Archive for category: Accountability

Global Moral Voices, Local Silence?: The Diaspora Intellectual’s Dilemma.

 OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan is right to condemn Holocaust denial in a state-owned newspaper. There can be no moral ambiguity on that question: the Holocaust is historically documented, its victims deserve dignity, and a government-owned publication should not normalize antisemitic distortions behind the shield of a disclaimer.

But Ramcharan’s intervention also invites an uncomfortable question: where has this same urgency been when Guyanese people have faced their own modern-day catalogue of official indifference?

This is not to diminish his scholarship or deny the value of his warning. It is to insist that moral authority carries obligations close to home. Dr. Ramcharan is not an ordinary commentator. He is a Guyanese of international standing, a former acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a former Chancellor of the University of Guyana, and a scholar whose career has been built around human dignity, international law and the protection of rights.

That is precisely why the public is entitled to expect more than occasional interventions on Guyana’s domestic condition.

Selective moral urgency

Too often, Ramcharan’s writings appear more animated by global historical debates, international personalities and grand geopolitical questions than by the sustained, grinding realities facing ordinary Guyanese: grieving families, poverty amid oil wealth, institutional impunity, unequal access to state resources, abuse of public power, and the persistent feeling that the citizen exists only at election time.

Guyana does not lack “live” human-rights issues. They are all around us:

◊Families seeking justice after deaths connected to state failures or public negligence.

◊Citizens humiliated by weak public services while politically connected interests appear to prosper.

◊Communities struggling with the consequences of mining, environmental degradation, land insecurity and unequal development.

◊Public funds being spent amid recurring questions about transparency, procurement, priorities and accountability.

◊Victims of crime, domestic violence, police excesses, discrimination and bureaucratic cruelty who rarely receive the sustained advocacy that influential voices can provide.

The issue is not that Ramcharan must write only about Guyana. No serious person should demand that an international human-rights scholar ignore international questions. The problem is proportion and consistency.

A scholar who finds the voice to warn of Guyana’s reputational damage abroad should also be equally relentless about the damage being done to Guyanese lives at home.

The lived reality

What does it say when six Guyanese lives can be met with a proposed or offered compensation package of $5 million, as though loss, grief and human worth can be reduced to an administrative calculation?

What does it say when people see oil wealth rising, new announcements multiplying, and foreign investors being courted, while many citizens still confront inadequate roads, weak health care, poor drainage, job insecurity, low wages and a public sector that can feel inaccessible unless one has political connections?

These are not abstract governance concerns. They are the lived reality of Ramcharan’s own people—his kin in the broadest national sense.

A human-rights voice must not become most forceful only when the victims are distant, historical, international or diplomatically convenient.

The measure of human-rights commitment is not merely whether one can eloquently defend victims of Nazi atrocity eight decades later. It is whether one is prepared to challenge the powerful when present-day Guyanese are being neglected, dismissed, impoverished, intimidated or treated as expendable.

A challenge to Ramcharan

Dr. Ramcharan should not be asked to retreat from the Holocaust-denial issue. He should press it harder. The Guyana Chronicle must answer for how such material was published, why it was repeated, who approved it, and whether its editorial standards apply equally to all contributors.

But he should also widen his gaze. Guyana needs his voice on:

◊The adequacy and dignity of compensation for families who lose loved ones through institutional failure.

◊The accountability of public officials and state agencies.

◊Whether oil wealth is being translated into measurable improvements in ordinary people’s lives.

◊The protection of vulnerable communities against environmental harm and unequal development.

◊The culture of impunity, political favoritism and public contempt that citizens say has taken root.

◊The duty of a government to treat every Guyanese life as possessing equal worth.

Ramcharan himself has recently raised domestic governance questions, including concerns relating to legal and institutional arrangements in Guyana.  But the scale of Guyana’s current social and governance crisis demands something more sustained, more specific and more personally rooted than intermittent commentary.

The real warning

The danger to Guyana’s international image is not confined to an offensive column in the Chronicle. The deeper danger is a government culture that seems unable to understand the pain of ordinary people, and a national intellectual class that too often responds selectively, cautiously or after the damage has already been done.

Holocaust denial must be condemned without qualification. But so too must the quieter denial taking place in Guyana: the denial of citizens’ suffering, the denial of their right to accountable government, and the denial that national wealth must first serve the people whose resources created it.

Diaspora intellectuals have a legitimate and potentially vital role in Guyanese public life—but legitimacy must be earned through humility, consistency, evidence and solidarity with people living the consequences of political decisions every day. They must be more than overseas commentators summoned for prestige, remittances, investment and public relations.

The Ramcharan question

In Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan’s case, his international human-rights background gives special weight to his public interventions. His criticism of Holocaust denial in a government-owned newspaper is justified; such material can damage Guyana’s moral standing and must be repudiated.

But that same standing raises the public expectation that his concern for human dignity will be equally visible when Guyanese confront injustice at home. A diaspora intellectual cannot be satisfied merely with identifying a scandal that could embarrass Guyana internationally. He must also confront the domestic conditions—official indifference, impunity, weak accountability and unequal treatment;that injure Guyanese long before foreign observers take notice.

Guyana needs diaspora intellectuals who are neither cheerleaders nor detached moralists. It needs engaged citizens: people prepared to place expertise in the service of truth, insist that oil wealth serves the population, and stand with ordinary Guyanese even when doing so brings discomfort to governments, parties, friends and influential institutions.

Dr. Ramcharan has spoken powerfully about the dignity of victims abroad. Guyanese now need him to speak with the same persistence, clarity and moral impatience about the dignity of victims at home.

Grief Is Not a Government Bargain: The MV Barima Families Must Not Be Pressured Into Silence

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

As reported in Kiskadee Watch in Sept 29 ,Leon Murray of Mabaruma was asked to accept $5 million for the loss of six relatives in the MV Barima catastrophe.

Six human beings. Six members of one family. Six lives abruptly taken in a maritime disaster that should trigger the highest level of national urgency, compassion, transparency and accountability.

Yet what Mr. Murray describes is an offer that works out to roughly $833,333 per life.

That is not a serious expression of national remorse. It is not justice. It is not an adequate response from a government presiding over an oil-rich country that repeatedly boasts of unprecedented revenues, transformational development and a brighter future for all Guyanese.

It is an insult to grief. 

Mr. Murray’s reported refusal deserves to be understood for what it is: a declaration that the relatives of the dead and missing are not seeking a quick payment in exchange for their silence, their legal rights, or their demand to know why their loved ones were placed in harm’s way.

“I am looking for justice,” he reportedly said.

That is the central issue. Not whether a government can put a figure beside a tragedy. Not whether lawyers can produce documents for traumatized families to sign. Not whether an official can characterize a settlement as assistance, relief or compassion. The issue is justice.

A Release Cannot Replace Accountability

Every bereaved family has the right to receive independent legal advice before signing any document that may compromise future claims or release the State, its agencies, operators, insurers or any other potentially liable party from legal responsibility. This is elementary fairness.

A family that has lost a breadwinner, a child, a parent, a sibling or several relatives at once must not be confronted with settlement papers while it is still grieving, while bodies remain unrecovered, while the vessel remains on the seabed, and while fundamental questions about safety, licensing, capacity, oversight, emergency readiness and regulatory failure remain unanswered.

The reported concern expressed by Paul  Seepersad’s- “the MV Barima chief engineer”-family is therefore entirely legitimate. They have said they do not want to sign away their rights. No reasonable person should fault them for that.

Indeed, relatives should be cautious of any agreement that requires them to accept a sum as “full and final settlement,” waive future legal action, or surrender their ability to seek further compensation if evidence later establishes negligence, misconduct or regulatory failure.

A compassionate government would ensure that every family is provided access to independent counsel of its own choosing, with the legal costs covered separately and without any condition requiring a family to accept a settlement.

Instead, the public is hearing reports that evoke the same anxiety and distrust that followed the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory fire: grieving families being asked to sign documents while serious questions of accountability remain unresolved. The circumstances may differ, but the concern is painfully familiar. Families fear that the State’s priority is not truth, justice and responsibility, but closure on terms designed by the State.

Oil Wealth, Yet Pennies for the Dead

Guyana is no longer a poor country pleading incapacity. This nation has entered an era of massive oil revenues. Government ministers speak constantly about prosperity, modern infrastructure, new highways, hospitals, hotels, stadiums and grand development schemes.

But when ordinary citizens die in a preventable or potentially preventable national disaster, their relatives are reportedly offered  $5  million to bring an end to the matter.

What, exactly, does the Government believe a Guyanese life is worth?

More importantly, what message does this send to citizens in the hinterland and riverine communities who depend on boats and ferries because there are no practical alternatives? Does it say that their lives matter equally? Or does it say that, once tragedy strikes, their families can be processed through a bureaucratic settlement exercise and expected to be grateful?

The loss of a relative cannot be reduced to a calculation. But compensation must at least reflect the gravity of the loss, the dependency created, the long-term impact on children and elderly parents, lost income, funeral costs, counselling, education, housing, medical needs and the possibility that negligence contributed to the tragedy.

In Mr. Murray’s case, the loss of six relatives may have devastated an entire family network. It may have removed income earners, caregivers, parents, children and the emotional foundation of a household.

To propose one $5  million payment for all six, if that account is accurate, reflects an astonishing absence of empathy and an even more disturbing casualness about human life.

Do Not Discourage Independent Counsel

The Government must also answer concerns about public comments attributed to the Attorney General discouraging surviving relatives from entertaining independent legal representation.

Why should families be warned away from independent lawyers?

Independent counsel is not an enemy of justice. It is one of the protections available to citizens confronting the unequal power of the State. The Government has the Attorney General’s Chambers, ministries, agencies, technical officers, insurers, legal advisers and access to public resources.

Bereaved families have grief, uncertainty and a document placed before them. The imbalance could not be more obvious.

No government that is confident in its conduct should fear families receiving competent, independent legal advice. If officials genuinely believe their offers are fair and their agreements transparent, then they should welcome scrutiny rather than create the impression that relatives ought to avoid counsel who may advise them not to sign.

The families must be allowed to make informed decisions—free from pressure, haste, intimidation, dependency or the fear that refusing to sign will result in the withdrawal of support.

The Wreck Still Lies Below

The deepest disrespect is that the wreck of the MV Barima remains submerged while relatives of the missing continue to wait.

For those whose loved ones have not been found, there can be no genuine closure while the vessel remains underwater and the Government’s salvage process appears mired in delay. Every passing day compounds the anguish of families who do not know whether the remains of their relatives are trapped inside, whether evidence is deteriorating, and whether the truth is being allowed to disappear beneath the sea.

The vessel may contain answers about the disaster. It may reveal whether basic safety requirements were ignored, whether the craft was overloaded, whether lifesaving equipment was sufficient and functional, whether crew and passengers received proper safety instructions, whether inspections failed, and whether regulators looked away.     

The longer the wreck remains untouched, the stronger the public suspicion becomes that urgency is being reserved for settlement documents rather than for the recovery of evidence and human remains. 

The Commission Must Not Become Another Delay

 The Commission of Inquiry must also move with urgency, independence and transparency. It cannot become another state exercise that produces delay, legalistic obstruction and carefully worded findings that avoid identifying individual or institutional responsibility. 

The public deserves answers to clear questions: 

⇒ Who approved, certified, inspected and monitored the MV Barima? 

⇒ Was the vessel seaworthy, properly equipped and operating within its lawful passenger capacity?

⇒ Were all required safety protocols followed before and during the voyage? 

⇒ Did the relevant maritime authorities fail in their oversight responsibilities? style

⇒ Were warnings ignored, concealed or inadequately acted upon? style

⇒  What emergency response systems were in place, and why were they insufficient? 

⇒ When will the wreck be salvaged, and who will independently preserve and examine the evidence?

⇒ What support—financial, medical, psychological, educational and legal—has actually reached every affected family?

No amount of compensation can substitute for these answers. And no settlement should be used to close the door on accountability.

Justice Before Closure   

 The families of the MV Barima victims are not asking for charity. They are demanding recognition of their rights and respect for the value of the lives that were lost.

They deserve separate, fair and transparent assessments of compensation. They deserve long-term support that does not vanish after the cameras leave. They deserve independent legal advice. They deserve access to all relevant information. They deserve the recovery of the vessel. And they deserve an inquiry that names failures, identifies those responsible and recommends consequences that prevent another disaster. 

Most of all, they deserve a government that understands the difference between offering assistance and attempting to purchase closure 

There were names behind those numbers. Families behind those names. Futures destroyed behind every family. 

And no oil-rich government has the right to treat the dead, the missing and the bereaved as though $5  million is the price of their silence.

 The Container and the Communiqué

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

There is a structure in Cap-Haïtien, built from converted shipping containers, with seating for about sixty people and two toilets outside. One of the toilets works. Neither has running water. This is where the United States government delivers Haitians it no longer wishes to have within its borders — at a rate, as of last month, of one planeload roughly every week, each carrying somewhere near two hundred people, into a city whose population has tripled in two years under the weight of exactly this kind of arrival.

Human Rights Watch’s account of what is happening in Cap-Haïtien is not an allegation. It is the product of researchers physically present at the airport, watching a flight land, watching people register their names against manifests that do not record why they are being removed, watching them receive a meal, a drink, and the equivalent of seventy-seven US dollars, and then watching them walk out of a shipping container into a country that the United States’ own State Department will not permit its citizens to enter. 

That is the contradiction sitting at the center of this policy, and it is not a subtle one. Haiti carries a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory — the highest classification the State Department issues, reserved for conditions judged to place American travellers at grave and immediate risk. The same government maintaining that advisory terminated Temporary Protected Status for Haitians on the stated basis that conditions had “improved sufficiently.” Both cannot be true. Either Haiti is dangerous enough to warn Americans away from, or it is safe enough to send families back to. The United States government has chosen, for administrative convenience, to hold both positions at once — and the people paying for that contradiction are not policymakers in Washington. They are a Miami hotel worker who trained new employees for seven years, deported without being permitted to say goodbye to a five-year-old son who still asks whether his father will be home from school. They are a woman detained at an interview for the very immigration status she had lawfully applied for, whose only crime was believing the process she had been told to follow would be honored.

What is most damning in Human Rights Watch’s account is not any single atrocity — it is the completeness of the abandonment. Nine Haitian government institutions were asked, separately, what capacity they had to receive, shelter, feed, protect, or reintegrate the people arriving on these flights. Nine gave, in substance, the same answer: none. No dedicated shelter. No sustained food assistance. No expedited path to the identity documents a person needs simply to exist administratively in their own country — a process that can otherwise take up to three months. No plan to enrol deported children who were educated in English, and who may not read or write in French or Creole. No mechanism for reuniting unaccompanied minors beyond ad hoc arrangements with private shelters, and no way to monitor those children once reunification happens.

This is not a gap in the system. It is confirmation that no system exists.

Washington’s own paperwork betrays the same carelessness. The manifests handed to Haitian migration officials; with roughly two days’ notice — list a name, a date of birth, a gender, a nationality, an A-number. Nothing about medical needs. Nothing about whether a person arrives with a disability, a chronic illness, or a documented fear for their safety in a specific neighbourhood. And even that thin manifest has proven unreliable: on both flights Human Rights Watch examined, more people arrived than the paperwork said would.

A government capable of tracking a person through a decade of tax filings, employment records, and immigration check-ins is, evidently, incapable of accurately counting how many of them it is putting on a single aircraft.

Nor can this be waved away as an unfortunate but lawful exercise of sovereign immigration authority. The people interviewed were not, in the main, individuals with exhausted legal options and clear removal orders they had simply ignored. They were people mid-process — asylum claims pending, permanent residence applications pending, court dates scheduled years into the future — swept up during scheduled check-ins, denied contact with counsel, and in some documented cases deported without ever being shown the removal order that supposedly authorised their return. One family, the Guardian notes from the Human Rights Watch record, fled to Canada rather than risk detention, was turned back to US custody within three days, separated on arrival, and told by an ICE officer that their US-citizen son could “stay” — but only into state custody, severed from his parents. This is not the incidental cruelty of an overburdened bureaucracy. It is a system that has stopped pretending due process is the point.

When confronted, the US Department of Homeland Security’s defense was that fifteen of the 161 people on the August 20 flight had criminal convictions. Set aside, for a moment, that none of the people Human Rights Watch spoke to were among those fifteen. Notice instead what the statistic concedes: that the overwhelming majority — roughly ninety-one percent of that single flight — carried no criminal conviction at all. If public safety were the governing logic of this program, that number would be the scandal. Instead, it was offered as vindication.

It would be convenient, and it would be wrong, to treat this as a story that ends at the United States’ border and belongs entirely to its domestic politics. It does not. The Trump administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, told CNN in August that he did not know the conditions in Haiti and had never set foot there — and in the same breath said the administration was simply “enforcing the law.” That is the voice of a hemisphere’s most powerful government treating the return of desperate people to a collapsing state as a matter of paperwork rather than consequence.

A communiqué that commits a hemisphere to shared security cooperation says nothing, by itself, about whether that same hemisphere is prepared to ask hard questions when one of its members empties planeloads of people into a shipping container with no running water. Silence on that question is itself a position.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has already said, in plain terms, what international law requires here: individualized assessment, due process, an effective remedy, and — where a credible risk to life or safety exists — no return at all. Haiti’s own government has said, through nine separate institutions, that it cannot absorb what is being sent to it. The United States’ own diplomats say, through an unchanged Level 4 advisory, that the country remains too dangerous for their own citizens to enter. Only the deportation flights continue as though none of this were true.

This editorial board does not pretend to adjudicate the domestic politics of US immigration enforcement.

But accountability journalism does not stop at a border, and neither should the plain observation that a policy built on a factual contradiction — declaring a country simultaneously too dangerous to visit and safe enough to deport into — deserves to be named as what it is.

Congress has a bill in front of it that would extend protected status through 2029. Until it passes, or until the flights stop, the container in Cap-Haïtien will keep filling.

— The Board

 THE SIX MONTHS HE DIDN’T MENTION

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

President Ali spent a lengthy interview cataloguing every weakness in Guyana’s electricity system — except the US$759 million one bearing his own name

PRESIDENT DR. IRFAAN ALI wants Guyanese to understand that the next six months are critical. In a recent sit-down with News Room, he walked through nearly every strand of the country’s electricity crisis: units coming offline for overhaul, an estimated US$800 million required over five years just for transmission and distribution, 25 to 27 megawatts of stranded capacity in Essequibo, engagement with Qatar on financing, and recommendations from InterEnergy on how to fix what he called gaps in GPL’s “technical expertise.” He said he was “frustrated.” He said the government was “not satisfied.” 

What he did not say — in an interview built entirely around the question of why the lights keep failing — is Wales. Or Gas-to-Energy. Or Lindsayca. The single largest infrastructure undertaking in Guyana’s history — the project his own government promised would cut electricity costs in half by 2024; does not appear in his account of why electricity costs have not been cut in half.

A Pattern, Not an Omission

This publication has tracked the Wales Gas-to-Energy project’s slide from a 2024 completion promise through four successive revised timelines, a confidential arbitration award the Prime Minister denied existed before admitting it did, and a two-year delay now estimated to cost the country roughly US$884 million above the plants’ original cost. None of that is in dispute inside government. What is notable is who says it. The reassurances; no extra payment under discussion, some communities already receiving phased reductions — carry the President’s name. The numbers; the revised timelines, the contractor’s request for another US$170 million, the shift from fixed-price to cost-plus — are delivered by Prime Minister Phillips, Minister Indar, or task force head Winston Brassington. It is opposition MP Sherod Duncan, not the government, who has had to point out publicly that 57 megawatts of turbine testing is not delivery of the 300 megawatts promised.

That division of labor is not accidental. It is the same architecture this publication has documented elsewhere: a government that announces reviews it does not enforce, appoints reshuffles it later re-announces as new, and stages consultations in place of consequence. GTE fits the mould precisely; the President is present for the vision and the reassurance, and absent for the reckoning.

Who Pays For This

The people who cannot afford this arrangement are the ones reading electricity bills that were supposed to have fallen by half two years ago. Every month GTE slips is a month GPL keeps burning Heavy Fuel Oil and renting powerships at a premium the state has quietly absorbed into an import bill nobody campaigns on. The US$800 million transmission-and-distribution ask the President raised in this interview is real, and it is separate from — and additional to — the money already sunk into Wales. Guyanese are being asked to accept both bills without ever being told, by the man who signed the original promise, why the first one has not yet paid off.

A president who can itemize Essequibo’s stranded megawatts down to the decimal, and describe in detail his engagement with Qatari financiers, has the capacity to explain Wales. That he consistently chooses not to is itself the finding.

 Sidebar — Claim vs. Record

What the President said, set against the government’s own public record.

— THE BOARD

Sources: News Room (Ali interview); Office of the Prime Minister / DPI press statements (May 2026); Kaieteur News (June 12, Sept 6, Sept 15, 2026); Demerara Waves (Sept 8, 2026); Rio Times (Sept 2026); Guyana Chronicle (Sept 11, 2026).

 Your Teenager Was Never Going to Comply — And the Data Proves It

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Why the world’s first under-16 social media ban collapsed in six months, and what it means before Guyana writes a law of its own

Imagine passing a law, watching it fail within four months, and having the exact mechanism of its failure documented by seven researchers before the ink on the policy was even dry. That is, more or less, what happened in Australia.

In December 2025, Australia became the first country in the world to bar anyone under 16 from holding an account on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Threads, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, or Kick. It was the most aggressive piece of adolescent social media regulation any government had attempted, and more than a dozen countries — along with numerous U.S. states — are reportedly watching to see if it works before writing similar laws of their own.

A team of economists and psychologists from the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Bocconi University, the University of Cologne, and Harvard Law School decided not to wait for the verdict. They surveyed hundreds of Australian teenagers four months after the ban took effect, then went back two months later to see what had changed. What they found should matter to every parent, teacher, and lawmaker anywhere a similar ban is being discussed — Guyana included.

The numbers, plainly

Four months in, only about 27% of banned 14- and 15-year-olds were actually complying. The rest had found a way around it, or had simply never been stopped in the first place. Two months after that, compliance had fallen to 6% — roughly one teenager in twenty.

This did not happen because enforcement got weaker. It happened while enforcement got stronger: platform penalties doubled over the same window, and regulators stepped up monitoring. The ban unwound anyway.

Why a ban with real teeth still failed

The researchers found that breaking the law carried almost no personal risk in a teenager’s mind — only 22% believed there were any consequences for being caught, even though 98% knew the ban existed. And getting around it required almost no effort: three in four teens called it easy or very easy. Some just lied about their birthdate. Some borrowed a parent’s or older sibling’s account. In one in five cases, an adult in the household actively helped a teenager get back online after their account was shut down.

But the single strongest predictor of whether a teenager kept using banned platforms wasn’t the law, and it wasn’t how hard the workaround was. It was how many of their five closest friends were still online. Teens whose friend groups had mostly quit were far more likely to comply themselves. Teens whose friend groups hadn’t quit almost never did — even when they knew, accurately, that quitting was what the law asked of them.

This is the part worth sitting with: teenagers were not confused about what their peers were doing. Their estimates of how many classmates were still on social media were accurate throughout the study. They understood the situation correctly, and they still went back — because being the only one offline, when your friends aren’t, has a real social cost, and no law was cancelling that cost out.

The math behind the collapse

The researchers asked teenagers a more pointed question: how many of your peers would need to quit before you’d be willing to quit too? The average answer was two out of three. But actual compliance never got past one in four. The gap between what teenagers said they needed to see, and what was actually happening around them, was never close to closing — which is why, when the researchers built a mathematical model of the tipping point Australia would need to reach for the ban to hold, the only stable number it produced was around 17%, below the rate already observed in April. The model predicted the collapse before the June data confirmed it.

There’s one more detail that explains why the pressure ran the wrong way. Teenagers who kept using social media were seen by their peers as more popular, not less — only 4% of respondents thought compliers were the more popular group. The teenagers with the most social influence were the ones least likely to log off, which meant the platforms never stopped being the place where the socially important conversations were happening.

What actually seemed to help

The researchers weren’t just interested in tallying a failure. They point to five things that might do better than a blanket ban on its own: tying restrictions to school grade rather than birth date,since classmates a year older are the most immediate source of pressure; favoring limits on use over outright prohibition — 72% of teens said they’d actually prefer a self-limiting app to a ban; pairing any restriction with campaigns that make not using social media something to be proud of, not something to hide; giving teenagers something real to do with the hours a ban would free up; and being honest that social media is one piece of the adolescent mental health picture, not the whole of it.

Why this matters here

Guyana does not yet have a law like Australia’s. But the conversation about one is already underway, and the evidence above is the most rigorous account anywhere of what happens when a country tries it.

There’s a reason to think the lesson could land even harder here than it did in Australia. Australia’s ban leaned entirely on large multinational platforms policing themselves, backed by a fine those companies could absorb — and even that arrangement only produced 6% compliance within six months. A smaller country, with a smaller and more tightly connected teenage population, would likely see the same peer dynamics resolve faster, not slower — because in a small enough social network, it takes fewer holdouts to keep everyone else online.

None of this means the underlying concern is wrong. It isn’t. It means the tool matters as much as the intention behind it. A ban that looks strong on paper and dissolves within two school terms protects no one — it only teaches a generation of teenagers, correctly, that this particular law wasn’t real.