The $12.5 Billion Mirage and the 6.9 Billion Cloak: The High Cost of Budgetary Fudging

Dear Editor,

The recent “adjustments” to the 2026 National Budget suggest that our fiscal planners have traded their calculators for magic wands. We are being presented with a series of numbers that do not merely stretch the truth—they snap it entirely.

The following points expose a coordinated effort to reconcile political promises with a demographic reality that simply does not exist:

• The Mid-Debate “Discovery”: When Budget 2026 was first tabled, the $100,000 adult cash grant was allocated $60 Billion, precisely accounting for 600,000 people. Following public scrutiny regarding the 630,000 recipients claimed in 2025, the government performed a sudden U-turn. Within days, Prime Minister Mark Phillips “discovered” an additional 116,000 eligible adults, ballooning the headcount to 716,261 and forcing a mid-debate budget injection of $12.5 Billion. This is not a refined estimate; it is a desperate attempt to pad the ledger.
• The GECOM Smoke Screen: Perhaps most telling is the staggering 600% increase in GECOM’s budgetary allocation—skyrocketing from an initial $897 Million to a massive $6.9 Billion. The government claims this is to facilitate Local Government Elections (LGE). However, the timing is too convenient. By funding an election cycle so closely following the General Elections, they are effectively using the constitutional process to validate and “cloak” a voter list that is clearly being used as the blueprint for these cash grants.
• The Voters’ List Paradox: In the September 2025 General Elections, the Official List of Electors (OLE) stood at 757,690. If the government is now preparing to pay 716,261 adults, they are claiming that 94.5% of every single name on that controversial list is a resident, eligible, and active recipient. This is a statistical impossibility in a country with a significant diaspora.
• The Absent Electorate: During those same 2025 elections, only 443,066 citizens actually showed up to vote. If the real, active adult population is roughly 443,000, where did the other 273,000 grant recipients come from? The government is essentially budgeting to pay a “phantom population” that is nearly 60% larger than the number of people who actually participated in the democratic process.
• The Nation Without Children: With a total population estimated at roughly 840,000, a recipient list of 716,261 adults implies that children under 18 make up only 14.7% of Guyana. To accept these budget figures, one must believe that Guyana has the lowest birth rate on the planet. In reality, our youth population is more than double that, proving that at least 150,000 of these “recipients” exist only as line items in a bloated budget.

The narrative is clear: the government is caught between a bloated voter list and a cash grant promise they cannot mathematically fulfill without exposing “ghosts.” By jacking up the GECOM budget to “legalize” the list through LGE, and simultaneously inflating the grant fund by $12.5 Billion, they are attempting to legitimize a massive transfer of wealth that defies the laws of biology and the reality of the ballot box.

It is time to stop the “fudging” and provide the nation with a transparent, audited list of recipients. Our treasury should not be used to fund a census of ghosts.

Regards,

Hemdutt Kumar