Guyana’s construction safety problem is not a knowledge problem. It is an enforcement problem.
On Thursday, Minister of Labour Keoma Griffith stood before a gathering of construction workers and employers at the Officers’ Mess in Georgetown and urged them to take safety seriously. He told them that safety is everybody’s business. He said Guyana has a culture of safety problem. He said the ministry intends to host symposiums in every region. He said he hoped the change in safety culture would begin with the people in the room.
Guyana1News does not dispute any of that. What we dispute is the premise behind it. Guyana’s construction industry does not have a knowledge problem. The workers on those sites know that helmets protect heads. The contractors know that scaffolding requires bracing. The engineers know that structural loads require calculations. The problem is not that Guyanese construction workers are unaware that safety matters. The problem is that nobody is checking whether safety is being practiced. And the government that is now hosting seminars about safety culture is the same government whose engineers and inspectors are sitting in their offices rather than visiting the sites.
You cannot talk your way to a safe construction industry. You inspect your way to one. And right now, Guyana is not inspecting.
The Record Speaks for Itself
On April 15, 2026, a two-storey concrete structure at Atlantic Gardens on the East Coast of Demerara collapsed without warning. A 46-year-old carpenter Radesh Domingo was killed. Seven other workers were injured. The men were completing work on the roof when the structure gave way beneath them. Kaieteur News reported that the Ministry of Labour’s Occupational Safety and Health Department was expected to conduct a thorough investigation into whether safety protocols were followed. There is no publicly available report of what that investigation found.
That collapse did not happen in isolation. In September 2025, a 24-year-old Cuban worker, Dayrovis Martínez Mendoza, died when a 15-foot concrete wall collapsed on him at a construction site in Bachelor’s Adventure, also on the East Coast of Demerara. A Migrants working in Guyana’s construction boom have been described by journalists covering the sector as the last to be paid and the first to be forgotten when things go wrong. The pattern repeats. The seminar circuit continues.
These are not isolated accidents in a generally safe industry. They are the predictable outcome of a construction sector expanding at a rate that its oversight infrastructure cannot match. Guyana’s oil-driven economic boom has generated an enormous demand for construction. New roads, new housing schemes, new commercial buildings, new government infrastructure. The pace of construction has accelerated dramatically. The pace of inspection has not.
Where Are the Inspectors?
The Ministry of Labour has an Occupational Safety and Health Department. It has inspectors. It has the legal authority under the Occupational Safety and Health Act to enter any workplace and require compliance with safety standards. That authority is real. The question is whether it is being exercised.
Guyana1News is asking directly: how many construction site inspections did the Ministry of Labour conduct in the first six months of 2026? How many improvement notices were issued? How many prohibition notices were served? How many prosecutions were initiated for safety violations? How many sites were shut down for non-compliance? These are not hostile questions. They are the metrics that would tell the public whether the ministry’s commitment to workplace safety is backed by action or by symposiums.
Engineers and inspectors are a critical part of this picture beyond the Labour Ministry alone. Building plans require approval. Approved plans specify structural requirements. Those requirements are supposed to be verified during construction by engineers who visit the site to confirm that what is being built matches what was approved. In Guyana, the gap between the plan on paper and the building going up is one that site visits are supposed to close. When those visits do not happen, or happen infrequently, the gap becomes a structural risk that workers and future occupants pay for with their bodies.
A building plan approved in an office and never verified on a site is not a safety document. It is a piece of paper. The safety is in the visit. And the visits are not happening at the rate this construction boom demands.
The Block Contradiction That Exposes the System
Here is the most revealing example of the gap between what the government says about construction quality and what it actually requires. It is specific, it is documented, and it is damning.
The Guyana National Bureau of Standards has a national standard for concrete hollow blocks. It is called GYS 215:2024, the Specification for Load Bearing Masonry Concrete Units. That standard specifies that an individual block must have a compressive strength of not less than 5.5 Megapascals, and that the average of three units must not be less than 7 Megapascals. The GNBS tests blocks against this standard. It certifies blocks against this standard. It issues certificates to manufacturers who meet the standard. It has been doing so for years.
Preliminary tests conducted by the GNBS revealed that the majority of blocks made by some manufacturers are below the compressive strengths stipulated by the national standard. The GNBS said this publicly. The GNBS encouraged manufacturers, contractors, and homeowners to submit their blocks for testing. It described the certification service as a significant step towards assuring stakeholders of the integrity of new concrete structures.
And here is the contradiction that the government has never satisfactorily explained: contractors building government-funded buildings are not required to use GNBS-certified blocks.
The government of Guyana has established a national standard for the concrete blocks used to build Guyanese homes, schools, hospitals, and offices. It has created a certification system to verify which blocks meet that standard. It has published evidence that the majority of blocks from some manufacturers do not meet that standard. And it does not require its own contractors to use certified blocks. That is not a bureaucratic oversight. That is a policy contradiction with structural consequences.
When Minister Griffith urges construction workers to build a new safety culture, he is speaking to the workforce. But the workforce is not the variable that determines whether a building stands or falls. The materials are. A worker with perfect safety consciousness, wearing every piece of protective equipment correctly, following every procedure on the site, can still be killed when a wall built from substandard blocks collapses on him. Radesh Domingo had a decade of construction experience. He was a veteran. He died because a structure gave way. Not because he did not take safety seriously.
What Enforcement Actually Looks Like
Guyana1News is not opposed to safety seminars. Education is part of the answer. But the evidence from jurisdictions that have actually reduced construction fatality rates is unambiguous about what the primary driver of improvement is: enforcement.
Guyana is not the United States. It does not have OSHA’s resources. But the principle is not resource-dependent. The principle is that safety culture is not created by telling people that safety matters. It is created by showing up on sites and requiring compliance. A contractor who knows an inspector may appear at any time behaves differently from a contractor who knows the inspector is at a seminar.
The ministry has the authority. It has the legal framework. What it needs is a commitment to deploy that authority systematically, regularly, and with consequences for non-compliance that make the cost of cutting corners higher than the cost of following the rules.
What Guyana1News Is Calling For
We welcome the Ministry of Labour’s initiative. We welcome Minister Griffith’s acknowledgement that safety culture in Guyana needs to change. We are asking the government to match its words with a programme of action that the construction industry, and the workers on those sites, can actually feel.
- Mandatory, unannounced site inspections must become routine. The Ministry of Labour’s Occupational Safety and Health inspectors must visit construction sites regularly and without prior notice. The frequency must be published. The results must be published. A safety campaign that does not include a credible threat of inspection and consequences is a communications exercise, not an enforcement programme.
- The government must require GNBS-certified concrete blocks on all government-funded construction contracts. This is the single most straightforward step the government can take to demonstrate that it is serious about construction quality. It already has the standard. It already has the certification system. The procurement requirement should have existed from the moment the certification scheme was launched. It must be introduced immediately.
- Building plan verification must include mandatory site visits at defined stages of construction. Structural plans approved by engineers must be verified at foundation, at structural frame, and at roof completion by a qualified engineer with the authority to stop work if what is being built does not match what was approved.
- Penalties for construction safety violations must be increased and enforced. A fine that is cheaper to pay than compliance with is not a deterrent. It is a licence fee. The ministry must review the penalty structure under the Occupational Safety and Health Act and ensure that non-compliance is financially prohibitive rather than financially convenient.
- The results of all GNBS block testing conducted on government construction projects must be published. If the government is not testing the blocks going into its schools and hospitals and housing schemes, the public has a right to know. If it is testing and finding failures, the public has a right to know that too.
The Worker Deserves More Than a Seminar
Radesh Domingo went to work on April 15, 2026, on a construction site on the East Coast of Demerara. He had more than a decade of experience. He was somebody’s father. He died when a structure collapsed on him while he was working on the roof. His death was investigated. No public findings have been released. The seminar circuit continued.
The construction workers who gathered at the Officers’ Mess on Thursday to hear Minister Griffith speak about safety culture are not the problem. They are not resistant to safety. They are working in an environment where substandard materials can go into buildings without certification requirements, where site visits happen inconsistently if at all, where the penalty for cutting corners is lower than the cost of following the rules, and where the government’s own procurement practices do not require the quality standards the government’s own bureau has established.
Change the environment. The culture will follow. But you cannot change the environment with a seminar. You change it with an inspector on the site, a certified block in the wall, and a government that enforces on its own contractors what it is urging the industry to embrace voluntarily.
Inspect the sites.
Then hold the seminar.
Source: Guyana1news
