NO ROYALTY, NO RULES

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

NO ROYALTY, NO RULES

The Kurupung Uranium Project and Guyana’s Regulatory Blind Spot

 Opinion By: The Board  ·  August, 2026

THE STATE NEGOTIATES WHAT IT HAS ALREADY GIVEN AWAY

Company filings on the Kurupung Uranium Project confirm what this news-media has long argued about Guyana’s extractive governance: the royalty owed to the Government of Guyana from any future uranium production has not been fixed. It will be “negotiated at the time that application is made for a mining permit” — a negotiation that can be deferred indefinitely, since applications may be filed “at any time during the term of a PL.”

Read plainly, this means the State of Guyana currently has no claim to any share of a resource historically estimated at 20.6 million pounds of uranium, sitting under 92.2 square kilometres of Region Seven, until the holder of the prospecting licence decides the moment is right to ask.

The contractor sets the clock. The regulator waits for it to ring.

We have written before about the opacity surrounding how exploration rights to Kurupung changed hands — from LIA Industries Pte. Ltd. of Singapore to U92 Energy Corp. of Canada — without the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) exercising any visible control over the transaction.

That finding stands. What follows extends it: the royalty vacuum is not an isolated omission. It is one symptom of a licensing framework that structurally cedes leverage to the licensee at every point where leverage should belong to the State.

PILLAR ONE: A ROYALTY WITH NO FLOOR

Guyana’s petroleum sector, for all its own well-documented deficiencies, at least operates within a negotiated framework anchored by precedent — the Stabroek Block production-sharing agreement, whatever its flaws, is a public, referenceable instrument.

Large-scale mineral mining under the Mining Act 1989 has no equivalent anchor. There is no statutory royalty rate for uranium. There is no benchmark percentage that GGMC or the Minister must not go below.

The rate is whatever is negotiated, whenever negotiation occurs, between the State and a single counterparty who has spent years — and by the time of application, potentially millions of dollars in drilling and evaluation — building the case for terms favourable to itself.

This is not a technicality. It means the government of Guyana’s return on a strategic, security-sensitive mineral is a function of negotiating leverage at a moment of the company’s choosing, not a matter of law.

 

PILLAR TWO: AN OFF-TAKE DEAL STRUCK WITHOUT THE REGULATOR IN THE ROOM

Before any royalty framework has been discussed, Gibraltar-based ROPA Investments Limited has already secured the contractual right to purchase up to 50 percent of the first 40 million pounds of uranium oxide produced from Kurupung — an option on 20 million pounds of production from a resource that has not yet cleared a mining permit, let alone entered production.

This news-media has previously established that ROPA and LIA Industries are related parties structured to present as arm’s-length counterparties in U92’s own acquisition filings.

GGMC was not a party to that transaction. It had no visibility into its terms and no opportunity to weigh how a privately negotiated off-take arrangement, agreed between related parties, might shape the economics of the very royalty the State will eventually sit down to negotiate.

A regulator that is absent from the deal that structures the resource cannot credibly claim to hold leverage over the value extracted from it.

PILLAR THREE: THE NATIONAL REPOSITORY THAT ISN’T REQUIRED TO RECEIVE THE DATA

GGMC describes itself, in its own institutional language, as the national repository for geoscientific data relating to Guyana’s mineral resources. The Mining Act 1989 does not build a mechanism equal to that mandate.

A prospecting licensee is obliged to submit work programmes and quarterly and annual operational reports. On relinquishment of licensed ground, the licensee must submit an evaluation report on the work undertaken. None of these obligations is the same undertaking as surrender of the underlying dataset — the drill logs, assay certificates, geophysical surveys, and resource modelling that constitute the actual commercial and scientific value of exploration.

The only point in the statute where “reports, analyses, and data resulting from investigations and studies” are explicitly required in full is at the application for a mining licence — the same discretionary juncture at which the royalty itself is negotiated.

Guyana’s only clear statutory mechanism for compelling both a royalty and a complete geological dataset from a uranium licensee is a single, optional filing that the licensee alone controls the timing of.

 

PILLAR FOUR: WHAT HAPPENS IF THE STATE SAYS NO

Consider the scenario a functioning regulatory framework should have already answered. GGMC and U92 sit down to negotiate a royalty rate. The company, having already sold forward an option on half its first 40 million pounds of production to a related party, has calculated its economics around a particular return threshold. GGMC, exercising the public interest it is charged to protect, holds out for a higher rate. Talks stall.

What then? The Mining Act offers no compulsory arbitration mechanism for this scenario, no statutory floor the Minister can fall back on, no default rate that applies absent agreement.

The Prospecting Licences run until 18th April 2027, extendable to 18th April 2029. The company can simply wait. It can let the clock run. If the licence lapses without a mining permit application ever being filed, the one statutory trigger that would have compelled surrender of the exploration dataset to the State never fires.

The company walks away — potentially still holding, through its corporate structure, a fully modelled uranium resource derived entirely from exploration conducted under a Guyanese state licence — while GGMC is left with quarterly activity reports and an evaluation summary.

No royalty. No enforceable claim to the data. No mining. And no accountability mechanism requiring anyone to explain why.

PILLAR FIVE: THE COMMUNITIES WHO WERE NEVER ASKED

None of the above accounts for the constituency this publication regards as the first and most fundamental stakeholder: the Indigenous and local communities of Region Seven. The Amerindian People’s Association has called for the Kurupung project to be halted outright, citing the total absence of public and community-level consultation before exploration rights were granted, transferred, and drilled against.

A regulatory framework that permits a foreign-held uranium resource to change corporate hands twice, secure a related-party off-take agreement, and commence a 5,000-metre drilling programme — all before Region Seven’s own residents have been meaningfully consulted — is not a framework failing at its edges. It is failing at its centre.

WHAT THIS NEWS-MEDIA DEMANDS

The pattern here is not new to readers of this news outlet’s ongoing accountability coverage: a regulator structurally absent from the transactions it is meant to police, a State whose return on a strategic mineral is deferred to a moment the extractor controls, and communities treated as an afterthought rather than a precondition. Kurupung differs only in the commodity — uranium is not gold, and the stakes of a genuinely opaque radioactive-minerals sector, in a country with no established uranium regulatory precedent, are of a different order entirely.

This publication calls on the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission and the Minister responsible for Natural Resources to state publicly, and without further delay:

◊ Whether a minimum statutory royalty framework for large-scale uranium and radioactive-mineral production is under consideration, and if not, why not;

◊ What legal instrument, if any, compels U92 Energy Corp. or its subsidiaries to surrender full exploration data to GGMC in the event the Prospecting Licences lapse or are relinquished without a mining permit application;

◊ Whether GGMC was consulted on, or was even made aware of, the ROPA Investments off-take agreement prior to its execution; and

◊ What steps have been taken, or will be taken, to conduct genuine community-level consultation with the Indigenous residents of Region Seven before any further drilling proceeds.

The people of Guyana own these minerals. The law, as it stands, has not yet caught up to that fact.

— The Board

Profit Sharing Who said What,Who said Naught.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY &INTEGRITYJOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Profit Sharing Who said What,Who said Naught

OPINION BY: GHK LALL

Part One
Said Exxon’s Chief Mr. Darren Woods on July 31st:

“The success of this development has set a new standard for the industry, and frankly, has exceeded our own expectations. Delivering on tight schedules, at industry-leading cost – with strong reliability and optimised production – has resulted in recovering our capital and cost nearly two years earlier than anticipated, increasing NPV, and desaturating the cost bank.”

Congratulations to Mr. Woods.  He sounded like Henry Kissinger, a Bloomberg algorithm, and an ancient Babylonian astronomer combined.  Money collected ahead of time.  Why confuse a simple issue with NPV (net present value) and “desaturating the cost bank?”  Given Exxon’s great success story from Guyana’s oil, it is time also for Guyana to succeed from its own oil.  Mr. Woods spoke to his stakeholders.  Guyana’s Dr. Jagdeo has to speak to Guyanese.  I’m still waiting.  

Said Exxon’s SVP and CFO, Neil Hansen also on the same great July 31, 2026 date: 

“…as we mentioned, at this point, we’ve fully recovered the $55 billion of investment, along with all the operating costs and the way the contractor agreement works is we can recover that investment up to 75%. After that, the remaining production is shared 50/50 between us and the government of Guyana.”

 

Thanks, Mr. Hansen.  Guyanese need to watch this fellow.  Is Exxon going to bushwhack Guyana on the full profit sharing?  More sharply, what does he mean by “we can recover that investment up to 75%. After that….?  What is hidden in that sneaky “After that….?”  After that is 25 percent.  It is still percent left.  Watch these Exxon chaps, Guyanese.  Start thinking of the cost bank getting an infusion of some new billions.  

In March 2026: Said Exxon Guyana Country Head, Mr. Alistair Routledge:

We were anticipating sometime next year in 2027 that we were going to get to the point where we had recovered those historic cost probably largely because of just increasing volumes of production that were generating higher and higher revenues to offset the ongoing expenditures plus recover historic costs.”

“If you stay at the current oil price then it will happen this year based on the level of expenditures and the production that we anticipate so that’s a significant acceleration. What that then means is that instead roughly the 14 and a half percent that the country has been receiving by way of revenues into the Natural Resource Fund from the Stabroek production and revenues, what will happen is that percentage will significantly increase.”

Meet Mr. Routledge, Exxon’s Jagdeo.  Quantum mechanics, Exxon-style.  Why can’t none of these guys from Texas talk straight?  They are always qualifying their words, hedging their bets.  He can say “significantly increase” but has a problem with a full 50:50 profit sharing.  WTF!

Now that I hauled Dr, Jagdeo into the Exxon-Guyana profit sharing, what happened to him?  My apologies to he, the PPP and everybody.  Guyana is in the midst of tragedy.  Today, I point to this monumental development of Guyana repaying Exxon every cent of its US$55 billion.  He should be dancing on his head, given what’s involved.

In a genuine, no gimmicks, no nonsense 50:50 profit sharing between Exxon and Guyana, something stands out for me.  In that profit sharing scenario, Guyana would be raking in FOUR TIMES as many profit dollars than it is doing today.  Oil prices rise Guyana’s share is more.  Oil prices fall, Guyana still would get more than before.  Oil prices have to fall off the charts for Guyana to make less than past years.

Think of what any government, any leader can do with such an inflow of dollars into its hands.  Incredible, that Dr. Jagdeo is in church.  He cannot be unhappy about the possibilities: a dozen MV Ma Liska; even at US$60 a barrel.  But I exaggerate.  Moving on, what’s the problem with this full 50:50 profit sharing? 

Something is rotten in Georgetown.  Imagine: with that kind of money freed up, who’d care about PPP corruption?  Or third term?  Say something. sir.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MV Barima -Postmortem II -PM Phillips

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY&INTEGRITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

MV Barima –Postmortem II -PM Phillips

Frontally: Prime Minister Phillips disappointed.  A soldier yielding ground.  Weakly.  Unnecessarily.  Pitifully. A leader who abandoned a vantage point that was his to hold.  He let go.  For what reward?  What honor?  Prime Minister Mark Phillips was a general. 

No general should descend to the level of stockade deodorizer.  A general is a bold leader, not a mindless follower. 

In this compulsory postmortem of PM Philips post the MV Barima tsunami, I try to be delicate, considerate.  Too many tears already flow in this brutalized Guyana.

I seek not to bury Mark Anthony Phillips.  I seek ways to glaze him, praise him, to raise him.  But how can I, when he flooded the consciousness of Guyanese with that one dreadful, painful, word.  Noise.  Noise, Mr. PM?  When people are blinded by emotion.  When they see red embers of danger and death lurking in every condition, every cranny.  Their rage roars.  They rise to their fullest height; ready to fight any slight. 

An army general of caliber should recognize a mutiny on his hands.  Mr. Phillips may have been the best general Guyana had at one time.  Show Guyanese that general is still alive, stirring, has something left in him.  Not to NOISE!  A former general should never stoop to a lackey’s level: ready for any dirty job.  I believe that former general, present Prime Minister Phillips still has it in him not to hear noise.  But to know how to defuse a volatile situation.  He should also know how he is being used because of who he is, and draw a line.  This will be the new way.  A standard set for president, second vice president, others (whatever their virtue, their vision.

He doesn’t hear “noise.”  No such word drips past his lips.  What he heard, should have sensed, were the deep-seated wraths of Guyanese who have had it with the PPP Govt.  In the gut!  In the eyeballs.  The man of war transforms into a peacemaker.  The prime minister attiring himself in princely respect.  If there was one man who could have put a stop to one kind of Guyanese called to do work that Untouchables wouldn’t touch, it was Mark Phillips. 

When all he heard in the post MV Barima cascading series of catastrophic failures was “noise” and was unbecoming enough to regurgitate it, he pitched headlong into ignominy.

He laid to waste a rare opening.  All he had to try, to put before the enraged, was this. 

We are all hurting.  We are all bent double by loss unknown and unimaginable.  By pain unlike before and unbearable.  I appeal for the best that’s within all of us.  Help me to deal with this disaster, this tragedy.  Let us stand shoulder-to-shoulder in this hour of supreme national trial.  Let us ready to bury our dead unified and dignified.  Let’s comfort our brothers and sisters with newly discovered sublime beauty of the spirit.  There’ll be time enough later for revisiting and rebuking.  For honest listening and authentic understanding

How spellbinding Mark Anthony Phillips could have been.  Not in the manner of the powerful politician he is.  Or overbearing as he could be.  Overwrought as he was.  But as man of the people rising to majesty’s peaks.  When the people were unhappy.  Driven to frenzies of fury.  He didn’t. 

It is Mark Phillips’ loss; a gem of a moment squandered for the cheap noise.  For depravity’s routine noise.  For politics gone obscene noise.  Should a man, a general, a prime minister, comport himself with flaring aggression, however it’s believed justified, when an impenetrable pall of grief suffocates, reduces to tears? 

I think not.  These discoveries came in this post MV Barima postmortem of Prime Minister Phillips.

I’d be of zero utility to PM Phillips, his political brothers, if I tell him what pleases his ear.  Not piercing, bludgeoning bars of noise that the circumstances demand.  But some make-believe symphony of insipidity.  At ease, mon general.  At ease!  Not I, sire!

MV Barima -The Bridge was Empty

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

MV Barima –The Bridge was Empty

OPINION BY: GHK LALL

First, the disclosures.  This is owed to all Guyanese, none more than the departed in the star-crossed MV Barima.  Next in line are the tragedy struck family members; parents, spouses, children, above all.  Last in line in this first leadership examination is Pres Ali.  Prime Minister Phillips turn is coming.

In this postmortem, the objective is not to dissect Pres Ali and drain him of all plasma.  It is to touch him in soft strokes.  Inspire him to view his actions differently.  Guide him to motivate himself, operate differently, should, God forbid, another disaster visits.

Wherever Pres Ali was-in Canada, in a swamp, in a plane, in a luxury box, in the company of quality people-he had to come to a dead stop and race back to Guyana.  If he was in a plane that might be problematic.  In all other settings, it would have to be the same controlled urgency to his movements.  Except for one.  The one exception I would make to Pres Ali staying one minute longer wherever he was on that horrendous Saturday night, Sunday’s predawn hours, would be as follows. 

The president is out of it, due to serious attention needed.  He was not, and I am grateful to the Almighty, the merciful and the benevolent.  Once he was mobile, in the fullness of his senses, it had to be to Guyana for Pres. Ali.  A charter had to be found.  Leader to leader that should have been very doable.

He and his retinue, his wider circle, may not see matters this way, but he could not distance for a second more than necessary.  With knee bent before God, I submit to Guyanese what I think.  Pres Ali distanced.  Not for long.  But long enough.  He belonged in the company of the Guyanese people. 

No other company could compete for his time and attention.  Nor the lushness of his presence in the hours after that MV Barima Saturday Night Catastrophe of a unique kind. 

It qualifies as a catastrophe in my thinking.  So, when he came all solemnity and warmth, he was already cold in the consideration of citizens traumatized and reeling.

For the record, I repeat: a president is not a private citizen.  A former president is.  The head of a sitting head-of-state is the property of his people.  I see nothing radical in these assertions.  They are inseparable from the role.  It’s not given to pantomime.  Or phantomlike disappearances and reappearances.  There was Brazil before, if recollection serves well.  A president has dotted lines to sign, and lines which he must not cross.  His protocol officers should inform him accordingly.

Pres Ali may be the frontrunner for Guyana’s worst president ever.  When the MV Barima was engulfed in an unconquerable avalanche of water, Excellency Ali had a glorious opportunity to be remembered as Guyana’s most inspiring president ever.  Like I said in the first lines, I do not judge Pres Ali.  Nor is he hoisted aloft.  Guyanese get that duty.  Since the first days of his assumption of the presidency, Excellency Ali has cast a broad shadow.  On the night and morn of the MV Barima being sucked into the depths by forces that hurled aside resistance, Pres Ali cast no shadow.  His shadow was a fairy of the imagination.  His substance was invisible, sprawled on the deck of conjecture.

Where was Guyana’s president in the hour when an SOS calls?  What could be so vital that the dead is made to wait, and the living to wrestle with their demons?  The MV Barima could have been Pres Ali’s finest hour.  Regrettably, his clock could find no minutes making it his dampest.  When the MV Barima went down with the lives of over 100 Guyana lost, Pres Ali should have rose and soared.  He had to be found first.  In retrospect, he was the first unsounded toll.

El Niño Is a Governance Test, Not Just a Weather Event

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊ GUYANA 

El Niño Is a Governance Test, Not Just a Weather Event

OPINION BY: Staff Writer

Guyana is entering a season that demands more than warnings about heat and dryness. The Hydrometeorological Service has already said the country should prepare for strengthening El Niño conditions, hotter-than-normal weather, fewer wet days, and as many as 80 hot spell days this year, with the greatest exposure in Regions 4, 5, 6, 8 and 10. 

The same advisory warns that reduced rainfall and higher temperatures are likely to stress crops, weaken pasture quality, raise livestock water needs, and increase the risk of water shortages.

El Niño is a Governance Test, not just a Weather Event That means this is not simply a climate bulletin. It is a food, income, and governance problem. If government response remains narrow, delayed, or rhetorical, then the burden will fall on citizens through higher prices, reduced production, and weaker household purchasing power.

 The public has a right to know whether the State is treating this as a serious national emergency or merely as another seasonal inconvenience. The evidence suggests that the risk is already visible. Hydromet has warned of drier conditions, prolonged dry spells, elevated temperatures, and short-term drought conditions in parts of Regions 8 and 9, with localized flooding still possible in low-lying areas. 

In other words, Guyana must prepare for both drought and flood stress at the same time.

 The Budget Must Now Be Tested

The government has repeatedly presented Budget 2026 as a major investment in food security and resilience. In January, the administration said agriculture would receive $113.2 billion, with $81.9 billion going to drainage and irrigation, $3.3 billion for other crops and technical support, and $745 million for agro-processing and storage-related support.  It also said agriculture and water spending was part of a broader effort to strengthen food security and drainage systems.

Those allocations are now under public scrutiny. A budget is not a talking point; it is a contract. If the country is now facing known El Niño risks, then citizens are entitled to ask whether the money was spent on genuine preparedness, and whether the promised infrastructure and support systems are operational.  

That question matters because the same government has claimed Guyana can fully feed its population and that agriculture is central to national resilience.  Such claims cannot be made while the country remains vulnerable to predictable climate shocks without a visible, funded, public response. Resilience is proved in action, not in slogans

What Authorities Must Explain

The Ministry of Agriculture must explain what specific El Niño measures were funded under Budget 2026, how much has been released, and where the projects are active. Farmers need to know whether there is drought-resistant seed distribution, irrigation support, technical extension, and region-by-region advisories. Hydromet has already made clear that crop stress and reduced pasture quality are expected outcomes, so the ministry cannot wait for losses to occur before reacting.

The Ministry of Finance must disclose what contingency planning exists for inflation, food-price spikes, and support to vulnerable households. If imports become more expensive because of global weather disruption, transport costs, or tighter regional supply, then the public should know what fiscal buffers are in place.

The absence of a public protection plan would amount to a policy failure, not a natural inevitability.  

The Ministry of Trade and Commerce must state how it will monitor food prices, prevent hoarding, and ensure that market behavior does not exploit scarcity. Citizens should not be left to discover that the price of basic food has risen only after the damage is already done.

Transparency on monitoring is as important as the monitoring itself.  

Hydromet, the Guyana Water Incorporated, the local government authorities, and the disaster-management system must also stop operating in silos. Hydromet has already described the likely impact on water resources, agriculture, heat stress, and wildfire risk.  That information must be converted into coordinated national action, not left as an isolated technical bulletin.

 What Citizens Should Watch

Citizens should insist on a public action plan that names the lead agencies, the budget lines, the geographic hotspots, and the trigger points for intervention. The plan should show what happens if rainfall falls below a threshold, if food prices spike, if water levels decline, or if crop stress becomes severe. Without trigger points, response becomes improvisation.  

They should also demand regular public updates, not occasional reassurance. The government should publish food-security information, price trends, farmer advisories, and water-risk updates in plain language. That is especially important because the most severe effects will not arrive all at once. They will accumulate quietly through rising costs, shrinking supply, and tighter household budgets.

This is also why local communities must be engaged early. Small farmers,hinterland residents, market vendors, household gardeners, school administrators, and public-health officials all need targeted guidance.

Heat stress, water scarcity, and transport disruption are not abstract risks; they are practical problems that will affect daily life.  

 The Failure That Must Be Avoided

The greatest danger is not only El Niño itself, but a familiar national habit: waiting for the crisis to become visible before treating it as urgent. That approach is costly, unnecessary, and unfair to the people who can least absorb the shock. If food prices rise, if water becomes harder to secure, or if farmers lose productivity, then citizens should be able to trace the failure back to specific offices that had both warning and budget.  

The public should not be told that all hardship is weather-related. Weather is the trigger; policy determines the depth of the damage. Guyana now has enough warning to act, enough money allocated to justify action, and enough institutional responsibility to be held accountable.

This is the moment for the authorities to prove that their promises mean something. The nation does not need more declarations of resilience. It needs a visible plan, disciplined execution, and honest public reporting so that families, farmers, and businesses can prepare together and weather the fallout with less pain.

Walk with kings…never lose touch with the common people

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA 

Walk with kings…never lose touch with the common people

OPINION BY: GHK LALL

And, I promise one and all – those who supported me and those who didn’t – that I will be the President for all the people of Guyana, and I will serve each of you with affection, without discrimination and with every attention to fairness and equity—President Ali August 2020

 

As President, I will have to walk with kings, in our country’s interest, but I assure you that I will never lose the common touch. My first and last responsibility will be to the people of Guyana – all of them.— President Ali August 2020

 

As I first declared on the 2nd of August 2020: I am not the President of some Guyanese; I am the President of all Guyana. That principle has guided me these past five years, and it shall remain my compass in the years ahead.” —President Ali September 2025

No one could justifiably think that Pres Ali is struggling with myopia. I think, though, that he struggles with a touch of amnesia in August 2020; the last from 2025. The quotes are his words.

Now fast forward almost six years later, and there is the tragedy of the MV Barima. Pres Ali committed to the Guyanese people that he is going to be there for them. Every single one of them. How about that today, sir? Just a little. In a time of national tragedy is the best situation to make good on those words.

A Commission of Inquiry and no consultation with the leader of the opposition? Where is “of all Guyana” in this current national conversation?

In a time of national hurting, this is when national leaders rise to the moment and reach with arms outstretched for national healing. Not one person left behind. Not one boat allowed to stay at the bottom. Not one Guyanese left out, cast adrift. Not one media house left. Not when the national house is in distress.

Mr. President: this is not about who has got it right and who has got it wrong. This is about what is done well, there is confidence that all have done their best. To honor the dead. To regard the living. To keep the flames of hope shining brightly.

Mine is not the right to condemn, Pres Ali. History will commend or criticize him accordingly.

On reading his first inaugural address to the nation in August 2020, I stated publicly. Let’s try him. Let’s give him the space. I am sorry, Mr. President, but disappointment comes in waves that crest and will not let me rest. Nor the dead in the MV Barima who now lie in the uneasy embrace of death at the end of the sea. Their time was cut short. Abruptly. Frighteningly. Enduringly.

Mr. President, please let the work of the commission proceed publicly. Guyanese have had COI’s of extraordinary luminosity. They shed darkness, when light was all that would suffice. Why not cut Guyanese some slack? Why heap Guyanese on the rack? Why inspire me, Mr. President, to rise above all the noise that is vexatious to the spirit of the dead? Why add to the torments of the Guyanese people that are still waiting to make good on his words? So lusciously tendered. So grandly delivered.

“I will walk with kings” and “I will never lose the common touch.”

Mr. President, the indigenous of Guyana are waiting for their leader to not lose touch with them. They are pleading, but not begging. They are crying, but not cursing. If there ever was a time for Excellency Mohamed Irfaan Ali to “never lose the common touch” that time is now.

And, if ever there was a moment that called for Guyana’s national leader to stand up and say that I will be different (and truly mean what he says) that time is now.

When words are hollow, they have a habit of coming back to haunt. And, after that they hollow out even the best amongst us. Mr. President, I close with the words of that immortal Athenian tragedian:

“And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

Who’s Responsible, Who takes Responsibility

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THE 592. GUARDIAN ◊. ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA ◊ OPINION..

Who’s Responsible, Who takes Responsibility

OPINION: BY GHK LALL ◊ JULY 2026

A tragedy of catastrophic proportions is now Guyana’s to manage. An old passenger ferry boat went to the bottom. According to news reports of Saturday, 73 bodies have been recovered and 76 rescued. Taking the official count of 179 passengers on board the MV Barima, it means that 30 of them are still unaccounted for. Over a week after the disaster, there is still uncertainty about how many passengers, paying or not, with a ticket or lacking one, were onboard the vessel. The answers that have been provided have led to more skepticisms, questions. The leadership that is needed in this time of heavy loss and grief has failed to inspire, with adjustment of details shared, and the blame game growing in strength. Guyanese live it. I hear it.

On whose head should lie responsibility for this national human disaster?                 Is it the minister that has oversight? Is it the Cabinet that sits and reviews policy decisions, spending on capital projects, and such? Is it the leadership of the PPP/C Government? Does the political opposition taken as a unit, or in its separate parts, have some responsibility of its own, in taking a disaster and engaging in ‘mischief?’ The crew of the MV Barima on its last voyage has been subject to intense scrutiny. The management team of the Transport and Harbors Department has been sent on leave.

The fear is that there could be tampering with evidence. One senior government representative chose to use “noise” to describe in derogatory fashion the anger over the disaster, and the demands for straight answers.

Straightforward representations even in small amounts would have given citizens a shot of confidence. Those in charge more focused on sharing the truth with families and citizens, and not on seeking out opponents to score political points. There could be no worst time to be about public relations than when scores of lives are lost, with more likely to follow, as the days prolong. Men of stature and men observant of the demands of principle take responsibility. A disaster occurred with many lives lost and many families hurting. The people under whose watch that disaster occurred have one clear duty in front of them. Man or woman, they have to go. In real countries with serious standards, CEO’s do not look to distance from disasters.

They do not pass that tainted baton to captive administrative departments. They do not shift responsibility to those who are lower on the power ladder.

I now give a quick peek at how leaders in countries with standards react in the face of disaster. In South Korea, the MV Sewol disaster that resulted in the loss of over 300 lives, 250 of them children, was a contributor to the impeachment of President Park Guen-hye. Broader issues of corruption, targeting protesting South Koreans, attempts at coverup, and inconsistent and inaccurate releases in the initial hours of the MV Sewol disaster all led to her downfall. Her ceremonial Prime Minister, Chung Hong-won had resigned with days of the Sewol disaster. It was not enough for furious South Koreans, with President Park impeached later. In South Korea’s MV Sewol ferry disaster, there are some strange parallels to Guyana’s MV Barima disaster, of which Guyanese should take note. Providing inaccurate information, minimizing loss, shifting blame, targeting dissenters, and massive corruption in the background.

In Latvia, 54 people died when the roof of the Maxima shopping center collapsed on November 21, 2013. Two days later, Latvian President Andres Berzins termed the disaster a “murder of defenseless people” and said that “the perpetrators should be arrested.” On November 27, six days after the disaster, Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis took responsibility and resigned. Some Latvians thought that the mayor of the city where the roof collapsed, Zolipude, should have resigned, as he was more directly involved.

In Argentina, Egypt, and Greece, responsible ministers resigned immediately after train crashes that caused the loss of dozens of lives in all of those countries.

In each of these foreign situations, those sitting in government did the decent thing and resigned. There was no blowing smoke, no dismissing of outrage, no police action against civil society protestors.

Citizens are still waiting for someone in Guyana’s government to take responsibility and resign. I do. It is not with a one-man decision about a panel. It is of where the will of people should decide, seven-seat majority or none. Let all be put on public trial

MV Barima -Deflections, Dissembling and the Damning. 

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

 AN UNSPEAKABLE TRAGEDY· OPINION  ANALYSIS

MV Barima –Deflections, Dissembling and the Damning. 

There’s human devastation.  Still, the PPP Govt commits to deflection. The MV Barima disaster qualifies as extreme domestic devastation.  Families and communities battered.  The nation bowed.  Rather than strengthening citizens in a time of tribulation, the government engages in desperate measures at self-protection.  At continuation.  At what hurls damnation on its head.  Follow these.

The first words out of the government’s mouth were denials.  The MV Barima wasn’t overloaded.  There was no engine problem.  Those held briefly.   Then were buried under storms of social media rebuttals.  The government stumbled, recovered. 

Desperate to deflect attention from the blood on its head, the PPP Govt then reached for its remaining props: MV Barima crew members, a management team.  All tested for alcohol and other substance use.  Search for scapegoats.  Find them.  Shift attention and intensifying rage to them.  A tragedy had to unfold before that step was taken.  The test results have been shared.  Now how do those exonerate an unbelievably reckless government?  Or insulates government ministers?  Nothing does.  

Not when the MV Barima was an open-air steel casket waiting to close one last time.  The divers will find supporting evidence.  Testing of crew members must be both random and routine, given the culture and public practice of casual drinking pervading that boat’s operations.  With that as baseline, similar testing should be done for public transportation operators. 

The Guinness and grass cultures should provide good business for labs, and inform Guyanese that care about their dangers.

On that same fateful Sunday, one minister launch into a love song celebrating the president’s excellence before a largely indigenous audience.  There’s time and place.  Amid death and unknown casualties, came that disgrace.  The president has to be unimaginably poor in his job to need so many verbal props to sell him to Guyanese.  I still can’t believe that there was that cheapness, coarseness, and unmatched crassness.

Within hours of Disaster Sunday, the National Toshaos Council Conference kicked off in Georgetown. 

Maybe as many as 150 Guyanese dead, many of them of indigenous heritage, and a gathering for indigenous Guyanese proceeds. 

I have heard that the show must go on.  But not when so many died.  Or are feared dead.  Politics has hardened Guyanese.  There’s none harder than the PPP Govt.  Simple humanity and basic decency are the losers.  Hopefully, there are no big sporting bashes, as is the custom.  

There are many dead to mourn and still many bodies to find.  The MV Barima is Guyana’s World Trade Center; except for domestic hands that inflicted death on a scale unknown to Guyanese.  America erred terribly in the wake of the Kennedy assassination (football).  America didn’t repeat that failure on 9/11.  I was there.  I share. 

The National Toshoas Conference could have waited a week.  Written in neon lights is the callousness of a government committed first to propaganda and self-celebration.

It is now days since the tragedy, now a confirmed national disaster.  What about a period of national mourning?  Finally, three days announced.  I think a two-week period of mourning should have been the least.  But three days will have to do.  To honor the dead, the missing, and the grieving.  The magnitude of the disaster, as it seeped into consciousness on Sunday, mandated that national mourning should have commenced on that same day. 

I forget that the MV Barima was a boat without hope, and that Guyana was a country without a head, during those crucial early hours.

On Tuesday morning, there’s breaking news from a very visible and audible Pres Ali: a full, thorough and independent investigation.  I trust that this presidential investigation wouldn’t be like the Warren Commission investigation into the Kennedy assassination.  Or the Linden and Mahdia COIs into police killings, and a firetrap, respectively. 

What insults all Guyanese.  More camouflaging than convincing.  More PPP sponsored propaganda and what has no relation to the purity of facts in unfettered inquiry and testimony. 

Another thought -any credible commission of inquiry is only as good as its scope (Terms of Reference) and the people piloting that boat. 

If it’s a PPP Govt love boat COI, better scrap it before it gets started.  If it’s a lifeboat to save the PPP Govt’s behind, let it go the way of the MV Barima.  Down and out.  Welcome to Guyana, and the PPP Govt’s deflections, dissembling, and what damns it.

I wonder about all those sophisticated foreigners flocking to Guyana, and what they may be thinking of this sick, savaged country.

 

 MV Barima -What is Truth….

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY& TRANSPARENCY 

 MV Barima –What is Truth….

‘What is truth?’  It was Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, who famously asked that of Jesus Christ.  I ask the same question of the PPP Govt: what is truth?  Relative to the now sunken MV Barima.  Then I go further: who in the PPP Govt has truth in them?  Re the MV Barima; beyond this boat to hell.  To draw closer to real truth, there was reaching out to people who plied that route for decades.  Plus, people in the shipping sector.  Plus, people of that area’s heritage; now its anguish.

For starters, cargo onboard can be much more (dangerously more) than what’s recorded.  Cargo loaded from top to bottom of what was a laboring, creaking, on-its-last breath dhow.  Add miners with the heavy equipment and appliances of their trade.  Add paying passengers with and without tickets.  Add children that may not be ticketed.  These all add up.  Only the surface is scratched, however.

Next, the MV Barima was an overdue ICU case.  Before putting out to pasture.  To pasture, not back in passenger service.  The truth is that, despite its severe handicaps, the MV Barima was repaired and patched up, when it ought to have been retired. 

Think in human terms.  Think of a dreadfully diseased ICU patient.  He is given some methylated spirits, and a full wheelbarrow to push, and a cart to load.  Last, the gasping patient himself has to haul the cart, as if it is a rickshaw.  There are neither mules nor donkeys around.

Separately, sending a management team home is a joke.  Too late to save one lost soul.  Means nothing for people shredded by their griefs.  Why wait for a disaster that was pending for years before there is action?

Truth be told, the entire PPP Govt has blood on its hands.  There are no innocents. 

Official spinning smears a tragedy.  It was the reflexive action Sunday morning.  Propaganda piles on indigenous agonies.  Crocodile tears degrade people dealing with unfathomable loss.  Losses for some.  While some were laffing and sportin’.

Today, the marine transport section of Guyana finds itself under harsh public glare.  I don’t think that’s a cure (sending home). 

I see a confluence of weaknesses; the sick way that this country is governed; part of the corruptions and coverups.  Year after year, state institutions and entities that form the bulwark of the Guyana Government’s face to the Guyanese people, have been infiltrated.  Then, generally overrun by politics and corruptions that dilute the standards and promise of Guyana.  Almost across the board, and in a long list of departments, PPP Govt selectees have turned a blind eye, dropped the ball, and fallen down in the performance of their jobs.  In the delivery of services that is safe and sound for Guyanese, what carries them to another level. 

In sum, the marine transport agency, and as harrowing as the MV Barima sinking is, it is not the disease itself.  Both are just symptoms, offshoots, of what festers fatally beneath the surface.  It is how a government has destroyed a country.  A government with virtually unlimited power and unquantifiable money, and that is all that it’s capable of: destroying a country.  Its standards.  Its morals.  Its systems.  Its funds.  Its aspirations.

In the PPP Govt, and with few exceptions, what Guyanese contend with is a combination of: Con artists, pathological deceivers, shifty concealers, and countless dirty tricksters.  Over 150 Guyanese, most of them poor, had to die, for the rest of Guyana to learn how the PPP Govt is a blight and a horror on this nation.

What is truth?  It is of men and women with only darkness in them. No truth.  No light.  Regardless, don’t lose hope.  There will be celebrating religious holidays before long.  Xmas is coming.  Why bother with a month of national mourning? 

Look at the kind of people that perished.  There’s that type of truth, too.  All should be pierced.  Could be the One Guyana that is desired.

Edghill must go; I say NO!

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THE 592 GUARDIAN. ◊ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

Edghill must go; I say NO!

The clamor is thunderous: EDGHILL MUST GO! I say NO! The people who put Minister Juan Edghill where he is must go. The people who kept Minister Edghill there must go. I take these positions for these reasons.

First, if Pres Ali was present in the hour of crisis, there would be no Juan Edghill making representations that now haunt him, load him with regrets. I believe he still has that human essence. I think that Pres Ali would have pushed him aside, and raced to the forefront to sell his own productions. I ask pro-PPP and anti-PPP Guyanese to think. Would Minister Edghill been given a chance to inform, defend? I don’t think so. So, who would have been the one lashing out at “overload” and “engine failure”? Minister Edghill would have had to hug the sidelines.

In his president’s absence, due to the urgencies attached to the presidency, Minister Edghill was saddled with the chore of going into full defensive-aggressive mode and tear apart those finding fault with the government.

Denounce “overload” and “engine” issues as fake news and mischief. He did. Then the bottom beneath Juan Edghill crumbled. Fake news was real news. Mischief transformed to prophetic truth. Minister Edghill, like the proverbial whale, was left stranded on the beach. He didn’t venture too far, or spoke too quickly. He did what had become normalized in the PPP Govt. Denied. Deflected. Denounced. Dismissed.

Second, I pardon the minister for over zealousness (no overload, no engine problem). But who would pardon the minister, or any other in the government, when a brand-new boat bought in 2023 has not yet been put in service? To repeat my Catholic Standard comment: did Guyana get a new boat, or a pig in a bag? He had delivered a defensive mouthful in Stabroek News, in June 2023. Now comes the contradiction: Why is the MV Ma Lisha in drydocks with a fixup bill for almost $200 million?

This was what sent the doomed MV Barima to the seafloor. To carry over a hundred Guyanese to their deaths. Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann used to transport Jews to waiting chambers of death. What’s different with the steel chambers of the MV Barima that led to the end of over a hundred sons and daughters of Guyana? Were they, also, a lower life form? Were they, too, undesirable, hence, expendable?

Third, I expand my earlier pig-in-bag assertion. Scan the tender rehab documents for the MV Ma Lishha. Guyana didn’t get a new boat. Not with that many repair areas and systems needing replacement or revitalizing. Without a mile traveled. Was that boat cannibalized and Guyana sold a shell? Well-camouflaged, naturally. A shell of a boat that made the MV Barima into a death boat. When the MV Ma Lisha couldn’t pull its own weight, then the already sickly, rickety, MV Barima was deadweight in the most fatal meaning of the word.

Fourth, the ones who should go are those involved in the US$12.7 million MV Ma Liska. Was it stripped down in India? Or was it vandalized in Guyana? Now it needs US$1 million to oxygenate into working life. The Indian firm should reimburse Guyana that amount, AND 50 percent of the cost price for this dud ship. I pray that it is not another floating deathtrap for poor, hardworking, and tricked Guyanese.

Cubans aren’t the only ones in Guyana getting cheated with what’s due to them. The Guyana Government does that to its own. Guyanese were either double-crossed with that boat, or they are now been given double-talk with its condition. These mysteries now forever link the MV Ma Liska and MV Barima. One paralyzed; the other dead.

Finally, keep Minister Edghill right where he is. So that Guyanese always remember him for the 100+ citizens who died, but should never have. The ones above him should go.

1960s England, a sex scandal dispatched the MacMillan government. In 2026 Guyana, 100+ Guyanese die in a mass killing, and the PPP Government resists going.