By Antonio Dey | HGP Nightly News|
GEORGETOWN, GUYANA — Less than three weeks after the historic opening of the 13th Parliament, political warfare has completely crippled the legislature’s premier fiscal watchdog. The newly elected Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), Dr. Vishnu Panday, has fiercely condemned the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) administration following a coordinated government “no-show” that forced the cancellation of yet another critical oversight sitting due to a lack of a quorum.
Dr. Panday, who was unanimously elected to head the bipartisan committee on June 15, 2026, representing the main opposition party, We Invest In Nationhood (WIN), described the repeated absences as a calculated, anti-democratic strategy designed by the ruling executive to stall parliamentary scrutiny of public infrastructure accounts.
The immediate collapse of the meeting directly triggers the controversial quorum rules pushed through by the PPP/C during the previous parliament. Under those heavily protested regulations, a PAC session cannot legally proceed without the physical presence of at least two government members, effectively granting the ruling party an absolute veto over when the treasury watchdog can sit.
Statutory Stalemate: The PAC Backlog Ledger
The systematic gridlock of the oversight body occurs amidst a historic backlog of state financial evaluations, leaving trillions in oil-boom expenditures completely unaudited by parliament:
- The Audit Deficit: The PAC faces a massive six-year backlog of unexamined Auditor General Financial Reports, with parliamentary scrutiny of public spending between 2019 and 2024 entirely frozen.
- The Quorum Veto In Action: Parliament clerks confirmed that notice for the session was issued well in advance. While the opposition benches were fully satisfied, consecutive alternative dates proposed by the Chairman—including June 22, 23, 24, and 26—were systematically rejected or ignored by the government’s five designated committee representatives.
- The Leftover Balance: The committee preceding the 2025 general elections was only able to complete state financial checks up to the 2018 fiscal envelope, leaving the country’s most explosive developmental spending entirely shielded from public review.
“We sent out the formal invitations again, requesting their presence so that the people’s business can be done. We haven’t had a single positive response, repeating a pattern of obstruction that we have continuously seen and reported,” Chairman Dr. Panday stated emotionally. “We cannot continue to manage the affairs of this country like this. We want to aggressively minimize and eradicate this backlog, but the approach by the PPP members is completely hostile to that objective. This attitude surely gives rise to deep public suspicion.”
Expanding his critique to the country’s broader developmental landscape, Dr. Panday—a veteran former executive of the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo)—directly linked the stymied PAC meetings to severe, ongoing issues plaguing national infrastructure works. He argued that multi-million-dollar road networks currently scattered across Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo have suffered structural delays ranging from six months to three years due to predatory contracting methods and poor state oversight.
“We are of the firm, uncompromised view that there is tremendous corruption taking place on the ground,” Dr. Panday charged code-blue. “In fact, that is the deliberate design. All of these poorly managed road projects have been rapidly scattered across the length and breadth of this country to enrich political insiders while wasting billions of taxpayers’ hard-earned money. It is a deliberate layout to sustain corrupt practices. Having the PAC sit regularly and transparently is the only institutional guarantee to protect public funds, and that is precisely why the government continues to flee from our invitations.”
With prominent senior ministers—including Public Works Minister Juan Edghill and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Gail Teixeira—holding the government’s seats on the committee, the immediate political stand-off leaves the 13th Parliament’s transparency promises in severe jeopardy. Until the executive branch commands its ranks to fulfill their statutory obligations to the legislature, the trillions currently flowing through the national treasury will remain completely insulated from independent democratic audit.
