By Theon Alleyne
*The views are the author's own.*
This newspaper has published five hundred articles. Almost all of them are about numbers: a tariff schedule, a lending rate, a port concession, a licence issued on land somebody else lives on. We built it that way on purpose. The micro, small and medium enterprise is the largest part of Guyana's economy and the smallest part of its coverage, and somebody had to do the arithmetic nobody else was doing.
This one is not about a number. It is about the people who own the businesses, and whether they are still allowed to be people.
The sector is not silent. It is selectively audible.
It is worth being precise, because "the private sector has gone quiet" is the kind of sentence an organisation can rebut in one line, and should be able to.
The organised private sector in this country can speak quickly, publicly and in hard language, and it has. It has a communications function, a membership mandate, and a demonstrated willingness to put its name to a position inside forty-eight hours. When a political actor has threatened the commercial interests of its members, it has said so in terms that needed no interpretation, and it was right to. I would defend those interventions on their merits.
So the machinery is not in question. What I am asking about is the range it is used across.
Every occasion I can call to mind has one thing in common. The cost of speaking was carried by somebody else.
The defence, and its shelf life
The answer given, when this is raised, is always the same, and it is always given in a lowered voice. *These things are handled privately. We raise them in the room. You do not say that in public.*
I have been in those rooms. The defence is not worthless. There are matters that are genuinely better settled quietly, and an organisation that leaks every disagreement to the press stops being invited and stops being useful.
But a private channel is a method, not an alibi, and it carries two obligations that are almost never met. The first is that the issue must actually be raised. The second is that when the private channel has been tried and has produced nothing, something has to happen next. A channel that never escalates is not a channel. It is a waiting room.
This newspaper has already extended that benefit of the doubt once in print. In August 2026, after searching the public record and finding no statement on a state-funded competitor to businesses that were asked to invest in the same product, we wrote that neither absence was proof of silence, that both bodies might have raised it with ministers privately, and that either might speak yet.
That was fair. It was also three months ago, and it has not been tested since. At some point a standing presumption of private diligence becomes a standing excuse for public absence, and the only people who can tell the difference are the ones in the room.
What it costs the people we claim to represent
A chamber is not a social club. It is a body that MSMEs pay dues to, in a country where a small contractor's entire year can turn on one procurement decision and one payment cycle.
When the sector's public voice is available only against opponents, the member learns something precise, and learns it quickly. The representation is conditional. It will be spent on matters that cost the leadership nothing and withheld on matters that might. A member working that out does not write a letter. He stops renewing, stops attending, and stops saying anything at all, because he has just watched what happens to people who do.
That is how an advocacy sector hollows out. Not by being banned. By being useless on the only occasions that would have proved it was not.
Three traditions, one answer
This country is Hindu, Muslim and Christian, and not one of those traditions offers any comfort to a man who stays quiet to protect his position.
The Bhagavad Gita opens with a man of standing who decides that the honourable thing is to withdraw. Krishna's answer to Arjuna is that withdrawal is not peace and is not innocence. To refuse a duty because acting on it would cost you is itself an act, and it has consequences you will own.
The Quran is more direct still, and it closes the escape route most of us actually use. *O believers! Stand firm for justice as witnesses for Allah even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or close relatives. Be they rich or poor, Allah is best to ensure their interests. So do not let your desires cause you to deviate from justice.* (An-Nisa 4:135.) The verse does not ask for courage against enemies. Anyone can manage that. It asks for it against yourself and your own people, which is the only version that has ever been difficult.
And Ellen White, in *Education*, wrote the line that ought to hang in every boardroom in Georgetown: *The greatest want of the world is the want of men, men who will not be bought or sold, men who in their inmost souls are true and honest, men who do not fear to call sin by its right name, men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole, men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall.*
Not men who raise it privately. Men who call it by its right name.
I am writing about myself
I am actively engaged in the civic sector. I am not standing outside this and pointing at it. I am inside it, and the verse I just quoted is the reason I am not exempting myself from it.
I have supported people with my time, my money and my advocacy. Supporting someone is not the same as surrendering the right to differ with them, and a relationship that cannot survive a disagreement was never a relationship. It was a subscription.
The business community is not a separate species. We live on the same roads, send children to the same schools, and bury people in the same ground. We are not a caste that has traded its citizenship for a tax ruling.
Our silence is not neutrality, and it has never once been mistaken for it by the people watching. It is a position. It is simply a position nobody has had to defend, because nobody has yet been asked to put their name to it.
I am putting mine to this.
The entities
- Bhagavad Gita is the Hindu scripture in which Krishna answers Arjuna's wish to withdraw from a duty he does not want to carry.
- An-Nisa 4:135 is the verse of the Quran requiring justice to be upheld as a witness even against oneself, one's parents and one's relatives.
- Education is the 1903 work by Ellen White carrying, at page 57, the passage on men who do not fear to call sin by its right name.
What the title card says
- Headline: five hundred articles about business, and this one is about businessmen.
- Bhagavad Gita, Krishna to Arjuna, Hindu: withdrawal is not peace, and not innocence.
- Qur'an, Surah An-Nisa 4:135, Muslim: stand firm for justice, even against yourselves.
- Ellen White, Education, page 57, Christian: call sin by its right name, though the heavens fall.
- The author of this article: inside, holding office in two of the bodies it discusses.
- Articles published by this newspaper: five hundred, almost all of them about numbers.
- Hours the organised sector needs to answer a threat, when it chooses to answer one: forty-eight.
- What a relationship was all along, if it cannot survive a disagreement: a subscription.
- This is an opinion article. The views are the author's own.
Disclosure: Theon Alleyne is the founder and managing director of La Caribeña News. This article criticises the public conduct of the organised private sector. He holds office in two of the bodies it discusses.