The Vendor and the Verdict

The Vendor and the Verdict

BOARD EDITORIAL– August, 2026

How the President Built New Markets, Then Blamed Citizens for Leaving Them

There is a particular kind of dishonesty that does not lie about facts. It lies about sequence. It takes something a government did, something a government failed to do, and something a citizen was forced to do in between — and rearranges the order until the citizen looks like the author of their own hardship.

This week, President Irfaan Ali performed that rearrangement in public, on camera, at a national press conference, and called it an explanation of the cost of living.

The claim, stated plainly, was this: Guyanese families are increasingly shopping in supermarkets and eating in restaurants rather than buying in traditional markets and cooking at home, and this shift in “consumer behaviour” is a meaningful contributor to what households are paying. The same sweet potato, cassava and plantain a family once bought in the market, he said, is now being bought under a supermarket roof — at a margin he attributes to overheads the supermarket, not the shopper, decided to carry.

Set beside that claim, and delivered by the same man in the same season, is a second set of facts that the government itself put into the public record. The administration is expanding the Model Village Initiative’s market infrastructure across multiple regions. In Skeldon, Region Six, the President personally announced an upgraded, modernised market as part of a wider community redevelopment plan. At the same cost-of-living press conference in which he diagnosed “changing consumer behaviour” as part of the problem, he also floated expanding direct farmer-to-consumer markets — a proposal that only makes sense as policy if the diagnosis is that people need better markets to shop in, not that they made a lifestyle error by leaving the old ones.

You do not fund the vendor and indict the customer in the same breath.

THE CONTRADICTION, STATED PRECISELY

A government cannot coherently hold three positions at once: that Guyana is modernising and prospering, that citizens are choosing supermarkets and restaurants because a modernising and prospering country makes those choices available, and that the same citizens are somehow responsible for the price consequences of choices the government spent years telling them to make with pride.

If the shift to supermarkets is evidence of rising national prosperity — which is precisely how this administration has narrated its own economic record for four years — then it cannot simultaneously be recast as a lapse in judgment when the bill comes due.            Prosperity narrated upward cannot be blamed downward.

Vendors at Stabroek Market

Nor can the market-infrastructure investment be reconciled with the consumer-behaviour framing without contradiction. If the government’s own analysis is that people have drifted from markets toward supermarkets and that drift is inflating what they pay, the coherent policy response is to make markets more attractive, more accessible, and more competitive — which is, to its credit, precisely what the Skeldon upgrade and the farmer-to-consumer market proposal represent.

But a government that is simultaneously building the very infrastructure meant to solve a problem cannot, in the same set of remarks, tell the public that the problem is theirs for having created it. Either the market system needs state investment because it was failing people, or people made a cultural error by leaving it.

It cannot be both, and the government’s own capital programme concedes which one is true.

WHAT A CITIZEN IN BOURDA MARKET ACTUALLY EXPERIENCES

The test of any economic claim is whether it survives contact with the person it is supposedly describing. A person shopping in Bourda Market paying for bora does not experience inflation differently because another person, three miles away, is buying the same bora under an air conditioner.

Vendors at Stabroek Market

A family cooking seven nights a week does not escape the price of plantain by virtue of never once entering a restaurant. A pensioner living on a fixed income does not defeat rising costs by refusing supermarkets he was never shopping in to begin with.                      The cost-of-living complaint was never limited to supermarket shoppers. It has come from vendors, from market shoppers, from pensioners, from people who have never set foot in an air-conditioned aisle — which is itself the evidence that the diagnosis offered does not fit the complaint being answered.

This is where the President’s own account becomes most useful to the case against it. He did not stop at consumer behaviour. He went further, and in going further, he handed the public the actual explanation: farmers, he said, are receiving one price. Consumers are paying a substantially higher one. Retailers, in his own words, are imposing what he characterised as excessive mark-ups between the two.

That is not a story about culture. That is a story about a supply chain in which someone, somewhere between the farm gate and the checkout counter, is extracting more than the system can bear — and the government’s own considered response, floated in the same breath, is to expand direct farmer-to-consumer markets specifically to shorten that chain.

PERSONAL FINANCE IS NOT PUBLIC POLICY

No serious person disputes that individual households make choices, some wiser than others. There are families who overspend. There are shoppers who pay for convenience. There always have been, and there always will be, in every economy on earth. But a national cost-of-living crisis, sustained across years, touching pensioners, market vendors, contract workers and salaried professionals alike, is not explained by aggregating personal budgeting decisions.

It is explained by policy: by what a government has and has not done about supply chains, mark-ups, transportation costs, production incentives and market access. Conflating the two is not an analytical error. It is a convenience — one that transforms citizens from people bearing the weight of economic pressure into people accused of having invited it.

A national cost-of-living problem is public policy. Rebranding it as a cultural habit is how a government excuses itself from answering for it.

THE RECORD THE GOVERNMENT CANNOT TALK AROUND

The administration wants credit — and has, in other contexts, earned some — for the subsidies, VAT removals and freight support it has extended over the past several budget cycles. That record exists and this publication has not disputed it. But that same record is precisely what makes the culture-blaming framing indefensible.

A government that boasts, correctly, that it has spent billions cushioning households from global price shocks cannot then turn around and describe the persistence of high prices as a matter of where people choose to shop.

Either the structural interventions have not been sufficient to solve the mark-up problem the President himself identified, in which case the honest answer is to say so and account for why, or the interventions have worked and the residual pressure genuinely is structural — the farm-gate-to-shelf mark-up — in which case the honest answer is to say that plainly and explain what enforcement or market-expansion measures are coming, and by when.

What the public does not need, and should not be asked to accept, is a shifting explanation that praises modernisation when it is politically convenient and blames the modernised consumer when the price data becomes politically inconvenient. A President who campaigns on a “world class nation” and a “better life for all” does not get to describe citizens living out that promise as victims of a circumstance they supposedly inflicted on themselves.

WHAT THIS PUBLICATION IS ASKING FOR

This is not a call for theatrics. It is a call for the government to finish the sentence it started. If retailer mark-ups between farm gate and consumer are, in the President’s own words, excessive, then the public is owed the data behind that claim: which commodities, what margins, at what point in the chain, and what regulatory or market-expansion response is planned and on what timeline. If the farmer-to-consumer market expansion is the actual policy answer — and the evidence suggests it is the more honest one — then it should be presented as such, without the accompanying suggestion that households erred by shopping in the modern retail economy this government spent four years telling them to trust.

Guyanese are not asking to be lectured on where to buy cassava. They are asking why buying it, wherever they buy it, has become a financial event rather than an errand. That is the government’s question to answer. It is not a cultural one, and it was never going to be solved by sending citizens back to a market this same government is, at this very moment, still building.

— The Board