A Government That Cannot Learn

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THE 592 GUARDIAN · 

INTEGRITY♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ TRUTH♦

INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL | GOVERNANCE & ACCOUNTABILITY

A Government That Cannot Learn

From EMBRAPA to UPI: How the Ali Administration’s pattern of politically convenient decisions over nationally optimal ones has become the defining feature of Guyanese governance — and why the cost is compounding.

By The 592 Guardian Editorial Board   |   June 2026   |   The 592 Guardian 

On a Tuesday morning in Georgetown, officials from Guyana, Brazil, and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture gathered in the Ministry of Agriculture’s boardroom to sign a Letter of Intent establishing the EMBRAPA Science, Technologies and Innovation Hub. On its face, it was one of the more prudent decisions this government has made. Brazil’s EMBRAPA is, by any credible metric, among the world’s foremost agricultural research institutions — a body that transformed a country once dependent on food imports into a global agricultural superpower within a single generation. Bringing its expertise to bear on Guyana’s tropical agriculture challenges, and anchoring a regional food security framework through it, is exactly the kind of strategic thinking that development economists would endorse.

Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha called it a game changer. He was not wrong.

But here is what the press conference did not address, and what the celebratory photographs obscured: at the very moment the Ali administration was publicly recognizing Brazil as an indispensable partner — close enough to anchor Guyana’s agricultural future, trusted enough to house a regional center of excellence on our soil — that same administration had already chosen to bypass Brazil entirely on a decision of equal or greater economic consequence.

When Guyana was ready to modernize its digital payments infrastructure, it did not look south to Brazil, whose PIX instant payment system had been live since November 2020 and had become one of the most successfully adopted financial technology platforms on earth. It looked east — all the way to India — and adopted the Unified Payments Interface instead.

One bad decision is an error. The same structural logic repeated across energy, infrastructure, procurement, and now digital finance is a governance philosophy.

That pivot, sitting directly alongside the EMBRAPA signing in the same news cycle, is not merely ironic. It is diagnostic. It tells us something precise and damning about how decisions are made in this administration — not through rigorous comparative analysis, not through a framework that consistently privileges national interest, but through a filter that sometimes, inexplicably, subordinates the obvious choice to something else entirely.

And once you see that filter at work, you cannot unsee it. Because the UPI-over-PIX decision is not an anomaly. It is the latest entry in a ledger that has been accumulating for years.

THE CASE THAT WAS NEVER MADE

Let us be precise about what was at stake in the digital payments’ decision, because the magnitude of the missed opportunity demands specificity.

Guyana and Brazil conduct over one billion dollars in bilateral trade annually. That relationship is not theoretical — it is embedded in the movement of goods, vehicles, building materials, agricultural products, and energy inputs across a shared land border. It is the economic lifeblood of Region Nine and has significant downstream effects across the country’s logistics and supply chain infrastructure.

A Guyanese digital payments system integrated with Brazil’s PIX architecture would have done something that UPI structurally cannot: it would have created the conditions for GYD-BRL convertibility at scale, reducing dollar dependency in cross-border trade, lowering friction costs for businesses and farmers operating in the bilateral corridor, and potentially seeding a broader CARICOM-anchored South American payments framework. The economic logic writes itself. More than a billion dollars in annual trade provides the liquidity base that makes currency integration viable. PIX had the infrastructure. The relationship had the volume. The geography made it obvious.

India’s UPI is an impressive platform. But Guyana does not share a land border with India. Guyana does not conduct a billion dollars in annual trade with India. The rupee has no meaningful role in Guyanese commerce, which means the dollar displacement argument — the most compelling case for any payments modernization effort — simply does not apply. What Guyana adopted was prestige technology untethered from the economic relationships that would have given it transformative value.

THE PIX CASE IN THREE LINES

Brazil: shared land border, $1B+ annual trade, PIX live since 2020, GYD-BRL corridor viable, CARICOM integration possible. India: no shared border, negligible bilateral trade, rupee irrelevant to Guyanese commerce. The comparative analysis was never published. We suspect it was never conducted.

The question that has not been answered — that no minister has been asked to answer in any public forum — is simple: was a comparative feasibility assessment conducted? Was PIX evaluated against UPI on criteria of trade volume, currency utility, geographic logic, and integration potential? If it was, where is the document? If it was not, on what basis was the decision made?

The silence is its own answer. And it rhymes with silences we have heard before.

THE LEDGER: WHEN PATTERN BECOMES POLICY

The PIX-UPI decision did not emerge from a vacuum. It emerged from an administrative culture in which consequential choices are made without published criteria, without independent review, and — critically — without consequences when the outcomes prove damaging. That culture has a documented history.

Consider the GPL-InterEnergy sole-sourced power contract. The Guyana Power and Light entered into a major energy supply arrangement through a process that bypassed competitive procurement entirely. No public tender. No comparative bid evaluation. No independent assessment of whether the terms secured reflected market value. The contract was presented as a solution; the process that produced it was presented as irrelevant. When the 592 Guardian and others pressed for justification, the administration retreated behind the language of urgency and operational necessity — the universal solvent that this government applies to dissolve procurement obligations whenever they become inconvenient.

The Karpowership episode compounded the pattern. Guyana’s engagement with the Turkish power ship company, Karadeniz, became a masterclass in contractual opacity. A country navigating an unprecedented oil windfall, with the resources to make long-term, asset-owning energy infrastructure investments, was instead negotiating short-term floating power arrangements whose terms were shielded from public scrutiny. The national interest calculus — what Guyana would own, what it would pay per kilowatt over the contract life, what exit provisions existed — was never transparently presented. The administration announced; it did not justify.

A country with Guyana’s resource windfall should not be making energy decisions in the dark. But darkness has become this government’s preferred procurement environment.

The National Drainage and Irrigation Authority audits told a different story of the same failure mode. Year after year, Guyana’s chronic flooding crisis — which displaces families, destroys crops, and disproportionately punishes the country’s most economically vulnerable communities — was attributed in part to infrastructure deficiencies within NDIA’s mandate. Year after year, audit findings documented financial irregularities, project delivery failures, and procurement anomalies within the agency. And year after year, those findings produced no meaningful accountability. No senior official faced consequence. No systemic reform was announced. The flooding returned. The audits continued. The ledger grew.

The G-Mining and Reunion Gold asset transaction exposed yet another dimension of the governance failure: not merely the absence of accountability after the fact, but the absence of protective mechanisms before it. When significant mining assets changed hands in a transaction that should have triggered scrutiny of transfer pricing, capital gains capture, and equity participation rights for the Guyanese state, the administration watched it happen without deploying the fiscal tools that resource nationalism — a doctrine this government invokes enthusiastically in its rhetoric — would demand in practice. Guyana captured none of the windfall. The foreign principals captured all of it. The government called it investment.

The Puruni River Bridge project illustrated how the failure mode extends to public infrastructure investment itself. A bridge project whose routing and specifications appeared to serve the operational interests of a foreign mining concern over the connectivity needs of the communities it ostensibly served raised fundamental questions about who public capital is actually working for in this administration. The questions were raised. They were not answered.

And then there is the Cabinet outreach program — a touring, government-funded engagement exercise conducted in the electoral calendar’s shadow, using state resources, ministerial presence, and public funds to perform constituency work that the boundaries between government and party should prohibit. It was campaigning dressed in the language of service delivery. When pressed, the administration insisted on the distinction between the two. The calendars told a different story.

THE ANATOMY OF IMPUNITY

What connects these cases is not complexity. Each individual decision, examined in isolation, can be given a narrative — urgency here, development imperative there, bilateral relationship management somewhere else. The administration is practiced at the individual justification. What it cannot justify is the aggregate.

Because when you lay the GPL contract alongside the NDIA audits alongside the Karpowership opacity alongside the G-Mining windfall failure alongside the Puruni routing alongside the UPI pivot, a structural portrait emerges that no individual explanation can account for. The portrait is of an administration that has identified, correctly, that Guyana’s oversight architecture lacks the teeth to impose real costs on consequential decisions made badly.

The Auditor General reports. Parliament debates. Civil society criticizes. The press — what remains of independent press in this country — investigates. And then nothing happens. No minister resigns. No contract is voided. No procurement officer faces sanction. No policy framework is revised. The administration absorbs the criticism, waits for the news cycle to move, and proceeds to the next decision with its risk calculus entirely unchanged.

This is not incompetence in the ordinary sense. Incompetence implies the absence of capacity. What Guyana has is the presence of a system — informal, durable, and rational from the perspective of those who benefit from it — in which the cost of a bad decision is borne by the public and the benefit of the same decision accrues to the network of relationships that the decision was designed to serve.

The administration has not failed to learn from its mistakes. It has learned precisely the right lesson: that in the absence of real consequences, the optimal strategy is to keep deciding.

That is why the UPI-over-PIX decision is not a puzzle. Once you understand the operating logic, it resolves completely. PIX would have been the correct technical choice. But the UPI decision served different imperatives — cultural alignment, diaspora politics, a preference for relationships that track ethnicity rather than economic geography. Whether those imperatives were explicit or atmospheric, conscious or reflexive, the outcome is the same: national interest, measured in trade corridor utility and currency integration potential, was subordinated to something smaller.

And no one will be asked to explain why.

BACK TO THE BOARDROOM

Let us return, then, to that signing ceremony. To the photographs of ministers and officials gathered in the Ministry of Agriculture’s boardroom, to the celebratory language about game changers and regional powerhouses, to the genuine value of the EMBRAPA partnership and what it could mean for Caribbean food security if executed with the seriousness the occasion demands.

We do not dispute the value of the initiative. We note, rather, what the initiative inadvertently demonstrates:that this administration is perfectly capable of recognizing Brazil as a partner of consequence. It knows what EMBRAPA is. It understands what the bilateral relationship represents. It can, when it chooses to, make the obvious call.

Which is precisely why the UPI decision is unforgivable. Because it was not made in ignorance of Brazil. It was made in full awareness of a relationship that this government publicly celebrates — and then, when a different sector required an analogous decision, chose to ignore.

The EMBRAPA signing is not evidence of a government finding its footing. It is evidence of a government that knows what good decisions look like, makes them selectively, and faces no pressure to explain why the selection criterion is something other than the national interest.

The 592 Guardian will continue to name the decisions that do not survive comparative scrutiny. We will continue to place them beside one another until the pattern is too legible to dismiss. And we will continue to ask the questions that the administration’s preferred interlocutors do not ask: not what was decided, but how, by whom, for whose benefit, and — most damningly of all — why no one has yet been required to answer for what was left on the table.

Guyana is not a poor country anymore. It does not have the luxury of excusing governance failure as the product of limited capacity.

It has the resources to do better. What it lacks, still, is a government that believes it must.

 

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet focused on Guyanese governance, transparency, and public interest reporting.

A Bank Built To Serve Power.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL♦ACCONTABILITY♦ TRANSPARENCY

A Bank Built To Serve Power.

The proposed Guyana Development Bank is not a transparent institution. It is a patronage architecture dressed in development language — and its contempt for established governance frameworks is, by itself, a scandal.

There is a well-worn playbook in Guyanese governance. You announce an initiative with genuine popular appeal — flood relief, housing, scholarships, now small business financing — and you structure the delivery mechanism so that access flows through political loyalty rather than merit. The Guyana Development Bank Bill, in its current form, is that playbook with a prospectus attached.

Let us be precise about what this legislation proposes. It does not merely create a bank. It creates a financial instrument — potentially managing tens of billions in public resources — whose entire governance structure is constituted by a single minister. The Finance Minister appoints the board. The Finance minister appoints the chair. The Finance Minister determines what directors are paid. There is no parliamentary confirmation, no civil society seat, no private sector voice, no Opposition input. The institution exists at the pleasure of the Executive, accountable upward to the Cabinet and downward to no one.

This is not an oversight. It is a design.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this legislation is not what it contains but what it deliberately omits: any meaningful relationship with the Bank of Guyana.

The Bank of Guyana exists precisely for this purpose. Under the Financial Institutions Act, the BOG is the statutory regulator for deposit-taking and lending institutions operating in Guyana. It sets prudential standards. It conducts examinations. It demands capital adequacy compliance. It investigates governance failures. It licenses institutions that handle public money. When Guyana’s financial architecture was rebuilt after the catastrophic banking collapses of the 1990s — collapses that wiped out the savings of ordinary Guyanese — the entire remediation framework rested on a single principle: no institution handling the public’s money operates outside independent central bank oversight.

The Development Bank Bill, as currently drafted, creates precisely such an institution.

There is no provision for BOG licensing. No mandatory BOG examination schedule. No capital adequacy framework referenced. No prudential reporting requirement to the central bank. No trigger for BOG intervention if the institution becomes insolvent or if lending decisions expose it to systemic risk. The institution that will manage what the government itself is advertising as a transformative public financing vehicle sits entirely outside the regulatory architecture that governs every other financial institution in this country.

Ask the question plainly: why? Why would a government drafting legislation for a public bank — an institution that will hold public deposits and disburse public funds — deliberately structure it to avoid central bank supervision? There is no development finance rationale for this exclusion. Regional development banks across CARICOM operate under some form of central bank oversight or independent statutory regulation. Guyana’s National Development Strategy, the IDB’s own technical assistance frameworks, and the Caribbean Development Bank’s governance standards all contemplate central bank supervisory roles in national development finance. The exclusion of the BOG from this architecture is not a regional norm. It is a local choice. And it is a choice that produces a single outcome: an institution whose financial conduct cannot be independently examined by anyone outside the government that controls it.

This is the structural foundation upon which every other governance failure in this bill rests.

The Patronage Architecture, Named

Consider what Guyana has spent the better part of a decade building, unevenly and imperfectly, in the domain of public financial governance. The Public Procurement Commission. The Audit Office. Parliamentary oversight committees. The SARA framework. Whatever their operational failures, these institutions rest on a conceptual foundation: that public resources require independent scrutiny and that no single political actor should control both the allocation of those resources and the evaluation of that allocation.

The Development Bank Bill, as drafted, seats a ministerially appointed board making lending decisions without clear criteria, without independent audit triggers, and — most strikingly — without any explicit anti-corruption provisions governing the conduct of loan officers and directors themselves.

But this is not merely a legal deficiency. It is a political economy. To understand what this bank will actually do, you do not read the eligibility clauses. You read the appointment clause.

The Finance Minister selects every director. The Finance Minister sets every director’s pay. Directors serve at the Finance Minister’s pleasure. What follows from this is not complicated: the directors will make decisions consistent with the preferences of the Finance Minister. Not because they are necessarily corrupt individuals, but because no rational appointee, in the absence of independent tenure protection, makes decisions that displease their appointing authority. The institution’s governance structure guarantees alignment between lending decisions and executive preference before a single application is reviewed.

Now overlay the operational reality. This bank is being positioned as the primary financing vehicle for small and medium enterprise in a country approaching a LG election. The government has publicly advertised loan access — collateral-free, interest-free by its own account — to constituencies that have historically struggled to access formal credit. Rural communities. Hinterland entrepreneurs. Young professionals without property to pledge. These are also, not coincidentally, the swing constituencies whose mobilisation determines electoral outcomes in Guyana’s tight political arithmetic.

The combination of discretionary lending criteria, politically appointed gatekeepers, no BOG oversight, and an election cycle is not a governance risk. It is a governance blueprint.

Guyana has lived this pattern before. The National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited contracts. The Housing and Water Inc. allocations. The COVID-19 relief disbursements. The various grant and voucher programmes administered through regional democratic councils in election years. In each case the combination of political appointment, discretionary criteria, and weak anti-corruption architecture produced outcomes that bore a suspicious resemblance to electoral maps. The Development Bank Bill creates the same conditions at larger scale and with the additional moral authority of a mandate that is supposed to serve the economically marginalised.

The more genuine the need, the more powerful the patronage instrument becomes. When people are genuinely desperate for financing, they will tolerate conditions they would otherwise refuse. They will vote for access. They will not complain about the terms. Political patrons have always understood this. A development bank, structurally captured before it opens, does not reduce that vulnerability. It monetises it.

The Corruption Architecture, Clause by Clause

The bill prohibits false information and records destruction. It does not prohibit a director soliciting a kickback in exchange for approving a loan. Read that sentence again. An institution disbursing concessionary public financing, with no independent regulator, a politically appointed board, and discretionary lending criteria, contains no explicit statutory prohibition on its own officials demanding payment for access.

This is not a drafting oversight. Anti-corruption provisions are standard in development finance legislation globally precisely because development banks are understood to be structurally vulnerable to rent-seeking. They control access to a scarce and valuable resource — concessionary credit — that the market does not otherwise provide. Every applicant who cannot get a commercial loan has an incentive to pay for access. Every official who controls that access has an opportunity to extract value from it. The legislative response to this structural vulnerability, in every credible jurisdiction, is explicit: name the conduct, criminalise it, specify the penalties, create independent reporting channels.

The Development Bank Bill names none of this. It creates a corruption-permissive environment not through malice in any individual clause but through systematic architectural omission. There is no fit-and-proper test for directors referenced to any independent standard. There is no conflict-of-interest register requirement. There is no whistle-blower protection for loan officers pressured to approve politically connected applications. There is no independent complaints mechanism for rejected applicants. There is no publication requirement for approved loans above threshold values. There is no mandatory referral to SARA or the DPP for suspected corruption in the lending process.

Each omission is individually explicable. Together they describe an institution in which corruption, if it occurs, will be nearly impossible to detect, document, or prosecute. That is not an accident of drafting. It is an environment that has been carefully cleared.

An Insult Inscribed in Legislation

There is a final dimension to this bill that deserves to be stated plainly, because it has not been stated plainly enough: the manner in which this legislation was presented to Parliament is itself a form of institutional disrespect that should offend every member of the National Assembly, regardless of party.

Guyana has a constitutional framework. It has a financial management and audit act. It has a Bank of Guyana Act. It has procurement legislation. It has anti-money-laundering obligations under FATF review. It has commitments to the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force. It has loan covenants with the IDB, the World Bank, and the Caribbean Development Bank that contain governance conditionalities. Every one of these frameworks exists because Guyana, at various points, made formal commitments — some under duress, some voluntarily — to govern its public finances according to standards that could withstand independent scrutiny.

The Development Bank Bill was brought to Parliament in apparent disregard of the coherence demands of every one of these frameworks. It creates a financial institution outside BOG supervision, without FATF-compliant beneficial ownership requirements clearly specified, without procurement-consistent tender obligations for institutional contracts, and without the audit architecture that Guyana’s own Fiscal Management and Accountability Act contemplates for public entities. This legislation does not merely have gaps. It sits in active tension with the governance architecture Guyana has spent years — and significant donor and creditor resources — constructing.

To have brought this bill in this form to the National Assembly is not bold governance. It is crass disregard for the nation’s own laws. It signals that the Executive views Parliament not as the institution through which public financial frameworks are legitimately constructed, but as a ratification chamber for decisions already made elsewhere, on terms already fixed in favour of those who made them.

The National Assembly has not merely a right but an obligation to refuse that role.

What A Real Development Bank Looks Like

The underlying need is genuine. Guyana’s credit market fails small farmers, coastal fisherfolk, hinterland entrepreneurs, and young professionals with viable ideas and no collateral. That failure is real and it has real consequences for economic diversification and for the people who bear the cost of an oil boom that has not reached them. A properly structured development finance institution could address a gap that the private market has not filled and will not fill at accessible rates.

But credibility is the precondition for effectiveness.

The IDB, the Caribbean Development Bank, the IFC — every institution Guyana aspires to partner with built its legitimacy on precisely the independence and transparency this bill refuses. Independent governance. Published lending criteria. Central bank or equivalent prudential oversight. Explicit anti-corruption frameworks. Publicly disclosed loan portfolios. These are not bureaucratic impositions. They are what separates a development bank from a slush fund.

What is being proposed here is not a development bank. It is a disbursement mechanism under executive control, surrounded by development language and pointed at an election.

If it passes unchanged, it will not serve Guyanese small business owners. It will serve whoever controls the appointment power — and through them, it will serve the project of making those people impossible to vote out.

The question before the National Assembly is not whether Guyana needs a development bank. It does. The question is whether the Assembly will allow this government to build one that works for the country, or ratify one that works for the party. That question must be answered in the legislation itself. It will not answer itself on the floor of a board meeting chaired by a political appointee, supervised by no one, accountable to nothing but the next election.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering governance, transparency, and the political economy of Guyana.

WHEN THE RECORD SPEAKS: A RESPONSE TO AUBREY NORTON’S WISMAR REVISIONISM

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WHEN THE RECORD SPEAKS: A RESPONSE TO AUBREY NORTON’S WISMAR REVISIONISM

Editorial | The 592 Guardian June 2026

Aubrey Norton has written a letter. He has given it a title — End This Nonsense About a Wismar “Massacre” — and signed it with his full complement of titles: Leader of the PNCR, Chairman of APNU, and, pointedly, a Proud Lindener. He wants the public to understand this is not merely a private opinion. It is a political position, staked on a date that carries its own weight.

We take him at his word. And we respond accordingly.

Norton’s central argument is this: the Wismar Commission of Inquiry does not support the characterization of what occurred in May 1964 as a massacre. He cites the commission’s finding that violence was greater elsewhere in the country. He counts five deaths among Indo-Guyanese in the post-Sun Chapman period. He invokes comparative suffering — the Abraham family, the Sun Chapman victims — as though the mathematics of atrocity, carefully arranged, can dissolve the testimony of thousands.

It is a masterclass in selective citation. And it fails on its own terms.

What Norton cited — and what he left out

Norton reaches repeatedly for the Wismar Commission Report as his authority. What he does not tell his readers is what else that same report contains.

The commissioners — whose composition Norton himself notes included no African Guyanese — did not merely count bodies. They examined 86 witnesses over 19 days and produced findings that no honest reading can reduce to a body count. The commission concluded, in its own language, that the destruction of Indo-Guyanese property was not spontaneous. It was, the commissioners wrote, “organized, and well organized.” More than 200 homes and business premises were systematically looted and burned to the ground.

Over 3,000 Indo-Guyanese residents were forcibly evacuated from the region by river to Georgetown — an entire community, expelled.

The commission also documented what Norton’s letter does not acknowledge: harrowing accounts of physical assault and mass sexual violence, deployed deliberately as instruments of terror to drive the minority population out.

These are not the findings of Indian rights activists. These are the findings of the commission Norton himself holds up as definitive.

The resignation Norton does not mention

There is one fact conspicuously absent from Norton’s lengthy letter. When the evidence of security force conduct during the Wismar attacks became undeniable — when it was clear that local law enforcement had stood aside as arsonists burned 200 homes and failed to apprehend a single perpetrator — the then Minister of Home Affairs resigned from Cabinet in protest.

That minister was Janet Jagan.

A sitting Cabinet minister, wife of the Prime Minister, walked out of government because the evidence of institutional collusion with or indifference to the atrocities could not be squared with her conscience or her office. The violence only subsided when British soldiers arrived to establish order — not the local forces whose mandate was to protect all residents equally.

Norton is a senior political figure with decades of experience in Guyanese governance and history. He is not unaware of Janet Jagan’s resignation. Its absence from his letter is not an oversight. It is a choice. And choices of omission, in matters of historical record, are their own form of testimony.

On the question of method

Norton accuses those who use the term “massacre” of race baiting. He frames accountability as divisiveness. This inversion deserves naming plainly.

It is not divisive to document what happened. It is not race baiting to insist that the forced expulsion of 3,000 people, the systematic destruction of their homes and livelihoods, the documented use of sexual violence as a weapon, and the institutional failure to protect them — constitutes an event of historical gravity that demands accurate language and honest reckoning.

What is divisive is the deliberate suppression of that record. What corrodes national fabric is not the naming of wounds but the insistence that the wounded are lying.

The record is being assembled

Norton writes as though the historical ledger on Wismar is closed. It is not.

Dr. Baytoram Ramharack’s recently released work THE WISMAR MASSACRE  details — the culmination of more than two decades of archival research, hundreds of oral history interviews, and examination of documents from the Guyana and British Archives — has now placed in the public domain a 825-page account of what occurred in May and July of 1964. It draws on eyewitness testimony, including survivors who have carried this history in silence for sixty years. It examines the geopolitical machinery — American and British cold war maneuvering against Cheddi Jagan — that created the conditions in which Wismar became possible. It uses the framework of ethnic cleansing, not casually, but with the evidentiary weight that two decades of scholarship can bring.

Cheddi Jagan called it a massacre. Janet Jagan called it genocide. The commissioners themselves, in an unguarded moment of their own report, reached for the word “holocaust” to describe the collective acts.

Norton wants the public to believe these are the hysterics of partisans. What he cannot explain away is that the commission he cites used that language too.

A note to Mr. Norton

The 592 Guardian does not adjudicate historical debates for sport. We engage them because the public record matters, because survivors deserve accuracy, and because those who hold positions of political leadership bear a particular responsibility for the claims they make in public about contested history.

Norton ends his letter by declaring it is “time to end this nonsense.”

We respectfully disagree. It is time, rather, to tell the truth — fully, without omission, and without the arithmetic of comparative suffering that transforms a community’s expulsion into a footnote.

The record exists. It is being uncovered and un-silenced. And this publication will continue to ensure that those who attempt to bury it know that fact checkers are paying close attention.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet committed to the full and accurate documentation of Guyana’s public record.

THE REPUBLIC NOBODY TRUSTS

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The 592 Guardian

 IN D E P E N D E N T• AC C O U N TA B I L I T Y J O U R N A L I S M •E D I TO R I A L ·               J U NE 2026

UN I V E R S I T Y O F

G U Y A N A                                               

G R E E N • IN S T I T U T E •

I N D E P E N D E N CE 6 0•

S U R V E Y

The Republic

Nobody Trusts

A new survey of 134 Guyanese — residents and diaspora — finds a nation hollowed out at its foundations: institutions distrusted, oil wealth captured by foreigners, and the generation that should be building the future already looking for the exit.

THE EDITORS · THE 592-GUARDIAN BASED ON UGGI INDEPENDENCE 60 SURVEY · FIELD PERIOD: 23–28 MAY2026

6%

 TRUST A STRANGER TO RETURN A LOST WALLET — A RAW MEASURE OF SOCIAL COHESION
51%

 GIVE OIL COMPANIES THE MINIMUM POSSIBLE TRUST SCORE: 1 OUT OF 10

77%

SAY CIVIC AND DEMOCRATIC SPACE IN GUYANA IS NARROWING 

Sixty years is long enough to build a country. It is also long enough to destroy one’s ability to pretend that no building has been done. The University of Guyana’s Green Institute has now produced, with the dispassion that only numbers can provide, what critics of the Ali administration have been saying with words: Guyana at sixty is a republic whose citizens do not trust it, do not believe it is working for them, and — among those under forty-Eve — are deciding in real time whether to stay and fight or leave and survive.

 

The survey is modest in scale — 134 respondents across the resident population and diaspora, field -tested in the final week of May 2026. But the findings are not modest. They are a rebuke. They are the quiet verdict of a people who have watched an oil windfall materialize, watched foreign companies and their local intermediaries grow visibly richer, and arrived at the considered judgment that none of it has been for them.

A Nation Without Social Glue

Only six percent of respondents trust a stranger to return a lost wallet. Pause on that figure . It is not a measure of government approval — governments can be loathed and societies can still function. It is a measure of the tissue between citizens: the informal, accumulated faith that the person beside you operates within a shared moral framework.

At six percent, that tissue is not frayed. It is absent.

Political scientists have long established that social trust — sometimes called generalized trust — is both a product of and a prerequisite for functional democracy. Countries with low institutional trust can still hold elections; countries with low social trust struggle to produce the civic cooperation that makes those elections meaningful. Guyana, as measured here, has both problems at once.

“No institution earns the public’s trust. Not the judiciary, not the GRA, not the media — and least of all the national government and foreign oil companies, which sit at the bottom of the table together.”

 U G G I ♦I N D E P E N D E N C E♦ 6 0 S U R V E Y 

 P R E L I M I N A R Y ♦ R E P O R T ♦ M A Y 2 0 2 6

The survey is explicit that no institution — none — earns the public’s trust. Not the judiciary. Not the Guyana Revenue Authority. Not the national media, whose failures of independence we have documented in these pages before. And sitting at the absolute bottom of the trust table, sharing the floor: the national government of Irfaan Ali and the foreign oil companies operating in Guyana’s waters. It is a damning colocation. The state and its most powerful commercial partners, assessed by the citizenry as equally, maximally untrustworthy.

Oil Is Repeating the Old Pattern. Guyanese Know It.

Sixty-three percent of respondents say oil is repeating the old pattern. Not producing a new Guyana. Repeating the old one — the Guyana of sugar and bauxite, in which a primary commodity generated extraordinary wealth for foreign capital and local elites, and left the broader population with roads, resentment, and emigration as their inheritance.

                           S U R V E Y  F I N D I N G S  A T A  G L A N C E • U G G I •                                         I N D E P E N D E N C E 6 0 • M A Y 2 0 2 6

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 75% identify foreign companies and their local partners as the primary visible beneficiaries of five years of oil growth

  
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 51% gave oil companies the lowest possible trust score on a 1–10 scale

  
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 77% say civic and democratic space is narrowing

  
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  63% say the oil boom is “repeating the old pattern” — same commodity logic, same exclusion

  
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  No institution surveyed — including the government, judiciary, GRA, and media — earned majority public trust

  
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 Among under -45s: only 1 in 3 is definitely staying –nearly as many are thinking of leaving; a third remain undecided.   

Seventy-seven percent of respondents can identify who has benefitted from seven years of oil growth. It is not them. It is, in the language of the survey, “foreign companies and their local partners.” This is not ideological abstraction — it is observed reality. The luxury vehicles, the procurement contracts, the offshore structures. Guyanese are watching this in real time, and they are capable of naming it.                               

This editorial has previously documented, in granular terms, the fiscal architecture that makes such capture possible: the transfer tax exemptions on indirect share sales, the absence of enforced transfer pricing rules, the carried interest arrangements that deny the state equity in its own resources. The Ali government did not construct these mechanisms alone — many predate his administration. But the obligation to dismantle them, in the middle of a historic boom, belongs to whoever holds power now. That is the Ali government. And they have not acted.

The Generation Preparing to Leave.                                      

The most consequential finding in the UGGI report is buried in the demographic breakdowns, but it should be on the front page of every newspaper in Georgetown: among Guyanese under forty-Even, only one in three is definitely staying. Nearly as many are actively considering leaving. A third remain undecided — a knife-edge population that the survey correctly describes as “policy-responsive.” They could be retained. They could be lost. The difference lies in whether the government they observe begins to behave in ways that suggest their future is possible here.                 

This is not new. Guyana has exported its human capital for generations — to New York, to Toronto, to London, to Suriname and Trinidad — and the oil boom was supposed to reverse the logic. Five years in, with Guyana producing over 600,000 barrels per day and recording among the fastest per-capita GDP growth rates on earth, the under-45 population is still doing the math and arriving at the same answer their parents did. The numbers do not lie in their favor. The opportunity is not distributed in their direction. The civic space, according to 77 percent of all respondents, is shrinking, not expanding.

“Among under-45s, only 1 in 3 is definitely staying. Nearly as many are thinking of leaving— and a third are undecided. The policy-responsive generation is poised on a knife-edge.”            

                                   U G G I♦ I N D E P E N D E N C E 6 0 S U R V E Y ♦                                                                  P R E L I M I N A R Y R E P O R T ♦ M A Y 2 0 26

A country that cannot retain its own young people during an oil boom has failed at the foundational task of development. Extraction without inclusion is colonialism by another name. The flag is different, the passport is Guyanese, but if the structural logic — foreign capital extracts, local elites administer the extraction, the population provides labor and receives patchy services — remains intact, the independence being celebrated is ceremonial, not substantive.

The Democracy Question.       

That 77 percent of respondents say civic and democratic space is narrowing should alarm anyone who believes Guyana’s oil future depends on stable institutions. It should particularly alarm the international partners — the United States, the United Kingdom, the multilateral development banks — who have made democratic governance a stated prerequisite for the kind of investment partnerships they are deepening with Georgetown.     

We are not in the business of performing alarm for its own sake. But narrowing civic space, collapsing institutional trust, and a population that cannot trust each other, let alone the state, is not a stable foundation for a petro-state trying to diversify, build human capital, and negotiate with international capital from a position of sovereignty. These are the conditions that precede, historically, either authoritarian consolidation or political rupture. The UGGI survey does not predict which. It documents the conditions.

What Independence at 60 Actually Looks Like.         

President Ali’s Independence Day address spoke of transformation, of a new Guyana rising. He is not wrong that something is rising.

What the UGGI survey adds — with the cold authority of empirical measurement — is the question of rising for whom, and whether the Guyanese people believe the answer is themselves. They do not.

Six in ten say oil is repeating, not transforming. Three in four see the wealth going to foreigners and their intermediaries. Three in four say the democratic space they would need to contest this arrangement is being closed. And the generation that would have to live with these choices for the next sixty years is standing at the door, hand on the latch, undecided.                                  

The University of Guyana Green Institute has done its job. It has produced the evidence. The question now is whether the institutions of this republic — the government, the parliament, the independent agencies, the media — are capable of hearing it and responding with policy rather than ceremony. Independence Day speeches will not retain the under-45s. Transfer pricing enforcement might. A genuine carried interest mechanism in oil contracts might. A press that is free to investigate might. A judiciary that is trusted might.    Sixty years. A republic. The data says: start building it.       

E D I T O R I A L- P O S I T I O N ♦ T H E 5 9 2 G U A R D IAN      

The UGGI Independence 60 Survey is not a political document. It is, in that sense, more dangerous than one — it is evidence. This editorial calls on the Ali administration to respond to its findings not with rebuttal but with policy: publish full oil contract terms including fiscal provisions; introduce and enforce indirect transfer taxation on resource asset sales; establish an independent Citizens’ Oil Revenue Audit with public reporting; and restore the press freedom and civic space that 77 percent of Guyanese say they are already losing. The sixtieth year of independence is not a moment for ceremony. It is a moment for reckoning.

Data Source: University of Guyana Green Institute (UGGI), Independence 60 Survey: Preliminary Report. Field period: 23– 28 May 2026. N=134 (residents and diaspora). Prepared by UGGI with AI assistance. Full report including confidence intervals and demographic breakdowns available at greeninstitute@uog.edu.gy. ·

Editorial Independence: The 592 Guardian received no funding from UGGI or any party connected to this survey. Analysis and editorial positions are independent and are those of the editors alone

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ INDEPENDENT ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GEORGETOWN, GUYANA♦EDITORIAL · JUNE 2026 ♦ ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THE OLIGARCH BLUEPRINT

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THE 592 GUARDIAN | INVESTIGATIVE ANALYSIS | JUNE 2026

THE OLIGARCH BLUEPRINT

How Guyana’s Ruling Elite Is Engineering Its Own Untouchability — and Why the Nation Must Wake Up Now

AN INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL|THE 592 GUARDIAN

On June 5, 2025, the Government of Guyana tabled a bill in the National Assembly to restore an unlimited, lifetime benefits package to former Presidents — a package that was repealed a decade ago precisely because the state could not afford it. That financial reality has not changed. What has changed is the audacity of those now positioned to collect.

Guyana’s poverty rate officially stands at 58 percent. More than half the country’s population cannot reliably access the basics of dignified life. Against this backdrop, the Ali administration has chosen to enshrine, in law, a perpetual premium class of citizen. The question every Guyanese must ask is not simply whether this is good policy. The question is: what kind of political project makes this decision — and what does it reveal about the destination?

The 592 Guardian believes the answer is not mere greed or political tone-deafness. The answer is architecture. This is the deliberate construction of an oligarchic class, and this bill is a cornerstone in its foundation.

“This is not a governance failure. This is a governance strategy.”

I. THE PATTERN: WEALTH BEFORE MANDATE

Across the five years of the Ali administration’s tenure, a traceable pattern has emerged that is too consistent to be coincidental. The government has, with remarkable precision, advanced measures that concentrate wealth in the hands of a defined political class while systematically dismantling every institutional safeguard that might hold that class accountable.

The evidence is not hidden. It sits in public record:

  • Opaque share-sale transactions in the extractive sector that transfer national mineral assets without triggering domestic tax obligations.
  • Offshore ownership structures for resource concessions, deliberately engineered to bypass Guyana’s beneficial ownership disclosure requirements.
  • Public contracts awarded at inflated valuations with negligible competitive oversight, enriching a narrow network of connected entities.
  • A state apparatus systematically muzzled: the Audit Office constrained, procurement commissions stalled, parliamentary scrutiny deflected.
  • And now: a lifetime benefits bill for former Presidents — a legislative guarantee that those who occupy the executive seat will exit into a cushioned, state-funded permanence, insulated from any post-power accountability.

None of these are isolated incidents. They are a portfolio. And portfolios have architects

II. THE THEORY: BEYOND THE REACH OF THE STATE

The 592 Guardian advances the following theory, grounded in observable conduct: the current crop of political actors governing Guyana are not governing for the public good. They are governing to reach an exit velocity — a threshold of personal wealth accumulation so vast that the machinery of the state, and any future government that might choose to use it, cannot touch them.

This is not a new phenomenon in global politics. It has a name: state capture for oligarchic exit. The playbook is well-documented in post-Soviet republics, in West African resource states, in Latin American petrostates. The sequence is as follows:

  • Step One: Use political office to access or facilitate the transfer of national resources to a connected network.
  • Step Two: Offshore and obscure those assets behind legal structures that outpace domestic regulatory capacity.
  • Step Three: Legislatively immunize the class — through pension protections, immunity provisions, or the neutering of accountability institutions.
  • Step Four: Reach a wealth threshold at which the outcome of any future election, prosecution, or public inquiry is irrelevant.

Guyana is, by every observable metric, in steps two and three simultaneously. The former Presidents’ benefits bill is not about the comfort of retired leaders. It is about the normalization of a political class that exists above consequence.

When those in power accumulate wealth at a scale that makes them financially sovereign — when their assets are offshored, their networks multinational, and their lifestyles untethered from the Guyanese economy — the outcome of an election becomes, to them, merely an inconvenience. They do not need to hold power permanently. They need only to hold it long enough.

“They are not governing for the public good. They are governing to reach an exit velocity that no future state can intercept.”

III. THE SIGNAL: PUBLIC OPINION NO LONGER MATTERS

What most distinguishes this moment from ordinary political corruption is the flagrant disregard for perception — even among the administration’s own supporters. The tabling of the former Presidents’ benefits bill has drawn public condemnation from across the political spectrum, including from vocal PPP-aligned constituents who have taken to social media and community forums to register their disgust.

The government has not flinched. No statement of justification. No gesture toward public consultation. No delay. The bill was tabled with the same procedural serenity of a government that has already concluded it does not need to persuade anyone.

This is the most alarming indicator of all. Democratic governments, even corrupt ones, typically maintain a performance of responsiveness. They delay. They spin. They convene commissions. They issue press releases. The calculated silence of this administration signals something more ominous: the belief that the electorate’s judgment has been, or is being, rendered structurally irrelevant.

An electorate that cannot translate its outrage into consequence is not a functioning democratic check. And this administration appears to have concluded — perhaps correctly, based on institutional analysis — that Guyana’s electorate is approaching that condition.

IV. CREEPING AUTOCRACY: THE ANATOMY OF A SILENT COUP

The term “coup” conjures tanks and radio broadcasts. But the most durable seizures of state power in the modern era have been procedural — achieved through election laws, judicial appointments, media regulation, and institutional defunding, not through force. Scholars of democratic backsliding call this “democratic deconsolidation”: the hollowing out of democratic institutions from within their own legal frameworks.

Guyana is not immune to this phenomenon. It is, in fact, particularly vulnerable. The country’s institutional architecture is thin. Regulatory bodies remain underpowered and politically exposed. The media landscape is concentrated. Civil society, while vocal, is under-resourced. And the extractive oil boom has produced a state revenue surge that makes the government financially capable of sustaining patronage networks without recourse to broad-based taxation — and therefore without accountability to taxpayers.

When a government need not tax its people heavily, it need not answer to them. This is the resource curse operating not just on the economy, but on the democratic contract itself.

The former Presidents’ benefits bill must be read within this context. It is not the cause. It is a symptom — and a milestone. It codifies, in statute, the principle that those who access the pinnacle of state power are entitled to permanent state-subsidized privilege. It normalizes the idea of a political caste. And normalization, once achieved through law, is extraordinarily difficult to reverse.

“The most durable seizures of state power are procedural. Guyana is living one, in slow motion, in broad daylight.”

V. 58 PERCENT: THE NUMBER THAT INDICTS EVERYTHING

Let us be plain about what a 58 percent poverty rate means in the context of this bill.

It means that more than half the people in whose name this government governs cannot meet the threshold of material adequacy. It means children in hinterland communities without reliable schooling. It means families in coastal villages flooded repeatedly because the drainage infrastructure this government was mandated to maintain has been neglected for electoral cycles. It means health facilities without medicines, roads without maintenance, and a standard of daily life that is, for the majority of Guyanese, a quiet emergency.

And against this reality — against this daily indictment of governance failure — the Ali administration has found it timely and appropriate to guarantee that former Presidents will never want for anything, at state expense, for the duration of their natural lives.

There is no economic justification for this bill that survives contact with the poverty data. The affordability argument that drove the original repeal has not been addressed. What has changed is only the political calculus — and the political calculus says that those who will benefit from this bill now have sufficient grip on the levers of power to pass it regardless.

That is not governance. That is extraction with parliamentary procedure attached.

VI. WHAT MUST BE DONE: A CALL TO ACCOUNT

The 592 Guardian does not counsel despair. We counsel clarity and urgency.

The Guyanese public, civil society, the diaspora, regional bodies, and international partners must collectively name what is happening with the precision it demands. This is not bad policy. This is oligarchic capture in motion. The language matters. Calling it by its proper name strips away the euphemisms that protect it.

We call upon the following:

  • The National Assembly opposition: Move immediately to block this bill at every procedural stage. Frame the opposition not in partisan terms but in constitutional and human rights terms. A government that codifies permanent class privilege in the face of 58 percent poverty has forfeited its claim to democratic legitimacy on this measure.
  • Civil society organizations: Mobilize public education campaigns that explain, in plain terms, what this bill does and what it signals. The Guyanese public is not politically naive — it is politically under-informed on the machinery being used against it.
  • Regional and international bodies: CARICOM, the Commonwealth, and international democratic integrity organizations must be placed on notice. Guyana’s democratic backsliding is not a domestic affair. It is a regional precedent and a signal to investor communities and multilateral institutions.
  • The media: Every outlet with a commitment to public interest journalism must treat this bill — and the pattern it represents — as the lead story it is. Normalization is the enemy. Scrutiny is the antidote.
  • The Guyanese diaspora: Your economic weight and international visibility make you a critical pressure point. Coordinate. Speak. Use the platforms you have access to in capital cities around the world.

CONCLUSION: THE HOUR OF CLARITY

History will not remember this moment kindly if those who saw it coming said nothing. The former Presidents’ benefits bill is, in isolation, an offensive piece of legislation. In context, it is a declaration of intent: that the political class governing Guyana has moved beyond the need to justify itself to the people it governs.

The theory of oligarchic capture is no longer a theory to be tested. The evidence is in the record. The pattern is visible to anyone willing to look without the distortion of partisan loyalty. The question is no longer what is happening. The question is whether Guyana’s citizens, institutions, and international partners have the collective will to interrupt it.

At The 592 Guardian, we believe they do. But belief without action is eulogy. This is the hour for action.

The nation is watching. So is history.

THE 592 GUARDIAN

Independent Accountability Journalism | Guyana

 

 

The Degree and the Deluge

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

Independent Accountability Journalism | Guyana

EDITORIAL

The Degree and the Deluge

President Ali holds a doctorate in integrated land management.

Guyana drowns every wet season.These facts are not unrelated.

592 Guardian Editorial Board | June 2026

There is a particular cruelty to official silence that compounds over time. It begins as evasion, hardens into arrogance, and ends — if unchallenged — as contempt for the governed.

The recurring public questions surrounding President Irfaan Ali’s doctorate in integrated land management from the University of the West Indies have followed precisely this arc. What began as a query about academic credentials has become, in the government’s hands, a test of something far larger: whether this administration believes it owes the Guyanese people any account of itself at all.

Let us be precise about what is and is not under scrutiny. This editorial does not allege that the degree does not exist. It does not require that conclusion. What it demands attention is this: in a country where land management failures are not abstract policy shortcomings but lived catastrophes — where families in Mahaica, Mahaicony, Abary, and across the Essequibo Coast watch their homes inundate with each passing wet season — a president who holds advanced academic credentials in the very discipline responsible for that failure cannot treat questions about those credentials as a nuisance. He must treat them as a civic obligation to answer.

A Dissertation and a Drowning Country

Guyana’s flooding crisis is not a natural phenomenon beyond governance. It is, in significant measure, a governance failure — a failure of drainage infrastructure, of coastal zone planning, of land-use policy, of the very integrated systems that a dissertation in integrated land management purports to address. The irony is not subtle. It is structural.

Guyana’s coastal plain sits below sea level. Its drainage relies on a network of canals, kokers, and sluices built largely in the colonial era and maintained — or not — by successive governments with varying degrees of seriousness. Climate change has intensified the threat. Oil wealth has provided the revenue to address it. And yet the flooding continues, year after year, relentless and predictable, falling hardest on the poor and the rural communities least able to protect themselves.

In that context, a president with a doctorate in land management is either an extraordinary asset or an extraordinary accountability problem. He is one or the other. He cannot be neither. The credential either informs policy, or it does not. The academic record either reflects genuine scholarly engagement with the discipline, or it reflects something else. The public has every right to know which is true — and the government’s refusal to provide the elementary transparency that would resolve the question transforms a credential dispute into a governance indictment.

The Anatomy of Defensive Silence

When questions about the doctorate first surfaced publicly, the government had an obvious and available response: disclose the record fully. Provide the dissertation title, the thesis committee, the year of conferral, the institutional confirmation from UWI. In a digital age, academic verification is not a complex exercise. The absence of such disclosure — and the replacement of disclosure with dismissiveness, bureaucratic delay, and political deflection — is itself a form of answer.

Defenders of the President will argue that the scrutiny is partisan, that the questions are motivated by political malice rather than civic concern. That argument does not hold. The source of a question does not determine its legitimacy.

A question can be asked for cynical reasons and still deserve a serious answer. In democratic governance, the standard for transparency is not whether the questioner is friendly; it is whether the question is legitimate. This one is.

What is more, the pattern of defensiveness is not isolated. It reflects a wider disposition of the Ali administration toward accountability: a preference for announcement over audit, for narrative management over transparency, for projecting confidence in place of demonstrating competence. The credential controversy is one thread in a larger fabric of opacity — a fabric that includes oil revenue disclosure, procurement opacity, the treatment of migrant workers in Region Seven, and the government’s systematic resistance to institutional scrutiny.

Trust Is Not a Favour — It Is a Requirement

The deeper issue is one of democratic first principles. In a functioning democracy, public officials do not merely tolerate scrutiny — they submit to it as a condition of their authority.

Legitimacy is not conferred by electoral victory alone. It is continuously earned through openness, accountability, and the willingness to be questioned. A leader who treats questions as threats has misunderstood the nature of the office he holds.

When President Ali asks the Guyanese people to trust his stewardship of the nation’s land, its resources, its drainage infrastructure, and its development trajectory, he is making an implicit claim: that his judgment, expertise, and character warrant that trust. That claim invites scrutiny. It cannot simultaneously demand credence and resist examination.

The families whose agricultural lands are submerged are not asking an abstract question about academic integrity. They are asking, in their practical and urgent way, whether the person who holds power over the systems that govern their land actually understands those systems — and whether, if he does, he is choosing not to act, or whether the credential that was meant to demonstrate that understanding was itself a performance. Either answer is damning. Only full transparency can determine which is true.

The Minimum Price of Credibility

This editorial calls on the Office of the President to do what it should have done at the outset: publish, without condition or equivocation, the full record of President Ali’s doctoral qualification. The dissertation. The thesis committee. The date of conferral. The institutional verification. Not in response to political pressure, but in affirmation of the principle that in a democracy, leaders are answerable for their public claims.

It further calls on the University of the West Indies to exercise its institutional responsibility to the integrity of its own credentials. Academic institutions do not merely confer degrees; they stand behind them.

If a degree awarded by UWI is the subject of sustained public question, UWI has both the ability and the obligation to clarify — not for the benefit of critics, but for the benefit of the public trust that underpins the value of every UWI credential held by every graduate.

Guyana stands at a defining moment in its national life. Oil revenues offer the possibility of genuine transformation. But transformation built on opacity is not development — it is extraction with better optics. The country deserves leadership that is as rigorous in its accountability as it is ambitious in its claims. It deserves a government that does not ask citizens to trust it in pieces, while withholding the whole.

“A government that wants trust must first stop asking citizens to trust in pieces.”

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability publication committed to democratic transparency in Guyana.

Editorials represent the collective position of the editorial board.

IRFAAN ALI , THE EXCEPTIONAL (at What?)

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Irfaan Ali the Exceptional (at what?)

OPINION 

BY: GHK LALL 

From shoveling away sludge to clear the way to braving the treacherous rapids of Guyana, there is the man on top of the world -Mohamed Irfaan Ali.  He is a far cry from the shaky lad who flew out of Leonora.  What a goose pimple-raising leader, a character straight out of Mark Twain, with some touches of Dickens thrown in to add to the grimness of his times, the froths stirred by his passage.

Parts of Guyana are set to be plunged into a reign of darkness.  Its president is trapped by lightheadedness.  Floating here, cavorting there.  Let there be light, said a celestial voice. 

Dr. Ali was all for it in the beginning (transparency), then he chickened out.  For what purposes?  Expose all of the PPP’s dirty laundry?  No one is that daft.  Blame the Turkish powerboat people, blame the blackouts hovering over the horizon.  But blackouts have a purpose. 

Keep the population in darkness, so that it is riven by the blankness of ignorance.  An ignorant citizenry is an obedient set of people.  What they don’t know can’t hurt them. 

To repeat my prior assurances: don’t get hot under the collar, fellow Guyanese.  The lights will stay on.  The people will get their new rates.  All will be well.  It is why Ali is so cavalier.  Pay the people, and be done with it.  Guyana doesn’t quibble over a million or few these days.  There’s a positive to the Turkish powerboat storm in a teacup: the PPP and Dr. Ali get to stick it to Guyanese.  Right in the kisser.  Who went the extra mile?  The PPP and Ali.  Who made the hard sacrifice?  The PPP and Ali.  I would do the same, too, using other people’s money.  Remember I said it first: Ali the Exceptional.

Ai-yai-yai!  This is a funny, tricky, nasty, sickly, and sleazy country.  Guyana really is. 

I lost track of the billions set aside for agriculture and drainage in budget after budget, when $240 billion was surpassed.  Ashni Singh did his usual magic with the numbers.  Only for the Ministry of Drainage to do a number on Guyanese.  Those who were pro-PPP since birth are now pro-WIN since the rains started and can’t seem to stop.  Check it out, good people.  Over US$1 billion, and the skies sneeze too long, and Guyana transforms into a rising wall of water all over.  I have been at airports that were snowed under.  Never saw one that was flooded out.  Lived through a few small sliders in snowed over runways.  Don’t want to think of landing on, or taking off from, one that the rains converted to a foot deep swimming pool.  Nerves and aging don’t go well.  Like trying bush rum and ice cream as a smoothie.

Thunderstorms hovering and threatening.  Turkish lightning rearing up and preparing to have a go.  And where is Pres Ali? 
He is on a new working campaign trail that he is busy trying out. 

Excellency Ali’s head is already fixed on 2030 (with handpicked contender at side), while flooded out citizens fear thinking of 20:30 tonight, and how they are going to manage.  To see.  To read.  To cook (if the money was there for the ingredients).  Before that, it’s how to keep dry.  To learn to sleep on a waterbed.

 When the gods want to punish people, they give them oil.  Then, to complete the circle of horrors, the people are given partners and leaders to drive them up a wall.  Or six feet dungeons. 

The people in Iran worry about bunker buster bombs.  The people in Guyana worry about partners and leaders.  I have heard about water near the heart and in the lungs.  Never came across water in the brain.  It is the special sickness that seems to strike prolifically at Guyana’s cohort of politicians.  Ethnicity aside, it must be hereditary. 

Meanwhile, Guyana’s boy wonder, Irfaan Ali, is now a fleet admiral, a marine biologist, and an Olympian aquatic astronaut.  Talk about exceptional, and Ali is he.

 

Ramsammy’s Flood Spin Drown In Reality

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Ramsammy’s Flood Spin Drowns in Reality

Ramsammy’s Flood Defense Collapses Under the Weight of Reality

Dr. Leslie Ramsammy’s column in Guyana Times is not an analysis—it is a political defense crafted to insulate the Government from scrutiny at a time when citizens are demanding answers. It relies on deflection, exaggeration, and selective framing, while the reality unfolding across Guyana tells a very different story.

Let us dispense immediately with the strawman. No serious critic is claiming that the PPP Government caused the rainfall. That argument exists only in the imagination of those seeking to trivialize legitimate public concern. The real issue is far more substantive: whether the Government’s drainage systems, maintenance regime, and emergency response are adequate for the conditions Guyana now routinely faces.

And on that question, the evidence on the ground is damning.

Across multiple communities—Buxton, Annandale, Lusignan, and sections of Mon Repos on the East Coast; Albouystown, South Ruimveldt, and parts of Sophia in Georgetown; and low-lying areas in Regions 3, 5, and 6, including sections of West Berbice and the Corentyne—residents reported prolonged flooding within hours of heavy rainfall. In several instances, water levels remained high well after rainfall subsided, a clear indication that drainage was either too slow, uneven, or compromised.

There have also been persistent complaints, supported by photographs and videos widely circulated on social media, of clogged canals, silted trenches, and overtopping kokers in areas such as Cane Grove, Enmore, and Mahaica. In some communities, residents reported pumps operating intermittently or below optimal capacity during critical periods. Whether each individual report is universally accurate is not the point—the consistency of these accounts across regions cannot be dismissed as fabrication.

This is precisely where Dr. Ramsammy’s argument collapses.

He points to increased drainage capacity—from 1.5 inches to 2 inches—as proof of progress. But citizens do not experience “capacity” in inches; they experience outcomes. If improved infrastructure still results in widespread and prolonged flooding, then the system—however improved—is still insufficient for present conditions.

Saying the system was “overwhelmed” does not end the discussion. It begins it.

It raises unavoidable questions: why are known flood-prone communities like Buxton and parts of the Corentyne still so vulnerable after years of investment? Why does water recede relatively quickly in some parts of Georgetown while lingering for days in places like Sophia and Albouystown? Are maintenance schedules consistent and verifiable, or reactive and uneven? Where is the transparent data on pump uptime, drainage flow rates, and response timelines?

These are not political attacks. They are basic standards of governance.

Equally troubling is the attempt to dismiss criticism as “disinformation” while relying on isolated counterexamples to defend a national system. Highlighting a single functioning pump in Plaisance does not negate reported issues in Enmore, Mahaica, or along the Corentyne Coast. Governance cannot be assessed through selective snapshots; it must be judged on system-wide performance.
 

Meanwhile, citizens have not been silent witnesses. From Buxton to Berbice, they have documented their experiences in real time—flooded yards, submerged roadways, water entering homes, and stagnant pools lingering for days. These are not opposition narratives; they are lived realities, visible to anyone willing to look beyond official statements.

Dr. Ramsammy also seeks to elevate ministerial presence in affected communities as evidence of effective governance. But presence after the fact is not a substitute for preparedness. If anything, the recurring flooding in places like Mahaica and West Berbice raises serious questions about whether enough preventative work is being done before the rains arrive.

Yes, climate change is intensifying rainfall. Yes, Guyana is not alone in facing these challenges. But invoking global trends cannot be used to dilute local responsibility. Other countries are also being judged—rightly—on how well their systems perform under pressure.

The truth is not as convenient as the narrative being advanced. Guyana’s drainage system may be improving, but it is still inconsistent, still vulnerable, and in too many places, still failing under stress. Acknowledging that reality is not an attack on the Government—it is a prerequisite for fixing the problem.

What is truly dangerous is the attempt to gaslight a population that is visibly and physically experiencing the consequences of these shortcomings. Telling citizens that everything is working while they stand in floodwater is not leadership. It is denial.

Dr. Ramsammy’s column does not rise to the level of serious national discourse. It asks the public to ignore evidence, dismiss their own experiences, and accept a politically convenient narrative.

The people of Guyana deserve better—especially when the water rises 

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

ALL HAIL THE CHIEF

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“All hail the Chief”—while the lights flicker, the streets flood, and the people foot the bill.#

 

“All hail the Chief” — while Karpowership, the Turkish power ship company, holds Guyana at ransom, demanding higher rates or it will plunge the nation into darkness. Flooded streets, $1M USD paid for a 2-year power ship rental, 58% poverty (IDB 2025), stagnant wages, an inactive legislature, and pay-to-play politics define a country teetering in corruption and decay. Can shoveling save Guyana from this morass?”

 

 

Man-in-the-street voices—those unvarnished, unfiltered snapshots of public sentiment—are increasingly telling a story that official narratives cannot contain. “All hail the Chief,” some declare, but the phrase lands less as praise and more as quiet indictment, tinged with fatigue, irony, and a growing sense of abandonment.

At the center of this unfolding reality is a government presiding over a fragile and deeply concerning arrangement with a Turkish power company—one that has now signaled, in no uncertain terms, its willingness to plunge Guyana into darkness if its demands are not satisfied. This is no routine commercial dispute. It is a national vulnerability laid bare. When a foreign operator can credibly threaten widespread blackouts, it raises serious questions about procurement practices, contractual transparency, contingency planning, and the state’s negotiating leverage. 

How did such a strategic sector become so exposed? 

And who, ultimately, bears responsibility for placing the country in this position?

Beyond the looming energy crisis, the physical condition of the country tells its own story. 

Flooded streets, inundated homes, and crippled businesses have become recurrent features of daily life rather than exceptional events. Drainage and irrigation systems—long neglected, poorly maintained, or unevenly upgraded—are failing under both predictable seasonal pressures and changing climate realities. The economic toll is cumulative and severe: lost productivity, damaged goods, disrupted commerce, and rising repair costs that fall squarely on citizens and small businesses least equipped to absorb them.

Overlaying this is a sobering socio-economic landscape. The Inter-American Development Bank’s 2025 assessment, placing 58% of the population in poverty and 32% in extreme poverty, should have triggered a national emergency response. Instead, it has been met with muted urgency. Independent analysts and local observers argue that even these figures may understate the depth of deprivation, particularly in hinterland communities and among informal workers whose struggles often escape formal measurement.

At the same time, wages remain stagnant or marginally adjusted, while the cost of living accelerates sharply driven by rising food prices, housing pressures, utilities, and imported goods. For many Guyanese, the arithmetic no longer works. The promise of oil wealth—once framed as a generational opportunity to transform living standards—has yet to translate into tangible relief for the majority. Instead, it has intensified scrutiny over how revenues are managed, allocated, and distributed.

Compounding these pressures is a growing perception—both domestically and regionally—that Guyana is sliding toward the upper ranks of corruption within the English-speaking Caribbean. Allegations of preferential contracting, opaque deals, politically connected beneficiaries, and weak oversight mechanisms have eroded confidence in public institutions. 

The phrase “pay-to-play” is no longer; it is openly discussed, reflecting a belief that access, opportunity, and advancement are increasingly mediated by political alignment and financial influence.

Equally troubling is the state of the country’s democratic machinery. An underperforming or inactive legislature diminishes scrutiny at precisely the moment when robust oversight is most needed. Parliamentary dormancy, limited debate, and constrained accountability mechanisms create a governance vacuum in which executive decisions face insufficient challenge. 

 

In such an environment, policy risks becoming insulated from public interest, shaped instead by expediency and entrenched networks.

What emerges from this convergence is not a collection of isolated issues, but a systemic crisis—a dense, miasmic blend of infrastructural decay, economic strain, governance weakness, and public disillusionment. 

It is a condition that cannot be resolved through ad hoc interventions, symbolic gestures, or reactive policymaking.

Which brings the question sharply into focus: can the “Chief,” through visible acts of intervention—through the metaphorical shoveling—extricate Guyana from this deepening morass

The answer depends not on optics, but on substance.

Real recovery demands more than performance. It requires renegotiating critical contracts from a position of national interest, investing in resilient and climate-adapted infrastructure, implementing targeted poverty reduction strategies, strengthening wage frameworks, and—critically—restoring integrity, transparency, and accountability across public institutions. It also requires reactivating democratic processes so that governance is not merely exercised but examined.

Because no amount of shoveling can clear a system that continues to generate the very conditions it seeks to escape. 

Without structural reform, the flooding—literal and metaphorical—will persist. 

The darkness—whether from power failures or governance deficits—will remain a looming threat. And the voices from the street, already resonating with skepticism and strain, will grow louder, sharper, and increasingly difficult to ignore.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

THE BILLION DOLLAR DRAINAGE PARADOX- CROSSFIRE OR MISFIRE ?

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The Billion-Dollar Drainage Paradox

 Billions Vanished; Floodwaters Return — The D&I Accountability Gap They Can’t Spin Away

The May 31 CHRONICLE– CROSSFIRE column titled “Floodwaters and Political Opportunism” is an audacious attempt to repackage a decade of administrative failure as leadership. The column praises President Irfaan Ali for convening emergency meetings “before dawn” and deploying pumps as if this were a triumph. However, this is not leadership—it is damage control for a system that should already be functioning effectively after $ 140 billion in spending.

The fundamental question the column dodges is this: if billions have truly been spent on drainage and irrigation (D&I), why does the nation revert to crisis mode with every heavy rainfall?
Let’s examine the actual numbers:

Spending Category Amount (GYD) Timeframe Documented Outcome
Total D&I allocated (government claim)

 G$140 billion 2020–2026 Flooding persists nationwide 
D&I expended by mid-2024 G$14.8 billion 2020–mid-2024 G$14.8B spent but systems still fail 
2024 D&I budget allocation G$72.3 billion Single year Floods continued throughout 2024–2026 
40 mobile pumps purchase G$29.4 billion 2024 Still deploying pumps in May 2026 
Linden (Region 10) D&I projects (4 years) G$1.5 billion 2020–2024 Region 10 still flooded March 2026 
Liliendaal pump station G$1.054 billion Completed 2025 Georgetown still flooded December 2025 
CDC disaster response allocation G$73 billion (~US$350M) 2026 Victims report NO relief received 
2022 flood protection (sea/river defenses) G$5 billion G$5 billion Flooding returned 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 
Region Two D&I works G$2.4 billion 2024 Ongoing—not completed; still flooding [29]
Region Six D&I modernization G$7 billion 2024 Still under construction, not operational 
2024 supplementary flood relief G$10 billion 2026 Aid to 30,000 households—emergency only 

 

These are not marginal investments. This is transformative-level spending that should have permanently resolved coastal flooding. Yet the flooding persists with devastating regularity.

Investigative Findings: Projects Announced, Promises Broken
The column breathlessly describes “hundreds of pumps operating across the country” and “newly acquired mobile systems.” But the investigative record tells a different story:
1. Geographic Spread of Failure (May 2026)
•East Coast Demerara: ~100mm rainfall, flooding in most communities 
•Leonora (Region 3): ~225mm rainfall, severe flooding 
•Region 10 (Linden): Repeated flooding despite G$1.5B in D&I spending 
•Berbice: Communities flooded simultaneously 
•West Coast: Also affected, showing systemic failure 
When flooding hits five regions simultaneously, this is not an “unpredictable weather event.” This is systemic infrastructure collapse.
2. The December 2025 Georgetown Flooding Contradiction
In December 2025, downtown Georgetown flooded after “only a brief period of rain,” paralyzing commerce and schools. This occurred just months after:
•President Ali boasted of “electronic monitoring of the drainage system by October 2025” 

•Minister Mustapha announced billion-dollar drainage investments 
The result? Knee-high water in commercial streets, children removing shoes to walk to school, and businesses forced to close. 
3. The G$73 Billion CDC Reliefs Failure
Despite G$73 billion (~US$350 million) allocated to the Civil Defense Commission for disaster preparedness and response:
•Residents report receiving NO cleaning supplies (mops, bleach) 
•No financial aid distributed 
•No emergency support provided 
•Families “deadlifting refrigerators out of contaminated floodwater” in the dark 

This is not “swift activation.” This is procurement paralysis at the expense of suffering citizens.
4. The 30,000-Household Emergency Pattern
The government distributed almost 30,000 hampers to flood victims in May 2026. This mirrors the 2021 flood crisis when 29,300 households in 300+ communities were affected. The pattern is clear:

•Flood → Emergency hampers → Water recedes → Families rebuild → Flood returns → Repeat
This is not governance. This is crisis management as a permanent state.

The Root Problem: Corruption, Cronyism, and Administrative Incompetence
The column dismisses criticism as “political theatre” and “manufactured outrage.” But the real crisis is documented in investigative reports:
1. Corruption at the Core of Infrastructure Failure
Shadow Attorney General Roysdale Forde explicitly states that Guyana’s infrastructure crisis is rooted in systematic corruption:

“Billions in public funds allocated for infrastructure projects have been misused or siphoned off, with political patronage and corruption at the forefront… contracts are routinely awarded to party loyalists, many of whom lack the competence to execute the work but are skilled in enriching themselves at the public’s expense.”

Forde goes further

“It is the result of political decisions driven by kickbacks, favoritism, and outright theft… widespread corruption has led to shoddy construction, overpriced repairs, and the creation of ‘ghost’ projects that serve only to line the pockets of those in power.”

2. The PPP/C Cronyism Network
Investigative reports document that up to 70% of contracts in some regions go to cronies through blatant favoritism. Businesses are routinely pressured to pay kickbacks of 10–20% of contract values just to secure deals.

3. The Heroes Highway Example
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally experienced the Heroes Highway during his March 2027 visit and called it “dangerous,” accusing contractors of doing a “terrible job”:

“If you did that job in America, someone would sue you for a lot of money… You’re better off with the dirt road… If you’re going to build a road, build a real road.” 

The highway was built by 12 local contractors with close ties to the ruling PPP/C. This is not accidental poor quality—this is systematic patronage.

4. The Kingston Waterfront Scandal
The Kingston Waterfront development project, launched as a “transformative urban renewal initiative,” has come under scrutiny for massive cost overruns and lack of accountability:

“Investigations have revealed irregularities in the bidding process, with a handful of well-connected contractors linked to PPP/C officials allegedly receiving inflated contracts.”

5. Oil-for-Infrastructure Deals Under Scrutiny
Investigative reports suggest that “Oil for infrastructure” deals are rife with corruption:

“Key government figures are accused of receiving kickbacks from foreign firms contracted to undertake these projects, inflating costs and delivering subpar results while siphoning off public funds.”

The Auditor General’s Flood Relief Investigation
In 2022, the Auditor General launched a special investigation into the Government’s Flood Relief Program after discovering major discrepancies:
•Office of the Prime Minister received G$183.5 million for ‘Other expenses’
•G$10 billion supplementary budget approved for Disaster Preparedness, Response, and Management
•Total revised allotment: G$10.184 billion
•Hundreds of millions unaccounted for.
The Auditor General’s report explicitly flagged major discrepancies in how flood relief funds were spent. This is not speculation—this is official audit findings.
The “Swift Response” Myth Deconstructed
The column describes the government response as “swift activation” and “coordinated response.” Let’s examine that claim:
What the Column Claims:
• “President convened senior officials before dawn”
• “Pumps were deployed, drainage systems mobilized”
• “More than 200 pumping units were deployed nationally”
• “Dozens of pumps were already operational on East Coast Demerara”
What Actually Happened:
•President had to convene emergency meetings at sunrise because the system failed 
•200 pumping units deployed as emergency stopgaps, not as functional infrastructure 
•30,000 households received emergency hampers, not systemic relief
•G$73 billion CDC allocation yielded no visible mobilization for victims

Here’s the contradiction: If the system was already “fixed” with G$140 billion in spending, why does the President need to convene emergency meetings every time it rains?
The answer is simple: The infrastructure was not fixed. The money was wasted.

The Real Question: Why Does the President Still Have to Fix What Was Already Supposed to Be Fixed?

The column frames the President’s sunrise emergency convening as “leadership.” But this is the leadership of a lighthouse keeper who lights the lamp every night instead of fixing the broken bulb during the day.
A properly functioning D&I system would:

•Drain water naturally without emergency pump deployment

•Prevent floodwaters from entering homes, yards, and business

•Operate without requiring Presidential emergency meetings

•Not require 30,000 households to receive emergency hampers

The fact that the President must convene senior officials, including Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo, ministers, regional leaders, and engineers every time it rains heavily is evidence of systemic failure, not leadership.

Why Criticism Is Not “Opportunism” — It’s Accountability

The column attempts to delegitimize dissent by calling it “political theatre,” “calculated exploitation,” and “livestream outrage.” But citizens are not “manufacturing” this crisis. They are living it:

•Families in flooded homes with water “right with the bed”

•Small businesses destroyed, livelihoods disrupted

•Schoolchildren removing shoes to walk through floodwaters

•Entire regions facing simultaneous flooding

•30,000 households receiving emergency hampers instead of permanent solutions.

This frustration is not political theater—it is accumulated anger from a decade of repeated flooding, broken promises, and unaccounted spending.

The Historical Context: This Is Not New

The column gestures at “historical perspective” and claims “recent responses demonstrate a level of capacity and coordination that would have been difficult to imagine in previous decades.” But the data contradicts this:
2005 Floods: Nationwide catastrophe, weeks of flooding
2013 Floods: 30,000+ households affected
2021 Floods: 29,300 households in 300+ communities affected
2025 Floods: Georgetown downtown paralyzed after brief rain
2026 Floods: Multiple regions simultaneously flooded, 30,000 households receiving hampers
The pattern is clear: Flooding recurs with increasing regularity, not decreasing frequency. The column’s claim of “improved capacity” is contradicted by the facts.

What the Public Is No Longer Buying

The column’s attempt to frame emergency response as success and criticism as opportunism is a political misfire. No serious observer doubts that emergency response is necessary. But response is not a substitute for competence, prevention, and accountability.

Guyanese are not buying the narrative that:

Claim Reality
G$140 billion in D&I spending is “working” Flooding persists annually, worse each year 
President convening emergency meetings is “leadership” It’s failure of preparedness requiring Presidential intervention 
Critics are “opportunists” They’re citizens demanding answers for recurring disaster
“Swift activation” proves competence Emergency pumps = stopgap for broken infrastructure
CDC “mobilized” with G$73B Victims report NO relief received
“Dozens of pumps operational” 200 pumps deployed as emergency stopgap
“Future investments required” It’s failure of preparedness requiring Presidential intervention 

 

G$140 billion already spent—WHERE DID IT GO?

The Questions That Must Be Answered

The floodwaters will recede. But these questions remain:
1.Where did the G$140 billion go? If systems were properly built, why does flooding persist?
2.Why did the G$73 billion CDC allocation yield no relief for victims? Who authorized this spending?
3.Why are contracts routinely awarded to PPP/C loyalists without competitive bidding?
4.Why do 70% of contracts in some regions go to cronies?
5.Why did the Auditor General find hundreds of millions unaccounted for in flood relief?
6.Why does the President still convene emergency meetings every time it rains? 
7.Why did Georgetown flood in December 2025 after “electronic monitoring” was supposedly implemented?
8.Why are roads like Heroes Highway called “dangerous” by the U.S. Secretary of State?

Conclusion: The Public Has Seen This Script Before
The column’s rhetoric is familiar: praise emergency response, dismiss criticism, deflect from systemic failure. But the public is no longer buying it.

Guyana deserves more than narratives of reassurance. It deserves:

•Transparency on what is not working
•Accountability for why billions were wasted
•A credible plan to ensure the next rainfall event does not produce the same national distress

Until those questions are answered with honesty and measurable results—not rhetoric—the public will rightly reject any attempt to reclassify recurring disaster as governance success.

Politics at its worst is profiting from problems. Politics at its best solves them. This government has yet to prove it can do the latter after G$140 billion in spending.
The floodwaters will recede. What remains will be a clearer picture of who squandered the money, who failed to build the systems, and who is responsible for the suffering of 30,000 households.

History has a habit of distinguishing between the two. And voters usually do as well

⁂EDITOR NOTE’S

Analysis of NDIA maintenance failures cited in recent audit reports
The recent Auditor General report on NDIA is quite clear: the problem is not simply “bad weather,” but a pattern of weak planning, poor records, vacant leadership posts, and incomplete maintenance oversight that undermines drainage performance.  NDIA spent G$6.674 billion on asset maintenance from January 2021 to June 2024, yet the audit still found no structured maintenance system, no comprehensive planning, and no reliable way to verify nearly half of sampled expenditure.
What the audit found
The audit says NDIA had over 30 vacancies every year from 2021 to 2024, with key positions such as CEO, Deputy CEO, Corporate Secretary/Legal Officer, Manager of Operations and Maintenance, Mechanical Engineers, Internal Auditor, and Engineering Technicians still vacant by September 2024. It also found that the Authority could not present its asset management policy, could not support claims about a multi-year strategic plan, and had no assessed training needs or training plan for staff. Those are not minor administrative gaps; they are the kind of failures that weaken daily upkeep and make systems break down when heavy rain arrives.
Maintenance spending gap
The report shows maintenance spending rising sharply: G$1.079 billion in 2021, G$1.643 billion in 2022, G$2.461 billion in 2023, and G$1.490 billion in the first half of 2024, totaling G$6.674 billion. But the audit also says NDIA’s budget documents did not explain how maintenance needs were calculated, and financial reports were too vague to show what was spent on which maintenance category. In one sample review of 99 assets costing G$2.314 billion, NDIA could present vouchers for only G$1.126 billion, leaving G$1.188 billion, or 51 percent, unverified.
Recordkeeping failures
The audit is especially strong on asset control and documentation. It found the asset register missing key details such as asset location, serial numbers, identification numbers, and transfer records, which meant the register could not reliably track equipment. It also found that proof of ownership for most of the more than 500 recorded assets was not provided, and that 10 pieces of heavy-duty equipment, motor vehicles, and cycles seen in the field were not recorded in the register. That kind of record failure makes it much easier for assets to be lost, misused, or simply left unaccounted for.

NDIA’s recent audit shows that billions were spent on drainage maintenance, but weak planning, vacant senior posts, poor asset records, and unverifiable expenditures left the system unable to deliver the reliability Guyanese communities were promised.