HGP Nightly News – APNU Member of Parliament Sherod Duncan says the long-delayed release of Guyana’s 2022 National Population and Housing Census has stripped away years of political spin and exposed what he describes as a housing programme built more on paperwork than on actual homes. In a statement reacting to the preliminary census report, Duncan welcomed the publication of the data but noted that it arrived years late and at a cost of nearly $2 billion to taxpayers.
Still, he said the figures now provide something the country has been missing for too long: hard evidence. Without reliable data, Duncan argued, national development has been guided by assumptions rather than facts, particularly in the housing sector. For years, the Ministry of Housing has pointed to allocation numbers, processed titles, and administrative outputs as proof of success.
But Duncan contends that when those figures are compared with the census data, the claims no longer hold up. He referenced end-of-year statistics released by Housing Minister Colin Croal in late December 2025 and said the numbers simply do not align with the population and household realities captured by the census unless, as he put it, “paper transactions” are being counted as actual housing delivery.
Duncan first pointed to what he described as title inflation in the hinterland. He noted that the Minister of Amerindian Affairs recently stated that more than 16,000 land titles were issued to Amerindians between 2020 and 2024. However, the census shows that the combined number of households across Regions 1, 7, 8, and 9 stands at just over 26,600.By Duncan’s calculation, that means titles were issued to roughly 60 per cent of all existing hinterland households.
He said this confirms long-standing concerns that the government’s headline figures are driven largely by the regularisation of families already living on ancestral lands, not by the construction of new homes. In his view, this represents administrative clean-up rather than genuine housing expansion.He then turned to Region Four, where the contradiction, he said, is even starker.
Duncan referenced Minister Croal’s admission of a backlog of approximately 52,000 housing applicants in the region. The census, meanwhile, records about 112,876 households in Region Four. That backlog, Duncan argued, amounts to nearly half of the region’s entire household population.
He said a deficit of that scale cannot be resolved through slow land allocations and reflects a deeper failure in housing policy. In his assessment, the current approach has barely made a dent in what is now a full-blown demographic challenge. Duncan also questioned claims of a national construction boom.
While the government has spoken of more than 53,000 housing allocations countrywide, he said the census data on building stock does not show a corresponding surge in completed homes. If tens of thousands of new lots were truly translating into construction, Duncan argued, the census would reflect a clear divergence between households and existing buildings.
Instead, he said the data suggests many recipients remain unable to build, leaving allocations unrealised. “The census counts people and homes,” Duncan said, contrasting that with what he described as the Ministry’s focus on letters and promises.
He warned that the widening gap between housing paperwork and physical homes has left tens of thousands of Guyanese waiting, not for allocations, but for keys. Duncan concluded that the census should serve as a wake-up call for policymakers, insisting that housing success must be measured by completed homes and occupied communities, not by administrative statistics.
