By Antonio Dey | HGP Nightly News|
GEORGETOWN, GUYANA — In a fierce assessment of the country’s fiscal management, former Minister of Finance Winston Jordan has sharply criticized the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) administration’s latest $54.8 billion supplementary budget request.
Jordan argued that the massive financial paper—tabled by Senior Minister in the Office of the President with Responsibility for Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh, just four months after the passage of the historic $1.558 trillion national budget—is clear proof of poor planning, weak management of public resources, and a parliament that has been structurally reduced to a political “rubber stamp.”
A Pattern of Fiscal Disregard
While acknowledging that supplementary funding requests are not inherently new to governance, Jordan emphasized that the sheer volume and immediate timing of this request should raise serious red flags across the country. He noted that while the PPP/C administration historically returns to the National Assembly for late-stage capital injections, doing so a mere four months into the fiscal year points to deep-seated programmatic failures.
“If you go back throughout the history of the PPP government, this is not new,” Jordan stated during an exclusive media interview. “The PPP have gone for supplementaries as late as the 20-something of December in a fiscal year. But the thing now is out of control. We are seeing billions now being asked, not the hundreds of millions that we were traditionally accustomed to.”
Parliament Dismissed as a “Rubber Stamp”
The veteran economist went further to describe the National Assembly as the weakest of the three branches of government in Guyana. He contended that because the executive arm holds an unassailable parliamentary majority, the house has completely failed to fulfill its constitutional oversight role, leaving taxpayers exposed to unrestricted spending.
| Parliamentary Oversight Baseline | Past Fiscal Review Standards | Current Observed Conduct Under New Bill |
| Scrutiny Rigor | Legislative adjustments limited to unforeseen emergencies | Routine mechanism used to artificially accelerate works |
| Request Volumes | Formulated around manageable, hundred-million dollar frames | Demanded in single, multi-billion dollar increments |
| Post-Spending Auditing | In-depth evaluation of structural project outcomes | Compliance checking limited to what was allocated vs. spent |
“People are becoming disgusted with the parliament. It’s a joke. It’s a rubber stamp,” Jordan remarked bluntly. He warned that when billions can be funneled through the legislature with minimal resistance or detailed explanation, the spirit of democratic checks and balances is compromised.
The Broken Accountability Loop
Jordan also turned his sights on post-spending transparency, arguing that modern state audit reports fail to interrogate public spending with the required analytical depth.
He stated that post-spending audits tend to function as basic bookkeeping exercises—merely verifying what was allocated and spent—while completely ignoring value-for-money outcomes or investigating the root structural errors that cause project costs to spiral out of control.
The $54.889 billion requested under Financial Paper Number One of 2026 includes massive, multi-billion-dollar injections to accelerate projects like the Wales Gas-to-Energy project ($19B) and regional housing developments ($17.5B). Jordan concluded by warning that without a drastic return to legislative rigor, the country’s surging oil economy remains highly vulnerable to structural waste and institutional overheating.
