The corruption cancer

Apr 21, 2026 Editorial, News

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(Kaieteur News) – We are no longer flirting with corruption in Guyana; we are living inside it. It is not a blemish on the national character, it is the bloodstream.

Like a cancer that has metastasised, it has spread from the high offices of power down into the smallest transactions of daily life, until it feels almost normal to participate, to comply, to look the other way.

Consider the ongoing revelations surrounding the Gas-to-Energy project, exposés that have raised troubling questions about procurement, inflated costs, and opaque decision-making. The figures being bandied about are not small change. Billions are being committed with a casualness that would make even seasoned spendthrifts blush. Yet the public is expected to accept reassurances while basic questions remain unanswered: Who benefits? Who approved? Who is accountable? When scrutiny is met with silence or hostility, it only deepens the suspicion that something is terribly wrong.

And this is not an isolated case. We have seen patterns before, contracts awarded without transparency, state resources treated as private spoils and officials behaving as though public office is a license to accumulate. The details may differ, but the underlying script remains the same. The watchdogs bark, the evidence mounts, and yet the system lumbers on, largely unmoved.

But let us not pretend this is only about those in high office. Corruption survives because it is fed—not just from above, but from below. The traffic policeman stops a driver and before a word is spoken, a folded bill appears. No receipt, no record, no consequence. A shortcut taken, a law bypassed. We grumble about the system, yet we grease its wheels every day.

There is a convenient fiction that corruption is something done to us by “them”—the politicians, the officials, the faceless bureaucrats. But corruption is a transaction. It requires two willing participants: one to demand, another to comply. The bribe offered is just as corrosive as the bribe accepted. In that sense, the moral erosion is collective.

This is not to equate the petty with the grand. There is a vast difference between slipping a note to avoid a traffic ticket and orchestrating multimillion-dollar schemes that drain the public treasury. But the psychology is connected. When a society becomes comfortable bending rules at the micro level, it loses the moral authority to challenge abuses at the macro level. The culture becomes permissive, even complicit. And so, we arrive at a dangerous place: a country where outrage is selective, where citizens rail against high-level corruption while quietly participating in their own smaller acts of dishonesty. We cannot build a culture of accountability on a foundation of hypocrisy.

The tools for resistance are already in our hands. In an age of ubiquitous smartphones, every citizen is a potential whistleblower. Why are there not more recordings, more images, more exposures of everyday corruption? Why do social media platforms overflow with gossip and trivialities, yet fall strangely silent when it comes to documenting wrongdoing? Fear may play a role, but so does apathy and, in some cases, self-interest.

There is also the question of consequences. Too often, allegations surface, headlines are made, and then… nothing. No resignations, no prosecutions, no meaningful reforms. The message this sends is unmistakable: corruption pays, and accountability is optional. It is this perception, more than anything else that entrenches the problem.

An old epitaph tells of a man who spent his life trying to change the world, then his country, then his family, only to realise at the end that he should have started with himself. It is a lesson we would do well to heed. National transformation does not begin in Parliament; it begins in personal conduct.

But personal reform alone is not enough. There must also be institutional courage. Investigative journalism has a role to play, and it is being played, often at great risk. Yet exposing wrong doing is only the first step. There must be a system willing to act on those exposures, to pursue justice without fear or favour. Corruption, like an iceberg, reveals only a fraction of itself above the surface. What we see in the headlines is merely the tip. Beneath lies a vast, submerged structure of deals, favours, and silent understandings. To confront it requires more than rhetoric; it demands sustained pressure from citizens, media and institutions alike.

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• cancer, corruption, Editorial, Gas-to-Energy project, politicians

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