Archive for category: Accountability

592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

On the APA, Carbon Financing, Chinese Landing, and FPIC

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar August 2026

Do you remember the narrative that the Amerindian Peoples Association (APA) was somehow trying to block climate finance — carbon credits money — from reaching Amerindian communities?

That was never how 592 Guardian  understood the issue. If you understand what Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) actually means, the position becomes much clearer.

When we read APA’s submission to the ART Secretariat at the time, we understood where they were coming from. It was not a position against Indigenous communities receiving funding or benefiting from development. Why would an Indigenous rights organisation want to prevent Indigenous communities from benefiting from resources intended for their development? That interpretation, to 592 Guardian, was absurd — but it certainly supported a political narrative, one the government itself actively cultivated.

Vice President Jagdeo publicly attacked the APA over its complaint; the Guyana Chronicle ran a piece titled “They do not speak for us,” quoting a government-aligned figure accusing APA of the very consent violation it had alleged; and a pro-government outlet later framed APA’s failed appeal as “a failed political attempt to stymie the development of Amerindian Villages,” pointedly noting Guyana earned US$150 million in 2023 ART-TREES payments — as if the size of the payment were itself an answer to the process question APA was asking.

The issue, to our understanding, was how the decision was made, who made it, and whether Indigenous peoples had actually consented to it. And this is where FPIC becomes important.

FPIC is not a mechanism to say “yes” or “no” after everything has already been decided. It is a safeguard for Indigenous self-determination.

Learn More: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1HkHyJoCG2/?mibextid=wwXIfr

THE SEQUENCE MATTERS

Free, Prior and Informed Consent means consent must come before the decision.

You cannot make the fundamental decisions about a project, program, policy or activity, begin implementing it, and then approach communities afterwards and call that FPIC. That is consultation after the fact. And consultation is not the same thing as consent.

Similarly, you cannot decide that mining concessions should be issued within or affecting Indigenous lands, conduct lotteries, issue concessions and allow activities to commence, and then approach Indigenous communities — as an agency or a miner — afterwards asking whether they consent to mining or entry to mine. By then, a critical decision has already been made. The consent was supposed to come before the decision to permit the activity, not after it.

This is why we have always found the criticism that organizations such as APA are simply “talking about consultation, consultation, consultation” to be somewhat simplistic. APA was attempting to apply FPIC as it is understood as an international standard, rather than treating it as another box to tick after a decision has already been taken.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED WITH THE CARBON CREDITS

This is not an abstract dispute. The documented timeline of Guyana’s ART TREES carbon credit program is, in fact, a textbook case of what FPIC is meant to prevent.

According to the Forest Peoples Program’s case study on the certification — first published on apaguyana.com and drawing directly on APA’s own account — the Government of Guyana submitted its proposal for carbon credit certification to the ART Secretariat in December 2020, before any prior consultation with Indigenous Peoples took place.

The proposal covered carbon credits generated from all forests nationally, including forests on Indigenous Peoples’ titled lands. Government did hold information-sharing sessions on the broader Low Carbon Development Strategy, of which the ART proposal was one component — but per APA and FPP’s account, these sessions did not amount to consultation in the sense required under international human rights law, and no Indigenous Peoples were asked for, or gave, their free, prior and informed consent to the proposal itself.

The National Toshaos Council did endorse the wider LCDS policy framework. But the NTC is not a body empowered to give FPIC on behalf of individual Indigenous communities for a scheme monetising carbon on their specific titled lands — a distinction government has repeatedly treated as immaterial, and one that goes to the heart of what “consent” is supposed to mean under FPIC. Consent is community-specific and land-specific.

A national council endorsing a national strategy is not the same thing as the villages whose titled forests are being sold into a carbon market agreeing to that sale.

Aster Global Environmental Services then conducted the validation and verification for ART’s certification — but its review, per FPP, was structurally limited to assessing government’s own self-reported compliance with the TREES standard, not an independent assessment of whether Indigenous communities had actually consented. ART certified the credits in December 2022. A portion was sold to Hess Corporation.

Only after all of that — the proposal, the endorsement, the validation, the certification, the sale — did APA’s formal complaint arrive, filed with ART’s grievance mechanism in March 2023. And even then, the complaint was dismissed twice: first in May 2023, then again on appeal in October 2023, both times without the Secretariat ever substantively engaging the FPIC question APA had raised. Government’s own framing of that outcome was that APA had failed on procedural grounds — questions about who APA represented, whether APA itself had consent to file.

Whatever the merits of that procedural dismissal, one fact remains: to this day, no independent body has actually adjudicated whether Guyana’s process met the FPIC standard. The complaint was dismissed on threshold grounds, not defeated on the merits.

 

That is the sequence problem in its purest form. The credits were designed, proposed, endorsed by a body without the authority to consent, validated against government’s own self-reporting, certified, and sold — and only at the very end of that chain was an Indigenous rights organization’s objection even heard, and then dismissed without reaching the substance.

592 Guardian understanding of APA’s position, then and now, was never that Indigenous communities should not receive the benefits of carbon financing. It was that the conditions for consent were never met before the money moved. That is a fundamentally different argument. It is the difference between saying: “Do not give Indigenous communities this funding,” and saying: “Before decisions are made about Indigenous lands and resources, Indigenous communities must have the opportunity to determine whether and how they consent to those decisions.” Those are not the same thing.

CHINESE LANDING

This brings us to mining, and to the standoff currently unfolding at Chinese Landing.

The question there cannot simply be whether the community was eventually consulted before a miner entered their lands with heavy equipment. We have to ask when they were consulted about the decision to mine from the inception, what information they had, what decision had already been made, and whether they actually had the ability to influence or withhold consent before that decision was taken.

The record at Chinese Landing shows exactly this pattern. A 1999 agreement gave the miner permission to work in exchange for tribute, employment and services — but by 2009 the Village Council had refused to renew that agreement and told the miner to cease work and remove his equipment. What followed was over a decade of legal proceedings that never actually resolved whether the village’s consent was required at all: a 2017 CCJ ruling that was narrowly procedural — it struck down a cease-work order on jurisdictional grounds and expressly left undecided whether the Village Council had standing to enforce consent requirements — followed by a 2021 High Court ruling, still on appeal, holding that minerals vest in the state and that the miner did not need village permission to access his permits in the first place.

That 2021 ruling is the sharper and more uncomfortable version of the argument this publication is  making here. It is not merely that consent was sought too late in that case. A court has held, as the law currently stands, that consent was never legally required at all — that the Mining Act’s vesting of minerals in the state overrides the Amerindian Act’s consent provisions. Notably, that reading contradicts an earlier ruling by the very same judge in a different case, where prospecting permits granted before the Amerindian Act’s commencement were held to require consent on renewal — a contradiction that has never been explained and remains unresolved on appeal.

If concessions have already been issued — which is often the case — the process has already moved considerably beyond the point at which consent should have been sought. And if our courts are, in live cases, reading our own laws as not requiring that consent in the first place, then the problem is not simply implementation. It is the law itself.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATION

Our existing laws may not fully reflect the FPIC standard. And perhaps that is precisely the uncomfortable conversation we need to have.

If our legal framework allows decisions affecting Indigenous lands to be made first and consent to be sought later — or, as the Chinese Landing litigation suggests, allows those decisions to be made without requiring consent at all — then perhaps the problem is not with the principle of FPIC. Perhaps the problem is that our laws need to catch up with the rights they are supposed to protect.

This is why this publication do not see FPIC as an obstacle to development, nor do we blame the APA for the positions it has held on either carbon financing or mining. What we do find a reasonable and open question is how to practically apply FPIC without jeopardizing Indigenous peoples’ rights in the process — and we believe the NTC and District Councils are trying to address exactly this through the development of FPIC guidelines and protocols.

Good intentions do not remove the requirement for consent. A project can be designed to bring jobs. A program can be designed to bring development. A policy can be designed with the best intentions. But good intentions do not automatically create consent.

FPIC exists precisely because even well-intentioned decisions can undermine Indigenous self-determination when Indigenous peoples are excluded from making those decisions.

SOURCES

Forest Peoples Programme, “ART’s Controversial Certification of Carbon Credits to the Government of Guyana” (29 Feb 2024, first published apaguyana.com); Kaieteur News reporting on APA’s March 2023 ART complaint and government response; Guyana Chronicle, “They do not speak for us” (15 Apr 2023); Vieira v. Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, [2017] CCJ 20 (A.J.); reporting on the 2021 High Court ruling and pending Court of Appeal proceedings; IACHR Precautionary Measures No. 196-23.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

The Border Is Not a Constitutional Vacuum nor Federal Fiefdom

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OP-ED BY: Hem Kumar–August 2026

At America’s Borders, CBP Has Claimed the Power to Make Rights Disappear

“It’s not indefinite,” the Customs and Border Protection officer said after an American citizen, held for hours at an airport, asked how long the government intended to keep him. “We’ll let you know.”

That is not an answer. It is a declaration of power.

It is the sound of a federal agency informing a citizen that time, information, counsel, explanation, and even the basic dignity of knowing why he has been seized by the state are now privileges to be dispensed with—or withheld—at the government’s pleasure.

Customs and Border Protection calls this “secondary inspection.” It calls the process “administrative.” It says lawyers are not permitted during secondary examinations because an international-arrivals inspection is not a criminal proceeding.

But the label is a legal convenience, not a moral defense.

If a person is ordered into a controlled area, separated from family, unable to leave, denied access to a telephone, interrogated about private associations and work, and given no explanation of the accusation or timeline for release, he is experiencing state coercion. Calling that coercion “administrative” does not make it less coercive. It merely reveals how easily government lawyers can use technical language to conceal a profoundly unequal exercise of power.

The reporter at the center of this account was an American citizen returning home with his wife. His passport was taken, locked in a container, and he was directed to secondary screening. His wife was admitted. He was held for approximately four hours. He asked to call a lawyer. He was refused. He was not told why he had been detained. And when he was finally cleared to enter his own country, the officer who processed him reportedly did not know why he had been held either.

Think about that.

The government confined a citizen without telling him why. The government denied him official means to speak with counsel. And the government employee who finally released him could offer no explanation because, apparently, the decision may have been made somewhere else—in a database, a hidden list, an automated targeting system, or an opaque bureaucratic chain that no individual officer could or would explain.

This is not accountable law enforcement. It is algorithmic bureaucracy armed with badges, detention rooms, and the presumption that the public has no right to ask questions.

CBP has substantial authority at the border. Nobody serious disputes that the government can inspect baggage, enforce customs law, identify fraud, intercept contraband, and investigate real threats. The issue is not whether a border exists. The issue is whether the Constitution, democratic accountability, and basic human decency cease to exist at that border.

For CBP, the answer increasingly appears to be yes.

A citizen’s right to return to the United States is fundamental. The government may demand proof of citizenship and may carry out lawful border inspections. But it cannot turn the right to come home into a conditional favor, dependent upon whether a traveler submits quietly to limitless uncertainty, invasive questioning, data extraction, and unexplained suspicion.

The danger is especially acute in the age of hidden databases and automated risk scoring. DHS acknowledges that it maintains extensive systems containing traveler data, including the Automated Targeting System and Secure Flight-related screening records. Yet Americans have no practical way to know whether they have been flagged, why they have been flagged, which agency entered the information, whether the data are wrong, or how to correct it before the next humiliating encounter at an airport.

That is the architecture of unaccountable power: the government knows, the citizen does not; the government records, the citizen cannot inspect; the government accuses by implication, the citizen is denied a meaningful chance to respond.

And those most vulnerable to this system are often those least able to fight it.

The American citizen delayed for four hours ultimately entered his country. A lawful permanent resident may instead be pressured to surrender a green card. A visitor may be placed on the next flight out. An asylum seeker may face a life-altering decision in a sterile interview room, far from a lawyer, family member, or any realistic opportunity to understand the consequences of what an officer places before them.

The account of an older Jordanian woman reportedly being pressured to sign away her permanent-resident status while her husband struggled to reach counsel illustrates the human cost. A decision that may separate families and alter the course of a life should never be treated as airport paperwork to be signed under distress, isolation, and official intimidation.

Nor should journalists, lawyers, advocates, academics, or diaspora communities be expected to accept special scrutiny because of their work, religion, ethnicity, travel history, foreign relationships, or political associations. Questions about journalism and media work may be presented as casual curiosity. But when those questions come from an armed federal authority holding a traveler incommunicado, “curiosity” carries the force of compulsion.

The First Amendment does not become a decorative suggestion at the arrivals gate.

CBP’s position is effectively this: the agency can compel waiting, demand answers, deny clarity, restrict access to counsel, and invoke sealed systems and undisclosed intelligence rationales—all while dismissing the matter as merely administrative. That proposition should alarm every American who believes government power must be explainable before it is excusable.

The response cannot be limited to sympathy after the fact. Congress must impose enforceable safeguards.

CBP should be required to provide travelers with a written record of their referral to secondary inspection, including the start and end time, the responsible office, and a meaningful explanation when disclosure would not compromise a legitimate investigation. Travelers should have prompt access to a telephone, family contact, medication, restroom facilities, disability accommodations, and legal advice. No lawful permanent resident should be pressured to abandon status without a genuine opportunity to consult counsel and understand the consequences.

DHS must also disclose how frequently U.S. citizens are sent to secondary inspection, how long they are held, how many are subjected to device searches, and how automated systems, watch lists, and database matches influence those decisions. An independent watchdog—not CBP itself—must audit the agency’s systems for error, bias, political retaliation, and unconstitutional targeting.

Finally, citizens must have a clear, rapid, and enforceable process to learn whether they have been placed on a government list, challenge false information, and obtain correction. A Freedom of Information Act request is important, but it is not enough. FOIA is slow, heavily redacted, and too often defeated by the very secrecy that enables abuse. Rights that can be exercised only after months or years of bureaucratic delay are rights already diminished.

The airport border is not a constitutional vacuum. It is not a federal fiefdom. It is not a place where the government may reduce citizens to data points, suspected names, travel patterns, and silent entries in a database.

 

A democracy is tested not by how it treats the powerful, well-connected, or politically favored. It is tested by whether an ordinary person can ask, “Why am I being held?” and receive an answer; whether he can call someone for help; whether he can challenge a government error before it becomes a punishment.

“We’ll let you know” is not due process. It is the language of unaccountable power

 

 

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

A MINISTER WHO SHOULD HAVE LEARNED TO ZIP IT.

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Edghill’s Canawaima Claim Is Not a Jurisdictional Dispute. It Is the Same Pattern That Failed Barima’s Victims.

OPINION BY :— Staff Writer ♦ August 2026

NOT A CONTRADICTION. A PATTERN.

When the MV Canawaima was pulled from service for the second time in ten days on 22 August, Public Works Minister Bishop Juan Edghill offered the public an explanation: two technical inspections by Guyanese and Surinamese experts had concluded, in writing, that the vessel could safely remain in operation until dry-docking within three months. The Maritime Authority Suriname (MAS), he said, had simply insisted on fixing immediately what could have waited. It read, on its face, like an ordinary dispute between two regulators over timing.

We do not think that is the right way to read it, and we do not think the public should either. This is not a contradiction. It is a pattern — the same pattern this news media  has already documented in exhaustive detail on the M.V. Barima, playing out again on a different vessel, in front of the same minister, who by now had every reason to have learned restraint.

THE BARIMA PRECEDENT, IN THE MINISTER’S OWN WORDS

On 19 July, less than 24 hours after the Barima capsized with dozens still missing, Edghill told grieving families at the Umana Yana that the vessel “was not overloaded by passengers or by cargo” and that there was “no engine problem or any mechanical problem.” On 20 July, at a formal press briefing, he went further: “There was no report of any kind that suggested the vessel was unseaworthy. It was in line for dry docking in keeping with the schedule.”

Those were not hedged, provisional remarks. They were confident, specific, technical assertions, delivered to a public in shock, by a minister with no maritime engineering background, about a vessel whose wreck had not yet been examined by anyone. On 13 August, Kaieteur News published a paper trail of internal maintenance logs, stamped requisitions, and urgent technical reports — the same defect record this news outlet  has independently corroborated — spanning nearly a year before the disaster, including repeated “urgent” flags on generator, heat-exchanger, and exhaust failures. The minister’s 20 July claim did not survive that record. It was not a matter of interpretation. It was simply false, and it took weeks and an outside document trail to establish that.

A minister who was wrong about Barima’s seaworthiness in July had no standing to be confident about Canawaima’s in August.

 

SAME MINISTER, SAME VOICE, SAME VESSEL TYPE

Now compare that to Edghill’s Canawaima statement. He again spoke with certainty about a technical seaworthiness determination — “the experts concluded the vessel can remain in operation” — on a matter that was, by his own account, contested by the actual regulator with jurisdiction over the vessel’s maintenance. And once again, a document surfaced almost immediately that complicated the minister’s reassurance: Marine Consulting and Surveyor Waldo Liauw Kwie Fong’s own 21 August report — the report Edghill’s statement appears to rest on — found the Canawaima’s hull in “poor” condition with heavy corrosion, stated plainly that the 30-year-old vessel’s “economic and service life has expired,” and listed the vessel as lacking a valid safety construction certificate, tonnage certificate, registry certificate, and load line certificate, with the Surinamese crew missing STCW certification and the vessel missing its ISM certificate despite running an international route. The same document Edghill cites for reassurance is, on a plain reading, a document that catalogues serious non-compliance.

We want to be precise about what we are and are not saying. We are not saying Edghill fabricated anything, and we are not saying the surveyor’s three-month operability window was wrong on its own terms — that is a technical judgment for qualified surveyors, not for this publication  or for a Minister of Public Works. What we are saying is narrower and, we think, harder to dispute: a minister who has already been publicly and documentarily proven wrong once this year about a vessel’s seaworthiness has no business speaking with the same unqualified confidence a second time, about a second vessel, while the government’s own cited document lists exactly the kind of certification gaps that turned out to matter on the Barima.

THE DISCIPLINE A MINISTER OF PUBLIC WORKS REQUIRES

A Minister of Public Works is not expected to be a marine surveyor. No one demands that of him. What is reasonably demanded — of any minister, in any government, anywhere — is the discipline to say “I am relaying what the surveyor’s report states” rather than personally vouching for a technical conclusion in his own voice, particularly on a subject where he has already gotten it wrong once, publicly, with fatal consequences attached.

That distinction is not pedantic. It is the entire difference between a minister who communicates and a minister who improvises, and it is precisely the discipline Edghill has now failed to exercise twice in five weeks.

This matters beyond Edghill’s own standing, though that standing is fair game — the call for his removal from office has stood, unresolved, since the week of the Barima disaster, and this publication  does not consider it settled. It matters because every time the minister overspeaks and is later proven wrong, the credibility cost is not paid by him personally. It is paid by the next set of passengers who are told a vessel is fine, and by the CoI, the audit team, and every other accountability mechanism this government has stood up since 18 July — each one a little less trusted, because the minister whose ministry oversees all of them keeps needing correction by outside document trails rather than by his own candor.

THE PATTERN, SET OUT PLAINLY

19 Jul 2026  Edghill: Barima “was not overloaded… no engine problem or any mechanical problem.”

20 Jul 2026  Edghill: “There was no report of any kind that suggested the vessel was unseaworthy.”

13 Aug 2026  Kaieteur News publishes a documented paper trail of nearly a year of urgent, unresolved defect reports on the Barima, directly contradicting the 20 July claim.

21 Aug 2026  The surveyor’s report underlying Edghill’s reassurance documents hull corrosion, an expired service life, and multiple missing statutory certificates.

22 Aug 2026  Canawaima suspended again; Edghill states Guyanese/Surinamese experts concluded the vessel can safely operate for three more months pending dry-docking — the same report cited above.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR

1. That Minister Edghill cease personally characterizing technical seaworthiness findings in his own voice, and instead publish the underlying surveyor and inspection reports in full, in real time, so the public can read the primary document rather than the minister’s summary of it.
2. That the Ministry of Public Works issue a public accounting of every instance since 18 July in which a ministerial statement on vessel condition was later contradicted by a primary document, so the pattern can be assessed on the full record rather than piecemeal.
3. That the standing calls for Edghill’s resignation or removal — unresolved since late July — be answered by government on the merits, rather than left to lapse through the passage of time and the arrival of the next news cycle.

Suriname’s regulator did its job on the Canawaima. Whether Guyana’s minister did his is now, for the second time this year, a fair and documented question — and this time, the public should not have to wait for another paper trail to surface before getting the answer.

— The Board

The 592 Guardian

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 THE NUMBERS GUYANA DIDN’T GIVE YOU

       A Region Published Its Exam Results. Georgetown Held a Ceremony             Instead.

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 Accountability Desk | August,2026

Every other education ministry in the Caribbean Examinations Council’s catchment let the numbers speak. Guyana’s Ministry of Education gave a ceremony, three headline figures, and a table of seventeen vocational trades — and called it a results release.

On August 18, 2026, the Caribbean Examinations Council convened its annual results ceremony in Anguilla, hosted for the first time in a decade outside the region’s larger capitals. CXC’s Registrar and CEO, Dr. Wayne Wesley, and its Director of Operations, Dr. Nicole Manning, presented the 2026 May-June cycle’s performance to the full region at once: candidate counts, subject entries, grade distributions, absenteeism, examination irregularities, and the regional pass rate for every major certification CXC administers.

The presentation was public, it was itemized, and it was the same for every territory sitting in that room.

Guyana’s Ministry of Education held its own event that same day, at the Pegasus Suites and Corporate Centre in Georgetown. Minister of Education Sonia Parag and Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain delivered remarks. What Guyana’s students, parents and press received from that event was not a report. It was a set of talking points — a national pass rate, a Mathematics improvement figure, a candidate count, and an unverified projection of vocational certifications still awaiting confirmation from the very council that had, that same day, published a complete regional accounting.

This is not a story about a failing grade. It is a story about a government that had access to the same comparative data as every other CARICOM ministry and chose not to publish it — and about what that choice, examined against the numbers CXC did release, looks like it was built to avoid.

WHAT CXC PUBLISHED, ON THE RECORD

CXC’s regional release on August 18 gave every territory a full comparative baseline. The figures below are CXC’s own, delivered from its own podium, to the full region simultaneously:

• Regional CSEC overall performance: 72.18 percent, a slight increase over 2025.
• Regional CSEC Mathematics acceptable-grade rate: 42 percent, a 4-point improvement.
• Regional CAPE acceptable grades (Grades I–V): 93.52 percent.
• Regional CVQ candidates: 4,977, across 37 occupational areas.
• Region-wide CSEC absenteeism: more than 32,000 candidates did not sit their exams — a trend CXC officials themselves called “worrying.”
• Region-wide examination irregularities: 128 recorded, up from 80 the prior cycle, including the first-ever official categorization of AI misuse as a form of exam malpractice.

Every one of those figures came from CXC’s own ceremony, delivered the same day, in the same format, to every member state. Guyana’s delegation was in a position to hear all of it. None of it appeared in what Guyana’s Ministry told its own public.

WHAT GUYANA PUBLISHED, ON THE RECORD

Compare that to the complete inventory of what Georgetown’s ceremony produced, as reported:

• A national CSEC pass rate of 67 percent — with no stated methodology for what counts as a “pass” in that figure, and no breakdown by subject, school, region, or gender.
• A Mathematics pass rate of 34.5 percent, framed only against Guyana’s own 2025 figure of 32 percent — never against the region CXC had just placed it inside.
• A CAPE claim of broad “stability and growth,“ specified only as “seven examined units” recording declines of 1 to 3 percent — with no regional CAPE figure offered for comparison, and no full subject table released.
• A CVQ projection of 2,813 certifications — a number the Ministry’s own Chief Education Officer acknowledged was not yet official, pending CXC confirmation, at the moment he announced it.
• No absenteeism figure. No SBA non-submission figure. No irregularity count. No mention of AI misuse, despite CXC formally introducing the category this cycle.

Nothing in Guyana’s release was false, so far as this desk has been able to verify. That is precisely the point. Every figure Georgetown chose to publish was accurate, favorable, and incomplete — and every category CXC flagged as a regional concern was a category Guyana’s ceremony did not mention at all.

CXC gave the region a report. Guyana gave its public a ceremony.— The 592 Guardian

METRIC	REGION  AUG .18 TH	MIN. OF ED.	GAP
CSEC overall pass rate	72.18%	67%	-5.18 pts
CSEC  Mathematics	42%	34.5%	-7.5 pts
CAPE acceptable grades	93.52%	NOT  DISCLOSED	UNKOWN
Absenteeism disclosed	4,977 (confirmed)	2,813 (projected)	UNVERIFIABLE
Absenteeism disclosed	32,000+ region-wide	not disclosed	UNKOWN
Irregularities disclosed	128 region-wide	not disclosed	UNKOWN

SIDE BY SIDE: THE COMPARISON GUYANA DID NOT MAKE

Where a figure is marked “not disclosed,” that is not this desk failing to find it. It is the complete record of what was and was not said at a nationally covered government press event. Where a comparable regional figure exists and Guyana’s does not, the silence is not neutral — it is a choice made available by CXC’s transparency and declined by Guyana’s Ministry.

THE QUESTION THIS DESK IS PUTTING ON THE RECORD

The Ministry of Education has both the data and the obligation to publish it. CXC hands every territory the identical breakdown Guyana’s delegation heard in Anguilla. Nothing prevented the Ministry from releasing a comparable document — a subject-by-subject table, a regional benchmark, an absenteeism figure, an irregularity count — the same day, in the same format CXC itself used.

It did not. It held a ceremony, named its top performers, and moved on to seventeen vocational trades before a single comparative figure could be asked about.

 

This desk is not asserting why. We are asserting what happened, on the record, and putting the question to the Ministry directly: if the underlying results support the celebratory framing offered at Pegasus, what is the rationale for withholding the very comparative data CXC placed in the public domain that same day? A Ministry with nothing to qualify has no reason to publish less than the region it answers to.

The 592 Guardian has written to the Ministry of Education and to Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain requesting the complete, subject-by-subject 2026 results — regional comparison included — and will publish any response in full.

A NOTE ON WHAT THIS PIECE DOES NOT CLAIM

This desk sought a regional teacher-salary comparison to test whether compensation helps explain the performance gap identified above. It does not exist in usable form. Crowdsourced salary aggregators return sample sizes too small to be meaningful — eleven data points for Barbados, thirty-seven for Jamaica, a single submission at one point for Guyana — and in at least one case returned a figure for Barbados equivalent to roughly five US dollars a day, which is not a real wage and was discarded.

A comparative review of what regional governments publish on public-sector pay found that most, including Guyana and Jamaica, disclose only aggregate ministry compensation spending, not post-level salary scales — meaning no like-for-like regional comparison currently exists in the public record.

What is verifiable is that Guyana’s own teacher salaries rose substantially over the 2024–2026 cycle under the negotiated agreement with the Guyana Teachers’ Union — a graduate teacher on the 2026 scale earns GYD 277,882 monthly, part of a phased increase the government has described as a 57 percent cumulative rise since 2021. That spending is real, it is documented, and it is fair to ask what it purchased. This desk declines to assert a wage-to-outcome causal link the data cannot currently support — and will pursue the regional salary comparison as its own investigation, sourced to government pay scales rather than crowdsourced estimates, rather than force an unverified number into this piece.

SOURCING

CXC regional figures: Caribbean Examinations Council, Official Release of Results Ceremony, Anguilla, August 18, 2026, as reported. Guyana figures: Ministry of Education press briefing, Pegasus Suites and Corporate Centre, Georgetown, August 18, 2026, as reported by Guyana Chronicle, Guyana Times, News Room Guyana, and HGPTV. Teacher salary figures: Ministry of Education–Guyana Teachers’ Union agreement, as reported by the Department of Public Information; 2026 salary scale as compiled by 592Hub from GRA and Ministry of Finance notices.