Pace and spin

Sep 21, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) There are governments that take a year to get started, governments that take a year to find their feet, and then there is the second Irfaan Ali administration, which seems to have been in office for approximately three years, seven months and a long weekend, even though it has been only one year.

At this rate, by the time the Government reaches the end of its term, the citizens may be entitled to claim retirement benefits for having lived through it. The first year has certainly been hectic. There is no denying that a great deal has happened and, more importantly, that a great deal is still happening. Guyana has become a country where you can leave home and when you are returning home in the afternoon wonder whether you are in the same country. By the time the day is over a new road, bridge, school, hospital or building has been erected. That is how fast things are moving.

There is also something refreshing about the fact that much of this development is not merely PowerPoint development, which is the kind where a minister stands before a screen and points proudly at an artist’s impression of a building that does not yet exist. There is physical evidence everywhere, with massive public infrastructure projects underway and a private sector that is also investing heavily, creating buildings, businesses, jobs and, one hopes, sufficient parking spaces to accommodate the people who will eventually use them.

Public services have also improved in important areas, and the opening of hospitals and schools, together with the increase in international-standard hotels, represents genuine progress. A country that can expand access to healthcare and education while simultaneously building infrastructure is doing something right. And it would be churlish to deny this merely because one disapproves of the Government.

There is also genuine wealth being created, and this is perhaps the most important change taking place beneath all the concrete, asphalt and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Guyana is no longer simply redistributing a small pie among people who have been arguing over the same slice for decades; the pie is getting larger, although we have not yet resolved the philosophical question of who gets the cherry. But prosperity has its own peculiar problem, because when a country suddenly becomes rich, everybody begins looking at the money with intensity. This is where the Government’s report card becomes considerably more complicated, because alongside the achievements are serious allegations concerning the enrichment of some ministers, overpriced contracts and other forms of corruption.

These allegations must not be dismissed merely because they are politically inconvenient. What is required is independent investigations and a willingness by the Government to demonstrate that it has nothing to fear from scrutiny. There is another troubling development in the report card. There is the growing perception that state agencies are being weaponised against political opponents and, particularly, against the We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) party.

The Government therefore faces an unusual situation in which the same report card contains both excellent marks and some very worrying comments written in red ink. It would be easy to celebrate the first and insist that the second were written by jealous people who have never learned to appreciate a properly constructed highway, but governments are not schoolchildren and national progress is not a competition for gold stars.

The real test of leadership is whether a government can look at its own failures with the same enthusiasm with which it looks at its achievements. This is particularly important with electricity, where Guyana’s rapidly expanding economy is producing demand that is placing extraordinary pressure on the system, resulting in increasingly frequent outages. There is also the less glamorous but more fundamental question of poverty, which has somehow managed to survive the arrival of billions of dollars in oil revenues. Infrastructure is important, hospitals are important and schools are important, but economic growth becomes meaningful only when it changes the lives of people who whose names are unlikely ever to be engraved on a plaque.

Guyana therefore needs an anti-poverty strategy that is as ambitious as its infrastructure programme, because building a bridge to somewhere is not much consolation to the family that cannot afford the bus fare to cross it. The Government must ask whether enough of the new wealth is reaching the poorest households through better incomes, skills, housing, healthcare, nutrition and opportunities for upward mobility. So, after one year, the report card is decidedly chequered.

There are excellent grades for infrastructure and important improvements in public services, but there are also some serious questions about corruption, political conduct, electricity and poverty. The Ali administration deserves credit for what it has built and the pace at which it has managed to do so. But it should also understand that concrete cannot cover every crack in the foundations.

The greatest danger facing a Government that has accomplished much is not criticism from its opponents; it is the temptation to believe its own advertisements, because the moment a government stops examining itself is usually the moment somebody else begins doing it for them and usually with a much less flattering pen.

(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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• electricity outages, govt, pace, Peeping Tom, public services, spin

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