Latest update June 13th, 2026 12:40 AM
Classic PPPC government move
(Kaieteur News) – It was inevitable that the PPPC Government would roll out what it always had up its sleeve. Vice President Jagdeo is the composer and announcer of what is set to come.
Certain state ads will now be placed on an online platform, and among the reasons he tendered, are efficiency and convenience. The government is delivering what serves the interests of the people in the best way. As usual, when Jagdeo says something, there is a lengthy list of big things that he finds it convenient to leave out.
State ads for government tender opportunities have been identified as more properly belonging online. “One of the first manifestations you will see next year is a procurement website that will now advertise contracts around the country. So, the current way of doing this is you put ads in newspapers mainly.
So, in 2024 alone, the cost to the Treasury of putting out those ads in the newspapers was nearly $800 million that went to the newspapers.” It is the standard now long associated with the PPPC Government in action, and with the party’s leader, Jagdeo, relishing the moment to deliver what he believes is a crippling blow to the newspaper business, and none more than the independent section of it.
Instead of working with the major newspapers, listening to the news that they publish, the good and bad of it, the government prefers to go in the opposite direction. It studies and searches for openings to wound the independent newspapers, while heavily subsidizing the state-controlled segment of newspaper media.
The independent press and the revelations that it presents to the nation has always been looked upon by successive PPPC Governments as an unnecessary and undesired presence. State ads have been weaponized by Jagdeo before, and withheld before, from different media entities, as part of his menu of vindictiveness and attempts to push them out of business. When there are fewer embarrassing revelations, then there are fewer criticisms of the government and its leadership, and there are fewer tough media questions to answer.
When the government (and Bharrat Jagdeo) should pour all their energies into the best management possible of Guyana’s oil and gas sector, the preference of both is to target the independent media to push it into a state of collapse. Serving the people, or prioritizing what serves the interests of the ruling PPPC first?
The vice president spoke in his last Thursday’s press conference about efficiency, as he mentioned the $800M 2024 bill for state ads, and from publishing tender notices in the newspapers.
This is both ironic and comical coming from the PPPC strongman, a leader who has stood over a series of inefficiencies for which no explanations have been offered. The stumbling, wasteful, sugar industry stands as a case of chronic inefficiency for the books, an embarrassment of gross proportions.
Yet, year after year, one PPPC Government after another has budgeted billions upon billions that go into a seeming black hole. The record emphasizes that more times than not, provisions in supplementary budgets were necessary to maintain GuySuCo in its state of inefficiency, and with little benefit to the nation. The future looks unchanging in that regard, where sugar is concerned, but we do not expect that the government will change its course and address that inefficient allocation of state resources.
We recall massive and costly inefficiencies in many state projects, where from the CJIA extension to roads to schools, there was an unbroken line of evidence that highlights PPPC Government failures.
The record is of billion-dollar projects plagued by cost overruns, lost time, and output that fails. This is just the tip of the inefficiency iceberg, but there was Jagdeo on Thursday trying to paint the placement of state ads for tender notices in mainstream newspapers as “inefficient” and inconvenient for readers.
He didn’t have to say it, because everyone knows that removing those state ads from Stabroek News and Kaieteur News is intended to hobble them, and hurt them. Moving $800M in annual state ads to an online platform is what is convenient to Jagdeo’s interests. He calculates that he wouldn’t be placed on the hot seat so often, nor left looking so inefficient and shallow.
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