The Arithmetic of Confidence

The Arithmetic of Confidence

What Ramsaroop’s Investment Dossier Leaves Out

By Staff Writer  |  The 592 Guardian

Peter Ramsaroop wears two hats when he writes about Guyana’s investment climate. He is a Member of Parliament for the governing PPP/C, and he is the government’s Chief Investment Officer — the official responsible for the very numbers he then presents to the public as independent proof of success. His recent dossier, laying out Vision 2030’s investment record, is a useful document.

Not because its arithmetic withstands scrutiny, but because it is a near-perfect specimen of a governing style this paper has tracked across a dozen files: announce the aggregate, withhold the underlying record, and treat the gap between the two as a detail rather than the story.

Two of his own examples make the case better than we could.

THE NUMBERS WITHOUT THE NAMES

Ramsaroop’s dossier is built almost entirely from totals. Approximately 189 investment projects. G$1.06 trillion in private economic investment. 73 per cent foreign, 20 per cent local. 137 companies helped into export markets, 112 connected with overseas buyers. Private-sector credit more than doubling since 2020.

Not one of these figures comes with a list. No project registry, no sector breakdown, no accounting of how many of the 189 “facilitated” investments are operating today versus merely agreed on paper. GO-Invest is, by definition, a promotional agency — its data is a record of its own activity, not an independently audited account of the economy.

Ramsaroop is careful to note that GO-Invest figures should not be confused with the Bank of Guyana’s balance-of-payments data on total FDI — a caveat that, read closely, concedes the point critics have been making for years: the investment figures cited in political speeches are frequently not the ones the central bank would recognize.

This is not unique to Ramsaroop. It is the house style of this government’s economic communication. Two case studies from his own dossier show what the aggregate numbers are built to obscure.

EXHIBIT ONE: THE 50 PER CENT THAT KEEPS SLIPPING

Ramsaroop names energy as “the foundation for the next phase of industrialization” and points to the 300-megawatt Gas-to-Energy plant at Wales as the transformational project that will cut electricity costs by roughly half. He gives a completion target: “first power targeted by the end of 2026.”

The public record tells a different story than the one in his dossier.

The Wales plant was originally contracted in 2022 at US$759 million, with completion promised by December 2024. It has since missed that deadline, then April 2025, then the end of 2025, then May 2026, and now sits at “end of 2026” for first power — a target the government’s own project consultant, Winston Brassington, has said will not bring the plant to full 300-megawatt capacity until mid-2027. That is two and a half years later than originally promised, on the government’s own most recent account.

The cost has moved with the schedule. A dispute settlement with the contractor over soil stabilization and delay claims pushed the contract price from US$759 million to US$856 million. Separately, reporting has surfaced that government paid the contractor US$80 million after losing an arbitration matter — a payment made without public disclosure at the time.

 The bill for the delay itself is larger than the overrun on the contract. With the plant not yet supplying power, Guyana has spent 2025 and 2026 running the grid on imported heavy fuel oil and two rented Turkish powerships, at a combined cost estimated at roughly US$884 million above what the original two-year timeline would have cost. The powership rental alone runs to approximately US$235,000 a day.

Ramsaroop’s dossier states a completion date and a savings target as though both were secure. Neither is. The promised 50 per cent reduction in electricity costs cannot be assessed against a plant that is not yet operating at the capacity required to produce it.

EXHIBIT TWO: THE FARM WITHOUT THE LEDGER

Ramsaroop’s second flagship example is Demerara Distillers Limited’s move into fresh milk production — “precisely the type of investment our government has worked to stimulate,” he writes, citing it as proof that local capital, agriculture and processing capacity are converging as intended.

What he does not mention is what the public sector put into making that example possible.

The Demerara Dairies farm at Moblissa sits on land the government’s own newspaper, the Guyana Chronicle, reports was acquired from the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission — state land. The Chronicle’s own account does not specify the terms of that acquisition: whether the land was sold at market value, leased, or granted on concessional terms. No lease, sale price, or transfer document has been made public.

Around that land, the government has committed a package of public infrastructure: a bridge built across the Moblissa creek, commitments to rehabilitate the access road, an electricity extension through Guyana Power and Light and the Linden Electricity Company, and rehabilitation of a water well — commitments significant enough to bring the President and his National Security Adviser to the site in person, alongside GPL’s acting chief executive.

None of these commitments has been published with a cost attached.

The gap between commitment and delivery is itself instructive. More than a year after government financed the Moblissa bridge, the project’s own representatives were still publicly asking government to upgrade the “currently deplorable” access road to the all-weather standard needed to move cattle, equipment and refrigerated milk trucks. The infrastructure Ramsaroop implicitly credits as evidence of a functioning investment ecosystem was, by the account of the company benefiting from it, still incomplete.

None of this makes DDL’s dairy venture illegitimate, and this editorial is not suggesting the company has done anything improper in accepting terms the state offered it. The point is narrower and more damning for Ramsaroop’s argument: he holds up Moblissa as proof that Vision 2030 investment strategy works, without disclosing that the example is underwritten by state land and public infrastructure whose terms have never been made public. A reader is asked to take the success story on faith, in exactly the way GO-Invest’s aggregate figures ask the public to take the trillion-dollar figure on faith.

THE PATTERN

Set beside each other, the two exhibits describe the same governing habit. A number or a date is announced with confidence — 50 per cent cheaper power, a transformational dairy venture — and the underlying record needed to test that confidence is never produced. When the record does surface, usually through freedom-of-information requests, parliamentary questions, or investigative reporting rather than voluntary disclosure, it tends to show the announced figure was optimistic, incomplete, or silent on the public cost behind it.

Ramsaroop closes his dossier by asking Guyanese to consider “where do we fit” in the transformation underway. It is a fair question, but it presumes the transformation is as documented as it is described. Before Guyanese citizens and businesses can sensibly answer where they fit, the government that employs Ramsaroop as its Chief Investment Officer might first answer a simpler one: what did the public actually pay, and what did the public actually get, for the flagship examples it is holding up as proof.

The 592 Guardian has sought comment from GO-Invest and the Ministry of Public Works on the matters raised in this piece and will publish any response received.