THE MANDATE IS NOT DISCRETIONARY

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THE
ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM • GOVERNANCE • ELECTORAL INTEGRITY.                                                                                                   

Editorial — Electoral Governance
The Mandate Is Not Discretionary: President Ali Must Act on Article 161

This is not a vacuum in the law. It is a vacuum manufactured by an Executive that prefers paralysis to a Leader of the Opposition it does not like.
The 592 Guardian | July 2026
Kaieteur News’s Peeping Tom column this week calls for the courts to “settle” the question of GECOM commissioner tenure, framing the dispute as an unresolved ambiguity that only judicial intervention can cure. It is a comfortable position for everyone content to wait. It is also wrong, and it lets the one actor with a present constitutional duty — the President of Guyana — off the hook entirely.
There is no ambiguity here. There is a refusal.

Two Provisions, Not One
Article 225, imported into the Elections Commission framework through Article 161(6), governs removal for cause: infirmity, misconduct, the disciplinary track that shields a sitting commissioner from being purged mid-term for political convenience.                                                                                    Nobody is invoking that provision against the opposition-nominated commissioners. Nobody has alleged misconduct. That is precisely why the “security of tenure” defence being raised on their behalf is a category error — it answers a question nobody asked.
The actual provision in play is Article 161(3)(b): three members appointed by the President acting on the advice of the Leader of the Opposition, tendered after meaningful consultation with the non-governmental parties in the National Assembly. The text names an office, not an individual. It has always named the office. That is why the same phrase recurs, unaltered in meaning, in the appointment of the Chancellor and Chief Justice under Article 127, the Judicial and Public Service Commissions under Articles 198 and 200, and the GECOM Chairperson under Article 161(2) itself.
Follow the logic of “permanent commissioner” theory to its end and it collapses on contact with its own premise: had the 2025 elections returned a different government, would anyone seriously argue the opposition-nominated commissioners should answer to advice tendered by a Leader of the Opposition who no longer exists in that configuration? The theory only survives because it currently protects the people asserting it.

Where the Obligation Actually Sits
GECOM’s own Chairperson has already said, on the record, that she has no power to remove or reconstitute the Commission herself — that the Constitution assigns appointment and removal elsewhere, and that the path runs through the President once the Leader of the Opposition tenders his nominees. That is not an unsettled question. That is the President being told, by his own Commission’s Chairperson, where his desk is.
Azruddin Mohamed, as the sitting Leader of the Opposition following meaningful consultation, holds the sole constitutional standing to tender that advice under Article 161(3)(b). Not the immediate past Leader of the Opposition. Not the Forward Guyana Movement, however useful a third seat might be to a compromise communique The office, as currently occupied, and no other.

The President’s instruments of appointment are not a courtesy he extends when convenient. They are a duty triggered by the tendering of valid advice.

Whether the appointing power is exercised promptly or withheld indefinitely is therefore not a gap in the Constitution — it is a choice made daily inside the Office of the President. A choice, this publication notes, made considerably easier by the fact that the current Leader of the Opposition is no friend of this government.

What the Courts Cannot Fix
Peeping Tom is right that political compromise cannot override constitutional text. He is wrong about what the text requires the courts to resolve. A judicial reference would take months, invite appeal, and hand every interested party an incentive to relitigate a question the Constitution already answers in plain language. What it would not do is compel a President who is already declining to act under clear advice to suddenly act under a court order he can also slow-walk.

Guyana does not have a drafting problem at Article 161. It has an enforcement problem at the Office of the President.

The remedy is not five more months of uncertainty manufactured for the comfort of incumbents on both sides of the seat — it is the President discharging the duty the Constitution already places on him.

THE GUARDIAN’S DEMAND
President Irfaan Ali must formally receive the Leader of the Opposition’s Article 161(3)(b) nominees and issue the instruments of appointment within thirty days of their tender, consistent with the duty the Constitution already imposes on his office. Anything short of that is not constitutional caution. It is obstruction with a legal-sounding excuse.
— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Trinidad’s Golden Silence : Fails Venezuela in it hour of Need .

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦TRANSPARENT OBJECTIVITY JOURNALISM

Trinidad’s Golden Silence: Fails Venezuela in its hour of need

When two powerful earthquakes tore through Venezuela on 24 June 2026, toppling buildings, crushing lives, and forcing rescue teams into a race against time, the Caribbean was handed a test of basic regional humanity. Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela’s nearest neighbour, should have answered that test with speed, visible solidarity, and concrete action. Instead, its public posture amounted to sympathy wrapped in caution: an offer of support “if requested,” rather than an unmistakable move to place assistance in motion.

That distinction matters. In earthquake disasters, the first hours are everything. Survivors buried beneath rubble do not benefit from diplomatic caution or polished statements. They need urban search-and-rescue teams, medical support, emergency shelter, and logistics that can be mobilised while there is still a chance to pull people out alive. International reporting showed that other countries responded with urgency: Mexico moved to deploy specialized rescue teams, while the United States, Qatar, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic signalled assistance quickly. Against that backdrop, Trinidad and Tobago’s response looked not merely restrained, but conspicuously slow.

The government’s defenders may point to procedure. They will say sovereignty matters, that assistance should be coordinated carefully, and that no state should impose itself on another in the middle of a calamity. That argument is not frivolous. But it is also incomplete. There is a wide gap between reckless intervention and decisive regional leadership. A government can make an immediate, public, and practical offer of help without violating diplomatic norms. It can pre-position assets, dispatch medical supplies, open lines to emergency coordinators, and make clear that the closest neighbour is ready to act the moment clearance is given. What it should not do is hide behind language so conditional that it sounds like a neighbour waiting at the gate while the house burns.

This is where geography becomes moral pressure. Trinidad and Tobago is not a distant observer reacting from another hemisphere. It sits just across a narrow stretch of sea from Venezuela.                                                                                             That proximity is not a matter of symbolism; it is a measure of responsibility. The nearer state should be among the first to respond, not among the last to settle on a cautious formulation. When a region is struck by disaster, proximity ought to translate into readiness, not hesitation. Yet that is exactly the impression Port of Spain has left.

The scale of the Venezuelan tragedy only sharpens the criticism. Reports from the United Nations and major international outlets described a grave and worsening situation, with deaths, injuries, and widespread destruction rising rapidly in the aftermath.

ReliefWeb’s situation reporting underscored the urgency of coordination, rescue, and humanitarian response in the immediate days after the quakes. That is why public solidarity alone is not enough. Sympathy does not cut through reinforced concrete. Readiness does not free the trapped. Only action does.

There is also a political context that cannot be ignored. Relations between Port of Spain and Caracas have long been strained, and that tension may well have shaped the government’s careful language. But if political friction is what explains the delay, then the explanation is not a defense; it is the indictment. Human beings buried under collapsed buildings should never become collateral in diplomatic discomfort. In a moment like this, the question is not whether relations are difficult. It is whether leadership can rise above them.

That is why this episode demands scrutiny, not excuses.
What exactly did the government do in the first hours after the earthquakes?
Was there a direct call to Venezuelan authorities?
Were rescue assets identified and readied?
Did the Coast Guard, Defence Force, or emergency management agencies receive instructions to prepare for deployment or logistics support? Were supplies placed on standby? Were CARICOM or bilateral channels used to accelerate consent and coordination?
These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum questions a serious public deserves answered.

If Trinidad and Tobago lacked the capacity to deploy search-and-rescue teams, then say so plainly and explain why. If its hands were tied by diplomatic protocol, then show what was done to overcome that obstacle. If the government chose caution because of political calculations, then the public should know that too. In a crisis of this scale, transparency is not optional. It is part of accountability.

The strongest case for regional solidarity is not sentimental. It is practical. Today’s disaster zone can be tomorrow’s rescue corridor. “Today for me, tomorrow for you” is not merely a slogan; it is a principle of Caribbean survival. Small states know, better than most, that when catastrophe comes, help cannot always wait on perfect paperwork. It must move with urgency, competence, and courage.

Trinidad and Tobago had an to show that it understood that truth. So far, it has chosen caution over force, language over logistics, and procedural comfort over visible neighbourly duty.
That may satisfy bureaucrats. It will not satisfy the families still waiting in the rubble, or the region that expects more from a government positioned so close to the suffering. History will remember not the sentiment of the statement, but the speed of the response.

The 592 GUARDIAN offer these few questions for the relevant authorities :

⇒What specific actions did the government take in the first 24 hours after the earthquakes struck Venezuela?
⇒Did Trinidad and Tobago offer any deployable rescue or medical assets immediately, or only a general expression of readiness?
⇒Was direct contact made with Venezuelan authorities, and at what time?
– ⇒Did the Coast Guard, Defence Force, or national emergency agencies receive instructions to prepare for deployment?
⇒Were humanitarian supplies, medical kits, or emergency shelters pre-positioned for rapid transfer?
⇒Was the government waiting for a formal request from Venezuela before acting, and if so, why?
⇒Did CARICOM or any bilateral channel help facilitate faster coordination?
⇒What prevented Trinidad and Tobago from publicly announcing immediate, practical assistance?
⇒Was the response shaped by current political tensions with Caracas?
⇒Does the government have a standing protocol for rapid assistance to neighbouring states struck by disasters, and was it activated?                                                                                                      Until these questions are adequately addressed ,the public can draw their own conclusions .                                                      THE 592 GUARDIAN maintains its objectivity, in addressing issues in the public’s interest  

SANCTIONED HANDS FAMILIAR ARCHECITURE

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THE 592 GUARDIAN
Accountability Journalism for the Guyanese Public Interest

SANCTIONED HANDS, FAMILIAR ARCHITECTURE: VENEZUELA’S EARTHQUAKE RESPONSE HOLDS A MIRROR TO GUYANA’S PETROSTATE DECAY
EDITORIAL | JULY 2026

When acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez addressed her earthquake-shattered nation in the early hours of June 28, she did so flanked by officials carrying a combined burden of U.S. and Canadian sanctions for corruption, narcotics trafficking, human rights violations, and — with particular relevance — the deliberate obstruction of international humanitarian aid. The death toll from the June 24 double earthquake has officially surpassed 1,500. Independent organizations and the United Nations estimate tens of thousands remain missing. And the officials tasked with the national reconstruction response cannot legally receive a wire transfer from a Western bank.
Georgetown should not watch this with detached concern. It should watch it with recognition.

THE ANATOMY OF CARACAS’S CAPTURED RESPONSE
The architecture of Venezuela’s disaster governance deserves precise enumeration, because precision is what distinguishes accountability from commentary.
Rodríguez placed the country’s Military Command under Defense Minister Gustavo González López, sanctioned by Washington since 2015. She assigned her brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez — sanctioned by both the United States and Canada for corruption and political repression — to chair the presidential commission responsible for temporary housing and rapid reconstruction. The broader commission incorporates Food Minister Carlos Leal Tellería, sanctioned by Canada; Caracas Mayor Carmen Meléndez, sanctioned by the United States; and Carabobo Governor Rafael Lacava, blacklisted by Washington in 2019 specifically for blocking the entry of international humanitarian aid into Venezuela.
Standing beside her at the José María Vargas Sports Complex was Diosdado Cabello — alleged head of a massive money-laundering and narcotics network, subject to a $25 million U.S. arrest bounty — whom Rodríguez instructed to keep “working and inspecting” the clothing drives while rescuers miles away dug through concrete rubble with their bare hands.
The consequence of this arrangement is not merely optics. The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a temporary humanitarian waiver suspending restrictions on financial transactions tied to earthquake relief — a procedural concession that is rendered structurally incoherent by the fact that the officials administering that relief remain individually sanctioned. International donors, multilateral institutions, and bilateral partners face an impossible compliance architecture: funds released for humanitarian purposes flow into a command structure that Western treasuries have formally designated as corrupt.

The waiver opens the pipe. The sanctioned cabinet poisons the well it feeds into.

This is not governance responding to a crisis. This is capture consuming one.

THE MIRROR GEORGETOWN REFUSES TO LOOK INTO
Guyana’s political class will observe Venezuela’s response and locate itself on the correct side of the moral ledger. This is a comfort it has not earned.

The structural condition on display in Caracas — the routing of national resource governance, public expenditure, and crisis authority through a closed network of loyalists insulated from legal accountability — is not a Venezuelan pathology. It is a petrostate pathology. And Guyana is a petrostate.

Consider the precise parallels.
Venezuela placed its earthquake reconstruction under officials who cannot be audited by Western partners. Guyana placed its single most consequential sovereign instrument — the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement — under a cost recovery and profit oil architecture that Christopher Ram’s forensic analysis has demonstrated operates without functional audit capacity, without independent verification of ExxonMobil’s submitted cost claims, and without the enforcement mechanisms a sovereign state requires to prevent systematic fiscal hemorrhage. The GGMC’s last credible independent audit is now nine years stale. The Guyana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’s self-certification failures — documented in this publication’s collaboration with TIGI — mean that Guyana’s extractive sector reports its own compliance to itself.

This is not oversight. This is the formal appearance of oversight performing the function of its absence

 Venezuela assigned reconstruction authority to Jorge Rodríguez, whose familial relationship to the acting president is the primary qualification on display. Guyana’s Public Accounts Committee — the constitutionally mandated instrument for legislative scrutiny of public expenditure — has been systematically rendered non-functional through the deliberate absenteeism of government members, depriving it of quorum at precisely the moments when accountability is most operationally required. The Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services was reduced from monthly to quarterly meetings.

The institution of parliamentary oversight did not fail in Guyana. It was disassembled from the inside, procedurally, by the same administration that controls the expenditure it is constitutionally obligated to examine

 Venezuela placed Governor Lacava — sanctioned specifically for blocking international humanitarian aid — in charge of reconstruction. Guyana awarded the Wales Gas-to-Energy contract to Venezuelan-linked entities BSJI and Lindsayca-CH4 through a procurement process that has not withstood public scrutiny, with MOAP Inc. payroll irregularities and budget variances that remain unreconciled in any public accounting. The contract award was not blocked. It was celebrated.

Venezuela’s acting president addressed a national catastrophe wearing a military cap, praising armed forces for folding clothes while citizens died under rubble, offering the nation a message that “the future is always marked by joy.” Guyana’s President Ali announced a diaspora bond to international applause while no enabling legislation exists, no regulatory framework has been tabled, and no independent institution has been empowered to receive, audit, or protect the savings of Guyanese citizens abroad who might invest in faith.
The parallel is not rhetorical. It is structural. Both governments have constructed governance architectures in which the formal institutions of accountability — audit, parliamentary scrutiny, independent procurement review, transparent resource contracts — exist as facades behind which captured networks make decisions of national consequence without legal exposure.

THE AID DIMENSION GUYANA CANNOT ESCAPE
Guyana holds a seat at CARICOM. Guyana chairs no small portion of regional diplomatic conversation about Venezuela. And Guyana’s own governance deficit will materially constrain any meaningful bilateral solidarity it attempts to offer.

Any humanitarian contribution Guyana extends toward Venezuela’s earthquake recovery will pass through Georgetown’s own procurement and disbursement machinery — machinery that this publication has documented, across multiple investigations, as structurally compromised

Sole-source contracting, as demonstrated in the GPL-InterEnergy award, is not an exception in Guyana’s public expenditure framework. It is a pattern. A humanitarian disbursement routed through that framework does not become clean because its destination is a disaster zone.
More fundamentally: Guyana cannot credibly advocate for transparent, accountable reconstruction governance in Venezuela while refusing to subject its own extractive revenues, parliamentary committees, and public contracts to the standards it would demand of Caracas.

The moral authority to hold Venezuela’s sanctioned cabinet to account requires first demonstrating that Guyanese oil wealth is itself governed by institutions with teeth. It is not.

The Amerindian Peoples’ Association’s unresolved FPIC complaint before the IACHR, the 25-year absence of audited financials from the Amerindian Purpose Fund, the Indigenous land rights violations at Chinese Landing — these are not peripheral footnotes. They are the accountability record of the state that would position itself as a regional governance exemplar.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES
Rodríguez offered Venezuela “hope” and “joy” while tens of thousands remained buried. Ali offers Guyana “progress” and “transformation” while the instruments designed to verify that progress have been systematically hollowed.
The difference between Caracas and Georgetown is not the presence or absence of capture. It is the degree to which capture has been forced into the open by catastrophe.
Venezuela’s earthquake did not create a governance failure. It illuminated one that was already complete.
Guyana’s reckoning has not yet arrived with that clarity. It will.

The 592 Guardian calls on the National Assembly to immediately restore the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services to its monthly schedule, reinstate functional quorum requirements in the Public Accounts Committee enforceable by the Speaker, and commission an independent audit of the GGMC’s verification record covering the full nine-year gap. We call on the Ali administration to table enabling legislation for the diaspora bond before a single dollar is solicited. And we call on Guyanese civil society to resist the temptation of continental distance — the assumption that Venezuela’s condition belongs to Venezuela alone.

Petrostate capture does not respect borders. It follows the oil.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, extractive industry, and civic rights. Editorial positions represent the institutional voice of the publication.

THE COUNSEL WHO WOULD BE GATEKEEPER

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THE 592 GUARDIAN
Independent Accountability Journalism · Guyana
EDITORIAL
 June 2026 | Georgetown, Guyana

The Counsel Who Would Be Gatekeeper: Devindra Kissoon and the Architecture of a Monopoly

When an officer of the court wields legal process not to vindicate rights but to extinguish competition, the integrity of the bar —and of Guyana’s constitutional order—demands an accounting.

The facts documented in Kaieteur News’ three-part investigation into Guyana’s commercial explosives market are not in dispute. They emerge from sworn affidavits, court filings, and correspondence on the letterhead of London House Chambers. They are, in the precise language of the law, matters of record. What remains in dispute — and what this Board now addresses directly — is whether the conduct they reveal is compatible with the duties of an attorney-at-law admitted to practice before the courts of this Republic.
The subject is Devindra Kissoon, known commercially as Dave Kissoon: a U.S. citizen, former director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Guyana, and the self-described exclusive supplier of explosives to the Guyanese mining market for decades. His firm, London House Chambers, acts as commercial counsel to Orica Mining Services, the world’s largest commercial explosives provider. In that capacity, the record shows, Kissoon has systematically deployed the machinery of the High Court to accomplish what the Civil Law of Guyana Act expressly forbids: the creation and enforcement of a commercial monopoly.

The Civil Law Act states that grants or licenses for the ‘sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything within Guyana… are altogether contrary to the laws of Guyana, and so are and shall be utterly void.’

THE LEGAL ARCHITECTURE OF EXCLUSION                                   
In 2015, Dominicana De Cales S.A. — Docalsa — a regional licensee of global distributor Dyno Nobel, attempted to enter the Guyanese market. This was a lawful commercial act. Dyno Nobel is a credentialed international explosives provider. Docalsa’s principals are not insurgents; they are business people pursuing trade in a jurisdiction whose laws explicitly contemplate competition.

Kissoon’s response was not to compete. It was to litigate. He filed an ex parte application — a proceeding conducted without notice to the opposing party — arguing that Docalsa’s solicitations to domestic buyers constituted tortious interference with his prospective business relations. In his sworn affidavit of 30 July 2015, Kissoon named BK Quarries Inc., AGM Inc., Guyana Goldfields Inc., Troy Resources Guyana Inc., and Pharsalus Gold Inc. as clients with whom he expected continuous and exclusive business — a claim that, stated plainly, is an assertion of monopoly rights presented to a court as though they were enforceable entitlements.

The High Court granted an interim injunction in August 2015. Docalsa was frozen out of the market. When the competitor attempted to discharge the injunction in December 2016, London House Chambers deployed procedural arguments to strike out their defense. The matter did not proceed until May 2018 — nearly three years during which a lawful competitor was excluded from a market that Guyana’s Constitution and statutory law promised would remain open.
That three-year exclusion coincided precisely with one of the most consequential periods in Guyana’s modern economic history: the confirmation of the Stabroek Block discovery in 2015 and the onset of the infrastructure surge that would require, among other inputs, commercial explosives at scale. The timing was not incidental. It was, the record suggests, the point.

THE THREAT OF ARREST: AN OFFICER OF THE COURT                 SPEAKS
This Board directs particular scrutiny to a piece of correspondence dated 14 August 2015, dispatched on London House Chambers letterhead to Docalsa. The letter, obtained by Kaieteur News, did not merely assert a legal position. It explicitly threatened a ‘warrant for your arrest and imprisonment’ should Docalsa fail to withdraw from the market. It further noted that customs authorities had been instructed to seize and destroy their products.

An attorney who threatens a competitor’s principals with arrest and imprisonment — not as a legal prediction, but as an instrument of market exclusion — has ceased to function as counsel. He has become an enforcement arm.

Let this be stated without euphemism: threatening arrest and imprisonment in a cease-and-desist letter to a lawful commercial actor is not the conduct of an officer of the court discharging professional obligations. It is the use of legal authority — real or implied — to intimidate. It weaponises the coercive power of the state, or the appearance thereof, to achieve market outcomes that the law explicitly prohibits. The Guyana Bar Association and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court bear an institutional obligation to examine whether this conduct falls within the bounds of professional propriety. This Board calls on both bodies to do so.

The November 2025 cease-and-desist letter to Eclisar Financial — a firm involved in state-sponsored audits of offshore oil operations — carries the same architecture, scaled to the present moment of petrostate expansion. Explicitly copied to the Minister of Natural Resources and the Commissioner of Police, the letter threatens ‘actual, punitive and exemplary damages… in an amount to exceed US$1,000,000.00′ and asserts that London House’s client remains the ‘only authorized explosives dealer in Guyana.’ The carbon copy to the Minister of Natural Resources is not procedural courtesy. It is a signal — to the recipient, to the market, and to any regulator who might contemplate authorizing a competitor — that institutional power stands behind the claim.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONTRADICTION                                        
The irony documented in the Kaieteur News investigation is not merely rhetorical. It is legally precise and professionally damning. Devindra Kissoon was lead commercial counsel in litigation that successfully dismantled the decade-long state telecommunications monopoly held by the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company, arguing before the courts that such monopolies violated the same Civil Law of Guyana Act that he now relies upon — by implication — to defend market exclusivity in explosives.
The Act’s prohibition is not ambiguous. It declares void ‘all grants or licenses for the sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything within Guyana.’ Kissoon understands this provision. He argued it successfully. He knows, as counsel must know, that the Explosives Act’s regulatory framework — however legitimate its public safety rationale — cannot lawfully be converted into a permanent barrier to market entry for the benefit of a single commercial actor. The police commissioner’s licensing authority exists to prevent diversion of dangerous materials to criminal uses, not to guarantee a monopoly to any attorney’s client.

The Explosives Act creates a safety regime. Kissoon appears to have converted it into a property right. These are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously.

THE U.S. CITIZEN AND THE SHERMAN STANDARD                       
Devindra Kissoon is a United States citizen. That fact carries weight beyond biography. The Sherman Antitrust Act — the foundational statute of U.S. competition law — criminalises monopolistic conduct and attempts to monopolise any part of trade or commerce. American courts have held that the Sherman Act applies to conduct abroad that has a direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on U.S. commerce. Guyana’s extractive sector, in which Kissoon claims exclusive explosives supply rights, is substantially capitalised by U.S.-registered entities and subject to extensive cross-border commercial flows.
This Board does not assert that U.S. antitrust jurisdiction attaches to the specific conduct documented here. That is a legal question for competent counsel. We assert, however, that a U.S. citizen operating in a market where American firms do business — and using legal threats to exclude competitors — operates in a landscape where extraterritorial regulatory scrutiny is not merely theoretical. The U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission have both demonstrated willingness to examine conduct affecting U.S. commercial interests in foreign jurisdictions. Kissoon’s AmCham directorship further embeds him in a network of U.S.-Guyana commercial relationships in which his market conduct becomes visible to exactly the regulatory audience most capable of acting on it.

THE FDI CALCULUS                                                                                  
Guyana is, by IMF measurement, the world’s fastest-growing economy. Its 2024 GDP growth exceeded thirty percent. The country requires foreign direct investment at scale to build the highways, sea defences, energy infrastructure, and industrial capacity that its oil revenues are meant to fund. That investment requires quarrying. Quarrying requires explosives. When the explosives supply chain operates through a single gatekeeper who has demonstrated willingness to use legal threats to suppress competition, every investor in every extraction-adjacent sector inherits that risk.

Foreign capital does not enter markets where legal process is weaponised as a market control mechanism. The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and institutional equity investors conducting due diligence on Guyanese infrastructure projects will encounter this record. When they do, they will price it. Guyana’s investment climate absorbs the cost of Kissoon’s conduct whether or not any single project is visibly deterred.

DEMANDS                                                                                                    
This Board directs the following demands to the named institutional actors:
→To the Guyana Bar Association: Initiate a formal professional conduct inquiry into whether the August 2015 and November 2025 cease-and-desist letters issued by London House Chambers, and the ex parte litigation strategy deployed against Docalsa, constitute a breach of the professional duties owed by an officer of the court to the legal system and to commercial counterparties. The threat of arrest and imprisonment deployed as a market-exclusion instrument is not advocacy. It requires examination.
→To the Chief Justice: Direct the court’s registry to review the procedural history of the Docalsa litigation — specifically, the use of strike-out applications to delay proceedings from 2015 to 2018 — for consistency with the duty of candour and the prohibition on using procedural mechanisms to oppress opposing parties.
→To the Competition and Consumer Affairs Commission: Open a formal market inquiry into the commercial explosives sector under the Competition and Fair Trading Act. The concentration of supply in a single commercial channel, maintained through preemptive litigation and cease-and-desist correspondence copied to government ministers, constitutes a prima facie matter for regulatory examination. The Commission’s enabling legislation provides the authority. What has been lacking is the will.
→To the Minister of Natural Resources: Explain publicly why your ministry received a copy of the November 2025 cease-and-desist letter threatening a competitor in the explosives market. Your acceptance of that notification — without documented objection or referral to the Competition Commission — implies a degree of ministerial endorsement of the incumbent’s market position that is incompatible with your statutory obligations under the Competition and Fair Trading Act and your constitutional duty to act in the public interest.
→To the Commissioner of Police: Clarify under what statutory authority the August 2015 cease-and-desist letter could credibly assert that customs had been ‘instructed’ to seize and destroy a competitor’s products, and whether any such instruction was in fact given. If it was, on whose authority and under which provision of the Explosives Act or Customs Act did it issue.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY STANDARD FOR OFFICERS OF THE COURT                                                                                                          
This Board closes with a principle that is neither partisan nor speculative. Officers of the court in every common law jurisdiction are held to a standard of conduct that transcends their client’s commercial interests. An attorney may zealously represent a client. An attorney may litigate aggressively. An attorney may seek injunctions, file strike-out applications, and write cease-and-desist letters — all within the bounds of professional duty.
What an attorney may not do is deploy the language and implied authority of the legal system to threaten competitors with arrest and imprisonment as a market control strategy.

What an attorney who successfully argued against telecommunications monopoly may not do is build a commercial monopoly in another sector using the same legal instruments he once condemned. And what an attorney who holds U.S. citizenship and leads a chamber of commerce bridging American and Guyanese commercial interests may not do is cultivate, in his professional conduct, the kind of market-distorting behaviour that the legal systems of both his countries prohibit.

Devindra Kissoon is not beyond accountability. He is, precisely because of his prominence, his dual citizenship, and his institutional affiliations, subject to a heightened standard of scrutiny.

The 592 Guardian will continue to document his conduct and the conduct of every institutional actor whose silence enables it.
The gatekeepers of Guyana’s explosives market will answer to Guyana’s law, or they will answer to the investors, institutions, and international partners who are watching what kind of legal culture this Republic is building on the foundation of its oil wealth.
                                           The Editorial Board
                                            The 592 Guardian

RESPONSE TO THE “INQUISITIVE OBSERVER”

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THE 592 GUARDIAN | EDITORIAL RESPONSE

The Inquisitive Observer’s Gulf Analogy Cannot Survive Contact With Guyanese Facts

A response to “The Inquisitive Observer,” published in Guyana Chronicle

The column in question is theoretically coherent and factually bankrupt. Its author correctly identifies that oil-rich states must convert hydrocarbon revenues into durable human capital — the UAE and Qatar offer genuine instructive precedents on that point. The argument collapses, however, the moment it arrives in Guyana, because the writer has chosen as his Exhibit A a programme that is itself a study in procurement failure, institutional opacity, and unresolved accountability.

GOAL is not a model. GOAL is a warning.

In early 2025, Staffordshire University publicly denied any affiliation with courses being offered under the GOAL initiative through a third-party intermediary, the International School Development Consortium (ISDC). Hundreds of Guyanese students had enrolled under the impression that they were earning internationally recognised degrees, only to discover that Staffordshire University had never authorised those courses.

Students registered for Maritime Affairs found themselves assigned Business and Finance modules. Those pursuing psychology and engineering encountered equivalent programme mismatches. These are not administrative anomalies. These are systemic failures of due diligence at the ministerial level.
The government’s response was not accountability — it was deflection. Vice President Jagdeo attributed the crisis to a change in management at the university, dismissed characterisations of fraud, and assured the public that a resolution was being sought through a meeting in London.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Ashni Singh redirected press inquiries about GOAL’s financial arrangements with ISDC to GOAL Director Professor Jacob Opadeyi — who initially promised the information by March 17, and then did not provide it. 
The financial dimension alone demands a forensic reckoning. In 2024, the Government injected $4 billion into GOAL — just $100 million more than the total allocation to the University of Guyana, Guyana’s only public tertiary institution.

The public is entitled to know how much of that $4 billion flowed to ISDC, what contractual oversight existed, and who bears liability for the breach.

To date, those questions remain unanswered.
Accountability analyst Christopher Ram called on the President to pause the programme, release the full ISDC contract, publish a detailed breakdown of all payments made, and subject GOAL to a forensic audit.

That call has not been acted upon.                                                    The writer’s Gulf comparison also exposes a structural contradiction he does not address. Qatar’s Education for a New Era initiative worked precisely because it was governed by a Supreme Education Council, an independent Education Institute, and an Evaluation Institute with a mandate to track outcomes against labour market needs. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 embeds education reform within a broader diversification architecture with measurable sectoral targets. The UAE’s early investments included direct grants to overseas students conditioned on return and service to national institutions. These were not scholarship disbursements laundered through unvetted intermediaries. They were governed ecosystems.

What does Guyana have in comparative terms? A programme operated outside normal procurement architecture, directed by an official who has a documented political relationship with the President — having supervised his doctoral dissertation, a thesis that has never been made public — and shielded from parliamentary scrutiny. GOAL has no published outcome data, no accreditation verification protocol, and no independent evaluation body. The writer praises the inputs while declining to examine the outputs.

Here, the Exxon question becomes decisive. ExxonMobil Guyana President Alistair Routledge recently announced the commissioning of a comprehensive industrial baseline study to assess Guyana’s labour capacity and future needs, stating explicitly that “it is becoming harder to find additional Guyanese workers, particularly those with the advanced skills and expertise required by a highly technical industry such as oil and gas.” This is not a peripheral data point. This is the principal employer in Guyana’s oil sector — the very sector that GOAL’s scholarships are ostensibly meant to serve — publicly declaring that the skilled labour deficit is widening, not closing. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued 13,713 work permits to foreign nationals in 2024, citing lack of local skills as the rationale. 

If GOAL were functioning as the writer claims — producing the engineers, ICT specialists, and technical professionals Guyana needs — Exxon would not be commissioning a skills gap study. The Ministry would not be importing nearly 14,000 foreign workers. The programme’s own graduation statistics would be visible in labour market outcomes. They are not.

The Inquisitive Observer’s instinct — that education is the indispensable instrument of resource nationalism — is correct in principle. The 592 Guardian has made that argument repeatedly. But honouring that principle demands that we apply it honestly. The Gulf states built enduring educational ecosystems on transparency, independent governance, and outcome accountability. Guyana has built a billion-dollar scholarship programme on opaque procurement, a politically connected director, a university partner that publicly disowned its association with the programme, and a government that silenced inquiry rather than invited it.

The graduates celebrating at GOAL’s recent ceremony are not the problem. They deserve recognition for their effort and better from their government. The problem is that a columnist has offered those graduates — and the Guyanese public — a flattering analogy in place of the accountability those graduates are owed.
Celebrating graduations while the ISDC liability question remains unresolved, while no forensic audit has been conducted, and while ExxonMobil is commissioning the skills gap survey the government’s own programme should have made unnecessary — this is not economic statecraft. It is state-managed amnesia.

The 592 Guardian calls, once again, for the immediate release of all GOAL-ISDC financial transactions, an independent forensic audit of the programme’s expenditures, a published accreditation verification report for every partner institution, and the tabling of all GOAL contractual arrangements before the National Assembly.

The oil will not wait. Neither will the facts.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, extractive industry, and public finance.

THE EMPTY CHAIR AS GOVERNMENT POLICY

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The 592 Guardian
Accountability Journalism for a Nation That Deserves Better

The Empty Chair as Government Policy

How the PPP administration has turned parliamentary absenteeism into a structural guarantee of impunity
Editorial | June 2026

Less than two weeks after its long-overdue formation, Guyana’s Public Accounts Committee is dead in the water. Not because of procedural confusion. Not because of resource constraints. Because the government’s elected members will not show up.
Four dates were proposed for the PAC’s inaugural session: June 22, June 23, June 24, and June 26. The Clerk’s office made the calls. The government benches were unavailable. Every single time. PAC Chairman Vishnu Panday has now confirmed publicly what anyone following Guyanese parliamentary governance has understood for years: the administration’s absence is not coincidence. It is method.

“The Government members’ reluctance to respond positively tells us that the affairs of proper governance are compromised,” Panday stated. The word he chose — compromised — deserves to sit without decoration. He is not describing a scheduling conflict. He is describing a political decision to prevent the one committee constitutionally empowered to hold the executive’s finances to account from doing its work.

The Architecture of Impunity
The mathematics of this dysfunction are more damning than any single allegation. The PAC has completed its examination of public financial records only through fiscal year 2018. Six full years — 2019 through 2024 — remain entirely unscrutinized. At the committee’s historical meeting frequency, clearing one fiscal year per calendar year, the backlog will not be resolved until 2031. By then, six new years will have accumulated behind it. The audit gap becomes permanent. That is not a consequence of this government’s behaviour. It is the design.
The previous parliamentary term, 2021 to 2025, produced its own indictment: 25 of 51 scheduled PAC meetings were cancelled. The reason cited, each and every time, was the unavailability of government members. This administration has now reproduced the same pattern within the first fortnight of a new term, before a single hearing has been held. The new parliament, same as the old.

Consider what those six unexamined years contain. They span the full arc of Guyana’s oil windfall: the first production revenues, the Gas-to-Energy project’s contested procurement, the proliferation of sole-source contracts, the expansion of state-linked commercial enterprises, and an infrastructure spending programme that has drawn repeated questions about oversight, competitive tendering, and beneficial ownership. The Auditor General has filed his reports. Parliament has received them. The PAC cannot examine them because the government will not attend.

Transparency as Rhetorical Performance
President Irfaan Ali and Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo have made transparency and prudent financial management cornerstones of their public communications. The administration advertises Guyana’s economic transformation to international investors, development partners, and multilateral lenders as evidence of disciplined, accountable governance. The language is fluent and well-rehearsed.

What Panday’s statement exposes is the gap between the rhetoric and the institutional reality. An administration genuinely committed to financial transparency does not need to be compelled to attend the PAC. It attends because transparency is not a communication strategy — it is a practice. The PPP government’s elected representatives will attend ribbon-cuttings, press conferences, and regional investment summits. They will not attend the committee that examines whether public money was spent as Parliament authorised.                                                The contradiction is not subtle. Panday made it explicit: the same government that “publicly champions transparency, accountability, and prudent financial management” is the same government whose members will not take their seats at the only table where those claims can be tested. The chair is empty. It has been empty, structurally and deliberately, for years.

What Investors With Integrity Should Note
Guyana markets itself as open for business. On the narrow question of whether capital can enter and whether contracts will be honoured, the answer is largely yes. But the business being conducted is not Guyana’s business. It is business transacted by a governing party that has systematically disabled the parliamentary mechanisms through which citizens verify how public resources are managed.

Responsible institutional investors, development finance institutions, and sovereign wealth fund counterparts operate under governance due-diligence requirements that extend beyond deal terms. They assess the quality of the public accountability ecosystem in which they are placing capital. A country where the PAC has a six-year audit backlog — not because the institution lacks capacity, but because the government refuses to attend — is a country that has answered a material governance question. The answer is not reassuring.

Some capital will come regardless. Capital without integrity always does, and the terms on which resource economies attract it are themselves a governance story. But those investors and development partners who weight institutional accountability should register what is being demonstrated here, with consistency and with impunity, in full public view.

The Constutional Stakes
The PAC is not a preference. It is a constitutional mandate. Its function — scrutinising the Auditor General’s annual reports to ensure public funds are spent as Parliament authorised — is the primary mechanism by which elected representatives exercise oversight of the executive’s use of public money. An administration that prevents that mechanism from functioning is not simply being evasive about individual expenditures. It is undermining the constitutional architecture of democratic accountability itself.

Panday has called on government members to attend and fulfil their obligations to the citizens who are their paymasters. The framing is deliberately civil. This editorial will be less so. Citizens of this country are owed six years of public accounts. Those years encompass billions of dollars in oil revenue, infrastructure spending, and state procurement conducted with minimal competitive constraint. The people whose names are on those contracts know that the committee empowered to examine them has been reliably, systematically, and deliberately prevented from meeting.
That is not a coincidence anyone should accept as such.

— The Editorial Board, The
Georgetown, Guyana | June 2026

MINISTER INDAR ECSTATIC MANIFESTATIONS

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

Minister Indar’s Ecstatic Manifestations

Minister Indar unwittingly got himself into a fine pickle.  In talking about negotiations with the Turkish electricity barge executives, he ventured into the realm of incomprehensible ecstatic manifestations. 

Our government led by President Ali, we made sure that we took some strong positions on negotiation.”

I am awed by unrestrained merriment that took hold of the honorable minister.  Apparently, Minister Indar is more the Minister of Public Comedies than he is as Minister of Public Utilities.  I humbly petition Excellency Ali to do his duty.  Make it official, please, Mr. President: Reappoint Deodat Indar to the Minister of National Hilarity portfolio.

When has our government led by Pres Ali…made sure that we took some strong positions on negotiation             

Because it is my government and my president, I search for such a record, hold both accountable.  To my fellow Guyanese: Seen as many Cuban medical personnel recently?  Check in Havana or Guantanamo. 

And there stands the government’s self-celebrating position of taking

The PPP Govt, as led by Pres Ali, took a strong position on deportees.  Not those who hailed from Demerara, Berbice and, (yes) Essequibo.  But those from far and farther away.  But then not even those that the government would be proud to invite to dinner at State House.  If the PPP wouldn’t welcome them at Congress, then they shouldn’t be in this country.  Game over.  Except that this isn’t a game. 

Hence, when Marco Rubio came sailing here like Christopher Columbus on his new voyage of discovery, he should have been given a return ticket there and then.  Take that message about third country deportees, and stuff it, buster.  How about that for taking a strong position on negotiation.  Gimme some Cubans doctors, and Guyana is duty bound to take in some Guyanese deportees.The U.S. milked them in their prime.  The U.S. must drink them in their grime and brine.

The Canadian gold people came here.  They put in a dollar and get an acre.  Thousands of acres.  From the small dollars invested, they swap out, flip over, and switch around those same now rich gold acres to new parties.  A million for a hundred more.  Sweet odds, lavish returns.  What strong position the PPP Govt, as led by Excellency Ali?  It happened once -nothing.  It happened again – no reaction from the Ali-led PPP Govt (again).  Some kind of special position and exceptional negotiation is that, from Minister Indar.  The foreign gold people pulled that one once.  Therefore, it made perfect financial sense (and leadership ones, too) to take a truly strong position and put a stopper in that loophole.  The situation cried out for that form of justice.  Like the blood of Abel cried out for recompense when the hand of a brother was raised fatally.  It was against what taints, even tampers, with the fabric of friendship.  What ought to have been a strong position taken (as led by Pres Ali) for a respectful relationship between Guyana and investors who rush here to grab a load of free gold.

I regret that in extoling the PPP Govt’s virtues: strong positions and the leadership of Dr. Ali, re negotiations, Minister Indar gave short thrift to history, and delighted himself with comedy.                                                                                                            Surely, he has to know that when he gleams with words like those that he descends into the old, soggy territory: what’s recklessly merry, of rank hilarity.  I think that Minister Indar has a second career waiting.  A master jester.  Hailed for making his mark as a determined, but still unskilled, entertainer.                         The PPP Govt seems to spawn them by the hundreds every week it’s in office.

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM 

A FIREFIGHTER’S ARREST, A MINISTER’S VEHICLE, AND THE ANATOMY OF PREFERENTIAL ENFORCEMENT

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦Independent Accountability Journalism♦ Guyana June  2026                                                                 EDITORIAL

A FIREFIGHTER’S ARREST, A MINISTER’S VEHICLE, AND THE ANATOMY OF PREFERENTIAL ENFORCEMENT

The Guyana Police Force’s conduct at Providence Stadium on June 28, 2026 was not an aberration. It was a pattern made visible.

I.WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS

On Saturday, June 28, 2026, at 11:41 in the morning, a Guyana Fire Service tender entered the compound of the Guyana National Stadium at Providence, East Bank Demerara, on a routine operational assignment: delivering water for sanitation use at the facility. While manoeuvring to exit through the eastern gate of the tarmac, the tender came into contact with a portable light pole. The pole fell and struck a motor vehicle parked nearby. That vehicle sustained damage to the right-side driver’s door and fender. No person was injured. The minister to whom the vehicle is assigned — Junior Housing Minister Vanessa Benn — was not present.

What followed was not proportionate to those facts. Traffic police ranks arrived and sought to arrest the driver — a fifty-year-old Leading Fireman — and reportedly attempted to detain at least two other firefighters who intervened on his behalf. A physical confrontation ensued. It was captured on video and circulated widely on social media. The lawmen eventually withdrew without effecting any arrest. One firefighter subsequently sought medical attention, alleging injury sustained during the police’s attempt to place him in a vehicle.

The Guyana Police Force, in its official statement, described the incident in anodyne bureaucratic language: “a commotion occurred” that was “subsequently de-escalated.” What the GPF’s statement did not say is that it omitted entirely that the damaged vehicle belonged to a government minister, referring only to “a motor vehicle attached to the Ministry of Housing.” It did not explain why traffic police sought an on-scene arrest for a vehicular accident on private property. It did not identify who authorised that response. And it did not address whether the Joint Services protocol governing inter-agency incidents between uniformed services was followed — because it was not.

The GPF’s own statement omitted that the damaged vehicle belonged to a government minister. That omission is itself an accountability failure.

II.THE PROTOCOL BREACH

Sources with direct knowledge of Guyana’s Joint Services operational framework have confirmed to The 592 Guardian that the established protocol for incidents involving members of the Guyana Fire Service is unambiguous: a senior police officer does not attempt an on-scene arrest of a firefighter. The correct procedure is for the senior officer present to contact the relevant senior officer within the Fire Service — or the Fire Chief directly — and request that a statement be provided at a mutually convenient time. That is the protocol. It exists precisely because uniformed services operate under operational hierarchies that cannot be collapsed by the exigency of a traffic unit’s discretion.

The traffic police ranks at Providence on Saturday did not follow that protocol. They attempted a physical arrest. When other firefighters intervened — as any colleague might, observing what appeared to be an unlawful seizure of a fellow officer engaged in the performance of his duties — the situation escalated into the brawl that Guyanese watched on their phones.

There is a further legal dimension. The incident did not occur on a public roadway. It occurred within the compound of the National Stadium — a bounded facility. The legal authority of traffic police to effect an arrest for what is, at its core, a property damage incident occurring on private property is not settled. Sources who have examined the circumstances tell this publication that the police intervention may have had no lawful basis at all.

We are not adjudicating that question here. We are stating, plainly, that it was a question that should have been asked before any attempt at arrest was made — and that the absence of that elementary legal reasoning in the GPF’s public account suggests either that it was never asked, or that those who made the operational decision were not concerned with the answer.

III. THE COMPARATIVE RECORD CONDEMNS THE FORCE

The conduct of the GPF at Providence Stadium on Saturday cannot be evaluated in isolation. It must be read alongside the institutional record — and that record is damning.

Consider the case of the son of the Minister of Home Affairs, the very minister under whose portfolio the Guyana Police Force sits. That individual drove a state vehicle into a ditch. There was no arrest. There was no public update. There was no conclusion to any investigation that was ever made public.

What there was, according to reporting at the time, was a presidential statement — and after that statement, the matter was, to all public intents, closed.

The President of the Republic delivered his verdict, and the Force’s institutional machinery quietly stood down

 Now set that precedent beside Saturday’s events. A firefighter — a fifty-year-old Leading Fireman performing a duty function, providing water supply to a public facility — accidentally damages a parked vehicle in the course of exiting a compound. No person is harmed. The vehicle’s assigned minister is not present. And traffic police attempt an immediate on-scene arrest.

A minister’s son drives a state vehicle into a ditch: no arrest, no update, no verdict — save the President’s. A firefighter dents a minister’s car doing his job: immediate arrest attempt. This is not policing. It is performance of deference.

The contrast is not incidental. It is the text. The GPF does not apply the law uniformly. It applies it instrumentally — with the weight of enforcement falling reliably on those without political proximity, and the apparatus of discretion deployed reliably in favour of those who have it. Saturday was not an exception to that pattern. It was its expression.

IV.THE INSTITUTIONAL POSTURE OF THE FORCE

This publication has documented, across multiple investigations, the Guyana Police Force’s disposition toward incidents that implicate the interests of the governing administration. The pattern is consistent: accelerated and visible enforcement when state-adjacent property or prestige is affected; institutional reticence, procedural delay, or outright silence when the interests of power are on the other side of the ledger.

We are witnessing, in the oil boom era, a police force whose institutional character is being shaped not by the rule of law but by the geometry of political proximity.

 That is a structural danger. A force that moves swiftly to arrest a firefighter doing his job — but cannot produce an account of what happened to a state vehicle driven into a ditch by the minister’s son — is not a neutral enforcer of the law. It is an instrument of selective accountability.                                            The GPF’s statement on Saturday confirms this disposition not only in what it says but in what it withholds.

The deliberate excision of the detail that the vehicle belonged to Junior Minister Vanessa Benn is not an editorial oversight. It is a choice. And it tells us something about the Force’s understanding of its own function: not to provide a complete and transparent public record, but to manage the optics of incidents in which government interests are involved.

V.WHAT MUST FOLLOW

The 592 Guardian calls on the Commissioner of Police to provide, without further delay, a full public accounting of the following: who authorised or directed the attempt to arrest the Leading Fireman at the scene; whether that authorisation was consistent with the Joint Services protocol; what legal basis, if any, was identified for an on-scene arrest for a property damage incident on private property; and what disciplinary or administrative review, if any, has been initiated in respect of the ranks involved in the physical confrontation.

We further call on the Ministry of Home Affairs to confirm, in writing, the current status of the Joint Services protocol governing interactions between the Guyana Police Force and the Guyana Fire Service, and to publish that protocol in full so that the public may assess Saturday’s conduct against the applicable standard.

We call on the Guyana Fire Service to formally document the injuries sustained by its member and to pursue any available legal or administrative remedy on their behalf.

And we call on the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Home Affairs — to the extent that committee continues to function — to summon the Commissioner of Police to account for the comparative record documented above: the Home Affairs minister’s son, and the Leading Fireman at Providence. Both involved state-adjacent property. Both involved a uniformed services response. The outcomes were not the same. The Committee owes the public an explanation of why.

A firefighter responding to duty should never have to fear the police he serves alongside. When he does, the institution of policing has failed its constitutional mandate

VI.THE LARGER WARNING

Guyana is in a period of resource-accelerated state expansion. The revenues flowing from the Stabroek Block are reshaping every institution — not always toward greater capacity or accountability, but sometimes toward greater consolidation of political control. In that context, the behaviour of enforcement institutions matters acutely. A police force whose conduct suggests it treats protection of government-proximate interests as an operational priority is not a police force capable of serving the democratic function the Constitution requires of it.

Saturday’s incident at Providence Stadium was, in the narrow sense, about a fire tender, a cable, a light pole, and a damaged vehicle.                                                                                                       

In the broader sense, it was about what kind of institution the GPF is becoming — and who, in this country, is protected from it, and who is not.

The firefighter who left the hospital before seeing a doctor because he had to respond to a fire tells us everything we need to know about the people the GPF attempted to arrest on Saturday. They were doing their jobs. The Force should be required to explain why it treated that as a provocation.

— The Editorial Board♦The 592 Guardian

THE AUDACITY OF THE UNACCOUNTABLE-Response to Freddie Kisson.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN
Independent Accountability Journalism | Georgetown, Guyana
EDITORIAL | June, 2026

The Audacity of the Unaccountable
On Freddie Kissoon’s review of Moses Bhagwan’s memoir, and the question of who has earned the right to judge
FREDDIE KISSOON has spent decades styling himself as Guyana’s foremost public conscience — the lone scribe willing to hold power to account.

 That self-portrait demands examination. Because when a man who was targeted with a chemical substance in an attack widely attributed to operatives loyal to the People’s Progressive Party — reportedly orchestrated by Kwame McCoy — chooses,  a decade later, to align his editorial voice with that same political formation’s dismissal of Moses Bhagwan, something more than literary criticism is taking place. What we witness is capitulation dressed as authority.

Let us be plain about what Kissoon’s review of Bhagwan’s memoir, Enter The Political Kingdom, actually is: a settling of old scores wrapped in the language of intellectual disappointment. It is the work of a man who once shared Bhagwan’s terrain of opposition and who has, by degrees, vacated it — not for reasons of principle, but of proximity to power.

Kissoon reserves his most withering contempt for a man who spent his life building what Kissoon only ever wrote about

Moses Bhagwan is not a polemicist. He is a statesman of the civic tradition — the rarer and more demanding vocation

His two published works, Enter The Political Kingdom and Ancestors of the River, represent something Kissoon has never produced: a sustained, documented contribution to the archive of Guyanese national memory.

These are not columns dashed off between grievances. They are the considered testimony of a man who signed marriage certificates in 1979 while others were being killed for their politics, who built and sustained the Working People’s Alliance through state terror, and who committed decades of his life to the liberation of Guyanese from poverty, racial tribalism, and authoritarian governance.

Kissoon accuses Bhagwan of political dishonesty and an anti-Jagan obsession. These are serious charges, rendered unserious by their source. The Kissoon who now writes these words is not the Kissoon of the 1980s. This is a Kissoon who, by his own published admission, went silent in April 2020 — the precise moment when silence carried the highest political cost.               He demanded Bhagwan speak on the elections rigging of that year. But what, precisely, was Kissoon’s own record of clarity on the systematic subversion of democratic process that preceded, accompanied, and followed those elections? The record is incomplete. The silence, when it mattered, was mutual.

The substantive criticisms Kissoon raises — Bhagwan’s omissions on the WPA in government from 2015 to 2020, the absence of reckoning with what Clive Thomas, Rupert Roopnaraine, and others became — are not without merit as questions.

Any serious accountability journalism would press them. This publication has pressed them. But Kissoon does not press them as a journalist. He deploys them as instruments of personal settlement, selectively, against a man he once called his political comrade, at the close of that man’s ninety-first year.

There is a name for that practice. It is not criticism. It is score-settling on a deathbed timeline.

A man who was chemically attacked by agents of the PPP now performs their preferred verdict on Bhagwan’s legacy. The substance worked.

Kissoon writes — with a register of wounded intimacy — that Bhagwan signed his marriage certificate in 1979.

He describes Moses as a kind, gentle soul. He tells us he was deflated when the memoir was announced because he anticipated what it would contain. And then he delivers the most devastating phrase of all, one that reveals more about Kissoon than about Bhagwan “Go to hell  Moses.”
That is not the language of a man doing journalism. That is the language of a man who feels abandoned. And perhaps Bhagwan did abandon Kissoon — by refusing, in April 2020, to become a weapon in Kissoon’s preferred narrative. Perhaps that refusal was itself a kind of political judgment that Kissoon has never forgiven.

We do not adjudicate every interpretive dispute Kissoon raises about Bhagwan’s memoir. Reasonable readers will disagree on questions of omission, emphasis, and the obligations of memoir as a form. But we do adjudicate the following: no columnist who aligned himself — whether through silence, selective outrage, or direct editorial companionship — with those who brought miasmic violence against him, and who then deploys that borrowed credibility to diminish one of Guyana’s genuine nation-builders, is operating in good faith.

Moses Bhagwan’s contribution to this nation is not carried in a column. It is carried in the bodies of men and women who were organised, protected, and politically educated under conditions that would have broken Kissoon before he reached the first paragraph. Ancestors of the River is a document of historical memory. Enter The Political Kingdom is a testimony of civic courage. Together, they constitute a body of work that will outlast every column Kissoon has published, including this one.
We challenge Freddie Kissoon to produce his own comparable record of nation-building — not his columns, which are the record of his opinions, but his record of sacrifice, organisation, sustained civic construction, and documented historical contribution to the Guyanese people.

Let him lay that record beside Bhagwan’s two books, beside the WPA’s years of unarmed resistance against Burnhamite state terror, beside the quiet, dignified labour of a man who chose not to be a weapon for any faction.

When that accounting is made, the question of who has earned the authority to pronounce on Moses Bhagwan’s legacy will answer itself.

Available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0dM2Bkcd
The 592 Guardian holds that legacy in the tradition we were founded to defend: evidence-led, prosecutorial, and unwilling to flatter power — including the power of the self-appointed.
— The Board of Editors, The 592 Guardian

THE CONSENT VACUUM:How Guyana is Dismantling Indeginous Land Rights

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THE 592GUARDIAN♦Accountability Journalism forPublic Interest  EDITORIAL

The Consent Vacuum: How Guyana Is Dismantling Indigenous Land Rights One Mining Permit at a Time

Chinese Landing is not an isolated failure. It is the template.

 | The 592 Guardian Editorial Board | June 2026

The government of Guyana has done something remarkable in Chinese Landing, Region 1. It has managed to simultaneously insist that mining restrictions remain “in effect” while actively endorsing the operations of the outside tenure holders those restrictions were meant to constrain. Minister of Natural Resources Vickram Bharrat offered this contradiction without apparent discomfort to Kaieteur News on June 28, 2026, and the Ali administration has made no effort to reconcile it.

This is not semantic confusion. It is policy. And it represents one of the most consequential accountability failures in Guyana’s accelerating petrostate transition: the systematic hollowing of the legal architecture that was supposed to protect Indigenous land rights as extraction expands.

“The villagers are the true, lawful tenure holders of the area by virtue of being the absolute owners of the titled lands.” — Chinese Landing Village Council, June 2026

I.THE STRUCTURE OF THE BETRAYAL

The facts at Chinese Landing are not in dispute, except by the government that is facilitating the breach. The Chinese Landing Carib community holds titled land under Guyana’s Amerindian Act. Section 48 of that Act is explicit: no external miner may operate within titled Indigenous territory without a formal agreement with the resident Village Council. That is not a guideline. It is a statutory precondition.

The Chinese Landing Village Council has confirmed that no such agreement exists. No operators presented themselves to the council. No formal consultation was conducted. The Toshao, Nikita Miller, has confirmed that current operations are active and that the persons managing the worksites — Stephen Vieira, acting under power of attorney for Wayne Vieira — sought signatures from individual residents at the Tassawini airstrip for a proposed labour agreement, bypassing the legally mandated party entirely.

Nine residents and two non-residents reportedly signed. The Village Council — the only body with statutory authority to enter such an agreement — was not involved. Under any reading of Section 48, this means current operations at Chinese Landing are conducted without lawful consent. The Minister’s claim that “legitimate tenure holders” are operating lawfully is a legal fiction built on the deliberate confusion of state-issued mining permits with the community consent those permits do not and cannot replace.

II.THE CCJ RULING AND THE GAP THAT WAS NEVER CLOSED

The government’s position rests on a misreading — or a deliberate misrepresentation — of the Caribbean Court of Justice’s ruling in the Wayne Vieira matter. In 2010, a GGMC officer issued a Cease Work Order against Vieira for operating without a village agreement. The CCJ ultimately struck down that order. The government reads this as validation of Vieira’s underlying mining operations.

That reading is false. The CCJ’s ruling turned on narrow jurisdictional grounds: the Mining Act empowers the Minister to craft regulations tied to that Act, but does not authorise GGMC officers to enforce the separate provisions of the Amerindian Act through Cease Work Orders. The court did not validate Vieira’s permits. It did not extinguish the community’s titled rights. It found, precisely and only, that the enforcement mechanism used was ultra vires.

What the CCJ actually produced was a legal gap: Guyana’s primary mining regulator has no statutory mechanism to enforce Indigenous consent requirements.

That gap has been sitting in plain view since that ruling. The Ali administration — which has had years and a petrostate revenue windfall to address it — has legislatively done nothing. The gap is not an oversight. It is an operational feature.

The CCJ did not validate Vieira’s mining. It exposed a gap. That gap has never been closed. It is now being exploited daily.

III.THE IACHR RECORD AND THE PATTERN OF TARGETED AGGRESSION

Chinese Landing is not new to international human rights scrutiny. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights previously issued precautionary measures for the community, citing a “serious and urgent risk” of irreparable harm. The IACHR documented a pattern of targeted aggression: a 2018 incident in which a local family was allegedly expelled from their home by mine security and the police Tactical Services Unit; multiple accounts of residents subjected to searches at gunpoint.

These measures were issued because ordinary domestic remedies had failed. The community’s land rights had not been adjudicated on their substantive merits. The Court of Appeal has yet to issue a ruling on the community’s underlying claims. Chinese Landing residents have been excluded from past legal proceedings between the GGMC and external miners, leaving their rights unrepresented in proceedings that directly affected their land.

The IACHR’s precautionary measures carry legal weight under international human rights law. The government of Guyana has an obligation to respond to them. The 592 Guardian is not aware of any substantive government action to implement those measures or report compliance to the Commission. This editorial demands that the Ministry of Legal Affairs and the Office of the Attorney General publicly disclose their current posture on Guyana’s IACHR obligations in the Chinese Landing matter.

IV.THE PATTERN: CHINESE LANDING AS TEMPLATE

This editorial treats Chinese Landing not as an isolated case but as the current iteration of a structural pattern this Board has documented across Guyana’s extractive sector.                                The pattern is consistent: state-issued instruments — mining permits, environmental clearances, sole-source contracts — are used to confer apparent legitimacy on operations that bypass mandatory consent, regulatory oversight, or both

When legal challenges arise, the enforcement gap is invoked. When international scrutiny arrives, the government issues process statements that obscure the substantive breach.

The GGMC’s nine-year audit backlog, documented in the 2024 Auditor General’s report and reported by this Board, is not unrelated to Chinese Landing. An agency that cannot produce audited financial statements cannot credibly regulate consent compliance in remote interior communities. The PAC’s stalled oversight function, the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services’ reduced meeting schedule — these institutional failures do not occur in isolation from Chinese Landing. They are the environment in which Chinese Landing is made possible.

The EKAA HRIM quarry case in Region Seven — passport confiscation, debt bondage, a worker death, no criminal charges — follows the same structural logic: an extraction operation that bypassed labour and consent protections, proceeded under state-issued instruments, and faced no meaningful regulatory consequence. The 592 Guardian filed a formal ILO dossier on that matter. We note that the same enforcement vacuum that enabled EKAA HRIM is the enforcement vacuum that Minister Bharrat is now defending in Chinese Landing.

The extraction pace is blazing. The implementation and enforcement lag is not accidental. It is the policy.

 

V.WHAT MINISTER BHARRAT SAID AND WHAT IT MEANS

Minister Bharrat’s statement to Kaieteur News warrants close legal analysis. He said: “Restrictions for mining in Chinese Landing, outside of legitimate tenure holdings, continue to be in effect.” This formulation does two things simultaneously. First, it acknowledges that restrictions exist — conceding that not all external mining at Chinese Landing is permissible. Second, it carves out “legitimate tenure holdings” as exempt from those restrictions.

But the Amerindian Act does not create a carve-out for tenure holders. Section 48 applies to all external operators regardless of their tenure status. A GGMC-issued permit is not a substitute for the community consent the Act requires. The Minister’s formulation, if it reflects actual government policy, constitutes an executive interpretation of the Amerindian Act that is without statutory basis. It is the kind of interpretation that, if applied consistently, would render Section 48 a dead letter throughout titled Indigenous territories wherever a state-issued tenure exists.

The Minister further asserted that “community members have been receptive.” The Village Council flatly denies this. The Toshao flatly denies this. The broader community, per the council, remains deeply opposed. This Board notes that the government’s claim of community receptiveness is unsubstantiated, contradicted by the titled owners’ elected leadership, and structurally consistent with the government’s practice of identifying sympathetic individuals within Indigenous communities to produce the appearance of consent without its substance.

VI.ACCOUNTABILITY DEMANDS

To Minister Vickram Bharrat:                                                  →Produce the legal opinion on which the government relies to characterise the Vieira operations as lawful under the Amerindian Act, Section 48.                                                        →Identify by name the “community members” whose receptiveness you cited. Explain whether the government considers an individual signature obtained at an airstrip to constitute compliance with the formal agreement requirement under Section 48.

To the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission:               →Disclose whether any formal notification was made to the GGMC that operations had resumed at Chinese Landing. Identify what enforcement mechanism, if any, exists for GGMC to act if the Village Council files a complaint. Produce the current status of Wayne Vieira’s tenure holdings and any conditions attached to those tenures.

To the National Toshaos Council:                                                  →This matter involves a titled community, a statutory consent requirement, active extraction without council approval, and a government minister publicly dismissing the community’s legal position. The NTC has a mandate to advocate for Indigenous land rights nationally. This Board demands a public statement on the Chinese Landing situation and a formal legal position on the government’s interpretation of Section 48.

To the Court of Appeal:                                                                            →The community’s substantive land claims remain undecided. Active, contested extraction is proceeding daily in the interim. This Board formally calls attention to the urgency of this matter and the real-world harm being inflicted during the pendency of proceedings.

To the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights:          →The government of Guyana has not, to this Board’s knowledge, provided a substantive compliance report on its obligations under the precautionary measures issued for Chinese Landing. Extraction has resumed. The community remains exposed. We call on the Commission to formally request a compliance update and to treat resumed extraction as a material change in circumstances.

VII. CLOSING: THE NOVEMBER ASSURANCE

As recently as November 2025 — seven months before Minister Bharrat’s statement to Kaieteur News — the government gave the Chinese Landing community assurances that mining restrictions would remain firmly in place. The community accepted those assurances. They were made by a government that knew, or should have known, that tenure holders it was already supporting were preparing to resume operations.

The reversal was not disclosed proactively. It was confirmed reactively, when Kaieteur News asked. The Village Council learned of the government’s changed position through press coverage, not through any formal notification from the Ministry of Natural Resources or any other state body.

This is the governance culture that Guyana’s oil boom has entrenched: assurances without enforcement, restrictions without mechanisms, consent claimed from individuals while the legally mandated collective body is bypassed. Chinese Landing’s titled Carib community did not lose their land rights through a court order. They are losing them through a process of institutional erosion — a budget here, a legislative gap there, a minister’s word that means less every time it is given.

The 592 Guardian will continue to report on this matter. We are requesting from the Ministry of Natural Resources, the GGMC, and the Office of the Attorney General all communications related to Chinese Landing mining operations since January 2025.  

The Editorial Board—The 592 Guardian