Archive for category: Accountability

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 Turned Off: GWI’s Five-Region Disconnection Campaign and the Regulatory Order Nobody Can Confirm Was Followed

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OPINION BY: Staff Writer — The 592 Guardian

As Guyana Water Inc. prepares to cut service house-to-house across Regions 3, 4, 6 and 10 this week, a 2022 regulatory order meant to guarantee due process and public reporting appears to have gone unmonitored — and neither the utility nor its regulator can say why.

Beginning August 10, Guyana Water Inc. (GWI) will send crews house-to-house through Georgetown, East Bank Demerara, East Coast Demerara, West Coast/West Bank Demerara and parts of Region Six, disconnecting customers with outstanding balances. The five-day campaign, publicised through a series of regional notices, covers dozens of named communities — from Alberttown and Kitty in the capital to Corriverton-Dukestown on the Corentyne — and arrives with a single instruction to residents: settle up, or lose water.

The notices are silent on a set of protections that GWI’s own regulator ordered into place nearly four years ago. In September 2022, following a formal challenge from the Guyana Consumers Association, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) issued Order 2 of 2022, upholding GWI’s disputed $7,500 reconnection fee but attaching conditions: a longer disconnection-notice period, a higher grace threshold before cutoff, a directive to review disconnection methods for cost-effectiveness, and — critically — a requirement that GWI file monthly reports to the PUC disclosing how many customers were disconnected, their outstanding balances, the methods used, and reconnection figures.

A related metering order set a December 2024 deadline for 100% metering of previously unmetered consumers, with quarterly progress reports due along the way.

The 592 Guardian sought to determine whether either compliance stream — the monthly disconnection reports or the metering updates — has actually been filed, and whether the 24-hour notice and $12,500 grace threshold set in 2022 are being honoured in this week’s campaign.

Neither GWI nor the PUC could provide a definitive answer. Both pointed, in substance, to an ongoing transition to digital systems.

THE 2022 ORDER: A REAL CONCESSION, WITH STRINGS ATTACHED

The 2022 proceeding is worth recalling in full, because it complicates any simple narrative of a state utility acting with impunity. Dr. Yog Mahadeo, appearing for the Guyana Consumers Association, argued before the Commission that GWI’s disconnection practices should be reconsidered altogether, invoking UN General Assembly Resolution 64/292 — the 2010 recognition of water as a human right — and pressing the Commission to review what he characterised as a punitive reconnection fee.

GWI’s then-CEO, Shaik Baksh, defended the fee on financial grounds, telling the Commission that the utility’s actual disconnection and reconnection costs already exceeded what the $7,500 charge recovered, and that a 2021 customer-assistance programme waiving half the fee had not achieved its intended effect and was discontinued.

The Commission’s ruling split the difference. It upheld the $7,500 fee — finding it did not exceed GWI’s own recovery costs — but it did not treat the matter as closed. Effective January 1, 2023, GWI was ordered to raise its credit/grace limit from $10,000 to $12,500, extend disconnection notice from four hours to twenty-four, review its disconnection methods, and submit monthly disaggregated reports to the PUC on every disconnection: who, why, how much was owed, how the cutoff was carried out, and when — if ever — service was restored.

“The fee was never defied. It was reviewed, and upheld, by the regulator — with a paper trail attached. The open question is what happened to that paper trail.”

That reporting requirement is the piece of Order 2 that matters most for this week’s campaign. It exists precisely so that a mass disconnection drive like the one now underway in five regions could be checked against a public record — how many households are losing water, whether vulnerable customers are among them, and whether the 24-hour notice and $12,500 threshold are being applied. In November 2023, GWI itself filed for a review of aspects of Order 2; the substance of that filing and its outcome are not available in the PUC’s public archive.

A COMPLIANCE TRAIL THAT GOES COLD

The PUC’s website lists dedicated pages for Monthly Reports, Annual Reports, and PUC Orders — the exact mechanism through which GWI’s obligations under Order 2 would be made public.     As of this reporting, none of those pages show content past early 2024; the Commission’s own news and orders listings likewise thin out around February 2024.

Whether that reflects a genuine gap in filings, a backlog in publishing filings that exist, or simply a website not being maintained is not something that can be determined from the public record alone.

The 592 Guardian put the question directly to both institutions:    ♦ Has GWI filed the monthly disconnection reports required since January 2023?

♦ Was the December 2024 metering deadline met, and were the required quarterly progress reports submitted?

♦ Is the 24-hour notice period, and the $12,500 grace threshold, being applied in the current five-region campaign?

Neither GWI nor the PUC provided a definitive answer to any of the three questions. The explanation offered, in substance, was that both institutions are in the midst of a transition to digital record-keeping systems, and that the requested data was not readily retrievable in the interim.

AN EXCUSE THAT PREDATES THE DEADLINE IT’S MISSING

That explanation does not sit comfortably against the government’s own digitisation timeline. President Irfaan Ali announced in September 2025 that most government services would be fully digitised by the end of the second quarter of 2026 — a deadline that has now passed. The obligations in question, moreover, are not digital-transformation projects. They are statutory reporting duties created by a regulatory order issued in 2022, with a first report due in January 2023 — twenty months before the digitisation programme was even announced, and well before any system upgrade could plausibly explain their absence.

If a national digitisation push that was supposed to conclude in June is now the reason a state utility and its own regulator cannot confirm compliance with a nearly four-year-old order, that is itself a finding: it suggests either the digitisation programme has slipped its own deadline without public acknowledgment, or — more troublingly — that the underlying compliance gap predates any system transition and the digitisation explanation has become a ready-made answer for record-keeping failures that were already occurring.

WHAT THE HUMAN RIGHTS STANDARD ACTUALLY REQUIRES

It is tempting, watching a disconnection notice reach this many communities at once, to reach immediately for the language of a human rights violation. The international standard is more precise than that, and worth stating accurately.

The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in its General Comment No. 15 on the right to water, holds that where disconnection follows non-payment, a customer’s capacity to pay must be taken into account, and that no one may be deprived of the minimum essential level of water regardless of ability to pay. Arbitrary or unjustified disconnection — as distinct from disconnection that follows due process and preserves a minimum supply — is what the Committee identifies as a violation.

On that standard, GWI’s public-facing materials are not, on their face, out of step: the utility’s own FAQ describes disconnection as a last resort after non-payment and points customers toward negotiated payment arrangements before cutoff. The 2022 PUC order, likewise, built in real procedural protections — more notice, a higher grace threshold, mandated reporting.

The gap is not in the written policy. It is in the absence of any current, checkable evidence that the policy’s own safeguards are being followed during a campaign of this scale.

 

QUESTIONS ON THE RECORD

The 592 Guardian is publishing this piece with those questions unresolved, rather than waiting on institutions that have not been able to answer them.

We put the following to GWI and the PUC and will update this record as responses are received:

1. Have GWI’s monthly disconnection reports, required under Order 2 of 2022 since January 2023, been filed with the PUC for every month since that date? If any months are missing, which, and why?
2. Was the December 3, 2024 deadline for 100% metering of unmetered consumers met? If not, what is the current metering completion rate, and were the required quarterly progress reports filed?
3. In the disconnection campaign now underway across Regions 3, 4, 6 and 10, is the 24-hour notice period and the $12,500 grace threshold set by Order 2 being applied to every household disconnected?
4. Does GWI screen for vulnerable households — elderly, disabled, or health-dependent customers — before disconnection, and if so, under what published policy?
5. What was the substance and outcome of GWI’s November 2023 application to review Order 2 of 2022?
6. When will the PUC’s Monthly Reports and Annual Reports archives be updated to reflect filings, if any, made since early 2024?

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

Guyana’s disconnection framework is not, on paper, indifferent to hardship. It has a regulator that has intervened before, a fee structure the Commission has scrutinised, and reporting requirements designed to make mass campaigns like this one auditable rather than opaque. What appears to be missing is not the rule but its enforcement — or, at minimum, the public evidence that enforcement is occurring. A five-region disconnection drive is precisely the moment that evidence should be easiest to produce. That it is not says less about whether GWI’s policy meets the human rights standard on paper, and more about whether Guyana’s regulatory institutions can currently show their own work.

In a season defined by El Niño’s scorching heat and parched communities, GWI’s mass disconnection campaign is more than administrative overreach; it is a chilling indictment of how far removed our decision-makers have become from the lived reality of ordinary Guyanese.

To cut water in the middle of a climate crisis is not just poor judgment, it is an act that flirts with cruelty, stripping families of the most basic means of survival while mouthing clichés about “management” and “efficiency.”

This campaign reveals a system that punishes instead of protects, one that treats water as a bill to be chased rather than a lifeline to be safeguarded.

If this is how we govern in the face of El Niño, then the real drought we face is one of empathy, accountability, and common sense—and that disconnect is more dangerous than any dry spell.

The 592 Guardian sought comment from Guyana Water Inc. and the Public Utilities Commission prior to publication. This report will be updated with any response received.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY ◊INTEGRITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

A STATEMENT GUYANA DIDN’T HAVE TO SHARE

OPINION BY: Staff Writer—August 2026

Why did Guyana’s Chancellor of the Judiciary fold a direct conflict of interest into a joint statement, instead of speaking independently?

When the region’s Heads of Judiciary issued their joint statement on August 13 expressing “grave concern” over the confidentiality breach at the Caribbean Court of Justice, Guyana’s Chancellor of the Juidicary  was among the signatories. So was the Chief Justice of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court — the superior court of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States, an institution to which Guyana does not belong. The two signed separately, for separate courts, on the same document.

That much is a matter of record, not confusion.

The question worth asking is not why Guyana’s name sits beside the ECSC’s. It is why Guyana’s Chancellor chose to sign a joint statement — one crafted broadly enough to cover Barbados, the Bahamas, Belize, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the ECSC bloc all at once — rather than issue an independent statement of her own.

GUYANA IS NOT A BYSTANDER IN THIS DISPUTE

The joint statement treats every signatory as equally distant from the substance of the allegations against CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson. For most of the signing jurisdictions, that framing may be defensible. For Guyana, it is not.

Two matters inside the leaked internal correspondence bear directly, and specifically, on Guyana.

The first is Bhagwansingh, the February 2026 CCJ ruling whose interpretation — broad or narrow — will determine whether Guyana’s own exposure under TCL v Guyana [2009] CCJ 5 (OJ) remains intact or is quietly narrowed. That dispute over how Bhagwansingh should be read is, by Justice Eboe-Osuji’s own account, the reason he was removed from the D’Almada panel in the first place. This newsroom has reported that ground already, at length.

The second is more direct still, and it has not yet been given the weight it deserves. Justice Peter Jamadar, in his internal email to fellow CCJ judges, named the Mohamed v MOHA, AG, and Magistrate extradition matter as one of two specific instances in which he experienced Justice Anderson attempting “to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed from yours in an authoritative manner.” That case was not an abstraction. It was Guyana’s own case. The Minister of Home Affairs, the Attorney General, and a sitting Magistrate of Guyana were named respondents. Guyana’s Attorney General, Mohabir Anil Nandlall, argued the government’s position before the court.

The CCJ unanimously dismissed the appeal by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed and his father on July 29, clearing the way for US extradition proceedings to resume — a ruling delivered by Justice Denys Barrow “on behalf of himself and CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson,” and presented publicly as settled and unanimous.

Guyana’s Attorney General stood on one side of the Mohamed extradition matter. A sitting CCJ judge has alleged the court’s president tried to steer the outcome of that very case.

Jamadar’s account suggests the deliberations behind that unanimity were considerably less settled than the public judgment let on. Justice Eboe-Osuji, in the same correspondence, went further still, alleging Anderson “tried single-handedly to override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions” — and was, by Anderson’s own account, absent from the case’s judgment delivery for reasons that were never specified.

Azruddin Mohamed has since publicly demanded an independent examination of the allegations, on the basis that they concern his own case.

TWO GOVERNMENTS, TWO POSITIONS, ONE SIGNATURE

This is not a hypothetical conflict of interest. Guyana’s Attorney General stood on one side of the Mohamed extradition matter. A sitting CCJ judge has now alleged, in writing, that the president of the court attempted to steer the outcome of that very case. Guyana’s government — through its AG — was a direct party to the proceeding a CCJ judge says may have been compromised by presidential overreach.

That is not the position of Barbados, or the Bahamas, or Belize, or the ECSC’s nine member territories, none of which had a government litigant inside the disputed case.

It is Guyana’s position, and Guyana’s alone.

A joint statement lets every signatory share both the cover and the ambiguity of collective phrasing. “Grave concern” about a confidentiality breach, expressed by seven Heads of Judiciary together, commits none of them individually to answering for the substance of what was breached.

An independent statement from Guyana’s Chancellor of the Judiciary would have carried no such shelter. It would have had to address, explicitly or by conspicuous omission, whether Guyana’s judiciary has any view on an allegation that its own government’s litigation was the subject of alleged presidential interference at the region’s apex court.

That is a different kind of statement, with a different kind of fallout — and it is the statement Guyana did not make.

THE QUESTION THIS PUBLICATION IS PUTTING ON RECORD

Why did Guyana’s Chancellor choose to fold Guyana’s position into a joint statement covering jurisdictions with no comparable stake in the underlying allegations, rather than address, independently, a matter in which Guyana’s own Attorney General was a named litigant?

Guyana’s judiciary owes the public more than shared cover. It owes an answer to why silence, diffused across seven signatures, was judged the safer course than an independent word of its own.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

TWO VOICES, ONE COUNCIL

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The Bar Council speaks fluently when the Judiciary is threatened. It has not yet found the same language for seventy-three dead Guyanese

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OPINION —August 2026

THE OCCASION FOR THIS COMPARISON

On 10 August 2026, the Bar Council of the Bar Association of Guyana issued a statement addressing media reports of a leaked internal correspondence among Judges of the Caribbean Court of Justice. The statement is unambiguous in its concern. It describes the unauthorized disclosure of internal judicial correspondence as a matter capable of bringing the administration of justice “into disrepute.”

It calls the act, if proven, “a gross breach of confidence and a serious dereliction of duty.” It urges that the President of the CCJ be afforded “sufficient latitude” to lead the Court according to his vision, subject to the Code of Judicial Conduct. It is, by any reasonable reading, a forceful and considered institutional intervention.

The 592 Guardian does not dispute the legitimacy of that statement. Confidentiality of judicial deliberation is a serious matter, and a Bar Association has standing — indeed, an obligation — to speak to it. The question this editorial raises is not whether the Council was right to speak on the CCJ leak. It is why the same Council, addressing a catastrophe that killed at least seventy-three Guyanese citizens and left dozens more missing, found only sympathy to offer, and nothing more.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS

On 22 July 2026, four days after the MV Barima capsized en route from Georgetown to Port Kaituma, the Bar Council issued its “Statement of Solidarity and Support.” It is a document of condolence. It extends “deepest sympathies” to the families of the dead, describes the Council as “profoundly saddened,” wishes survivors “strength, healing, and a full recovery,” and closes by joining “the nation in mourning the lives that have been lost while praying for comfort, healing, and peace.”

That is the entirety of the Council’s public position on the deadliest maritime disaster in Guyana’s modern history. A review of the Bar Association’s own media centre, and of its public social media channels, confirms that as of this writing, no further statement has followed.

◊ Not on the international Commission of Inquiry chaired by Justice Godfrey Phillip Smith, sworn in on 30 July with a mandate to establish facts, determine accountability, and recommend reforms.

◊ Nothing on the conflict of interest involving one of its own member’s— a sitting minister  professional relationship with an appointed commissioner.

◊ Not on the Terms of Reference published in the Official Gazette, which direct the Commission to examine vessel maintenance, certification, loading practices, and the conduct of state agencies above the level of the crew.

◊ Not on the murder charges laid against Captain Kevin Price, Chief Mate Rondell Roberts, and Goods Superintendent Delon Granderson — each facing seventy-two counts — nor on the due process protections owed to them as the matter proceeds through the Charity Magistrate’s Court alongside an international inquiry operating in full public view.

This last silence is the most difficult to explain. A Bar Association’s core institutional purpose is the protection of legal rights and fair process, particularly for the accused, particularly under public pressure, particularly when the pressure is most intense.

Three Guyanese citizens face the heaviest charge in the criminal code, multiplied seventy-two times, under conditions of extraordinary public anger. If there was ever a moment for the Council to speak in its own primary register — due process, fair trial rights, the presumption of innocence — this was it. It did not.

THE CONTRAST, SIDE BY SIDE

CCJ Leak Statement — Aug 2026	MV Barima Statement — 22 July 2026
“Gross breach of confidence” “Serious dereliction of duty” “Bring the administration of justice into disrepute”	“Deepest sympathies” “Profoundly saddened” “Stand in solidarity”
Institutional integrity of the CCJ invoked and defended	No reference to institutional integrity of any state agency
Explicit latitude urged for the CCJ President’s authority	No reference to the Commission of Inquiry, its Terms of Reference, or its work
Confidentiality and disclosure framed as a matter of principle	No reference to preservation or disclosure of maintenance, inspection, cargo, or communication records
Duty of members to the Court articulated in detail	No reference to the due process rights of the three persons charged

The disparity is not simply that one statement is longer or more detailed than the other. It is that the two statements draw on entirely different vocabularies. The CCJ statement speaks the language of institutions, duty, and consequence. The Barima statement speaks the language of grief.

Both languages have their place. But when the body capable of the former chooses only the latter in the face of mass state-linked death, the choice itself becomes the story.

WHAT THIS IS NOT

This editorial does not allege that the Council’s silence was purchased, ordered, or coordinated with the Government of Guyana. We have no evidence of that, and we do not suggest it. Institutional caution is a real and sometimes legitimate instinct — a Bar Association may reasonably hesitate to comment publicly on matters that are, or may become, sub judice while criminal charges are being prosecuted. That caution deserves to be named as a possible explanation, not dismissed.

But caution explains restraint. It does not explain three weeks of total silence on the existence of a Commission of Inquiry, the fairness of an ongoing prosecution, or the state’s own regulatory failures — none of which required the Council to prejudge a single fact. A Bar Association can call for an independent and timely inquiry, for the preservation of evidence, for respect for due process, and for accountability wherever the facts lead, without pronouncing a single person guilty or innocent. Those are not political demands. They are the ordinary vocabulary of a functioning Bar Association. It is a vocabulary the Council used fluently for the CCJ. It has not yet used it for the Barima.

The question is not whether the Bar Council expressed condolences. It did. The question is whether its intervention matched the gravity of a catastrophe involving mass death, a state-operated transport system, and the due process rights of three citizens now facing seventy-two counts of murder apiece.

— The Editorial Board

A PATTERN WORTH NAMING

This is not the first institution this news room  has documented responding with force to threats against the machinery of governance while offering only ceremony in the face of harm to ordinary Guyanese. It is a pattern this newsroom has traced across the Model Village consultations, the Development Bank Bill’s passage without debate, and the Region 10 administrative impasse: energetic institutional voice where institutional privilege is at stake, and comparative quiet where public accountability is owed.

The Bar Council’s conduct across these two statements fits that pattern precisely — not proof of coordination, but further evidence of a civic culture in which the instruments meant to hold power accountable reserve their sharpest words for their own house.

WHAT THE COUNCIL SHOULD DO

The remedy is straightforward, and it costs the Council nothing it has not already spent on the CCJ matter. The Bar Council should issue a further statement addressing the MV Barima tragedy on its merits as a matter of public law: affirming the necessity of an independent and transparent Commission of Inquiry, insisting on the preservation and disclosure of all relevant maintenance, inspection, cargo, and communication records, and affirming the due process rights of every person charged in connection with the disaster, including the presumption of innocence pending trial.

None of this requires the Council to take a side. It requires only that the Council speak in the register it has already shown it possesses.

Guyana does not lack institutions capable of forceful language. It lacks the consistent will to direct that language toward the country’s actual emergencies rather than its institutional grievances.

The Bar Council has, this month, demonstrated that it knows how to speak with teeth. Seventy-two families are still waiting to hear it use them.

Sources: Bar Council of the Bar Association of Guyana, “Statement by the Bar Council of the Bar Association of Guyana on Media Reports Concerning the Leak of Internal Correspondence Among the Judges of the Caribbean Court of Justice” (Aug. 2026); Bar Council of the Bar Association of Guyana, “Statement of Solidarity and Support by the Bar Council of the Bar Association of Guyana Following the MV Barima Tragedy” (22 July 2026); Guyana Chronicle, “MV Barima CoI Empowered to Probe Safety Failures, Recommend Prosecutions, Maritime Reforms — ToRs Outline” (4 Aug. 2026); Guyana Chronicle, “Boat Captain, Two Others Remanded on Murder Charges Over MV Barima Tragedy” (29 July 2026); Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation, “Guyana to Launch International Inquiry into MV Barima Tragedy.”