Poor delivery of public services mostly affects working class and poor families

Dec 01, 2025 Letters

Dear Editor,

For approximately thirty years, successive People’s Progressive Party (PPP) governments – from Bharrat Jagdeo through Donald Ramotar to the current administration of President Irfaan Ali – have presided over a steady and shameful decline in the delivery of basic public services in Guyana. Road’s crumble, hospitals run out of essential drugs, newborns and their mother too frequently being injured or dying during or after child birth, land titles take years, driver’s licenses are for sale, and water and electricity remain unreliable in many communities. This is not bad luck or Burnham; it is the direct result of PPP created centralisation, corruption, nepotism and political interference in institutions that were meant to serve the people.

The latest promises of “digitisation” are being sold as the miracle cure. They are not. Computer systems cannot compensate for the deliberate understaffing of regional offices, the siphoning of funds, or the culture of “facilitation payments” that citizens now accept as the only way to get what they are already entitled to.

While ordinary citizens queue for hours or pay bribes for basic documents and services, the political class enjoys a parallel universe: duty-free vehicles, state-funded medical treatment abroad, generous pensions that bypass the broken National Insurance Scheme, and VIP lanes at every ministry. The same leaders who tell us to be patient fly to Trinidad, Barbados or the United States the moment they or their families need serious medical care. They have insulated themselves from the consequences of the system they created.

Bi-monthly “regional outreach” exercises, heavily branded and funded with taxpayers’ money, are little more than political theatre. They temporarily ease pressure on a few citizens, create photo opportunities, and allow the government to claim it is “close to the people,” yet the underlying rot remains untouched. Real improvement would mean empowering the Regional Democratic Councils, rooting out corruption, ending political appointments in the public service, and making ministries directly accountable for delays and extortion. None of this is happening.

Until the PPP leadership experiences the same public hospitals, the same passport office, the same land registry, and the same electricity blackouts that ordinary Guyanese endure every day, nothing will change. Cosmetic digitisation and staged outreaches are not solutions; they are distractions. The working people and the poor of this country deserve far better after thirty years under one party’s rule.

C.A. Singh

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Poor delivery of public services mostly affects working class and poor families

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