“Selective interpretation, chronic and barefaced distortion” – Finance Minister hits back at Opposition

…says 58% poverty data cited by Opposition MPs was APNU/AFC’s legacy

Senior Minister with Responsibility for Finance, Dr Ashni Singh, closed off the Budget 2026 debates in the wee hours of today with a resounding rebuttal to what he described as “selective interpretation” and “barefaced distortion” by the Parliamentary Opposition.
Delivering his contributions to the debates in the National Assembly, Dr Singh took to task the combined Parliamentary opposition – comprising 12 members from A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), 16 members from We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) and one from the Forward Guyana Movement (FGM).
He singled out the lead for the APNU Parliamentary group, Terrence Campbell, who had cited an Inter-American Development (IDB) 2025 report that states approximately 58 per cent of Guyanese are living in poverty, with 32 per cent in extreme poverty.
However, according to the Finance Minister, all of the Opposition Members of Parliament who referenced the report in their presentations failed to mention that the data was sourced from a labour force survey done by the Guyana Bureau of Statistics for the years 2016 to 2018 and then in 2021.
“For those who need to be reminded, the period 2016 to 2018 fell squarely during the APNU+AFC tenure in Government. And 2021 was in the heart of the COVID-19 shutdown,” the Minister stated.
This, Dr Singh pointed out in the late hours of Friday evening, reflects a pattern of behaviour by the Opposition.

“This is a pattern of behaviour: selective interpretation, selective quotation, chronic and barefaced distortion. This is a pattern of behaviour: misleading the country. But guess what? There is something called basic common sense,” he contended.
The Finance Minister went on to highlight that the report produced the data on Guyana against two poverty lines established by the World Bank for extreme poverty.
The World Bank defines the median poverty line for lower middle-income countries as individuals living on US$3.65 per day and US$6.85 for those in the upper middle-income countries.
According to the Minister, no one in Guyana is working, at minimum, for a daily wage of G$1400. “Everybody in Guyana knows this – that an unskilled labourer does not come out of his bed and does not leave his yard for less than $8000. Common sense would tell you that you can’t get any. nobody is working for that amount of money in Guyana. And if the honourable member [Campbell] can find people who are working at that rate and willing to work at that rate, bring them and we will pay them. We will employ them.”
“It is convenient and now an ingrained habit of misrepresentation,” the Finance Minister said of the Opposition, as he listed a new Labour Market Survey that highlights how incomes have risen, employment has grown, and unemployment has halved in Guyana.
“That survey is publicly available, and many members quoted from it. But it is this chronic habit of selective citation of statistics, whether accurate or otherwise, that has been displayed for a very long time by the APNU MPs; that has resulted now in their complete and abject loss of credibility with the people of Guyana, and that has directly resulted in them being consigned to 12 seats in the back benches. Because today, the Guyanese people are much wiser,” he declared.
The Finance Minister concluded his marathon presentation in the early morning hours of today, bringing the curtains down on the Budget 2026 Debates. On Monday, the National Assembly will commence the consideration of the estimates of Budget 2026 for five days before it is put to the House for passage.