A Letter Ali May Not Be Able to Answer

ELECTORAL GOVERNANCE

A Letter Ali May Not Be Able to Answer

The Constitutional Hole at the Centre of Mohamed’s GECOM Campaign

592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL BOARD – August 2026

Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has now written President Irfaan Ali on the composition of the Guyana Elections Commission enough times that the letters have started to blur into one another. The latest, sent in the wake of The Carter Center’s statement on the GECOM impasse, asks Ali to give “urgent consideration” to appointing Mohamed’s three nominees — his own private attorneys, Roysdale Forde, Siand Dhurjon and Damien Da Silva — in place of the three sitting opposition-nominated commissioners. It is, by any reasonable count, his fourth or fifth attempt since June.

What has not changed across any of these letters is the assumption sitting underneath them: that this is a request Ali is capable of granting.

THE QUESTION THE LETTER TREATS AS SETTLED

Mohamed’s position rests on reading Article 161(3)(b) of the Constitution as attaching to an office, not a person. The Leader of the Opposition’s power to advise the President on GECOM appointments, on this view, belongs to whoever currently holds that title — so when the office changed hands from Aubrey Norton to Mohamed following the 2025 elections, the basis on which the three sitting commissioners were appointed changed with it.

University of Guyana law lecturer Neville Bissember has made this case seriously: the relevant constitutional language speaks of “the Leader of the Opposition” as a role, not a named individual, and a role that has been reconfigured cannot indefinitely bind the President to advice given by its previous occupant.

It is a real argument. It is not, however, the only one, and it is nowhere close to settled.

The competing reading draws on Article 161(6), which imports the removal protections of Article 225 into GECOM membership — the same protections that shield judges from arbitrary dismissal. On this view, a commissioner can only be removed for cause: infirmity, misbehaviour, the standard categories that apply to constitutional officeholders generally. 

A change in the opposition’s parliamentary arithmetic is not a recognised cause for removal. The sitting commissioners — Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin and Desmond Trotman — have made exactly this argument in their own defence: that appointment created a personal constitutional tenure, not a leash held by whichever party leader happened to nominate them.

Both readings have been argued in good faith by people who understand the Constitution. Neither has been resolved by a court.

Mohamed’s letters to Ali do not acknowledge this. They proceed as though the “office not person” interpretation is simply correct, and as though the only obstacle to Ali acting on it is inattention or bad faith.

THE DEEPER PROBLEM: EVEN IF MOHAMED IS RIGHT, ALI MAY NOT BE ABLE TO SAY SO

This is where the letter-writing campaign runs into its real difficulty, and it is a difficulty that survives even a charitable reading of Mohamed’s constitutional argument. Legal opinion aired publicly in July concluded that there is, at present, no vacancy on GECOM for the President to fill — because nothing in the Constitution gives the President the unilateral authority to decide, on his own initiative, which of two competing constitutional interpretations governs.

That determination belongs to the courts.

Put plainly: Mohamed is not simply asking Ali to act quickly. He is asking Ali to resolve, by executive letter, a genuine and unresolved dispute about the meaning of Article 161(3)(b) — a dispute serious enough that it has produced dueling legal opinions in the national press for months.

Even if Ali agreed entirely with Mohamed’s reading, replacing sitting constitutional officeholders on that basis alone would be an act of constitutional interpretation the Presidency does not clearly have the standing to perform unilaterally. It would almost certainly invite the very litigation Mohamed says he is prepared to bring — except brought against the President, by the displaced commissioners, rather than by Mohamed against the President.

This changes what “no response” actually means. Ali’s silence need not be read as obstruction or political convenience, though it may be that too. It can just as easily be read as the more legally cautious course available to him: declining to adjudicate a live constitutional question that properly belongs before a judge, rather than acting on one party’s account of it and creating a fresh cause of action in the process.

WHAT THAT DOES TO THE LETTERS THEMSELVES

If this reading is right, the recurring letters to Ali were, in a meaningful sense, never going to work — not because the President is unresponsive, but because the request was addressed to an office that most likely cannot grant it. That reframes the entire exercise. A letter asking for something the recipient cannot lawfully give is not really a request for action.

It is a public record being built: evidence, for a later court filing or a later international appeal, that “urgent” correspondence was sent and ignored.

Whether or not that is Mohamed’s actual strategy, it is the practical effect. And it sits inside a pattern that is now difficult to miss. The same posture — treat a contested legal question as though it is obviously resolved, address the request to an authority who may not have the power to grant it, invoke the international community rather than the courts — has now appeared in Mohamed’s approach to the Region 10 impasse and in his legal team’s demand letter to the CCJ Registrar over Justice Anderson’s participation in his own extradition proceedings.

In each case, the domestic judicial remedy that could actually settle the underlying question — judicial review, injunctive relief, a constitutional motion — remains unused, while the letters multiply.

The answer the moment requires is a judicial one, not another letter to an office that has now been asked, repeatedly, to do something it may not be constitutionally positioned to do.

The GECOM commissioners’ dispute deserves an answer. Guyana’s electoral machinery cannot indefinitely run on a commission whose composition even its own members and the Chairperson herself have publicly disputed, and the country cannot deliver credible Local Government Elections while that dispute drags on unresolved.

But the answer the moment requires is a judicial one, not another letter to an office that has now been asked, repeatedly, to do something it may not be constitutionally positioned to do.

— The Board