Budget 2026: numbers, numbers cometh the device

Feb 09, 2026 News, The GHK Lall Column

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(Kaieteur News) – Guyana’s 2026 budget is a mountainous mass of green mossed numbers.  Frankly, it is a One Guyana budget, for the people specially identified as belonging, invited under that tent.  PPP insiders.  Private sector.

Brownnosers, soup-drinkers, bootlickers.  Assorted hustlers and robbers.  They are not mutually exclusive, but populate the One Guyana Lodge.  What do the numbers say when fleshed out, from the perspective of the impoverished?  Hard-up, dry-up, and beaten up Guyanese.  In the kindest consideration, the budget numbers have their insuppressible, unconquerable, tales to share.  They are ghastly.  The Brits love to say that about horror situations.

One trillion and a half dollars have so many zeros that they make the eyes glaze, head spin.  Think of this: all their lives, Guyanese counted in pennies and shillings.  Now they thrill to talk in trillions in recent years.  Some Guyanese are; most Guyanese have had nothing to be thrilled about in their budgets, with this record one for 2026 included.  Here is a first startling number: 76,000 pensioners (or 96,000) receive fractions of a cent per month on each million in the budget.  When the additional nine zeros of a trillion are incorporated to form part of the divisor, the result is so invisible that they need a space age microscope to detect.  The few cents are part of a decimal that has so many zeros at its beginning that the mind does somersaults.  Cents in fractions and decimals for people, many of whom live only on old age pension income, out of a trillion-and-a-half-dollar budget and the PPP says that’s care and consideration in action.  I hear about gas tank subsidies.  For citizens without cars, they are exposed to the exploitations of public transportation pirates.  After all the budgetary provisions, the small man and woman still don’t have buying power, but that’s a budget for the masses.

I urge extending the budget deduction into schools.  Eighty-five thousand dollars total this year for 206,000 children.  If there are two parents in that household that’s a total of 618,000 Guyanese collecting that $85,000 for a year from a budget that is $1,558,000,000,000,000.  Cancel the three zeroes from $85,000 and the result is $85 for a year for every three Guyanese (two adults, one child) from $1.558 billion.  The PPP Govt spokespeople say this is How We Care.  If this is the cash in hand reality for 618,000 Guyanese with a child and 76,000 (or 96,000) older Guyanese, then the budget provisions for public servants and teachers should stand in that same cash category.  I’m already well over 700,000 Guyanese, and this is their horror story from this year’s budget.  Take the budget provisions individually, or take them all together, including invisible, likely phantom, subsidies, and Guyanese still don’t know what it is to be living like proud, prosperous citizens in a rich oil producing nation.  One of the richest per head, as they are told.  They probably are, except that their own government leads the line of exploiters that fools them, rips them off, keeps them in beggary, and leaves them chronically dependent.

After all the subsidies, plus this year’s supposedly sweet “pro poor” budget (sociologist and poor people Messiah, Minister Juan Edghill), and a budget glistening with “transformational progress” (Guyana’s caregiving Mother Teresa, Minister Vindya Persaud), the searing question is: why Guyanese on the far side of the PPP Govt’s generosity cannot buy basic food supplies?  If they can’t buy food basics, then buying clothes becomes a challenge best postponed for later.  And when they cannot obtain vital medicines, more often the case, from Pres. Ali’s world-class healthcare system, then it is frightening for them to consider how they will get those lifesaving chemicals.  There are the contradictions that brutalise what Drs. Edghill, Persaud, and Ali put on the table and persist with the farce that they are good for Guyanese.  Edghill’s “pro poor” budget somehow makes the rich richer, and the poor less food sufficient and less garment clad.  Persaud’s “transformational progress” transforms poor Guyanese to zombies, and sends the rich soaring into the stratosphere.  And, Mr. Ali’s world-class healthcare system is what foreigners call last in class.  A dunce of profound proportions.

Real money for working class Guyanese has led to a 5-year war between PPP Govt troops and Guyanese they deem guerillas (maybe gorillas).  Budget numbers say so.  Budget pennies for the poor in Guyana support this assertion.

(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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• Budget 2026, GHK Lall, PPP, Private Sector

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