Author: Christopher Ram

Posted on

Silica City – Pradoville 3 in the Making

Introduction

Other than periodic, campaign-style announcements, the Silica City project on the Soesdyke-Linden Highway operates in near-complete secrecy. It is repeatedly celebrated as the President’s “brainchild”, yet the public has been told nothing of how it is financed, how it is structured within government, or by what criteria the beneficiaries of its house lots will be selected. That pattern was maintained most recently as last week, when Collin Croal, Minister of Housing, announced that agreements have been signed and allocations of houses made, without accompanying disclosure of any legal authority, eligibility rules, pricing framework, or institutional approvals governing those allocations.

This silence is not accidental. Silica City has been variously described as a housing scheme, a “young professionals” enclave, a smart city, a decongestion strategy, and a commercial and healthcare hub. The descriptions shift with the audience – and with each statement. That is contrived confusion to avoid the project being pinned down to a single statutory regime, a single governance framework, or a single line of accountability. When a project is so flaky, when it begins to appear like a recycled scheme, it is time to raise the alarm.

We have seen this movie before. The Sparendaam housing project – Pradoville 2 – did not unravel by accident. The investigation showed that it was financed through multiple state entities, with no single institution carrying the full cost and no consolidated accounting of the project. That fragmentation diluted responsibility, obscured the true cost, and prevented scrutiny until long after land was transferred and beneficiaries entrenched. By the time the full picture emerged, accountability was already lost – and no one was ever held responsible.

The forensic investigation later showed how the absence of clear statutory footing, the bypassing of institutional processes, undisclosed allocation criteria, missing records, and political direction substituting for law produced outcomes that benefited a select few, including the then President, Ministers, party figures, and carefully chosen beneficiaries.

The project  

Little has been said about Silica City’s administration, except that it appears to fall under the Central Housing and Planning Authority, established under the Housing Act, more noted for its outdatedness (1946) than for its relevance. The CHPA is a statutory authority governed by the Housing Act, with defined objectives – Housing of persons of the Working Class –  procedures, reporting obligations, and safeguards designed to prevent the kind of opacity and looseness exposed by the Sparendaam investigation.

Yet, an enduring and necessary safeguard provided for under the Act has been dispensed with – too inconvenient for Silica City. Annual Reports have disappeared. There is no identifiable public accounting for the project. The project does not appear in the National Estimates, nor is it identifiable in the financial statements of the CHPA or any other government authority. This is despite the vast sums being spent on infrastructure and construction.

The chain of command compounds the danger. The Minister administering CHPA reports directly to Mohamed Irfaan Ali. There has been some reshuffling of junior ministers, but a party loyalist remains in charge. From all accounts, the administrative structure and key personnel unchanged. The result: a flagship housing project executed by CHPA under direct political oversight, with diminished reporting and no transparent disclosure of financing, governance, or allocation criteria. All in an environment of an explosion of funds accompanied by an erosion of accountability.

Loosening the reins of accountability

Since the PPP/C returned to office in 2020, CHPA has abandoned the comprehensive Annual Reports required by section 49 of the Housing Act, substituting bare audited financial statements that say nothing about projects, allocations, beneficiaries, or policy decisions. The stage was set: no meaningful statutory reporting. As a result, Silica City is rendered financially invisible to citizens and Parliament alike. This violation of the law shields the project from scrutiny while land is allocated, infrastructure constructed, and commitments locked in.

That this has gone undetected and unchallenged is itself a serious institutional failure. The Audit Office of Guyana exists to ensure compliance not only with accounting standards, but with the laws governing public authorities. The absence of Annual Reports, and the complete invisibility of Silica City in CHPA’s published accounts, should have been explicitly flagged.

Equally troubling is the silence of the National Assembly of Guyana, at least some of whose members know that the Housing Act requires far more than numbers stripped of context. When a statutory reporting framework collapses in plain sight, unnoticed by auditors and unchallenged by Parliament, accountability disappears, and lawful administration collapses. 

President Ali

At this point, it is no longer credible to discuss Silica City without addressing the common role of President Ali himself. The Sparendaam investigation did not describe a single rogue decision or a momentary lapse. It documented an infrastructure of persons and practices through which housing projects were executed: political direction overriding statute, institutions reduced to conduits, records absent or reconstructed after the fact, and accountability dissolved by design. 

What makes the current project more troubling is that many of the same enabling conditions have re-emerged on a far larger and more expensive scale. Then, Dr Ali operated as Housing Minister under a President. Now, he is the President. Then he reported to Cabinet. Now, Cabinet reports to him.

Silica City is framed as a legacy project. But vanity cannot come before legality, and legacy cannot be built on secrecy, evasion, and disregard for statutory accountability. History is unforgiving on this point. It judges leaders not by the size of their projects, but by whether those projects followed the law, the institutions of the state, and earned the public trust.

Conclusion

Having been involved in the investigation into the Sparendaam project, I recognise the warning signs. I fear that if this project is allowed to continue under existing conditions of opacity, avoidance of scrutiny, and deliberate invisibility, we will not later be wondering whether Silica City was Pradoville 3.

We will already know the answer.

Posted on

President’s swearing in of TSC members constitutes erosion of Constitution and gutting of rule of law

Dear Editor,

In announcing his appointment of members to the Teaching Service Commission (TSC) without consulting the Leader of the Opposition, President Ali explained that no consultation was possible because no such Leader had been elected since the elections, and that conditions in the education sector required immediate action. In substance, the President was asking the public to accept that constitutional compliance could be set aside in the name of urgency and the public good. That is a bitter pill to swallow.

The Constitution does not suggest or invite consultation with the Leader of the Opposition: it commands it. The constitutional office of LOO is not ceremonial, ornamental nor optional. It is intended to place a restraint on executive power in a winner-take-all constitutional system and to ensure that constitutional commissions operate independently and professionally, representative of the society rather than as proxies for the government of the day. By ignoring this constitutional mandate, the appointments to the TSC are not merely irregular; they are  constitutionally tainted – and dangerous.

On inspection, the President’s announcement rings hollow. As a senior member of the Bar observed in another context – that of the mysterious exit of the former acting Chancellor – procedural silence often conceals mischief. The prolonged failure to have a Leader of the Opposition elected raises identical concerns. This is not conjecture; it is a conclusion supported by deliberate inaction and disturbing, verifiable facts.

The elections are over. The recess has been taken. Parliament is sitting. A speaker has been elected. Opposi-tion members are present and calling for the election. The Speaker first disappears and then, acting with the political comfort of his sponsors strengthened by an enlarged government majority, blatantly refuses to facilitate the election. This is not inadvertence. It is obstruction. The vacancy advanced by President Ali to justify his constitutional violation, has been engineered, maintained, and is now being cynically invoked by the President.

What is being presented as constitutional impossibility is, in truth, constitutional engineering.

The President has attempted to cloak this manoeuvre in urgency, pointing to staffing pressures within the education system. He spoke of some 2,700 senior vacancies to be filled, including more than 800 newly created senior posts that did not previously exist. The suggestion was that events had overtaken constitutional formality. But the 2025 Estimates expose that claim. Education staffing spans Agency 40 and all ten regions. Its levels, scales and senior layers were known, budgeted for and deliberately restructured. These pressures were not sudden. They were foreseeable and, in significant part, policy-driven.

That makes the invocation of urgency disingenuous. Senior vacancies do not arise overnight; they build up over time and should have been addressed long before they became a constitutional excuse. The urgency claim also clashes with the Government’s own rhetoric. In his 2025 Budget Speech, the Minister responsible for Finance boasted of a transformative education agenda, and in the debate the Minister of Education praised the PPP/C’s record in the sector. Neither spoke of crisis. A government cannot celebrate success in one breath and plead constitutional necessity the next.

That contradiction matters, because this is not the first time “necessity” has been pressed into service to excuse constitutional shortcuts. In 2022, the appointment of Clifton Hicken as acting Commissioner of Police was defended on the basis that consultation with a Leader of the Opposition was impossible because none existed—an explanation accepted as exceptional at the time. Following the 2025 elections, the same rationale has been recycled, with Parliament once again allowed to remain incomplete so that constitutional consultation can be declared impossible.

The pattern extends beyond appointments. Nowhere is constitutional disregard more visible than in the administration of the Access to Information Act, enacted to give effect to the constitutional right to information. For years, the Commissioner of Information has failed to provide responses to requests or meaningful oversight, while reporting and enforcement have all but disappeared. This inaction has been tolerated rather than corrected—an omission made more troubling by the fact that the President himself holds the portfolio of Minister of Information. What is presented as bureaucratic failure is, in truth, constitutional neglect at the highest level.

Viewed together, these episodes point to a clear strategy by President Ali: constitutional constraints are not confronted but systematically weakened. When compliance is inconvenient (access to information), institutions are allowed to fail; when consultation is required (the election of the Leader of the Opposition), the conditions for it are deliberately left unmet; and when challenged, necessity is invoked after the fact (the Teaching Service Commission).

This is not governance; it is the erosion of the Constitution and the gutting of the rule of law.

The Teaching Service Commission appointments therefore raise more than a legal issue. They raise a democratic one. The failure to empower the opposition does more than narrow political inclusiveness; it contributes to what Nobel Prize–winning scholars describe in Why Nations Fail as the drift toward an extractive political system.

Yours faithfully,

Christopher Ram

Posted on

Yearend 2025 – President and Minister must act on 2022 Census

Business and Economic Commentary by Christopher Ram

Introduction

On November 26, 2025, Stabroek News reported Senior Minister with responsibility for Finance, Dr Ashni Singh, as saying that he was “still awaiting a clear update” on the long-delayed 2022 Population and Housing Census, that he was unsure what caused the delay, and that he intended to raise the matter with the Chief Statistician “very soon.” Such an explanation might pass from an ordinary minister. Dr Singh is not. It might also be excusable if the issue were routine. This particular census is neither. And it might still be tolerable if the delay were brief. It is now measured in years.

For all these reasons, Dr Singh’s explanation is bewildering at best. He has the honour – and the responsibility – of presenting annual budgets exceeding one trillion dollars, allocating resources across an expanding landscape of ministries, departments, agencies, regions, and sectors.

That task demands the most current and reliable demographic and socio-economic data available. It cannot responsibly and properly be discharged by guesswork, political preference, or incremental increases carried over from the past. A population and housing census is precisely the dataset that anchors such decisions. For the Senior Minister responsible for Finance to accept – assuming his account is accurate – a state of affairs in which that foundational data is unavailable, unexplained, and unmanaged is not merely regrettable. It borders on incredible.

The explanation is not merely puzzling in a political sense; it is difficult to reconcile with the statutory framework governing official statistics in Guyana. The Statistics Act does not contemplate an open-ended census process, nor does it permit foundational national data to drift indefinitely without explanation or accountability. Censuses are not peripheral outputs. They are universally regarded as core state functions.

The statutory, governance framework

The Bureau of Statistics does not operate in isolation. It is governed by a Board chaired by the Finance Secretary – who operationally reports direct to the Minister – with the Chief Statistician as Vice-Chair, and comprising senior public officials. Oversight of the Bureau therefore sits squarely within the financial and administrative architecture of the State. Delays of this magnitude cannot occur unseen, unexplained, or unmanaged at that level.

Nor does responsibility end with Dr. Singh. In a move that is unprecedented, was never explained, and is not clearly understood, President Ali has not allocated finance to its own minister. Under our constitutional framework, Finance is therefore retained within the Office of the President, and responsibility for Statistics has been allocated to no other minister. In such circumstances, prolonged non-delivery cannot be treated as an operational mishap. It becomes an executive failure that points directly to Dr. Singh and indirectly to President Ali.

What makes this failure especially troubling is that in response to calls for the report to be published, the public have been fed with a mixture of excuses and promises have been made for the release of the report. This is no longer a single lapse. It is a pattern. Years have passed and another beckons. The Census has now outlived one Board of the Bureau of Statistics and is approaching the end of the tenure of its successor. The impending expiry of the current Board heightens that failure. A governing body chaired by the Finance Secretary, with the Chief Statistician as Vice-Chair, and populated by senior public officials, will have completed its term without delivering the most important statistical output of the decade.

Boards are appointed to govern, to supervise, and to ensure delivery. When a board’s term expires without results, responsibility gives way to accountability – not excuses. It does not roll forward automatically to the next appointment. This is therefore a moment of reckoning. As 2025 draws to a close, the continued absence of the 2022 census cannot be treated as an inherited problem, a technical delay, or a matter awaiting engagement “very soon.” Without the proverbial bogeyman of the PNC or the Coalition, the ownership of this failure – spanning years, boards, and budgets – belongs 100% to the Ali Administration. At year-end, responsibility cannot be deferred any further – it must be owned and acted upon.

Broader functions in peril

What makes this failure even more troubling is that the Statistics Act does not contemplate a single, isolated census. It provides for several distinct censuses and large-scale statistical exercises – including population and housing, labour force, household expenditure and other socio-economic surveys – each separate in scope, but all essential to decision-making, public administration, and management applying evidence-based governance. The Act also gives the Bureau latitude, with ministerial approval, to undertake additional censuses and surveys as circumstances require. In other words, the population and housing census is not the sole output of the statistical system, but the cornerstone upon which the others rest.

The prolonged non-delivery of that cornerstone therefore raises unavoidable questions about the wider statistical architecture of the State. If the most comprehensive, best-resourced, and most anticipated census cannot be brought to completion and publication, what confidence can be placed in the timeliness, reliability, or even the existence of other censuses mandated or permitted by law? Planning on social and physical infrastructure, skills requirements and availability, poverty measurement, household consumption analysis and intercensal estimates all depend, directly or indirectly, on the population baseline. The failure to publish the 2022 casts a shadow over the entire system of official statistics and weakens the informational foundation on which policy decisions are made and national finances are allocated.

There is an additional and more troubling consequence of this prolonged inaction. In the political sphere, the absence of inconvenient data may be tolerable, even advantageous. It allows narrative to substitute for evidence, delays scrutiny, and permits claims of progress to go largely untested. In management, however, the same absence is dangerous. Decisions made without reliable baseline data distort priorities, misallocate resources, and entrench inefficiencies. Political convenience in the short term is almost always harmful in the long run.

Conclusion

As the year draws to a close, this matter can no longer be left to drift. The imminent expiry of the current Board makes inaction dangerously unacceptable. If the 2022 Population and Housing Census is to retain any value, the President and the Senior Minister responsible for Finance must act decisively: appoint a new Board without delay, with a clear and public mandate to bring the exercise to publication within a fixed timeframe.

Anything less would constitute a governance failure that has already persisted far too long.

Posted on

Property tax regime needs reform and proposed removal should be revisited

Dear Editor,

Mr. Hemdutt Kumar’s letter, “Removal of property tax is a victory for the wealthy and a betrayal of the poor” (Stabroek News, December 20, 2025), is theoretically sound and morally courageous. Predictably, critics will recycle the familiar claim that property tax is widely evaded and difficult to enforce. By that logic, Guyana should abandon almost every major tax. VAT fraud is endemic, income and corporation tax avoidance is widespread, and customs duties haemorrhage daily. Acknow-ledgment of weak enforcement is a call to strengthen administration – not a justification for capitulation.

Before looking at the history of the property tax which President Ali plans to scrap on individuals – ‘to axe the tax,’ as older heads might say – we need to note that “Individuals” in taxation includes professionals, unincorporated businesses, partnerships, and the majority of contractors. This is a huge body of taxpayers. And if the President does keep his promise, retaining it on companies will not have the simplistic effect assumed: all the “one man” and family companies have to do to avoid the remnants of the tax is to de-incorporate.  As was the case with the minimum tax.

Guyana once operated a harshly progressive tax system, with marginal income-tax rates reaching 70 percent, reinforced by the National Development Surcharge Levy (subsequently ruled as unconstitutional by the courts). Over time, that framework has been steadily dismantled. Dividends, then taxable, have been made tax-free, estate duty effectively abolished, capital gain is either exempted or taxed at a lower rate than tax on income. And now, property tax – the last meaningful levy on accumulated wealth – is to be removed.

Guyana’s current $40 million property-tax threshold is already generous by international standards. And in computing the tax payable, full deduction of debts and exempted certain assets is allowed. As Mr. Kumar points out, it already excludes the poor.

Other critics will point to countries that have abandoned wealth taxes. They need to tell the whole story. Where such taxes were removed, wealth concentration intensified. What the tax needs is reform, not abolition – least of all at a moment when oil-driven wealth concentration is accelerating. If the measure is implemented, $2 billion plus will go into the pockets of a not-so-new and rapidly expanding wealth class for whom ‘greed is good’ appears to be the governing mantra, a class that visibly includes ministers, their friends, and their families.

Without more, the repeal would also remove the obligation on taxpayers to itemise and declare their assets, leaving mandatory disclosure confined to income alone. And to make a bad situation worse, the country will bear those consequences through taxation, borrowings and drawdowns from the Natural Resource Fund.

I will be personal and direct. This repeal will save me millions of dollars annually. I do not need it. I did not ask for it, and it will make no difference to how I live. In none of the Budget submissions to which I have contributed over decades did I ever advocate for, or recommend, the removal of property tax. I hope the decision will be revisited. 

The Property Tax was one of the 1962 measures advocated by world famous welfare economist Dr. Nicholas Kaldor and warmly embraced by the late President Dr. Cheddi Jagan in the 1962 Budget. When the last remaining tax on accumulated wealth is removed, the signal is unmistakable. The burden shifts downward. To present this as “relief for all” is shallow and dishonest.

Sincerely,

Christopher Ram

Posted on

The $10 Billion NIS Grant: Compassion or Deception?

Business & Economic Commentary by Christopher Ram

Introduction

This column took issue with the announcement of a $10 billion allocation to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS), the Government’s quick fix to decades of weak supervision and administrative failure dating back almost to the Scheme’s inception in 1969. Now, even the accuracy of the sum is in doubt. In the 2025 Budget Speech, the Government stated that it would be “injecting $10 billion into the Scheme” to provide a one-off grant to persons aged 60 and over with between 500 and 749 contributions.

To the ordinary citizen, that language conveyed that a long-standing injustice had finally been addressed and that the NIS itself was being strengthened after years of failure. The ordinary citizen must be forgiven for believing the country’s First Citizen and accepting his announcement.

But viewed alongside a series of prior assurances – the promise to review and renegotiate the 2016 Petroleum Agreement, the promised cash grant before Christmas, the commitment to establish an Anti-Corruption Unit, and the President’s undertaking to ensure the proper administration of the Access to Information regime – a clear pattern emerges. Language is repeatedly expressed in terms of certainty and resolution, only to be later reinterpreted, repurposed, delayed, or quietly abandoned once its immediate political purpose has been served.

After enough such episodes, these assurances cannot be treated as genuine commitments,  or even as reliable statements of intention. Delivered at moments of pressure and framed to sound decisive, they have repeatedly had the effect of deceiving the public into believing that action would follow, when experience suggests otherwise.

The $10 Billion question 

What, then, does this have to do with the $10 billion “injection” into the NIS?

Appendix C of Volume I of the 2025 Estimates discloses an outward cash flow within the Public Enterprise accounts of the NIS. That Parliament authorised the spending of real money is not in dispute. What is not clear is whether there was any upfront injection at all, or merely authority for payments to be made over time as claims are processed. The Estimates, it seems, describe a payment programme rather than a strengthening of the Scheme.

Given the significance of this much-touted initiative, I sought clarification from the 2025 Mid-Year Report published on November 3, 2025 by the Ministry of Finance, which exercises portfolio responsibility for the NIS. Regrettably, the report was most unhelpful. Making no reference to the $10 billion allocation, paragraph 3.54 stated: “During the first half of 2025, the National Insurance Scheme reported higher collections from contributions of $2.3 billion.” There was no disclosure of how much of the $10 billion had been disbursed, to whom, or by bands.

This omission raises obvious questions about how much of the $10 billion has been paid, how many beneficiaries have received payments, how those payments are distributed across contribution bands, and how the funds are being accounted for. Because the NIS is perennially late in publishing its annual reports –  the most recent available being for 2022 –  the public is left to speculate about matters that ought to be transparently reported.

Pattern of non-disclosure

That distinction matters because the NIS is a statutory social-insurance scheme, funded by compulsory contributions from workers and employers, and governed by legal duties of transparency, reporting, and actuarial oversight. Those duties have been honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Statutory reports have frequently been tabled several years late, depriving the public of timely information on performance, investments, and sustainability.

The consequences are not abstract. In one case, an elderly contributor waited nearly two decades for an appeal to be heard, only for management to challenge the decision again, despite the long-vacant post of National Insurance Commissioner. Such experiences are not aberrations; they are the predictable consequences of systemic dysfunction.

There is a deeper, structural failure. Although the law requires a five-yearly actuarial review, successive governments have failed to address the 2016 actuarial review warning about contribution adequacy, benefit structures, demographic pressures, and long-term viability. 

Systemic and institutional challenges

These failures are rooted in systemic and design weaknesses. The NIS remains effectively controlled by the Government of the day, with ministerial appointment of the Board too often favouring political compatibility over independence or expertise. Without an independent Board, meaningful oversight is weakened and holding management responsible for entrenched inefficiencies becomes almost impossible. 

Equally troubling is the legislative stagnation surrounding the Scheme. The National Insurance Act has remained structurally unchanged for more than half a century, despite profound changes in Guyana’s economy, labour market, and demographics. A social-insurance system frozen in legislative time cannot be expected to function effectively in a vastly changed society.

Management also operates under chronic resource constraints that no serious reform effort should ignore. The NIS today serves a contributor and beneficiary base many times larger than when its staffing levels, systems, and physical infrastructure were designed. Without sustained investment in modern systems and adequate personnel, delays, errors, and backlogs become inevitable rather than exceptional.

Conclusion

Seen against this record of weak governance, legislative stagnation, and administrative incapacity, the significance of the $10 billion grant lies not in its size, but in what it leaves untouched. Effective social security is not measured by the size of a headline figure but by its predictability, fairness, transparency, social awareness, respect for contributors’ rights, and, not least, efficiency. Until the NIS is freed from excessive political control, its legislative and governance framework modernised, is properly resourced both physically and technologically, professionally managed, and subjected to genuine actuarial discipline, these problems will remain and become worse. 

And the question posed by this column remains unavoidable: is the $10 billion grant an act of compassion – or another opportunistic attempt to gloss over the result of a system that those in authority have long neglected?