“Manufacture Here or Get Out”: Ali’s Ultimatum and the Infrastructure Vacuum Behind It

“Manufacture Here or Get Out”:Ali’s Ultimatum and the Infrastructure Vacuum Behind It

The 592 Guardian | Editorial  Analysis

President Irfaan Ali stood before an audience at the commissioning of two HAL 228 small regional aircrafts on Saturday and issued what he apparently believes is a commanding ultimatum to international manufacturers: invest in Guyana or lose access to its market.

 The declaration was delivered with the theatrical confidence of a head of state presiding over a diversified industrial economy. Guyana is not that economy. Not even close

The questions write themselves. Where is the power?

Before a single foreign manufacturer can be expected to anchor a factory on Guyanese soil, it must answer a foundational question: how will it run? Guyana Power and Light remains one of the most unreliable utilities in the hemisphere — a chronic embarrassment that predates this administration but has deepened under it.

The Gas-to-Energy project, sold as the transformative fix, remains behind schedule, over budget, and structurally dependent on a pipeline whose completion timeline has shifted so many times it no longer commands serious credibility. Residential consumers still endure load-shedding. Industrial users run generators as a matter of operational necessity, not contingency.

What ISO-certified food manufacturer — the sector Ali specifically invoked with the Banks DIH/Dominican Republic partnership — will commit capital to a plant that cannot guarantee three-shift electrical continuity? The president offered no answer because the question was never invited.

 What exactly are “the most aggressive fiscal incentives in the Caribbean”?

Ali’s claim that Guyana now offers the region’s most competitive manufacturing incentives is asserted, not demonstrated.

 The Investment Act, the various sector-specific concession frameworks, the discretionary waivers administered through Go-Invest — these exist on paper with variable enforcement and well-documented opacity in how they are applied. Companies that have navigated Guyana’s investment environment know that the headline incentive and the operational reality are frequently different documents.

The Dominican Republic, which Ali cites as his model partner, runs the Western Hemisphere’s most mature free zone architecture — decades of institutional build-out, transparent administration, and a track record that has attracted genuine multinational manufacturing commitments. Guyana has incentive language. That is not the same thing.

 Corruption and the cost of doing business

Any serious manufacturer conducting due diligence on a Guyana investment will consult Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the U.S. State Department’s Investment Climate Statement, and the lived experience of companies that have operated here.

What they will find is a procurement environment marked by opacity, a regulatory enforcement apparatus that is selectively deployed, and a pattern — documented across this publication’s coverage — in which contracts flow through relationships rather than competition.

The EKAA HRIM labor exploitation thread. The Wales Gas-to-Energy MOAP ghost-payroll pattern. The GGMC’s nine-year audit currency gap. The Guyana Lottery Company’s procurement opacity. These are not peripheral anomalies; they are systemic signals. A foreign manufacturer considering a multi-million dollar capital commitment reads them as country risk, not editorial grievance.

 For a manufacturer weighing political risk, regulatory unpredictability, infrastructure unreliability, and anti-money-laundering exposure, the calculus is considerably less flattering than the president imagines.

 The Trump parallel — and where it breaks down entirely

The rhetorical structure is indeed familiar: if you want our market, you build here. Trump deployed it against some of the world’s largest export economies, backed by the leverage of a $27 trillion consumer market, the world’s reserve currency, and two centuries of industrial infrastructure.

 Guyana’s GDP, even at its oil-boom trajectory, does not purchase that leverage. The domestic consumer market is approximately 800,000 people. Regional manufacturers exporting to Guyana are not trembling at the prospect of losing access to a market that, in aggregate, represents a rounding error on their revenue statements.

 What Trump had — and what makes the copycat framing accurate — is the instinct to perform strength as a substitute for structural analysis. The performance may satisfy a domestic audience. It does not rewrite the investment calculus of a Trinidadian food manufacturer or a Dominican agro-processor.

 The Banks DIH Partnership: A Showcase or a Warning?

The president’s flagship example deserves closer scrutiny. Banks DIH — a well-managed local conglomerate with real institutional capacity — is partnering with Dominican Republic firms for an agro-processing hub. That is a legitimate private sector development worth monitoring. But note what the president is actually describing: a local company doing the anchoring, with foreign firms as partners, under direct presidential pressure.

That is not a replicable foreign direct investment model. That is a showcase arrangement built on a relationship, announced at a political event, offered as proof of a policy thesis it does not actually validate.

 If the administration has a pipeline of similar arrangements — companies that have committed capital, applied for permits, broken ground — the public record should reflect it. Publish the Go-Invest data. Publish the manufacturing investment approvals for the past three years alongside their current operational status. Let the numbers carry the argument the president cannot carry with rhetoric.

 The questions Ali was never asked on Saturday:

The president issued a demand. The infrastructure, the institutions, and the transparency record necessary to back that demand do not yet exist at the scale his rhetoric assumes.

That gap is not a policy footnote. It is the story.

 The 592 Guardian holds power accountable across Guyana’s governance, extractive industry, and civil rights landscape.