IT is time to turn the page on the strange obsession with President Irfaan Ali’s so-called “megafarm” on the Soesdyke-Linden Highway. There are more than 60,000 reasons to do so. That’s how many Guyanese received titles to their houselots, generous cement and steel vouchers and favourable mortgage rates over the last five years. Be assured, they don’t give two hoots about a farm.
Three days ago, President Ali laid out as clear a roadmap as there is of where the national housing backlog is and his administration’s plan to clear most of it by the end of his second term. Earlier this month, the president delivered a significant speech to mark the 25th anniversary of the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission (GLSC). The opposition media, not surprisingly, ignored it because it revealed something remarkable about this president.
The story of land access in former European colonies is an unresolved moral and economic question at the heart of post-colonial nationhood. When Dutch settlers arrived on the Guiana coast in the 1600s, they carved up the coastal plain into plantation tracts, some exceeding 100 hectares, backed by enslaved African labour and a drainage infrastructure that still underpins the country today.
Upon Emancipation in 1838, freed men and women abandoned those plantations. Some pooled their meagre resources to purchase failed estates, establishing the earliest “freedom villages,” the first collective land acquisitions by formerly enslaved people in the Western Hemisphere. Most lacked the capital to sustain the villages and were forced to revert to subsistence farming.
The takeaway is that the structural denial of land as a vehicle for wealth was, from the very inception, the mechanism by which colonial inequality was reproduced after slavery officially ended. This story was never unique to Guyana.
Across the Caribbean, the same crushing plantation logic played out. In Jamaica, emancipated workers were systematically excluded from crown lands after 1838; the 1888 Land Settlement Act maintained its European bias, and it was not until the Moyne Commission of 1938-39, convened after labour riots across the region, that meaningful land reform was even contemplated. In Trinidad, the British simply overlaid one plantation hierarchy onto another, with land concentrated in European hands well into the twentieth century.
In Zimbabwe, Mugabe inherited a system so skewed that, as late as 1980, Black Zimbabweans were effectively locked out of productive land by the Lancaster House settlement. When he eventually moved, brutally and without institutional capacity, the result was economic collapse. The lesson is not that land reform was wrong; it is that reform without institutional architecture, legal frameworks, and post-transfer support is a recipe for disaster. I hope by now you’re beginning to get a clear picture of President Ali’s vision.
South Africa offers an equally sobering parallel. Since 1994, the ANC has consistently failed to meet its redistribution targets. The “willing-seller, willing-buyer” model, embraced under World Bank advice, handed market power back to landowners who inflated prices, and the newly resettled could not access bank loans because they held no formal title. Without title, there was no collateral; without collateral, no capital to invest. Not surprisingly, the promise of land reform failed.
Singapore drew a sharply different lesson. Facing a post-colonial housing crisis in 1960, the Housing Development Board was granted sweeping powers under the Land Acquisition Act. The Act allowed the state to acquire land below market value in the public interest. Armed with institutional capacity to build, the state proceeded to survey and train engineers to deliver at scale. Within ten years, it had built 54,000 flats.
Today, more than 80 per cent of Singapore’s population lives in state-built housing, and home ownership, the single greatest driver of household wealth creation, exceeds 90%. What Singapore understood, and what too many post-colonial governments failed to grasp, is that the institutional machinery must precede the ambition.
This is precisely what President Ali has committed himself and his administration to doing. The full digitisation of the GLSC within four years matters and should be applauded. His vision of an entity that he described as “system-based, people-centred, and service-driven” is not merely a modernisation slogan; it is an acknowledgement that Guyana cannot repeat the failures of Zimbabwe or South Africa.
In those countries, ambition outran administration. President Ali is well aware that hundreds of citizens in some communities have already endured decades of uncertainty living on un-titled lots while the state and claimants argue over who really owns the ground beneath their feet.
To put the scale in perspective: clearing Guyana’s 75,000 housing backlog alone requires the development of 20,000 acres of new land, an area nearly half the size of Antigua, and it falls to GLSC to survey, title, and deliver every one of those acres with speed and precision.
That President Ali, who cut his teeth walking back dams with surveyors as Minister of Housing, now stands as the architect of the most ambitious land distribution programme in this nation’s post-independence history, is no accident. President Ali stands at the critical juncture where the convergence of institutional memory, political will, and oil is fuelling a moment that Guyana may not see again in our generation.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.
