SELF-PRESERVATION, NOT PRINCIPLE

 SELF-PRESERVATION, NOT PRINCIPLE

What GMSA’s Sudden Voice on the Water Plant Reveals

By; Hem Kumar, Editor

The Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association has, this week, said something true. Its August 4 press release identifies a real conflict of interest in the $496.3 million the National Assembly approved for a state-owned bottled water plant under Guyana Water Incorporated — capital deployed by the state directly into a market that private Guyanese manufacturers already serve, with their own money, at their own risk.

The Association is right to call for a review. It is right to point out that President Ali’s own February commitment, at the Bartica plant commissioning, described a shared-infrastructure model, not a state producer competing against the businesses it claims to be strengthening.

What is worth examining is not whether GMSA’s complaint has merit. It does. What is worth examining is why it took a threat to members’ own balance sheets to produce it.

A RECORD OF WELCOME, NOT WATCHFULNESS

GMSA’s public statements over the past eighteen months form a consistent pattern, and it is one the Association has built proudly and on the record. It welcomed Budget 2025 within days of its presentation, citing income tax adjustments and SME market-development funding as reasons for its enthusiasm. It welcomed Budget 2026 as a “game changer,” citing the removal of corporate taxes on agro-processing and the launch of the Guyana Development Bank — the same Development Bank Bill that passed the National Assembly on July 27, 2026 without debate, without independent board representation, and without a word of public concern from GMSA about the $40 billion in ministerial discretion it concentrated in one office.

It thanked the Government for securing reduced US tariffs on Guyanese exports. It welcomed the opening of the Demerara River Bridge as a competitiveness win. In December, marking its own thirtieth anniversary, GMSA told the public directly that the Government’s five-year economic agenda “closely reflect[ed] long-standing policy recommendations and advocacy advanced by the GMSA on behalf of its members.”

That is not the record of a watchdog. It is the record of a partner — one that has, by its own account, had the Government’s ear and used it successfully.

•Where was that same voice when the Development Bank Bill moved through the same sitting the water plant did, concentrating discretionary lending authority with no debate?

•Where was it during any of the accountability fights this Board and others have carried over the past year — the sequencing questions, the unexplained appointments, the pattern of legislation moving fastest when public attention is fixed elsewhere?

GMSA was not silent because it lacked standing to speak. It has proven, repeatedly, that when it speaks, government listens. It was silent because none of those matters touched its members’ pockets.

THE CHICKENS AND THE POCKETBOOK

This is not a case for cynicism about the water plant complaint itself — the complaint stands on its own facts, and this Board has made a version of the same argument elsewhere.

It is a case for clarity about what has changed. What changed is not GMSA’s appetite for good governance. What changed is that the State, for the first time in this run of documented alignment, has turned its commercial weight toward GMSA’s own membership rather than toward their competitors, their tax bills, or their trade barriers.

The Association has found its voice now because self-preservation, unlike principle, does not wait to be invited.

There is a lesson here for every private-sector body that has treated proximity to government as a substitute for independence. Access purchased with silence is access that lasts only as long as your interests and the State’s happen to run in the same direction.

GMSA is discovering, publicly and in real time, what that arrangement is worth the moment those directions diverge. The water plant may well be reviewed. The $40 billion Development Bank will not be, because the body best positioned to demand it already spent its credibility welcoming the bill that created it.

GMSA is owed a serious answer on the bottled water plant. It is also owed the observation, plainly made, that a voice raised only when the wallet is threatened is not oversight.

It is self-interest wearing the language of principle — and Guyana’s private sector, as a whole, will need to decide whether that is the posture it wants to be known for the next time the State’s ambitions cross into its own territory.

— The Board