HGP Nightly News – Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister, Kwame McCoy, has sharply criticised the Opposition’s response to Budget 2026, arguing that its commentary reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what the fiscal plan is intended to achieve.
“The Opposition’s commentary makes it clear that they have not grasped what this budget is designed to do,” McCoy said, explaining that Budget 2026 is focused on consolidating economic growth, protecting vulnerable groups, expanding productive capacity, and managing a rapidly growing economy in a responsible way. According to McCoy, rather than engaging with those objectives, opposition figures have relied on what he described as “noise, slogans, and shallow sound bites.”
McCoy stressed that a national budget is not a political slogan or campaign document. “A national budget is not a campaign flyer or a protest chant,” he said. “It is a technical, policy-driven instrument grounded in data, projections, and fiscal discipline.” He added that the opposition’s approach points to “an absence of seriousness about governance” and warned that Guyana “cannot afford leaders who confuse performance with theatrics.”
Those remarks stand in contrast to the assessment offered by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed following the budget presentation. Mohamed acknowledged that the $1.558 trillion plan is the largest in Guyana’s history but argued that its priorities are misplaced. “It doesn’t reflect the people,” Mohamed said, claiming that the budget favours infrastructure spending while neglecting direct investment in citizens’ well-being. “What about the most important resource, our human resource?” he asked.
Mohamed was particularly critical of increases for pensioners, public assistance recipients, and persons living with disabilities, describing them as inadequate in the face of rising living costs. He also revisited campaign promises, arguing that expectations created during the election period have not been met in the current budget. “We were expecting more for our children, more for our pensioners,” he said, adding that the measures announced fall short of what many households anticipated.
While McCoy insists that the opposition has failed to engage with the macroeconomic framework, sectoral investments, and long-term planning embedded in Budget 2026, Mohamed maintains that those technical arguments do not translate into meaningful relief for ordinary Guyanese. The exchange highlights a widening divide between the government’s defence of fiscal discipline and growth management, and the opposition’s claim that the budget’s scale has not resulted in sufficient, immediate improvements in people’s daily lives.
As parliamentary debate unfolds, Budget 2026 is shaping up to be contested not only on numbers and projections, but on the deeper question of whether economic growth, as structured by the government, is being felt where it matters most.
