THE ARITHMETIC OF SURRENDER

July 3, 2026/0 Comments/in Business & Economics, Featured/by Editor

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦Accountability Journalism for Guyana

EDITORIAL
The Arithmetic of Surrender: How Guyana’s Profit Oil Was Promised Away Before It Arrived.

Christopher Ram’s 2025 financial statement analysis reveals a structural betrayal embedded in the 2016 Stabroek Agreement — and a government that has broken its own contract while claiming to honour it

Georgetown, Guyana | July ,2026 | The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

When President Irfaan Ali’s administration speaks of the Natural Resource Fund as Guyana’s intergenerational patrimony — a sovereign store of wealth to be held in trust for generations yet unborn — it speaks in the language of stewardship. Chartered Accountant and Attorney Christopher Ram now compels us to examine that language against the arithmetic. The result is not merely unflattering. It is a structural indictment.
Ram’s analysis of the 2025 audited financial statements of ExxonMobil Guyana Limited, filed alongside the already-reviewed statements of Hess and CNOOC, provides for the first time a complete picture of six years of Stabroek Block production. That picture should be required reading in every secondary school economics classroom in this country — because what it reveals is that the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement, celebrated by successive administrations as the framework for national transformation, was designed to ensure that Guyana would always finish last.

THE NUMBERS THAT CANNOT BE ARGUED AWAY

Let us state the figures plainly. In 2025 alone, ExxonMobil — holding a 45% interest in Stabroek — recorded revenue of G$1.713 trillion and profit before tax of G$1.214 trillion, approximately US$5.8 billion. Guyana’s entire 50% share of profit oil for that year: G$451 billion, approximately US$2.1 billion. ExxonMobil’s 45% interest yielded nearly three times what the sovereign nation earned on its nominal half-share.
Across all three companies combined — ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC — 2025 total revenue reached G$3.59 trillion with combined profit before tax of G$2.52 trillion, approximately US$12 billion. For every dollar Guyana earned on its so-called 50% share, the three operators earned $5.50 in profit. The ratio is not incidental. It is structural. It is the Agreement operating as designed.
The six-year aggregate is more damning still. From 2020 through 2025, the three companies recorded combined revenue of G$12.30 trillion and combined profit before tax of G$8.58 trillion — approximately US$41 billion. After tax, they retained G$7.02 trillion. Guyana’s accumulated profit oil over the same period: G$1.58 trillion, approximately US$7.57 billion. The ratio across six years averages 4.89 to one, climbing to nearly six to one in 2024. Guyana holds the majority interest in name. In reality, it is a minority beneficiary.

ARTICLE 15.4: THE CLAUSE THAT CONSUMED THE FUND But Ram does not stop at the revenue disparity. He arrives at a finding that should have provoked ministerial resignations, emergency parliamentary sessions, and a formal audit demand from the Public Accounts Committee. He has not received any of these responses. The country has received silence.
Article 15.4 of the 2016 Agreement stipulates that the State — meaning the Government of Guyana — pays the income tax of the oil companies. The mechanism: the appropriate portion of the Government’s share of profit oil is accepted as payment in full of that tax liability. The companies do not write a cheque to the Guyana Revenue Authority. Guyana’s profit oil is simply routed back to extinguish the companies’ tax obligations.
Over the six-year production period, the three companies recorded income tax of G$1.56 trillion. Guyana’s total accumulated profit oil: G$1.58 trillion. The differential — the residual that remains after the nation’s profit oil is consumed by the companies’ tax liability — is G$22 billion. Not G$22 billion per year. G$22 billion across six years. A rounding error on ExxonMobil’s quarterly earnings call.

This is what the Natural Resource Fund was built upon. Not a surplus. Not a patrimony. A remnant

The Fund, as Ram correctly identifies, retains in substance only the two-percent royalty and whatever interest the balance earns. A two-percent royalty on one of the world’s fastest-growing oil productions is not a foundation for intergenerational wealth transfer. It is a consolation prize, dressed in the language of sovereignty.

A GOVERNMENT THAT CANNOT CHOOSE BETWEEN ITS VIOLATIONS
Ram identifies the consequent legal paradox with surgical precision, and this editorial endorses his framing without reservation. One of only two conclusions is available. Either the Agreement has been honoured — in which case nearly the entirety of the nation’s profit oil has been transferred back to the companies in satisfaction of their tax obligations, and the Natural Resource Fund holds almost nothing of substance — or the Agreement has been violated, and the oil companies have been issued tax certificates for payments that the National Estimates show were never remitted to the Guyana Revenue Authority.

President Ali’s administration cannot occupy both positions simultaneously. It has claimed, repeatedly and forcefully, that the 2016 Agreement is sacred, that it respects the rule of law, and that the Agreement cannot and will not be renegotiated. If that is so, the Fund is a fiction. If the Fund contains something, it is because the Agreement is being systematically breached — not by ExxonMobil, not by Hess, not by CNOOC, but by the Government of Guyana itself, which has been issuing tax certificates as instruments of political theatre while silently declining to honour Article 15.4 in the national accounts.

This platform has documented, across multiple investigations, the PPP/C administration’s pattern of treating contract sanctity as a rhetorical weapon — invoked against citizens, indigenous communities, and civil society organisations when convenient, and quietly set aside when the obligation falls upon the state. The Article 15.4 mechanism is the most consequential instance of that pattern yet identified.

THE RENEGOTIATION CLAUSE AND THE COURAGE IT REQUIRES Ram notes that the Agreement contains a renegotiation clause — and that the Government has not invoked it. This publication notes that the Government’s refusal to invoke that clause, while simultaneously breaching other provisions, represents the worst of all possible outcomes.

It preserves the fiction of contract sanctity for public consumption while delivering none of its protections in practice. It denies Guyana the benefit of a renegotiated agreement that might reflect the extraordinary scale of production now realised, while also denying the nation the full benefit of the existing agreement’s own terms.
Finance Minister Ashni Singh has repeatedly cited the Agreement’s stability provisions as justification for inaction. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo has framed any challenge to the Agreement as an assault on investor confidence. These are not arguments. They are deflections. The question before the nation is not whether investors should have confidence. It is whether the citizens of Guyana — the 800,000 people in whose name this Agreement was signed — are receiving what the Agreement itself promises them. Ram’s arithmetic says they are not.

THE PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE MUST ACT
This editorial makes the following formal accountability demands, addressed to the institutions that carry the constitutional obligation to respond.
The Public Accounts Committee must immediately summon the Commissioner-General of the Guyana Revenue Authority to provide a public accounting of whether tax certificates were issued to ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC in respect of income tax obligations under the 2016 Agreement, and whether corresponding receipts appear in the National Estimates. The discrepancy Ram identifies — tax certificates issued, no GRA receipt recorded — is, on its face, a falsification of public financial records. The PAC cannot remain silent.

The Natural Resource Fund’s Board of Directors must publish a formal reconciliation of the Fund’s actual receipts against the theoretical entitlement under Article 15.4. If the Government’s profit oil share has been used to discharge the companies’ tax liability, that disbursement must appear in the Fund’s audited statements. If it does not, the Board is maintaining accounts that do not reflect the Agreement’s actual operation. That is not stewardship. That is concealment.

The Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services — which this publication has previously documented as operating on a drastically reduced meeting schedule — must treat Ram’s analysis as urgent business and convene a special session with the Ministry of Finance, the NRF Board, and the GRA in attendance. The reduction of that Committee’s oversight function during the precise period in which Guyana’s oil revenues reached their highest levels is not a coincidence this editorial is prepared to leave unexamined.

WHAT THE FUND WAS PROMISED TO BE
When the Natural Resource Fund Act was amended in 2021, the PPP/C government argued that its new architecture was superior to the Coalition’s framework — more transparent, more rule-bound, more protective of future generations. Vice President Jagdeo made that case publicly and repeatedly. The Board was appointed. The advisors were retained. The structure was celebrated.

Ram’s analysis renders that celebration hollow. Not because the Fund’s architecture is poorly designed. Because the underlying Agreement that was supposed to fill the Fund was designed — or has been administered — to ensure that the Fund would receive, in net terms, almost nothing from six years of one of the most productive offshore oil operations in the Western Hemisphere.
An intergenerational fund with no meaningful assets to transfer between generations is not a patrimony. It is a liability — a political instrument designed to create the appearance of responsible resource governance while the substance of that governance is surrendered, clause by clause, to the two largest economies in the world.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY STANDARD THIS EDITORIAL APPLIES
This news outlet does not adjudicate legal disputes. But it does apply an accountability standard: when a government claims that a contract is sacred, it must honour that contract; when it claims to protect the national interest, its financial statements must confirm that protection; and when a credentialed analyst produces documented arithmetic demonstrating that neither claim withstands scrutiny, the government must answer — publicly, specifically, and promptly.

President Ali, Finance Minister Singh, and Vice President Jagdeo have not answered Ram’s previous analyses. They have not answered the GGMC audit backlog. They have not answered the Wales Gas-to-Energy budget variance. They have not answered the diaspora bond’s missing enabling legislation. They will not, on present form, answer this.
That silence is itself an answer. And this publication will continue to record it.

— The Editorial Board, The 592 Guardian | June 2026
This editorial is based on the published analysis of Christopher Ram, Chartered Accountant and Attorney, as reported in Kaieteur News, June 28, 2026, and on The 592 Guardian’s independent review of publicly available audited financial statements of the Natural Resource Fund and the Stabroek Block operators.

THE CORNER HE CANNOT NAME

July 2, 2026/0 Comments/in Business & Economics, Accountability/by Editor

The 592 Guardian Accountability Journalism.July 2026

Energy Procurement · Karpowership Investigation

The Corner He Cannot Name

Minister Indar insists the Government was never backed into a corner. The arithmetic of his own admissions tells a different story — and Guyanese ratepayers will fund every cent of the distance between those two accounts. The 592 Guardian Editorial Board June 2026 · Georgetown.

Public Utilities Minister Deodat Indar appeared on the Starting Point podcast this month to reassure the nation that the Government of Guyana had not been outmaneuvered in its ongoing contract renewal negotiations with Turkish power company Karpowership. “No one should believe we were ever backed into a corner,” he declared. “We will defend the interests of the Guyanese people.”

The minister’s confidence deserves scrutiny — not because his rhetoric is untypical, but because the numbers embedded in his own account produce a conclusion he appears unwilling to draw. When those numbers are laid end to end, what emerges is not a portrait of a government defending its citizens. It is a portrait of a government presiding over a structural dependency of its own making, and reaching for the language of strength to describe the dimensions of its own trap.

The 592 Guardian does the arithmetic Minister Indar declined to offer.

I.The Rate Surrender: From 7.2¢ to 9.5¢

When GPL signed the first Karpowership contract in 2024 — the 36 MW vessel docked at Everton in the Berbice River — it secured power at 7.2 cents per kilowatt-hour. Indar himself called this “the lowest rate on the market at that time.” The second vessel, 60 MW at Meadow Bank on the Demerara River, was contracted at 9.5 cents per kWh. No public explanation was ever furnished for why the second ship cost 32 percent more per unit than the first, negotiated in the same calendar year, by the same government, with the same counterparty.

Now both contracts have elapsed. Karpowership is asking for 9.5 cents per kWh across the board for the renewal. The Government, Indar tells us, wants 9 cents. “We are working between that,” he said, which is the minister’s way of announcing that the floor established in 2024 — 7.2 cents, which he himself described as historically low — is simply gone. It will not be recovered. It is not even part of the conversation.

“They would never renew it for a concessional rate of 7.6 cents. We know that.” — Minister Deodat Indar, Starting Point Podcast, 2026 The minister says this as though it is a concession to realism. What it is, in fact, is a confession that the procurement architecture of 2024 contained no mechanism to preserve the rate advantage the Government now boasts about securing. A truly advantageous contract is one whose terms can be extended or benchmarked against renewals. A concessional rate that evaporates at the two-year mark is not a negotiating victory. It is a deferred cost.

II.What the Minister Did Not Do: The Full Cost Calculation

Indar offered no numbers to the public beyond the per-kWh rates. He offered no annual cost figure. He offered no contract-total projection. He offered no per-household burden. The 592 Guardian provides what the minister withheld.

The two vessels together supply 96 MW of contracted capacity. At a standard capacity factor of approximately 85 percent — a conservative industry estimate for powerships operating as baseload or near-baseload supply — annual generation is approximately 713,376 MWh, or roughly 713.4 million kWh per year. The calculations below use this figure across all scenarios.

// Cost Analysis — Karpowership Procurement · 96 MW Combined Capacity

Scenario	Rate (¢/kWh)	Annual Cost	2-Year Cost	vs. 7.2¢ Baseline (Annual)
Original Berbice rate 2024 benchmark — “lowest on market”	7.2¢	US$51.4M	US$102.8M	—
Government’s current position Indar’s stated ask in renewal	9.0¢	US$64.2M	US$128.4M	+US$12.8M/yr
Karpowership’s demand Company’s stated position	9.5¢	US$67.8M	US$135.5M	+US$16.4M/yr
NEGOTIATING BAND EXPOSURE
Gap between 9.0¢ and 9.5¢ positions “Working between that” — Indar	0.5¢	US$3.6M/yr	US$7.1M	over 2 years
Full surrender arc: 7.2¢ → 9.5¢ Total rate erosion since 2024	+2.3¢	US$16.4M/yr	US$32.8M	cumulative 2-yr loss vs baseline

Calculation Assumptions Combined capacity: 96 MW (36 MW Berbice + 60 MW Demerara) · Capacity factor: 85% · Annual generation: ~713.4M kWh · All figures in USD · Per-household burden (see below) assumes ~230,000 residential GPL customers · Exchange rate: GYD 209/USD · Cost pass-through assumed via tariff or subsidy mechanism

III.What Households Absorb

GPL does not operate on charity. The cost of purchased power — whether from Karpowership, InterEnergy, or any other supplier — flows directly to consumers through tariffs, to the Treasury through subsidy obligations, or to both. The minister did not address this transmission mechanism. The 592 Guardian addresses it now.

Per-Household Cost Burden — ~230,000 GPL Residential Customers

Rate Scenario	Annual System Cost	Annual Burden/HH	Monthly Burden/HH
7.2¢ — 2024 baseline	US$51.4M	US$224	US$18.6
9.0¢ — Government’s ask	US$64.2M	US$279	US$23.3
9.5¢ — Company’s demand	US$67.8M	US$295	US$24.6
INCREMENTAL HOUSEHOLD EXPOSURE vs. 7.2¢ BASELINE
Additional burden at 9.0¢	+US$12.8M/yr	+US$55/yr	+US$4.60/mo
Additional burden at 9.5¢	+US$16.4M/yr	+US$71/yr	+US$5.90/mo

To be precise: these figures represent the Karpowership component of GPL’s power purchase cost. They do not include transmission losses, administrative overhead, or the cost of other purchased-power agreements. They represent the minimum exposure attributable to this single contract. The actual per-household pass-through, depending on GPL’s tariff review schedule and subsidy arrangements with the Treasury, may be higher.

In a country where the median household income remains below US$800 per month, an additional US$4.60 to US$5.90 in monthly energy burden attributable to a single contracted supplier is not a rounding error. It is a policy consequence. And it has a name: it is what happens when a government procures power on a short-term, sole-source basis from a foreign supplier, creates grid dependency, and then discovers at renewal time that its leverage has been structurally foreclosed by its own prior decisions.

IV.The Architecture of Dependency

Indar’s most revealing statement was not his bravado about defending Guyanese interests. It was his acknowledgment that “the vessel is here, it’s already hooked up to our system, we need the power.” That sentence is the admission the minister did not intend to make. It describes, with clinical precision, the conditions under which one party in a negotiation does not, in fact, have the options it claims.

A supplier whose infrastructure is already integrated into the national grid, whose disconnection would immediately affect 96 MW of national generating capacity, and whose contract renewal is being negotiated while their ships continue to operate, holds structural leverage that no amount of ministerial firmness in a podcast interview can neutralize. This is not a commentary on Indar’s competence as a negotiator. It is a structural observation about the procurement choices made in 2024 and the absence of any competitive tendering process that would have created genuine alternatives at renewal time.

“We know we need the generation, but they’re not the only ones in town too.” — Minister Indar, conceding dependence while asserting leverage simultaneously

The minister cannot have it both ways. Either the Government needs the 96 MW — in which case the supplier has leverage — or it does not need the 96 MW, in which case the minister should immediately explain to Guyanese consumers what the backup generation plan is, who supplies it, at what rate, and under what procurement mechanism it was secured. No such explanation has been offered.

What has been offered is the assertion that the Government “has options.” The 592 Guardian formally requests that those options be named, costed, and subjected to public scrutiny. The people whose household budgets underwrite this negotiation are entitled to that information.

V.The Gas-to-Energy Deflection

Both the minister and the Government’s public communications have consistently invoked the Wales Gas-to-Energy project — slated to deliver approximately 300 MW from offshore natural gas “later this year” — as the eventual solution to Guyana’s generating capacity deficit. The power-ships, on this account, are merely a bridge. This framing deserves direct challenge.

The GtE project has been “later this year” for multiple successive years. Its cost trajectory, contractor complications involving Venezuelan-linked entities, and MOAP Inc. payroll irregularities have been documented in this publication and remain subjects of active public concern. Even accepting the Government’s timeline at face value, the question the minister has not answered is this: at what rate, and under what contract terms, will the two Karpowership vessels operate during the remaining window before GtE comes onstream? That window — measured at either 9.0 or 9.5 cents per kWh, for 96 MW, at 85 percent capacity — costs Guyanese consumers between US$64 million and US$68 million per year. The bridge has a toll.

Furthermore, bridging procurement that creates grid dependency without exit mechanisms is not a bridge. It is a foundation for the next renewal negotiation, in which the same structural conditions — hooked-up vessels, immediate need, no competitive alternative — will recur. Nothing in Indar’s account suggests the Government has contractual exit rights, performance benchmarks, or rate-cap provisions that would constrain Karpowership’s leverage at the next renewal point, assuming GtE delays continue.

VI.What Accountability Requires

The 592 Guardian does not allege bad faith on Minister Indar’s part. What we allege — on the basis of his own public statements — is a pattern of rhetorical deflection that consistently substitutes bravado for transparency, and that systematically withholds from Guyanese citizens the cost information necessary for informed public judgment about their government’s energy procurement decisions.

The minister is not “99 percent there” on a deal the public understands. He is 99 percent there on a deal the public has never been permitted to properly examine. That is a distinction with consequences — for parliamentary oversight, for GPL’s tariff review process, and for every household whose electricity bill will reflect the outcome of negotiations conducted, as Indar himself put it, away from public view.

Editorial Demands — For the Public Record

1. Minister Indar must publish the full cost modelling for each rate scenario under negotiation — annual totals, 2-year contract values, and projected per-household burden — before any renewal contract is signed.

2. The National Assembly’s Sectoral Committee on Economic Services must convene an emergency session on GPL’s power purchase agreements, including Karpowership, InterEnergy, and any other sole-source contracts, and do so at monthly frequency, not the quarterly schedule to which it has been reduced.

3. The Government must disclose what competitive procurement process, if any, was conducted before the 2024 Karpowership contracts were signed, and what competitive process, if any, is being conducted alongside the current renewal negotiations.

4. GPL’s Board must confirm, in writing, whether the renewal contract contains rate-cap provisions, exit clauses, or performance benchmarks enforceable against the supplier.

A minister who is truly not backed into a corner will welcome this transparency. One who is will not.

THE COUNSEL WHO WOULD BE GATEKEEPER

June 30, 2026/0 Comments/in Business & Economics, Accountability/by Editor

THE 592 GUARDIAN
Independent Accountability Journalism · Guyana
EDITORIAL
June 2026 | Georgetown, Guyana

The Counsel Who Would Be Gatekeeper: Devindra Kissoon and the Architecture of a Monopoly

When an officer of the court wields legal process not to vindicate rights but to extinguish competition, the integrity of the bar —and of Guyana’s constitutional order—demands an accounting.

The facts documented in Kaieteur News’ three-part investigation into Guyana’s commercial explosives market are not in dispute. They emerge from sworn affidavits, court filings, and correspondence on the letterhead of London House Chambers. They are, in the precise language of the law, matters of record. What remains in dispute — and what this Board now addresses directly — is whether the conduct they reveal is compatible with the duties of an attorney-at-law admitted to practice before the courts of this Republic.
The subject is Devindra Kissoon, known commercially as Dave Kissoon: a U.S. citizen, former director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Guyana, and the self-described exclusive supplier of explosives to the Guyanese mining market for decades. His firm, London House Chambers, acts as commercial counsel to Orica Mining Services, the world’s largest commercial explosives provider. In that capacity, the record shows, Kissoon has systematically deployed the machinery of the High Court to accomplish what the Civil Law of Guyana Act expressly forbids: the creation and enforcement of a commercial monopoly.

The Civil Law Act states that grants or licenses for the ‘sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything within Guyana… are altogether contrary to the laws of Guyana, and so are and shall be utterly void.’

THE LEGAL ARCHITECTURE OF EXCLUSION
In 2015, Dominicana De Cales S.A. — Docalsa — a regional licensee of global distributor Dyno Nobel, attempted to enter the Guyanese market. This was a lawful commercial act. Dyno Nobel is a credentialed international explosives provider. Docalsa’s principals are not insurgents; they are business people pursuing trade in a jurisdiction whose laws explicitly contemplate competition.

Kissoon’s response was not to compete. It was to litigate. He filed an ex parte application — a proceeding conducted without notice to the opposing party — arguing that Docalsa’s solicitations to domestic buyers constituted tortious interference with his prospective business relations. In his sworn affidavit of 30 July 2015, Kissoon named BK Quarries Inc., AGM Inc., Guyana Goldfields Inc., Troy Resources Guyana Inc., and Pharsalus Gold Inc. as clients with whom he expected continuous and exclusive business — a claim that, stated plainly, is an assertion of monopoly rights presented to a court as though they were enforceable entitlements.

The High Court granted an interim injunction in August 2015. Docalsa was frozen out of the market. When the competitor attempted to discharge the injunction in December 2016, London House Chambers deployed procedural arguments to strike out their defense. The matter did not proceed until May 2018 — nearly three years during which a lawful competitor was excluded from a market that Guyana’s Constitution and statutory law promised would remain open.
That three-year exclusion coincided precisely with one of the most consequential periods in Guyana’s modern economic history: the confirmation of the Stabroek Block discovery in 2015 and the onset of the infrastructure surge that would require, among other inputs, commercial explosives at scale. The timing was not incidental. It was, the record suggests, the point.

THE THREAT OF ARREST: AN OFFICER OF THE COURT SPEAKS
This Board directs particular scrutiny to a piece of correspondence dated 14 August 2015, dispatched on London House Chambers letterhead to Docalsa. The letter, obtained by Kaieteur News, did not merely assert a legal position. It explicitly threatened a ‘warrant for your arrest and imprisonment’ should Docalsa fail to withdraw from the market. It further noted that customs authorities had been instructed to seize and destroy their products.

An attorney who threatens a competitor’s principals with arrest and imprisonment — not as a legal prediction, but as an instrument of market exclusion — has ceased to function as counsel. He has become an enforcement arm.

Let this be stated without euphemism: threatening arrest and imprisonment in a cease-and-desist letter to a lawful commercial actor is not the conduct of an officer of the court discharging professional obligations. It is the use of legal authority — real or implied — to intimidate. It weaponises the coercive power of the state, or the appearance thereof, to achieve market outcomes that the law explicitly prohibits. The Guyana Bar Association and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court bear an institutional obligation to examine whether this conduct falls within the bounds of professional propriety. This Board calls on both bodies to do so.

The November 2025 cease-and-desist letter to Eclisar Financial — a firm involved in state-sponsored audits of offshore oil operations — carries the same architecture, scaled to the present moment of petrostate expansion. Explicitly copied to the Minister of Natural Resources and the Commissioner of Police, the letter threatens ‘actual, punitive and exemplary damages… in an amount to exceed US$1,000,000.00′ and asserts that London House’s client remains the ‘only authorized explosives dealer in Guyana.’ The carbon copy to the Minister of Natural Resources is not procedural courtesy. It is a signal — to the recipient, to the market, and to any regulator who might contemplate authorizing a competitor — that institutional power stands behind the claim.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONTRADICTION
The irony documented in the Kaieteur News investigation is not merely rhetorical. It is legally precise and professionally damning. Devindra Kissoon was lead commercial counsel in litigation that successfully dismantled the decade-long state telecommunications monopoly held by the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company, arguing before the courts that such monopolies violated the same Civil Law of Guyana Act that he now relies upon — by implication — to defend market exclusivity in explosives.
The Act’s prohibition is not ambiguous. It declares void ‘all grants or licenses for the sole buying, selling, making, working, or using of anything within Guyana.’ Kissoon understands this provision. He argued it successfully. He knows, as counsel must know, that the Explosives Act’s regulatory framework — however legitimate its public safety rationale — cannot lawfully be converted into a permanent barrier to market entry for the benefit of a single commercial actor. The police commissioner’s licensing authority exists to prevent diversion of dangerous materials to criminal uses, not to guarantee a monopoly to any attorney’s client.

The Explosives Act creates a safety regime. Kissoon appears to have converted it into a property right. These are not the same thing, and the difference matters enormously.

THE U.S. CITIZEN AND THE SHERMAN STANDARD
Devindra Kissoon is a United States citizen. That fact carries weight beyond biography. The Sherman Antitrust Act — the foundational statute of U.S. competition law — criminalises monopolistic conduct and attempts to monopolise any part of trade or commerce. American courts have held that the Sherman Act applies to conduct abroad that has a direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on U.S. commerce. Guyana’s extractive sector, in which Kissoon claims exclusive explosives supply rights, is substantially capitalised by U.S.-registered entities and subject to extensive cross-border commercial flows.
This Board does not assert that U.S. antitrust jurisdiction attaches to the specific conduct documented here. That is a legal question for competent counsel. We assert, however, that a U.S. citizen operating in a market where American firms do business — and using legal threats to exclude competitors — operates in a landscape where extraterritorial regulatory scrutiny is not merely theoretical. The U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission have both demonstrated willingness to examine conduct affecting U.S. commercial interests in foreign jurisdictions. Kissoon’s AmCham directorship further embeds him in a network of U.S.-Guyana commercial relationships in which his market conduct becomes visible to exactly the regulatory audience most capable of acting on it.

THE FDI CALCULUS
Guyana is, by IMF measurement, the world’s fastest-growing economy. Its 2024 GDP growth exceeded thirty percent. The country requires foreign direct investment at scale to build the highways, sea defences, energy infrastructure, and industrial capacity that its oil revenues are meant to fund. That investment requires quarrying. Quarrying requires explosives. When the explosives supply chain operates through a single gatekeeper who has demonstrated willingness to use legal threats to suppress competition, every investor in every extraction-adjacent sector inherits that risk.

Foreign capital does not enter markets where legal process is weaponised as a market control mechanism. The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and institutional equity investors conducting due diligence on Guyanese infrastructure projects will encounter this record. When they do, they will price it. Guyana’s investment climate absorbs the cost of Kissoon’s conduct whether or not any single project is visibly deterred.

DEMANDS
This Board directs the following demands to the named institutional actors:
→To the Guyana Bar Association: Initiate a formal professional conduct inquiry into whether the August 2015 and November 2025 cease-and-desist letters issued by London House Chambers, and the ex parte litigation strategy deployed against Docalsa, constitute a breach of the professional duties owed by an officer of the court to the legal system and to commercial counterparties. The threat of arrest and imprisonment deployed as a market-exclusion instrument is not advocacy. It requires examination.
→To the Chief Justice: Direct the court’s registry to review the procedural history of the Docalsa litigation — specifically, the use of strike-out applications to delay proceedings from 2015 to 2018 — for consistency with the duty of candour and the prohibition on using procedural mechanisms to oppress opposing parties.
→To the Competition and Consumer Affairs Commission: Open a formal market inquiry into the commercial explosives sector under the Competition and Fair Trading Act. The concentration of supply in a single commercial channel, maintained through preemptive litigation and cease-and-desist correspondence copied to government ministers, constitutes a prima facie matter for regulatory examination. The Commission’s enabling legislation provides the authority. What has been lacking is the will.
→To the Minister of Natural Resources: Explain publicly why your ministry received a copy of the November 2025 cease-and-desist letter threatening a competitor in the explosives market. Your acceptance of that notification — without documented objection or referral to the Competition Commission — implies a degree of ministerial endorsement of the incumbent’s market position that is incompatible with your statutory obligations under the Competition and Fair Trading Act and your constitutional duty to act in the public interest.
→To the Commissioner of Police: Clarify under what statutory authority the August 2015 cease-and-desist letter could credibly assert that customs had been ‘instructed’ to seize and destroy a competitor’s products, and whether any such instruction was in fact given. If it was, on whose authority and under which provision of the Explosives Act or Customs Act did it issue.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY STANDARD FOR OFFICERS OF THE COURT
This Board closes with a principle that is neither partisan nor speculative. Officers of the court in every common law jurisdiction are held to a standard of conduct that transcends their client’s commercial interests. An attorney may zealously represent a client. An attorney may litigate aggressively. An attorney may seek injunctions, file strike-out applications, and write cease-and-desist letters — all within the bounds of professional duty.
What an attorney may not do is deploy the language and implied authority of the legal system to threaten competitors with arrest and imprisonment as a market control strategy.

What an attorney who successfully argued against telecommunications monopoly may not do is build a commercial monopoly in another sector using the same legal instruments he once condemned. And what an attorney who holds U.S. citizenship and leads a chamber of commerce bridging American and Guyanese commercial interests may not do is cultivate, in his professional conduct, the kind of market-distorting behaviour that the legal systems of both his countries prohibit.

Devindra Kissoon is not beyond accountability. He is, precisely because of his prominence, his dual citizenship, and his institutional affiliations, subject to a heightened standard of scrutiny.

The 592 Guardian will continue to document his conduct and the conduct of every institutional actor whose silence enables it.
The gatekeepers of Guyana’s explosives market will answer to Guyana’s law, or they will answer to the investors, institutions, and international partners who are watching what kind of legal culture this Republic is building on the foundation of its oil wealth.
The Editorial Board
The 592 Guardian

The Ambassador ‘s Convenient Mystery

June 25, 2026/0 Comments/in Featured, Business & Economics/by Editor

THE 592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY EDITORIAL | June, 2026

THE AMBASSADOR’S CONVENIENT MYSTERY

A government envoy poses as a puzzled economist over a currency that has not moved in years, recycles a fellow defender’s disputed arithmetic without credit, and calls an unbuilt bond scheme proof that the diaspora has already become Guyana’s investment partner.

On the week of Guyana’s sixtieth Independence anniversary, the country’s Ambassador to Belgium, the Netherlands and the European Union, His Excellency Sasenarine Singh, published an essay under the banner of patriotic reassurance. Its thesis: the US$444.4 million Guyanese households are projected to receive from relatives abroad in 2025 — up from US$264.6 million in 2016 — is not a sign of failure but “the nature of the growing pains of a rapidly modernizing economy.”

Coming from an independent economist, that argument would deserve a fair hearing. Coming from a sitting government ambassador whose own posting was publicly questioned in Guyana’s press as a political reward rather than a career diplomatic appointment, it deserves something closer to cross-examination.

Ambassador Singh’s most revealing sentence is also his most evasive. He writes that the Guyana dollar “is not strengthening” despite years of petro-dollar inflows, and declares this “an area that requires a detailed analytical study by the University of Guyana.” It does not. Guyana’s currency has traded within a few cents of GY$208–209 to the US dollar for years — a stability so exact it appears identically across multiple commercial exchange trackers in June 2026 — through the entire span of the oil boom Singh spends six paragraphs celebrating.

That is not market mystery. That is the Bank of Guyana running a managed exchange rate, intervening in the foreign exchange market to hold the rate fixed rather than letting petro-dollar inflows bid the currency up, as basic Dutch Disease economics would predict.

Singh holds a Master’s in Finance from Lancaster University and is a Chartered Accountant by training. He does not need a university study to explain central bank intervention; he needs the Bank of Guyana’s own foreign exchange intervention data — a table the Bank already compiles — which his government controls and could release tomorrow.

Posing the peg as an open question lets an ambassador of the government that manages it avoid saying who benefits from a frozen rate during an oil boom, and who absorbs the imported-inflation cost that a floating, appreciating currency would have softened.

BORROWED ARITHMETIC

Singh’s second major claim — that remittances fell from 51% of household income in 2010 to “about 10% today,” evidence that households need the diaspora less — did not originate with him. The identical figures, 51% in 2010 declining to approximately 10% by 2025, were published five months earlier, in January 2026, by economic commentator Joel Bhagwandin across DemocracyGuyana.com and SphereX, framed as evidence that Guyana’s household welfare had shifted from remittance dependence to “domestically generated income anchored in wages and government transfers.”

This publication has previously examined Bhagwandin’s defense of the Guyana Development Bank Bill and found his analysis consistently structured to flatter government patronage architecture rather than interrogate it.

Singh reproduces Bhagwandin’s numbers without attribution and without Bhagwandin’s own caveat: that remittances “grew modestly in nominal terms” even as their share fell, because the denominator — oil-inflated household and national income — grew far faster. A falling share is not proof that Guyanese families need less from abroad.

It is arithmetic evidence that the oil economy’s gains are not reaching the same households sending and receiving those remittances in proportion to GDP growth.

Two members of the same government-aligned commentary circuit publishing the identical unsourced statistic, five months apart, in two different registers — one a financial blogger, one a sitting ambassador — is not independent corroboration.

It is an echo chamber presenting itself as data journalism.

THE NUMBERS DON’T AGREE

There is a further problem Singh does not address: his own trend line is contradicted by other published data. World Bank balance-of-payments figures place Guyana’s 2023 personal remittances at US$548.84 million, up from US$525.03 million in 2022 — both substantially higher than the US$444.4 million Singh cites for 2025. If accurate under comparable methodology, that would mean remittances have been falling, not rising, in the very years Singh holds up as proof of a “silent boom.”

The discrepancy may reflect differing definitions — the World Bank’s measure includes compensation of employees alongside personal transfers, while Singh’s figure is sourced to the Bank of Guyana’s narrower series — but an ambassador presenting a single trend line as settled fact, without reconciling it against the international data his own government reports to the IMF, has not cleared the bar of due diligence his platform demands. This publication could not resolve the discrepancy from public sources alone and puts the question to the Bank of Guyana directly: which figure is correct, and why do they not match?

A BOND THAT DOES NOT YET EXIST

Singh’s closing flourish treats President Irfaan Ali’s Diaspora Bond, announced at the National Stadium on May 26 during Independence celebrations, as a fait accompli — proof the diaspora is “quietly transitioning from a safety net into a partner in national investment.” It is neither quiet nor a partnership yet. President Ali promised the bond would launch “within one week.”

Nearly a month later, the government has disclosed no size, no interest rate, no eligibility criteria and no prospectus — nothing beyond the announcement itself. Guyana has an established pattern of front-loading the press conference and back-loading, or simply omitting, the delivery.

This page has documented it across the Karpowership contract, the GPL-InterEnergy sole-source deal, and the Amerindian Purpose Fund. An ambassador citing an undelivered bond as evidence of a completed economic transformation is not describing reality. He is pre-selling it.

None of this means Guyana’s remittance economy is a crisis, or that family money sent home is anything other than what Singh says it is in his more honest passages — love crossing distance.

It means the explanation he offers for why that money keeps arriving in record sums during the most oil-flush years in the country’s history is not analysis. It is an ambassador’s brief, dressed in a chartered accountant’s credentials, built on another defender’s unattributed numbers, and capped with a bond that does not yet exist.

Guyanese households deserve the real explanation: a Bank of Guyana that has chosen, as policy, to hold the exchange rate still while oil dollars flood in, and a government that has not yet told its own diaspora what they are actually being asked to buy.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

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

June 23, 2026/0 Comments/in Business & Economics, Accountability/by Editor

“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:

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

Public Transport .Private Abuse : The cost of weak Enforcement

June 5, 2026/0 Comments/in Local News, Business & Economics/by Editor

Fare Evasion in Reverse: How Commuters Are Being Overcharged

The ongoing problem of fare overcharging in the public– transportation system is not a mystery of weak regulation—it is a clear and continuing failure of enforcement. The laws exist. The fare structures are approved. The offences are defined. Yet, on any given day, commuters are still being charged above the legal rates, often in plain sight and without consequence.

his is not a gap in policy; it is a breakdown in compliance and accountability.

Minibus operators who overcharge or fail to display approved fare charts are not operating in a grey area. They are in breach of the law. The requirement to display fares is not optional, and neither is adherence to approved rates. These are basic conditions of operating within a regulated public service. When these rules are ignored without penalty, the system effectively signals that enforcement is negotiable.

Recent guidance encouraging commuters to report violations at any police station is a welcome step, but it also raises an uncomfortable question: why has this level of accessibility not been standard practice all along?

For years, the burden of enforcement has quietly shifted onto passengers—many of whom lack the time, resources, or confidence to pursue formal complaints. The result has been predictable: widespread underreporting and a culture of normalized overcharging.

Lowering the barrier to reporting is necessary, but it is not sufficient.

A reporting mechanism only has value if it leads to action. Commuters will not engage with the system if complaints disappear into administrative silence or fail to produce visible outcomes. Enforcement must be consistent, transparent, and consequential. Fines, suspensions, and other penalties must not only be applied but seen to be applied. Without this, the current approach risks becoming another procedural reform that fails to alter behavior on the ground.

Equally troubling is the ongoing agitation within sections of the minibus sector for increased fares, even as existing regulations are routinely disregarded. Operators cannot credibly demand adjustments to fare structures while simultaneously ignoring the legal framework that governs them.

Compliance is not conditional. It is the baseline requirement for participation in a regulated system.

If there is a legitimate case for fare increases—driven by fuel costs, maintenance, or broader economic pressures—then that case must be made through established channels. Until such adjustments are formally approved, the current rates remain binding. Any unilateral increase is not negotiation; it is exploitation.

At its core, this issue is about more than fares. It is about the credibility of regulation and the everyday experience of citizens navigating essential services. When passengers are routinely overcharged and fare charts are absent, the message is clear: rules exist, but enforcement is optional. That perception erodes public trust not only in the transport system but in governance itself.

Public education campaigns, while important, cannot substitute for enforcement. Commuters should be informed of their rights, but they should not be expected to police the system in place of the authorities responsible for regulating it. The obligation to uphold the law rests squarely with those tasked to enforce it.

If this renewed push for reporting is to mean anything, it must be matched by visible, sustained action. Every complaint must be treated as a test of institutional credibility. Every violation left unaddressed reinforces the very behavior the law is meant to deter.

The solution is neither complex nor elusive. Enforce the law consistently. Penalize violations decisively. Ensure fare transparency in every vehicle.

Until that happens, overcharging will persist—not because it cannot be stopped, but because it has not been treated with the seriousness it demands.

Striking Drivers

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

Mortgages for the Few: Why Guyana’s Rate Cuts Are a Mirage for the Masses

May 11, 2026/0 Comments/in Business & Economics, Featured/by Editor

BY: Hem Kumar

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣

Warm words. Swift press releases. Three percent rates that gleam like fool’s gold. GBTI slashes mortgages this week, Republic Bank uncaps to $60 million at five percent, New Building Society trumpets “best rates in the industry.” In a nation wired for homeownership dreams—$159.1 billion in Budget 2026, 15,000 house lots, 8,000 homes—it’s sold as the great democratization.

It is not.
The Unspoken Threshold
Here is the question no bank answers: What salary gets you through the door? GBTI offers 25-year terms for low-income loans up to $30 million—no minimum wage disclosed. Republic demands payslips, NIS statements, sale agreements—still silent on the payslip’s number. NBS advertises rates, not reality. This opacity is no accident. Publish the thresholds, and the dream shatters.

Arithmetic unmasks it. Average gross monthly salary: GYD 100,000. Median: GYD 50,000. Private minimum: GYD 60,147—40% of Georgetown basics. A $30 million loan at 3.5% over 25 years? GYD 150,000 monthly. Banks cap payments at 30-40% of income. Qualifying wage: GYD 375,000 to 500,000. Three to five times the average. Seven times minimum. For 90% of workers, $30 million is theory, not tenure.[paylab +1]
Savings dazzle the elite: From 5% to 3%, monthly drops GYD 33,200 on $30 million—over GYD 10 million lifetime interest spared. But if you earn GYD 60,000? You’re invisible.

Supply Without Subsidy
Ceilings rise—supply expands. Repayments don’t shrink. No income bridge for the poor. Contrast: 50,000+ house lots since 2020—90% low-income, 47% single women, 54% youth under 35. Tiered, targeted. State-backed homes demand just GYD 100,000 contribution. Mortgages need that model: income-tested subsidies. Caribbean neighbors taper state-paid interest gaps—borrower gets 3%, Treasury tops up. Guyana lags.

Liquidity or Laundering?
Why the rush? Economy swims in liquidity—31% reserves-to-assets. Oil billions idle; banks funnel into “safe” mortgages. Marketing teases masses, underwriting gates the few. Debt trap? No—rejections protect. Laundering? Unlikely; deposits cycle legitimately. But opacity breeds suspicion. Where’s the data on low-wage approvals?

Demand Transparency Now
Bank of Guyana, Ministry of Finance: Mandate disclosure. Minimum net income per tier. Debt-to-income ratios. Approval rates below median wage. Not trade secrets—family rights.

Three percent for the top tenth isn’t progress. It’s a headline. Homeownership demands arithmetic for all, not illusions for some. Guyana’s families deserve doors flung open, not thresholds in the shadows.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣-𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 , 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮,𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙 𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨.— ✦—

Transactional Diplomacy and the Courage to See Opportunity in Adversity

April 14, 2026/0 Comments/in Local News, Business & Economics, Featured/by Staff Writer

In an era when transactional diplomacy has become the global norm, Guyana must respond not with indignation or insularity, but with pragmatism, foresight, and the courage to see opportunity in adversity. President Irfaan Ali’s formal protest against Suriname’s decision to impose fees on vessels using the Corentyne River has ignited fierce debate, not just between Georgetown and Paramaribo, but among business chambers and trade advocates across the country. Yet amid the noise, one truth is clear — Guyana’s private sector has once again failed the test of vision.

Every major chamber and business commission has rushed to condemn Suriname’s move as protectionist, a knee-jerk reaction that reveals more about their own lack of imagination than any policy flaw across the border. True entrepreneurs understand that obstruction breeds innovation; real opportunity often hides where others see crisis. Adversity has always been the cradle of invention — but Guyana’s business elite appear more inclined toward complaint than creativity.

Let us not forget that “choke points” — those strategic intersections of trade, geography, and influence — have become the modern vocabulary of economic power. From Singapore to Panama, nations have turned location into leverage, converting geography into sustained prosperity. Ironically, while many Guyanese business leaders parrot Singapore’s success story, few seem to grasp the essence of that transformation. Singapore had no oil wells or forests to sell — only an unyielding supply of political will. Today, Suriname is demonstrating a similar temperament, employing its natural geography to create long-term fiscal gain. Why should Guyana begrudge such sovereign pragmatism?

Even more troubling is the hypocrisy underlying the local outrage. The same voices that decry Suriname’s assertion of sovereignty have remained curiously silent about Guyana’s own surrender of it — most glaringly in the oil sector. Our government, perched on a mountain of potential revenue, has timidly refused to implement a windfall tax, surrendering the nation’s fiscal destiny to ExxonMobil. The nation’s “captured state” has become an open secret, and yet the same business elites — who howl at Suriname’s tolls — have nothing to say about the most lopsided contract in modern times.

This duplicity must be called out, not just in political halls, but within the ethos and logos that define The 592 Guardian. Guyana’s future depends on leaders — both public and private — who can see beyond their limitations, who understand that sovereignty, economic innovation, and transactional diplomacy are not adversaries but allies. When protectionism meets pragmatism, we must choose courage over comfort. That is the real lesson in this moment — and the test of our national maturity.