When one man decides everything

Oct 19, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – Eight hundred million dollars! That is the figure that’s lately being tossed about like a grenade in the public square. “Eight hundred million on advertisements!”

The critics gasp, as if the number itself were proof of profligacy. It sounds enormous, even grotesque, in a country where a modest home can be built for one-twentieth that sum. But in context and context is everything, the number shrinks to the size of a rounding error.

In 2011, the national budget stood at roughly G$161 billion. Fast forward to 2025, and it has swollen to a staggering G$1.4 trillion. That’s not a modest increase; it’s an astronomical one, a 769 percent surge in just over a decade. To put it differently, for every dollar the government spent in 2011, it now spends almost nine. If the government’s expenditure has ballooned by nearly 770 percent, then why should it surprise anyone that the advertising bill has also climbed? The machinery of the State is now infinitely larger, the number of projects exponentially greater, and the demands of public communication vastly more complex.

Advertising is not ornamental to governance; it is the bloodstream through which a government communicates with its citizens. It is how notices are published, tenders advertised, vacancies announced, safety messages shared, and, yes, political greetings extended. The government of 2025 presides over ten times the number of projects that existed in 2011 — roads, schools, hospitals, energy developments, digital initiatives, water expansion, housing schemes. Each of these demands its own tender notices, environmental warnings, or project updates. The State’s advertising output has multiplied not because of indulgence but because of function. Eight hundred million dollars, in this light, is hardly the bacchanal of spending that some allege. If anything, it suggests restraint. For if the national budget has grown by 769 percent, then for the advertising allocation to keep pace, it should now be in the vicinity of G$1.4 billion, not G$800 million. The truth is that the increase in advertising expenditure has not kept pace with the proliferation of government projects and communications. The government today spends proportionally less on advertising than it did fourteen years ago.

Moreover, much of that G$800 million doesn’t even concern what most people think of as advertising. The sum covers the publication of government gazettes, the routine notification of appointments and legal notices, the advertisement of job vacancies, and a miscellany of other compulsory public communications. The sheer volume of government transactions — and the legal requirement to publish them — has risen dramatically. When the number of projects multiplies, the paperwork follows like a shadow, and with it the ads.

Then there are the ceremonial communications — the government greetings and messages that accompany religious and cultural festivals, Independence Day, Christmas, Diwali, Eid, Phagwah, Mashramani, and so forth. Each one of those greetings — the kind that appears in the dailies or circulates on social media — is counted in the advertising tally. In the age of optics, silence is interpreted as indifference. A government that fails to extend greetings to its people is accused of disrespect; one that does is accused of extravagance.

Still, in its zeal to appear modern and thrifty, the administration has announced the creation of an online portal where all procurement ads will be placed. It is not the first time this idea has been floated. The previous attempt at such a portal ended as so many government “modernizations” do — in quiet failure.

The problem wasn’t technical but cultural. Procurement is a process embedded in habit, in the daily rituals of bureaucratic life. Businesses, contractors, and suppliers still look to the newspapers, where notices are visible, permanent, and verifiable. Digital portals, in contrast, are ephemeral; they depend on users who are willing to go hunting for information instead of seeing it placed directly before them.

The government will fail again for the same reason it failed before — because it misunderstands the ecosystem of information. It assumes that by merely uploading advertisements to a website or social media platform, the message will find its audience. It won’t. Online advertising, especially through platforms like Facebook, is ruled by the black magic of algorithms. These algorithms are unseen mechanisms that decide which messages are shown and to whom. The ruling party learned this lesson the hard way during its election campaigns, when its online ads failed to gain the expected traction. It has yet to realize that unless an advertisement is boosted, targeted, and continuously paid for, it will sink beneath the algorithmic sea like a stone.

What is at work here is not fiscal irresponsibility but a species of bureaucratic naïveté — the belief that technology can replace human intelligence and habit. It is the same faith that produces half-baked digitization projects and “smart” initiatives that end up being neither. The irony is that the same government that professes to be guided by data seems incapable of understanding how data-driven platforms actually function.

And so, the paradox persists: while the State expands and its communications multiply, decisions about how to manage those communications are made by a shrinking circle of persons. And now it seems by one man. The logic of centralization — the conceit that one person’s judgment can substitute for the collective intelligence of institutions — is the real extravagance here.

In the end, the G$800 million is not the scandal. The scandal is the illusion that efficiency can be commanded from the top down, that wisdom resides in one mind, that decisions made in solitude will somehow produce coherence in a nation of 800,000 persons – counting the migrants. That is the delusion of emperors and technocrats, not of democratic governments. When the power to decide everything — from the placement of ads to the course of national projects — rests in one pair of hands, the result is always the same: confusion masquerading as order.

That is why these weird, self-defeating decisions will keep happening. Not because the State spends too much on advertising, but because it listens too little to reason.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• advertising, National Budget, one man, Peeping Tom

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