From 12.5% to Nearly 40% – How Long Can the Good Times Last? – Part 4: Conclusion
Introduction
Last week’s column ended with Professor Clive Thomas’s estimate that wastage, incompetence, mismanagement and corruption consume 20% of public expenditure. Applied to 2021–2025, that is G$838 billion, or about US$4 billion. My fear is that the true figure is higher.
We cannot know. Too many institutions created to prevent, detect and expose such losses are compromised, years behind, or simply not functioning. At a time of unprecedented revenue, borrowing and expenditure, Guyana is not being asked to invent accountability. The Constitution and laws already provide much of the machinery. The failure is to make it work.
Audit Office
Article 223(7) of the Constitution requires an annual systems and financial audit report on the Office of the Auditor General itself, while sections 43 and 44 of the Audit Act require annual performance and financial reporting and an independent audit. Yet the latest independently audited financial statements on the Audit Office’s own website are for 2022.
Its capacity has also failed to keep pace with public spending. The Budget has risen from G$329.5 billion in 2020 to G$1.558 trillion in 2026, with the Public Sector Investment Programme alone at G$779.6 billion. Auditing major infrastructure requires engineers, quantity surveyors, IT auditors and other specialists. The Audit Act permits technical experts; that power should be used accordingly.
The Office also raises serious questions of independence. On the improperly exercised goodwill of President Ali, Auditor General Deodat Sharma remains in office after attaining the prescribed retirement age. Immediately beneath him is the more qualified and effective Ms. Geetanjali Singh, wife of Senior Minister responsible for Finance Dr Ashni Singh. A Government-commissioned forensic audit concluded years ago that the relationship compromised the independence of the Audit Office. By accident or design, keeping Sharma masks the conflict.
Financial indiscipline runs through successive Auditor General’s reports, but sadly ending there. CH&PA has effectively abandoned annual reports while billions are spent on Silica City without proper public accounting. NDIA spent almost G$13 billion in 2024 although its last audited financial statements were for 2016. Yet, the money keeps flowing. Both entities are audited by the Auditor General.
There are also duties the Office does not appear to discharge. The Investment Act requires an annual audit and report on tax holidays and fiscal incentives. Over the decades of this Act, none has been done. And despite being put on notice of the treatment of the oil companies’ taxes under Article 15.4 of the Petroleum Agreement, the NRF is audited and opinion issued, without compliance or audit qualification. On both matters, silence is dereliction.
The Public Accounts Committee
The PAC, the next link after the Auditor General, operates years behind and has repeatedly been frustrated by Government members. No Minister should sit on the PAC. Members of the Executive responsible for spending public money should not also sit on Parliament’s principal committee scrutinising that expenditure. If ministerial duties interfere with attendance, appoint Government MPs who are not Ministers.
Central government current and capital expenditure between 2021 and 2025 amounted to about G$4.19 trillion. Yet the PAC remains years behind. The latest Treasury Memorandum I can identify concerns the 2016 Public Accounts and was tabled in 2023! This is totally unprofessional and irresponsible.
The Public Procurement Commission is worse. There is presently no constituted Commission. The last commissioners’ terms expired in July 2025, and their successors have not been appointed. Meanwhile hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts continue to be awarded. Ministries procure, NPTAB operates and Cabinet retains its statutory no-objection role in major procurements, while the independent constitutional body created to monitor the system has no commissioners. July 2025 did not arrive unexpectedly; the expiry date was known three years beforehand. This pattern defines the post-2020 era.
Then there is the Integrity Commission. Four members appointed in 2022 were reappointed in 2025. Yet its public reporting tells us little about declarations examined, complaints investigated, breaches established, prosecutions or sanctions. We see defaulters and warnings, but rarely outcomes. Its composition is itself a classic case of loyalty over competence, further weakening confidence as allegations of corruption involving Ministers, parliamentarians, contractors and Government associates arise almost weekly.
The real corruption crisis, therefore, is not merely the number or seriousness of the allegations. It is the absence, weakness or deliberate dismantling of institutions in which the country can have confidence to determine which allegations are true and which are false.
President Ali’s record hardly inspires confidence on that score: repeal of the State Assets Recovery Act, removing a specialised mechanism for tracing, restraining and recovering State assets believed unlawfully acquired; abolition of the Personal Property Tax, avoiding disclosure; continued support for a Commissioner of Information whose performance has repeatedly attracted serious criticism, while the responsible Minister has failed to ensure that the Commissioner’s reports are laid before the National Assembly as required by law; failure to modernise the Integrity Commission Act and strengthen the asset-declaration regime; and an apparent unwillingness to insist on credible explanations and consequences when ministers are associated with egregious conduct.
The difficulty is compounded because serious questions and allegations have also concerned the President himself over the years: aspects of his earlier academic history, the Pradoville 2 charges arising from his tenure as Housing Minister which were withdrawn without trial, and more recent allegations concerning his farm. Allegations have also involved persons close to him and members of his family, including his non-resident brother. And yes, an allegation is not proof. Nor is family relationship or sudden display of wealth necessarily evidence of wrongdoing. But presidential denial is not independent investigation either.
Conclusion
These are warning signs of the Resource Curse: unprecedented revenues and borrowing; unprecedented spending; weakened scrutiny; discretionary power; institutions unable or unwilling to keep pace; accountability systematically reduced to form rather than substance; institutional weaknesses exploited for corrupt purposes.
The near-40% share announced by the Exxon President and repeated – ineptly – by the Guyana President is not guaranteed. Oil prices can fall, recoverable costs can rise and production will eventually decline. More fundamentally, Guyana has the petroleum but not the institutions to match it. Nearly a decade after a Petroleum Commission was proposed, the country still depends heavily on the oil companies for technical direction, project execution and even basic information about a sector the State is supposed to regulate. Critical responsibilities remain concentrated in a Ministry of Natural Resources operating with a team unequal to the technical, commercial and regulatory demands of a world-class petroleum province.
Suriname is embarrassing us. Despite Guyana’s enormous petroleum advantage and earlier start in large-scale production, we would do well to learn from a neighbour that has spent decades building the institutional capacity to manage its petroleum industry.
Guyana therefore risks emerging from the boom with lower revenues but the same debt, spending habits and expectations – and with a State still dependent on the very companies it should be independently regulating, a danger the President and Vice President refuse to confront. That is why the question posed by this series – how long can the good times last? – is not really about oil prices or percentages. It is about whether Guyana can convert temporary petroleum wealth into durable national capacity before the opportunity passes.
Ali’s failure to build the institutions capable of managing, regulating and accounting for this wealth while revenues are abundant risks squandering a unique opportunity. That would be a tragedy of historical and generational proportions – one that will define his presidency more enduringly than all his other shortcomings.
Acknowledgment: My appreciation to readers who commented – both orally and in print – to this extended mini-series