Soundproof Walls, Silent Ledger

Soundproof Walls, Silent Ledger

 EDITORIAL BY: Staff Writer

 How a Bank That Does Not Yet Exist Found Its First Client

 August, 2026

At Rose Hall on Saturday, President Irfaan Ali told Region Six residents that the government’s answer to noise complaints from bars and nightclubs is not enforcement. It is a loan.

Establishment owners, he said, should look to the Guyana Development Bank to finance soundproof enclosures, so that patrons who “want to hear the noise hard” can go inside while the neighbourhood is spared. It was offered as a small, practical fix to the top complaint raised at community consultations.                It is worth examining what else was on offer, and what was not.

A BANK LENDING BEFORE IT OPENS

The Guyana Development Bank Act 2026 passed the National Assembly on July 27 without opposition participation in the debate, MPs having withdrawn from the chamber over the MV Barima matter.

President Ali assented to the Act on July 30. Two weeks from now, a delegation led by Senior Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh, Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha and Government Efficiency and Implementation Minister Zulfikar Ally is scheduled to return to Region Six to formally launch the bank.

That launch has not happened. There is no application process. No portal. No published lending criteria, no disclosed underwriting standard, no office where a Region Six business owner could walk in and ask a question.

The bank exists, at this writing, as a statute and a promise of up to $3 million in collateral-free, interest-free financing to small and medium enterprises. Yet the first specific lending purpose President Ali has attached to it, in his own words to residents, is bar and nightclub soundproofing.

Before this institution has disbursed a single dollar, its inaugural publicised use case has already been named for it by the Head of State, at a podium, ahead of its own opening.

WHAT SOUNDPROOFING DOES NOT TOUCH

Noise is the complaint residents are permitted to raise, and evidently the one the government is most comfortable answering, because it has a hardware solution. Foam panels and enclosed walls are a contractor’s job. The harder facts sitting alongside the noise are not.

Guyana’s own public health data describes a population with one of the earliest ages of first alcohol use in the Caribbean, and a share of heavy drinkers with diagnosable alcohol-use disorder. The 2019 Guyana Women’s Health and Life Experiences Survey found that 55 percent of Guyanese women have experienced some form of violence in their lifetime, and United Nations estimates place Guyana’s femicide rate as the highest per capita in the region. None of this is unique to licensed premises, but the global and regional literature linking alcohol venues to intimate partner and gender-based violence is not in dispute, and nightlife establishments are consistently identified within it as elevated-risk sites, not neutral ones.

“The first lending purpose named for this bank was not a farm, a shop, or a young entrepreneur’s idea. It was a nightclub wall.”

Then there is the matter the U.S. State Department has documented in successive Trafficking in Persons reports on Guyana. The 2024 and 2025 reports both record that traffickers have used social media to recruit workers for jobs including wait staff in bars and hotels, and that non-governmental organisations report traffickers are often middle-aged men who own or operate nightclubs.

The government’s own investigative caseload grew from 28 cases involving 25 suspects in 2022 to 77 cases involving ten named suspects in 2024. As recently as May of this year, two Cuban nationals were remanded by a Georgetown magistrate over an alleged trafficking operation in which a woman’s passport was confiscated on arrival, a debt of US$5,400 was imposed along with US$300 in monthly rent, and she was, according to the prosecution, forced into commercial sex work at a named city nightclub.

That case is active in the courts as this editorial goes to publication.

Set against that record, the government’s own posture toward bars has not always been to subsidise them. In 2018, a raid on a Georgetown strip club was framed publicly by the then Minister of Public Security as part of a deliberate campaign against trafficking and prostitution tied to such establishments, with liquor licence revocation floated as the enforcement tool of choice.

Whatever one makes of that episode, it establishes that Guyanese governments have, within recent memory, treated bars and nightclubs as sites requiring scrutiny — not sites qualifying for concessional state financing.

THE QUESTION ROSE HALL WAS NOT ASKED

None of this means every bar in Guyana is a trafficking front, and this editorial does not allege that any specific establishment named in the President’s remarks is implicated in any of the cases cited above. The point is narrower and, we think, harder to wave away: a public development bank is a finite pool of concessional capital, and every dollar of it directed at acoustic panelling is a dollar not directed at due diligence, at labour inspection capacity, at the enforcement infrastructure that the government’s own Trafficking in Persons cooperation with Washington says is still needed.

The soundproofing proposal was offered at Rose Hall as a response to a resident complaint about noise. It was not offered alongside any parallel announcement of stronger licensing checks, staff welfare verification, or trafficking screening for the same premises now being invited to apply for financing.

⇒We do not know, because it has not been disclosed, whether the Development Bank intends any due-diligence screen at all for applicants in this sector — something more than the standard SME underwriting that would apply to a farm-supply shop or a hairdressing salon.

⇒We do not know whether the ministries touring the country this month have discussed, internally, the same TIP-report findings cited here.

⇒We do know that the bank’s very first publicly named lending purpose, delivered by the President himself before the institution has opened its doors, was not a young entrepreneur’s idea, nor a woman-owned enterprise of the kind Dr Ali has repeatedly said the bank exists to support. It was a nightclub wall.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING

The 592 Guardian is submitting formal queries to the Office of the President and to the Guyana Development Bank’s transitional secretariat requesting:

(1) whether any due-diligence, licensing, or labour-welfare screening criteria specific to bars, nightclubs and entertainment venues have been developed for Development Bank applicants in this sector

(2) whether the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security or the Guyana Police Force’s anti-trafficking unit were consulted on the soundproofing proposal prior to its public announcement; and

(3) what mechanism, if any, will prevent Development Bank financing from reaching an establishment under active investigation or prosecution for trafficking-linked offences.

We will publish any response in full.

— The Board