Archive for category: Accountability

Surprise Visits Are Not Public-Service Reform

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Fine. But why must a ministerial ambush be necessary for Government to discover that its own offices are failing the public?

That is the real question.

For years, citizens have complained about the same degrading experiences across government ministries and agencies: unanswered telephones, endless lines, missing files, staff who pass people from desk to desk, officers who appear indifferent, and citizens made to feel as if they are begging for a favor rather than seeking a public service they are entitled to receive.

None of this is new. None of it should require a surprise visit to uncover.

When a minister must personally turn up, unannounced, to confirm that an office is dysfunctional, it is not merely an indictment of frontline staff. It is a damning indictment of the Permanent Secretary, departmental heads, supervisors, internal reporting systems, and the wider machinery of public administration.

◊ Where are the performance reports?

◊  Where are the service-delivery targets?

◊ Where are the call-response records, queue-time data, complaint registers, file-tracking systems, staff evaluations, and independent audits?

◊  What exactly are senior managers monitoring every day if it takes a minister walking through the door to reveal that citizens are being ignored?

The much bragged about Digital Ecosystem

Government cannot boast about smart cities, digital transformation, modernization, and a safer, more efficient Guyana while managing public offices through a system of occasional surprise inspections. That is not modern management. It is reactionary supervision dressed up as decisive leadership.

A public service cannot be run on the assumption that employees will perform only when they fear that a minister may suddenly appear. That approach belongs to an old command-and-control culture—one too close to the “Massa Days” mentality Guyana should have left behind.

Unannounced visits have their place. They can expose problems that polished reports conceal. They can give decision-makers a direct view of how ordinary citizens are treated. They can also send a needed signal that public servants are accountable.

But they are not a substitute for institutional reform.

Guyana needs continuous, evidence-based oversight of public service delivery. Public-facing government offices should have properly governed monitoring systems, including video surveillance where appropriate, electronic queue management, recorded and audited call systems, file-tracking mechanisms, service standards, accessible complaint channels, and regular independent performance audits.

These measures must be implemented with clear privacy protections and rules against political misuse. The purpose is not to create a workplace police state. It is to protect citizens, identify recurring failures, reward competent workers, improve training, and ensure that supervisors cannot pretend that problems do not exist.

Taxpayers should not have to finance ministerial trips simply to establish whether staff are attending to the public. Ministers have policy portfolios to manage. Their time should not be consumed by discovering basic failures that competent managers ought to identify and correct daily.

If a department cannot tell its minister how many callers were answered, how long citizens waited, how many complaints were received, whether applications were processed on time, or which officers repeatedly failed the public, then that department is not being managed. It is being left to drift.

Editor’s Note: Accountability Cannot Stop at the Counter

The minister’s unannounced visit exposed more than poor customer service. It exposed the failure of a Government that has budgeted billions for ministries and agencies, financed staff training, purchased equipment, promoted digitalization, and repeatedly promised improved service delivery—yet still appears unable to ensure that ordinary citizens are treated efficiently and respectfully at the most basic point of contact.

The issue is not whether an employee was discourteous on one particular day, whether a phone rang unanswered, or whether citizens waited too long in one office. Those are the visible symptoms. The deeper disease is institutional failure.

Value for money is not a press release. It is not a budget speech, a ribbon-cutting exercise, a glossy report, or a ministerial visit arranged for public consumption. Value for money is reflected in results: calls answered, files located, applications processed, appointments kept, complaints resolved, citizens informed, and people treated with basic dignity.

If a minister can enter an office unannounced and discover dysfunction that has apparently escaped the attention of the ministry’s management, then the minister must not confine responsibility to the staff behind the counter. The Permanent Secretary must answer. Departmental heads must answer. Supervisors must answer. And the minister, as the political head with responsibility for the portfolio, must answer as well.

◊Who monitors service standards?

◊ Who receives and analyses complaints?

◊ Who checks attendance and productivity?

◊ Who reviews pending applications and delayed files?

◊ Who determines whether training has actually improved performance?

◊ Who evaluates whether money spent on technology has reduced waiting times and made services easier to access?

The same concern applies beyond a single office. Guyana has become accustomed to presidential and Cabinet outreaches where the country’s highest political officials are called upon to learn that a drain is blocked, a streetlight is broken, a road is deteriorating, or potholes have gone unattended. Citizens may welcome the intervention because it sometimes brings quick relief.

That is not a sign of strong governance. It is evidence of an administrative culture that is excessively top-down, reactive, and dependent on political intervention. A functioning State should not require the President to identify a blocked drain or a minister to discover that an office is failing to answer telephones.

The Government cannot credibly promote a “smart city,” modernization, technological transformation, or efficient public administration while relying on impromptu inspections and outreach tours as the principal tools for identifying routine failures. This is an asymmetry of governance: grand national ambitions at the top, but weak monitoring and poor execution where citizens actually encounter the State.

The minister’s visit was therefore useful—not because it revealed something extraordinary, but because it revealed what too many Guyanese already know. It also implicitly indicted the Government’s own management systems and the ministerial leadership responsible for ensuring that those systems work.

There should be consequences. Not theatrical reprimands for junior officers alone, but formal service-delivery reviews; public performance targets; audited complaint, call, and processing-time records; regular reports to Parliament; corrective deadlines for senior managers; and sanctions where negligence, incompetence, or chronic non-performance is established.

Ministers cannot take credit for budget allocations and new initiatives while disowning responsibility for the results. Permanent Secretaries cannot administer billions in public funds without being held accountable for whether their agencies deliver. Department heads cannot occupy positions of authority while routine dysfunction festers below them.

Until that happens, unannounced visits will remain what they are—brief moments of official discovery in a country where taxpayers have long been living with the consequences of Government’s failure to manage what it funds

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 The Article 51 Sleight of Hand

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar– September 2026

A Speaker’s press release, a Chief Whip’s rebuttal, and a consultation exercise that collapses the moment anyone asks what, precisely, is being consulted on

There is a particular kind of institutional evasion that does not deny the substance of a complaint so much as it changes the subject to something true but irrelevant, and hopes no one notices the swap. The Speaker of the National Assembly has just supplied a textbook specimen of it.

On Tuesday, President Irfaan Ali proceeded with a meeting billed as an engagement with the Parliamentary Foreign Relations Committee. Opposition members of that committee, and of the Economic Services Committee summoned for a separate sitting, did not attend. The We Invest in Nationhood Party said its MPs stayed away because correspondence to the Speaker had gone unanswered in any meaningful way. The Speaker, in a press release, acknowledged the correspondence, stated that a reply had in fact been dispatched, and closed with a line evidently meant to settle the matter: Article 51 of the Constitution provides that Parliament comprises the President and the National Assembly.

A civics footnote, delivered as though it were a rebuttal. It is not one. And the response from Opposition Chief Whip Tabitha Sarabo-Halley, released the same day, does the necessary work of showing why.  

WHAT WAS ACTUALLY ASKED

Sarabo-Halley’s account matters because it reframes what the dispute is actually about. Her letter to the Speaker, she says, did not simply ask whether a meeting was happening. It asked under what authority the meeting was being convened, in what capacity Members were being asked to attend, and what business was to be considered — the ordinary, minimum information any parliamentary committee needs before a Chairperson can properly summon it. The reply she received, she says, came not from the Speaker directly but from the Deputy Clerk, and it conceded the central point: these sessions do not constitute meetings of the respective Parliamentary Sectoral Committees.

“If these are not meetings of the respective Parliamentary Sectoral Committees, then Members cannot reasonably be expected to attend them as committee meetings.”

That is not a minor procedural quibble. It is the Clerk’s own office confirming that the thing opposition MPs were being asked to attend carried no defined parliamentary status at all — not a formally constituted committee sitting, not chaired by the committee’s own Chairperson, not built around a circulated agenda. What, then, was it? The Office of the President has called it consultation. APNU’s Coretta McDonald, present at a separate but related sitting, called it something blunter: “just one of those– photo op to say consultation did take place.”

THE CONSTITUTIONAL SLEIGHT OF HAND

This is where the Speaker’s invocation of Article 51 does its quiet work. The provision is accurate as far as it goes — the President is, formally, part of the institution of Parliament, alongside the National Assembly. But the Speaker deploys that fact to answer a question no one asked. Sarabo-Halley was not disputing that the President sits within Parliament in the constitutional sense. She was asking what a specific committee, operating under its own standing orders, under a specific Chairperson, with a specific mandate to scrutinize government policy and administration, was actually being convened to do — and by whom.

Those are different questions with different answers, and the difference is the entire point of having sectoral committees in the first place. A Parliamentary Sectoral Committee is not a standing invitation for the Executive to address its members whenever convenient. It is a scrutiny mechanism, with its own procedure for how it is summoned and what it does when it meets. If the President’s membership in Parliament under Article 51 were sufficient, on its own, to require committee attendance without an agenda, without the Chairperson convening it, and without any defined business — as Sarabo-Halley put it — then Article 51 appears to have been given a rather remarkable interpretation.

Her formulation is the more precise one, and worth stating plainly: the President being part of Parliament does not make parliamentary committees departments of the Executive. Collapsing that distinction is not a reading of Article 51. It is a repurposing of it.

A PATTERN WITH A NAME

This newsroom has tracked a recurring structure in how consultation gets performed in Guyana’s current political arrangement: an invitation is extended, attendance or non-attendance is then treated as the entire story, and the substantive question — consultation over what, on what terms, with what actual input into the outcome — goes unaddressed. The pattern recurred, in different registers, in the selective initiation of consultation on Judicial Service Commission, Local Government Commission, and Public Service Commission appointments earlier last month, where some appointments moved forward through formal consultation and the substantive Chancellor and Chief Justice vacancy; arguably the most consequential of the lot — did not.

The mechanism is the same here. Meet the form of consultation; contest the framing the moment anyone asks whether the form had any substance.

Rupnarain’s warning, in the account carried alongside McDonald’s, names the risk directly: that attendance at such a meeting would later be cited as proof the opposition was consulted, or had signed off on decisions already made — on, in this instance, live matters including Guyana’s ICJ case against Venezuela and the Third Country National Agreement with the United States. An opposition MP who walks into a room with no agenda has no way of knowing, in advance, whether their presence will be recorded as scrutiny or as endorsement.

That is precisely the ambiguity a properly constituted committee meeting, with a circulated agenda and a Chairperson in the chair, exists to foreclose.

WHAT THE SPEAKER’S OFFICE OWES THE RECORD

None of this requires assuming bad faith on the part of the Office of the President in scheduling the sessions, or accepting every particular of the opposition’s account without scrutiny of its own. It requires only taking seriously what the Deputy Clerk’s letter itself appears to have conceded, and asking the Speaker’s office the question its press release did not answer: if these were not sectoral committee meetings, what were they, under what parliamentary authority were members summoned to them, and why was a circulated agenda — the baseline precondition Sarabo-Halley says she specifically requested — not provided?

A constitutional citation is not a substitute for an answer to that question. The Speaker’s office would do more for the institution it represents by supplying one than by repeating, correctly but besides the point, that the President is part of Parliament.

Everyone already knew that. What no one yet knows is what, exactly, opposition MPs were being asked to attend, and on whose terms.

— The Board

Freedom Is Not Free: What Happens When the State Comes for the Lawyer, Not Just the Client

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

On September 2, a Chinese lawyer named Ruth Wang arrived at Taoyuan International Airport in Taiwan with her husband and two young children, carrying little more than the knowledge that she could not go home. Her offense was never framed as a crime. No court charged her, no warrant named her. Her firm was simply told to dissolve, or be dissolved. Her mentor’s law license had already been revoked. Her colleagues had been suspended from practice for six months. The message required no indictment to be understood: stop representing Zion Church, or stop practicing law.

Wang’s case is worth sitting with — not only because it is a grave violation of religious freedom, which it plainly is, but because of where the state chose to apply pressure. Beijing did not simply prosecute the believers. It went after the people defending them.

That distinction is the whole story, and it is a pattern accountability journalists should learn to recognize wherever it appears, in whatever calibration a given system permits.

The Church, the Crackdown, the Deal

Zion Church is one of China’s most prominent unregistered Protestant congregations — a “house church” operating outside the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement that Beijing uses to keep Christianity under Communist Party supervision. In October 2025, Chinese authorities conducted one of the largest single-church crackdowns in decades, detaining more than twenty members and formally arresting eighteen, including founding pastor Ezra Jin.         Jin’s case eventually became a diplomatic bargaining chip. He was released this past July, after nine months in custody, following direct intervention by the Trump administration — reportedly raised personally with Xi Jinping. He is now believed to be in the United States with family.

But diplomacy freed one man. It did not free the church. Eight of Jin’s co-workers remain detained at Beihai Detention Center in Guangxi: pastors Wang Lin, Gao Yingjia, Yin Huibin, Liu Zhenbin, Lin Shucheng, and Wang Cong, elder Wang Zhong, and church worker Wu Qiuyu. Their release required no presidential phone call, because they had no equivalent leverage.

This is the quieter cruelty embedded in high-level diplomatic rescues: they tend to reach exactly as far as international attention does, and no farther.

Criminalizing the Defense

It is against this backdrop that Ruth Wang’s flight matters most. She was not a defendant. She was defense counsel — a partner at Beijing’s VDoor Law Firm, part of the legal team representing Zion Church figures since the arrests began. Her mentor, Zhang Kai, had his license revoked and was barred from leaving the country. Other VDoor lawyers were suspended from practice. When some tried to move to different firms, they were blocked from doing that too. Judicial authorities did not merely discourage the representation — they ordered the lawyers off the case and off the firm altogether.

This is what it looks like when a state decides that the right to counsel is itself the threat. Beijing did not need to convict Ruth Wang of anything. It needed only to make continuing her work impossible, and let the professional consequences do what a courtroom did not have to.

Even Wang’s escape carries the same lesson. Taiwan gave her “temporary accommodation” but was explicit that it cannot grant political asylum to mainland Chinese citizens — a bind produced entirely by cross-strait politics that have nothing to do with her case. She is now appealing to the United States or Canada for resettlement, a woman and her children rendered stateless not because she broke a law, but because she practiced one.

The Machinery Beneath the Headline

Wang’s case did not emerge in isolation. It sits atop a rapidly hardening legal architecture. On January 1, 2026, revisions to China’s Public Security Administration Punishment Law took effect, and for the first time explicitly listed “illegal religious activities” as grounds for administrative detention — five to fifteen days, plus fines, imposed without the safeguards of a criminal trial.

Administrative detention is a useful tool for a state that wants punishment without due process: it is fast, deniable, and difficult to appeal.

In the first half of 2026, more than a dozen Chinese cities built enforcement infrastructure on top of that legal foundation — infrastructure that depends not on police work, but on citizens turning on each other. In Yunnan’s Honghe prefecture, authorities published 35 categories of reportable “illegal religious activity,” reaching into private homes, WeChat sermons, and unapproved religious education. In Qinghai’s Haidong prefecture, the reporting obligation was extended to hotels and travel agencies, conscripting private businesses into state surveillance of religious life. In Chengdu, the state began paying for it outright — up to 800 RMB, roughly $120, for a verified tip.

None of this requires banning religion outright. It only requires making the administrative cost of practicing it, or defending someone who does, high enough that self-policing accomplishes what mass arrests once did.

That is the actual mechanism of “Sinicization”: not the abolition of faith, but its confinement to whatever narrow space the state finds convenient to permit today and can revoke tomorrow.

 Freedom Is Not Free

There is a version of this story that ends at outrage over religious persecution, and that version would already be worth telling. But the sharper accountability point is this: authoritarian systems rarely attack a right in the open. They attack the people who make the right usable — the lawyer willing to file the brief, the pastor willing to preach, the witness willing to talk. Punish the defenders, and the right survives on paper while dying in practice. Beijing can continue insisting, accurately in the narrowest technical sense, that its citizens are free to worship.

It is simply no longer true that they are free to be defended for doing so.

This is not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, and it is not always this visible. Where a government’s institutions are large and its media loud, pressure on legal representation shows up as license revocations and firm closures, because the state does not fear being watched. Where institutions are smaller, more personal, and more easily obscured from public view, the same pressure can move quieter — through professional or employment consequences for a lawyer’s associates, never officially tied to the case, never confirmed on the record, and therefore never required to answer for itself.

The mechanism is the same. Only the visibility differs, and visibility is precisely what determines whether the public ever gets to hold anyone accountable for it.

That is the throughline worth carrying past this single case: freedom of religion, freedom of counsel, freedom of the press — none of them are self-executing. They exist only as far as someone is willing to exercise them, and stay standing only as long as someone else is willing to defend the ones who do. Ruth Wang’s children do not yet have a country.

That is the price this particular defense cost. Readers who take comfort in distance from Beijing’s methods should ask, plainly, whether they would still recognize the same mechanism if it arrived without a press release.

— The Board

THE SURVEILLANCE NO ONE VOTED FOR

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Twenty-five years ago this month, nineteen men turned commercial aircraft into weapons and murdered nearly three thousand people on American soil. Nothing written here disputes the scale of that grief, or the legitimacy of a state’s obligation to prevent its recurrence. But grief is not a blank check, and in 2001 Congress wrote one anyway. The USA PATRIOT Act passed both chambers and reached the President’s desk in six weeks — a bill that, as the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy observed at the time, moved through Congress faster than routine legislation raising no constitutional concerns, while gutting large sections of the Fourth Amendment.

Twenty-five years on, the law’s financial-surveillance architecture — expanded Know-Your-Customer mandates, a widened net of obligated institutions, and Section 314(a) information-sharing that lets federal agencies map a citizen’s entire banking footprint without a warrant, a subpoena, or a grand jury — is no longer used chiefly against terrorists. It has been redirected at immigrants and, this year, at protest movements, exactly as critics warned a permanent security state eventually would.

The American reckoning with that law is, at least, a live public argument. Reporters file to it. Cato writes about it. Talking Points Memo can publish an investigation into Homeland Security Investigations using Section 314(a) to surveil left-leaning organizing, and the story finds an audience prepared to be outraged.

Guyana has no equivalent public reckoning, because Guyana has no equivalent public knowledge of what its banks are actually doing — and this editorial exists to begin correcting that.

THE TRANSACTION THAT SHOULD NOT REQUIRE AN INTERROGATION

Here is the fact pattern, stated plainly, because plain facts are the strongest indictment available: a Guyanese customer sought a bank cheque. The funds were the customer’s own, already on deposit, already known to the institution, already accounted for on its books. There was no cash coming in from an unverified source. There was no foreign wire of uncertain origin.

There was, in the plainest sense available to a bank’s own compliance framework, no open question about where the money came from — the bank was already holding it.

The bank nonetheless demanded photo identification for the payee — a person who is not the bank’s customer, has no account relationship with the institution, and was not a party to any transaction the bank needed to evaluate for risk. The customer, whose funds and whose conduct are the actual subject of the transaction, is the one who is already fully documented, fully known, and fully compliant. The payee’s identity adds nothing to any legitimate assessment of that transaction’s risk. It cannot, because the money’s provenance was never in question.

This is not risk-based due diligence. Risk-based due diligence calibrates scrutiny to the actual uncertainty in a transaction — the FATF standard that Guyana’s own regulators claim to follow requires exactly that calibration, and explicitly warns against its opposite. This is something else: a reflexive demand for identification because demanding identification has become the institutional posture, regardless of whether the specific transaction in front of the teller presents any question that identification could answer.

NO ONE MADE THEM DO THIS

It would be a different editorial — a more familiar one — if Guyana’s banks could point to Basseterre, or to Paris, and say the FATF made them do it. That defense is not available to them. As of the June 2026 FATF plenary, Guyana is not on the Jurisdictions Under Increased Monitoring list. It is not grey-listed. It is not black-listed. It sits alongside the large majority of jurisdictions the FATF has not flagged for strategic AML-CFT deficiencies requiring international remediation.

This matters because the FATF’s own guidance is explicit that grey-listing is not an automatic trigger for enhanced due diligence, and that even where a jurisdiction is listed, the FATF discourages indiscriminate de-risking. In other words: even the architects of the global AML regime that grew out of America’s post-9/11 panic have had to formally warn financial institutions against exactly the behavior Guyanese banks are now engaged in — applying scrutiny with no proportion to actual risk.

Guyana’s banks are not merely over-complying with an international standard under pressure. They are manufacturing a standard that does not exist, on a jurisdiction that is not under the monitoring that would purport to justify it.

Two explanations remain, and neither reflects well on the institutions involved. Either this is a defensive posture; a bank inventing friction it can point to later as evidence of vigilance, at the direct expense of a customer’s time and a non-customer’s privacy, regardless of whether the friction accomplishes anything — or it is a Bank of Guyana-driven KYC requirement applied without the risk-calibration the framework itself demands, sweeping in payees who are not parties to any suspicious conduct because it is administratively simpler than assessing each transaction on its merits.

Both are failures of governance. Neither is counterterrorism, or counter-laundering, or anything the Bank Secrecy Act’s original 1970 drafters, or the PATRIOT Act’s 2001 authors, would recognize as their purpose.

THE PATTERN AMERICA IS ONLY NOW QUESTIONING

The lineage matters, and it is not flattering. Financial surveillance in the West did not begin with terrorism. It began with tax evasion, then annexed the war on drugs, then annexed counterterrorism after September 11, and is now — a quarter century later, in the same country that wrote the PATRIOT Act — annexing immigration enforcement and the policing of protest. Treasury’s recent directive requiring banks to report suspected undocumented immigrants, and Homeland Security Investigations’ use of Section 314(a) to map the finances of protest organizations without judicial process, are not aberrations from the system’s design.

They are what a permanent, expandable surveillance infrastructure does when the original justification runs out and a new one is needed to keep it staffed and funded.

Guyana should study that trajectory with more urgency than it currently does, because small states adopt these architectures with none of the institutional friction that at least slows the process in Washington. There is no Cato Institute publishing a dissent from the Bank of Guyana’s compliance posture. There is no investigative outlet with the resources of Talking Points Memo cataloguing which agencies request customer data and why. There is, in most cases, no statute a customer can cite back to a teller who has just demanded a stranger’s photo ID for a transaction the bank’s own records show presents no risk at all.

The asymmetry of power between an ordinary depositor and an institution that can simply say “regulations require it” — whether or not any regulation actually does — is the entire story, and it is a story Guyana’s banking public has had no occasion to hear told plainly.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES

This is not an argument against know-your-customer obligations, anti-money-laundering law, or the legitimate function of financial-crime enforcement. It is an argument that those obligations exist to answer specific questions about specific risks, and that a bank which cannot say what risk a payee’s photo ID resolves in a transaction it has already verified is not practicing compliance.

It is practicing theater, and billing the public for the performance in wasted time, needless friction, and the quiet normalization of surveillance for its own sake.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11 is an appropriate moment for the United States to ask whether the architecture Congress built in six weeks of 2001 still serves the purpose it was built for.

It is an equally appropriate moment for Guyana to ask a simpler and more answerable question: when a bank cannot show that a specific demand for identification actually resolves a specific question of risk, on whose authority — and for whose benefit — was that identification ever required?

The 592 Guardian has posed that question to the institutions concerned. It should not require an editorial to get an answer.

— The Board

A Pattern, Not Two Incidents: How MARAD and the GPF Are Both Exercising Authority Neither Was Given

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Two institutions. Two separate justifications. One boat, one man, and — on close reading — a single underlying pattern: agencies of the state substituting their own discretion for the authority the law actually assigns elsewhere.

The license. MARAD’s Friday statement all but ruled out granting Azruddin Mohamed a captain’s license, invoking his US sanctions designation and pending extradition proceedings as evidence of disqualifying “character.” As this newsroom has already established, that argument does not survive contact with the Department’s own governing statute. The Guyana Shipping Act 1998 draws a clean, repeated line between the Minister responsible for shipping — who alone holds the power to make regulations under section 51, including on the examination, certification and discipline of skippers — and MARAD itself, whose delegated powers under section 9 expressly exclude “the power to make orders and regulations.” Cancellation of a seafarer’s certificate is, per the Act’s own table of contents, a matter of “Cancellation, etc., of certificate by Minister” (s.110), following a court recommendation (s.109), with a statutory right of appeal (s.111). MARAD is not the Minister. No regulation made under s.51 naming foreign sanctions or indictment as a disqualifying condition has been cited by the Department, because none appears to exist on the public record. What MARAD announced as compliance was, on the statute’s own architecture, policy; dressed in the language of law it does not have the standing to write.

The vessel. Ten days after two of Mohamed’s vehicles and his boat were taken into custody at Leonora, no resolution is in sight. One vehicle, PAB 4000, is held over an engine-number discrepancy that a senior GRA official — by Mohamed’s account to Kiskadee Watch — described as a likely “simple fix” the tax authority itself was not even aware of until he raised it directly. The boat’s status is murkier still: Mohamed says he has not been told what, if anything, is required of him to secure its release. What he has received, repeatedly, is a commander’s verbal assurance that the matter would be addressed “today, tomorrow.”

Article 142 of the Constitution permits property to be held only under the authority of a written law, carving out a narrow exception for property retained for the purposes of an active investigation. That exception exists to enable legitimate police work — not to function as an unreviewed, self-renewing hold with no defined evidentiary objective and no judicial instrument authorizing its continuation. Ten days of “today, tomorrow” from a single commanding officer, with no charge laid, no stated release conditions, and no indication the matter has been placed before a magistrate, is not an investigation with an endpoint.

The throughline. Look at what MARAD and the GPF have in common in these two episodes, and the pattern stops looking like coincidence. In both cases, a state agency has reached for a discretionary, character-or-circumstance-based justification — “sanctioned character” on one hand, an open-ended “investigation” on the other; in place of a specific, citable legal instrument that would make its action lawful. In both cases, the authority actually needed to take the contested action belongs to a different institution entirely: a Ministerial regulation MARAD cannot write for itself; a judicial order the GPF has not sought.

This is the deeper accountability problem the Mohamed matter exposes, independent of any view on the man himself or the merits of the US case against him. When agencies routinely reach past the powers actually assigned to them; MARAD into Ministerial regulation-making, the GPF into functions the Constitution reserves for judicial review; the result is a governing pattern where discretion substitutes for law whenever the state finds a particular outcome convenient.

Formal questions this newsroom is putting to MARAD, the Guyana Police Force, and the Ministry responsible for shipping:

1. Under what regulation made pursuant to section 51(b) or 51(g) of the Guyana Shipping Act does MARAD assert authority to treat foreign sanctions or indictment status as disqualifying for a boat operator’s license — and has the Minister issued any such regulation, published or otherwise?
2. Under what specific statutory authority are Mohamed’s two vehicles and boat currently held, and has that authority been placed before a magistrate for review at any point during the ten days in custody?
3. What documentation, if any, does the GPF require to release the boat, and why has MARAD’s licensing refusal and the GPF’s continued custody of the same vessel not been reconciled into a single, transparent institutional position?
4. Can either agency produce a comparable case — another applicant, another seizure — handled under the same discretionary standard, to demonstrate this is a consistent rule rather than a standard applied to one man?

Until MARAD identifies the Ministerial instrument it claims to be enforcing, and until the GPF identifies the judicial instrument authorizing continued custody, both agencies are operating in the same territory: exercising power that belongs, by the law’s own design, to someone else.

— The Board