The Arithmetic Ali Won’t Say Out Loud

ACCOUNTABILITY DESK · FISCAL GOVERNANCE

The Arithmetic Ali Won’t Say Out Loud

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

Guyana borrowed nearly a billion US dollars in six months, debt service jumped 30 percent, and the government’s own mid-year numbers point straight at the US$10.3 billion mark it announced — quietly — back in January

 The Ministry of Finance’s Mid-Year Report for 2026 is, on its face, a technical document. Tables of creditor shares, ratios of domestic to external debt, a paragraph on T-bill issuance. It is not written to be alarming. It does not need to be. The number does the work: Guyana’s Public and Publicly Guaranteed debt stood at US$8,573.1 million at the end of June 2026, up from US$7.7 billion at the close of 2025 — a jump of nearly one billion US dollars in a single half-year.

That is not a projection. It is not an opposition estimate, or a Kaieteur News calculation, or a number pulled from an IMF working paper. It is the government’s own account of its own borrowing, published by the same Finance Minister who has spent the better part of a decade telling Guyanese that debt sustainability is the one metric on which this administration cannot be faulted.

THE NUMBER NOBODY ANNOUNCED TWICE

Dr. Ashni Singh told Parliament in January, during the Budget 2026 presentation, that PPG debt had reached US$7.7 billion at the end of 2025. What he did not dwell on; and what this publication had to report separately — is that government’s own financing plan for 2026 was already designed to carry that figure to US$10.3 billion by year’s end. The IMF’s Article IV concluding statement in August confirmed the trajectory and blessed it: risk of debt distress “low,” borrowing strategy “prudent.”

Six months into the year, the mid-year numbers show the country roughly one-third of the way to that US$10.3 billion marker, on pace, arithmetically, to land close to it. Nobody in government has said so plainly. The figure exists in a budget document, in an IMF statement, and now in a mid-year report — three separate publications that, read together, describe a single line rising toward a target that was never put to the public as a number to watch.

A government that wants credit for prudence does not get to keep the total off the podium.

DEBT SERVICE OUTPACED THE DEBT ITSELF

The more telling figure in the mid-year report is not the stock of debt but the cost of carrying it. Guyana spent US$145.7 million servicing debt in the first half of 2026, against US$110 million in the same period last year — a 30 percent increase, comfortably outpacing the roughly 11 percent growth in the debt stock itself over the same stretch. External debt service alone came to US$101.5 million; domestic service added US$44.2 million.

Debt service rising faster than debt is the arithmetic of a portfolio shifting toward costlier terms, not merely a larger one. The mid-year report itself shows why: bilateral creditors’ share of external PPG debt climbed from 30.1 percent at the end of 2025 to 33.6 percent by June 2026, while the multilateral share — historically the more concessional lending Singh has told LatinFinance and the Commonwealth Secretariat he prefers — fell from 64 to 61.5 percent.

Guyana is not simply borrowing more. It is borrowing on somewhat harder terms than a year ago, even as officials continue to invoke the concessional-financing pitch as though the mix has not moved.

THE SUSTAINABILITY SCRIPT, ON REPEAT

None of this is being denied by government — it is simply not being framed as a single, continuous story. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has followed Singh’s public accounting of debt since his earliest budget presentations: the debt-to-GDP ratio, always cited against 1991’s catastrophic 600-plus percent, always improving in relative terms even as the absolute dollar figure climbs. It is true, and it has been true for over a decade, that Guyana’s debt burden looks nothing like it did in 1992.

It is also true that comparing today’s borrowing to a collapsed economy from thirty-four years ago tells the public almost nothing about whether this year’s US$1 billion increase, or next year’s push toward US$10.3 billion, is being spent, allocated, and governed with the discipline the word

The IDB’s own Caribbean Economics Quarterly, cited approvingly by government this year, is more precise than the government’s own messaging: Guyana’s total debt ratio rose from 24.3 percent in 2024 to 28.6 percent in 2025, external debt’s share of that total climbed to 56.3 percent, and — the detail that tends not to make it into press releases — capital expenditure as a share of GDP fell for the first time since oil production began, from 11.5 to 10.2 percent.

Debt is rising. Capital spending, the thing borrowing is nominally for, is not rising with it.—(read again)

WHAT THE REPORT DOES NOT ANSWER

A mid-year report is an accounting instrument, not an accountability instrument. It tells readers what was borrowed and from whom, in aggregate. It does not tell them which specific projects the new billion dollars financed, whether procurement on those projects followed the disclosure standards this publication has had to demand project by project — the Development Bank Bill’s unchecked ministerial discretion, the Kimbia facility’s unverified anchor producer, the Wales Gas-to-Energy overruns; or whether the debt ceiling Parliament raised to accommodate this borrowing was debated with the scrutiny US$40 billion, or US$10 billion, or any of these figures deserve.

Guyana is entitled to borrow. Oil-backed states borrow against future revenue as a matter of course, and multilateral lenders would not extend concessional financing to a country they judged reckless. The complaint here is not that the government is borrowing. It is that the government wants the public to hear “sustainable” and “prudent” on a loop, while the year-over-year arithmetic — a billion in six months, debt service up 30 percent, the concessional share shrinking — is left to Kaieteur, to the Ministry’s own quarterly filings, and now to this publication, to assemble into a single picture.

— The Board