By now, most Guyanese have seen the images. Sections of the $13.3 billion Heroes Highway, commissioned with great ceremony by President Irfaan Ali in December 2023, cordoned off for repairs less than two years later. Workers picking apart a road that was supposed to last generations. Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed holding up a strip of BRC mesh barely wider than his fingernail, the very reinforcement used to build a national highway.

It is scandalous. It is infuriating. And it is, by now, almost familiar.

But in the flood of daily revelations about crumbling infrastructure, substandard materials and wasted billions, one conversation is conspicuously absent. Nobody is asking about the project managers.

Major infrastructure projects of this scale are not simply handed to contractors and left unsupervised. They come with layers of oversight. Engineers of record. Resident supervisors. Quality assurance consultants. Project management firms, often paid handsomely from the same public purse, whose entire function is to ensure that what is being built meets specification, that materials are tested and approved before they go into the ground, and that no contractor cuts corners without consequence.

So where are they?

Twelve contractors were awarded sections of the Heroes Highway in 2021. Twelve. Each with deadlines, specifications and contractual obligations. An independent engineer with whom Kaieteur News spoke confirmed that no geotechnical studies appear to have been conducted beforehand, that subsurface preparation was inadequate, and that resurfacing the road will be a waste of money unless crews dig down and start again. That is not a contractor quietly misbehaving. That is a systemic failure of oversight. Someone approved those materials. Someone signed off on those foundations. Someone certified that the work met standard before billions more were paid out.

Those someone’s have names. They have contracts. They received fees from the Guyanese treasury. And yet their names do not appear in any statement, any investigation or any public accounting of what went wrong.

This is the pattern that should alarm every taxpayer. In Guyana, when infrastructure fails, the conversation begins and ends with the contractor. The political opposition points fingers. The government stays silent. Engineers offer anonymous commentary. And the management firms, the consultants, the supervisory bodies collect their fees and disappear from the narrative entirely.

It is not enough to expose the crumbling road. The public deserves to know who was paid to prevent it, what they did with that money, and why not a single one of them has been called to account. Until those questions are answered, no amount of resurfacing, politically or literally, will fix what is broken.

SOURCE: Kaieteur News, “Multi-billion Heroes Highway crumbling two years after commissioning,” February 23, 2026