Whose Face, Whose Money

Whose Face, Whose Money

EDITORIAL—Staff Writer —August 2026

The Essequibo Expo and the Public’s Right Not to Fund Its Own Persuasion

The Essequibo Expo opened Friday  night at Anna Regina under a banner that tells you everything about how this administration understands the difference between governing and campaigning: it tells you nothing about it, because in the mind of the Guyana Office for Investment, there is no difference. “GUYANA UNLOCKED. VISION 2030 AND BEYOND. GUYANA’S INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES,” the backdrop declares, in letters large enough to be read from the Charity market square.

Beneath it, life-sized, unmissable, and entirely unnecessary to the stated purpose of the exhibit: the faces of President Irfaan Ali and GO-Invest Chief Executive Officer Peter Ramsaroop

Around them, on trestle tables built by a public agency and staffed by public officers, sit the actual products of Guyanese enterprise — Rooster’s pure Pomeroon coconut water, Pomeroon Rose Products’ farm-value additions, Flamboyant Grill’s achars and pepper sauces, Industries Moore’s cornmeal and cassava flour. These are the people the expo is nominally for. They did not ask for their labour to be framed by two political portraits. They did not need to be.

The government supplied the framing regardless, at public expense, because the point of the exercise was never solely to promote coconut water. It was to ensure that whatever goodwill these products generate accrues, by visual association, to two men who did not grow, process, bottle, or sell a single item on that table.

A STATUTORY AGENCY, NOT A CAMPAIGN OFFICE

GO-Invest is not a PPP/C institution. It is a statutory body of the Guyanese state, funded by the Consolidated Fund, mandated to facilitate investment and export readiness for every Guyanese regardless of how they vote.

Its budget is not the President’s money, and it is not Mr. Ramsaroop’s money.

It is the public’s money, extracted through VAT, PAYE, and the excise this newsroom’s  readers pay every time they buy fuel, cigarettes, or a case of the very beverages showcased at that booth.

It is worth being precise about what that money already buys Mr. Ramsaroop personally. Disclosed only reluctantly during the Committee of Supply, and only after a minister first protested that time had run out, the figures are now on the parliamentary record: a basic salary of $1.9 million per month, a gratuity of two times that figure annually — $5.223 million — a vacation allowance of $1.901 million, and $117,000 in travelling and other allowances. This is not the compensation of a struggling public servant scraping by. It is the compensation of a man handsomely remunerated by the very taxpayers whose currency he now spends, again, on a backdrop bearing his own face.

Peter Ramsaroop self promotion courtesy of public funds

The public is not merely paying for the message. It is paying to be told, in its own currency, whom to credit for the sun rising.

Mr. Ramsaroop has left no ambiguity about how he understands his role. “Catch the President’s vision,” he told Guyanese in 2021, urging citizens “regardless of their political persuasion” to buy into it. GO-Invest’s mandate, he said, is “to deliver on the President’s promise to the people of Guyana.”

Note the substitution: not the state’s promise, not the country’s development plan ratified through any institutional process — the President’s promise. A statutory investment agency’s chief executive, drawing a public salary north of $28 million a year in total remuneration, has defined his own institutional purpose as personal fealty to the man who appointed him.                                  The Essequibo Expo banner is simply that sentiment rendered in vinyl.

THE PARADOX THIS EDITORIAL BOARD WAS ASKED TO EXPOSE

Readers have reach out  to us making a point too rarely stated plainly: many Guyanese who pay the taxes and duties that fund GO-Invest’s operations do not support this government, do not endorse this President’s branding, and would not choose to have their tax contribution spent building his public image.

They are not exempted from the bill. Every VAT receipt, every duty on imported goods, every excise line on a payslip flows into the same Consolidated Fund that pays for the tent, the banner, the printing, and the salaries of the officers who erected it — irrespective of whether the person paying voted PPP/C, APNU+AFC, WIN, or did not vote at all.

This is the paradox this editorial exists to name:

citizens are compelled, through the ordinary mechanics of taxation, to underwrite political messaging some of them actively reject.

There is no PPP/C fundraising drive here soliciting willing donors. There is no opt-out. The funding mechanism is indistinguishable from the mechanism that pays for hospitals, roads, and salaries — which is precisely what makes the diversion of that mechanism toward incumbent image-building so difficult to see, and so important to say aloud.

THIS IS NOT A UNIQUELY GUYANESE PROBLEM — WHICH IS WHY IT HAS A KNOWN REMEDY

Jurisdictions that take public integrity seriously have already drawn this line. The United Kingdom’s Cabinet Office Directory on Government Communications and equivalent Westminster-tradition codes in Canada, Australia, and across the Commonwealth Caribbean generally prohibit the use of a minister’s name, image, or personal branding on government-funded public communications, precisely because state resources cannot lawfully be converted into an incumbency advantage.

The distinction those codes draw is simple and exportable: government communication informs citizens of a service; political communication personalizes credit for a leader. GO-Invest’s Essequibo Expo booth is unambiguously the latter, dressed in the institutional clothing of the former.

Min. of Finance Ashni Singh amongst the crowd

Guyana has no comparable code that this editorial board has been able to identify — no GECOM guidance, no Public Service Commission directive, no Cabinet circular restricting the personal branding of state-funded promotional material. That absence is not evidence of propriety. It is evidence of a gap the Constitutional Reform Commission, the Public Service Commission, and this Parliament have simply never been made to close.

Silence in the statute book has never once meant the practice is harmless — it has meant only that no one has yet been made to answer for it.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES

This publication  does not ask GO-Invest to stop promoting Guyanese agro-processors. It does not ask that the Rooster’s, the Pomeroon Rose Products, the Flamboyant Grills of Essequibo be denied a platform their products have earned.

It asks a narrower and entirely reasonable thing: that a statutory agency’s public-facing material bear the institution’s name and mandate, not the personal likeness of its politically appointed chief executive and the President who appointed him. If Mr. Ramsaroop wishes to campaign on his record, the PPP/C’s party apparatus is fully equipped to fund that campaign.

It should not be funded, even partially, by the Consolidated Fund, and it should never be indistinguishable from the state’s own communications

Until that distinction is restored, every taxpayer in Essequibo who walked past that booth last night — supporter and skeptic alike — paid for the privilege of being told, in the government’s own choice of imagery, exactly whom to thank.

Most of them did not ask to be thanked on those terms. Fewer still were asked whether they agreed.

— The Board