Archive for category: Accountability

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Stopgap That Never Closed the Gap: Guyana’s Solar Billions and the Blackouts That Won’t Stop

OPINION BY : Staff Writer  August 2026 

Solar farms were sold to the public as the fix for Guyana’s power shortfalls. Months and years after commissioning, the shortfalls are still here — and no one in government has published the numbers to explain why.

Guyana’s electricity grid failed again this month. Not in a remote hinterland outpost waiting on infrastructure that has not yet arrived, but in Linden — a town where the government has been promising a 15-megawatt solar solution for years, and where residents are now enduring rolling blackouts while they wait for it to switch on. The Linden Electricity Company confirmed the outages stem from a straightforward supply shortfall: demand has outgrown the 14.5 MW available from Bosai, the solar farms meant to close that gap remain under construction, and the government has been forced back to the negotiating table with the same bauxite company whose limits triggered the crisis in the first place.

This is not an isolated embarrassment. It is the clearest illustration yet of the question APNU parliamentarian Ganesh Mahipaul has now put to the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, the Guyana Energy Agency, and Guyana Power and Light: if hundreds of millions — and in some cases billions — of taxpayer dollars have gone into solar infrastructure explicitly framed as an urgent fix for Guyana’s power reliability problems, why does the reliability problem persist?

A STOPGAP BY DESIGN, NOT YET A FIX IN PRACTICE

The solar programme was never pitched to the public as a long-horizon decarbonisation project on a fifteen-year timeline. It was pitched, repeatedly and specifically, as an immediate answer to diesel dependency, generation shortfalls, and the reliability failures that have plagued the Guyana Power and Light network and isolated hinterland systems alike.

That framing is precisely what makes the current moment so difficult to explain away. Linden’s own case makes the point without any need for interpretation: the government’s own public messaging around the Linden solar project describes it as the intended remedy for a demand surge that has now arrived before the fix did — leaving residents on rolling blackouts while the solution sits half-built.

Guyana Power and Light’s own numbers, meanwhile, show a national system running close to its edge. As of mid-August, GPL reported available generation capacity of roughly 266 megawatts against peak demand ranging between 235 and 240 megawatts — a reserve margin of about 26 megawatts on a system that has separately been described as recording its highest-ever demand reading this year. A country that has spent years and tens of billions of dollars building solar capacity should not still be operating this close to the margin. If the installed solar capacity that Mahipaul has catalogued were reliably feeding the grid at anything close to its rated output, that reserve margin should look very different.

WHAT HAS ACTUALLY BEEN SPENT

Mahipaul’s letter assembles, for the first time in one place, the individual price tags behind Guyana’s solar buildout. The figures span both hinterland stand-alone systems and the larger grid-connected GUYSOL program:

Facility	Capacity	Cost	Status Claimed
Mabaruma Solar	400 kW	≈G$272 M	Operational
Lethem Solar	1 MW	G$472–490 M	Operational
Bartica / Daag	1.5 MW	G$625M -$703M	Operational
Mahdia (storage)	650 kW	G$362.41M	Operational
Onderneeming-GUYSOL	5 MW	10.4M USD	Completed  18MWp
Hampshire-GUYSOL	–	GUYSOL (inc)	Completed  18MWp
Prospect- GUYSOL	3 MW	$5.5 M USD	Completed  18MWp
Trafalgar (GUYSOL)	4MW	$8M USD	Completed 18MWp
Charity-GUYSOL	3MW	$14M USD	Completed 18MWp
GUYSOL (TOTAL)	33MWp(34 storage)	$83.3 USD	8 sites mixed status
Linden (3 phases)	15MW	undisclosed	1st phase due 2026

Individually, each of these numbers might be defensible. Solar infrastructure is capital-intensive, hinterland logistics are expensive, and battery storage adds real cost. Collectively, they represent a sum large enough that the public is owed more than installed-capacity press releases — it is owed operating data.

CAPACITY IS NOT THE SAME AS DELIVERY

This is the distinction Mahipaul’s letter turns on, and it is the correct one. A solar farm’s rated capacity — its megawatts or megawatt-peak figure — describes what it could theoretically generate under ideal irradiance conditions. It says nothing about actual output over a year, nothing about downtime, nothing about how much of that output ever reaches a consumer’s meter rather than being curtailed, stored, or lost.

The government’s own projections for two of the completed GUYSOL sites illustrate why the distinction matters: Onderneeming is projected to generate approximately 7,700 megawatt-hours annually, saving an estimated G$447 million a year in avoided fossil-fuel costs; Charity is projected at roughly 4,600 megawatt-hours annually, worth an estimated G$267 million.

These are meaningful numbers — if they are being realised. The government has published the projections. It has not published a single quarter of actual generation data to show whether those projections are holding, falling short, or being exceeded.

Mahipaul’s letter also raises a technical point that deserves more attention than it has received: connection to a local distribution network is not the same as export to the national interconnected grid. GUYSOL facilities connect to 13.8-kilovolt distribution networks in their respective areas, and several hinterland installations operate on isolated systems entirely separate from the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System. A solar farm described in a press release as “connected to the grid” may in practice be feeding a small local network with no meaningful bearing on the national reliability picture that ministers invoke when defending the programme’s cost.

The public has been given capacity figures. It has not been told, facility by facility, where the electricity generated actually goes.

THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN UNANSWERED

Mahipaul’s demand is specific and, on its face, unobjectionable for a government that maintains its solar investments are performing as promised: publish, for every facility, the total expenditure and how it compares to the original contract price; the contractor and procurement record; monthly generation figures; diesel volumes actually displaced; realised financial savings against fossil-fuel-cost projections; battery storage performance; and operational status including downtime and maintenance history.

“Guyana cannot simply count solar panels and call that energy transformation.”

That is the crux of it. Guyana has, over several years now, been shown ribbon-cuttings, capacity announcements, and projected-savings press releases. It has not been shown a single consolidated account of what these facilities have actually produced, what they have actually saved, and what has happened when demand outpaced supply in the very communities the solar farms were built to serve.                    Linden is not a hypothetical test of that gap. It is the test, running in real time, right now.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE BALANCE SHEET

Guyana’s oil revenues have created the fiscal space to make investments of this scale without the immediate budgetary strain such spending would once have imposed. That is precisely why the accounting standard should rise, not fall. Money that is easy to spend is not thereby immune from scrutiny — if anything, the ease of spending is the reason scrutiny becomes more necessary, not less.

A government sitting on record oil revenue has fewer excuses, not more, for leaving a reserve margin this thin, a hinterland town on rolling blackouts, and a national solar programme’s actual output undisclosed years into its rollout.

The Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, the Guyana Energy Agency, and Guyana Power and Light have the generation data. Smart meters, inverters, and battery management systems on modern solar installations record output automatically; this is not information that would need to be reconstructed from scratch. If the political message accompanying each commissioning — that this facility would ease the shortfall, cut diesel costs, and strengthen reliability — was accurate, the underlying data will bear that out and the disclosure costs the government nothing but the paperwork.

If it will not bear that out, Guyanese taxpayers who have funded hundreds of millions and, cumulatively, billions of dollars in solar infrastructure are entitled to know why — and who signed off on projects that did not deliver what they were sold as delivering.

The stopgap was supposed to close the gap. Linden’s blackouts this month are the clearest evidence yet that, on the government’s own timeline and its own terms, it has not. The figures exist to settle the question either way. The government’s continued silence on them is itself an answer of a kind.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

The Tap, Not the Tax: How Guyana Inverted the Redistribution Debate

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BOARD EDITORIAL

State Wealth, Discretionary Dispersal, and the Erosion of an Independent Civil Society

Every recent American argument against redistribution begins from the same premise: wealth is born dispersed, in private hands, and the state’s task is to gather it up. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani want the state to do more of the gathering. Their critics, invoking Friedrich Hayek and pointing to fortunes that financed abolitionism and suffrage and even Karl Marx’s own writing desk, warn that the gathering itself is the danger — that authority migrates from citizens and civil society to the centre, one tax return at a time.

Guyana does not have this problem. Guyana has the opposite one.

WEALTH THAT NEVER LEFT THE STATE

In the American frame, private wealth is the baseline and the state is the intruder. In Guyana, the state is the baseline. Petroleum revenue arrives already concentrated in government hands through the Natural Resource Fund and the terms of the Stabroek Block production-sharing arrangement, before a single dollar has touched a private ledger.

There was no antecedent class of dispersed owners for the state to expropriate, because the wealth in question was never dispersed to begin with.

The moral hazard the American essayists worry about — a government that acquires what belonged to someone else — does not describe Guyana’s condition. The government here is not acquiring resources it must first take from citizens. It is sitting on resources it already holds and deciding, at its own discretion, who gets a share and on what terms.

This is not a semantic distinction. It changes where the danger sits. Redistribution, in the classic critique, is dangerous because it transfers authority from the private sphere to the state. In Guyana the authority was never in the private sphere. The live question is not whether the state should take. It is whether the state, having already taken, will ever let go — and on what terms it chooses to.

DISPERSAL WITHOUT RELINQUISHMENT

The state can hand out money without ever giving up the authority to decide who deserves it.

This is where patronage enters, and where it must be distinguished sharply from redistribution proper. A genuine dispersal of state-held wealth back into private hands would look like a rule: a published formula, a transparent eligibility test, an entitlement a citizen could claim without asking anyone’s permission.

Guyana’s Development Bank Bill, passed without debate on July 27, 2026, was pitched publicly as interest-free and collateral-free lending for ordinary Guyanese. Its actual text tells a different story: Section 5(2) preserves discretionary collateral and interest terms, Section 23 carries no citizenship-eligibility requirement, and the board of up to forty billion dollars in disbursement authority answers to no one but the Finance Minister, who alone appoints every director. There is no opposition seat, no civil-society nominee, no published criteria.

Within days of the Bill’s passage, the pattern that discretion invites was already visible. At a Model Village consultation in Rose Hall, the President instructed bar and entertainment-venue owners to draw on Development Bank financing to soundproof their premises against noise complaints — this from a bank that, at the time of the remarks, had no application process, no disbursement portal, and had not yet held its formal launch.

The lending priority existed before the lending mechanism did. That sequence only makes sense if the money was never intended to move by rule. It was always going to move by instruction.

 

This is dispersal without relinquishment. The state hands out access to its wealth, but it never hands over the authority to decide who receives it, when, or why.

A citizen with a rule-bound entitlement does not need to stay in anyone’s good graces to keep it. A citizen or business dependent on discretionary allocation does.

That dependency is the entire point, and it is the opposite of what the American redistribution debate assumes redistribution produces.

THE VILLAGE AS THE UNIT OF PATRONAGE

The Model Village Initiative supplies the clearest illustration of the mechanism at village scale. Launched August 3, 2026, as a multi-region consultation tour, it was scheduled on weekday daytimes — structurally excluding the working residents it claimed to be consulting — and delivered polished concept renders (a gateway sign, a landscaped park with splash pad and gazebos) with no attached funding, procurement process, or delivery date. Over forty individual village plans were produced within the tour’s first week, a volume of cabinet-level coordination that does not happen in three weeks and was, on the evidence, substantially pre-planned rather than assembled in response to public pressure.

The tour’s own security posture undercuts the consultation framing further. In Buxton/Foulis, the local NDC chairman — holding a personal invitation — was barricaded out of the very meeting convened to hear him, and threatened with arrest for asking why young women were being moved along near the venue. In Koberimo, placard-holding women met a flak-jacketed police presence. A boat bound for a Moruca consultation was intercepted by the Coast Guard.

A government engaged in genuine damage control de-escalates. A government staging a pre-scripted electioneering tour polices its own audience.

None of this is redistribution in the sense the American essayists mean. No wealth tax was levied; no private fortune was seized. But the effect the essayists fear — citizens taught to see their material circumstances as something dispensed from above rather than built through their own initiative — is being produced anyway, and produced more directly, because the wealth was concentrated at the source and the dispersal itself is being timed to an electoral calendar rather than a citizen’s claim of right.

WHAT THE ESSAY GETS RIGHT, READ BACKWARDS

The American case against redistribution rests on an empirical claim: that dispersed private wealth finances things governments will not — dissent, unpopular causes, independent institutions, art and scholarship hostile to the prevailing order. Friedrich Engels’ textile profits paid for the writing of Capital.

Private fortunes, in the American telling, bankrolled abolitionism and suffrage years before either enjoyed public approval.

Guyana’s civil society and independent press have no equivalent financial base to draw on. There is no class of private petroleum wealth in domestic hands sitting parallel to the state’s share, available to fund criticism the state finds inconvenient. What independent institutions exist are financed by advertisers with state-linked interests, by foreign donors, or not at all.

The essay’s own safeguard against centralised authority — a dispersed private sector wealthy enough to fund its own critics — is close to absent here. That is not an argument for redistribution in the American sense. It is an argument that Guyana’s civil society is more exposed to the concentration-of-authority risk the essay describes than the American essayists’ own country is, because it lacks the very buffer their argument assumes every modern state still has.

The essay closes by quoting Hayek: that a minimum of food, shelter, and clothing can be assured to everybody, but that it does not follow that the state should become the standing manager of incomes, opportunities, and social life. Guyana’s government has reversed the order of that sentence. It has not assured a minimum through any rule a citizen can claim.

It has made itself the standing manager first, and left the assurance of a minimum to whichever village gets a roadshow stop, whichever bar owner gets a soundproofing loan, and whichever chairman is let past the barricade.

THE ACTUAL REMEDY

If the essay’s warning has any purchase in Guyana, it points toward the opposite of what its American authors intended. The problem is not that too much wealth might be redistributed by rule. It is that too little is. A transparent, formula-bound Natural Resource Fund withdrawal schedule; a published, contestable Development Bank lending criterion; procurement records a citizen can inspect without a court order — these are the dispersal mechanisms that would actually return authority from the centre to individuals, the very outcome the American essayists claim to want and fear losing.

Guyana does not need to be warned off redistribution. It needs redistribution conducted by rule instead of by favour — the thing patronage is built to resemble without ever becoming.

— The Board

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Charity Police Station And The Costly Myth Of “World-Class” Governance

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OPINION BY: Staff Writer —August 2026

One year ago, the government stood at Charity and declared a victory. The reconstructed Charity Police Station, commissioned at a cost of $ 62.7 million, was branded modern, “futuristic” and “world‑class” – the template, we were told, for citizen‑friendly policing infrastructure across Guyana. Twelve months later, the same facility is back on the tender board, this time with an engineer’s estimate of $ 66.8 million for “external waiting area, infrastructural works and rehab” – almost matching the original reconstruction cost.

If that does not immediately raise red flags about planning, procurement discipline, and honest governance, nothing will.

When “additional works” rival the original project

The Ministry of Home Affairs has invited bids for the new round of works at Charity, with 23 contractors responding. The engineer’s estimate: $66,810,150. Bids range from $ 47.9 million to $ 87 million. This comes after an earlier tender, for a perimeter fence alone, carried an eye‑popping government estimate of $ 74 million – more than the reconstruction of the station itself.

Guyanese taxpayers must now ask:

How did a “complete” and “futuristic” station, commissioned in July 2025, suddenly demand rehabilitation and an external waiting area barely a year later?

⇒ Why is an external waiting area, routine civil works and “infrastructural rehab” valued in the same bracket as an entire station’s reconstruction?

⇒What exactly was covered in the original $ 62.7 million scope, and what was left out – by design or by incompetence?

We are not talking about unforeseen structural damage, a natural disaster, or a radical change in policing needs. The ministry’s own description – “construction of external waiting area, infrastructural works and rehab” – reads like housekeeping that any competent project design should have anticipated and included from day one.

The culture of half‑done, over‑priced projects

At Charity, the numbers tell a familiar story in Guyana’s public sector:

⇒ Original reconstruction: $ 62.7 million.

⇒ Fence estimate: $ 74 million.

⇒Additional works one year later: $ 66.8 million.

In other words, the “extras” – a fence and now “external waiting area and rehab” – are poised to outstrip the core reconstruction. This is not modern project management; it is the old culture of fragmenting public works into multiple contracts, multiplying costs, and blurring accountability.

Some hard questions demand public answers:

⇒Was the original design incomplete, and if so, who signed off on it?

⇒ Did the engineer’s estimates fully capture the functional requirements of a modern police station – including external waiting facilities – or were key elements deliberately postponed?

⇒ Which officials within the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Guyana Police Force reviewed and endorsed the original scope of works?

⇒ Has there been any independent evaluation of whether the first    $ 62.7 million was prudently spent and delivered according to standards?

Guyana has seen this pattern in schools, health centers, roads and wharves: the fanfare of commissioning, the ribbon‑cutting, the promise of “world‑class” this and “state‑of‑the‑art” that – followed by a steady drip of add‑ons, variations and “rehab” that quietly doubles the public bill.

 “Futuristic” talk, pre‑modern practice

At the time of commissioning, Charity was held up as one of the most modern, responsive stations in Region Two: upgraded male, female and juvenile lockups; witness and ID parade room; marine and immigration offices; CID and traffic departments; officers’ accommodation; a child‑friendly area and a domestic violence unit.

That is exactly why this new tender is so troubling. You do not proclaim a facility to be “futuristic” and “world‑class” and then return within a year to fix basic infrastructure, build an external waiting area, and undertake rehab. Either the original claims were exaggerated political marketing, or the project management was fundamentally deficient.

In a world where policing infrastructure is being designed around community engagement, trauma‑informed spaces, accessibility and digital systems, Guyana’s version of “futuristic” appears to move at a break‑neck crawl. The world is racing toward integrated justice campuses and smart, flexible public buildings; we are still retrofitting waiting areas after commissioning.

This gap between the rhetoric and the reality is not a technical issue. It is a governance problem.

Procurement opacity and the engineer’s estimate

The NPTAB opening on August 4 showed bids stretching from $ 47.9 million to $ 87 million. That spread alone prompts serious scrutiny of the engineer’s estimate and the procurement process:

⇒ Why is the engineer’s estimate so close to several mid‑range bidders, but almost $ 19 million above the lowest bid?

⇒ What is the detailed bill of quantities behind the $.66.8 million estimate?

⇒ Has the Ministry published any justification for this cost to the public, or are taxpayers expected to accept the figure on faith?

The engineer’s estimate is not a private internal number; it is the benchmark against which NPTAB and the Ministry will adjudicate bids. When such estimates repeatedly hover at the higher end of the spectrum, Guyanese citizens have every right to question whether the system structurally favors more expensive outcomes.

Where is the oversight?

Key institutions ought to be asking questions today:

⇒ The Auditor General’s Office should be looking at the full Charity station portfolio – reconstruction, fence, and these new works – as a single project with cumulative cost, not as isolated tenders.

⇒ The Public Procurement Commission, still struggling to assert relevance, should insist on transparency for the scope and cost drivers of these add‑on works.

⇒ Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee should demand explanations from the Ministry of Home Affairs about planning failures and cumulative spending on a single station over a short period.

A simple, concrete example: if a rural health centre were rebuilt at   $ 60 million and, within a year, required another $ 65 million for “external works and rehab,” citizens would cry foul. Charity is no different. Policemen and women deserve decent facilities; citizens deserve safe and humane spaces.

But taxpayers also deserve evidence that their money is being spent with foresight, competence and integrity.

Citizens should not accept “business as usual”

This is not about one station in Region Two. It is about the norms we are silently accepting:

⇒ Grandiose language at commissioning, minimal transparency afterward.

⇒ Multiple tenders for a single facility, each inflating the cumulative cost.

⇒A political system that equates concrete and steel with governance, while ignoring planning rigor and financial discipline.

The government cannot continue to market every building as “world‑class” while operating with pre‑modern project control.      If Charity is truly a model station, then the public deserves a full breakdown of:

⇒ The original design and cost.

⇒ The scope and justification for the fence and new “external waiting area and rehab.”

⇒ The total projected lifetime cost of the facility to the public purse.

Until then, Guyanese should treat every “futuristic” ribbon‑cutting with skepticism. Modern governance is not what you say at the podium; it is how you plan, procure, and account for every dollar long after the cameras leave.

Charity Police Station is now a test case. Will this government confront the hard questions about over‑fragmented, over‑priced public works, or will it simply add another line item to the national budget and hope nobody connects the dots?

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Consultation À La Carte

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OPINION BY : Staff Writer – August 2026

The President consults promptly on three vacant commissions. On the two judicial offices Guyana has waited twenty years to fill, he has yet to write at all.

P resident Irfaan Ali wants Guyanese to know he takes the Constitution seriously. “Wherever consultation is required in accordance with the Constitution,” he told reporters on Tuesday, “you can be assured that I will fulfill my mandate.” The occasion for the assurance was a genuine one: through Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance Gail Teixeira, the President has initiated consultation with Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed on three constitutional bodies whose membership had lapsed — the Judicial Service Commission, the Local Government Commission, and the Public Service Commission.

By the letter of the process, this looks like the Constitution working as designed. The JSC’s life expired July 13; nine days later, Teixeira wrote proposing the reappointment of retired Justice Carl Singh under Article 198(2). The Local Government Commission Act required three opposition nominees; Mohamed, after consulting APNU’s Aubrey Norton and Forward Guyana’s Amanza Walton, delivered them — Leola Narine and Leslyn Lowe from WIN, Nicholas Chesney from Forward Guyana. The Public Service Commission slate — Maurice Gajadhar, Meleita Bovell, Leila Ramson — was proposed and acknowledged in turn. Three letters, three responses, three commissions moving toward being properly constituted. Whatever one thinks of the individual nominees, the mechanics of consultation were followed.

Which is exactly why what’s missing from that list is so conspicuous.

Mohamed said it plainly: consultation has proceeded on the three commissions, but the President “has not initiated consultation on the substantive appointment of a Chancellor and Chief Justice.” Guyana has gone without a substantive Chancellor since 2005 and without a substantive Chief Justice since Carl Singh — the same Carl Singh now being proposed for the JSC — stepped down from acting as Chancellor in 2017 after twelve years in the role. Justice Ian Chang acted as Chief Justice for fifteen years before that. The current arrangement, with Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire and Justice Navindra Singh both acting, is simply the latest chapter in an impasse now past twenty years old.

Article 127(1) sets out exactly the same mechanism as the commissions the President just moved on: appointment by the President, “acting after obtaining the agreement of the Leader of the Opposition.”

It is not a more complicated provision than Article 198(2). It does not require different machinery, a different minister, or a different letter-writing process.

Guyana’s own courts have already confirmed there is no legal barrier to the President initiating it at will — a 2023 High Court ruling declined to find that the delay amounted to a dereliction of constitutional duty, but pointedly directed that the political actors involved act with “all convenient speed.”

Three years on, “convenient speed” has yet to arrive.

The pattern is not new, and it is not partisan in a way that lets the President off the hook. When Aubrey Norton held the LOO seat, he was invited to consult on the same two positions and, by his own account, declined — calling the exercise a “waste of time” because he did not believe genuine consultation would follow.

Norton’s reasoning deserves scrutiny of its own; refusing an invitation is not the same as never receiving one. But Mohamed has now held the office for more than six months, and the record shows no comparable invitation extended to him. Asked directly about it, the President’s position has reportedly been that a letter written to a previous Opposition Leader does not automatically carry over to his successor — a technical distinction that, notably, did not stop the administration from moving briskly on three commissions with  different opposition leaderships in the same stretch of time.

That contrast is the story. It is one thing to argue, as the Attorney General has in court, that the President is entitled to sequence his constitutional obligations — commissions with vacant seats first, offices that are “occupied and persons are functioning in them” later.

It is another thing to watch that sequencing hold, letter after letter, for every seat except the two that carry the most institutional weight and the least security of tenure for whoever holds them.

A commissioner serves a fixed term. An acting Chancellor or acting Chief Justice serves at the pleasure of whoever keeps them there — a standing incentive, structural rather than personal, for any Executive to prefer the acting arrangement over the substantive one. Twenty years of unbroken continuity in that preference, across administrations, is not proof of a single conspiracy.

It is proof of a mechanism that consistently rewards inaction, regardless of who is in office to benefit from it.

None of this requires reaching for the more explosive allegations now circulating about how the last serious attempt at these appointments actually unfolded — the claims that a sitting CCJ President personally pressed a former Opposition Leader toward a government-preferred slate, or that Justice Cummings-Edwards’s own departure from the acting Chancellorship was less a request than a push. That history is serious enough to warrant its own reckoning, and this news outlet  has been tracking it as such. It does not need to be imported into this piece to make the point that stands on Tuesday’s letters alone: a President who wants credit for constitutional fidelity should be judged by his least convenient obligations, not his easiest ones.

The Leader of the Opposition has the stronger position here, and he should use it. Mohamed does not need to wait for an invitation that has not come. Nothing in Article 127 requires the President to write first any more than nothing in Article 198 required him to write first on the JSC — except that in this case, he already did, to someone else, over a different name. The Opposition Leader should put the President on record: initiate the request himself, in writing, and force a public answer to why the seats that most need a permanent occupant have waited the longest.

Twenty years is not a queue. It’s a choice, renewed every year no one is made to explain it.

— The Board

 

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SAFE COUNTRY, WATCHED COUNTRY

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Guyana Is Building a Surveillance State by Announcement, Not by Law

EDITORIAL◊THE 592 GUARDIAN◊AUGUST,2026

Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo has now said it twice, four years apart, with the same casual confidence: cameras with facial-recognition software are going up “right across the country.” In November 2022 it was a plan. In February 2025 it was a fact on the ground. In both cases it was announced the way this Government announces most things it does not intend to submit for scrutiny — as an achievement, not as a policy requiring authorization, oversight, or a single line of enabling legislation specific to biometric surveillance.

 

This is the pattern The 592 Guardian has documented across a dozen files this year: capacity is built and declared before the legal architecture that would make it accountable is built at all. The Data Protection Act No. 18 of 2023 received presidential assent three years ago. By the reporting available to us, it has still not commenced, because the ministerial order needed to bring it into force has not been made, and the Data Protection Office the Act contemplates has not been established.

A law can sit on the books indefinitely in Guyana while the practice it was meant to govern proceeds anyway. That is not an oversight. It is becoming the operating model.

WHAT THE LAW WOULD ACTUALLY REQUIRE

Had the Act commenced, a nationwide facial-recognition network would not automatically be illegal — but it would be answerable. The statute’s own definition of “sensitive personal data” is instructive, and it should worry anyone who has ever attended a political meeting, a religious service, or a protest in this country. The Act names political opinions and membership of a political body as sensitive categories in their own right, alongside religious belief, health, sexual life, and criminal proceedings.

A camera on a public road is not neutral once it can tell the State who was praying, who was marching, and who was standing next to whom.

Facial-recognition templates are not listed by name as a standalone sensitive category in the Act’s summary text available to us — an omission that itself deserves legislative attention — but that silence is not a license. A face, once matched against a database, is personal data the moment it identifies a living individual, and it becomes sensitive personal data the moment that identification reveals political opinion, religious belief, health status, or alleged criminal involvement. Attendance at a PPP rally, a APNU+AFC meeting, a mosque, a church, a mandir, a picket line outside Parliament, or a lawyer’s office are not abstract hypotheticals in Guyana’s political climate.

They are the precise activities a nationwide camera-and-matching system would be positioned to record, store, and cross-reference — without a Data Protection Office to answer to, because none exists.

EIGHT QUESTIONS THE GOVERNMENT HAS NOT ANSWERED

The 592 Guardian’s position is not that Guyana should have no cameras. Public safety is a legitimate government interest, and CCTV recording an event for later review is categorically different from a system that can identify and track a citizen in real time against a watchlist. It is that distinction — event-recording versus identification-and-tracking — that the Government has never publicly acknowledged, let alone regulated.

Before another camera goes up, the public is owed answers to at least the following:

• Which agency owns and controls each camera network, and under what statutory authority.
• Whether facial recognition is operational, on trial, or merely proposed — Jagdeo’s own statements have blurred this for four years.
• What databases or watchlists a face or number plate is matched against.
• Who is authorized to run a search, and on what legal threshold.
• How long footage, templates, and match records are retained before deletion.
• What independent body audits the system and hears complaints of misuse.
• What remedy exists for a citizen wrongly flagged by a false match.
• Whether an ordinary Guyanese can obtain the footage and data held about them — and on what timeline before it is overwritten.

Jagdeo has also linked the initiative to “potential use by the banking sector,” a phrase that should have drawn far more scrutiny than it has. If a State-operated facial-recognition capability is being contemplated for private commercial use, that is no longer a public-safety program at all. It is a biometric identity infrastructure being built for reasons that have never been debated in the National Assembly, priced for the public, or subjected to a procurement record anyone outside Cabinet has seen.

THE REMEDY IS NOT OUTRAGE. IT IS A PAPER TRAIL.

Guyana does not litigate under the American Fourth Amendment, and importing that language wholesale into a Guyanese constitutional argument would be a category error. But the underlying principle translates without difficulty: a democratic government does not get to build an architecture of indiscriminate, searchable monitoring of its own population and then decline to say, in enforceable law, who controls it and under what limits. Necessity, proportionality, legality, transparency, and independent oversight are not American inventions. They are the baseline of any constitutional order that takes privacy, expression, and association seriously — all of which appear in Guyana’s own Constitution.

For any citizen who believes they have been recorded, matched, or flagged, the practical route runs through preservation before it runs through protest. Surveillance systems overwrite footage on short cycles. A letter to the Commissioner of Police, the responsible ministry, and any identified contractor — demanding preservation of footage, search logs, match records, and the underlying vendor contract, before requesting access to one’s own data — is not a symbolic gesture.

It is the only way to convert a system designed to be unaccountable into one that can, eventually, be made to answer in court, through judicial review, or through whatever mechanism the Data Protection Act supplies once it is finally switched on.

Until it is switched on — until there is a named agency, a published policy, an independent regulator, and a retention schedule a citizen can actually read — “Safe Country” is not a security policy.

It is a euphemism for a surveillance capability introduced by press statement, operated without a supervising law, and answerable to no one but the Vice President who announced it.

— The Board