President Irfaan Ali has faced the press twice in recent weeks—once in an interview with Al Jazeera and again before the local press corps in Georgetown. Across both engagements, one impression is difficult to escape: there remains a considerable distance between the explanations coming from his Presidency and the economic realities confronting ordinary Guyanese. Two issues illustrate that disconnect particularly well—the continuing cost-of-living pressures and the deteriorating reliability of the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) system. Both are problems for which there is no shortage of data. The difficulty appears to arise when that data must be reconciled with the explanations being offered publicly.
Take cost of living. President Ali has offered a multidimensional explanation involving imported inflation, retailer mark-ups and changing consumer behaviour, including increased supermarket shopping and eating out. To be fair, his argument was broader than the simplified claim that Guyanese merely need to change their eating habits: he also identified global inflation, fuel and fertiliser costs and the margins between farmers and retailers. But this is precisely where hard data became inconvenient for the President. Records from the New Guyana Marketing Corporation showed that the average price of selected food items at Stabroek Market increased by more than 75 per cent between May 2021 and May 2025. Cassava rose by 77.8 per cent, plantain by 63.6 per cent, local chicken by 75 per cent and several other basic commodities by considerably more. The Bureau of Statistics similarly recorded its food index at 212.92 for 2024 compared with 152.51 in 2020. These are not restaurant bills. They are measurements of the prices of commodities itself.
The supermarket explanation becomes even less comfortable when tested against actual prices. Red Thread subsequently compared several basic commodities in a Georgetown supermarket with Bourda Market and found examples in which rice, sugar, flour and milk were actually cheaper at the supermarket. None of this establishes that consumer behaviour has no bearing whatsoever on household expenditure; obviously, where and how people spend their money affects what they have left. But that is quite different from explaining why the underlying prices confronting them have risen so sharply. Nor does the argument travel particularly well into Guyana’s hinterland, where consumers face transportation costs, limited competition and very different retail conditions. The President therefore does not need another anecdote about where Guyanese eat: what he needs to do is explain why hard data does not appear to be his comfort zone.
Then there is GPL. Here, the data is even more revealing because the President has now acknowledged that the electricity system is under severe pressure. At Monday’s press conference, he cited an independent InterEnergy assessment showing peak demand on the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System increasing from approximately 205 MW in 2024 to 242.6 MW by August 2026, an increase of about 18 per cent. GPL itself had warned only days earlier that rising demand and an overloaded distribution network were contributing to the recent outages. None of this should have arrived as a bolt from the blue. Since 2020, Guyana has experienced an extraordinary construction boom: new hotels and hotel rooms, housing developments, offices, commercial facilities and industrial operations have been added to an electricity system whose weaknesses were hardly a State secret: what projections were being exchanged between the ministries approving and encouraging this expansion and the utility expected to powerit?
Electricity demand is forecastable. Hotel rooms do not materialise overnight. Housing schemes do not suddenly appear between one GPL board meeting and the next. Major commercial and industrial investments normally pass through layers of Government approval before the first light switch is ever turned on. If Government knew how many houses it intended to build, how many hotels it was facilitating and how rapidly industrial and commercial activity was expanding, GPL should have been working from corresponding demand projections. Indeed, the President’s own figures now show demand growing much faster than the regional norm. The problem therefore cannot simply be described as unexpected growth overwhelming the system. The more difficult question is whether the institutions responsible for planning that growth were speaking meaningfully to the institution responsible for supplying its electricity.
And this is where threats about “heads rolling” become something of a distraction. President Ali has previously warned GPL management about consequences if performance does not improve, while his latest intervention acknowledges structural deficiencies requiring substantial investment. Firing somebody may satisfy the political need to demonstrate action, but it does not answer the planning question. Who projected demand? What did those projections show? When did GPL warn Government that generation or transmission capacity would become inadequate? What investments were recommended? Which were approved, delayed or rejected? Those are questions answerable with documents and numbers rather than threats.
The common thread between the cost-of-living problem and GPL is therefore not merely Government policy. It is evidence-based policymaking. On food prices, Government possesses years of market-price and inflation data against which presidential explanations can be tested. On electricity, Government knows—or ought to know—how many houses, hotel rooms, factories and commercial developments it is approving and what additional megawatts those developments will require. Yet the public conversation too often begins with an explanation and only afterwards encounters the numbers.
President Ali is correct about one thing: both problems are complex. Inflation cannot be reduced to a single cause, and GPL’s deterioration cannot be repaired with a single generator. Complexity, however, makes hard data more important, not less. The President does not need figures that accommodate his explanations; his explanations must accommodate the figures. Until that relationship is reversed, Guyanese may continue hearing increasingly elaborate accounts of why food is expensive and electricity unreliable while experiencing both realities every day with considerably less difficulty than their Government appears to have explaining them.
Discussion