The Certificate Cannot Certify What the State Won’t Publish

The Certificate Cannot Certify What the State Won’t Publish

EDITORIAL · OPEN DATA & INSTITUTIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY 

 A government training agency wants to claim a “world-class workforce” for Guyana. It cannot, because the state has built no mechanism for anyone outside it to check the claim — and the one office created to force that disclosure has been left to fail by design.

By the Editor – August, 2026

The Board of Industrial Training’s Chief Executive Officer, Richard Maughn, returned from a U.S. State Department leadership program this month with an assessment that Guyana is “on track in building a world-class labour market,” missing only greater collaboration between agencies to complete the picture. The claim was carried, uncontested, in the Guyana Chronicle. It should not have been.

Not because the training programs Maughn describes are fictional, and not because collaboration between agencies is a bad idea. The claim should not have gone uncontested because there is no way for a member of the Guyanese public, an academic, a civil society organisation, or an independent journalist to verify it. Guyana has no statutory requirement that any public agency — the Board of Industrial Training included — publish the workforce data, disaggregated by sector, nationality, and employer, that a claim like “world-class workforce” would need to survive contact with evidence. What exists instead is an architecture of non-disclosure, anchored by a single office that has spent more than a decade demonstrating what happens when transparency is optional.

A DECADE OF DORMANCY, PRICED AT $40 MILLION

That office is the Commissioner of Information, established under the Access to Information Act of 2011 to give the Guyanese public a statutory right to demand records from public bodies. Kaieteur News reported on February 10, 2026 — during the first day of consideration of the 2026 Budget Estimates — that the office has produced no annual reports, engaged in little to no meaningful contact with media, and given little to no response to citizens or civil society seeking public information, for more than a decade.

The government’s response to that record, per the same report, was to allocate $40 million to the office in this year’s budget, $33.5 million of it earmarked for the Commissioner’s own salary and benefits. The allocation was challenged on the floor of the National Assembly by an opposition parliamentarian during budget scrutiny; a government minister present committed to writing the Commissioner to press for compliance.

An office with no annual reports for over a decade was budgeted $40 million to continue operating exactly as it has.

Kaieteur News’s reporting adds a detail that sharpens the accountability failure: the ruling party’s own 2025 election manifesto promised full enforcement of the Access to Information Act if returned to office, and the Vice President said publicly that improvement should follow a win. The party won. Kaieteur News reports no notable change followed.

This is not an absence of promises. It is an absence of consequence for breaking them.

That finding is corroborated independently. A press freedom assessment published in April 2026 by the Inter American Press Association’s affiliated monitoring project found that the Access to Information Act, passed in 2011, is not functioning in practice; that numerous information requests from civil society and media have gone unanswered; and that the government added resources to the Commissioner’s office in the 2026 budget without attaching any guarantee of accountability.

Two independently reported sources — a domestic outlet covering a budget debate, and a regional press freedom monitor assessing the state of Guyanese journalism — arrive at the same conclusion by different routes.

THE PICKET, THE PRE-ACTION NOTICE, AND THE JUDICIAL REVIEW

The clearest demonstration of what that dormancy costs in practice belongs to Christopher Ram — chartered accountant, attorney, and one of Guyana’s most persistent civic advocates on matters of public disclosure. Ram is a public figure who has made his advocacy on this issue a matter of open record, and his effort to force the Commissioner’s office to function is worth tracing in full, because it shows an escalation, not a single complaint.

Citizens picketing Commisioner of Information Office

In late March and early April 2025, Ram organized a picket outside the Commissioner’s office at 340 East Street, Georgetown, joined by lawyers, opposition Members of Parliament, independent media, and transparency organizations, according to Kaieteur News’s contemporaneous coverage. Ram said the group’s information requests had been rebuffed on what he characterized as absurd grounds — including, he said, the Commissioner’s insistence on being addressed by his full honorific title before engaging with a request at all. Ram announced the picket would run for four weeks, escalating to the Office of the President — which holds portfolio responsibility for the Commissioner’s office — if the government did not respond.

The government did not respond in the way Ram sought. On April 23 and 24, 2025, Demerara Waves and Stabroek News reported that Ram had escalated to formal legal action: pre-action notices served on the Minister of Natural Resources and on the Commissioner himself, over the continued withholding of records related to the 2016 ExxonMobil Production Sharing Agreement — an agreement governing the disposition of Guyana’s single largest natural asset. By May 16 and 17, 2025, Stabroek News reported that Ram had filed what was described as Guyana’s first judicial review action under the Access to Information Act, alleging that the Commissioner’s conduct amounted to a systematic refusal to enforce the nation’s transparency law and constituted, in Ram’s words as reported, a constitutional crisis in government accountability.

That litigation remains a live thread in Ram’s public advocacy more than a year later. In a column published by Kaieteur News in May 2026, Ram named the Commissioner of Information’s continued, functionally unoccupied status alongside a dormant Constitutional Reform Commission and an opposition-chaired Public Accounts Committee that has not been permitted to meet — leaving years of Auditor General findings on public expenditure in the range of four to five billion United States dollars unexamined by the body constitutionally tasked with examining them.

Ram’s own assessment, as reported, was that Guyana’s democratic and accountability institutions are decaying under the weight of oil-era public spending, precisely because no institution with the power to compel disclosure is being permitted to use it.

FROM ARCHITECTURE TO WORKFORCE DATA

This publication has argued before — in response to a Stabroek News commentary on inter-agency information silos — that Guyana’s information failures are not a matter of institutional culture that better collaboration can fix. They are a matter of architecture. There is no statutory mandate compelling public agencies to produce and publish machine-readable data on a regular schedule. There is no independent regulator empowered to compel disclosure or sanction its refusal.

The Commissioner of Information was meant to be exactly that regulator. The record above is what happens when the office is funded to exist and not funded, staffed, or held accountable to function.

The Board of Industrial Training’s claim to a “world-class workforce” has to be read inside that architecture, not outside it. No labour force survey, sectoral employment breakdown, or work-permit disclosure accompanying Maughn’s remarks is available to the public through any standing government data channel. What is publicly available instead comes from two sources: international bodies, whose reports on Guyana’s labour and governance conditions are cited precisely because they are the only figures anyone outside government can obtain — and direct, physical observation of who is actually working on the ground.

This publication’s own reporting on Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc., the Bangladesh-linked contractor holding a portfolio of Guyana Water Inc. contracts now confirmed at close to twelve billion Guyana dollars, is illustrative of the second category. Photographic evidence obtained in the course of that investigation — including an image published by Guyana Water Inc.’s own official account, captioned as showing “several Guyanese staff” — shows a workforce that is visually, overwhelmingly South Asian, standing alongside Guyana Water Inc.’s own Chief Executive Officer at a completed plant site.

Whether that composition reflects lawful work permits, documented labour-market testing, or compliance with the local-hiring obligations that apply to engineering and technical contracts under Guyana’s legal framework has not been disclosed by any government agency and cannot currently be verified against any published dataset.

That is not a gap in this publication’s reporting. It is the gap the state has left standing.

A workforce claim that cannot be checked against published data is not a finding. It is an assertion, made by the same government that funds an information office to sit idle and answers civic advocacy with a promise to write a stern letter. Guyana does not need another certificate, another training pipeline announcement, or another appeal for inter-agency collaboration to reach a world-class workforce.

It needs a legal obligation to publish the data that would let the public judge whether one exists — procurement records, work-permit issuances by sector and nationality, labour-market testing outcomes, and the Commissioner of Information’s own annual reports, filed on schedule, for the first time in over a decade.

Until that obligation exists in law, with a penalty attached to its breach, claims like Maughn’s will keep arriving exactly as this one did: unaccompanied by evidence, unchallenged by the outlet that carried it, and unverifiable by anyone the claim was supposedly made to.

— The Board

SOURCES

Guyana Chronicle, “BIT CEO says, emphasises need for greater collaboration,” August 2026.

Kaieteur News, “‘$40M for silence’ – Govt. allocates millions for unresponsive office of commissioner of information,” February 10, 2026.

Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa (SIP-IAPA) affiliated press freedom report on Guyana, April 20, 2026.

Kaieteur News, “Protest against Commissioner of Information continues today,” April 4, 2025.

Demerara Waves, “Christopher Ram threatens legal action over no information on oil agreement,” April 23, 2025.

Stabroek News, “Ram serves pre-action notices to Bharrat, Ramson over failure to provide oil info,” April 24, 2025.

Stabroek News, “Ram files judicial review case against Commissioner of Information,” May 17, 2025.

Kaieteur News, “Resource curse has taken root in Guyana – Ram warns,” May 4, 2026.

The 592 Guardian, prior reporting: “Beyond Polite Suggestions: Guyana Needs Open Data by Law, Not by Goodwill”; ongoing Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc. investigation.