food producer for the Caribbean.

Those achievements, if real and sustained, matter. But Government must stop treating food security, agricultural production, and food affordability as if they are the same thing. They are not.

A country can produce more food, export more food, boast of greater acreage, and still leave ordinary citizens unable to afford a basic basket of groceries. Guyana can be food secure on paper while families are food insecure in their homes.

Food security concerns the availability, stability, access, quality, and reliability of food supplies. Food affordability concerns whether people have enough money to buy nutritious food consistently after paying rent, transportation, utilities, school expenses, medicine, and other necessities. Increasing production does not automatically lower the price at the supermarket, market stall, village shop, or hinterland outlet.

This is the question the Government has avoided: if agricultural expansion is succeeding, why are so many Guyanese still struggling to afford chicken, eggs, cooking oil, milk, fish, vegetables, flour, and other essentials?

It is not enough to tell citizens that more crops are being planted, that production targets are rising, or that Guyana is helping to feed CARICOM. The Government must show how its policies are reducing the amount ordinary households pay for food each week and each month.

The price on the shelf is shaped by much more than farm output. It reflects the cost of fertiliser, animal feed, fuel, machinery, drainage and irrigation, credit, storage, refrigeration, packaging, transport, imports, exchange-rate pressures, wholesaler margins, retail mark-ups, and the high cost of moving food into rural, riverain, and hinterland communities.

Unless Government addresses those costs deliberately, “agricultural expansion” will remain a slogan that does not translate into relief at the checkout counter.

The policy discussion also requires honesty. Some who reject direct subsidies go on to call for tax relief, food credits, transport support, fertilizer and feed assistance, State bulk purchasing, and free school meals. These are all subsidies in one form or another.

Tax and duty removal is an indirect subsidy because the State gives up revenue to reduce prices. Food credits are direct subsidies to consumers. Fuel, freight, fertiliser, feed, and cold-storage support subsidise producers and distributors. Government bulk buying and resale at reduced prices subsidise the market, while school feeding is an in-kind subsidy that reduces household expenses.

There is nothing wrong with using public resources to protect citizens from an unbearable cost of living. What is wrong is pretending that these interventions are not subsidies, or introducing them without transparent rules, proper targeting, independent oversight, and public accounting.

The Government should not attempt a universal food-credit scheme that sends public funds to every household regardless of income. That would be costly, difficult to sustain, and likely to worsen inflation if demand rises while supply does not. More money in consumers’ hands will not lower prices if importers, wholesalers, and retailers simply absorb the benefit through higher mark-ups.

Instead, Guyana needs an affordability programme aimed at those under the greatest pressure: low-income workers, pensioners, persons with disabilities, single-parent households, unemployed citizens, and families with young children. A targeted electronic food-support system, with publicly known eligibility criteria, audit trails, restrictions to essential foods, and protection against political interference, would provide real assistance without turning into an uncontrolled election-season giveaway.

Government must also identify every tax, duty, levy, and administrative charge that still inflates the price of essential foods and production inputs. Where such charges serve no compelling public purpose, they should be reduced or removed. But tax concessions must be accompanied by mandatory price monitoring and publication of before-and-after retail prices. Guyanese consumers must not be told that taxes were removed only to discover that supermarkets and importers kept the difference.

The Government also needs to confront the issue of price formation. It must explain why lower international prices, reduced duties, increased local production, or improved harvests do not consistently result in lower consumer prices.

♦ Are importers and distributors operating in excessively concentrated markets?

♦  Are wholesale and retail margins justified?

♦  Are storage failures, transport bottlenecks, weak enforcement, or poor market information contributing to price spikes?

These are not questions that can be answered by another ceremonial launch or acreage announcement.

A properly empowered consumer-protection and competition system is essential. The responsible agencies should publish regular prices for a standard national food basket, track variations by region, identify abnormal increases, investigate possible anti-competitive conduct, and report publicly on their findings. In particular, Government must focus on the severe disparity between coastland prices and what families pay in the hinterland, riverain, and remote communities.

There must also be a shift from announcing agriculture projects to measuring affordability outcomes. Each major agricultural investment funded by taxpayers should be tested against clear questions:

♦  Has it lowered the cost of production?

♦  Has it increased the quantity reaching domestic consumers? Has it reduced post-harvest losses?

♦  Has it reduced transport and storage costs? Has it lowered the price paid by households?

If the answer is no, then Government cannot claim success merely because more money was spent or more land was brought into cultivation.

Oil revenues provide Guyana with an opportunity that previous generations did not have. But that wealth cannot be used simply to celebrate production statistics while citizens are asked to adjust their diets, purchase less, or accept rising food bills as unavoidable. The wealth must be invested in reliable drainage and irrigation, farm-to-market roads, cold storage, agro-processing, affordable finance, farmer support, climate resilience, and efficient transport systems.

At the same time, targeted support is necessary now. Hinterland freight assistance, properly monitored input support for small producers, and universal nutritious school meals would offer practical relief while helping to build domestic demand for locally produced food.

School feeding, in particular, should be expanded nationally, with transparent procurement from local farmers, fisherfolk, livestock rearers,and agro-processors.

Food security is a worthy national objective. Agricultural expansion is necessary. Exports can generate income. But none of these accomplishments should be used as a shield against the most basic question of all: Can ordinary Guyanese afford to eat properly?

Until Government makes affordability a measurable policy priority—with published targets, transparent interventions, regular price data, and consequences for profiteering—its boasts about food security will ring hollow in households where the grocery bag gets lighter every week.

–The Board