Guyana Is Building New Airports While the Transportation Most Guyanese Actually Use Is Killing Them.
This week, the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation opened bids for the construction of municipal airports at Lethem in Region Nine and Rose Hall in Region Six, along with the rehabilitation of several hinterland airstrips. Eight bids were received from Chinese and Indian contractors. The government has set aside $4.1 billion to rehabilitate and upgrade hinterland airstrips this year alone, with a further $600 million approved by the National Assembly for the maintenance of 51 government-operated airstrips. The vision, as President Ali has articulated it, is to make Guyana the most competitive destination globally for value-added agriculture and food-based industries, connected by modern aviation infrastructure.
Guyana1News has a simple question. Who is going to fly in these airports?
Not the woman selling provisions in Lethem market. Not the farmer in the Rupununi whose children need to get to school in Georgetown. Not the family in Port Kaituma whose breadwinner travels to the capital for work. Not the pensioner in Region Six who needs to reach Georgetown General Hospital. Those people travel by minibus on roads where 137 people died last year. They travel by ferry on vessels that the government rehabilitates rather than replaces. They travel by speedboat on rivers with no safety oversight and no life jackets. They do not travel by aircraft because a domestic flight in Guyana costs more than a week’s wages for most of the people the airports are supposed to serve.
Guyana is building airports for a Guyana that does not yet exist while neglecting the transportation that the Guyana that does exist depends on every single day. That is not a development strategy. That is a press release.
The Numbers That Define the Contradiction
Let us establish the facts of who travels how in Guyana.
Domestic flight Ogle to Lethem (one way): US$65 to US$420 Trans Guyana Airways, approximately one hour
Average monthly minimum wage Guyana: approx. US$333 at current exchange rates
Cost of domestic round trip as share of minimum wage: 39% to 252% of monthly income for a one-week round trip
Road deaths in 2025: 137 six percent increase from 2024, World Bank calls rate unacceptably high
Road deaths first 170 days of 2026: 62 on pace to exceed 2025 total
Age of MV Barima at capsizing: 87 years built 1939, never replaced
MV Ma Lisha commissioned to replace Barima: April 2023 US$12.7 million vessel, still never sailed Port Kaituma route as of July 2026
Airport rehabilitation budget 2026: $4.1 billion GYD for hinterland airstrips alone
Government airstrips: 51 operated across hinterland-coastal regions
For a domestic round trip to Lethem, the cheapest available fare is equivalent to 40 percent of a Guyanese minimum wage earner’s monthly income. For the most expensive fare, it is two and a half months of earnings. That is not a transportation network. That is a service for people who do not need government transportation because they can afford their own.
The Ferry That Should Have Been Retired Three Years Ago
The most damning transportation story in Guyana’s oil era is not about roads or minibuses. It is about a ship. Specifically, it is about two ships: the MV Barima, which should have been retired, and the MV Ma Lisha, which was supposed to retire it.
On April 23, 2023, President Irfaan Ali stood at Georgetown’s GuySuCo Sugar Terminal and personally commissioned the MV Ma Lisha, a new $2.5 billion Guyanese dollar vessel costing approximately US$12.7 million. He told the country it would replace the aging MV Barima on the Port Kaituma route. It could make the 24-hour Barima journey in just 15 hours, he said. It would save the Transport and Harbours Department the roughly GYD $12 million per month it was spending to keep the nearly 90-year-old pre-independence vessel running.
More than three years later, the MV Ma Lisha has still never sailed to Port Kaituma. The MV Barima was still running that exact route on July 18, 2026, when it capsized off the Essequibo coast, killing at least 73 people and leaving 30 more missing. The reason given by the Public Works Minister was that a newly built wharf at Port Kaituma developed structural problems after the surrounding soil shifted. That wharf problem has persisted for three years. The 2024 budget allocated GYD $2.9 billion for the Ma Lisha’s final loan payment and the wharf’s completion. As of July 2026, the wharf is still not complete. And in March 2026, the government issued a GYD $440 million rehabilitation tender that included a further GYD $124.5 million for more work on the MV Barima, the very vessel the Ma Lisha was meant to retire.
The government spent money rehabilitating an 87-year-old vessel rather than completing the infrastructure needed to put the new vessel into service. It allocated billions to hinterland airstrip rehabilitation in the same budget cycle. It commissioned new airports in Lethem and Rose Hall. It did not retire the Barima. And then the Barima killed 73 people.
Guyana built an airport before it built a wharf. It rehabilitated an 87-year-old ferry before it completed the dock for the new one. And the people who paid for that order of priorities were the passengers of the MV Barima.
The Roads That Kill: Guyana’s Other Transportation Crisis
While the government builds airports and the ferry fleet ages, the road network that carries the vast majority of Guyanese daily is delivering a rising body count.
In 2025, Guyana recorded 137 road traffic deaths from 124 fatal accidents, a six percent increase from the 132 deaths recorded in 2024. In the first 170 days of 2026 alone, 62 people had already died on Guyanese roads, putting the country on pace to exceed the 2025 total. The World Bank has explicitly described Guyana’s road death rate of 15 per 100,000 people as unacceptably high. Between 2020 and 2024, the country recorded 574 crashes and 642 deaths, including 24 children.
The primary cause of fatal road accidents in Guyana is speeding, which contributed to 75 percent of fatal crashes in the first half of 2026. The vehicles doing most of that speeding are minibuses. The minibus is not a transportation option in Guyana. It is the transportation option. There is no national public bus system. There is no metro or rail. In Georgetown and along the coast, the minibus is what ordinary Guyanese depend on to get to work, school, the hospital, and the market. It is unregulated, frequently overcrowded, operated by drivers who are incentivised to move fast and pack passengers tight, and it is killing people at an accelerating rate.
The government’s response to the road safety crisis has been campaigns with slogans. The ‘Do the Right Thing’ campaign. The ‘Careful Driving Saves Lives’ campaign. National Road Safety Month. These campaigns ask the individual Guyanese to behave better in a system that the government has not invested in making structurally safer. A campaign does not slow a speeding minibus. A properly funded, properly regulated, properly inspected public transportation system might. Guyana does not have one.
Between 2020 and 2024, 642 people died on Guyanese roads. In the same period, the government allocated billions to airport rehabilitation. It has not allocated a single dollar to creating a national public bus service. The transportation that kills the most Guyanese is the one that receives the least investment.
Who Actually Uses Guyana’s Airports?
This question deserves an honest answer, and the honest answer is not flattering to the government’s connectivity narrative.
Domestic air travel in Guyana primarily serves four categories of passenger. The first is foreign tourists, principally eco-tourists travelling to interior lodges in the Rupununi, Iwokrama, and surrounding areas. This is a valuable market, but it is a foreign one. The second is oil sector workers and executives, primarily foreign nationals and Guyanese professionals in the oil industry, travelling between Georgetown and interior operational sites. The third is government officials, who travel on departmental budgets that ordinary Guyanese do not have access to. The fourth is wealthy Guyanese who can afford fares that represent two to three months of earnings for the working poor.
The ordinary Guyanese resident of Lethem, Mahdia, Annai, or Port Kaituma does not travel by light aircraft as a matter of routine. They travel by the road that is barely accessible in rainy season, by the ferry that connects their community to the coast, or by speedboat on rivers where life jackets are optional and oversight is minimal. When the government builds an airport in Lethem, it improves the connectivity of the eco-tourist resort, the oil sector official, and the government minister visiting the region. It does not improve the connectivity of the woman who needs to take her sick child to Georgetown General Hospital and cannot afford the airfare.
Even President Ali himself has acknowledged the problem. In an admission that received less attention than it deserved, the President called on local air operators to lower the hefty fares for travel to hinterland communities. He said this publicly. He said it because the fares are indeed hefty. He said it because even the President of the Republic recognises that the domestic aviation market is not accessible to ordinary Guyanese. And then his government opened bids for two new airports and $4.1 billion in airstrip rehabilitation.
The President publicly called on airlines to lower their fares because the prices are too high for ordinary Guyanese. Then the government announced billions in new airport investment. Those two positions cannot both be the right answer to the same problem. Building more airports does not make existing flights affordable. It makes more expensive flights available.
The Local Content Question Nobody Is Asking
There is one more dimension to the airport bidding story that deserves attention in the context of the Local Content Act, which the government promotes as its primary mechanism for ensuring that Guyanese companies benefit from oil-driven development.
Eight bids were received for the Lethem airport, Rose Hall airport, and hinterland airstrip rehabilitation contracts. The bidders are China CAMC Engineering Company, Kalpataru Projects International from India, CAMC-CMEC Group from China, Ashoka Buildcon Limited from India, OEC USA, and two Guyanese companies: BK International in consortium with CAMCE, and International Imports and Supplies. The two Guyanese companies are competing for the smallest contract, the hinterland airstrip rehabilitation, and only in consortium or as a standalone local entity against Chinese state-linked competition.
The major airport construction contracts, the ones for Lethem and Rose Hall, have attracted no standalone Guyanese bidders. The contractors who will build the airports that are supposed to connect Guyanese communities are Chinese and Indian firms. The workers who will benefit from construction employment on these projects will be primarily foreign. The profits that flow from these contracts will leave Guyana. The Local Content Act mandates Guyanese participation in oil sector contracts. It appears to have generated limited traction in aviation infrastructure procurement.
What a Real Transportation Investment Agenda Looks Like
Guyana1News is not arguing against airports. Connectivity matters. The interior communities of Guyana need better links to the coast. Eco-tourism has real potential. Lethem as a regional hub connecting Brazil and the Caribbean is a legitimate development vision.
What we are arguing is that the sequencing of transportation investment in Guyana reflects the priorities of a government that is building the country it wants to be seen building rather than the country most Guyanese actually live in. A government serious about transportation equity would:
- Complete the Port Kaituma wharf so that the MV Ma Lisha, commissioned and paid for in 2023, can actually sail the route for which it was procured. Three years and one disaster later, this remains undone.
- Retire every government vessel over forty years old and replace it with purpose-built modern ferries designed for the routes and conditions of Guyana’s coast. The NRF has received US$9.3 billion since 2020. A fleet of safe, modern ferries is not beyond the budget of a nation at this level of resource wealth.
- Establish a national public bus service on the East Coast Demerara, East Bank Demerara, West Coast Berbice, and West Bank Demerara corridors. A properly run public bus service reduces dependence on unsafe private minibuses, reduces road deaths, and democratises transportation for the majority of Guyanese who cannot afford private cars or domestic flights.
- Mandate domestic air fare regulation for routes serving hinterland communities. If the President himself acknowledges that fares are too high for ordinary Guyanese, the government has both the authority and the obligation to address this. Building more airports while allowing prohibitive fares to continue is not a transportation solution. It is a construction project.
- Require that all government-funded aviation infrastructure contracts comply with Local Content Act participation requirements, with documented Guyanese ownership and employment thresholds applied to airport construction as they are to oil sector contracts.
The Infrastructure That Serves Whom
There is a principle in public infrastructure investment that is well established and frequently ignored: infrastructure serves whoever it was designed for. A highway designed for private cars does not serve pedestrians. A ferry designed for colonial-era rice sacks does not safely serve a modern economy’s cargo volumes. And an airport in Lethem does not serve the Guyanese family that cannot afford to put its children on a plane.
The infrastructure that most Guyanese depend on is the minibus that kills 137 of them every year. It is the ferry that was built in 1939 and killed 73 of them in 2026. It is the road with no streetlights, no pedestrian crossings, and no safety enforcement. It is the speedboat with no life jackets and no manifest. These are the transportation systems of the majority of Guyanese citizens. They are also the transportation systems that receive the least coherent, sustained, and equitable investment from a government that has access to extraordinary oil revenues.
The airports at Lethem and Rose Hall will be built. They will be impressive. They will be photographed. They will be commissioned with speeches about connectivity and vision and the Guyana of tomorrow. And the day after the commissioning ceremony, the woman in Lethem who cannot afford the airfare will still get on the minibus. The family in Port Kaituma will still wait for the ferry. The road on the East Coast Demerara will still be waiting for the pedestrian crossing that has never come.
Guyana is building a transportation system for the one percent of its citizens who can afford to fly within it. That is their right as a government with resources. But it is not what most Guyanese need. And after the MV Barima, after 137 road deaths, after the minibus that killed a 16-year-old schoolgirl in Berbice last November, it is not what most Guyanese can afford to wait for.
Source: Guyana1news
