GBJ NOTE · DEVELOPMENT FINANCE · LEGISLATION
The Guyana Development Bank, Part III: The Board Is the Proof
The directors now have names. The question Part II raised still has no answer.
Seven names answer whether qualified people would serve. They do not answer whether those people can say no — and the Act declined to build anything that would let them.
By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · 5 October 2026 · Brooklyn, New York
The Guyana Development Bank opened its doors this week. The Government also named the seven-member Board of Directors that will run it. Abu Zaman chairs it, with Kathy Smith as Deputy. Alongside them sit James Bond, Sukrishnalall Pasha, Dion Inniss, Nalinie Singh and Praem Rambharak — a roster spanning banking, law, public finance, aviation, governance and enterprise. It is a competent board. If the question was whether qualified people would staff this institution, the answer is now plainly yes.
That is precisely why the appointment settles nothing. In Part II of this series, we read the Bill clause by clause. We asked a single question the text could not answer. Could a board appointed entirely by one office — on terms that office renews, at remuneration that office fixes — safeguard the independence of credit decisions from that office? The Act gestures at that independence once, in §9(c). Yet it nowhere builds the machinery to secure it: no statutory credit committee, no related-party lending limit, no independent prudential supervisor. The board named this week is our first chance to hold the finished institution against that question. It does not answer it. Instead, it illustrates it. Consider, then, three tells.
One: The Finance Secretary sits on a board his own office appoints
Sukrishnalall Pasha is the Finance Secretary at the Ministry of Finance. That makes him the senior officer of the very office that appoints every director, fixes their pay, and renews their terms. When that office’s own official is himself a director, independence from the office is not a weak protection. It is a structural impossibility. That a second director, James Bond, is a sitting PPP/C Member of Parliament and a legal adviser to a government ministry sharpens the concern rather than softening it.
Two: The appointments are ungazetted on a bank already lending
Section 7(5) of the Act requires the Government to publish every director’s appointment in the Official Gazette. On its first day of operations — with zero-interest, no-collateral loans already on offer — no such notice has appeared. Nor has the bank named a Chief Executive or published the credit manual that will decide who actually receives the money. The bank is lending before the Government has made the one disclosure the law mandates, while the rules that matter live where no one can read them.
Three: Governance hired as a credential, not built as a constraint
The Government describes one director as a governance-reform strategist. That is a line on a biography, not a mechanism in an architecture. An appointee fluent in the vocabulary of oversight is not oversight.
A board is an existence proof of competence. It is never a proof of independence, because independence is a property of the design, not the roster.
— T.R.B.
The precedent we have already lived
We have met this institution before. The Guyana Agricultural and Industrial Development Bank (GAIBANK), founded in the 1970s to lend to farmers and industry, did not fail for want of competent directors. By the early 1990s a third of its loans were in arrears. Devaluation had multiplied its foreign-currency debts, and loans steered to favoured borrowers went unrecovered. In 1995 the state dissolved it into the Guyana National Co-operative Bank and moved its bad loans to a recovery unit; seven years later it sold the merged bank. GAIBANK failed because nothing in its design constrained how the state could use competent directors.
So let the record show the board, and let us judge it on the only standard that holds. We measure a development bank by the constraints it places on the powerful, not by the credentials of the people it appoints.
Here are the credentials.
The constraints are still missing.
Note on sources. The Guyana Development Bank Act 2026 (Act No. 6 of 2026, Official Gazette, 30 July 2026), sections 7, 9, 10, 14, 20, 24 and 32; the Government’s announcement of the inaugural seven-member Board of Directors on the bank’s commencement of operations, 5 October 2026, as reported by the Guyana Chronicle and iNews Guyana; and this series’ own Part II, “The Proposed Guyana Development Bank, Part II.” The observation on the Official Gazette reflects the position as of this writing.
Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D., is Founder and Publisher of the Guyana Business Journal. He is Professor of Mathematics and Dean (Interim) of the School of Science and Allied Health at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. The views expressed here are his own and do not represent those of Medgar Evers College or the City University of New York.
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