From Where I Stand: It feels like we are building without a blueprint 

Oct 05, 2025 Features / Columnists, News

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(Kaieteur News) – There’s something deeply unsettling about the idea of building without a blueprint…whether it’s a house, a school or indeed a nation. And yet, it often feels like that’s exactly what we’ve been doing in Guyana for a while. And now it’s as if we are moving full speed ahead on the back of unprecedented economic momentum, but with no clear national roadmap to guide where we’re going.

I’ve been searching for the current version of a National Development Strategy, which is essentially a single document or vision that outlines where Guyana is going as a nation, beyond the five-year promises of whichever government is in power. From what I’ve found, the last widely recognized version expired in 2017. Since then, we’ve had individual plans, some rebranded, some revised, others entirely new. But nothing cohesive, and certainly nothing that has outlived a political term.

We had the Low Carbon Development Strategy under the PPP/C then the Green State Development Strategy (GSDS) under the APNU+AFC administration, and now we have the Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS 2030) again. Now, don’t get me wrong, all of these are incredibly important but they never were a comprehensive national development plan. A real national strategy shouldn’t shift with the political wind. It doesn’t start over every five years. And it certainly doesn’t confuse a party manifesto with a national vision. A manifesto may be the starting point but should not be confused for the whole plan. Ironically, if you strip away the partisan packaging, many of the ideas across the manifestos overlap. That tells me that consensus is possible, if only there were political will to pursue it beyond election season.

Even when sectoral plans are developed and many are, like the Ministry of Education’s Education Sector Plan 2021–2025, they often exist in silos. They don’t seem to be speaking to each other. It’s not clear, for instance, how the education plan then aligned with the future needs of many other sectors experiencing rapid expansion.

I was reading recently that Guyana hopes to welcome one million visitors and three million transiting passengers by 2030. This is an exciting target and I genuinely applaud the vision and energy behind it. But I have questions. Are we preparing our communities for that kind of growth? Are we training the workers? Is this tourism strategy sitting side by side with strategies in security, education, health, and infrastructure? Or are we rolling out initiatives in isolation, hoping they somehow fit?

And maybe I wouldn’t ask these questions so urgently if I didn’t keep seeing signs of poor planning in real life. We recently built the Heroes Highway, launched at the end of 2023. This is a brand new, multi-billion-dollar project and less than two years later; we had to dig it up to build another roundabout, right next to one that already exists, to accommodate traffic from the soon to be commissioned Demerara Harbour Bridge. I’m not an engineer, and I’m not pretending to be one. But something about that feels wrong, inefficient and frankly, wasteful. These projects were underway around the same time. Shouldn’t that level of coordination have happened long before?

When I speak of a national development strategy, I’m not asking for a glossy document to check a box—that’ll just be another waste of time and taxpayers money, quite frankly.  I’m talking about a shared vision that guides ministries, informs private sector investment, engages communities, and reflects the values and priorities of the Guyanese people. Such a vision isn’t torn up or replaced every time the seat of power changes hands, it says: this is who we are, this is where we’re going, and this is exactly how we’ll get there, together.

But the reality is that long-term planning often dies in the shadows of short-term politics. One of the reasons these strategies rarely outlive a political cycle is the winner-takes-all nature of our system. Yes, we are back at the constitutional/electoral reform conversation.  The “pettiness over progress” logic of “if my party didn’t conceptualise it, we can’t implement it” limits our ability to enjoy continuity and evolution. Instead, what we get are disruption and rebranding, which I’m sure we can all agree, Guyana, simply cannot afford.

Other countries have done it. Rwanda has Vision 2050 and Barbados is working on a 20-year strategic plan right now. “Big” Dubai didn’t become Dubai by chance. It did so with a plan, executed over decades through consistency, coordination, and clarity (yes, I’m fully aware that their political realities are vastly different)

Guyana, too, deserves such a plan. One that doesn’t collapse with every election cycle; one that allows us to dream beyond five years ; and one that links our oil money to something meaningful for generations to come. Sometimes I hear bits and pieces in the speeches of President Ali and indeed key government Ministers but we need a single place so we all understand, scrutinize and see where we fit.

I don’t know if such a plan already exists, somewhere in a Cabinet memo or a consultant’s report. If it does, I hope they release it soon. Because right now, it feels like we’re sprinting through a construction site in the dark, trusting instinct over architecture and praying the whole thing doesn’t collapse. We can do better but only if we build from a blueprint.

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• blueprint, building, economic momentum, national roadmap

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