Archive for category: Accountability

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

Guyana Is Not a Prize: The U.S.–China Contest Must Not Eclipse the Public Interest

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OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

The increasingly public exchange between U.S. and Chinese representatives over Guyana should concern every Guyanese—not because the country must choose Beijing or Washington, but because both powers are plainly seeking influence in a rapidly changing, oil-rich state.

Guyana is entitled to investment, development assistance, technical support and commercial partnerships from China, the United States and every other country willing to engage on fair terms.

But no foreign partner—however generous its aid, impressive its construction portfolio, or forceful its diplomatic rhetoric—should be allowed to convert that engagement into undue influence over Guyana’s national decisions.

The central duty belongs to the Government of Guyana: protect the national interest through transparency, competitive procurement, competent supervision, enforceable contracts and a foreign-policy posture that does not confuse friendship with dependency.

This Is Now a Public Spat

The latest Chinese Embassy statement did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed a series of documented American interventions concerning Chinese activity in Guyana: public remarks by U.S. Ambassador Nicole Theriot that attracted a response from Chinese Ambassador Yang Yang; Congressman Gabe Evans’s letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio; and Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Juan Pablo Segura’s X post invoking Guyana’s airport project in criticism of Chinese state-led development.

These are not disconnected events. They represent a clear pattern: Washington is increasingly raising the issue of China’s commercial, infrastructural and strategic presence in Guyana.

The Chinese Embassy has responded by rejecting what it calls false claims, political manipulation and malicious smears against normal China–Guyana economic and trade cooperation. It has cited Chinese firms’ participation in national development, including work associated with the new Demerara River Bridge, six regional hospitals and the China–Guyana Friendship Joe Vieira Park.

There is merit in one central Chinese contention: Guyana is sovereign. It has the unquestionable right to work with China, the United States, India, Brazil, Europe, CARICOM partners and any other country or company prepared to operate lawfully and constructively here.

But sovereignty cannot mean immunity from scrutiny.

The Airport Cannot Be Wished Away

Segura’s reference to the Cheddi Jagan International Airport expansion may have been politically motivated. It may also have been selectively deployed as part of the United States’ wider campaign to question Chinese state-linked companies across the region.

Yet political motive does not automatically make a factual issue disappear.

The airport expansion has long been associated in public discussion with delays, escalating costs, alterations to the original scope and continuing questions over the execution and supervision of the project. Guyanese citizens are entitled to ask whether the state received value for money, whether contractual obligations were adequately enforced, whether all defects and deficiencies were remedied, and whether officials exercised the degree of oversight expected on a project of national importance.

That is not an attack on China. It is an insistence on accountability.

The issue is not that a Chinese company participated in the work. Guyana has every right to retain Chinese contractors, just as it has every right to retain American, Indian, European, Brazilian, Caribbean or local firms. The issue is whether contracts are awarded transparently; whether the terms are publicly known; whether costs, variations and extensions are fully explained; and whether the State pursues remedies when a contractor fails to meet its obligations.

A public project cannot be defended merely by reciting its strategic importance. Airports, roads, bridges and hospitals are not diplomatic trophies. They are national assets paid for by the Guyanese people, and the public has a right to know how those assets were procured, financed, supervised and delivered.

China’s Contribution Must Be Fairly Recognized

Objectivity requires Guyana to acknowledge the contribution Chinese companies and Chinese-supported projects have made to the country’s development.

China has become a significant participant in Guyana’s modernization. Its companies have been involved in infrastructure, construction, trade, equipment supply and other areas of the economy. The country has seen Chinese engagement in major public works, while Chinese businesses have also become a visible feature of commercial life.

It would be dishonest to pretend that every Chinese undertaking is inherently suspect, or that every Chinese company is incapable of performing valuable work. Such reasoning would be prejudicial, simplistic and contrary to Guyana’s own economic interests.

Guyana is a developing country with enormous infrastructure needs. Roads, bridges, drainage, hospitals, housing, ports, energy facilities and communications systems require capital, technology, skilled labor and timely execution. No sensible government should close the door to qualified Chinese companies simply because China is a strategic competitor of the United States.

Nor should Guyana be pressured into abandoning a relationship that has produced visible projects and long-standing cooperation

But appreciation is not a waiver of oversight. Chinese firms, especially where they are involved in major state projects or strategic infrastructure, must meet the same tests imposed on every other foreign participant: quality, cost discipline, contractual compliance, local benefit, environmental responsibility and transparency.

Washington Also Wants a Seat at the Table

The United States is not an uninterested observer in this matter. It is a major development partner of Guyana, with a history of assistance in areas including health, governance, security, disaster response, education and institutional capacity-building.

That assistance has value. It should be fairly acknowledged.

The United States has also become increasingly engaged with Guyana at a time when the country’s oil production, strategic location, energy potential and wider regional importance have elevated its profile. American interest is not irrational. Guyana matters more today than it did a decade ago.

But American concern about Chinese influence should not be mistaken for pure altruism.

Washington is jostling for a larger share of the opportunities opening up in Guyana: infrastructure contracts, engineering work, energy-related logistics, technology, security cooperation, private-sector investment and influence over how a strategically important state develops. That is what powerful countries do. They pursue their interests.

The issue is whether Guyana understands that reality and manages it intelligently.

America’s aid programs do not entitle American companies to Guyanese contracts. Nor do Chinese grants, construction projects or diplomatic support entitle Chinese companies to preferential treatment, political protection or a privileged place in Guyana’s strategic future.

Every firm must earn its place.

Berbice Raises Important Questions

The proposed deep-water harbor in Berbice offers an important example of why Guyanese must examine the practical consequences of great-power competition.

Chinese-linked interests were associated with earlier examination of a possible deep-water port or logistics facility in Berbice. The strategic appeal is obvious. A properly developed deep-water facility could have implications for petroleum logistics, industrial development, exports, shipping, manufacturing, regional connectivity and Guyana’s broader economic transformation.

Subsequently, U.S. engineering firm Bechtel became involved in feasibility and technical work connected to the proposed Berbice deep-water-port initiative.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that development. Bechtel is a major international engineering company. Guyana should be prepared to work with capable American firms, just as it works with capable firms from other countries. The Government should not reject quality expertise merely because it comes from the United States.

But the public is entitled to clarity.

What became of the prior Chinese feasibility work?                              Was it completed? What did it recommend?                                          Was it paid for by the State, a private entity or a foreign partner?          Is it available for public examination?                                                    What technical, financial, environmental or strategic considerations informed the movement toward Bechtel’s involvement?                    What precisely is Bechtel being paid to do?                                            Who finances the current work? What obligations, if any, could follow from it?

These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum questions of responsible public administration.

Guyana must ensure that strategic projects do not become bargaining chips in a contest between foreign powers. A deep-water port should not be awarded, designed, financed or reconfigured because it suits a geopolitical narrative in Washington or Beijing. It must proceed because it is economically sound, environmentally defensible, commercially viable and beneficial to Guyanese people over the long term.

The Risk Is Overconcentration

The problem is not foreign investment. Guyana needs foreign investment.The problem is overconcentration.

No country should become so dependent on one external power’s contractors, finance, equipment, technology, suppliers, spare parts, software, credit or political support that it loses the ability to negotiate firmly or act independently.

That concern applies to China, but it also applies to the United States and every other major external player.

Guyana should be wary of any arrangement in which a single country becomes dominant across multiple strategic sectors at once: roads, bridges, ports, airports, telecommunications, energy infrastructure, security systems, digital networks, medical facilities, extractive industries and large-scale logistics.

Dependence does not always announce itself with a flag. It can arrive through repeated sole-source arrangements, opaque financing, bundled contracts, proprietary technology, maintenance agreements, foreign labour dependence, undisclosed subcontractors and long-term operating arrangements that leave the State unable to act without external approval or expertise.

A country rich in oil revenue but poor in institutional safeguards can still surrender enormous leverage.

That must not happen in Guyana.

Government Must Show Its Work

The Government of Guyana cannot simply invoke sovereignty when challenged by foreign governments. Sovereignty must be demonstrated through systems that protect the public.

The country needs a clear, public and enforceable framework for major infrastructure and strategic investments.

That framework should include:

♦ Publication of all major state contracts, including original values, variations, extensions, completion dates and final costs.

♦ Disclosure of financing terms, guarantees, repayment obligations and any state exposure associated with large projects.

♦ Independent technical audits of major infrastructure works before final acceptance and payment.

♦ Public reporting on defects, remedial works, performance bonds, liquidated damages and penalties imposed or waived.

♦ Transparent procurement records showing how contractors were selected and what competing bids, where applicable, were considered.

♦ Strong local-content rules requiring meaningful employment, training, procurement and skills transfer for Guyanese workers and businesses.

♦  A national assessment of foreign participation in critical infrastructure and strategic sectors.

♦ Security and resilience reviews where foreign companies participate in airports, ports, telecommunications, data systems, energy facilities, hospitals and other sensitive national assets.

♦ Clear beneficial-ownership disclosure so Guyanese know who ultimately controls the companies receiving public contracts.

If Government believes its processes are sound, publication and scrutiny should not be feared.

If contracts are properly awarded, works competently supervised and failures appropriately sanctioned, transparency will strengthen Guyana’s hand against both foreign criticism and domestic doubt.

No One Should Dictate to Guyana

The Chinese Embassy is correct on one fundamental point: Guyana and other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean should be free to determine their development partners without outside interference.

But this principle must apply in full.

China must not expect Guyana to silence legitimate scrutiny of Chinese companies. The United States must not expect Guyana to accept a “backyard” mentality, however delicately it may be expressed. Neither power should presume that Guyana’s resources, infrastructure program or diplomatic posture are available for capture.

Guyana must reject the false choice.

It does not have to become anti-China to demand transparency from Chinese contractors. It does not have to become anti-American to reject Washington’s attempts to frame Guyana primarily through the lens of strategic rivalry.

The proper position is pro-Guyana.

A pro-Guyana policy welcomes development partnerships, encourages genuine competition, rewards competence, exposes waste, punishes non-performance, protects strategic assets and insists that all foreign partners deal with this country as an equal.

The Test Ahead

Guyana is entering an era in which foreign governments, multinational companies, contractors, financiers and geopolitical strategists will compete intensely for access and influence.

The danger is not that outside powers have interests. They always will.

The danger is that Guyana’s leaders may be flattered, pressured or divided into accepting arrangements that serve external agendas more reliably than they serve the Guyanese people.

The current public spat should therefore be treated as a warning, not a spectacle.

China should be judged by the quality, cost, transparency and consequences of its engagement. The United States should be judged not only by its warnings about China, but by the seriousness, fairness and competitiveness of what it offers Guyana. And the Government of Guyana must be judged by whether it is willing to put every major partnership under the light of public scrutiny.

Guyana does not need permission from Washington to work with China. It does not need permission from Beijing to work with America. But it does need leaders with the resolve to ensure that, in the contest for Guyana’s future, Guyana itself does not lose.

 

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Democracy for Sale?

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

The United States is preparing to use the Organization of American States to isolate Nicaragua after Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo pushed through constitutional changes designed to extinguish what remained of democratic competition in the country. The changes reportedly ban most political opposition, target parties with foreign funding, and extend the presidential term from 6 to 7 years—renewable, of course.

Washington’s condemnation is justified. Ortega’s regime has earned no presumption of good faith.

Since the 2018 protests, Nicaragua has endured a brutal and sustained campaign of political repression: demonstrators killed, opponents imprisoned, journalists silenced, civic groups dismantled, universities shuttered, religious institutions harassed, and hundreds of citizens forced into exile or stripped of nationality.

.There is no credible democratic defense of this record. Ortega and Murillo are not protecting a revolution from foreign sabotage; they are protecting their hold on power from the judgment of their own people.

That is the central indictment.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Ortega and Murillo are waging a “war on democracy” that threatens the stability and prosperity of the hemisphere. True enough. But where does that standard go when Washington pursues enormous commercial arrangements with Venezuela’s ruling apparatus, represented by Delcy Rodríguez?

Rodríguez is not the product of a transparent, competitive, internationally credible electoral mandate. She did not rise to authority through a free contest in which Venezuelans had an unfettered ability to organize, campaign, vote, and see their votes respected. Yet the United States has demonstrated its willingness to conduct high-stakes energy and economic business with the Venezuelan state when oil markets, migration pressures, geopolitical calculations, or corporate interests dictate it.

This is not a demand that the United States refuse all contact with Caracas. Diplomacy is not a purity test. Governments sometimes must negotiate with adversaries and authoritarian governments. They do so to secure the release of prisoners, protect citizens, reduce migration pressures, prevent armed conflict, stabilize energy markets, or advance humanitarian access.

The problem is not diplomacy. The problem is hypocrisy dressed as principle.

If Washington wishes to deal with Venezuela pragmatically, it should say so plainly. It should acknowledge that national interest is influencing its choices. It should not then mount a moral crusade against Nicaragua as though the United States applies one consistent rule across the hemisphere: democratic legitimacy for all, or preferential treatment for none.

The distinction becomes even more glaring because the same tools used to justify pressure on Nicaragua—political exclusion, institutional capture, suppression of dissent, and the erosion of electoral legitimacy—are the very concerns that have long defined the Venezuelan crisis. The United States cannot insist that Ortega’s manipulation of institutions makes him untouchable while accepting arrangements with officials empowered by a political system Washington itself has repeatedly described as authoritarian and illegitimate.

That is not principled statecraft. It is selective enforcement.

And selective enforcement has consequences. It gives Ortega the propaganda he needs. It allows Managua to dismiss legitimate criticism as another exercise in US imperial preference. It reinforces the claim—frequently made by authoritarian governments—that Washington’s concern for rights and elections evaporates whenever oil, security cooperation, migration control, or commercial access is on the table.

Ortega’s arguments may be cynical, but US inconsistency makes them easier to sell.

The OAS Test

The OAS now faces its own credibility test.

Nicaragua formally withdrew from the organization, a process completed in 2023 after years of conflict over the regime’s human rights record. That means the OAS has limited direct leverage over Managua. It cannot simply compel democratic reform through a resolution or restore political rights through condemnation alone.

But it can still matter.

The organization can create a clear hemispheric record of Nicaragua’s democratic collapse. It can coordinate diplomatic pressure. It can call on member states to limit normal political engagement with the Ortega-Murillo government. It can support independent documentation of abuses, amplify the voices of exiled Nicaraguans, defend political prisoners and their families, and press for the restoration of citizenship and civil rights to those arbitrarily stripped of both.

Most importantly, it can refuse to normalize the destruction of an entire political system.

Yet the OAS must avoid becoming merely a stage on which Washington performs outrage against an adversary it has already chosen to punish. If the body is to retain authority, its members must make clear that their concern is not obedience to the United States. Their concern must be the basic democratic rights of Nicaraguans: the right to organize, speak, worship, report, protest, compete for office, and remove a government peacefully.

That standard cannot be negotiable.

 A Hemispheric Double Standard

The United States has enormous influence in the Americas. With that influence comes a choice.

It can support democracy consistently, even when doing so complicates energy deals, migration agreements, security arrangements, and corporate ambitions. Or it can continue applying democratic standards selectively—harshly against governments deemed hostile, flexibly against governments deemed useful.

The second path may yield short-term transactions. It will not create long-term credibility.

Washington should condemn Ortega without qualification. It should press Nicaragua’s government to restore political pluralism, free political prisoners, halt persecution of journalists and civic organizations, and permit genuinely competitive elections. It should support Nicaraguan civil society, refugees, and exiles without imposing suffering on ordinary citizens already trapped under an increasingly authoritarian state.

But it should also stop pretending that democracy is an inviolable principle when confronting Ortega and an optional consideration when making billion-dollar arrangements with Venezuela’s unelected governing class.

The people of Nicaragua deserve more than rhetorical solidarity. They deserve coherent action.

And the hemisphere deserves something better than a democracy doctrine that changes according to who controls the oil, who controls the migration routes, and who is useful to Washington at a given moment.

The United States can be the leader of a principled democratic coalition—or it can be the manager of a transactional sphere of influence. It cannot convincingly be both.

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY INJOURNALISM◊GUYANA

GUYANA DOES NOT NEED TO COUNT MIGRANTS. IT NEEDS TO ASK WHAT THEY CAN BUILD.

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

A Caribbean engineer’s “Friction Economy” theory names the question Guyana has never asked about its migrant workforce — not who authorized them, but what they could build if anyone looked

A Jamaican born engineer living in Brazil recently gave the Business Guardian an economic vocabulary Guyana badly needs and does not have. Kimroy Bailey, with his wife Sherika Trott Bailey, has spent the last six years  across South Korea, Brazil, and now a still-unrealized interest in Trinidad and Tobago, developing what they call the Trott Bailey Friction Economy Theory: the idea that a country can be sitting on capability, need, and resources simultaneously, and still generate nothing, because nothing connects them.

Bailey’s illustration is deliberately small. A builder needs a tool. A welder needs a workspace. Between them, both problems are solvable. But if neither has capital, the transaction defaults to a market that doesn’t exist, and both needs go unmet, not because the value isn’t there, but because nothing in the system is designed to notice it.

Guyana should sit with that example longer than a headline allows, because it describes, almost exactly, the shape of the country’s migrant labor problem — a problem this paper has been documenting piece by piece for over a year, and one Guyana has no functioning framework to answer.

THE GAP HAS A PAPER TRAIL

Start with what is not disputed. In February 2024, Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs authorized a company called Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc. to recruit up to 500 healthcare workers from Bangladesh, at Sigma’s own request. Government later confirmed zero recruits were ever brought in under that authorization. The shortages it was meant to address were filled instead by Cuban medical personnel — an entirely separate migration channel, with its own unresolved allegations of labor exploitation that this paper has tracked independently.

Meanwhile, the same Sigma entity was executing a very different kind of contract: multi-billion-dollar water treatment infrastructure work for Guyana Water Inc., beginning just seven days after its Guyana incorporation in October 2022. Photographic evidence obtained by this paper — including GWI’s own published Facebook post — shows work crews at these plant sites that are visibly, overwhelmingly South Asian, standing beside a caption claiming the team comprised “several Guyanese staff.” No Guyanese face is identifiable in the image GWI chose to publish alongside that claim.

Guyana’s own laws require labor market testing before a foreign worker is hired: an employer must show the position could not be filled locally. The Local Content Act names engineering and technical services explicitly among the sectors covered by local-hiring obligations. Whether that testing was done for this workforce, whether it was done at all — is not publicly documented anywhere. Nobody has been made to show their work.

This is not a story about Sigma’s guilt or innocence in a separate procurement scandal, which is its own matter and still unfolding.

It is a story about a state that has built an elaborate machinery for awarding contracts and no comparable machinery for accounting for the labor those contracts pull into the country, where it comes from, what it can do beyond the single task it was imported for, or what it leaves behind when the contract ends

REGISTRATION IS NOT THE SAME QUESTION AS CAPABILITY

Bailey’s caution to Trinidad applies with equal force here: a government’s instinct, faced with a migrant population it does not understand, is to register it – for identity and security reasons that are genuinely legitimate. But registration answers only who is here. It says nothing about what they can do, and worse, when skills-mapping does happen, it is almost always aimed at slotting migrants into existing vacancies.

As Bailey put it, if a Guyanese and a migrant are both qualified for one job, mapping both of their abilities doesn’t create a second position.      Someone still loses, and the country stays locked inside the same “local versus migrant” argument, just with better paperwork.

That argument is precisely where Guyana’s migrant labor discourse has been stuck, a discourse of suspicion in one direction (are jobs being taken) and pretext in the other (is a healthcare authorization actually cover for engineering labor), with almost no public attention paid to what either group of workers, Guyanese or migrant, is actually capable of beyond the narrow occupational box a work permit or an NPTAB bid document assigns them.

WHAT THE FRICTION ECONOMY WOULD ASK INSTEAD

Bailey’s reframe is not naive about capital — he is explicit that machinery, land, and credit still matter, and that money should not be pretended out of the picture. But he insists money should not be the only mechanism a country has for connecting a need to a solution that already exists nearby.

Applied to Guyana’s Bangladeshi and Cuban migrant populations, that reframe produces sharper questions than any Ministry of Foreign Affairs authorization letter has yet asked. Cuban medical personnel brought in to cover healthcare shortages – do they carry skills beyond the specific clinical role they were slotted into, that Guyana’s own strained health system could use if anyone had asked? A South Asian workforce imported for water-treatment plant construction, once the plants are commissioned and the contract ends, does that capability simply leave the country, or could it be connected to Guyana’s next infrastructure need, the next repair, the next skills gap in a sector far from GWI? Nobody has asked, because nobody has built a system designed to notice the answer.

Guyana does not currently have Bailey’s Pacorips — the AI capability-mapping system he has piloted informally in Brazil, matching people, needs, and idle resources without reducing anyone to one official occupation. It does not need to import his software to import his discipline. What Guyana lacks is not technology. It is the prior decision to ask the question at all: not is this person authorized to be here, and not did this company follow the rules that got them here, but what can these people, together with the Guyanese working alongside or instead of them, build that does not currently exist.

THE PIE QUESTION

Bailey’s closing formulation is the one worth sitting with longest: a country cannot build lasting prosperity by endlessly relitigating who gets the remaining slice of a fixed pie. Guyana’s public conversation about migrant labour — Cuban, Bangladeshi, Venezuelan, has been almost entirely a pie-slicing conversation: who authorized this, who benefited, who was cut out, who lied about when the first contract was signed. Those questions matter, and this paper will keep asking them, because accountability for the how is not optional.

But Bailey’s theory names the question sitting underneath all of it, one Guyana has not asked even once in public: what has arrived in this country, alongside the thin paper trail of authorization letters and NPTAB awards, that nobody has yet tried to use.

— The Board