UNITY IS NOT A GAG ORDER

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊GUYANA

 UNITY IS NOT A GAG ORDER

A response to “Crossfire,” Guyana Chronicle

The Guyana Chronicle’s Crossfire column this week asks the nation to fall silent. It invokes the dead of the MV Barima — seventy-three recovered, others still missing — and from that grief draws a political instruction: that questions are indecent, that opposition scrutiny is “campaign speeches,” that Amanza Walton-Desir and Janelle Sweatnam should “hang their heads in shame” for asking what a publicly funded newspaper will not.

We take grief seriously. We do not take it as license.

WHAT THE COLUMN ASKS THE COUNTRY TO FORGET

Crossfire’s argument depends on a single move: treat every specific, named demand from the opposition as indistinguishable from opportunism, while asking the government’s critics — and only the government’s critics — for restraint. Consider what was actually said, on the record, by the two women singled out for shame.

Walton-Desir’s position, made at a joint opposition press conference, was not a slogan. It was a specific legal argument: that because the MV Barima was a state-owned and state-operated vessel, any investigation into its maintenance, certification, inspection and regulatory oversight will necessarily examine the conduct of government agencies — and that under the International Maritime Organization’s casualty investigation framework, an inquiry touching the state’s own conduct must be structured for independence to command public confidence. She asked the government to say plainly which legal instrument it is proceeding under — the Commissions of Inquiry Act, the Shipping Act, or an IMO marine safety investigation — and who is leading it. These are not campaign lines. They are the questions any credible accountability process answers as a matter of course.

Sweatnam’s demand was equally specific: whether the vessel was properly maintained and seaworthy, whether mandatory inspections occurred, whether maritime regulations were followed, and whether Minister Juan Edghill and MARAD Director Stephen Thomas should be held to account for a portfolio in which those questions arose.

Asking whether a minister bears responsibility for the regulatory failures under his portfolio is not a breach of national mourning. It is the ordinary function of an opposition in a parliamentary democracy — one Crossfire’s own column claims to defend a few paragraphs later, when it says the opposition has “every constitutional right and indeed a democratic responsibility to ask difficult questions.”

The column cannot have it both ways. It cannot affirm the opposition’s right to scrutiny in the abstract while naming and shaming the specific women who exercised it.

THE FACTS CROSSFIRE DECLINES TO SIT WITH

An editorial invoking unity should be able to withstand the plain record. The MV Barima’s official manifest listed 133 people aboard. Confirmed reporting puts the actual number closer to 179 — a discrepancy of roughly 46 people that has direct bearing on how search-and-rescue was scoped in its earliest hours. The vessel’s captain and first engineer tested positive for cannabis. The vessel itself was built in 1939, eighty-five years in service, with a replacement ferry reportedly sitting unused for want of a completed pier. Every one of these facts belongs to the government’s own disclosures, made through the Prime Minister’s office and the Ministry of Public Works.

None of them were surfaced by the opposition. All of them are the proper subject of exactly the kind of independent scrutiny Walton-Desir called for.

An editorial that spends its full length on the propriety of the opposition’s tone, and none of it on a state-owned vessel’s inaccurate manifest or its crew’s drug tests, has not written about restraint. It has written about deflection.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY ACTUALLY REQUIRES

We do not dispute Crossfire’s better instincts. It is right that the dead are not props for scorekeeping, right that families in mourning are not an audience for anyone’s speech, right that premature verdicts should give way to a credible process. We hold the same standard for government spokespeople who, within days of the tragedy, offered blanket denials of neglect before reversing course once the drug tests came back — Minister Edghill himself moved, in the space of a single Sunday, from insisting there was no sign of neglect to confirming a crew member’s positive test. That, too, is a “blanket denial wrapped in uncertainty.” Crossfire finds no shame to assign there.

Accountability that flows in only one direction is not accountability. It is public relations wearing the language of grief, financed with public funds, aimed at a newspaper’s own government.

A state broadcaster or a state-funded newspaper does not lose the right to publish opinion. But it forfeits the right to be read as a neutral referee of who may grieve and who must stay silent, when the institution itself has a direct stake in how blame is finally assigned.

Seventy-three Guyanese families are still waiting — some for bodies, some for the truth. They are not served by a column that tells the opposition to bow its head. They are served by an investigation structured, as Walton-Desir insisted, to survive scrutiny of the state itself; by a minister who answers plainly instead of reversing himself under pressure; and by a press, publicly funded or otherwise, that asks the same hard questions of power in July that it asks in any other month.

That is not crossfire. That is the job.

— The Board

A Line Kissoon Invented, Then Accused Others of Crossing

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY ◊GOVERNANCE ◊ THE PUBLIC RECORD

EDITORIAL RESPONSE

A Line Kissoon Invented, Then Accused Others of Crossing

Freddie Kissoon’s July 30 column builds its entire moral case on a rule that does not exist. What follows is worse than a factual lapse.

By The Board  ·  July, 2026

Freddie Kissoon’s July 30 column opens with a premise stated as settled fact: that children do not belong in Guyana’s Parliament, that their presence on July 27 was “unheard of in the world,” and that Azruddin Mohamed therefore crossed a line that is, in Kissoon’s word, “unforgivable.”

The premise is false, and not in a way that requires specialist knowledge to correct.

School civics tours through the National Assembly are a routine feature of parliamentary systems, including Guyana’s own — a fact available to anyone who attended secondary school within walking distance of the Public Buildings.

Stakeholder and special-interest hearings that bring affected families before a legislature to address the matter that concerns them are likewise unremarkable practice, not a Guyanese or global anomaly.

Kissoon’s rhetorical question — “in which country has that happened?” — has an answer, and it is: most of them, regularly.

This matters because the column’s entire architecture depends on the premise holding. Strip out “children are categorically barred from Parliament” and what remains is not a violated rule but a policy dispute over optics — whether it was wise or exploitative for the Opposition Leader to bring grieving family members, including children, into the House in connection with a disaster that killed their parents and siblings.

That is a legitimate question. It is not the question Kissoon asked. He asked it as though the answer were already written into the Standing Orders, and built a column’s worth of moral certainty on top of an assertion he never verified.

TWO DIFFERENT THINGS, COLLAPSED INTO ONE

The column treats “children in the public gallery” as interchangeable with “victims’ family members, including children, present in connection with a matter that killed their relatives.”

These are not the same category. A school tour and a stakeholder appearance by bereaved families are both examples of children in a legislature; neither is “the public wandering in to watch a sitting for entertainment,” which is the image Kissoon’s column works to conjure.

Collapsing the distinction is either careless or convenient. Given the rest of the column, convenient seems the likelier reading.

THE UNASKED QUESTION

Kissoon asks “for what purpose?” four times in various forms, treating it as rhetorical — a question with no honest answer, only a cynical one. He does not engage with the stated purpose: that these were relatives of MV Barima victims, present to make their concerns known to a government whose response to the disaster — from the handling of funeral arrangements to the timeline on salvage to the circulation of a memorial-site “Declaration of Agreement” ahead of any genuine consultation — has itself drawn sustained and specific scrutiny.

A columnist confident in his own premise does not need to ignore the competing one.

Kissoon ignores it entirely, then fills the vacuum with motive he has not demonstrated: ego, bandwagon politics, “crass mentality.”

THE PRESUMPTION OF BAD FAITH, APPLIED SELECTIVELY

The column’s roll call — Kaieteur News, Kiskadee Watch, Demerara Waves, the Guyana Human Rights Association, Transparency International Guyana, Red Thread — is presented as a list of organizations that will stay silent because they “need” Mohamed.

This is asserted, not shown. It is also asserted before any of those organizations had published anything on the matter, which means the column is not describing a silence that occurred but predicting one, and then treating the prediction as evidence of the bad faith it has not yet observed.

That is not analysis. It is a script written in advance of the facts it claims to interpret.

WHAT THE COLUMN NEVER ASKS

A column genuinely concerned with the welfare of grieving children might have asked whether the government’s own conduct in the days after July 18 — the disputed account of remarks about burial costs, the reported instruction not to photograph or film, the pre-drafted memorial declaration circulated to families ahead of a stated “consultation” process — contributed to families feeling they had no avenue but a public one. Kissoon’s column asks none of this.

It reserves its outrage entirely for the opposition’s optics and none for the government conduct that gave families cause to seek an audience in the first place.

None of this requires taking a position on whether bringing children to Parliament was, on balance, wise. Reasonable people can disagree on that. What they cannot do honestly is invent a rule that does not exist, use it to declare a line “unforgivably crossed,” and then spend a column’s remaining length assigning motive to everyone who might question the premise.

WHOSE POSITION, EXACTLY

One further point deserves the record. The column runs in the Guyana Chronicle, a state-owned newspaper, under a standard disclaimer identifying Kissoon as a paid columnist whose views are his own and not the outlet’s official position.

That disclaimer exists precisely because Chronicle is state property, and it is boilerplate practice for compensated contributors at any paper. It does not by itself prove alignment with government messaging.

But it is a fact worth placing beside the column’s own accusation — that the opposition and civil society are motivated by what they “need,” never principle — because that accusation arrives from a paid platform of the state, aimed at people writing for free.

Readers can weigh that asymmetry for themselves.

— The Board

A $40 BILLION BLANK CHEQUE

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦GUYANA

A $40 BILLION BLANK CHEQUE

How the Guyana Development Bank Bill Was Passed Without Debate

Parliament used the Barima crisis as cover to wave through a bill built to concentrate control

OPINION♦July, 2026

On July 27, while the Joint Opposition was inside the National Assembly demanding the resignations of Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill and Minister within Public Works Deodat Indar over the MV Barima disaster, the government moved the Guyana Development Bank Bill to a second reading and passed it — 52 days after it was tabled, and without a single substantive contribution from the Opposition benches.

The same sitting passed a $54.9 billion bill and observed one minute of silence for the 73 confirmed dead. The Development Bank Bill received considerably less scrutiny than the moment of silence.

This is not incidental. A chamber consumed by grief and protest is a chamber that cannot read a bill clause by clause.

The government’s own contributions to the “debate” — from Minister of Culture Youth and Sport Charles Ramson, Minister Zulfikar Ally, and MPs Lenox Shuman and Alister Charlies — proceeded while Opposition MPs stood near ministers mid-presentation and the Speaker suspended the sitting twice to restore order. Whatever this was, it was not deliberation.

THE SALES PITCH VERSUS THE STATUTE

The Guyana Development Bank was publicly marketed as a facility offering interest-free loans of up to $3 million to Guyanese entrepreneurs, with no collateral required. The legislation says something narrower. Section 5(2) permits the Bank to provide loans “with or without collateral and with or without charging interest” — discretionary language that leaves the government free to impose collateral and interest on some or most applicants, with no criteria in the Bill specifying which projects qualify for the interest-free, collateral-free terms that were used to sell this to the public.

The eligibility gap runs deeper. Part V does not restrict financing to Guyanese nationals. Section 23 requires only that an applicant “provide such information, documents and statutory declarations as may be prescribed” — language vague enough that a foreign-owned enterprise could plausibly qualify under the same terms as a Guyanese small business the fund was announced to serve.

ONE MINISTER, TOTAL DISCRETION

The structural core of this Bill is Section 5 and the governance provisions that follow it.

Up to $40 billion — roughly US$200 million, a figure that can be revised upward by Parliament — will be administered by a board of five to nine directors appointed entirely by the Minister of Finance. The Minister appoints the chairperson, the deputy chairperson, sets director remuneration, and the board in turn appoints the CEO. Directors serve three-year terms and may be reappointed at the Minister’s discretion.

“No seat is reserved for the Opposition. No seat is reserved for civil society. No seat is reserved for a transparency body. This is not an oversight — it is the single most consequential design choice in the Bill.”

A development bank distributing this scale of public capital without a single independently-nominated director is a bank answerable to one office and one office alone.

PENALTIES THAT MISS THE ACTUAL RISK

The Bill enumerates five offences:

⇒providing false information to the Bank

⇒obstructing the Bank’s functions

⇒falsifying records

⇒improperly disclosing confidential information 

⇒willfully misapplying Bank funds or assets.

Every one of these is oriented toward the borrower — the person seeking or holding a loan.

Nowhere does the Bill create a specific offence for unauthorised withdrawal or self-dealing by the officials entrusted with managing the $40 billion pool itself.

The “connivance” clause — imposing fines of $5 million to $10 million on a director, manager, or officer who consents to or connives in one of the five listed offences — is derivative. It requires an underlying offence to attach to. It does not independently criminalise a Finance Minister appointee steering approvals toward political allies, because favouritism in loan approval is not on the list of offences at all.

Combine this with the appointment structure above: a board selected without external check, operating under a penalty regime that does not contemplate insider misconduct as its own offence. The Auditor General will audit annually, and the Annual Report will be tabled in the National Assembly — but after-the-fact reporting is not a substitute for structural safeguards at the point of decision.

THE PATTERN

This joins a growing list of instruments — the GECOM Article 161(3)(b) dispute, the Former Presidents Benefits Bill — that share a common architecture: broad ministerial or executive discretion, minimal independent check, and passage timed to avoid the scrutiny the moment would otherwise attract. On July 27, that moment was Barima. The country was watching a grieving Opposition Leader’s sister confronted in the halls of Parliament and a Prime Minister proclaiming salvage conditions “not favourable” for recovering a vessel with the dead still aboard.

Forty billion dollars changed hands, procedurally, in the same sitting.

The Guyana Development Bank may yet do real good for small business owners who cannot access commercial credit.

That possibility does not answer the structural question this Bill leaves open: who decides who gets the money, on what terms, and who answers for it if the decision is made badly. As written, the answer to all three is the same person.

— The Board

The Minister in the Commissioner’s Firm

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

EDITORIAL  ·  COMMISSION OF INQUIRY  ·  MV BARIMA

The Minister in the Commissioner’s Firm

How a sitting Cabinet minister’s own law chambers became the Guyana address of a COI commissioner’s firm — and how that record was quietly edited in the days around the swearing-in

By Hem Kumar, Editor  ·  The 592 Guardian  ·  July, 2026

Thursday’s swearing-in of the five-member Commission of Inquiry into the sinking of the MV Barima was held behind closed doors. The media were barred. President Irfaan Ali stood before the commissioners he alone had appointed and declared that the panel “meets the highest benchmarks of independence, impartiality, and objectivity.”

No journalist was present to ask him what, precisely, he meant.

The 592 Guardian can now report that in the days immediately surrounding that ceremony, a Trinidad-based law firm quietly stripped a sitting Guyanese Cabinet minister’s name from three separate pages of its public website — pages that had tied him, directly, to the professional home of one of the President’s own appointees.

THE FIRM AND THE COMMISSIONER

Among the five commissioners named by President Ali is Nyree Dawn Alfonso of Trinidad and Tobago, an attorney with expertise in admiralty and maritime law. Ms. Alfonso is the Managing Partner of N.D. Alfonso & Co., a Port-of-Spain firm operating in Guyana as well as Trinidad.

Junior Minister of Labour Keoma Griffith is a Guyanese attorney admitted to practice in both jurisdictions since 2016.

This news- media  has independently confirmed, through the firm’s own published record, that Mr. Griffith has appeared as counsel for N.D. Alfonso & Co. clients in Guyana’s Supreme Court. In a March 2025 case update still live on the firm’s website, N.D. Alfonso & Co. states that the owners of a tug and barge released from judicial arrest in Guyana “were represented by Nyree Alfonso, Asif Hosein-Shah and Keoma Griffith,” naming the future Junior Minister in the same breath as the firm’s Managing Partner — the same Managing Partner President Ali has now placed on the Commission of Inquiry into the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Guyana’s history.

A sitting Cabinet minister does not casually share a byline with a COI commissioner in a Supreme Court filing. The question is not whether the connection exists. It is why the government did not disclose it.

WHAT WE FOUND, AND WHAT WAS REMOVED

The 592 Guardian independently examined N.D. Alfonso & Co.’s website, ttattorneys.com, on July 30 — the day of the swearing-in — and traced a pattern of edits made in the days before it.

The firm’s dedicated professional biography page for Mr. Griffith, previously indexed at ttattorneys.com/keoma-d-griffith, returns a “page not found” error as of this writing. Google’s cached index of that page, reviewed by this news- media shows it described him as admitted to practice law in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago in 2016, with appearances before the Caribbean Court of Justice, the Guyana Court of Appeal, the High Court and the Magistrates’ Court.

The firm’s “Our Team” page, still live, was last modified on July 25, 2026 — one day before Mr. Griffith’s appointment record was scrubbed and five days before the commissioners were sworn in. That page today lists only Ms. Alfonso, one partner, and three consultants. It no longer mentions Mr. Griffith. Google’s cached version of the same page, reviewed by this news outlet , previously listed him as “Correspondent (Guyana), Consultants.”

The firm’s “Contact Us” page, also still live, was last modified on July 26, 2026. It currently lists only a “Guyana Satellite Office” at 225 South Street, Lacytown, Georgetown — with no name attached. An earlier indexed version of that identical page, reviewed by this newspaper, listed the Guyana office as “C/O Mr. Keoma D. Griffith, 225 South Street, Lacytown, Georgetown, Guyana.”

Three pages. Three edits. All in the narrow window between the government naming its commissioners and the public swearing-in it chose to conduct without the press present.

THE QUESTIONS GUYANA DESERVES ANSWERED

This publication  draws no conclusion here that has not already been drawn by the firm’s own website, in its own words, at a time of its own choosing. What the record shows is this:

⇒ A Cabinet minister’s chambers address served as the Guyana contact point for a COI commissioner’s firm.

⇒A Cabinet minister appeared as named counsel alongside that commissioner in Guyana’s courts.

⇒ And in the days around his own government’s swearing-in of that commissioner, the public-facing record of that relationship was edited down to nothing.

President Ali, Minister Griffith, and Commissioner Alfonso each owe the country a direct answer to a direct question: did the President know of this relationship when he named Ms. Alfonso to a Commission investigating a tragedy that killed more than a hundred Guyanese, and if he did not know, why not?

The opposition parties warned, before a single commissioner was named, that public confidence in this inquiry would depend not only on the credentials of its members but on a transparent process free of “actual or perceived conflict of interest.”

TIGI has separately raised concern over the integrity of several commissioners.  APNU’s

Ganesh Mahipaul has objected specifically to the Chairman’s political background.

Chartered accountant Christopher Ram has pressed, unanswered, on why the Commission’s terms of reference stop at the night of July 18 rather than the decade of decisions that put an 87-year-old vessel on that river.

Each of those warnings was dismissed, in effect, by a government that proceeded to swear in its commissioners behind closed doors. Now a fourth thread joins them — one written not by an opposition politician or a critic, but by the commissioner’s own law firm, in its own case files, before anyone thought to ask.

UNCOVERING WHAT THEY COVER

Seventy-two Guyanese families have buried their dead. Thirty more wait for bodies that may never surface.

The government has promised them a Commission that meets “the highest benchmarks of independence, impartiality, and objectivity.”

It has not yet explained why the public record supporting that claim needed editing in the week the claim was made.

The 592 Guardian has sought comment from Minister Griffith, Commissioner Alfonso, and the Office of the President. This is a developing story. We will publish any response in full.

— The Board

Thirty-One Toshaos, Nine Hundred Thirty Million Dollars, and No Bids: The Threshold That Vanished in a Week

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

Thirty-One Toshaos, Nine Hundred Thirty Million Dollars, and No Bids: The Threshold That Vanished in a Week

Gtown, Guyana — July, 2026

On Saturday, thirty-one village leaders from Regions Eight and Nine stood in the boardroom of the Ministry of Public Works and signed their names to Community Participation Contracts worth roughly $30 million apiece — a combined $930 million in public money, delivered without a single open bid.

Permanent Secretary Vladim Persaud called it capacity-building. It is also, on the public record, the single largest expansion of uncompeted procurement discretion this administration has exercised in the hinterland in recent memory, and it happened in under a week.

The mechanism is not new. Community Participation Contracts have existed for years as a deliberate, defensible exception to open tendering — a way to let villages execute their own road and bridge maintenance with local labour rather than importing an outside contractor. Nobody at this newspaper disputes that the underlying idea has merit.

What changed, abruptly and by ministerial announcement rather than by any visible legislative or regulatory process this newspaper can locate, is the ceiling on what that exception now covers.

A THRESHOLD RAISED AT A PODIUM

At the National Toshaos Council Conference, Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo told delegates the government would raise the CPC threshold from $5 million to $30 million — a sixfold increase — and instructed, in terms that left no room for bureaucratic delay, that it be done “before you leave.” It was. Within days, thirty-one contracts at or near the new ceiling were signed in a Georgetown boardroom.

A threshold that took years to sit at $5 million was multiplied sixfold at a podium and operationalized into $930 million of signed contracts before the conference delegates had returned home.

This news-media has covered enough hinterland procurement to recognize the shape of what is being described here. The prior $5 million ceiling was not an oversight; it was a guardrail sized to what village councils — most of which are not incorporated companies with standard contracting capacity — could plausibly execute and account for without a formal open-tender evaluation. As recently as May 2025, villages were being urged by the Ministry of Public Works to consider incorporating precisely so they could handle larger sums. That advice was still being given a little over a year before the ceiling was raised sixfold and $930 million moved.

WHAT CRITERIA? WHAT QUALIFICATIONS?

Minister of Local Government and Regional Development Priya Manickchand has said contracts will only be awarded where villages have “demonstrated capacity to complete the work successfully.”

This publication takes no position on the sincerity of that statement. What it observes is that “demonstrated capacity” is not a criterion; it is a conclusion. No published scoring rubric, no engineering pre-qualification standard, no capacity audit methodology, and no evaluation committee composition has been made public for the thirty-one contracts signed on Saturday.

The 592 Guardian was unable to identify, in any government statement, DPI release, or ministry publication, a single objective standard against which a Toshao’s village was measured before receiving an award of up to $30 million.

That absence is not a technicality. It is the entire question. When $930 million moves through a channel exempt by design from the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board’s open-tender rules, the exemption is only defensible if something else — publicly stated, consistently applied criteria — stands in for the market discipline that competitive bidding would otherwise provide. As of this writing, nothing has.

ON THE OPEN-BID QUESTION, PRECISELY

Readers have asked directly whether these contracts were advertised for open bids. They were not, and under the CPC framework as constituted, they were never going to be — that is the defined character of a Community Participation Contract, not a deviation from it. The relevant failure is therefore not procedural evasion but design: a mechanism built for modest, locally-executed maintenance work has just had its ceiling raised sixfold with no accompanying publication of the safeguards that would ordinarily substitute for competition at that scale. NPTAB’s own procurement guidance draws an explicit line between what falls below threshold, subject only to internal record-keeping, and what rises above it, subject to Board-level scrutiny and public notice. This administration has, in a single week, moved $930 million from one side of that line’s practical effect to the other without moving it formally at all.

IS THIS PATRONAGE?

We are conscious that some in the hinterland will read any scrutiny of this initiative as an attack on Indigenous communities’ right to development finance, and we reject that framing in advance. Toshao Russian Dorrick’s own appeal at the NTC conference — asking the ministry directly, “why not give us the contract, we will do it” — is on the public record and deserves to be taken at face value as a legitimate demand for self-determination in how hinterland infrastructure money is spent. That demand is not the problem.

The problem is a government that answered it by removing competitive and evaluative safeguards rather than building new ones suited to the larger sums now in play.

This news media will will not accuse the administration, on the present record, of purchasing political loyalty in Regions Eight and Nine. That is a serious charge and we have not seen the evidence to sustain it.

What we will say, plainly, is that a $930 million disbursement, announced and executed within a single conference cycle, timed precisely to a gathering of the political constituency it benefits, with no published evaluation criteria and no NPTAB oversight role disclosed, is patronage-shaped whether or not it is patronage-intentioned.

Guyanese taxpayers, and the Indigenous communities this initiative claims to serve, are entitled to know which of the two it is — and the only way to know is for the government to publish what it has so far kept to itself.

WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN NOW

The equipment and training components of this initiative — $1 billion across seven Region Eight clusters, $50 million in technical training, a funded road-safety and signage programme — are, on their face, sound public investment.

None of what follows is a call to unwind them. It is a demand that they be made auditable.

  1. The Ministry of Public Works should publish the evaluation criteria and scoring methodology used to select the thirty-one awardee villages, including whether any village that applied was declined and why.
  2. The Ministry should publish the individual contract value, scope of works, and completion timeline for each of the thirty-one CPCs, not merely the aggregate $930 million figure.
  3. The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board should state, on the record, what oversight role — if any — it retained over CPC awards following the threshold increase from $5 million to $30 million, and whether that increase was formalized in regulation or remains a ministerial instruction.
  4. The Public Procurement Commission, established under Article 212W of the Constitution specifically to guard against exactly this category of risk, should confirm whether it reviewed the threshold change before or after it was announced at the NTC conference.
  5. Village councils that registered as companies to access these contracts should have that corporate and financial structure disclosed, so that beneficial ownership and any contractor relationships are transparent to the communities the money is meant to serve.

None of these five demands require the government to slow down hinterland development. They require it to show its work. An administration confident that thirty-one Toshaos were selected on merit and capacity, rather than proximity to the podium at Arthur Chung, should have no objection to publishing the record that proves it.

— The Board

WHAT IS GOVERNMENT AFRAID A FLOATED MV BARIMA WILL SHOW?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA 

WHAT IS GOVERNMENT AFRAID A FLOATED MV BARIMA WILL SHOW?

The Paper Trail Behind the “Family Choice” on Recovery

THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL

By Hem Kumar, Editor

The government wants the nation to believe that whether the MV Barima is raised from the seabed remains an open question — one to be decided by the families of the dead, gently and patiently, through consultation.

It has gone so far as to float the idea of retaining, at public expense, a conflict resolution expert should those families disagree among themselves. All very reasonable-sounding. All very procedurally correct.

It is also, on the documentary record now before this news-media, a fiction.

I. Before a single questionnaire was drafted. Before any “consultation process” was announced to the public. Before, as far as this news-media  can establish, most families had been formally approached at all — a document titled “Declaration of Agreement — MV Barima as Memorial Site” was already circulating for signature.

Read that title again. Not a survey. Not a canvass of sentiment. A declaration of agreement. The document does not ask the relative of the deceased what outcome they would prefer. It states, as an accomplished fact, that the vessel will remain a memorial where it sank — and it invites the signature of the grieving to ratify that fact. 

Name of the deceased. Name of the relative. Relationship. Address. Telephone number. Signature line.

That is not the architecture of an inquiry. That is the architecture of a release form — the kind an institution circulates when it needs the record to show consent it has not actually earned.

II. The sequence damns the government more than the document alone. This news outlet timeline shows the Declaration following directly on the heels of Prime Minister Mark Phillips’s own pronouncement in the House — delivered before the families’ “consultation” had even formally begun — that recovery “conditions are not favourable.” The conclusion preceded the process. The verdict came before the hearing.

What followed was not fact-finding. It was the construction of a paper record to justify a decision the Cabinet had already reached in private. The questionnaire, when it did arrive, did not exist to discover what families wanted. It existed to produce signatures consistent with what the government had already decided they should want.

A government that had genuinely left this question open does not tell the nation the vessel is staying down and then go asking families to sign a form agreeing that it should.

III. This casts the “conflict resolution expert” proposal — offered to the public as evidence of the state’s sensitivity to divided family opinion — in a considerably less flattering light. If the outcome was fixed before the canvassing began, there is no live dispute for such an expert to mediate. 

There is only the management of dissent: the handling of those families who decline to sign a script already written for them. Guyanese taxpayers would not be funding conflict resolution. They would be funding compliance management, dressed up as grief counselling.

IV. None of this changes the underlying moral arithmetic, which this news-media  has already set out plainly: it defies belief that any family, absent influence or inducement, would choose to leave a loved one’s remains at the bottom of the Essequibo rather than retrieve them for burial. It defies belief further still that a memorial marker — which is all any family will ever see or touch, whether the vessel is raised or not — cannot achieve every commemorative purpose the government claims only a sunken hull can provide. And it should not need saying, though apparently it does, that surfacing the vessel, recovering the remains and any evidence of value, and returning it to the water afterward serves every party’s stated interest at once — unless one interest was never about grief at all.

The government has already conceded that the manifest cannot reliably establish who was aboard when the Barima went down. Somewhere between that admission and the pre-drafted Declaration sits an uncomfortable question this publication  intends to keep asking: what, precisely, does government fear a floated MV Barima would disclose — and to whom does it owe an answer first, the families, or itself?

The families deserve a genuine choice, honestly presented, before any decision — not a signature drive dressed up as one.

— The Board

Physician, Disclose Thyself

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

 Physician, Disclose Thyself

A reply to Freddie Kissoon on TIGI, transparency, and who exactly is taking directives from whom

By the Editorial Board  ·  July, 2026

Freddie Kissoon has published a column accusing Transparency International Guyana Inc. (TIGI) of being an “opaque organisation” for withholding public support from the Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima ferry disaster pending disclosure of commissioners’ conflicts of interest. He built his column on a geographic non-sequitur — conflating a Guyanese-registered, locally governed national chapter with the German location of the international movement’s secretariat, apparently missing the word “international” in the organisation’s own name — and he did it while asking TIGI to disclose things about itself that he has never disclosed about himself. We take up his invitation. Since Mr. Kissoon has made transparency about institutional affiliation the test of credibility, that test applies to him too.

THE TEST HE PROPOSES, APPLIED TO HIM

Mr. Kissoon writes for TBN Heat and previously for Kaieteur News. He asks who funds TIGI, who its executives are, and what connections its members hold. Fair questions for any institution operating in public life — including a columnist with a regular platform. So: has Mr. Kissoon ever disclosed, to his own readers, every institutional or personal connection that might bear on what he writes?

By his own standard, the absence of that disclosure is not evidence of innocence. It is exactly the opacity he condemns in others.

A DOCUMENTED HISTORY, NOT AN INSINUATION

On May 24, 2010, Mr. Kissoon was assaulted outside Nigel’s Supermarket on Robb Street, Georgetown, when a man threw faecal matter in his face. Kwame McCoy — at the time the PPP/C’s Press and Publicity Officer and a former Presidential Press Liaison Officer — was charged and tried alongside Jason Abdulla and Shawn Hinds in connection with that attack; one of the defence attorneys told the court his client was following the direction of his employer, McCoy, and that refusing would have cost him his job. This is not a claim we are advancing on hearsay. It was reported at the time by Kaieteur News and the Guyana Chronicle, and it was still being invoked in print as recently as this month.

Kwame McCoy is now Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister with responsibility for Public Affairs — the portfolio that sits over government information and media affairs, the same ambit under which the state-owned Guyana Chronicle operates. We are not asserting a formal chain of command between a minister and every commentator who writes favourably of this government. We are asking the question Mr. Kissoon insists is fair game when applied to others: what is the relationship, and has it been disclosed?

“If an organisation wants to be taken seriously, then it has to be open about its leadership and membership.” — Freddie Kissoon, July 29, 2026

Mr. Kissoon wrote that sentence about TIGI. We are simply applying it.

ON THE SUBSTANCE TIGI ACTUALLY RAISED

Stripped of the German tangent, TIGI’s request was narrow: that commissioners named to inquire into the Barima disaster disclose, in advance, any commercial, financial, or institutional connection to the government, state agencies, the maritime sector, or any interested party.

This is a standard conflict-of-interest disclosure, the kind expected of judges, auditors, and inquiry panels in any functioning accountability system. Mr. Kissoon calls it “comical” and “insulting.” A commissioner asked to declare a financial interest before ruling on a matter that could touch that interest is not being insulted. That is the minimum architecture of a credible inquiry.

On TIGI’s absence from the 2020 election crisis and the Article 13 point, we note only that critiquing an organisation’s past record of engagement is a legitimate line of argument — unlike attributing to it a foreign ideology by way of a shared word in its name.

WHAT WE ARE NOT SAYING

We are not asserting that Mr. Kissoon currently receives instruction from Minister McCoy, and we have not established that as fact. We are noting a documented history between the two men, McCoy’s current portfolio over government information, and the pattern Mr. Kissoon’s recent columns have taken — and we are asking him to apply to himself the disclosure standard he applied to TIGI.

If the answer is that no such relationship exists, that answer costs him nothing to give. Its absence so far is his choice, not ours.

The Board.

PRESS RELEASE -JULY 29 2026.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

REPUBLIC OF TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO  

  Telephone: (868) 612-5CCJ   Fax: (868) 624-4710 

  Website: www.ccj.org 

MEDIA RELEASE 

(For immediate release) 

 No. 30:2026 

30 July 2026 

 CCJ DISMISSES APPEAL, ALLOWS EXTRADITION PROCEEDINGS TO 

CONTINUE AGAINST GUYANESE OPPOSITION LEADER AND FATHER  

 Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. On Wednesday, 29 July 2026, the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ/Court) dismissed an appeal brought by Mr Azruddin Mohamed, Leader of the Opposition in Guyana, and his father, Mr Nazar Mohamed, challenging the validity of an Authority to Proceed (ATP) issued under Guyana’s Fugitive Offenders Act in connection with a request by the United States of America for their extradition. 

The extradition request was received by the Government of Guyana on 28 October 2025. Two days later, the Minister of Home Affairs issued an ATP, which initiated the extradition process before the courts. The Applicants subsequently sought judicial review of that decision, alleging that the ATP was invalid because it was tainted by actual or apparent bias arising from public statements made by senior government officials during the 2025 election campaign. They also contended that the Minister had improperly consulted the Attorney General, who was likewise alleged to be biased. 

The High Court and the Court of Appeal dismissed the challenge. The Applicants then sought special leave to appeal to the CCJ, which decided to hear the application for special leave and the substantive appeal at the same time. The Court also granted an interim stay of the extradition proceedings pending determination of the appeal. 

At the CCJ, President Anderson and Justice Barrow, in a joint judgment, held that special leave should be granted. On the merits, they held that while the broad rule against bias can apply to a ministerial decision to issue an ATP, mere political bias would not invalidate its grant. They further found that the Applicants had failed to establish that the issuance of the ATP was tainted by bias in any relevant sense and emphasised that an ATP is a preliminary administrative step in the extradition process. The Minister’s role is to engage in the decision-making process contemplated by the legislation. The Applicants did not allege that the Minister failed to consider relevant factors or had relied on irrelevant considerations. Instead, they relied solely on allegations of political bias. The Judges found those allegations insufficient to invalidate the ATP. 

President Anderson and Justice Barrow also expressed the view that challenges to an ATP may be filed before but, save in the most exceptional of circumstances, should be heard only after completion of the committal stage of the extradition process. Such an approach, they reasoned, would better align with Guyana’s extradition framework and international obligations.  

In separate reasons, Justices Rajnauth-Lee, Jamadar, and Bulkan agreed that the appeal should be dismissed but held that there was no legal bar preventing an early judicial review challenge to an ATP where bias is alleged. While finding no appearance of bias on the part of the Minister, they concluded that there was a real possibility of apparent bias on the part of the Attorney General. Nevertheless, they determined that any such apparent bias did not contaminate the Minister’s decision-making process or invalidate the ATP. The CCJ Judges further ordered that each party bear its own costs and underscored the importance of judicial independence, cautioning against public comments by public officials on pending judicial proceedings. 

In a further separate opinion, Justices Ononaiwu and Eboe-Osuji agreed that the appeal should be dismissed. They stressed that allegations of bias must be assessed from the perspective of a fairminded and informed observer who considers all the surrounding circumstances. On that test, bias is not made out in the particular circumstances of the present case. The CCJ Judges also highlighted procedural considerations concerning the timing of challenges to an ATP, observing that extradition proceedings themselves provide mechanisms for addressing potential unfairness. 

Ultimately, the CCJ unanimously granted special leave to appeal but dismissed the substantive appeal. The interim stay of extradition proceedings previously granted by the Court was lifted. The Court further ordered that there be no order as to costs before the CCJ and reserved its decision on the costs in the courts below. 

The appeal was heard by the full CCJ Bench comprising the Honourable President Mr Justice Winston Anderson, and the Honourable Justices Rajnauth-Lee, Barrow, Jamadar, Ononaiwu, Eboe-Osuji, and Bulkan. Mr Fyard Hosein, SC, Mr Roysdale A. Forde, SC, Mr Sasha Bridgemohansingh, Mr Siand Dhurjon, Mr Damien Da Silva, and Mr Aadam Hosein represented the Appellants. Mr Douglas L. Mendes, SC and Mr Clay J. Hackett represented the First Respondent, the Minister of Home Affairs. Mr Mohabir Anil Nandlall, SC, Attorney General, Mr Nigel O. Hawke, Solicitor General, Ms Shoshanna V. Lall, Deputy Solicitor General, and Ms Dishon Persaud represented the Second Respondent, the Attorney General. Mr Arudranauth Gossai represented the Third Respondent, Magistrate Judy Latchman. 

 

-End- 

_____________________________________________________________________________________ About the Caribbean Court of Justice 

 

The Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) was inaugurated in Port of Spain, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago on 16 April 2005 and presently has a Bench of seven judges presided over by CCJ President, the Honourable Mr Justice Winston Anderson. The CCJ has an Original and an Appellate Jurisdiction and is effectively, therefore, two courts in one. In its Original Jurisdiction, it is an international court with exclusive jurisdiction to interpret and apply the rules set out in the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas (RTC) and to decide disputes arising under it. The RTC established the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME). In its Original Jurisdiction, the CCJ is critical to the CSME and all 12 Member States which belong to the CSME (including their citizens, businesses, and governments) can access the Court’s Original Jurisdiction to protect their rights under the RTC. In its Appellate Jurisdiction, the CCJ is the final court of appeal for criminal and civil matters for those countries in the Caribbean that alter their national Constitutions to enable the CCJ to perform that role. At present, five states access the Court in its Appellate Jurisdiction, these being Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, and Saint Lucia. However, by signing and ratifying the Agreement Establishing the Caribbean Court of Justice, Member States of the Community have demonstrated a commitment to making the CCJ their final court of appeal. The Court is the realisation of a vision of our ancestors, an expression of independence and a signal of the region’s coming of age. 

 

For more information please contact:  

The Public Education & Protocol Unit 

Tel: (868) 612-5225 ext. 2260, 2246  

Email: ccjcomm@ccj.org  

 

PRESS RELEASE -JULY 29 2026.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA 

PRESS RELEASE
The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has issued a second statement on the MV Barima tragedy, raising pointed concerns that the State’s response—particularly the sweeping decision to institute seventy-two murder charges against three individuals—may be drifting toward spectacle rather than substance. As government officials move to project decisive action, the GHRA is warning against any attempt to obscure unanswered questions, sidestep accountability, or compromise due process under the cover of legal aggression. The intervention places renewed focus on whether justice is genuinely being pursued, or strategically performed, in the aftermath of one of Guyana’s deadliest maritime disasters.

 

PRESS RELEASE 

GHRA MONITORING  OF MURDER CHARGES IN MV BARIMA TRAGEDY

The GHRA is carefully following the statements of Defense Counsel and of the Director of Public prosecutions (DPP) regarding the seventy-two murder charges brought against three accused persons in the MV Barima tragedy. Lawyers for the accused have raised the points of intent and of protection against self-incrimination and the DPP has come out with a statement. When taken in conjunction with the announced Commission of Enquiry, the filing of murder charges appear intended to show that the government is taking massive action.

The GHRA would like to stress the importance of observing the rule of law in everything that is done in pursuit of the truth about the sinking of the Mv Barima with its extensive loss of life; the imperative need to ascertain the facts, underlying causes, and corrective measures required. Against this background, the GHRA is particularly alert to the importance of respecting and  protecting the rights of the accused.

The GHRA would also like to underline the importance of the ruling party showing inclusiveness towards the Opposition in the aftermath of the disaster. Wisdom and justice demand this.

Executive Committee

Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA)

July 29 2026

56B Austin Place & Hadfield Street, P O Box 10653, Georgetown, Guyana, South America

Tel: (592)-226-1789/-227-4911     e-mail: ghraguy@gmail.com

The Street Corner Was in the Prime Minister’s Mouth

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 592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL

The Street Corner Was in the Prime Minister’s Mouth

On the Office of the Prime Minister’s statement, Kwame McCoy’s condemnation of Hadiyyah Mohamed, and the video that says otherwise

There is a particular species of political statement that survives only in the dark — issued in the confident hope that no one troubled themselves to record what actually happened. The Office of the Prime Minister’s Monday release on the confrontation between Prime Minister Mark Phillips and Hadiyyah Mohamed does not have that luxury. Guyana has the video. It has had it since the moment the exchange occurred inside the precincts of Parliament, in full public view, during a sitting convened in the shadow of the MV Barima tragedy. 

The Office’s statement asks the country to disbelieve its own eyes.

Let us be exact about what is being alleged and by whom. The Prime Minister’s office says Ms. Mohamed “forced herself into the precincts of Parliament” and directed “offensive and distasteful remarks” at the Prime Minister. It says the precincts “must not be reduced to a stage for intimidation, disorder and Opposition theatrics.” It commends Mr. Phillips for a “composure” it says reflected “discipline, dignity and restraint.” Each of these claims is checkable against a public record that shows something close to the reverse.

WHAT THE PUBLIC BUILDING ACTUALLY CONTAINS

Hadiyyah Mohamed did not force her way anywhere. Family members of MV Barima victims — a tragedy that has already claimed lives the government has yet to fully account for — came to Parliament to see the Leader of the Opposition, Azruddin Mohamed, whose party had spent the sitting wearing placards bearing photographs of the dead. It was the Prime Minister who inserted himself into that meeting, approaching grieving relatives to offer condolences the Opposition contends were overdue and unearned given the ministerial record on the disaster. When Ms. Mohamed pressed him on when the government intended to correct what she and others regard as its failures, it was Mr. Phillips who told her to “get from here” and demanded to know why she was in the building — a public building, funded by the public, that she has every right to enter. It was his personal security detail that made physical contact with her. And it was Mr. Phillips himself who called it off: “leave her, don’t touch her.”

Throughout, by every account and every frame of footage that has circulated, Ms. Mohamed remained composed. She addressed the Prime Minister of Guyana as “sir.”

That is not the vocabulary of a street thug. It is the vocabulary of a citizen who understood, even as she was being physically handled by state security inside a legislative building, that she was the one behaving correctly.

THE OFFICE’S STATEMENT INVERTS THE RECORD

Which makes the Prime Minister’s office’s chosen framing worth sitting with. Parliament, the statement says, “is not a political street corner.” Correct. And on the available video, it was not Ms. Mohamed who turned it into one. A Prime Minister who tells a grieving citizen to “get from here” while his security lays hands on her has not modeled discipline; he has demonstrated exactly the disorder his own office now attributes, backwards, to the person on the receiving end of it.

Composure is not what a camera recorded. What a camera recorded was a public official losing control of an encounter he initiated, and a young woman keeping hers.

The statement goes further, invoking Ms. Mohamed’s

That is not an accountability argument. It is guilt assigned by bloodline, dressed up in the language of institutional standards. The 592 Guardian has covered Azruddin Mohamed’s legal jeopardy on its merits and will continue to; it is a different matter entirely, and beneath the dignity the Office claims to be defending, to use a brother’s indictment as a cudgel against his sister’s conduct in an encounter the video shows she did not instigate.

A FAMILIAR VOICE, A FAMILIAR PATTERN

This is not the first time the Mohamed’s  has been cast as the aggressor by officials whose own conduct invited scrutiny. Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister Kwame McCoy has built something of a specialty out of it, previously accusing her of running a “deliberate misinformation campaign” during last year’s election recount — an accusation issued, as this one was, in a statement rather than in any forum where the claims could be tested against contrary evidence. The pattern is consistent: an official statement asserts a narrative; the available video contradicts it; no correction follows. Guyanese are entitled to notice the pattern, and to weigh a government’s fondness for it against its professed devotion to institutional standards.

None of this excuses genuine disorder in the National Assembly, wherever it originates, or license for any citizen — related to an indicted figure or not — to disrupt the proceedings of Parliament.

That is a real standard, and this publication  holds all sides to it. But the Office of the Prime Minister’s own statement is not a defense of that standard. It is an attempt to relocate blame from the official whose security touched a citizen to the citizen who was touched, and to do so using her brother’s legal troubles as aggravating evidence against her.

The nation has the footage. It does not need a taxpayer-funded press release to tell it what it watched.

WHAT ACTUALLY WARRANTS REJECTION

The Prime Minister’s office is right about one thing: Guyana must firmly reject this level of political hostility and disrespect. It should start by rejecting it from whichever side of an encounter it actually originated — and on the record so far available to the public, that is not the side the statement names. If the Office of the Prime Minister believes otherwise, the remedy is simple and available to it: release the full, unedited footage in its possession, alongside a transcript, and let the public standard the statement invokes be applied evenly.

Short of that, this cannot and must not become the new normal either — a government official manhandling a grieving citizen in a public building, and then authoring the official record that says she did it to him. —The Board