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A $40M insult
(Kaieteur News) – The PPPC Government is now very versed in insulting citizens. National budgets weaponised, with friends and allies of the government made stronger, while those outside the ruling party’s circle are left weaker, more vulnerable.
One of the latest outrages from this year’s record budget is the $40M for the Office of Commissioner of Information (OCI). This is waste to the nth degree, such a prolonged river of waste that it’s now an obscenity.
What is Guyana getting from the Information Office? In what way are Guyanese benefiting from the work of the OCI? Guyanese have followed all the required steps, petitioned in accordance with procedures, and gotten nowhere. Some did get somewhere, but not to a place that they could ever have imagined.
They have been mocked, insulted, and abused, for their troubles. To add insult to injury, Guyana’s chief information officer, President Irfaan Ali shrugged his shoulders, opened his hands in that well-known arc of helplessness, and that’s where the OCI rests. A president all but publicly confessing to his own impotence, and lack of will to bring the same foot-dragging, stonewalling, undermining OCI in line. The man in charge of the OCI must be quietly celebrating his extended good fortune, and the reduction of the president to a pitiful heap.
It is regrettable that OCI budget outlays are fast closing in on a quarter billion taxpayer dollars, with almost nothing to show for that expenditure. Almost a quarter billion have now been splurged on what represents a black hole that sucks up precious millions, and the nation is rewarded with a blank report card. If the OCI is above responding to Guyanese requests for information allowed by law, then either its structure or its management should be dismantled, and a new start made from scratch. It is a costly sacred cow to maintain at $40M a year.
The OCI is not a brewing scandal of vulgar proportions, it is a full-time scandal in full public view, one that is fully in the face of every Guyanese. Isn’t it time for this farce, what is a con game being played by the PPPC Government, to come to a stop?
President Ali is not an accidental president, nor should he make himself into a wingless lame duck one. To be frank, the president does not cut an inspiring figure when he engages in that rope-a-dope slide that he likes. The one where he doesn’t get involved in developments of that kind, and far be it for him to intervene and demand improvements. The way that we at this publication see this situation is that since the office is so comatose, more or less a permanent ICU patient, the president has one of two choices.
First, President Ali must shed his pretenses at reservation, discard his hands-off standard (no matter how convenient to him) and demand changes for the better. Second, if that is still not happening, then he has to issue an ultimatum: a presidential order that is nonnegotiable.
When the government can allocate another $40M to the OCI for 2026, and the president allows that office to reduce his leadership to a joke, then it is more than the reputation of the OCI that is dented. Twist it or turn it, at the end of the day, it’s President Ali’s own decisive leadership credentials that come under sharp scrutiny, if not discredit. The OCI, the quantity and quality of its responses to petitioning citizens, and its overall output now stand as another silo that could be painted National Disgrace. Whether he cares to acknowledge that or not, it is unavoidable that some of that would trickle down to the president and splash on him.
The OCI, for the longest interval has given off the foulness of a national scandal. Another $40M in 2026 simply breathes new life into this ugly and enduring Guyana scandal. It is time that it functions as it should, and deliver. If not, then it should be overhauled from the top, with heads rolling. President Ali would be doing Guyanese two favors with one stroke. He opens the door for smoother access to information requests, enshrined in law, and he gives citizens the last laugh.
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