The Ambassador’s Blind Spot

The Ambassador’s Blind Spot

EDITORIAL◊GUYANA DEVELOPMENT BANK

BY: Staff Writer- August,2026

Singh Praised the Bank’s Discipline the President Had Already Abandoned

Sasenarine Singh, Guyana’s Ambassador to Belgium and the EU, used his column this week to praise President Irfaan Ali’s “will” in pushing the Guyana Development Bank into law, and to warn — in the abstract — that the $40 billion facility could collapse into the next GAIBANK if credit decisions ever became subject to political influence, such as “officials prioritising requests from Regional Chairpersons rather than on merit and the bankability of the project.”

Singh wrote that warning as a hypothetical. It was already out of date. The very day  before his column ran, President Ali stood before residents in Rose Hall, Region Six, and told bar and entertainment-venue owners to expect Development Bank financing to soundproof their premises — a specific sector, a specific use of funds, announced by the President personally, at a political roadshow stop, months before the Bank has a board, a lending policy, or an application process.

This is not adjacent to the risk Singh described. It is the risk Singh described, already realized, by the same president Singh’s column exists to praise.

AN AMBASSADOR, NOT AN ECONOMIST, AND NOT A NEUTRAL ONE

It is worth stating plainly what Singh is and is not. He is not an independent financial commentator assessing a policy on its merits. He is a sitting Guyanese ambassador — accredited to Belgium, the EU, and the OACPS — writing under his diplomatic title to build a partisan case for the head of the government that appointed him.

This is not the first time. In July, Kaieteur News called for his recall after he inserted himself into a domestic political dispute over the government’s handling of Region Two squall damage, on the grounds that an ambassador represents Guyana, not the party, and not the administration currently in office.

That distinction is not a technicality; it is the entire basis on which a diplomat is permitted to speak with the authority of the state rather than the authority of a faction. Singh has now set it aside twice inside a single month.

None of that would matter much if the substance of his column were sound. It is not.

THE GOVERNANCE ARGUMENT SINGH BORROWED, THEN ABANDONED

Singh’s strongest material is not his own. His warning about Section 5(2)’s discretionary lending language — the provision allowing loans “with or without collateral and with or without charging interest” — closely tracks a public warning from Kenrick Hunte, a former Guyanese ambassador, who argued in a letter to the editor that the same provision creates four distinct lending scenarios, and that reliance on the looser two would turn the Bank into “a welfare agency” rather than a functioning development institution, repeating the mistakes that sank GAIBANK.

Hunte made that argument as a critique. Singh borrowed its shape, then used it to build the opposite conclusion — that the Bank’s guardrails simply need to be “constructed early,” as though early construction were still possible, and as though the President himself were a neutral party to that construction rather than the person already making unilateral allocation decisions in public.

Singh’s own numbers undercut him further. He cites the Bank of Guyana’s 2025 non-performing loan ratio — 1.5 percent, against a 4.9 percent Caribbean average — as evidence of the discipline this new institution inherits. That figure describes the existing commercial banking sector operating under existing prudential regulation.

It describes nothing about an institution with no board, no published lending criteria, and a president who has already begun naming sectors and use cases from a podium.

WHAT THE TIMING ACTUALLY SHOWS

Singh’s column never mentions that the Bill passed the same sitting the opposition boycotted in protest over the MV Barima disaster — a maritime tragedy still without a resolved accountability process. He does not mention that the Bank remains, as of this writing, a statute and a launch date: no portal, no office, no application window. And he does not mention Rose Hall, where the President personally directed a category of prospective borrowers toward the Bank’s future financing — bars and entertainment venues, for soundproofing — a sector Guyana’s own police force and the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons reports have repeatedly identified as a recurring site of labor and sex trafficking risk, most recently in the pending Magic City Nightclub matter now before the courts.

Singh asked the country to trust that “the country must demand” discipline of this Bank going forward. The country does not need to demand anything hypothetically. It needs an ambassador willing to report what has already happened, rather than one auditioning to have written the government’s press release before the government did.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR

This outlet renews, in this context, the disclosure requests already put to the Office of the President and the Bank’s future secretariat:

1. Whether soundproofing financing for bars, taverns, or entertainment venues will carry any safeguarding, licensing-compliance, or anti-trafficking due-diligence conditions, and who will verify compliance.
2. Under what legal authority a not-yet-operational Bank — with no board, no published lending criteria, and no application process — is being publicly committed by the President to specific borrowers and specific uses of funds.
3. Whether any establishment currently under investigation, charge, or licence review — including those connected to the pending May 28 Magic City matter — would be eligible to receive Development Bank financing under this initiative.

Ambassador Singh’s column asked Guyanese to trust that discipline would come later. Rose Hall is the record of what came first.

— The Board