The State Has No Business at Facebook’s Takedown Counter

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦Accountability Journalism ♦Guyana

EDITORIAL ♦JUNE  2026

The State Has No Business at Facebook’s Takedown Counter

When a government seeks a fast lane to remove speech it dislikes, the Constitution is not being protected — it is being dismantled, one deleted post at a time.

Guyana’s Attorney General has confirmed that the administration is exploring an “institutional arrangement” with Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — to expedite the removal of online content. His justification was candid to the point of being inadvertently revealing: by the time a post comes down, “the damage is already done.”

That is not a legal argument. That is the complaint of a government that wants to act before process, before proof, and before any court has found that the speech in question crosses a lawful line. It is, in plain terms, the logic of censorship dressed in the language of administration

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What Meta’s Framework Actually Says

It is worth being precise about what Meta’s transparency framework actually permits — because the Attorney General’s framing suggests he either misunderstands it or is deliberately conflating it with something more convenient.

Meta distinguishes between at least four types of government engagement with its platform: formal requests for user data, content restrictions based on local law, enforcement of Meta’s own Community Standards, and internet disruption reports. These are not interchangeable. A government cannot simply call Meta and demand a post be removed because it is embarrassing. Meta reviews each request for legal sufficiency.

It rejects requests that are overly broad or vague. When content is restricted in response to a local-law argument, that restriction applies in-country — it is not a global deletion.

Furthermore, Meta logs and publishes data on government content requests through its transparency reports and, in some cases, makes takedown requests available through the Lumen database. This means that any government that abuses the process leaves a public record. An “institutional arrangement” designed to move faster than due process would still be visible to the world — and it would still require Meta to find lawful basis.

The Constitutional Test the Government Cannot Pass

Guyana’s Constitution is unambiguous. Article 146 protects freedom of expression, including the right to hold opinions without interference, to receive ideas and information, and to communicate ideas and information without interference

Article 155 protects privacy, including against interference with correspondence.

Restrictions on these rights are permitted only where they are “reasonably required” for specific purposes: public safety, public order, the protection of others’ rights and freedoms, or preventing the disclosure of confidential information

Political embarrassment is not on that list. Inconvenient reporting is not on that list. Satire of public officials is not on that list. Civic advocacy, criticism of procurement decisions, exposure of governance failures, commentary on electoral conduct — none of these are lawful targets of state suppression, and no “institutional arrangement” with a private platform changes that constitutional reality.

 The burden of justification sits entirely on the state. If the government believes a specific post is defamatory, threatening, or otherwise unlawful, there is a mechanism for that: courts. If it believes content constitutes incitement or criminal fraud, there are law-enforcement channels. A bilateral arrangement with Meta is not a legal process. It is a shortcut around one.

The Muzzle Effect Is the Point

Free-speech jurisprudence across constitutional democracies recognizes that censorship does not require a formal ban to be effective. The fear of surveillance, the knowledge that the state has a special relationship with the platform where you post, the awareness that criticism may trigger removal even if it is entirely lawful — these create what courts have called a “chilling effect.” Speech does not have to be suppressed to be silenced. It only has to be discouraged.

That is precisely what a government “fast lane” to Meta would produce. Ordinary Guyanese citizens — journalists, activists, trade unionists, community organizers, opposition supporters, concerned diaspora members — would be justified in concluding that their posts about government conduct are not safe. That conclusion, once drawn, discourages the kind of civic participation that democracy depends on.

 The Attorney General’s complaint that the “damage is already done” by the time content is removed is, therefore, precisely backwards. In constitutional terms, the damage he describes is not the post being seen. The damage is the state trying to prevent it from being seen at all.

A Pattern This Editorial Board Has Documented

This is not an isolated incident. This Editorial Board has previously documented the administration’s pattern of treating accountability as a threat management problem: the Cybercrime Act provisions that Reporters Without Borders flagged as dangerously broad; the management of information around extractive-industry contracts; the suppression of audit findings; the use of state resources for political communication while civic critics are sidelined.

The approach to Meta fits this pattern. Each individual episode can be explained away — as routine administration, as security concern, as platform governance. But the accumulation of episodes tells a different story: a government that is systematically uncomfortable with the free flow of information about its conduct, and that reaches for institutional tools to manage that discomfort.

That is not governance. That is control.

What Legitimate Government Action Would Look Like

We are not arguing that the state has no legitimate interest in online conduct. Fraud is real. Impersonation is real. Threats of violence are real. Coordinated disinformation targeting electoral integrity is real. These are harms that platforms and governments can and should address through lawful, transparent, narrowly tailored processes.

If Guyana’s government has specific concerns of this nature, it should identify them publicly, ground them in law, proceed through courts or properly constituted law-enforcement channels, and accept the scrutiny that comes with that. That is how a constitutional democracy handles the tension between speech and harm.

What it should not do is seek an opaque back-channel relationship with a private platform for the accelerated removal of content that the state finds inconvenient.

That is not protecting citizens. That is protecting the government from citizens.

The Line That Must Not Be Blurred

In constitutional democracies, the line between lawful enforcement and political censorship must be policed with suspicion, not dissolved by administrative convenience. Once a government normalizes the practice of asking platforms to move fast on speech it dislikes, that line becomes impossible to maintain. The category of “lawfully harmful content” quietly expands to include “content the government finds damaging.”

Guyana is an oil-producing nation at a governance crossroads. Its citizens need more civic information, not less. Its journalists need greater protection, not more exposure to informal state pressure. Its Constitution promises freedom of expression as a fundamental right — not a convenience to be managed away through an institutional arrangement with Silicon Valley.

The Attorney General should be asked, plainly:                  →which specific lawful basis does the government intend to invoke when it contacts Meta?                                                →Which court will have oversight?                                            →Which citizens will be notified?

If he cannot answer those questions, then the arrangement he is describing is not law enforcement. It is censorship by another name, and Guyana’s Constitution — and its citizens — deserve better.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

“Manufacture Here or Get Out”: Ali’s Ultimatum and the Infrastructure Vacuum Behind It

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“Manufacture Here or Get Out”:Ali’s Ultimatum and the Infrastructure Vacuum Behind It

The 592 Guardian | Editorial  Analysis

President Irfaan Ali stood before an audience at the commissioning of two HAL 228 small regional aircrafts on Saturday and issued what he apparently believes is a commanding ultimatum to international manufacturers: invest in Guyana or lose access to its market.

 The declaration was delivered with the theatrical confidence of a head of state presiding over a diversified industrial economy. Guyana is not that economy. Not even close

The questions write themselves. Where is the power?

Before a single foreign manufacturer can be expected to anchor a factory on Guyanese soil, it must answer a foundational question: how will it run? Guyana Power and Light remains one of the most unreliable utilities in the hemisphere — a chronic embarrassment that predates this administration but has deepened under it.

The Gas-to-Energy project, sold as the transformative fix, remains behind schedule, over budget, and structurally dependent on a pipeline whose completion timeline has shifted so many times it no longer commands serious credibility. Residential consumers still endure load-shedding. Industrial users run generators as a matter of operational necessity, not contingency.

What ISO-certified food manufacturer — the sector Ali specifically invoked with the Banks DIH/Dominican Republic partnership — will commit capital to a plant that cannot guarantee three-shift electrical continuity? The president offered no answer because the question was never invited.

 What exactly are “the most aggressive fiscal incentives in the Caribbean”?

Ali’s claim that Guyana now offers the region’s most competitive manufacturing incentives is asserted, not demonstrated.

Which fiscal package? Published where? Independently audited by whom?

 The Investment Act, the various sector-specific concession frameworks, the discretionary waivers administered through Go-Invest — these exist on paper with variable enforcement and well-documented opacity in how they are applied. Companies that have navigated Guyana’s investment environment know that the headline incentive and the operational reality are frequently different documents.

The Dominican Republic, which Ali cites as his model partner, runs the Western Hemisphere’s most mature free zone architecture — decades of institutional build-out, transparent administration, and a track record that has attracted genuine multinational manufacturing commitments. Guyana has incentive language. That is not the same thing.

 Corruption and the cost of doing business

Any serious manufacturer conducting due diligence on a Guyana investment will consult Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, the U.S. State Department’s Investment Climate Statement, and the lived experience of companies that have operated here.

What they will find is a procurement environment marked by opacity, a regulatory enforcement apparatus that is selectively deployed, and a pattern — documented across this publication’s coverage — in which contracts flow through relationships rather than competition.

The EKAA HRIM labor exploitation thread. The Wales Gas-to-Energy MOAP ghost-payroll pattern. The GGMC’s nine-year audit currency gap. The Guyana Lottery Company’s procurement opacity. These are not peripheral anomalies; they are systemic signals. A foreign manufacturer considering a multi-million dollar capital commitment reads them as country risk, not editorial grievance.

Ali’s ultimatum presupposes that Guyana is a prize worth competing for on his terms.

 For a manufacturer weighing political risk, regulatory unpredictability, infrastructure unreliability, and anti-money-laundering exposure, the calculus is considerably less flattering than the president imagines.

 The Trump parallel — and where it breaks down entirely

The rhetorical structure is indeed familiar: if you want our market, you build here. Trump deployed it against some of the world’s largest export economies, backed by the leverage of a $27 trillion consumer market, the world’s reserve currency, and two centuries of industrial infrastructure.

His ultimatums landed — unevenly and with significant economic self-damage — but they landed because the underlying market power was real.

 Guyana’s GDP, even at its oil-boom trajectory, does not purchase that leverage. The domestic consumer market is approximately 800,000 people. Regional manufacturers exporting to Guyana are not trembling at the prospect of losing access to a market that, in aggregate, represents a rounding error on their revenue statements.

Ali’s ultimatum carries the rhetorical architecture of economic nationalism without the economic mass to enforce it.

 What Trump had — and what makes the copycat framing accurate — is the instinct to perform strength as a substitute for structural analysis. The performance may satisfy a domestic audience. It does not rewrite the investment calculus of a Trinidadian food manufacturer or a Dominican agro-processor.

 The Banks DIH Partnership: A Showcase or a Warning?

The president’s flagship example deserves closer scrutiny. Banks DIH — a well-managed local conglomerate with real institutional capacity — is partnering with Dominican Republic firms for an agro-processing hub. That is a legitimate private sector development worth monitoring. But note what the president is actually describing: a local company doing the anchoring, with foreign firms as partners, under direct presidential pressure.

That is not a replicable foreign direct investment model. That is a showcase arrangement built on a relationship, announced at a political event, offered as proof of a policy thesis it does not actually validate.

 If the administration has a pipeline of similar arrangements — companies that have committed capital, applied for permits, broken ground — the public record should reflect it. Publish the Go-Invest data. Publish the manufacturing investment approvals for the past three years alongside their current operational status. Let the numbers carry the argument the president cannot carry with rhetoric.

 The questions Ali was never asked on Saturday:

  1. What is the current average industrial electricity tariff and guaranteed uptime SLA for manufacturing investors?
  2. How many manufacturing investment approvals issued in the last three years are now operational versus stalled or abandoned?
  3. What is the publicly available, independently audited account of how fiscal concessions are allocated and to whom?
  4. How does Guyana’s AML/CFT compliance rating affect the due diligence calculus of foreign manufacturers considering capital deployment here?
  5. What enforcement mechanism backs this ultimatum — and what legal authority governs it?

The president issued a demand. The infrastructure, the institutions, and the transparency record necessary to back that demand do not yet exist at the scale his rhetoric assumes.

That gap is not a policy footnote. It is the story.

 The 592 Guardian holds power accountable across Guyana’s governance, extractive industry, and civil rights landscape.

Mutual Respect, One-Sided Ledger: What Beijing’s Global Governance White Paper Leaves Out of Guyana

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY ♦TRUTH

Mutual Respect, One-Sided Ledger: What Beijing’s Global Governance White Paper Leaves Out of Guyana

 THE 592 GUARDIAN | EDITORIAL 

On Wednesday, Beijing’s State Council Information Office released a new white paper on global governance, the latest articulation of Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative—a framework built on the language of extensive consultation, joint contribution, shared benefits, and a “community with a shared future for humanity.” The document claims the backing of nearly 160 countries and more than 60 in a formal “Group of Friends.”

It positions China as a defender of UN-centered multilateralism against a turbulent, unequal world order. 

Guyana is not named in the white paper. It does not need to be. Guyana is where the doctrine gets tested against contract law, customs waivers, and a riverbed. 

 A live laboratory, not a footnote 

Guyana was the first English-speaking Caribbean nation to recognize the People’s Republic of China, in 1972. Half a century later it is China’s largest trading partner in the Caribbean. Chinese investment into Guyana in 2024 alone totaled US$10.6 billion; bilateral trade has quadrupled since 2019. When Foreign Minister Hugh Todd travelled to Beijing last year and met his counterpart Wang Yi, the language on both sides was the same language now repeated in the white paper — shared future, mutual respect, multilateralism, support for the UN Charter. Guyana’s government has, on the record, endorsed China’s global governance vocabulary almost word for word. 

The question this editorial puts plainly: does the conduct of Chinese state-linked capital inside Guyana’s borders bear any resemblance to the principles Beijing has just spent a five-part white paper describing? 

The contractors writing their own terms 

Start with China Harbor Engineering Company. CHEC’s contract for work on Guyanese infrastructure — reported by the Caribbean Investigative Journalism Network — secured full payment of the contract price while being released from paying taxes, duties, royalties, and fees ordinarily owed to central or local government. The same contract reportedly stipulated that sixty percent of non-technical labor be Chinese nationals,with specialized positions reserved exclusively for Chinese citizens.

This is not a contractor adapting to local content law. This is a contractor writing around it — in a country whose own Local Content Act requires Guyanese nationals to fill the overwhelming majority of positions in comparable sectors. 

Then there is China Railway Construction Corporation, the joint-venture partner awarded the US$260 million contract to build the new Demerara River crossing. CRCC was expelled by the World Bank in 2019 — alongside its subsidiaries and 730 controlled affiliates — for submitting manipulated information in the award of a highway contract in the country of Georgia.

Guyana awarded it the largest transport infrastructure contract in the country’s history regardless.

Construction began without a completed environmental and social impact assessment. Guyanese environmentalist Simone Mangal-Joly has warned that the absence of basic design information makes it impossible to assess the bridge’s effect on a river already carrying heavy sedimentation.

None of this required Beijing’s intervention. Georgetown signed it. 

CNOOC holds a twenty-five percent stake in the ExxonMobil-led Stabroek consortium, with $5.25 billion of its own capital committed — making the government’s repeated insistence that ExxonMobil’s audit disputes are a bilateral matter between Guyana and one American operator increasingly difficult to sustain. Bai Shan Lin’s logging record, Bosai Minerals’ manganese operations in Region Ten, and the slow transformation of Lethem into a Chinese-financed trading and transit hub round out a picture of saturation across timber, mining, hospitality, energy, and now cross-border logistics toward Brazil. 

The quarry fight nobody wanted to have on the record 

In May, truckers protesting a loss of income over sand and stone access forced Vice President Jagdeo onto the record. He insisted that none of the sixteen active quarries was Chinese-owned, that Chinese firms were merely contracted to operate them, and that none of the major housing programs on the East Coast used Chinese contractors. The public record does not support the ownership denial. Golden Rock Investment and Construction Co. — described in its own promotional materials and in NCN Guyana’s coverage as a Chinese company, with Managing Director Mike Wu unveiling the project at Guyana’s Building Expo — owns the quarry at Lanabali, Essequibo Islands-West Demerara, advertised as the country’s largest with a projected capacity of two to five million tons a year. And the Arisaru Mountain quarry in Region Ten, the actual site at the centre of the original trucker protests, has been identified in Kaieteur News’s reporting on Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill’s own response to those protests as a Chinese-owned quarry — the same report in which Edghill was defending the duty-free status of equipment operating inside it.

A Vice President cannot credibly deny Chinese ownership of the quarry sector while his own Minister of Public Works is on record managing the fallout from a quarry that reporting consistently identifies as Chinese-owned.

Jagdeo’s more honest line came earlier in the same remarks, where he volunteered the actual justification for why Chinese firms keep winning these awards: in his words, the Chinese may be able to do it faster and, in some cases, cheaper. That is a coherent economic argument.

It is not the argument in the white paper. The white paper sells partnership and shared benefit

 The Vice President, under pressure from his own truckers, sold speed and price — while denying an ownership pattern his own ministry had already been forced to manage in public.

 Self-certification, again 

This publication has spent the past several months documenting how Guyana’s extractive governance — gold, carbon credits, the EITI framework itself — collapses under the weight of self-certification without independent external verification. The same structural flaw governs the China file.

There is no independent registry of Chinese state-linked contracts in Guyana, no published evaluation criteria for the fourteen bidders who competed for the Demerara Bridge award, no public accounting of which contracts carry tax and royalty waivers, and no legislative mechanism requiring parliamentary ratification of contracts above a defined threshold. What exists instead is a closed loop: Beijing’s white paper affirms its own good conduct, and Georgetown’s diplomatic statements affirm Beijing’s affirmation. Nobody outside that loop is asked to verify anything. 

 What accountability requires 

A government that has publicly embraced the vocabulary of mutual respect and shared benefit owes the public the documents that would let citizens judge whether that vocabulary describes reality. The National Assembly should require disclosure of the full CHEC and CRCC contract terms, including labor quotas and fiscal waivers, currently known to the public only through investigative reporting rather than government publication. The Local Content Secretariat should be asked, on the record, whether the sixty percent non-technical labor provision attributed to CHEC was ever reviewed against the Local Content Act, and if not, why not. The Environmental Protection Agency should explain how a $260 million bridge across a sediment-heavy river proceeded without a completed impact assessment, and whether that omission would have been tolerated from any contractor not carrying the weight of a head-of-state relationship behind it.

And given CRCC’s documented blacklisting by the World Bank, the Public Procurement Commission owes the country a public explanation of how that history factored, or failed to factor, into the award. 

 None of this requires hostility toward China, toward Chinese workers, or toward the genuine economic opportunity that Chinese capital has brought to a country starved of infrastructure financing for decades. It requires the same thing this outlet has demanded of every other concentration of unaccountable power in Guyana: documents, named officials, and answers that don’t arrive pre-laundered through the language of friendship.

Silent in Accra: Where Was Guyana When the Caribbean Made Its Case?

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592GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

Silent in Accra: Where Was Guyana When the Caribbean Made Its Case?

CARICOM unveiled an updated reparations manifesto this week before the world. Georgetown, host to the regional movement’s own headquarters, appears nowhere in the record of who showed up to defend it.

THE 592 GUARDIAN  |  EDITORIAL  |   JUNE 2026

Mia Mottley spent Thursday June 18th in Accra doing what Caribbean heads of government have increasingly had to do alone: making the moral and legal case for reparatory justice on a continental stage, with an updated manifesto in hand and a regional mandate behind her. The document she distributed at the Next Steps High-Level Consultative Conference sharpens CARICOM’s decade-old ten-point plan, adding explicit language on the gendered toll of the transatlantic trade — compensation for sexual violence inflicted on enslaved women, recognition that roughly 30 percent of trafficked Africans were female — and a new commitment to repair for the genocide of Indigenous peoples who were already in the Caribbean when Europeans arrived.

It links climate justice to historical extraction. It demands money, not merely apology, from the European governments, monarchies, churches, corporations and families that profited.

 It is, by any measure, a significant moment for a movement Caribbean governments have pursued formally since 2013. President John Mahama of Ghana opened the gathering and announced three new international panels — on advisory strategy, cultural restitution and legal mechanism — to carry the agenda forward under a UN resolution, adopted in March, that for the first time in the General Assembly’s eighty-year history names the trafficking of enslaved Africans as humanity’s gravest crime. The published delegate lists from Accra carry the names one would expect: Mahama; Liberia’s Joseph Boakai; Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye; Namibia’s Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah; Mottley, speaking on CARICOM’s behalf; Professor Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission; Wole Soyinka; Julius Garvey.

Nowhere in that record is President Irfaan Ali. Nowhere is Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo. Nowhere is a Guyanese foreign minister, a named special envoy, or any official delegation representing the Cooperative Republic at the most consequential reparations gathering that has ever been staged in a decade.

That silence is not a footnote. The CARICOM Reparations Commission’s own institutional home is Georgetown — its headquarters listed at a Camp Street address, its administrative apparatus built on Guyanese soil. Guyana was among the first CARICOM states to stand up a National Reparations Committee, in 2013, chaired for over a decade by Eric Phillips. And Ali himself has not been a stranger to reparations rhetoric on the international stage: at the African Prosperity Dialogue in Ghana in January 2024, he told African business and political leaders bluntly that the debate over whether reparations were owed was settled, that what remained was mechanism, and that the Caribbean could not afford to wait another century for payment to follow apology.

That was a head of state claiming a seat at the front of this fight. Eighteen months later, with the fight’s most significant diplomatic milestone unfolding in the same city, the seat appears empty.

 The Office of the President and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs owe the public a direct answer, not a press release engineered around the omission. Did Guyana send any delegation to Accra this week, at any level?

Did the government formally endorse, co-sign, or even receive advance text of Mottley’s updated manifesto on the Caribbean’s behalf — given that Ali chaired CARICOM as recently as 2024 and has personally staked rhetorical claim to this issue? Was Georgetown’s own National Reparations Committee consulted on the manifesto’s new provisions before they were distributed in Ghana, or did a regional document bearing Guyana’s institutional fingerprints get drafted and unveiled without the body that hosts the regional commission ever being in the room?

There is a second, harder question the manifesto itself forces into view, and it is one this media-outlet believes Guyanese commentary has been too polite to ask directly.

The document’s new Indigenous-genocide provision demands repair for the people who were in the Caribbean before European arrival — a category that, in Guyana, sits in plain historical tension with the documented role of some Indigenous nations in helping Dutch and British colonial authorities hunt down Maroons and suppress the 1763 Berbice rebellion. Guyana already has its own domestic instrument addressing Indigenous rights, the Amerindian Act of 2006.

If the government is prepared to stand on an international platform and demand reparatory justice for Indigenous genocide from European capitals, it should be prepared to say, on the same record, what reparatory justice means for Indigenous and African descendants inside Guyana’s own borders — and whether the National Reparations Committee’s long-standing complaint, that it has received less support from its own government than from the wider region, has been resolved or simply outlasted by silence.

None of this diminishes what Mottley accomplished in Accra, or the weight of a UN resolution that took eighty years to arrive. It is precisely because the moment matters that Guyana’s absence from its record demands scrutiny rather than indifference. A government that postures forcefully on reparations in Ghana in 2024, hosts the regional commission’s headquarters in Georgetown, and then cannot be found in any dispatch from the movement’s defining 2026 gathering has a credibility gap to close.

This publication is now asking  the Office of the President and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the record of Guyana’s participation, if any, in the Accra conference. We will publish their answer, or their refusal to give one, in full.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, politics and extractive industry.

Procedure Recited Is Not Accountability Rendered: CJIAC’s Non-Answer to Zaid Khan

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  EDITORIAL♦June 20, 2026

Procedure Recited Is Not Accountability Rendered: CJIAC’s Non-Answer to Zaid Khan

Three days of silence ended not with an answer but with a policy memo. CJIAC’s press release confirms a prosthetic should never have been removed — and never once confirms, denies, or investigates whether Zaid Khan’s was.

The Cheddi Jagan International Airport Corporation has finally spoken, three days after Zaid Khan’s account of being ordered to remove his clothing and his prosthetic leg in a side room began circulating widely. What it produced is not a response to Khan. It is a recitation of the National Civil Aviation Security Program, dressed up as one.

Nowhere in CJIAC’s statement does the name Zaid Khan appear. Nowhere does the date June 17 appear. Nowhere is there an acknowledgment that a specific, named traveler made a specific, detailed allegation against specific members of staff.

 

The corporation answered a question nobody asked — what is the policy — while leaving untouched the question the entire country is asking: what happened to this man, and was it followed.

Read closely, the release is more revealing than its authors likely intended. It states that passengers facing a secondary screening alert must be offered a choice between a private screening room or a secondary screening machine, and it states without qualification that removal of a prosthetic device is never mandatory.

If that is CJIAC’s own standard, then Khan’s account — an officer in a side room instructing him to remove both his pants and his prosthetic — describes conduct that fell outside policy on its face. CJIAC has, in effect, confirmed the violation while declining to confirm that it occurred.

That is not clarification. It is a corporation citing the rulebook to avoid discussing the foul.

 Just as telling is what the statement asks of the public going forward: passengers with complaints should bring them to the Customer Relations Unit, through a phone line, a WhatsApp number, or an email address. This is the posture of a corporation that has not yet treated Khan’s account as a complaint requiring a response, despite it being public, specific, dated, and amplified for days.

A traveler does not need to refile a grievance the entire country has already read in order for an airport corporation to pull its own security footage from June 17 and look at it.

That CJIAC apparently has not done so — or has done so and declined to say what it found — is itself the story.

 The minister with responsibility for civil aviation followed the same script three days on: a statement that walked through existing protocol without engaging the specifics of what Khan says was done to him. Reciting the rules a second time, through a different office, does not multiply into an answer.

It only confirms that the instinct across this administration, when a disabled traveler alleges mistreatment by name, is to point at the manual rather than open the file.

None of this addresses the pattern Khan’s post has already surfaced — other travelers, including Muslim women, describing screening that singled out their attire. CJIAC’s release does not mention that pattern at all, which means it has not yet decided whether June 17 was an isolated lapse or a symptom. The public cannot tell the difference from a press release that never engages the incident in question.

This outfit does not require CJIAC to assume guilt before any review is complete. We require it to do what it told the public it would do: investigate where procedure has been breached, and say so. That means four things, plainly stated, not implied through boilerplate:

•Confirm or deny what occurred in that side room on June 17

•Disclose whether the officers involved have been identified and what, if anything, follows for them

•Commit to a public timeline for that review rather than an open-ended invitation to file a complaint 

•Address whether Khan’s account fits a broader pattern at the airport’s screening checkpoints.

 A press release that defines the rules without confirming whether they were broken is not transparency. It is choreography, and the traveling public — along with every investor this country is courting on the strength of its openness — deserves better than a non-answer dressed in institutional language.

We will keep asking until CJIAC, and the ministry standing behind it, answer the question actually in front of them.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Guyana’s Carbon Billions

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THE 592 GUARDIAN|INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL
Guyana’s Carbon Billions: The High-Integrity Myth and the Accountability Vacuum
The World Bank’s flagship carbon pricing report barely registers the Caribbean. Guyana’s absence from its pages is not an oversight — it is a mirror. Behind the government’s boasts of US$750 million in landmark climate finance lies an unresolved indigenous rights complaint, an opaque revenue architecture, and a deal that has now passed into the hands of Chevron without a word of parliamentary scrutiny.

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board • June 2026

The World Bank published its State and Trends of Carbon Pricing 2026 report this month — a 75-page survey of every significant carbon tax, emissions trading system, and carbon crediting mechanism on the planet. It tracks 87 implemented carbon pricing instruments across 47 countries. It documents US$107 billion in annual government revenues. It maps CORSIA-eligible credit premiums to the dollar.                                                     

Guyana does not appear once.
This is a remarkable omission. Guyana has sold a total of 37.5 million ART TREES credits for the period 2016–2030 for a combined US$750 million, with initial sales based on a floor price of US$15 for pre-2021 credits and US$20 for 2021 credits and beyond. The buyer was Hess Corporation — one of the same oil companies extracting offshore Guyanese petroleum — and the deal was announced by President Irfaan Ali in December 2022 as the centerpiece of Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy.

By July 2025, Chevron Corporation completed its acquisition of Hess, adding a 30% position in the Guyana Stabroek Block to its portfolio. What was a carbon credit agreement with an independent oil company is now a contractual obligation held by one of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations. Whether the terms, pricing, and delivery commitments survived that acquisition intact — and on whose authority that determination was made — has never been publicly accounted for before the Guyanese parliament or people.

THE SCALE PROBLEM
The World Bank report notes that the estimated total traded value of voluntary carbon credits globally in 2024 was approximately US$535 million. Guyana’s deal alone, at US$750 million committed across a multi-year window, is a figure that dwarfs entire annual voluntary market valuations. And yet the report — which explicitly discusses ART TREES as a CORSIA-approved mechanism and nature-based jurisdictional REDD+ as a growing asset class — never once names Guyana.

In February 2024, ART issued 7.14 million 2021 TREES Credits to Guyana, and Guyana became the first government to report a corresponding adjustment to the UNFCCC for the associated emission reductions. This built on Guyana being the first country in the world to be issued TREES Credits by ART in December 2022 — 33.47 million verified credits for its work to protect forests from 2016 to 2020. Most recently, the Government of Guyana announced ART’s issuance of 9,085,923 high-integrity TREES carbon credits for the year 2023, labelled as CORSIA-Eligible.

Guyana is, by any measure, one of the most consequential actors in the global voluntary carbon credit market. Its invisibility in the World Bank’s annual survey is not explicable on the merits.

 THE CORSIA PREMIUM — AND WHAT IT CONCEALS

The World Bank report identifies CORSIA-eligible credits as the premium tier of the global carbon credit market, trading at US$15–22 per ton against a broader market range of US$1–14. The government’s announcements lean heavily into this premium status, claiming that the CORSIA label confirms Guyana’s credits meet “the highest international standards for environmental integrity , transparency, and accountability.”

This language performs a sleight of hand that demands scrutiny.

CORSIA eligibility is determined by ICAO’s assessment of the ART TREES standard as a program — not by independent verification that each individual issuance has satisfied the social safeguards the standard requires. The Cancún Safeguards — which ART TREES explicitly incorporates and which require that program participants respect, protect and fulfil the rights of indigenous peoples — are a foundational element of that social integrity framework.

The Amerindian Peoples Association has formally and repeatedly alleged that those safeguards were not met in Guyana’s case. ART dismissed the complaint on procedural grounds without examining the substance. The CORSIA label was applied regardless.

“Program-level approval does not validate instance-level compliance with safeguards. Buyers are purchasing a premium product whose social integrity certification coexists with an unresolved, substantiated allegation that the program own indigenous rights requirements were violated.”

What the government presents to the nation as independent international validation of “the highest standards” is, in reality, program-level approval that coexists with an unresolved, substantiated allegation that the program’s own indigenous rights requirements were violated at the point of implementation. Buyers — including any airline purchasing Guyana’s credits for CORSIA compliance — have not been told that a national indigenous peoples’ organization formally alleged a gross violation of the standard’s safeguards, and that the allegation was never adjudicated on its merits.

THE INTEGRITY PROBLEM
The government has marketed its carbon program under the banner of high-integrity certification and extensive national consultation. Its own communications state that all 242 villages and communities throughout the country held community meetings where every village and community voted to participate in the REDD+ program and created Village Sustainability Plans.

This account is directly contested by the people it purports to describe.

Mario Hastings, Toshao of Kako Village and Chair of the Upper Mazaruni District Council — who presented before the IACHR — stated plainly that while the government publicly claims it held consultations with Indigenous communities, those meetings were not consultations.

“Indigenous peoples were deprived of free, prior and informed consent. The distinction is not semantic.” 

Community meetings at which government officials present a fait accompli and record attendance as “participation” are not FPIC processes. FPIC requires that consent be sought before decisions are made — not after credits have already been issued and sold.

The APA specifically raised that instead of being involved in crafting benefit-sharing mechanisms from the outset, Indigenous communities received village planning documents only after the initial sale of carbon credits — an approach that limits their input and involvement in shaping how these projects can work for their long-term needs.

The government’s response to the APA’s complaint was not engagement. It was attack. The APA formally accused Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo of conducting a “campaign of disinformation” concerning the association’s criticism of the carbon credits program.

The government’s response to the APA’s complaint was not engagement. It was attack. The APA formally accused Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo of conducting a “campaign of disinformation” concerning the association’s criticism of the carbon credits program.

Jagdeo characterized the APA as having been invited to participate in and help lead consultations — a version of events the APA flatly rejected. The pattern is familiar to observers of this administration: when institutional criticism cannot be answered on the merits, the critic is delegitimized.

At Climate Week 2024 in New York, the APA raised a further structural contradiction: the sale of carbon credits generated by Guyana’s forests to an oil company sits in direct tension with Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy — particularly as that same oil company, now Chevron, simultaneously extracts petroleum from Guyanese waters without regard for the carbon emissions that extraction will ultimately generate.

THE REVENUE PROBLEM
The numbers, by the government’s own account, are substantial. Under the landmark agreement with Hess Corporation, Guyana committed to selling 37.5 million ART TREES credits between 2022 and 2032 for a minimum of US$750 million, with upside sharing provisions if market prices rise. The revenue has been flowing. US$187.5 million had been received as at January 2024 from the first commercial sale.

By any reconstruction of the publicly available figures — including President Ali’s own disclosure in May 2026 — the three-year cumulative total is now approaching US$400 million: approximately US$150 million received in 2023, US$87.5 million in 2024, and revenues approaching US$200 million for 2025 alone. These are not figures produced by investigative reconstruction or opposition estimates. They are the President’s own numbers, offered on a public platform.

“That matters, because the same administration that volunteers these headline figures has constructed no independent institutional architecture to account for them.”

There is no carbon revenue equivalent of the Natural Resource Fund Act — no legislated transparency framework requiring parliamentary scrutiny of inflows, no independent audit mandate, no public register of how revenues are received, held, and disbursed before they reach community benefit-sharing allocations. The Natural Resource Fund, for all its structural weaknesses this publication has documented, at least exists as a legislated instrument with defined governance obligations. Carbon revenues flow through no equivalent framework.

What governs community benefit-sharing is the Vice President’s discretion. Without consultation, the government decided to allocate 26.5% of the 2024 income from the sale of jurisdictional forest-carbon credits — equivalent to EUR 21.4 million — to 241 Amerindian Village and hinterland communities. The word “decided” carries the full weight of the problem. There is no legislation mandating the percentage. There is no independent oversight body. There is no parliamentary committee with jurisdiction over the allocation methodology. The percentage is set unilaterally by the Vice President and announced at the National Toshaos Council conference.

In May 2025, Guyana for a second consecutive year adjusted the share of proceeds allocated to Amerindian communities, keeping absolute financial benefits nominally the same. Read carefully, this formulation reveals what the government does not say plainly: if absolute benefits remain the same while the percentage share is adjusted downward, total revenues increased — and the additional increment went elsewhere, to destinations that no public document explains.

“The Vice President is projecting a US$4 to US$5 billion carbon sector. The communities whose forests underpin every dollar of that projection are before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.”

The scale of what is coming makes the governance gap not merely a present concern but an urgent structural emergency. Vice President Jagdeo has publicly projected that Guyana’s carbon credit sector could eventually generate US$2 billion annually — and at full scale, potentially US$4 to US$5 billion. If those projections materialise, Guyana will be managing a carbon revenue stream that rivals or exceeds its current oil revenue allocations to the Natural Resource Fund, governed by no law, audited by no independent body, and allocated at the discretion of one office.

The nation was told the oil money would be different — ring-fenced, governed,transparent, intergenerationally protected. The Natural Resource Fund Act was the response to that promise, however imperfectly implemented. No equivalent promise has been made about carbon revenues. No equivalent legislation has been proposed. And yet the Vice President is projecting a multi-billion-dollar sector while the communities whose forests underpin every dollar of that projection are before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights arguing they were never properly consulted.

This is not a footnote. It is the central accountability failure of the LCDS as currently administered.

THE CHEVRON COMPLICATION
The transfer of the Hess carbon credit obligation to Chevron through the July 2025 acquisition introduces a dimension the government has conspicuously declined to address. Chevron is a company whose core business model — offshore oil extraction in Guyana’s own waters — is in direct tension with the forest conservation rationale underpinning the credits it has inherited. Whether Chevron will continue purchasing credits at the contracted pace, seek to renegotiate terms, or treat the obligation as a legacy liability to be wound down is unknown.

No public statement from the Office of the President, the Ministry of Natural Resources, or the LCDS Secretariat has addressed the implications of this corporate transfer for Guyana’s carbon revenue projections or contractual security. No parliamentary question has been tabled. No independent legal review has been published. The deal that the government describes as the centrepiece of its climate financing architecture passed into the hands of a different corporation without a word of public scrutiny.

This silence is not incidental. It is structural. An administration that has built its climate credibility on the Hess deal cannot easily acknowledge that the counterparty to that deal no longer exists as an independent entity — and that its successor is an oil major whose climate commitments and appetite for voluntary carbon credits may differ fundamentally from its predecessor’s.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES
The 592 Guardian puts the following questions directly to the Office of the President, the Ministry of Natural Resources, and the LCDS Secretariat. We invite formal written responses, which will be published in full.

1.President Ali disclosed in May 2026 that carbon credit revenues for 2025 would approach US$200 million, bringing the three-year cumulative total to approximately US$400 million. In which account or accounts are these revenues held, and under what legislative authority are they governed?

2.What is the complete revenue schedule — by vintage year, issuance volume, and price per tonne — for all credits sold under the Hess/Chevron agreement to date?

3.What are the specific contractual terms governing the transition of the Hess credit purchase agreement to Chevron, and has the government received independent legal advice on whether that transition required any renegotiation or novation? Will that advice be made public?

4.On what legislative or regulatory basis does the Vice President determine the community benefit-sharing percentage each year, and why has no legislation been introduced to codify, protect, and independently audit that allocation?

5.Which independent auditor has examined the full carbon revenue account — not merely community disbursements — and when will that audit be published?

6.Does the government accept the APA’s position that free, prior and informed consent was not obtained from individual communities before the December 2022 credit issuance? If not, which specific community-level consent votes, conducted before that issuance, does it rely upon?

7.Have airline buyers of Guyana’s CORSIA-eligible credits been formally informed of the APA’s complaint alleging violation of the Cancún Safeguards, and of ART’s dismissal of that complaint on procedural grounds without substantive examination?

8.Given Vice President Jagdeo’s projection of US$2–5 billion in annual carbon revenues at scale, will the government introduce legislation to govern this revenue stream with the same institutional architecture as the Natural Resource Fund?

SIDEBAR
From Georgetown to Washington: The Indigenous Challenge the Government Wants You to Forget
In February 2024, two representatives of Guyana’s indigenous communities travelled to Washington DC and sat before commissioners of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. They were not there to celebrate Guyana’s carbon milestones. They were there because every domestic avenue had been closed to them.

The regional thematic hearing — entitled “Impact of the carbon market on indigenous peoples and local communities” — took place on 28 February 2024 during the 189th session of the IACHR, with civil society participants from Colombia, Guyana, Peru and Brazil. The APA’s presentation was delivered by Communications and Visibility Officer Lakhram Bhagirat and focused on the technical shortcomings in the Guyana carbon scheme process. The IACHR heard that APA made a complaint to ART in March 2023, but ART did not address the substance of its complaint — which was that ART certified credits to Guyana despite violations of Indigenous Peoples’ rights and the lack of effective consultations with Indigenous peoples as the owners of the lands and forests.

Also present was Mario Hastings, Toshao of Kako Village, who delivered the community’s experiences with the carbon scheme. He pointed out that while the government publicly claims that it held consultations with Indigenous communities, those meetings were not consultations — which meant Indigenous peoples were deprived of free, prior and informed consent. “Our people still have many questions and concerns about carbon credits and markets and what they mean for our lands.”

 THE TIMELINE ART WANTS BURIED

December 2022 — ART issues 33.47 million TREES Credits to Government of Guyana. Credits sold to Hess Corporation.
March 2023 — APA files formal complaint with ART Secretariat alleging FPIC violations. Jagdeo launches public counter-campaign, accused by APA of “deliberate disinformation”
May 2023 — ART dismisses APA complaint without considering any substantive concerns raised.
October 2023 — ART dismisses APA’s appeal without ever considering the substantive issues raised. ART refuses to even negotiate the terms of the appeal review process.
February 2024 — APA and Kako Village Toshao Mario Hastings present before the IACHR in Washington DC. The Commission commits to including the carbon market impact on indigenous peoples in its work plan.
February 2024 — ART issues 7.14 million CORSIA-eligible 2021 vintage credits to Guyana. Government announces these as “world’s first CORSIA-eligible credits.” No reference to unresolved APA complaint.
September 2024 — APA presents at Climate Week 2024 in New York, raising the contradiction of selling forest credits to an oil company while issuing mining concessions that destroy the same forests.
July 2025 — Chevron completes acquisition of Hess Corporation. The carbon credit purchase agreement passes to a new corporate counterparty. Government makes no public statement. 
February 2026 — ART issues 9.08 million CORSIA-eligible 2023 vintage credits. Government press release describes these as confirmation of “the highest international standards for environmental integrity.” APA complaint remains unresolved on the merits.
May 2026 — President Ali discloses 2025 carbon revenues approaching US$200 million, bringing three-year total to approximately US$400 million. No independent audit published. No legislative framework governing the revenues exists.
“We are told that the carbon in the trees on our lands does not belong to our people — it belongs to the state.”— Amerindian community representative, Climate Change News, 2024
The IACHR does not forget. The 592 Guardian does not forget. And the people of Kako, and of Baramita, and of Chinese Landing, and of every Amerindian village whose forests are being monetised in their name but without their full consent — they have not forgotten either.

 The 592 Guardian is Guyana’s independent accountability journalism outlet. We invite formal written responses from the Office of the President, the Ministry of Natural Resources, the LCDS Secretariat, and the Amerindian Peoples Association to the questions posed above. Responses will be published in full and unedited.

Bhagwandin’s Word-Fog Cannot Bury the One Question He Won’t Answer: Who Holds the Pen?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY

Bhagwandin’s Word-Fog Cannot Bury the One Question He Won’t Answer: Who Holds the Pen? 

Joel Bhagwandin has written 1,800 words to avoid answering one question. That, in itself, is the story. 

His letter in the Guyana Chronicle on the Guyana Development Bank is a masterclass in a particular genre of public-relations writing: bury the politically inconvenient question under a landslide of technical vocabulary, and hope the reader mistakes density for substance.

Peer-cluster vetting. Staged disbursement. Credit-scoring architecture. Quarterly portfolio dashboards.

 It reads like a man performing competence rather than demonstrating it — and performance is precisely what is required when the actual answer is unflattering. 

Strip away the jargon and what remains is this: the Bill gives one office-holder the power to appoint the Board and the management structure of an institution that will control public lending capital, with no requirement for parliamentary consensus and no meaningful external check on that appointment power. Bhagwandin does not dispute this. He does not even really engage with it. He simply changes the subject — at length, and with great technical confidence — to talk instead about what happens after the appointments are made.

That is not an answer. That is a diversion dressed up as expertise. The architecture doesn’t operate itself 

 Bhagwandin’s entire defense rests on a quiet but load-bearing assumption: that peer review clusters, credit committees, and internal audit functions are self-executing — that once written into a manual, they enforce themselves regardless of who sits above them.

This is not how institutions work, and a financial analyst of his stated standing knows it. 

 

A credit manual is not a force of nature. It is a document that can be amended, reinterpreted, or quietly unenforced by anyone with authority over the people enforcing it. Centralised appointment power doesn’t get neutralised by decentralised paperwork. It sits above the paperwork, with its hand on the pen. 

This is why “who appoints the Board” is not, as Bhagwandin frames it, a narrow obsession of people who haven’t thought it through.

It is the load-bearing wall of the entire structure he’s describing. Every technical safeguard he cites is downstream of it. The tomfoolery of false modesty

There is something almost theatrical in Bhagwandin positioning himself as the lone adult in the room, calling for “a more mature debate” while declining to mention that he is, by public account, among those positioned for leadership inside the very institution he is publicly defending. If that is accurate, it is not a footnote — it is the single most relevant fact missing from his letter, and its absence does more to explain the tone of the piece than anything actually written in it. 

The public is entitled to a straight answer, not a paragraph about portfolio dashboards: is Joel Bhagwandin a prospective officer of the Guyana Development Bank? If so, say so on the page, in the first paragraph, before the lecture on financial maturity begins. 

And while he is disclosing, the public has a second, older question still sitting unanswered.

As a sitting member of the Public Procurement Commission, what was his role — and what was the Commission’s role — in the handling of the Tepui Construction matter, reported to involve some $167 million in public funds?,

A man who wants to be trusted with the design of a public lending institution’s accountability architecture should be willing to account, in detail, for his own record on a public accountability body. Silence on that front, while writing lecture-length essays on “institutionally costly” arbitrary lending elsewhere, is not a good look. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing his own framework would flag as an early-warning signal. 

The peer-cluster sleight of hand 

Even taken on its own terms, the peer-cluster model does no work against the actual risk. Whether a weak loan application is dressed up by a cluster of borrowers below or waved through by a minister’s appointee above, the final decision still passes through a structure controlled, top to bottom, by people, one office-holder put there. Decentralising the origination of applications while centralising control of the people who approve them is not a safeguard. It is theatre with extra paperwork. 

What the debate actually requires 

Guyana needs a development bank. No one credible disputes that. What the country cannot afford is a Bill that lets its strongest advocate write 1,800 words defending the institution’s internal mechanics while saying nothing about who controls its leadership — and possibly say nothing because he stands to be part of that leadership. 

Until Bhagwandin, and the Bill’s sponsors, answer the appointment question directly — not technically, not procedurally, but directly — no quarterly dashboard and no credit scoring matrix will mean anything at all. The architecture he is so eager to discuss is only as honest as the hand that built it.

Right now, that hand belongs to one man, and the public still doesn’t know if that man is also the bank’s prospective CEO

That is the level at which this debate should now proceed. Bhagwandin chose not to go there. We will.

The Missing Agency in a Billion-Dollar Conversation

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦ JUNE 2026

The Missing Agency in a Billion-Dollar Conversation

BY: HEM KUMAR                                                                  Guyana’s rapidly expanding investment profile continues to attract international attention, but a recent meeting between Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill and a visiting U.S. delegation raises questions that go beyond routine diplomacy and into the core of governance practice.

At the center of the concern is not merely the meeting itself, but its structure—and what it reveals about the evolving approach to governance. The delegation reportedly included representatives tied to a prospective industrial-scale project in  Upper Berbice. This venture falls squarely within the realm of heavy industry, natural resource utilization, environmental regulation, and fiscal planning. Yet, the primary government interface was the Ministry of Public Works.

That is an unusual starting point.

Public Works plays a critical supporting role in national development, particularly in roads, bridges, and logistics corridors. But it is not the state’s principal gateway for negotiating or assessing industrial investments of this scale and complexity. That responsibility rests with institutions such as the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest), supported by technical agencies and sector-specific ministries. 

These bodies exist precisely to ensure that proposals are rigorously evaluated across legal, environmental, economic, and fiscal dimensions before any policy alignment is even contemplated.

 According to reports, the discussions touched on potential alumina refinery operations in Berbice—an undertaking that demanded interaction with the mandated State agency. Yet, the apparent absence of the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest) from this engagement is both conspicuous and troubling.

Guyana has invested in building out agencies like GO-Invest with technical staff, policy frameworks, and statutory responsibilities. Taxpayer resources sustain these institutions for a reason. When they are sidelined—whether deliberately or through informal parallel processes—it raises a fundamental question: are these agencies central to national development strategy, or are they being reduced to ceremonial back-end processors of decisions shaped elsewhere?

GO-Invest is not a ceremonial body. It is the state’s designated investment facilitation agency, staffed with the technical, legal, and policy expertise required to evaluate proposals, guide investors, and ensure alignment with national development priorities. Its role is foundational, particularly at the early stages of complex, capital-intensive ventures such as an alumina refinery.

This raises a simple but unavoidable question: was GO-Invest invited to participate, and if not, why not?

 

The absence—at least publicly—of technical personnel or inter-agency representation in such a meeting only sharpens the concern. This is not a minor administrative detail. It goes directly to process integrity. Standard practice in serious investment discussions, even at preliminary stages, involves technical accompaniment to ensure that conversations are grounded in feasibility, regulatory constraints, and national interest considerations. Without that, engagements risk becoming politically driven rather than technically informed.

It also opens the door to perception—and in governance, perception is often as consequential as reality.

 If the agency was excluded, it suggests a deliberate sidelining of institutional processes in favor of a more centralized, minister-led approach to investment engagement. If it was invited but absent, that raises an entirely different set of concerns about coordination and operational coherence within the state’s investment architecture. Neither scenario inspires confidence.

If this was merely an informal, exploratory courtesy call, then that should be clearly communicated. But if substantive discussions were entertained regarding a refinery and associated industrial expansion, then the process appears misaligned with established institutional roles. And that misalignment is not an isolated concern. It reflects a broader and increasingly visible pattern in which ministerial offices appear to supersede or bypass constitutionally and administratively mandated agencies.

This is where the issue moves beyond protocol into principle.

The issue is compounded by the choice of lead ministry. While Public Works is integral to infrastructure development, it is not the primary interface for negotiating or assessing industrial investments. Its role is supportive—ensuring that roads, bridges, and logistical networks can sustain economic expansion—not defining or vetting the investments themselves.

Equally significant is the reported absence of technical accompaniment. Serious investment discussions, even at exploratory stages, are typically supported by teams capable of interrogating feasibility, regulatory requirements, and long-term implications. Without that layer of expertise, such meetings risk becoming politically driven engagements untethered from the rigorous analysis that projects of this magnitude demand.

There is also an economic inversion worth noting. Investors pursuing industrial projects—particularly in extractive or processing sectors—are generally responsible for developing or financing the infrastructure necessary for their operations.

Governments facilitate and regulate; they do not ordinarily serve as the entry point for pitching industrial ventures. When that line begins to blur, it invites scrutiny.

To be fair, direct ministerial engagement is not inherently inappropriate. Governments often use high-level access to signal openness and accelerate investor interest. In a competitive global environment, that can be a strategic tool.

But strategy cannot come at the expense of structure.

When constitutionally and administratively mandated agencies like GO-Invest are absent from critical early engagements, it signals more than a procedural lapse—it suggests a governance model that is shifting away from institutional accountability toward centralized discretion. Over time, that shift can erode transparency, weaken safeguards, and create parallel decision-making channels that are difficult to track or challenge.

Guyana is operating in a high-stakes environment where investment decisions carry long-term consequences for its economy, environment, and sovereignty over resources. That reality demands stronger institutions, not their quiet displacement.

Until there is clarity on whether GO-Invest was engaged—or deliberately bypassed—the question will persist: why is the very agency designed to manage and scrutinize investment not at the table when it matters most?

 

 

 

We Are Selling Rice.We Are Buying Back

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Our Shame.

Guyana exports the grain and imports the flour. It harvests the oil and outsources the refinery of ambition. This nation has been haemorrhaging economic value and political accountability for generations — and the time to stop the bleeding is not tomorrow. It is now.

Walk into any supermarket in Georgetown today and you will find it on the shelf: four pounds of rice flour, imported from India, priced at approximately US$9.00 — nearly two thousand Guyanese dollars — for a product derived from a crop this country grows in abundance. Let that sit for a moment. Guyana, one of the Caribbean’s foremost rice producers, is paying a foreign nation to mill its own grain and ship it back. This is not a quirk of the market. It is a monument to our collective failure.

That failure did not arrive overnight. Its roots reach back to the Burnham era, when initiatives to process rice into value-added goods — flour, bran, starch — were derailed not by any shortage of raw material or industrial capacity, but by political weaponisation of public fear. Opposition voices of the time warned that rice flour consumption would cause “beri beri” or “white mouth.” Whether born of genuine misunderstanding or naked expediency, those narratives found purchase. Public confidence in domestic production collapsed. And with it, the ambition to build an agro-industrial economy worthy of this nation’s resources.

“A nation cannot keep blaming its past while its present leaders reproduce the same pattern of squandered opportunity and deflected accountability.”

But we will not let old political ghosts carry all the blame. The deeper failure was institutional. Policy was inconsistent. Technological investment was inadequate. Processing infrastructure was neglected. And there was no long-term strategy to develop domestic markets for domestically transformed goods. Skepticism thrives where competence is absent — and competence requires sustained political will, not just good intentions at a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

US$9.00

PER 4 LBS OF IMPORTED RICE FLOUR — A PRODUCT GUYANA GROWS BUT DOES NOT MILL

At current retail prices in Georgetown supermarkets. Guyana remains dependent on Indian processors for value-added rice products while exporting raw paddy at fraction of the price.

The result is a textbook case of value-chain dependency: raw commodity out, finished product back in — at a premium. Every bag of imported rice flour is a quiet indictment. It tells us that decades after independence, after nationalisation, after oil discovery, after billions in revenue projections, we still have not built the systems to transform what we grow into what we need. We are, in the language of development economics, trapped at the bottom of the value chain — not by fate, but by choice. By negligence. By a failure of governance that has never been adequately named, let alone corrected.

ON ACCOUNTABILITY

And this brings us to the harder truth. The rice flour scandal — and we will call it what it is — does not exist in isolation. It is a symptom of a governance culture in which leaders are never truly required to answer for what they leave undone. Decisions with generational consequences are made, or unmade, without explanation. Opportunities are buried. And the public is expected to accept, to move on, to wait for the next election cycle as though that alone constitutes democratic accountability.

It does not. Accountability is not a quadrennial event. It is a daily obligation. It is transparency in decision-making. It is the willingness to stand before the people — not with press releases and photo-opportunities — but with honest reckoning about what has failed and why. It is the courage to say: we got this wrong, here is how we will fix it, and here is the timeline on which you may hold us to that promise.

Power is not built on comfort. It is built on responsibility, on pressure, on the unrelenting demand to do better. A leader who cannot face scrutiny has no business holding authority.

Guyana stands today at a genuinely historic inflection point. Oil revenues have changed the arithmetic of what is possible. The world is watching. Investment is flowing. And yet the old patterns persist: raw potential exported, finished value imported, questions deflected, failures absorbed quietly by a population conditioned to expect disappointment from those who govern them. That conditioning is itself a form of political damage — and reversing it requires citizens who refuse to be quiet.

We are not calling for rancour. We are calling for standards. We are calling for servant leadership — leaders who understand that public office is a mandate issued in trust, not a throne claimed by election. Leaders who measure their tenure not by the infrastructure they announce but by the lives they materially improve. Leaders who welcome scrutiny as the legitimate exercise of democratic sovereignty, not as an affront to their authority.

The question for this new era of Guyanese prosperity is therefore not simply whether the country will build a rice flour mill — though it should, and urgently. The question is whether Guyana will build a governance culture equal to its resources. Whether it will create institutions capable of converting potential into transformation. Whether it will hold those in power to a standard commensurate with the trust placed in them.

Wealth without accountability is not development. It is an accelerant for inequality, entrenched dysfunction, and the deepening cynicism of a people who have seen too many promises evaporate.

Our Demand

The time for quiet acceptance has passed. It passed long ago — with every bag of imported rice flour, with every missed processing opportunity, with every year that the country’s agricultural inheritance was left unrefined and undervalued. Citizens who remain silent in the face of repeated, documented failure do not escape its consequences. They inherit them. And they pass them on.

So we say this plainly: public servants exist to serve the public — not the reverse. Their mandate is not self-perpetuation. It is transformation. And transformation demands that they be challenged, pressed, questioned, and if necessary, replaced by those with the competence and the courage to do what the moment requires.

“Guyana does not need louder promises.
It needs leaders who are held — and hold themselves — to account.
Servant leadership is not a slogan. It is a standard.
And we will accept nothing less.”

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

Hypocrisy on the Hemispheric Stage

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BY: Hem Kumar                                

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣

Guyana’s Parliament continues to project a troubling contradiction: while the institution at home is visibly weakened, underperforming, and increasingly irrelevant to the public it is supposed to serve, its senior figures continue to seek prestige abroad in forums that reward democratic symbolism more than democratic substance.

The presence of Deputy Speaker Dr. Vishwa Mahadeo at the 74th Meeting of the ParlAmericas Council and the 22nd Plenary Assembly in Ottawa may be presented as an act of parliamentary diplomacy, but it also invites a harder question: what exactly is being exported under the banner of “regional engagement” when the domestic legislature remains marred by dysfunction, inertia, and a persistent failure to command respect? A parliament that does not properly deliberate, scrutinize, or hold the executive to account cannot credibly posture as a model of democratic practice on the international stage.

This is not an argument against Guyana’s participation in hemispheric parliamentary bodies. It is an argument against the hypocrisy of sending representatives to speak the language of governance, transparency, and institutional strengthening while the home institution continues to atrophy.          

If ParlAmericas is genuinely committed to democratic renewal, then it must do more than host ceremonial gatherings and issue polished declarations. It must also reckon with the reality that participation alone does not equal performance, and membership alone does not confer credibility.

Guyana’s parliamentary leadership should understand that international visibility is not a substitute for domestic responsibility. A deputy speaker cannot represent parliamentary excellence abroad if the parliament itself is widely seen as an appendage of the executive, a chamber too often reduced to formality, and a place where accountability is diluted by political convenience. The more these officials travel to forums on governance while failing to uphold governance at home, the more they expose the hollowness of their commitments.

There is also a larger institutional problem here. Bodies like ParlAmericas risk damaging their own moral authority when they allow weak parliamentary systems to bask in the legitimacy of association without demanding visible standards of conduct and performance. 

Cooperation should not become cover. Dialogue should not become applause. And multilateral fellowship should not become a laundering mechanism for domestic failure.

If Guyana’s parliament is to recover any serious standing, its leaders must first show seriousness where it matters most: in the National Assembly, before the people of Guyana, through disciplined scrutiny, real debate, and uncompromising accountability. Until then, every foreign forum becomes another stage on which local dysfunction is repackaged as democratic participation.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮,𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—