Bhagwandin’s Word-Fog Cannot Bury the One Question He Won’t Answer: Who Holds the Pen?

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY

Bhagwandin’s Word-Fog Cannot Bury the One Question He Won’t Answer: Who Holds the Pen? 

Joel Bhagwandin has written 1,800 words to avoid answering one question. That, in itself, is the story. 

His letter in the Guyana Chronicle on the Guyana Development Bank is a masterclass in a particular genre of public-relations writing: bury the politically inconvenient question under a landslide of technical vocabulary, and hope the reader mistakes density for substance.

 It reads like a man performing competence rather than demonstrating it — and performance is precisely what is required when the actual answer is unflattering. 

Strip away the jargon and what remains is this: the Bill gives one office-holder the power to appoint the Board and the management structure of an institution that will control public lending capital, with no requirement for parliamentary consensus and no meaningful external check on that appointment power. Bhagwandin does not dispute this. He does not even really engage with it. He simply changes the subject — at length, and with great technical confidence — to talk instead about what happens after the appointments are made.

 Bhagwandin’s entire defense rests on a quiet but load-bearing assumption: that peer review clusters, credit committees, and internal audit functions are self-executing — that once written into a manual, they enforce themselves regardless of who sits above them.

A credit manual is not a force of nature. It is a document that can be amended, reinterpreted, or quietly unenforced by anyone with authority over the people enforcing it. Centralised appointment power doesn’t get neutralised by decentralised paperwork. It sits above the paperwork, with its hand on the pen. 

This is why “who appoints the Board” is not, as Bhagwandin frames it, a narrow obsession of people who haven’t thought it through.

It is the load-bearing wall of the entire structure he’s describing. Every technical safeguard he cites is downstream of it. The tomfoolery of false modesty

There is something almost theatrical in Bhagwandin positioning himself as the lone adult in the room, calling for “a more mature debate” while declining to mention that he is, by public account, among those positioned for leadership inside the very institution he is publicly defending. If that is accurate, it is not a footnote — it is the single most relevant fact missing from his letter, and its absence does more to explain the tone of the piece than anything actually written in it. 

The public is entitled to a straight answer, not a paragraph about portfolio dashboards: is Joel Bhagwandin a prospective officer of the Guyana Development Bank? If so, say so on the page, in the first paragraph, before the lecture on financial maturity begins. 

And while he is disclosing, the public has a second, older question still sitting unanswered.

As a sitting member of the Public Procurement Commission, what was his role — and what was the Commission’s role — in the handling of the Tepui Construction matter, reported to involve some $167 million in public funds?,

A man who wants to be trusted with the design of a public lending institution’s accountability architecture should be willing to account, in detail, for his own record on a public accountability body. Silence on that front, while writing lecture-length essays on “institutionally costly” arbitrary lending elsewhere, is not a good look. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing his own framework would flag as an early-warning signal. 

The peer-cluster sleight of hand 

Even taken on its own terms, the peer-cluster model does no work against the actual risk. Whether a weak loan application is dressed up by a cluster of borrowers below or waved through by a minister’s appointee above, the final decision still passes through a structure controlled, top to bottom, by people, one office-holder put there. Decentralising the origination of applications while centralising control of the people who approve them is not a safeguard. It is theatre with extra paperwork. 

What the debate actually requires 

Guyana needs a development bank. No one credible disputes that. What the country cannot afford is a Bill that lets its strongest advocate write 1,800 words defending the institution’s internal mechanics while saying nothing about who controls its leadership — and possibly say nothing because he stands to be part of that leadership. 

Until Bhagwandin, and the Bill’s sponsors, answer the appointment question directly — not technically, not procedurally, but directly — no quarterly dashboard and no credit scoring matrix will mean anything at all. The architecture he is so eager to discuss is only as honest as the hand that built it.

Right now, that hand belongs to one man, and the public still doesn’t know if that man is also the bank’s prospective CEO

That is the level at which this debate should now proceed. Bhagwandin chose not to go there. We will.