The Ebini Scramble: When “Always the Plan” Meets No Plan at All

        THE 592 GUARDIAN                 Independent. Accountability Journalism  Guyana

The Ebini Scramble: When “Always the Plan” Meets No Plan at All

Opinion

By The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Three hundred pregnant heifers arrived in Guyana this week as the vanguard of the government’s National Herd Expansion Programme, and by Monday they were exactly where a well-planned state agricultural project should never leave its livestock: stranded on trucks at a river landing, waiting on excavators to improvise what proper barge infrastructure was supposed to provide. The Ministry of Agriculture says Ebini was always the destination. The scene at Ebini says otherwise, and the distance between those two claims is where this story lives.

APNU parliamentarians Dr. Terrence Campbell ,Sherod Duncan and Saiku Andrews travelled to the landing on Monday after word spread of the shipment’s troubles, and what they live-streamed was not a routine reception. Trucks loaded with pregnant cattle sat waiting for transport across the Berbice River while workers cut makeshift access with heavy equipment because the barges and unloading facilities on hand could not do the job. “What is happening here is absolutely no preparation,” Dr. Campbell said, and it is difficult, watching the same footage, to argue the point.

A state programme that had genuinely allocated 300 pregnant heifers to a named facility for months of planning does not meet its own cargo with improvisation.

THE TIMELINE PROBLEM

The Ministry’s Saturday statement was unambiguous: the animals, procured from Brazil-based supplier Coopera through the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board at a cost of G$245,000 per pregnant heifer, were always intended for the Breeding and Research Centre at Ebini. That is a specific, falsifiable claim, and it is precisely the claim that Monday’s chaos puts under strain.

A planned event was a challenge.

If Ebini was the fixed endpoint, the receiving infrastructure — adequate barge capacity, functioning unloading facilities, pasture and staffing sufficient for a herd this size — should have been a solved problem before the shipment ever left Brazil, not a problem being solved in real time with excavators while pregnant animals wait on trucks.

Member of Parliament Saiku Andrews drew the natural inference from the scene in front of him: “The impression is that there is a lack of preparation, and so it causes you to question whether or not these cattle were intended for this area.” That is an inference, not a finding, and this paper treats it as such — but it is an inference any reasonable observer would draw from unloading infrastructure that visibly did not exist until the day it was needed.

If the Ministry had always intended the cattle for Ebini, proper transportation and unloading arrangements should have been completed before the shipment arrived.  — Dr. Terrence Campbell, MP, paraphrased from Monday’s Ebini livestream

A PROCUREMENT RECORD WITH A HOLE IN IT

NPTAB records show the tender drew multiple bids before Coopera was selected as supplier, at G$245,000 per animal — a figure the Ministry has publicly defended alongside claims of rigorous veterinary vetting, health inspection, and quarantine compliance prior to shipment. Kaieteur News, citing the Ministry’s own account, reports the field at four bids: one local and three international. Readers should note that discrepancy stands unresolved in the public record as of this writing, and it is exactly the kind of granular detail NPTAB should be made to clarify on request, not leave to competing tallies.

More troubling is what does not appear in the record at all. Beyond the name “Coopera,” this media has been unable to locate an identifiable corporate footprint for the entity on the Brazilian side — no registration trail, no export history, no presence among the cooperatives and meatpackers that dominate Brazil’s well-documented, heavily traced cattle-export sector. Brazil is the world’s largest beef exporter, moving through a small number of major, internationally scrutinised players.

A first-time government-to-government livestock contract of this scale, awarded to a supplier this difficult to independently verify, is a legitimate subject for scrutiny regardless of which administration signed it. NPTAB and the Ministry owe the public the underlying bid documentation, not just the headline price.

THE WIDER PATTERN AT THE BORDER

This shipment does not arrive in a vacuum. Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed had already alleged, days before the Ebini scramble, that the cattle moved into Guyana without the involvement of GRA, the Ministry, or the standard cattle-import protocols — an allegation made in the same breath as a broader dossier accusing a regional administrator in Region Nine of shielding gold-smuggling and illicit livestock networks along the Brazil border. Whether or not that broader dossier holds up, the narrower procedural question stands on its own: did this shipment move through the ordinary chain of agricultural, customs, and biosecurity clearance, or did it not? That is a documentary question with a documentary answer, and it should not require a parliamentary livestream to surface it.

WHAT WE ARE NOT SAYING

Trucks with live animals and nowhere to go.

That theory, circulating in political commentary, is currently unsupported by documentary evidence and is properly attributed to opposition speculation, not reported as established fact. Nor can we verify Dr. Campbell’s reports of animal deaths in transit; those claims remain unconfirmed and should be treated as such until independently substantiated — ideally by a veterinary accounting the Ministry itself should now be compelled to publish, given the animals’ extended journey from Brazil and their prolonged confinement on trucks at the landing.

What can be said plainly is this: a G$73.5 million procurement — 300 animals at G$245,000 each, with 700 more reportedly to follow under the programme’s full 1,000-head target — was executed by a Ministry that either did not plan its receiving infrastructure adequately or did not plan for Ebini at all until very recently. Both explanations are failures of governance. Only one of them is the story the Ministry is currently telling.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEMAND.

The Ministry of Agriculture should release the full NPTAB bid file for this tender, including the identities and corporate registration details of all bidders, reconciling the bid count publicly. It should account, on the record, for when Ebini’s receiving infrastructure was budgeted, contracted, and inspected relative to the shipment’s departure from Brazil. And it should commission an independent veterinary report on the condition of the 300 animals now at Ebini, given the credible, if unverified, concern already raised in Parliament. None of this requires conceding the Opposition’s inference about the cattle’s original destination.

It requires only that a state programme moving public money and living animals at this scale be able to show its work — before the excavators arrive, not after.

— The Board