Dear Editor,
Whether it is a PNC or PPP budget, the pitch, the language, is the same: high-sounding, noble-minded, caring, evocative, all of which is really a pile of verbiage. The appeal to emotion rather than to reason and data is just plain psychology and demagoguery, pure propaganda.
The eye-catching branding of Budget 2026 (B26), “Putting People First” is just hot air, and in this it does not deviate from the budget branding tradition. In 2025, the slogan was “A Secure, Prosperous, and Sustainable Guyana,” in 2024, “Staying the Course: Building Prosperity for All,” while the 2021 budget proclaims, “A Path to Recovery: Economic Dynamism and Resilience.” In 2015, the APNU+AFC budget proclaims, “A Fresh Approach to the Good Life in a Green Economy” and five years later, “Our Plan for Prosperity.”
In the spirit of “Putting People First,” B26 hands out cash grants and other perks that collectively do not ease the cost-of-living woes of the “small man,” who has been stuck, like Rainstorm, below the poverty line since Independence in 1966. On page 85 of B26, this gem appears:
as Guyana navigates this period of unprecedented growth, it is imperative that we cultivate the intrinsic values of a more caring, compassionate, honest, respectful and humane society. We must build a society that is value-based and where civility in our daily interactions with each other is the new norm. As we strive for excellence as a nation, we must stand steadfast on our morality, ethical values, love and respect for each other as well as love for animals and the environment. At the same time, we must abhor the immoral consequences of gambling, bullying in our schools, drug abuse, domestic violence and animal abuse … To cultivate a sense of national pride, we must focus on civic education in our school system and encourage respect, ethical behavior and harmonious living among our students and young people to produce good citizens, allowing them to inculcate democratic values …
The cultivation of “intrinsic values,” including moral and ethical values, honesty, respect and compassion, should not only be directed at “our students and young people,” but, more importantly, at politicians and businesspeople, the small class of wealthy people who are corrupt, morally bankrupt and thus in need of a moral compass; the “we” seems to exclude this class. As to the need to “inculcate democratic values,” those should be directed at the politicians and not only should “our students and young people.” In an important sense, B26 calls to mind Orwell’s Animal Farm but in this case the politicians see themselves as fully educated and compassionate and it is the “students and young people” who need to lift themselves above the level of ordinary animals.
The overall emphasis, structure and political orientation of B26 are the same as previous budget except that it has a larger price tag, 12.7 percent larger than B25. In effect, B26 is not a “people” budget because it makes no concerted effort to lift Guyanese above the poverty line and to share the fruits of a booming economy. It continues to perpetuate corruption, shoddy work and inequality.
Budget slogans from 2021 to 2026, the period considered in this essay, essentially dwell on prosperity and the people. Appendix 1, page 103, of B26 has a revealing table that offers some data about how the “people” are doing in terms of health and education, especially the former, among others. Let’s start with the standard of living, a crucial dimension of human development. Public sector monthly minimum wages increased from $74,900 to $102,346 in 2021 to 2025. Data on the minimum wage rate for 2026 is absent from the table, but it is safe to assume that it will be 8 percent higher than the previous year, given the multi-year agreements to grow wage by that rate (B26, p. 16). That boost will bring the minimum monthly wage rate to $110,534 in 2026, an increase of 47.4 percent from 2021.
Based on the data, the monthly wage rate of public sector employees rose by an annual average of 7.9 percent over the six-year period while mean inflation was 3.8 percent. In other words, the wage rate grew by more than twice the inflation rate. The message, then, is that Guyanese are doing extremely well under the PPP, consistent with what the B24 proclaimed: “Building Prosperity for All.” Alas, that’s a mighty fiction and the lived experience of Guyanese vociferously proclaims that inflation is much higher than what the official data say and that it is impossible for a single person, not a family, to live on $111,000 per month. As an experiment, I suggest our politicians try to live on that paltry amount for a month. Little wonder that poverty is so widespread; more than half of the population is impoverished. Instead of the (arithmetic) average of minimum wage, it would be insightful to have data on the median wage rate of public sector employees. One can compute the median wage rate if the MoF, BoS or both make the raw data available.
The number of physicians per 10,000 population rose from 17.8 in 2021 to 19.3 in 2025, which is lower than the average of the CARICOM sub-region. Hospital beds per 10,000 people grew from 22.0 to 37.0, which is way lower than most countries in CARICOM. The number of nurses per 10,000 population fell from 36.6 to 32.5. By these metrics, health care in Guyana does not measure up to what is offered in many countries in the sub-region. Low birthweight (<2500g) remained unchanged at 8 percent of all live births. Severely malnourished children rose slightly, from 0.4 percent to 0.5 percent, while moderately malnourished children increased from 1.0 percent to 1.5 percent. Overweight children expanded from 1.0 percent to 1.5 percent. Life expectancy at birth, a crucial summary indicator of the state of health, was 70.2 years in 2023 (WDI latest available data), which is the third lowest in LAC, lower than the average of LAC by 5.5 years, lower than Jamaica (1.3 years), Trinidad and Tobago (3.3 years), and Suriname (3.6 years).
How much does the government spend on human capital, which is so central to the continued rapid growth and transformation of the economy and thus the livelihood, education and health of Guyanese? I take spending on health as the allocations to the MoH and the “Health Services” of the ten administrative regions, and spending on education as the sum of allocations to MoE and the “Education Delivery” line of the regions.
In 2021, education consumed 13.6 percent of the national budget, slightly more than health (13.2 percent). Thereafter, the share of the budget allocated to these two foundational pillars of human capital began to shrink and were almost equal in both 2023 and 2024, at about 10.2 percent. In the following year, the slice of the budget destined for education reached a low of 8.8 percent, while that of health remained roughly the same as in the past two years. The data for 2026 indicated that the education allocation increased to 10.7, which is slightly more than health (10.3 percent). The litmus test: Guyana’s Harmonized Test Scores is one of the lowest in LAC.
There are three messages from the data presented in the above paragraph. First, health has been prioritized above education, and second, the government seemed to recalibrate this year as it apparently recognizes the centrality of education to the economy. Even so, and this is the third point, the government is still squeezing investment in human capital, cutting investment in human capital from more than quarter of its budget to less than a fifth from 2021 to 2026, indicating a shrinking priority to investment in human capital.
Concluding, the data suggests that, despite budget slogans, more than half of the population remains mired in grinding poverty. B26 is more of the same old medicine even though the “sickness,” the disease, has evolved and deepened to include economic, literacy, health and the very moral fabric of society. The “people” test will come next year, when they ask themselves: “Are we better off now than a year earlier?”