Category: Uncategorized

Dear Ministers,
I returned to Guyana yesterday evening after a journey involving nearly twenty hours. Immigration and Customs were a breeze. Everything went well until we reached Friendship on the East Bank. What followed was among the most chaotic and mismanaged public sector activities imaginable. For the better part of an hour there was little movement of traffic in either direction. Heavy and construction vehicles competed for road space, government vehicles with sirens forced their way through, and there appeared to be no system for keeping traffic moving.

Minister Edghill, you are responsible for road construction and, surely, for managing its consequences. Where are the signs, controlled diversions and arrangements for construction vehicles entering and leaving the roadway? Where are the personnel to ensure that road works do not themselves bring traffic to a standstill? Have these responsibilities been farmed out along with the construction contracts?The Roads Act, Cap. 51 is not concerned merely with constructing roads. It contemplates their supervision and management. Contractors cannot simply be permitted to occupy and interfere with public roads white motorists and the public are left to fend for themselves.

Minister Walrond, the Police cannot be spectators. The road traffic legislation expressly empowers the Police to intervene where abnormal traffic requires directions to relieve congestion and prevent obstruction. Traffic management and enforcement are plainly police responsibilities.

The two Ministries cannot pass responsibility between themselves. Public Works must manage the consequences ot construction; the Police must manage and enforce the movement of traffic. What we see instead is an extraordinary failure of coordination between two arms of the same Government.

Even if you are insensitive to the hardship and frustration inflicted on the public, you cannot be unaware of the serious economic cost and reputational damage. Thousands of persons losing thirty minutes or an hour each day means thousands of productive hours lost. Fuel is wasted, employees arrive late, deliveries are delayed and costs ripple through the economy. And consider the message to visitors. They arrive in a country celebrated for extraordinary economic growth and massive infrastructure spending, only to leave the airport and encounter stationary traffic, construction vehicles, inadequate signage and unmitigated disorder.

What makes the situation particularly unacceptable is that it is neither new nor temporary. It has persisted for years. After all that time, the continuing chaos can no longer be explained away as inconvenience caused by development. It represents a sustained failure of planning, coordination and ministerial oversight. Ministers, on traffic management your performance has moved beyond poor administration to something approaching dereliction of responsibility.

Minister Walrond, you were recently moved from Tourism to Home Affairs. What would the Minister of Tourism have said about the impression being created by the traffic management for which the Minister of Home Affairs now shares responsibility? Guyana boasts one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Yet on one of the country’s principal arteries, between its international airport and its capital, traffic management can be among the slowest and worst imaginable. That contradiction should embarrass a government spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure.

Ministers, this is not an occasional inconvenience. It is a prolonged and serious management failure. Please tell the public who is responsible, what arrangements exist between Public Works, its contractors and the Police and, more importantly, what you individually and together – are going to do about it.

Christopher Ram

24- Sep-26

Yesterday’s commentary on the 2026 Mid-Year Report dealt with how housing was reported. Today’s concerns something potentially more serious involving the Berbice Bridge – a project dogged by controversy from its conception more than two decades ago. The omission is inexplicable and far too consequential to dismiss as an oversight by a Senior Minister.

This current round did not mysteriously emerge in September 2026. In August 2025, President Irfaan Ali said publicly that Government was already in the final stages of negotiations to acquire the Bridge and, significantly, that “the Minister of Finance is leading that.” By August 21, 2026, Singh had therefore been leading the negotiations for a full year. On that date, the members of Berbice Bridge Company Inc. (BBCI) resolved that the company be wound up voluntarily and appointed chartered accountant Raan Motilall as liquidator.

The Mid-Year Report is dated August 28, a week after that event, although it was not released until September 14. Yet the 119-page Report contains not a word about the proposed “acquisition” of BBCI by an over-accommodating Government, following negotiations which President Ali had said Singh was leading, or about the company’s August 21 decision to enter voluntary liquidation.

Yet within days of its release, the public learnt that Government had paid out $400 million in the very transaction the Report had ignored. This was no peripheral matter carelessly omitted from a long report.

A so-called explanation subsequently given by former BBCI Chairman Paul Cheong makes the transaction even more difficult to understand. Government did not, strictly speaking, pay $400 million to BBCI for the Bridge. Cheong says it bought all 400 million issued ordinary shares at $1 each, with the money paid to the existing shareholders.

That distinction is fundamental. A sale of existing shares is a transaction between seller and purchaser. The company does not receive the purchase price; its role is principally to recognise and register the transfer. If Government bought all the ordinary shares, it acquired ownership of those shares and the rights attaching to them; that did not, by itself, terminate or reverse the liquidation.

Once the shareholders resolved to wind up BBCI, the position changed completely. The winding-up took effect from the date of the resolution and any subsequent transfer of shares was void unless made to or with the sanction of the liquidator. If the $400 million transaction occurred after August 21, did Motilall sanction it? If before, why did Government buy the shares of a company whose members were about to put it into liquidation?

Significantly, the Government is no innocent outsider. Through NICIL, its investment arm, it was already part of BBCI’s corporate structure and held the special or “golden” share with substantial veto rights.

A share sale does not dispose of the company’s assets or liabilities. Liquidation does. What, then, was left for Motilall to liquidate? What assets and liabilities remained? What became of the preference shares, bonds and other financial instruments? And how did the winding-up fit into Government’s purchase of the ordinary shares?

As a measure of value, the claim that Government acquired an $8 billion Bridge for only $400 million is wrong, mischievous and misleading. The number of shares in issue tells us nothing about the value of the company. BBCI could have had four million shares instead of 400 million and Government could still have agreed to pay $400 million, or whatever sum. Multiplying 400 million shares by $1 is an arithmetic exercise, not a valuation.

Nor does Cheong’s reference to a $1 “nominal value” help. Guyana abolished par or nominal value for shares when the Companies Act 1991 came into force in 1995. If Government agreed to pay $1 per share, that was the purchase price, not some legally prescribed value.

The real valuation issue lies in the Concession Agreement. BBCI never owned the Bridge in perpetuity. It operated under a fixed-term concession due to expire in 2027. Under the Berbice River Bridge Act and the Concession Agreement, the Bridge and related rights and assets were to pass to Government at the end of the concession period, free of the relevant liens and encumbrances and in the condition required by the concession.

And what became of the Government’s much-vaunted principle of the “sanctity of contract”? President Ali and Vice President Jagdeo have repeatedly invoked that principle in relation to Exxon and the 2016 Petroleum Agreement. Yet here was another contract involving the State, with a clear end date and a clear obligation to transfer the Bridge to Government. If sanctity of contract is the inviolable principle Government says it is, why was the State paying $400 million for shares in the concessionaire only months before the contractual handover?

Sanctity cannot be an immutable principle when dealing with ExxonMobil and an inconvenience when dealing with the Berbice Bridge.

By September 2026, only months remained before the contractual handover. The relevant question is therefore not what the Bridge cost to build nearly twenty years earlier, nor the historical value of BBCI. Under the Concession Agreement, Government was shortly to receive the Bridge and the rights and assets required to be transferred with it. BBCI would remain responsible for its other assets, liabilities and obligations. Why, then, did Government need to buy BBCI’s ordinary shares at all – and what did the $400 million purchase give the State beyond what it was entitled to under the Concession Agreement?

Nor is there any basis yet for assuming that $400 million was the entire cost and obligation to the State. BBCI had obligations and securities beyond its ordinary shares. Its audited financial statements disclosed hundreds of millions of dollars in other obligations. Until there is a complete accounting of the liabilities, preference shares, debt instruments and any obligations assumed or discharged directly or indirectly by Government, the transaction should properly be described as involving at least $400 million, and potentially more.

Liquidation is a process that includes the statutory order of payment to all stakeholders. It is unfair to expect Ashni Singh and Paul Cheong to understand all its legal implications. And so I have to ask: where was the Attorney General, the principal legal adviser to the Government? A transaction of this nature surely demanded competent and independent legal advice. The failure to obtain or heed such advice may bring into play an even more critical piece of legislation – the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act (FMAA).

This is no longer simply about whether Government negotiated a good or bad bargain. Section 31 of the FMAA regulates the requisition and payment of public money and requires the necessary certification before payment. Section 48 goes further: a Minister or official shall not “misuse, misapply, or improperly dispose of public moneys.” Section 49 provides for personal liability where a loss of public money is caused or contributed to through misconduct or deliberate or serious disregard of reasonable standards of care.

On the basis of publicly available information, there is no finding of statutory breaches. But their existence can change the character of the questions Government must answer. Who gave the legal advice? Who authorised and certified the payment? What valuation supported it? And what precisely did the State acquire for its money?

On housing, the problem was the disjointed inclusion of information in the Mid-Year Report. On the Berbice Bridge, it was the opposite – the exclusion of critical information within the knowledge of Dr. Singh. If $400 million – and potentially much more – of public money was paid out when it ought not to have been paid, the issue goes far beyond an omission from an accountability report. It raises questions of misuse or misapplication of public money and personal liability for loss of public funds, matters for which sections 48 and 49 of the FMAA expressly provide.

Christopher Ram                                                                     

September 22, 2026

On September 17, 2026, on chrisram.net, I published a letter entitled “CHPA and its Performance,” raising questions about the quality of financial and performance reporting by the Central Housing and Planning Authority. I indicated then that I would examine the Government’s 2026 Mid-Year Report more fully. Having now done so, the housing section – and the role of Dr. Ashni Singh, the Minister Responsible for Finance – reinforce those concerns.

The Report states that $89.9 billion of the $159.1 billion housing-sector allocation was spent in the first half of 2026, describing the expenditure as being “to expand affordable housing for citizens.” That description is misleadingly broad, since the housing programme also encompasses major infrastructure, community facilities, Silica City and other expenditure which cannot simply be equated with affordable housing. If the $89.9 billion includes expenditure on roads, drains, street lighting, industrial areas, recreational facilities and major developments still in progress, then the Report should say so and identify how much was spent on each major component. Without that breakdown, the reader cannot tell what proportion of the $89.9 billion actually went to houses or house lots, what went to infrastructure and community works, and what went to longer-term projects such as Silica City.

Clearly, the problem is not a shortage of numbers. It is that, presented as they are by Singh, they make very little sense as an account of expenditure. They are neither reconciled nor adequately explained and, for purposes of determining what the $89.9 billion actually purchased, are largely meaningless. Instead of a coherent account showing where the money went, the reader is given a succession of disparate statistics: lots allocated, titles distributed, houses constructed, developments completed or in progress, street lamps installed, subsidies provided, applications processed, and recreational spaces and industrial areas under development.

The sheer quantity of numbers should not be mistaken for accountability. What Dr. Singh fails to provide is the information that matters: expenditure by programme and project; the cost of completed works; expenditure to date on unfinished works; the relationship between money spent and physical progress; material variations from budget; and some basis upon which the National Assembly and the public can judge the use made of nearly $90 billion.

The deficiencies are therefore not merely matters of presentation or drafting. When expenditure of this magnitude is reported without the information necessary to assess it, public scrutiny is weakened and financial accountability is reduced to a cash spent statement. A country dealing with public expenditure on this scale is entitled to considerably better reporting.

That responsibility cannot simply be laid at the door of CHPA. Dr. Singh presents both the annual Budget and the Mid-Year Report. The Budget sets out the Government’s account of past performance and its policies, allocations and targets for the current year; the Mid-Year Report is intended to report on their implementation. The defective quality of that financial reporting therefore falls squarely within the portfolio for which Dr. Singh is responsible.

On top of this, there is a curious institutional confusion surrounding the finance portfolio. Dr. Singh’s formal – and cumbersome – title is Senior Minister in the Office of the President with Responsibility for Finance. The Office of the President stated on his appointment that responsibility for finance was placed within the Office of the President, which would retain its oversight role. Yet the 2026 National Estimates contain “Agency 03 – Ministry of Finance”, identify Dr. Singh as the Minister responsible for that agency, and describe its functions as those of “the Ministry”.

The Government also operates a Ministry of Finance website and issues its Budget documents under that name. The Gazette arrangements recognise a Ministry of Finance, but there is no separately styled Minister of Finance: the political responsibility remains with Dr. Singh in his capacity as Senior Minister in the Office of the President with Responsibility for Finance. The problem may therefore be wider than the housing numbers. The Government’s own documents do not present a wholly coherent institutional picture: finance is retained within the Office of the President, while for budgeting and administration a Ministry of Finance continues to exist and operate under Singh’s responsibility.

Whatever explains that strange arrangement, accountability cannot be allowed to become equally confused. Dr. Singh presents the Budget and the Mid-Year Report, while President Ali retained oversight of finance within the Office of the President. Between them, there should be no uncertainty about who bears responsibility for ensuring that the country receives a clear, coherent and intelligible account of how its money is being spent.

The CCJ Crisis: Its President Has Responded. Questions Remain.

The lengthy statement by CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson is an important development in a crisis which has damaged the integrity and perceived impartiality of the Court – hopefully not irreparably, but certainly for years to come, particularly if the existing leadership remains in place.

Justice Anderson deserves credit for responding publicly. He rejects allegations of panel fixing and improper attempts to influence judicial outcomes. His explanations deserve fair consideration, but cannot substitute for an independent examination of allegations made by five of the Court’s six other sitting judges.

Two of the controversies are of particular importance to Guyana. On the Mohamed extradition case, Justice Anderson does not directly answer Justice Jamadar’s specific allegation that he attempted to influence colleagues whose views differed from his. Unanimity in the eventual result does not answer an allegation about the integrity of the process by which that result was reached.

The other concerns Guyana’s Judiciary, for which the Constitution makes specific provision. Anderson now acknowledges that in October 2025 he privately sought to encourage agreement on the substantive appointments of Chancellor and Chief Justice, speaking separately with President Irfaan Ali and then Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton. He concedes that another course would have been better and that he might have confined himself to public commentary, as his predecessors had done.

This not only reflects poor judgment unbecoming of the holder of such an exalted judicial office, but raises the more important question whether the President of Guyana’s final appellate court should intervene in a constitutional process entrusted to the President and Leader of the Opposition of a Member State.

Significantly, Anderson sidesteps Norton’s more specific allegations: that he sought Norton’s agreement to particular appointments; said that he had participated in negotiations concerning then acting Chancellor Yonette Cummings-Edwards and sought to facilitate them; and told Norton that the President and others were waiting to swear in the proposed appointees, indicating when questioned that he had been with President Ali.

In a lengthy statement intended to answer the controversies surrounding him, omissions of that significance cannot simply be dismissed as oversight.

Nor can responsibility rest with Justice Anderson alone. At the political level, the circumstances demanded strict observance of the separation between Executive and Judiciary. Instead, President Ali appears to have lent support to an intervention by the President of the CCJ in a process which, according to Norton, encompassed the departure of the then acting Chancellor and the proposed appointment of Guyana’s two highest judicial officers.

Ali must – but won’t – explain his role in these serious matters. Who initiated the discussions? What was discussed? What did he understand Anderson’s role to be? Was the Attorney General consulted?

More fundamentally, if the President was prepared to engage the head of Guyana’s final appellate court in such an intervention at the apex of the judicial system, Guyanese are entitled to ask where he believes the boundary lies between legitimate executive action and interference with the Judiciary. If Ali is prepared to cross that boundary with the apex court, what assurance is there that it will be respected in the domestic courts?

Against this background, Guyana’s institutional responses are disappointing. The Bar Association concentrated on confidentiality and expressly declined to address the substance. That position will inevitably reinforce existing suspicions about its political independence.

For its part, Guyana’s judicial leadership associated itself with a regional statement which declined to address the merits while expressing grave concern about the breach of confidentiality. Given Guyana’s exceptional involvement, was there consultation within our Judiciary before its leadership joined that statement?

There is also an unavoidable issue of perception. In the 2018 presidential term-limits case, Justice Anderson was the lone dissenting judge in the CCJ’s six-to-one decision upholding Guyana’s constitutional term limits. His dissent was entirely within his judicial right and is not evidence of political bias. But his subsequent acknowledged intervention with Guyana’s political Executive inevitably causes that history to be viewed in a new and uncomfortable context.

The controversy also unfairly casts a shadow over the acting Chancellor and acting Chief Justice and their prospects for confirmation. Nothing disclosed establishes wrongdoing by either. That unfair consequence itself demonstrates why the appointment process should have been insulated from outside intervention.

Finally, the Guyana Bar Association and the regional judicial leadership elevated the leaking of confidential correspondence above grave allegations which the CCJ President’s lengthy statement has only partially addressed. There is no evidence that any of the five judges leaked the emails. The disclosure could have come from anyone with access. What matters is that the correspondence exposed an atmosphere harmful to the Court and the Region. The five judges did not create this crisis by raising these concerns. The crisis lay in the conditions that caused them to do so.

Justice Anderson’s statement is welcome but incomplete. It cannot be the final word.

Saturday, August 15, 2026

Mr. President,

The sinking of the MV Barima is, I believe, the worst maritime tragedy in our country’s history. Families have been devastated. Parents have lost children. Children have lost parents. Scores of ordinary Guyanese have perished. Survivors have endured unimaginable trauma. Every Guyanese shares their grief and extends heartfelt sympathy to all whose lives have been changed forever.

In times of grief, the nation expects leadership. In the hours immediately following the tragedy, Guyanese looked to the Government for clear information, decisive action and reassurance that every available resource had been mobilised. Instead, there was uncertainty, confusion, conflicting reports and official statements that raised as many questions as they answered. Attention appeared to shift too quickly from discovering what had happened to defending official action. That only added to the tragedy.

In any national disaster, Government’s first obligation is to activate a machinery capable of minimising further loss of life and damage to property, coordinating rescue efforts, providing timely and accurate information to anxious relatives – including through a dedicated hotline and ensuring that the public receives information that is accurate, consistent and credible. Only then can Government turn to the equally important task of establishing the truth.

That is precisely why Parliament enacted the Guyana Shipping Act, 1998. It recognised that when lives are lost in rivers or at sea, the search for truth cannot be left to official assurances or political debate. The Act itself is an elaborate piece of legislation establishing a statutory framework governing maritime safety, regulation and the independent investigation of marine casualties. It also separated the operation of vessels from their regulation by establishing the Maritime Administration as the country’s maritime regulator. My cursory reading of the Act is that it has been systematically ignored in practice. But that is a matter for another forum.

As the nation comes to terms with the scale of this tragedy, disturbing questions arise.

* Was the Barima properly maintained and operated by the Transport and Harbours Department?

* Had the Maritime Administration discharged its statutory responsibility to regulate and oversee the vessel’s safety to protect lives and limbs of passengers and crew?

* Were the vessel’s inspections, surveys and certificates current and fully compliant with the law?

* Had the Maritime Administration identified any deficiencies and, if so, what corrective action was required and taken?

* Did the Transport and Harbours Department comply with every statutory requirement governing passenger safety?

* How did the Minister, who bears responsibility for both the operator and the regulator, satisfy himself that each had properly discharged its separate statutory responsibilities?

* Did failures of operation, regulation, supervision or enforcement contribute to this disaster?

• Does this concentration of responsibility within a single ministry compromise the independence of the regulatory process?

I ask you not to regard these as political questions. They are legal and factual questions, and we deserve and expect honest and factual answers.

The purpose of an independent investigation is not to assign blame before the evidence is heard. It is to ensure that the evidence is gathered independently, examined objectively and reported publicly. That is how confidence is built. It is also how future tragedies are prevented.

Mr. President, public confidence does not exist in a vacuum. Many Guyanese still carry unanswered questions from previous national tragedies, including the Mahdia Dormitory Fire which cost the lives of twenty of our children. There is a widespread perception that official investigations too often fail to satisfy the reasonable expectation that every relevant fact will be exposed and every lesson learnt. Against that background, the handling of the Barima tragedy assumes even greater significance.

There is another matter that deserves urgent attention.

Our maritime legislation still contains penalties that belong to another era. Conduct capable of exposing passengers to grave danger attracts fines that are derisory by modern standards. In an era when Guyana has become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, such penalties neither deter misconduct nor reflect the value that our society places upon human life.  That is a matter for Parliament to correct.

But where statutory penalties are inadequate, the responsibility of the State becomes correspondingly greater. The families of those who perished are entitled not merely to sympathy but to justice. If regulatory failures contributed to this tragedy, legal accountability cannot end with outdated fines imposed upon individuals. It must extend, where the law and the evidence justify it, to the public authorities charged with protecting those who entrusted their lives to the nation’s transport system.

Mr. President, the Barima must not be allowed to become another national tragedy remembered only for grief and unanswered questions. It should be remembered as the moment when your Administration demonstrated, by action rather than words, that in Guyana the rule of law is stronger than official convenience, party interest and the protection of personalities. The families of the victims deserve the truth. The people of Guyana deserve accountability. History will remember whether your Administration chose official reassurance or independent scrutiny.

I therefore respectfully urge you to declare an appropriate period of national mourning in honour of those who lost their lives. Thereafter, and without delay, to establish an independent Commission of Inquiry under the Guyana Shipping Act, 1998, and to allow it to discharge its mandate completely independently, free from interference or influence of any kind.

That, I believe, is the surest way to honour the dead, comfort the bereaved and restore public confidence in the administration of justice.

Respectfully,

Christopher Ram