Guyana Orders Compulsory Land Acquisition for La Bonne Intention Estate Road

Land along the corridor of the La Bonne Intention estate road, running from the railway embankment into the estate on the East Coast Demerara, has been opened to compulsory acquisition by an order published in the Official Gazette of Guyana. The Acquisition of Lands for Public Purposes (LBI Estate Road – Railway Embankment to Estate) Order 2026, cited as Order No. 195 of 2026, appears at page 1123 of Gazette No. 426/2026, an Extraordinary issue dated Saturday, 7 November 2026. The instrument was published by the authority of the Government, from Georgetown, in the Legal Supplement (Section B) of that issue.

The order is subsidiary legislation made under the Acquisition of Lands for Public Purposes Act, Chapter 62:05 of the Laws of Guyana — the statute under which the State has historically taken private land for public works, including the road reserves being assembled along the coast. Gazette No. 426/2026 was printed by Guyana National Printers Limited, 1 Public Road, La Penitence, Greater Georgetown, and carries the standard note that it appears on an extraordinary day directed by the Government.

The issue is a single-item publication: Acts are recorded as nil, Bills as nil, and Order No. 195 of 2026 is the only subsidiary legislation listed in the table of contents. Its text runs across pages 1123 and 1124 of the Legal Supplement.

A targeted acquisition for a single corridor

The order is drawn narrowly and named for its geography rather than for a parish or an administrative region: its subject is the LBI estate road, and its stated limits are the railway embankment at one end and the estate at the other. That framing identifies the corridor whose land is being taken, running inland from the coastal railway line into the La Bonne Intention estate, rather than a general road reserve across the coast.

An order of this series is how the State formally brings the lands described in it within a public purpose — here, the construction and use of the estate road — and it is the instrument that residents and landowners along the corridor must read to know whether their parcels are affected.

One of several road acquisitions in a fortnight

The LBI order did not appear alone. It was one of a sequence of acquisition orders for road corridors published within a month, including a companion order issued the same day:

• Order No. 194 of 2026 — Acquisition of Lands for Public Purposes (Public Road Reserve – Plantation Schoonord to Plantation Reynstein Wales Estate) Order 2026, Gazette No. 425/2026, 7 November 2026, p. 1121.
• Order No. 190 of 2026 — Acquisition of Lands for Public Purposes (Public Road Reserve – Plantation Versailles to Parika Highway) Order 2026, 24 October 2026, p. 1075.
• Order No. 182 of 2026 — Acquisition of Lands for Public Purposes (Road Extension Heroes Highway to Ogle/Timehri Highway) Order 2026, 10 October 2026, p. 947.

Taken together, the pattern is of a programme assembling land for road reserves and extensions on both banks of the Demerara and along the East Coast, with the LBI corridor added to the list on the first Saturday of November.

The estate and the embankment

La Bonne Intention, known as LBI, is a sugar estate settlement on the East Coast Demerara whose name recurs in the gazette’s transport and mortgage notices, both as a village district and as an estate compound. Guyana Sugar Corporation Inc. lists its registered office at the La Bonne Intention (LBI) Estate compound on the East Coast Demerara.

The railway embankment named in the order is the same feature used across the gazette to describe East Coast house lots, which are routinely conveyed as lying “south of the Railway Embankment” in districts such as Lusignan, Good Hope and Foulis. That makes the corridor a densely settled strip of residential lots and small holdings, and it places the acquisition squarely in front of individual house-lot owners rather than a single large landholder.

The practical consequence is that the land needed for the estate road has been placed on a statutory footing, with the order itself serving as the public notice of what is being taken and for what purpose. Residents and landowners along the embankment-to-estate line now have a defined legal instrument to test their position against, and the corridor is fixed in the official record as public road land rather than as estate land.

Source: Official Gazette of Guyana, No. 426/2026 (Extraordinary), 7 November 2026, Legal Supplement – B, p. 1123 (official reference: Order No. 195 of 2026).