Former Finance Minister Winston Jordan says Guyana is “moving backward” on basic public-finance transparency, arguing that routine fiscal disclosures introduced under the coalition have been delayed, discontinued, or made harder to access, leaving businesses and citizens “to make decisions in the dark.”
Jordan’s charge centers on three pillars; the late Mid-Year Report, the discontinuation of the annual Debt Management Report, and the broader drying-up of routine, timely data (including monthly revenue/expenditure bulletins and the 2020 census release).
“We were well ahead of the game,” Jordan said, recalling that under the coalition, budgets were tabled and passed before the start of the fiscal year, and monthly spending and revenue reports, covering central government and public corporations, were published with only a two-to-three-week lag. He added that an annual Debt Management Report was established and produced for 2018 and 2019.
That infrastructure, he argues, has been allowed to wither. “This government has discontinued the publication of the annual debt report,” Jordan said, contending that the move “hides the mountain [of] debt” and deprives the public of ratios and analysis that show how much is being borrowed and on what terms.
On the Mid-Year Report, which by law faces an August 29 deadline, Jordan criticized both the tardiness and the decision to hold release until Parliament reconvened, despite no rule mandating that sequence. “When it comes to important documents like the mid-year report… it is hard to figure [that] a late document… has to await the convening of a parliament before it’s released to the public,” he said. By the time figures appeared in the press, “its utility value [was] lessened considerably because of the lateness,” forcing firms to staff, stock, and price “well in advance… in the dark,” especially heading into the Christmas season.
Jordan was blunt that capacity is not the issue. “They have more staff at the Ministry of Finance, they have more technology and everything else,” he said, so a timely report could have been prepared and sent to Parliament before recess. “Take that and smoke it in your pipe,” he added, insisting the coalition had set a higher bar for timeliness and public release.
Beyond those headline reports, Jordan says the overall climate for obtaining official information has deteriorated. Getting data from the Commissioner of Information is “worse than pulling teeth,” he charged. He pointed to Guyana’s slide in the World Justice Project rankings and linked it to information-access failures, most notably the still-unreleased 2020 census. “2025 is about to end without the census being available,” he noted, despite repeated assurances the results would be published. The only national headcount still available to the public is 2012, he said.
For Jordan, the stakes are more than procedural niceties; transparency underpins credible policymaking, investor confidence, and public trust. Discontinuing the debt report and slowing routine publication of core fiscal data, he warned, risks cultivating “an uneducated nation… grateful for handouts,” rather than an informed citizenry able to hold leaders to account.
He frames the contrast starkly; “We produced all kinds of reports, and many of them on a timely basis,” including monthly revenue/expenditure bulletins and comprehensive debt reporting. “It was a sad day when we had to discontinue them,” he said of the monthly series, then added that the current administration “just shut [the debt report] down. They don’t want it. They don’t want you to know how much money they’re borrowing.”
Jordan’s bottom line is a call to restore a transparency culture that treats timely disclosure as a public right, not a political favor. “The kind of exposure and transparency we wanted for this country, you would never get it [without pressure],” he said. “It’s up to us” whether Guyana returns to regular, on-time reports that allow businesses, Parliament, and the public to see, clearly and promptly, how the people’s money is managed.
