A LIFE IN SERVICE TO THE NATION.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN   |SPECIAL FEATURE 

 

THE 592 GUARDIAN

SPECIAL FEATURE •  GUYANA INDEPENDENCE EDITION •  JUNE 2026

A LIFE IN SERVICE TO THE NATION

Honoring the Diplomatic Brilliance, Corporate Mastery, and Lifelong Patriotism of

Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally

Ph.D.  •  MBA  •  BBA  •  FAIA (UK)  •  DTM

Scholar • Financial Executive • Ambassador • Global Citizen

To be honored at the Guyana Independence Ball –New York City • Saturday, June 27,2026

There are men and women who serve their nation from a sense of obligation. And then there are those who serve from a sense of destiny—who look at every degree earned, every corporation turned around, every classroom inspired, and see not personal achievement, but tools to be laid at the feet of a people and a republic. Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally belongs emphatically and irrevocably to the latter company.

As the Guyanese diaspora gathers in New York for the prestigious annual Independence Ball on Saturday, June 27th , the spotlight falls on this remarkable son of the soil—a scholar, corporate titan, international diplomat, academic pioneer, and global thought leader whose career spans six decades, five continents, and 84 countries. To honor Dr. Ally is to honor the very spirit of what Guyana can produce when ambition meets integrity and personal success is fused with national purpose.

The 592 Guardian presents this comprehensive tribute not merely as a record of titles held or positions occupied, but as a chronicle of a life lived in full—in boardrooms and embassies, in lecture halls and presidential libraries, in the oil-rich corridors of the Middle East and the quiet streets of Georgetown where it all began.

INTRODUCTION

From the Red Earth of Providence

The Village That Forged a Statesman

Favorite Quote

“Service to Humanity is the Best Work of Life.”

Before the ambassadorial credentials, the Wall Street boardrooms, the Gulf-state negotiations, and the Guinness World Records—there was Providence. Providence Sugar Estate, East Bank Demerara: red earth roads and the warm, dense smell of cane under a Guyanese sun; logie row houses where an entire community lived shoulder to shoulder and raised its children as one. It is here, in this particular soil, that the story of Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally truly begins.

He was born the first child of Soharab Ally—shop owner and pharmacist at Providence Estate Hospital—and his mother, Bebi Rahana. The Ally family grocery shop, set within the logies, was more than a place of commerce; it was a gathering point, a pulse of the community’s daily life. From his earliest years, Dr. Ally observed what it meant to be of service to a people: his father dispensing medicine and provisions alike, his mother holding the warmth of home steady. The values of that shop—reliability, generosity, dignity in every transaction—would travel with him to every office and every continent that followed. In time, the family moved to a modern residence at 7 Public Road, Providence, East Bank Demerara, but the logie foundations were already set, permanent and deep.

Dr. Ally childhood home

Providence Estate taught him something no university curriculum can fully convey that greatness is rooted in community. Neighbors shared what little they had without keeping score. Elders settled disputes and dispensed wisdom in the cool shade of mango, tamarind, genip, soursop, golden apple, cherry, guava, jamoon, gooseberry, and sugar apple trees—a natural parliament of the village, convened under branches rather than beneath official seals. There was a collective, unspoken covenant that every child mattered, that no one’s potential belonged to them alone. It was a conviction that would later animate every textbook Dr. Ally donated, every scholarship he championed, every development grant he fought to secure.

His formal education unfolded at Wilson’s Preparatory and Central High Schools—institutions that shaped not merely his mind but his character. Wilson’s instilled the foundational trinity of discipline, rigorous education, and intellectual curiosity. Central High expanded the horizon: it was there he encountered the power of ideas as instruments of change, the dignity embedded in honest labor, and the concept of duty to something larger than the self. These were not abstractions taught from a textbook; they were lessons absorbed from teachers who demanded excellence because they believed their students were capable of it—and who understood that belief, in itself, is a form of investment.

Those years live in the body as much as the memory: the sound of rain hammering zinc rooftops; the thwack of a cricket ball on a road wicket as evening gathered; the smoke and laughter of cookouts in the back-dams where community was not a concept but a daily practice. They live in the voices of the teachers who refused to let a single student believe that geography or circumstance determined destiny. It was an education conducted simultaneously inside the classroom and outside it—in the estate roads, the village yards, the shared kitchens, and the long conversations under those fruit trees.

From those foundations, Dr. Ally carried his formation to the University of Guyana, where he completed the Diploma in Management Program—the bridge between the village that raised him and the world he would go on to shape. Every institution he would later attend—Adelphi University, Walden University, the Association of International Accountants in the United Kingdom—was built upon a base of values poured in Providence, reinforced in the classrooms of Wilson’s and Central High, and tested in the practical life of Georgetown’s commercial and civic arena.

It is that journey—from the red earth and the logie row houses to the halls of power and the pages of international history—that gives Dr. Ally’s life its particular resonance and authority. He did not arrive at his convictions through theory. He arrived at them through Providence. And the conviction he carries, the one that has guided every decision across six decades of service, remains the same one forged in that estate community:

 

Guyana’s true wealth is its people, and service is the debt we owe to the place that raised us.

PART I: THE CRUCIBLE OF NATION-BUILDING — Guyana, 1964–1979

To understand the diplomat who would one day secure historic multi-million-dollar agreements in the Middle East, one must return to the streets and institutions of Georgetown in the years immediately following Guyana’s independence. Between 1964 and 1979, the young Dr. Ally was not a spectator to history—he was a participant in the foundational machinery of the new republic.

 

He served as Administrative Assistant to the legendary R.B. Gajraj—Lord Mayor of Georgetown, Speaker of Parliament, and CEO of H.B. Gajraj—learning the levers of civic power at the elbow of one of the nation’s towering figures. This was his first postgraduate school: not a university campus, but the living, breathing engine of Guyanese governance.

During this formative fifteen-year period, Dr. Ally’s footprint expanded across the full architecture of Guyanese commercial and civic life:

  • Company Secretary and Accountant for Booker Lithographic & Boxmakers Ltd. (later Guyana Lithographic Co. Ltd.), and Secretary/Director/Accountant of the Guyana Lithographic Co-operative Credit Union—building the cooperative economic architecture of the new nation from within.
  • Selected as a Member of the elite Guyana Financial Advisory Team tasked with negotiating and executing the national acquisition of Booker Holdings—a watershed moment in Guyana’s economic sovereignty and self-determination.
  • Director of the National Lotteries; Director of Guyana Cooperative Insurance Services; Deputy Chairman of the Board of Governors for Kuru Kuru Cooperative College; and General Manager of the powerhouse Gafoors Group of Companies.
  • Civic architect and connector: President of the Central Demerara Lions Club; Vice President of the Georgetown Jaycees; President of the Georgetown Toastmasters Club; and, for seven years, President of the Twinning Association of Georgetown—personally leading annual diplomatic delegations to Ottawa, Canada, and hosting reciprocal delegations from Ottawa and Lusaka, Zambia, in a forerunner of the municipal diplomacy he would later practice on the world stage.

These were not ceremonial roles. They were the proving grounds of a leader who understood that national service demanded technical mastery, financial discipline, and the courage to act at pivotal moments in a young nation’s story.

PART II: THE FINANCIAL ALCHEMIST — Wall Street and the Corporate World

When Dr. Ally departed for the United States, he carried with him not the hunger of an immigrant seeking personal fortune, but the ambition of a man who understood that the most dangerous thing a developing nation can lack is a corps of world-class financial minds. He was determined to become one.

His academic pursuit was systematic and relentless. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration and an MBA from Adelphi University, followed by a Ph.D. in Administration and Management from Walden University (in association with Indiana University)—a doctoral dissertation of 373 pages focused on restructuring CARICOM for the 21st century through regional economic integration. To that he added the Fellow of the Association of International Accountants (FAIA) designation from the United Kingdom, a grueling 16-examination benchmark equivalent to a CPA or CMA, demonstrating that his credentials were not the product of convenience but of rigorous, competitive pursuit.

For 27 years, Dr. Ally operated at the apex of American corporate finance—not as a middle manager, but as Controller and Chief Financial Officer of major publicly listed technology and manufacturing companies on NASDAQ, NYSE, and AMEX, including Acrodyne Industries, Veeco-UPA Technology, and Porta Systems Corp. The results he delivered were not incremental. He engineered rapid financial reporting turnarounds, reducing closing cycles to as few as three to five business days, and delivered over $31 million in cumulative annual cost savings across his major corporate tenures—a figure that stands as one of the most concrete demonstrations of executive capability in the Guyanese diaspora’s professional history.

His American career also included a notable year (1994–1995) as a Federal Agent with the Internal Revenue Service in New York, where he applied his command of Title 26 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code to enforce corporate tax compliance at the highest levels—a role that speaks to a moral seriousness about financial governance that would define his diplomatic tenure a generation later.

PART III: THE DIPLOMAT — Kuwait, the Middle East, and the US$950 Million Legacy

When Dr. Ally was appointed Guyana’s Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest) in 2016, it was a recognition that Guyana’s investment story needed to be told with both passion and precision. When he was subsequently appointed Guyana’s Second Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the State of Kuwait—presenting his credentials to the Amir in March 2017—he carried with him not the typical diplomat’s portfolio of protocol and pleasantries, but the balance sheet of a CFO and the conviction of a patriot.

His signature framework— “Show, Tell, & Know Guyana”—transformed the Guyanese Embassy in Kuwait City from a passive outpost into a high-octane investment promotion hub. The results were historic.

The US$50.7 Million Debt Write-Off

Through sustained, skillful negotiation, Dr. Ally secured a landmark bilateral agreement in which the State of Kuwait formally forgave US$50.7 million of Guyanese debt—a single stroke of financial diplomacy that removed a significant burden from the national treasury and repositioned Guyana as a trusted, respected partner in the Gulf region.

The US$900 Million Islamic Development Bank Portfolio

Serving concurrently as Guyana’s First Alternate Governor to the Islamic Development Bank (Is DB) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Dr. Ally operated with rare dual authority—representing Guyana in both bilateral and multilateral arenas simultaneously. It was in this capacity that he orchestrated a US$900 million portfolio of grants and loans from the Is DB for critical Guyanese infrastructure and national development—an injection of capital unmatched in the history of Guyana’s multilateral financing relationships. These were not promises or letters of intent. They were secured commitments, the product of a man who understood both the technical language of development finance and the personal relationships required to translate proposals into signed agreements.

The Guinness World Record and the Art of Cultural Diplomacy

In January 2020, Dr. Ally demonstrated that diplomacy need not be confined to conference rooms. He led the Guyana Embassy to a Guinness World Record for the “Most Stickers on a Car” (41,543 stickers) at Kuwait Motor Town—an initiative that captured international headlines while fusing environmental recycling advocacy with cultural diplomacy in a way that cemented Guyana’s image as a creative, vibrant, and forward-looking partner. It was the act of a man who understood that soft power and hard finance are not opposites but complements.

When his tour of duty concluded in August 2020, the Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry bid him farewell with deep and genuine respect. The measure of an ambassador is not the office he occupies, but the institutional bridges he builds and the goodwill he leaves behind. By that measure, Dr. Ally’s tenure was exceptional.

 

PART IV: THE PROFESSOR AND THE PUBLISHED MIND — 25 Years in the Academy

Throughout his corporate and diplomatic career, Dr. Ally never abandoned the classroom. For 25 years, he taught graduate and undergraduate courses spanning International Accounting, Strategic Management, and Global Sustainability at eight universities across New York, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., and internationally including DeSales University, George Washington University (where he served as a doctoral dissertation examiner), and Qatar University.

His authority as a leadership thinker was globally validated when he was selected as one of only 30 global leaders interviewed for Dr. Michael Marquardt’s seminal work, Leading with Questions—alongside leaders from Switzerland, Korea, and Singapore. He is also a  published author in his own right; his Amazon title, My Tenure as Guyana’s Ambassador in Kuwait and Lessons in Diplomacy offers an authoritative insider account of how small-nation diplomacy can be conducted with vision and executed with discipline.

He has also long been ahead of the curve in educational technology—mastering narrated course delivery on Blackboard and Blackboard Learn platforms years before the pandemic made online learning a global necessity. He achieved the prestigious Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM) designation as far back as 1975, a half-century of mastery in communication and leadership that few can rival.

PART V: THE PHILANTHROPIST — Giving Back to Guyana’s Future

Dr. Ally’s patriotism has never been merely rhetorical. Through his personal vision and personal financing, he donated 1,458 specialized U.S. textbooks—valued at over G$19 million—to establish the “Dr. Shamir Ally Reading Corner” at the University of Guyana. This was not a tax strategy or a publicity exercise. It was the act of a man who understood that a nation’s future is built in its libraries, and who was willing to fund that future from his own resources.

During the 2007 Cricket World Cup Super-8 matches in Guyana, he personally conceptualized, executed, and financed 90% of a comprehensive Visitor Spending Survey—generating hard empirical data (average visitor spending of $439 on shopping and $379 on transport, among other metrics) that provided the Guyanese state with the analytical framework needed to optimize its sports tourism infrastructure for generations. This was private investment in public knowledge, the kind of contribution that rarely makes headlines but permanently shapes policy.

PART VI: THE GLOBAL CITIZEN — 84 Countries and the Continuing Education of the World

Dr. Ally operates on a philosophy that has guided his life for decades: “Travel is global continuing education on people, culture, food, music, and history.” He has backed this belief with his feet and his years, visiting 84 countries across five continents, 45 of the 50 U.S. states, and 11 U.S. Presidential Libraries and Museums—an extraordinary curriculum in executive leadership drawn not from syllabi but from direct observation of how nations are governed and how leaders are remembered.

His travels have been marked by memorable milestones: in September 2001, he completed a true circumnavigation of the globe—Newark to Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, and back to Los Angeles—that included a historic stay at the iconic, ultra-luxury Burj Al Arab in Dubai. Most recently, from January 25 to February 10, 2025, he embarked on a seven-nation journey through Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Qatar, and Brunei—with Brunei marking his official 84th distinct country.

Among all the nations he has visited, it is Singapore that he holds as the gold standard of national governance—a city-state that has shown the world what is possible when leadership combines education, health, and financial security into a coherent national vision. That admiration is revealing it is the admiration of a man who has seen the possibilities, who believes Guyana can achieve them, and who has spent his life trying to help make them real.

PART VII: THE MEDIA VOICE — “Diplomatic Speak” and the Weekly Counsel of a Statesman

Retirement, for Dr. Ally, is not a condition he recognizes. Today, he serves as President, CEO, and CFO of International Consulting Services (ICS) in Long Island, New York, bringing the full weight of his financial and diplomatic expertise to bear on the challenges of global enterprise.

He also continues to share his wisdom with the Guyanese public and diaspora through his weekly “Diplomatic Speak” column for Village Voice News, with more than 200 published columns to date covering leadership, governance, macroeconomic metrics, and international affairs. This is not the work of a man coasting on his legacy—it is the work of a public intellectual who believes that every week brings a new obligation to inform, challenge, and inspire.

★ A FITTING TRIBUTE ★

When Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally steps onto the stage at the Guyana Independence Ball on the evening of June 6th, he will do so carrying more than personal achievement. He will carry the weight and the honor of every Guyanese student who ever opened one of his donated textbooks, every civil servant whose infrastructure was funded by a deal he negotiated in the Gulf, every diaspora member who drew courage from his example, and every young person who has come to understand, through watching his life, that it is possible to belong to the world and still belong, above all, to Guyana.

The accolade he will be  receiving  on June 27th is not a retrospective. It is a recognition, in real time, of a life still actively being lived in service. Dr. Ally continues to write, to consult, to advise, and to advocate. The story is not finished. The nation is still being built.

The 592 Guardian salutes Dr. Shamir Andrew Ally, Ph.D., MBA, FAIA, DTM—diplomat of distinction, financial architect, academic pioneer, philanthropist, and selfless servant of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana. His life is proof that one person, armed with expertise, integrity, and an unbreakable love for their homeland, can change the trajectory of a nation.

THE 592 GUARDIAN • WHERE GUYANA’S STORY IS TOLD

Special Feature • Guyana Independence Edition • June 2026

The Invisible Transfer: 

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EDITORIAL — SPECIAL REPORT 

RESOURCE SOVEREIGNTY & GOVERNANCE REVIEW 

EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRIES · TAX POLICY · NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY 

The Invisible Transfer: 

How Guyana’s Governance Gaps Give Away Strategic Resources 

When a uranium deposit changes hands in Singapore, Guyana collects nothing. This is not an accident— it is a system working exactly as poorly designed systems do. 

MAY 2026 · SPECIAL EDITORIAL · TAX & RESOURCE GOVERNANCE

The acquisition of Guyana’s only uranium project by Canadian firm U92 Energy Corp.—executed through the purchase of Singapore-registered LIA Industries Pte. Ltd.—did not merely expose a gap in one law. It illuminated the outline of a governance architecture that was never built. What the country faces is not a single loophole to be patched; it is a structural condition in which the legal, regulatory, and fiscal scaffolding around its extractive sector lags dangerously behind the sophistication of those who exploit it. 

The mechanism here is neither novel nor obscure. It is a well documented instrument in the global extractive industry: the indirect transfer of resource assets through offshore holding companies. Instead of selling the Guyanese asset directly—which would trigger domestic tax obligations—a company sells the foreign entity that owns the asset. The asset never formally moves. Only the beneficial owners change. And so, from Guyana’s current legal vantage point, nothing taxable occurred on its soil at all. 

The Kurupung uranium project—spanning over 90 square kilometers with an estimated 20.6 million pounds of uranium in the ground—changed hands without the State capturing a single dollar in transfer taxes, capital gains tax, or windfall levies. In a world increasingly turning toward nuclear energy as a low carbon baseload solution, uranium is not merely a mineral. It is a strategic asset. And Guyana appears to have had no seat at the table when its ownership was reassigned.

“The DRC did not even know it was happening, despite owning a 20% equity stake in the project. The acquisition occurred entirely onshore, through a Bermuda holding company, and the country received nothing.”
COLUMBIA CENTER ON SUSTAINABLE INVESTMENT, ON THE $2.65 BILLION TENKE FUNGURUME COPPER MINE SALE, 2016

 

Guyana is not alone in this vulnerability—but the global precedents make inaction all the more inexcusable. The Democratic Republic of Congo watched as Freeport McMoRan sold its 56% controlling stake in one of its largest copper mines to China Molybdenum through a Bermuda holding company for $2.65 billion, receiving nothing in return. The DRC did not even know the transaction was occurring. If that scale of loss is possible in a country with a 20% equity stake and formal operator relationships, consider what is possible in a country where the regulatory regime is still being assembled.

1.The Anatomy of an Indirect Transfer

To understand the full scope of the problem, one must understand how these transactions are structured. A mining or resource company wishing to exit a project in a developing country has two broad options: sell the underlying asset directly or sell the shares in a company that holds that asset. The first route is visible, taxable, and open subject to regulatory approval in the host country. The second route—the indirect transfer—occurs in a foreign jurisdiction, sometimes involving multiple layers of holding companies across multiple tax havens.

In Guyana’s case, LIA Industries Pte. Ltd., incorporated in Singapore, held the prospecting license for the Kurupung uranium project. When U92 Energy Corp. acquired LIA Industries, it acquired Guyana’s uranium project. But legally, what was sold was a Singapore company. Singapore received whatever taxes were applicable there. Guyana received none. 

The Platform for Collaboration on Tax—a joint body of the IMF, OECD, UN, and World Bank—has articulated the foundational principle clearly: direct and indirect asset transfers that represent the same transfer of ownership should attract the same tax treatment. Otherwise, the incentive structure actively encourages offshore structuring to avoid the host country’s fiscal claim. 

This is precisely what Guyana’s current framework incentivizes. The country’s tax legislation does not contain provisions to “look through” the offshore holding structure and assert fiscal jurisdiction over gains derived from the underlying Guyanese resource. The result is a system in which the more creative the corporate structure, the less the country collects. 

The UN Handbook on Selected Issues for Taxation of the Extractive Industries—a dedicated technical resource for developing countries— identifies indirect asset transfers as a discrete and serious challenge, dedicating an entire chapter to the design of legal responses. Guyana does not yet appear to have translated that guidance into legislative action. 

COMPARATIVE CASE 
How Tanzania Closed the Gap

Tanzania’s Mining Act and Income Tax Act were amended to treat indirect transfers of mining rights as taxable events, requiring notification and withholding, regardless of where the transaction occurs. The triggering criterion is whether the underlying asset derives its value principally from Tanzanian resources. Similar “principal value” tests have been adopted across Africa and Asia. 

Countries including Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, India, China, and Peru have each, in their own ways, enacted legislation that either taxes indirect transfers directly, requires their notification, or subjects them to approval conditions. Guyana has none of these protections. 

“$2.65B 

 DRC COPPER MINE SOLD OFF SHORE

 0 TAXES TO HOST COUNTRY

 20.6M 

 LBS OF URANIUM 

 ESTIMATED AT 

 KURUPUNG — 

 TRANSFERRED WITHOUT 

 GUYANA AT THE TABLE

 0 

 GUYANESE TAX DOLLARS 

 CAPTURED FROM THE 

 U92/LIA INDUSTRIES 

 TRANSACTION

 

11.A License Is a Public Asset. It Must Be Treated as One.

At the center of this transaction lies a prospecting license—a legal right granted by the Guyanese State to explore and potentially extract a mineral resource that belongs, constitutionally, to the people of

Guyana. It is not a private property right that can circulate freely in commercial channels without State involvement. It is a delegated public right, granted conditionally, revocable in principle, and tied to specific obligations of the licensee. 

Yet the practical reality is that this license has now passed to new beneficial owners—U92 Energy Corp. and its principals—without any formal regulatory approval process specific to the change of control. The license was not transferred. The company holding it was simply sold abroad. And because the license nominally remains in the name of LIA Industries Pte. Ltd., no formal transfer of license was triggered. 

This is the second tier of the governance failure: the disconnect between formal legal title and actual beneficial control. Guyana’s licensing framework does not appear to contain provisions requiring the disclosure or approval of indirect changes of control over license holding entities. The company on the license remains the same; only who owns that company has changed. 

Many jurisdictions have corrected this through what are known as change-of-control provisions in their mining or petroleum legislation. These require that any transaction—whether a direct sale of the license or an indirect acquisition of the controlling interest in the license holder—constitutes a triggering event requiring regulatory notification, review, and in some cases, approval or payment of a transfer fee. 

The absence of such provisions in Guyana creates a dangerous parallel reality: on paper, a State-issued license remains in the hands of the original licensee; in practice, an entirely different set of principals now controls the economic destiny of that resource. 

The implications extend beyond taxation. Questions of beneficial ownership transparency, national security vetting, environmental liability, and regulatory accountability   all hinge on knowing who actually controls a resource asset. If that information can be withheld through offshore corporate structuring, the State is not merely losing revenue—it is losing oversight itself.

“If a company can change hands abroad and automatically retain control of a Guyanese license, then the State has electively relinquished control over who exploits its resources.” — THE PRECIPITATING EDITORIAL ON THE U92 ACQUISITION

III Uranium Is Not Gold. The Governance Stakes Are Higher.

 There is a tendency in resource governance debates to treat all extractive commodities similarly. The Kurupung transaction demands a more differentiated analysis. Uranium is not gold. It is not bauxite. It is not even crude oil, despite that industry’s own considerable governance complexities. 

Uranium is a dual-use material with applications in both civilian energy generation and nuclear weapons development. Its extraction, processing, and trade are subject to international regulatory regimes— including the International Atomic Energy Agency’s safeguards framework—that impose obligations on both states and operators. The identity, affiliations, and security clearances of uranium operators are not merely commercial questions. They are national security questions. 

Guyana enters this sector with what the government has itself acknowledged: no other uranium projects, no established regulatory framework, and no domestic experience with the specific hazards and obligations that uranium extraction entails. That context does not make the resource less valuable—the global nuclear energy renaissance, driven partly by decarbonization commitments, may make Guyanese uranium considerably more valuable over the coming decades. But it does make the governance deficit considerably more dangerous. 

There are four distinct dimensions of risk that Guyana must now navigate simultaneously with respect to Kurupung: 

Radiological and Environmental Risk: Uranium extraction generates radioactive tailings and contaminated water that, if improperly managed, can persist in the environment for centuries. Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency and Geology and Mines Commission must have the technical capacity to monitor, inspect, and enforce environmental standards specific to uranium—a very different challenge from gold or bauxite oversight. 

Geopolitical and Security Risk: The identity of the ultimate beneficial owners of a uranium license matter. International safeguards regimes require states to account for nuclear materials within their territory. If Guyana cannot identify who controls its uranium resource at any given time, it may struggle to meet its international reporting obligations—let alone its national security interests.

Regulatory Capacity Risk: The sector is genuinely new to Guyana. Neither the institutional expertise nor the specialized regulatory instruments required for uranium governance have been established. The country is, in effect, being asked to regulate something it has never encountered before—and it is being asked to do so retroactively, after ownership has already changed hands. 

Fiscal Sovereignty Risk: As with all extractive commodities, uranium’s fiscal contribution to Guyana will depend almost entirely on the quality of the fiscal regime that governs it—including royalties, profit taxes, ring-fencing provisions, and yes, taxes on indirect transfers. If those instruments are not in place before production begins, they become extraordinarily difficult to introduce without triggering investor disputes. 

The window for proactive governance is open. It will not remain so indefinitely. Once exploration advances toward development, and once financial commitments compound, the political economy of reform shifts sharply away from the State. 

1v The Systemic Failure: Oil Was the Warning, Uranium Is the Test 

The U92 acquisition did not occur in a vacuum. It occurred against the backdrop of Guyana’s ongoing—and extensively documented—struggles to capture adequate fiscal returns from its petroleum sector. The country’s oil contracts, negotiated under the Stabroek block regime, have been widely criticized by international fiscal governance experts for royalty rates, cost recovery provisions, and ring-fencing structures that limit the State’s take. These were not the product of malice; they were the product of a negotiating context in which the State had less information, less capacity, and less leverage than its counterparts. 

The pattern matters: resource sectors tend to be governed by the frameworks that existed at the time of the first major transaction, not the frameworks that should have existedBy the time the scale of the asset is understood, the contracts are signed, the precedents are set, and the cost of renegotiation—financial, diplomatic, and political—is prohibitive. 

Guyana is now receiving a second notice. The uranium sector is embryonic. There are no production-stage contracts. There are no entrenched investors with sunk capital claiming sovereign protection for existing arrangements. The cost of reform at this stage is political will and legislative time—considerably cheaper than the cost of reform after the fact. 

The IMF, in its own assessments of developing country resource governance, has consistently flagged indirect transfer taxation as one of the areas where developing countries leave the most revenue on the table. The mechanism is technically understood. The legislative models are available. The question is whether Guyana’s institutions will act on the evidence before the window closes. 

The answer to that question will say something lasting about the country’s capacity to govern its resource wealth in the interest of its citizens—not just in uranium, but in whatever comes next.

THE GLOBAL PRECEDENT — INDIA’S GENERAL ANTI-AVOIDANCE RESPONSE 

When Vodafone Sued India for $2 Billion — and India Rewrote the Law 

In 2012, India’s Supreme Court ruled that the government could not tax Vodafone’s acquisition of an Indian telecom business through a Cayman Islands holding company. The transaction—valued at $11 billion—had been structured to route control of the Indian asset through a foreign entity, placing it outside India’s tax jurisdiction. The Supreme Court agreed with Vodafone. India’s Parliament then amended the Income Tax Act retroactively to assert jurisdiction over indirect transfers of assets whose value is substantially derived from Indian sources. The lesson: waiting for litigation is the most expensive way to reform. Guyana should not need a billion-dollar case to prompt action.

  1. What Reform Must Look Like
  3. Reform in this area is achievable. It is technically understood, internationally precedented, and—at this stage of Guyana’s extractive sector development—politically feasible. The following measures constitute a minimum legislative and regulatory agenda, not an aspirational wish list.

01 LEGISLATE INDIRECT TRANSFER TAXATION 

Amend the Income Tax Act to assert Guyana’s fiscal jurisdiction over gains derived from the indirect transfer of assets whose value is principally derived from Guyanese resources. The “principal value test”—requiring that at least 50% or 75% of the entity’s value be attributable to local resource assets—is the standard adopted by Tanzania, Uganda, India, and others. This closes the Singapore-Singapore sale scenario entirely. 

02 MANDATE CHANGE-OF-CONTROL NOTIFICATION AND APPROVAL Amend the Mines Act and relevant petroleum legislation to require that any change in the ultimate beneficial ownership of a license-holding entity—direct or indirect—constitutes a triggering event requiring notification to the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission and, for strategic resources, Ministerial approval. This closes the “same license, new owners” loophole. 

03 ESTABLISH BENEFICIAL OWNERSHIP REGISTERS FOR LICENCE HOLDERS 

All companies holding prospecting or mining licenses in Guyana must file and maintain current beneficial ownership 

information, updated within 30 days of any change of control. This registry should be accessible to relevant regulatory bodies and, where national security is implicated, to intelligence agencies. Beneficial ownership transparency is the prerequisite for all other oversight. 

04 DEVELOP A DEDICATED URANIUM REGULATORY FRAMEWORK The Kurupung project cannot be adequately governed under generic mining legislation. A sector-speci5c regulatory framework for uranium—covering radiological safety, tailings management, IAEA safeguards compliance, export controls, and security vetting of operators—must be developed before exploration advances toward development stage. Guyana should engage directly with the IAEA’s technical cooperation 

programmes to build this capacity. 

05 CONDUCT AN IMMEDIATE FISCAL REGIME REVIEW FOR THE URANIUM SECTOR 

Before any development licenses are considered for Kurupung, the Guyana Revenue Authority and Ministry of Finance should commission an independent fiscal regime analysis for uranium, benchmarking royalty rates, profit taxes, ring-fencing 

provisions, and stability clause frameworks against comparable jurisdictions. This analysis should be public and should precede —not follow—any negotiation with the license holder. 

06 REVIEW ALL EXISTING LICENCES FOR UNDISCLOSED INDIRECT TRANSFERS 

The U92 acquisition is unlikely to be the only instance of indirect transfer affecting Guyanese resource licenses. A comprehensive audit of all active prospecting and mining licenses, verifying current beneficial ownership against original applicant identity, would reveal the scope of the problem and inform legislative priorities.

— ◆ — 

There is a phrase that recurs in resource governance literature: “the resource curse is not inevitable—it is a policy choice Countries do not become cursed by oil or gold or uranium. They become cursed by the 

institutional arrangements they fail to build before extraction begins, and by the political environments that make reform feel impossible once the money starts =owing. 

Guyana is not cursed. It is, in fact, one of the few countries in the world that has received clear, repeated, well-documented warnings about the governance gaps in its extractive sector—and still has the time and political space to address them. The oil sector’s fiscal architecture is imperfect but established; reforming it now is difficult. The uranium sector has no such entrenched architecture yet. The cost of building it correctly today is a fraction of the cost of renegotiating it under duress tomorrow. 

The U92 acquisition is not primarily a story about one company, one project, or one transaction. It is a story about what a State owes its citizens when it grants away the right to their natural inheritance. That inheritance does not belong to whoever is clever enough to structure around the rules. It belongs to the people of Guyana. The only question is whether their government will act in time to protect it. 

— ◆ — 

RESOURCE SOVEREIGNTY & GOVERNANCE REVIEW · EDITORIAL BOARD · MAY 2026 · ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Citi’s Arrival Is Not Banking Expansion — It Is Strategic Extraction

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Citi’s Arrival Is Not Banking Expansion —

It Is Strategic Extraction

The announcement that global financial giant Citi has received approval to establish a representative office in Guyana is being widely celebrated as a signal of international confidence and a strengthening of the local banking sector. That interpretation is not only misleading—it obscures the true nature of what is unfolding.

This is not banking expansion in any meaningful domestic sense. It is strategic positioning.

A representative office is not a commercial bank. It does not take deposits, issue local loans, or provide retail or broad-based corporate banking services within the domestic economy. Its purpose is far narrower and far more targeted: to facilitate high-value transactions, manage relationships with multinational clients, and channel capital flows through global financial networks.

In plain terms, Citi is not coming to bank Guyana—it is coming to service the upper tier of international business already operating within it.

This distinction matters because it exposes the gap between perception and reality. While the public is being led to believe that this development will expand access to financing, particularly for local enterprises, the opposite is more likely. Citi’s model is structured around large-scale, export-oriented, and foreign-linked transactions. Small and medium-sized Guyanese businesses—the backbone of the domestic economy—will remain largely excluded from its services.

Even among larger local firms, access will likely depend on their integration into international trade or their alignment with sectors such as oil and gas, infrastructure, and export logistics. This is not inclusive banking; it is selective financial intermediation designed for high-value clients operating in foreign currency ecosystems.

And that brings us to the core issue: currency and capital flows.

Citi’s operations in Guyana will almost certainly be anchored in U.S. dollar transactions, not Guyana dollar intermediation. This is not incidental—it is fundamental to its business model. The office will function as a conduit for moving capital into and out of Guyana efficiently, ensuring that profits, payments, and financing arrangements remain within Citi’s global system.

In effect, this creates a parallel financial channel—one that operates alongside, but not within, the domestic economy.

The implications are significant. Rather than deepening local financial capacity, such arrangements risk reinforcing an enclave-style economic structure, where high-value activities are externally managed and internally disconnected. Wealth flows through the country, but not necessarily into its broader economic fabric.

This is why the narrative of “confidence” must be treated with caution. Citi is not expressing confidence in Guyana’s domestic financial ecosystem or its small business sector. It is expressing confidence in its ability to extract value from a rapidly expanding, resource-driven economy.

That is a fundamentally different proposition.

The only tangible national benefit from this presence will depend on policy choices—specifically, whether the government ensures that such entities are subject to fair taxation and regulatory oversight. If tax concessions or holidays are granted, as has been the case in other sectors, even that limited benefit could be undermined.

Absent strong policy intervention, Guyana risks repeating a familiar pattern: attracting global players who participate in its growth without meaningfully contributing to its development.

Citi’s move should therefore be understood not as a milestone in banking sector expansion, but as a signal of where value is being concentrated—and who is positioned to capture it.

The real question is not whether Guyana is attracting global institutions. It is whether it is structuring their presence in a way that serves national interests, rather than simply accommodating global capital.

Until that question is answered with clarity and intent, celebrations of “confidence” will remain premature at best—and misleading at worst.

 

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

Flag, Fiasco, Fallout

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Flag, Fiasco, Fallout:

The Desecration of Fort Zeelandia

 

Fort Zeelandia did not deteriorate overnight. Its current condition, following the ill-conceived Independence flag-raising event, is the direct result of decisions—decisions made by public officials entrusted with both national heritage and public funds.

What unfolded was not simply a poorly managed ceremony. It was a failure of governance.

Responsibility begins squarely with the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport, the state body charged with oversight of national events and the preservation of cultural assets. Any event staged at a site of this magnitude requires meticulous planning, strict usage controls, and, critically, a post-event restoration protocol. The absence of these basic safeguards suggests either a breakdown in administrative competence or a disregard for the site’s historical value.

Equally implicated is the National Trust of Guyana, the statutory agency specifically mandated to protect and manage heritage sites such as Fort Zeelandia. If the Trust approved the use of the site without enforceable preservation conditions, then it failed in its legal and moral duty. If it was bypassed or sidelined, then that raises even more serious questions about governance and institutional integrity.

And above these agencies sits the Cabinet itself, which cannot credibly claim ignorance. National Independence events are not minor undertakings; they are centrally coordinated, politically visible, and funded from the public purse. That means ultimate accountability rests at the highest levels of government, including the Office of the President, which has repeatedly positioned itself as a champion of Guyana’s global environmental and sustainability credentials.

This is where the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.

Guyana has aggressively marketed its Low Carbon Development Strategy and carbon credit framework to the international community, positioning itself as a model of environmental stewardship. Billions in climate financing are premised on the idea that this nation understands the value of preservation—that it treats its natural and cultural assets with care, discipline, and respect.

Yet at Fort Zeelandia, we see the opposite: a heritage site treated as a disposable backdrop, left visibly degraded in the wake of a single evening’s spectacle.

Environmental stewardship is not divisible. A government cannot credibly claim to safeguard millions of hectares of forest while failing to protect a single, well-defined national monument. The principles are the same—planning, respect, accountability, and restoration.

What compounds the issue is the question of public funds. How much was spent on this event? Which contractors were engaged? Were there environmental or heritage impact guidelines embedded in those contracts? And crucially, has any allocation been made for the restoration of the site?

Silence on these questions only deepens public suspicion.

This is not merely about optics. It is about governance culture. When state institutions act without consequence—when heritage protections are ignored, when public spending yields damage rather than value, when no official steps forward to accept responsibility—the result is erosion not just of physical sites, but of public trust.

Fort Zeelandia is not an ordinary space. It is a repository of national memory. It carries the weight of Guyana’s colonial history, its struggles, and its evolution into an independent state. To allow it to be mishandled in this way is to diminish that history itself.

The government now faces a simple test.

Will the Ministry of Culture publicly account for its planning failures? Will the National Trust assert its authority and outline corrective measures? Will there be a transparent assessment of damage and a funded restoration plan? And most importantly, will anyone in a position of authority accept responsibility?

Or will this, like too many other episodes, be quietly absorbed into the machinery of impunity?

Guyana cannot afford that outcome—not if it wishes to be taken seriously, either by its own citizens or by the international partners to whom it sells a vision of sustainability and stewardship.

Because stewardship is not declared. It is demonstrated.

And at Fort Zeelandia, the demonstration has been a failure.

 

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

 

 

World- class
World-class
Abuse of public funds
Abuse of Public Funds
Rental paid by you
Clean up paid by you
Who cleans this ?
Big Soiree?
Rental
Rental still being paid
58% Poverty
58% Poverty?
Desecration of Flag
No respect
Who is paying for this?
A HERITAGE SITE ?

 

 

Silence vs Scrutiny: What Guyana Must Learn from the Philippines Case

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Silence vs Scrutiny: What Guyana Must Learn from the Philippines Case

By: Staff Writer

The recent release of 64 Chinese nationals in the Philippines—detained amid allegations of nuclear safety violations and breaches of immigration and labor laws—should command serious attention in Guyana. Not because the circumstances are identical, but because the institutional response offers a revealing contrast.

In the Philippine case, authorities acted swiftly to detain foreign workers linked to potentially hazardous industrial operations. The allegations were grave, touching on issues of public safety and regulatory compliance. Yet just as swiftly, the judicial process intervened. The Department of Justice reviewed the evidence and concluded that it was insufficient to sustain the charges. The detainees were released. Six more are expected to follow.

This sequence—allegation, enforcement, review, and legal resolution—reflects a functioning, if imperfect, system. It underscores a basic principle: the state must not only act when serious concerns arise but must also subject its actions to scrutiny and evidentiary standards.

Now consider Guyana’s unfolding Ekaa HRIM controversy.

Here, the issue is not a lack of allegations—it is an abundance of them. Reports continue to surface from workers describing troubling conditions: unsafe handling of materials, questionable labor practices, and what appear to be systemic breaches of occupational and environmental safeguards. These accounts are not isolated. They are accumulating, forming a pattern that demands urgent and credible investigation.

Yet, conspicuously, the state has not matched the gravity of these claims with commensurate action.

There has been no visible, comprehensive probe. No clear indication of independent oversight. No sustained public communication outlining what is being investigated, by whom, and under what legal framework. Instead, there is a vacuum—one filled increasingly by worker testimonies, speculation, and public unease.

This silence is not merely a communications failure. It is a governance failure.

At stake is more than the credibility of a single enterprise. The Ekaa HRIM matter touches on core questions about how Guyana manages foreign investment, enforces labor protections, and safeguards both workers and communities from industrial risk. It raises the uncomfortable possibility that regulatory mechanisms may be either under-resourced, compromised, or selectively applied.

That possibility alone should trigger alarm at the highest levels of government.

Guyana is in the midst of a transformative economic period, driven in large part by foreign capital and large-scale industrial activity. This transformation carries undeniable opportunities—but also significant risks. 

 

Chief among them is the emergence of regulatory blind spots, where the pace of investment outstrips the capacity or willingness of institutions to enforce the law.

If left unaddressed, such gaps do not remain isolated. They metastasize. They create precedents—quiet understandings that certain actors may operate with a degree of impunity, particularly where economic or diplomatic considerations are perceived to be at play.

The Philippine example demonstrates that even where allegations prove unfounded, the act of investigation itself is essential. It reassures the public, tests the integrity of claims, and reinforces the principle that no entity operates above scrutiny.

Guyana, by contrast, risks sending the opposite message.

 

The continued emergence of “horror stories,” as described by affected workers, suggests not only potential violations but also a growing crisis of confidence. Workers are speaking out because they perceive that formal channels may not be functioning as they should. That, in itself, is a red flag.

The government cannot afford to treat this as a peripheral issue. Nor can it rely on silence as a strategy.

What is required is immediate, visible, and credible action: a full-scale investigation led by competent and independent authorities; transparent reporting of findings; and, where violations are confirmed, decisive enforcement. This must include scrutiny of labor practices, immigration compliance, environmental standards, and any handling of hazardous materials.

Anything less will deepen public suspicion and erode institutional legitimacy.

There is also a broader reputational dimension. Guyana’s international standing—as an emerging economy seeking investment and partnerships—depends not only on its resource wealth but on the strength of its governance. Investors and partners alike take note of how states respond to controversy, particularly where it intersects with labor rights and safety standards.

A failure to act decisively in the Ekaa HRIM matter risks signaling that oversight is negotiable and that enforcement may yield to expediency.

That is a dangerous signal to send.

 

Ultimately, this is a test—not just of a single company or a discrete set of allegations, but of the state itself. It is a test of whether Guyana’s institutions are prepared to uphold the rule of law consistently, even when doing so may be inconvenient or politically sensitive.

The Philippines, in this instance, demonstrated that action and accountability can coexist. Guyana must now demonstrate that it is capable of the same.

Silence is no longer tenable. The integrity of governance demands a response.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

Guyana’s Diaspora Bond: A Financial Rendezvous Without the Scaffolding of Governance

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Guyana’s Diaspora Bond:

A Financial Rendezvous Without the Scaffolding of Governance

By: Staff– Writer

President Mohamed Irfaan Ali recently announced that Guyana will launch a special diaspora bond within a week, aimed at raising funds from Guyanese living overseas to finance public infrastructure projects. The bond was unveiled during a joint appearance with Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley at Guyana’s National Stadium, part of the country’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, alongside broader plans for passport-free travel, digital ID integration, and a regional investment fund.

This is a major step in the wrong direction—not because diaspora capital is unwelcome, but because the government is embarking on a sovereign-backed financial instrument without first answering the most basic questions of authority, accountability, and investor protection.

The Authority Deficit

On what legal and constitutional authority is the government, and President Ali personally, launching this bond? Guyana’s Constitution vests law-making power in Parliament, and public debt management best practices, including those from the World Bank and IMF, require that borrowing, guarantees, and contingent liabilities be either approved by Parliament or reported to it in a timely, detailed manner.

Yet there is no indication that this bond has been authorized by specific legislation, debated in Parliament, or subjected to public scrutiny. The government is effectively taking on the responsibility of financial underwriting without consultation. This is not policy innovation; it is fiscal improvisation.

The Credit Problem

A diaspora bond is only as credible as the borrower behind it. Investor confidence depends on the sovereign’s creditworthiness, the legal framework governing repayment, and the enforceability of commitments.

Guyana still does not have a widely recognized sovereign credit rating. In 2020, analysts argued that the time was opportune for Guyana to obtain one; nearly six years later, that exercise remains incomplete. Without a publicly disclosed credit rating, without transparent debt sustainability analysis, and without disclosed terms, the government is asking diaspora investors to bet on trust rather than on verifiable financial strength.

The Legal Vacuum

What legislation will be put in place to guarantee investors? What security backs the bond? What recourse do investors have if the state cannot or will not pay?

Diaspora bonds are more effective when they sit inside a clear legal architecture, sometimes with institutional safeguards or credit support. When they are not, they rely heavily on sentiment rather than enforceable protection. The announcement has provided none of these details.

This is not abstract. Guyana has seen financial promises collapse before. When CLICO Insurance failed, many investors were left unpaid for years, with little recourse and no clear resolution. That trauma is still fresh in the public memory. A government-backed diaspora bond that lacks statutory backing risks repeating the same pattern: high hopes, weak legal protection, and a long tail of unresolved claims.

The Political Risk: What Happens If the Government Changes?

The most dangerous gap in this design is political. What happens if the administration changes and the next government decide it does not want to honor the debenture?

Sovereign debt is not personal. It is institutional. But when an instrument is launched quickly, without legislation, without budgetary anchoring, and without parliamentary oversight, it becomes vulnerable to political reinterpretation. The next administration could delay payments, renegotiate terms, or simply disown the initiative, leaving investors exposed and the state’s credibility damaged.

Patriotism cannot substitute for a binding legal commitment. If the government truly wants diaspora investment to be safe and credible, it must anchor the bond in law, not in press statements.

The Regional Pattern: Integration Promises That Outpace Governance

The diaspora bond is just one part of a broader Guyana–Barbados integration agenda: passport-free travel starting July 1 based on a digital ID system, plans for digitally connected financial systems, and a new regional investment fund called Trident Arrow.

President Ali has said the system will eventually support integrated healthcare services between the two countries. These are ambitious goals. But ambition without legal architecture is a recipe for policy overload. The Caribbean has seen this reel before: grand announcements, rapid political momentum, and then a slow, messy realization that the institutions, laws, and oversight mechanisms were never built.

Guyana now risks turning its diaspora into testing subjects for unstructured financial engineering.

Why This Matters for Guyana’s Future

Diaspora capital can absolutely support development. But it must be mobilized responsibly. That means:

  • Parliamentary approval for any sovereign-backed borrowing or guarantee
  • A clear legal framework that defines the bond’s terms, security, and enforcement mechanisms
  • Transparency on credit risk, including disclosure of debt sustainability and sovereign rating status
  • Protection against political turnover, ensuring that obligations survive changes in government

 

Without these safeguards, the diaspora bond becomes less a development tool and more a political gamble

The Bottom Line

Guyana is at a pivotal moment. Oil and gas revenues have transformed the economy, but they have also exposed the country to new risks: fiscal overreach, weak governance structures, and policy decisions that outpace institutional capacity.

This diaspora bond is a test. If the government proceeds without parliamentary sanction, without a legal framework, and without investor protections, it will signal that political momentum matters more than fiscal prudence.

If Guyana truly wants to honor its diaspora, it must treat their investment not as a patriotic donation, but as a serious financial contract—one that is backed by law, overseen by Parliament, and protected from the whims of political change.

Otherwise, what is being sold as regional innovation may become another Caribbean lesson in how easily political ambition outruns governance.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

 

Mr. President,  the People Are Still Waiting

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OPINION & EDITORIAL 

THE PUBLIC RECORD 

MAY 2026   EDITORIAL 

Mr. President, the People Are Still Waiting 

Eight years of oil. Sixty years of independence. And more than half the country still lives in poverty. No speech, however soaring, can paper over that arithmetic. 

THE EDITORS · OPINION 

There is a particular cruelty to eloquence deployed in the presence of deprivation. President Dr. Irfaan Ali’s address on the eve of Guyana’s 60th Independence Anniversary was, by the standards of political oratory, a polished performance. It had rhythm. It had poetry. It had the grand architecture of a speech designed to be quoted, clipped, and circulated. What it did not have — what it conspicuously, almost defiantly, lacked — was an honest reckoning with the country it was delivered in. 

The oil beneath Guyana’s waters is, as the President declared, the property of the people. He is right about that. Which is precisely why the people deserve a government that speaks to them plainly about why, after eight years of oil production and historic revenue windfalls, the majority of Guyanese remain poor.

58% 

POVERTY RATE — AFTER 8 YEARS OF OIL 

Guyana became a major oil producer in 2016. By any credible measurement, the majority of its citizens have yet to feel that transformation in their daily lives. This is not a statistic to be dismissed with a road metaphor.

Let us grant the President his roads and bridges. Infrastructure is real. Construction is visible. Progress can be photographed and inaugurated. But a road that connects a community still mired in poverty, still without reliable electricity, still without clean running water, still without a functioning primary health care system — that road does not connect destinies. It connects misery to more misery, only faster. 

The President told Guyanese that schools “teach children to dream.” But dreams require a foundation. They require a teacher who is paid on time and trained well. They require a school building that does not Nood in the rainy season. They require a child who arrived that morning having eaten. The gap between the rhetoric of dreaming and the reality of classrooms in the hinterland and poor coastal communities is not a gap that poetic language can bridge. 

Hospitals, the President, “affirmed that every Guyanese life has worth“. A beautiful sentiment. And yet Guyanese continue to travel abroad for procedures unavailable at home. The chronically ill navigate a public health system stretched beyond its limits. Maternal mortality remains a scandal. Drug shortages are routine. If hospitals affirm the worth of lives, someone should tell the hospitals. 

The US$100 million STEM program announced in partnership with ExxonMobil deserves scrutiny, not celebration. A knowledge economy built in partnership with the very extractive corporation profiting most handsomely from Guyana’s resources is not a bold vision of sovereignty — it is a continuation of dependency, dressed in the language of innovation. Who negotiated those terms? What does Guyana own of that pro gramme? These are not hostile questions; they are the minimum due diligence a nation owes itself. 

“One Guyana does not mean we are all the same — it means we are all equal.” If equality is the standard, Mr. President, then the standard has not been met“.

The President’s “One Guyana” formulation is ideologically convenient precisely because it asks nothing of those in power. It asks citizens to look past ethnic division, past regional disparity, past historical grievance — and to trust that the government is building toward something better.

But unity without accountability is not unity. It is compliance. And the test of whether a government is governing “for all” is not the number of projects announced, but the number of lives materially improved. 

THE LITANY THE SPEECH DID NOT ADDRESS

01 Poverty at 58% after eight years of oil revenue
No policy explanation. No timeline for reduction. No accountability for why transformation has not reached the majority of citizens who were promised it would. 

02 Cost of living crushing ordinary households

Food prices, fuel costs, and basic necessities continue to strain families whose wages have not kept pace with the oil economy’s growth. The GDP numbers do not eat breakfast. 

03 Corruption and procurement opacity 

Billions in oil revenue flow through government contracting processes with limited independent oversight. The question of who benefits — and who awards the contracts — demands a direct answer, not a sermon about collective patrimony. 

04 Healthcare infrastructure in crisis 

Beyond the ribbon-cutting of new hospital buildings, the functional capacity of Guyana’s health system — staffing, medication supply chains, specialist availability — remains critically deficient for most citizens outside Georgetown. 

05 Hinterland and interior communities left behind

The President’s vision of a child in any region having the same opportunity is belied by the stark reality of Indigenous and interior communities who lack basic services that coastal Guyanese take for granted. Equal rights require equal investment, not equal rhetoric. 

06 Oil contract transparency and sovereign wealth management 

The terms of Guyana’s production-sharing agreements remain poorly understood by the public. “Spending with purpose and saving with discipline” are phrases — not policies. Where are the independent audits? The parliamentary oversight? The citizen dashboards? 

None of this is to say that Guyana has not built things. It has. None of it suggests that government is without genuine intent. Perhaps it has intent in abundance. The problem is not intent — it is delivery. It is the distance between the podium and the yard, between the micro phone and the market stall, between the speech and the school that still floods. 

At sixty years of independence, Guyana deserves a leader who will stand before its people not with poetry, but with plans. Not with vision, but with verifiable targets. Not with the confidence of someone who believes the oil has already won, but with the humility of someone who knows the work has barely started. The test of independence is not whether a president can deliver a stirring address. It is whether the people he addresses can afford to eat, to heal, to educate their children, and to believe — on evidence, not faith — that tomorrow will be better than today. 

The oil is the peoples. Mr. President so is the reckoning. 

“March not with arrogance, but with confidence,” the President urged. We would add “march not with rhetoric, but with results.” 

— The Editor

 

Guyana’s Global Turn and the Quiet Risk of a Fracturing Caricom

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OPINION

Staff Writer

The confrontation between Trinidad and Tobago and Caricom over the reappointment of Secretary-General Dr Carla Barnett is being framed as an internal dispute. It is not. It is a reflection of a deeper transition now underway across the region—one that carries particular significance for Guyana.

Because at the very moment Caricom shows signs of strain, Guyana itself is moving in the opposite direction: outward, rapidly and decisively, into the global arena.

Oil has changed the equation.

 In less than a decade, Guyana has shifted from a peripheral economy within Caricom to one of the fastest-growing energy producers in the world. Its economic trajectory now commands attention not just within the Caribbean, but in Washington, Brussels, Beijing, and beyond. Investment flows, security partnerships, and diplomatic engagement are all expanding at a pace the region has never before seen.

Guyana is no longer operating primarily within a regional frame. It is now navigating a global one.

That shift is already reshaping policy instincts. Decision-making is increasingly influenced by global capital markets, multinational energy interests, and strategic alliances with major powers. The scale of opportunity—and risk—has changed fundamentally.

But this global turn creates a subtle danger.

As Guyana’s economic center of gravity shifts outward, the perceived relevance of Caricom may begin to diminish. Regional integration, once a central pillar of economic and diplomatic strategy, can start to appear secondary—useful, but no longer essential.

That perception would be a mistake.

Because Guyana’s rise is not occurring in a vacuum. It is unfolding within a complex geopolitical environment defined by energy competition, great-power rivalry, and an active territorial controversy with Venezuela that has already drawn in international actors.

In such an environment, regional alignment is not a luxury. It is a layer of strategic insulation.

A cohesive Caricom strengthens Guyana’s diplomatic position by reinforcing legitimacy, amplifying its voice, and providing a collective buffer against external pressure. It transforms what could be a bilateral vulnerability into a multilateral concern.

Conversely, a fragmented Caricom weakens that shield.

If regional unity erodes—if member states increasingly pursue narrow, transactional agendas—then the Caribbean becomes more susceptible to external division. Global powers will engage states individually, leverage asymmetries, and shape outcomes in ways that may not always align with regional interests.

For Guyana, that is not a theoretical risk. It is a foreseeable consequence.

The dispute involving Trinidad and Tobago underscores precisely this shift. What was once managed quietly within the architecture of regional diplomacy is now being contested in the open, with national positioning taking precedence over collective discipline.

This is the new reality Guyana must navigate.

There will be a growing temptation to mirror that approach—to prioritize bilateral deals, maximize immediate returns, and treat regional commitments as negotiable rather than foundational. Given the scale of Guyana’s new economic leverage, that path may appear not only viable, but rational.

It is neither sufficient nor sustainable.

Because Guyana’s long-term national interest is not defined solely by oil revenues or external partnerships. It is also defined by stability—regional, political and institutional. And that stability has historically been underwritten, in part, by Caricom.

What is at risk is not simply an organization, but an enabling environment.

Caricom has provided Guyana with more than market access. It has offered diplomatic alignment, legal familiarity, and a framework through which small states could act with coordinated purpose. These are not easily replicated in purely global engagements, where asymmetries of power are far more pronounced.

The challenge, therefore, is not to choose between global engagement and regional commitment. It is to understand that the two must operate in tandem.

Guyana’s emergence as a global energy player makes Caricom more important, not less. It increases the need for a stable regional platform through which its growing influence can be anchored and legitimized.

At the same time, Caricom itself must adjust to this new reality. The rise of Guyana introduces new dynamics into the regional balance—economic, political and strategic—that cannot be ignored. Leadership within the Community will need to evolve accordingly.

But evolution requires coherence.

If the current trajectory—marked by open confrontation and increasingly transactional engagement—continues unchecked, Caricom risks becoming less a strategic bloc and more a loose collection of states pursuing parallel, and sometimes competing, agendas.

For Guyana, that would represent a strategic loss at precisely the moment of greatest opportunity.

The country is stepping onto the global stage. But global visibility does not eliminate the need for regional grounding. If anything, it makes it more urgent.

Because in a world of expanding ambition and intensifying competition, even rising states benefit from standing within something larger than themselves.

The question is whether the Caribbean will remain that structure—or allow it to weaken just as one of its members begins to outgrow the confines that once defined it.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮, 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—

 

A Nation Left Stranded –The Fort Island Independence Debacle and the Collapse of State Logistics

/in /by

 

 EDITORIAL

Staff Writer

When World- Class is no longer a “SLOGAN”

 

Guyana’s Independence celebration at Fort Island will be remembered not as a triumphant national observance, but as a case study in governmental disorganization, poor planning, security recklessness, and administrative arrogance. 

 

What should have been an occasion of pride instead descended into confusion, embarrassment, and avoidable danger. And what makes it worse is that none of it was unforeseeable. Every failure that evening was the product of choices — or the deliberate absence of them.

The most troubling aspect of the evening was not any single mistake. It was the systemic nature of the incompetence on display. When failures are isolated, they can be attributed to oversight. When they are layered, interlocking, and spread across every dimension of an event’s execution, they speak to something more fundamental: an institutional culture that does not take governance seriously enough to sweat the details — even when the occasion demands nothing less.

1.The Citizens Left Behind

Let us begin where the evening ended — with thousands of Guyanese stranded in the dark, waiting for vessels that were not coming quickly enough, on an island they had been invited to celebrate upon.

The transportation failure to and from Fort Island was not the consequence of bad weather, mechanical emergency, or some unforeseeable crisis. It was the consequence of elementary miscalculation. Planners organized a national public event on an island — a geographically enclosed venue with a single mode of mass egress — and failed to provision adequate maritime transport for the return journey. This is not a logistical nuance. It is the first question any competent event planner asks: how do we get people home?

The answer, apparently, was not asked loudly enough, or not answered honestly, or not acted upon at all.

What followed was entirely predictable. 

Exhausted citizens — many of whom had made the effort to attend out of genuine patriotic feeling — scrambled for passage back to the mainland in conditions that ranged from disorganized to dangerous. 

Unforgettable Moment

Officials who should have been coordinating were apparently unprepared for the entirely predictable reality that the ceremony would end and people would need to leave.

There is something particularly corrosive about this kind of failure. It is not the failure of ambition. It is the failure of basic care. The state invited citizens to participate in a national celebration and then abandoned the operational responsibility of ensuring they could return safely. That is not a logistical shortcoming. It is a statement about whose comfort, time, and safety the state considers worth planning for.

11.The Security Question No One Should Have to Ask

While citizens scrambled on the docks, a more quietly alarming tableau was unfolding above them.

Reports indicate that Cabinet members — senior figures of the Guyanese executive — were clustered together in the top VIP section of a single vessel during transport. In ordinary circumstances, this might be unremarkable. These are not ordinary circumstances.

Guyana is presently navigating one of the most consequential and sensitive geopolitical situations in its history. The territorial controversy with Venezuela over the Essequibo region has elevated the country’s strategic exposure in ways that carry real, not theoretical, risk. Against this backdrop, the decision to concentrate a significant portion of senior state leadership in one exposed maritime environment — without apparent security zoning, contingency separation, or layered emergency protocols — is not merely poor optics. It is a failure of basic statecraft.

Serious states, particularly those operating under conditions of heightened geopolitical tension, do not casually centralize their executive leadership in vulnerable transit settings. 

The principles of state continuity — ensuring that no single incident can decapitate a government’s command and decision-making capacity — exist precisely because history has demonstrated, repeatedly, that risk does not announce its arrival.

This is not paranoia. It is not theatrical caution. It is the fundamental obligation of those who manage state security to plan not for the probable, but for the possible. The question is not whether anything happened that night. The question is whether anything was in place if something had. The silence on that question is, itself, an answer.

III. What the World Saw

Nations are judged, in part, by the small moments — the details that reveal whether a state is genuinely capable of executing what it claims to represent. Fort Island offered the world a revealing detail.

The United States Ambassador to Guyana, one of the most senior diplomatic representatives present at the occasion, was reportedly left to navigate her way onto a vessel using unstable boards placed haphazardly between the dock and the boat — largely unassisted, in conditions of darkness and confusion. She managed. That is not the point.

Diplomacy is theatre as much as it is policy. Visiting ambassadors and foreign dignitaries are not merely guests at national events. They are, whether we acknowledge it or not, observers and reporters. What they experience becomes part of the informal record of a country’s institutional character — the stories that circulate in embassies, foreign ministries, and diplomatic cables. 

What was communicated to Guyana’s international partners that evening was not the image of a confident, capable, oil-rich emerging state asserting its place among the nations. It was the image of a country that could not organize safe boarding conditions for one of its most important diplomatic guests.

Guyana is, at this precise moment in its history, seeking to project itself as a serious and sovereign actor — a nation whose governance infrastructure is equal to its extraordinary natural wealth. Fort Island did not reinforce that projection. It undermined it, quietly but unmistakably, in front of an audience that will remember.

IV.The Flag That Faltered

None of the above failures occurred in isolation. They shared the evening with a moment that, in the context of national ceremony, carries particular symbolic weight.

The midnight flag raising — the ceremonial centerpiece of Independence observance, the act around which the entire gathering was organized — faltered. Visibly. In a manner that communicated, without ambiguity, a lack of adequate rehearsal and coordination.

This matters more than it may appear. National ceremonies are not casual social events. They are deliberately constructed expressions of sovereignty — rituals that project the discipline, precision, and institutional competence of a state to its own citizens and to the world. They derive their emotional and symbolic power from flawless execution. When they fail, even partially, they do not merely embarrass. They communicate something about the state itself — about whether its institutions are capable of commanding the details that collective identity demands.

 

A flag raised clumsily on Independence Night is not just an aesthetic blemish. In a country navigating the weight of its history, the complexity of its present, and the uncertainty of its geopolitical future, it is a signal. And signals, once sent, cannot be unsent.

V.A Pattern, Not an Incident

Individually, each of the failures at Fort Island might be dismissed as an aberration — a bad night, a miscommunication, an unfortunate oversight. But they did not occur individually. They occurred together, on the same evening, at the same event, organized by the same state apparatus. That simultaneity is not incidental. It is diagnostic.

What Fort Island revealed is not merely that event planners made mistakes. It revealed that the state’s approach to high-visibility public obligations is not underwritten by the rigor, accountability, and systematic preparation that such obligations require.

The citizens were an afterthought. The security calculus was casual. The diplomatic protocol was inadequate. The ceremonial execution was unrehearsed.

These are not the failures of a government that was unlucky. They are the failures of a government that was underprepared — and, more troublingly, of a government that may not have considered that preparation necessary.

Guyana is a nation at a crossroads of enormous historical consequence. Its oil revenues, its territorial disputes, its emergence onto the international stage — all of it demands a state that is not merely present, but capable. Fort Island showed us, in miniature and in real time, what an incapable state looks like when it dresses itself in the clothes of national celebration.

There are no easy answers here. There is no single official to blame, no single department to restructure, no single reform that addresses what was on display that night. What happened at Fort Island is the product of a broader institutional culture — one in which accountability is deferred, standards are negotiated downward, and the performance of governance is permitted to substitute for its substance.

The celebration is over. The stranded citizens made it home. The ambassador boarded her vessel. The flag, eventually, was raised.

But the questions that Fort Island asks of this government have no expiry date. And they have not yet been answered.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮, 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—

One Guyana or One Party Rule? The Quiet Unraveling of Accountability

/in /by

A Constitutional Silence: Legislative Inactivity, Executive Concentration, and the Erosion of Accountability in Guyana

BY: Hem Kumar                               

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣

The present state of Guyana’s parliamentary system raises a narrow but consequential question: can the sustained non-sitting of the National Assembly, absent a formal constitutional mechanism, coexist with the requirements of responsible government?

On the facts as they stand, the answer is increasingly difficult to sustain.
For approximately 104 days, the National Assembly has not convened. There has been no prorogation. There has been no dissolution. There is no publicly articulated recess resolution grounded in Standing Orders or constitutional practice. In constitutional terms, the Assembly appears neither lawfully suspended nor operational—it is simply inactive.

This is not a procedural triviality. Guyana’s Constitution establishes a system of parliamentary democracy grounded in the principle of executive accountability to the legislature. That principle is not symbolic—it is operational. It requires regular sittings, questioning of ministers, and the functioning of parliamentary committees.
The absence of sittings, therefore, engages more than political optics. It raises the issue of whether the executive is, in practice, avoiding the very forum to which it is constitutionally answerable.

The position is compounded by the apparent non-functioning of parliamentary committees since the election. Committees are not ancillary; they are extensions of the Assembly’s oversight jurisdiction. Through them, the Assembly exercises scrutiny over public expenditure, administrative conduct, and statutory implementation.
Where committees do not convene, oversight does not merely weaken—it collapses into formality without substance.

In Commonwealth constitutional jurisprudence, responsible government depends on two interlocking conditions: (1) the continuous availability of the legislature to hold the executive to account, and (2) the clear attribution of executive authority to identifiable ministers who are answerable to that legislature.
Both conditions now warrant scrutiny.
The expanding operational role of the Vice President introduces a second axis of constitutional concern. While the Constitution of Guyana provides for a Vice President, it does not contemplate an office exercising diffuse, cross-sectoral executive authority unmoored from explicit ministerial responsibility.

Under orthodox Westminster-derived principles, executive power must be traceable. Decisions must be attributable to ministers who can be questioned, censured, or removed through parliamentary mechanisms. Authority without accountability is not merely inefficient—it is constitutionally suspect.
If policy direction across major sectors is being exercised by an office that does not fully accept corresponding ministerial responsibility to the Assembly, then the chain of accountability is interrupted. The result is not simply concentration of power, but diffusion of responsibility—a condition fundamentally at odds with responsible government.

It is also material that the government commands a working parliamentary majority. This is not a case of legislative paralysis arising from instability or lack of numbers. The executive possesses the capacity to convene the Assembly, sustain its legislative agenda, and withstand scrutiny through established procedures.
The decision not to do so must therefore be understood as elective rather than compelled.

Comparative constitutional practice offers guidance. Across Commonwealth jurisdictions, prolonged legislative inactivity without formal prorogation or dissolution is rare and typically subject to political and legal challenge. Courts have increasingly recognized that procedural devices—or their absence—cannot be used to frustrate the core functions of the legislature. While Guyana’s courts have not yet been invited to pronounce on a fact pattern of this kind, the underlying doctrine is clear: constitutional forms cannot be used to defeat constitutional substance.

None of these observations, standing alone, establishes illegality or corruption. That is not the present claim.
The issue is structural risk.
A legislature that does not sit cannot exercise oversight. Committees that do not meet cannot examine the use of public funds. Executive authority that is not clearly tethered to accountable ministers cannot be effectively scrutinized.

Taken together, these conditions create what may be described, in constitutional terms, as an accountability deficit.
It is precisely this deficit that international governance frameworks are designed to detect. Organizations such as Transparency International and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project do not rely solely on proof of wrongdoing; they assess enabling environments—patterns of opacity, weakened oversight, and institutional imbalance. Similarly, assessments by the U.S. Department of State and diplomatic missions, including those of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, routinely consider the functionality of democratic institutions as a core indicator of governance integrity.
Guyana’s emergence as a significant oil-producing state heightens, rather than diminishes, the importance of these considerations. Resource-driven economies are particularly vulnerable to governance slippage where oversight mechanisms are weakened or bypassed.

The constitutional question, therefore, is not whether wrongdoing has been proven.
It is whether the current configuration of legislative inactivity and executive concentration is consistent with the minimum requirements of accountable government.
On that question, the burden does not lie with critics to prove collapse. It lies with the State to demonstrate that constitutional governance remains intact in both form and function.

Until that demonstration is made—through the resumption of sittings, the activation of committees, and the clarification of lines of executive responsibility—the present silence of the Assembly will continue to speak louder than any official assurance.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮, 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—