There is a word that has been banned in Guyana’s National Assembly. Not a slur. Not an obscenity. Not a threat. The word is corruption. Speaker Manzoor Nadir confirmed the prohibition some time ago, ruling the term unparliamentary. During the 2025 budget debate, Opposition Chief Whip Christopher Jones experienced the absurdity in real time, pivoting from corruption to dishonest dealings to loot, each word silenced in turn until a colleague suggested runnings, a piece of street slang, as the only permissible substitute for what every Guyanese already knows is happening with public money.

The government hosted an anti-corruption expo. Its own Minister of Governance, Gail Teixeira, acknowledged the awkwardness of a parliament that cannot say the word printed in the title of a government-sponsored event. Opposition MP Amanza Walton-Desir put it plainly in an open letter to the Speaker: banning the word does not make the problem go away. It creates the illusion that we are more concerned with appearances than action.

She was right. And the appearances in Guyana right now should concern every citizen deeply.

Guyana scored 40 out of 100 on Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking 84th among 184 countries and territories assessed. That score places the country at the bottom of the English-speaking Caribbean, a position it has held for most of the past two decades. Canada scores 75. Barbados 68. Trinidad and Tobago 41. Guyana 40. These are not partisan numbers. They are the international community’s measured assessment of how well public institutions in this country resist abuse.

And yet the country’s oil revenues have grown from roughly US$1 billion annually in 2020 to a position where Guyana has earned more than US$7.5 billion in oil revenue since production began. The 2026 national budget stands at $1.558 trillion. Every ministry, every region, every state agency is now flush with money on a scale that Guyana has never seen. History and evidence are unambiguous on what large, rapid influxes of public money do in environments with weak oversight institutions: they accelerate corruption. This is not a Guyanese opinion. It is an international pattern documented from Norway’s early oil decades to Nigeria’s resource curse to the procurement scandals that followed post-war reconstruction spending in Iraq.

The areas of highest risk in Guyana are not difficult to identify. Public procurement is the most obvious and most documented. The 2024 Auditor General’s Report, laid before Parliament in September 2025, exposed overpayments of G$95 million in the Ministry of Housing alone, duplicate land allocations, multiple instances of contractors being paid for work not completed or equipment never delivered, and a Central Housing and Planning Authority whose internal audit unit was described as weak. The Ministry of Home Affairs saw four police station contracts worth G$1.4 billion suffer delays and defects, while the Guyana Fire Service paid G$88 million in advance for equipment it never received.

Perhaps most revealing was the finding that the Guyana Police Force itself violated the Procurement Act of 2003 by splitting 62 contracts totalling $15 million to avoid the oversight thresholds that require formal competitive bidding. Contract splitting is not a technicality. It is a deliberate mechanism for bypassing transparency, and it opens the door directly to kickbacks and bid-rigging. The force responsible for investigating procurement fraud was itself committing procurement fraud.

Beyond the Auditor General’s findings, the US Treasury Department sanctioned Guyanese businessmen and a senior government official in 2024 for public corruption, with Treasury noting explicitly that a corrupt Permanent Secretary could manipulate procurement processes to suit a preferred bidder by providing inside information at the evaluation stage. A Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Labour was named in those sanctions. The US State Department’s 2025 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report identified corruption in Guyana as a significant obstacle to combating drug trafficking. These are not opposition talking points. These are findings by foreign governments and multilateral institutions.

The sectors most vulnerable to corruption in the current environment are well known. Natural resource contracts and the oil and gas sector remain the highest-value targets, particularly given the absence of ring-fencing and the opacity surrounding cost bank calculations in the Stabroek Block. Construction and infrastructure, where Guyana is spending billions on roads, schools, hospitals, drainage, and housing, offers almost limitless opportunity for contract manipulation, inflated quantities, and substandard work. The housing sector, with hundreds of thousands of house lots and thousands of core homes being distributed, is ripe for duplicate allocations, fraudulent applications, and illegal resale schemes. Customs and immigration, where cash-based informal sector activity intersects with formal border processes, creates conditions for bribery that are almost impossible to police without dedicated anti-corruption units. The gold and mining sector, where informal miners operate largely outside formal financial systems, has been identified by the US as a corridor for money laundering.

What Guyana is doing to address this, and what it must do urgently, are very different things.

What exists on paper is reasonable. The Public Procurement Commission, the Integrity Commission, the Auditor General’s office, the Financial Intelligence Unit, and whistleblower protection legislation are all institutional frameworks with genuine mandates. The problem is capacity, independence, and follow-through. The Public Accounts Committee, which is the parliament’s primary vehicle for acting on the Auditor General’s findings, has been delayed repeatedly in examining reports, meaning that the cycle of expose and ignore continues year after year. The Integrity Commission was dormant for more than a decade before being reactivated. The oil and gas audit capacity at the Auditor General’s office, as the Auditor General himself noted in 2025, consists of approximately three to four staff members for one of the most complex and high-value sectors in the country.

What works elsewhere and must be adopted here is not mysterious. Singapore transformed from a deeply corrupt society in the 1960s to one of the least corrupt in the world through a combination of independent prosecution, civil service salary reform that reduced the financial incentive to take bribes, and a culture of zero tolerance enforced from the top of government with no exceptions for political allies. Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption, established in 1974, succeeded by giving investigators genuine independence from the police force and the government, with powers to investigate, arrest, and prosecute without ministerial permission. Rwanda, closer to home in terms of developmental context, built its post-conflict anti-corruption architecture around mandatory asset declarations with criminal penalties for false filings, a dedicated anti-corruption court, and citizen reporting mechanisms.

Applied to Guyana, several reforms are both achievable and urgent. Every ministry and state agency that spends above a defined threshold must establish a dedicated internal fraud and compliance unit staffed by trained forensic accountants, not generalist administrators. This is already standard practice in larger procurement-active countries. These units must report to a board or oversight committee independent of the minister, not to the Permanent Secretary whose procurement decisions they are reviewing. The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board must publish all contract awards, all bid scores, and all evaluation reports online within 30 days of a contract being awarded, without exception. Anything contracted above $5 million should be searchable by any citizen, journalist, or auditor with an internet connection. Asset declarations by all public officials, including members of parliament, permanent secretaries, regional chairpersons, and board members of state entities, must be filed, verified, and published annually. The Integrity Commission must be given prosecutorial referral powers and a budget commensurate with its mandate.

The Auditor General’s office must be expanded specifically for the oil, gas, and extractive sectors to a minimum of 20 dedicated staff, trained in international petroleum accounting standards, with the mandate and access to audit cost bank calculations and production sharing compliance in real time. Guyana is currently accepting ExxonMobil’s cost bank figures largely on trust. That is not acceptable for a country whose revenue entitlement is directly determined by those figures.

And the parliament must be able to say the word. Not as an accusation against an individual, which parliamentary tradition reasonably restricts, but as a description of a systemic condition that affects how public money is managed, how contracts are awarded, how state resources are distributed, and how the oil wealth of 800,000 people is ultimately governed. A legislature that cannot name the disease it is supposed to diagnose is not a legislature. It is a ceremonial chamber.

Guyana is at a crossroads that comes once in a generation, if that. The money is here. The question is whether the institutions are strong enough, independent enough, and honest enough to ensure it reaches the people it belongs to. The answer, right now, is no. But it does not have to stay that way.

SOURCE: Guyana1news