Archive for category: Editorial

BY: Hem Kumar                               

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣

After two months of global distraction driven by escalating tensions with Iran, the United States has once again pivoted sharply back to Cuba—this time with a sense of urgency that appears less strategic than political.

With midterm elections looming on November 3 and polling trends suggesting a difficult road ahead for Republicans, Washington’s renewed intensity toward Havana raises an unavoidable question: is this foreign policy, or electoral calculus dressed in geopolitical clothing?

At the center of this shift is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose longstanding hardline posture on Cuba is now intersecting with a narrowing political window. The logic seems stark—if policy gains are to be extracted from Cuba, they must come now.

What distinguishes this latest phase of pressure is not its intent, but its method. For decades, the United States has relied on sanctions, trade embargoes, and diplomatic isolation to weaken the Cuban state. Yet none of these measures have inflicted the kind of systemic strain now being produced by what can only be described as a de facto fuel blockade.

By threatening punitive tariffs and secondary sanctions against any country or company supplying petroleum to Cuba, Washington has effectively choked off the island’s energy lifeline. In just a matter of months, this strategy has succeeded where decades of embargo failed—triggering cascading failures across transportation, electricity generation, healthcare delivery, and basic food distribution.

The humanitarian implications are no longer abstract. They are immediate and visible: prolonged blackouts, shuttered hospitals, stalled supply chains, and a population increasingly pushed to the brink. This is a level of collective hardship that earlier iterations of US policy, including the original Eisenhower-era embargo—which notably exempted food and medicine—appeared designed to avoid.

That distinction is critical. It underscores how far current policy has departed from even the restrained logic of Cold War containment. What we are witnessing now is not merely economic pressure on a government, but systemic deprivation affecting an entire society.

The contrast with recent history is equally striking. Just a decade ago, the United States and Cuba stood on the threshold of normalization. President Barack Obama’s 2016 visit to Havana symbolized a generational shift, framed explicitly as an effort to “bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.”

That moment now feels less like a turning point and more like a brief interruption.

Today, Cuba faces a convergence of crises. The depletion of Russian oil shipments—once a temporary buffer—has exposed the fragility of its energy infrastructure. The withdrawal of Sherritt International, following expanded US sanctions targeting entities linked to Cuba’s state-controlled economy, has compounded the collapse. Not only has the country lost a significant portion of its electricity generation capacity, but it has also seen one of its last dependable sources of foreign exchange evaporate overnight.

This is not pressure in isolation; it is pressure layered upon vulnerability.

At the same time, Washington appears to be escalating its legal and psychological campaign. Reports that the US Justice Department may indict former president Raul Castro over the 1996 “Brothers to the Rescue” incident introduce a new dimension—one that blends legal accountability with geopolitical signaling.

Whether such a move is enforceable is almost beside the point. Its primary function may be coercive: to fracture internal power dynamics and accelerate political transition.

This approach bears resemblance to strategies deployed against Venezuela, where legal indictments and sanctions were used in tandem to delegitimize and destabilize leadership. The results there have been, at best, inconclusive and, at worst, deeply destabilizing for the civilian population.
Yet alongside these punitive measures, Washington has also introduced a conditional incentive: a reported US$100 million offer tied to “meaningful reforms,” with the Catholic Church positioned as a potential intermediary.

This dual-track strategy— bun maximum pressure paired with selective engagement—places the Church in a uniquely consequential role. Historically, the Catholic Church in Cuba has functioned as one of the few semi-independent institutions capable of mediating between state and society. Its involvement could lend credibility to reform efforts—or, conversely, expose it to accusations of facilitating external influence.

The Vatican’s response, therefore, may prove pivotal. It is not merely a question of accepting or rejecting financial assistance, but of defining the moral and political boundaries of engagement in a deeply polarized environment.

Ultimately, the current trajectory raises a broader and more uncomfortable question: what is the intended endgame?

If the objective is regime change, history offers little evidence that economic strangulation produces stable or democratic outcomes. If the goal is reform, the tools being deployed risk hardening the very structures they seek to dismantle.
What is clear, however, is that the cost of this strategy is being borne not in the halls of power, but in Cuban homes, hospitals, and streets.

And as the pressure mounts, the line between policy and punishment becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish.

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

BY: Hem Kumar                               

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣

There is a dangerous lie taking hold in our national consciousness—that what is happening is fixed, inevitable, beyond challenge.

That the machinery of power, fueled by oil wealth, is too vast, too entrenched, too rewarding for those inside it to ever be meaningfully confronted. That silence is safer. That resistance is futile.

That lie must be rejected with every fibre of civic courage this nation still possesses.

What we are witnessing in Guyana today is not destiny. It is design. Cold, calculated, and executed with the kind of institutional precision that only becomes visible when you stop looking at individual incidents and start reading the pattern. The strategic deployment of oil revenues—through inflated budgets, opaque contracts, selectively distributed local content opportunities, and politically calibrated infrastructure spending—has engineered a system in which access to national wealth is no longer a right of citizenship. It is a reward for allegiance.

Loyalty is compensated. Dissent is taxed. And in that climate, fear does not need to be spoken aloud.

It circulates like oxygen—invisible, everywhere, essential to the system’s survival.
But here is what must be said plainly, without diplomatic softening or editorial hedging: the most catastrophic failure in this moment is not the behavior of those wielding power. It is the studied silence of those whose entire institutional purpose is to challenge it.

THE INSTITUTIONS THAT HAVE GONE QUIET. Let us be direct about what is missing.
Where is the Guyana Bar Association when parliamentary oversight committees fail to convene with regularity, when constitutional provisions are stretched to their limits of credibility, when the rule of law is invoked selectively to protect the powerful and punish the inconvenient? The legal profession does not exist merely to process transactions and represent private clients. It exists as a guardian of the constitutional order. When lawyers go silent as the architecture of accountability crumbles around them, they are not being professional. They are being cowardly—and that cowardice has a cost that will eventually land on their own doorsteps.

Where is the private sector—the chambers of commerce, the business associations, the captains of industry who speak eloquently about investment climate and economic diversification—when corruption distorts markets, when procurement processes reward political proximity over competence, when fair competition becomes a quaint fiction reserved for those without contracts to protect? Every business that accepts a tender it did not fairly earn, every entrepreneur who stays silent about a market rigged against them because they fear exclusion from the next opportunity, every boardroom that prioritizes access over integrity, is not merely compromising itself. It is actively financing the normalisation of a system that will, in time, consume them too.

Where are the civil society organisations and human rights activists when trafficking networks operate with the kind of visibility that suggests tolerance from those paid to suppress them? When governance standards that took decades to build are quietly dismantled in plain sight? When the most vulnerable members of this society—women, indigenous communities, migrant workers—find that the institutions meant to protect them have been hollowed out or redirected? Civil society’s power has always rested on its independence. The moment it begins calibrating its outrage to avoid offending those who fund it or control the spaces in which it operates, it ceases to be civil society. It becomes window dressing.

And where, ultimately, are the citizens themselves—the professionals, the educators, the religious leaders, the journalists, the trade unionists—who know what they are seeing but have concluded that it is not yet bad enough, or that someone else will speak first, or that speaking carries risks they are not prepared to absorb?

Silence, in this moment, is not neutrality. It is complicity. And complicity has consequences.

THE CONSEQUENCES THAT ARE ALREADY ARRIVING
We are not speaking of future hypotheticals. The consequences of institutional inaction are not coming—they are compounding in real time, and anyone paying attention can see them clearly.

The first consequence is: the death of genuine accountability. When oversight bodies do not function, when professional associations retreat into procedural irrelevance, and when citizens normalize the absence of transparency, accountability does not simply weaken—it inverts. Power becomes its own justification. Investigation becomes persecution. And those who ask legitimate questions about public funds, public contracts, and public conduct find themselves characterized as enemies of development rather than defenders of it. This is not conjecture. We have already seen this language deployed. We will see it deployed with greater aggression as the stakes of oil wealth increase.

The second consequence is :economic fragility dressed as prosperity. Oil revenue is not economic development. It is a windfall. And windfalls, history teaches us with brutal consistency, do not build resilient economies—they build dependency, inflate expectations, and, when captured by narrow political interests, create the conditions for spectacular collapse. The resource curse is not a myth. It is a documented pattern that plays out in predictable stages: initial euphoria, selective distribution, institutional capture, and then—when prices fall, when reserves thin, when the contracts dry up—a reckoning for which ordinary citizens are entirely unprepared because they were never meaningfully included in the prosperity that preceded it. If the private sector does not fight now for competitive, transparent markets, it will inherit a post-boom economy stripped of the institutional foundations needed to sustain it.

The third consequence is :the weaponization of fear as a governance tool. When people calculate that silence is safer than speech, that observation is more prudent than objection, that access requires the performance of loyalty, a society has already crossed a threshold it rarely acknowledges in the moment of crossing. Fear, once normalised, does not stay contained to politics. It migrates into professional life, into community relationships, into the way people raise their children and what ambitions they permit themselves. A nation whose citizens have learned to self-censor is a nation whose intellectual and creative capital is being systematically destroyed—not by force, but by the far more efficient mechanism of anticipatory submission.

The fourth consequence is the :erosion of democratic infrastructure that cannot simply be rebuilt by the next election. Institutions are not permanent. They are sustained by use, by defense, by the willingness of enough people in each generation to insist on their function. The judiciary, the legislature, the press, the professional associations, the civil society sector—these are not buildings. They are practices, expectations, and norms. When those practices are abandoned, when those expectations are deflated, when those norms are treated as optional, the damage is not visible in the way that a collapsed bridge is visible. But it is just as real, and just as dangerous, and far harder to repair.

The fifth, and most immediately personal consequence, is this: no one is insulated. The business owner who stayed quiet to protect a contract will find that the same system that rewarded their silence will, when it becomes convenient, redistribute their market share to someone more recently loyal. The lawyer who declined to challenge overreach will find that the legal order they failed to protect offers them diminishing protection in return. The civil society leader who softened their advocacy to preserve access will find that the access they preserved buys them less and less as power consolidates. The citizen who waited for someone else to speak will find that by the time the consequences become undeniable, the moment for effective response has already passed.

A system that conditions opportunity on obedience does not generate prosperity. It generates a hierarchy of the compliant—and hierarchies, by their nature, have very limited room at the top.

THE TRUTH THAT POWER FEARS MOST
Here is what every apparatus of concentrated power understands, even when it cannot admit it: the power of the people is greater than the people in power. Not because of any romantic notion about justice ultimately prevailing, but because of arithmetic. Because of the structural reality that no government, no matter how well-resourced, can sustain itself indefinitely against the organised, persistent, principled rejection of those it governs.

That power is not abstract. It is not poetic. It is operational.

It lives in a Bar Association that issues a public statement when the Constitution is being tested and refuses to be silenced by political pressure. It lives in a chamber of commerce that publicly names market distortions and demands transparent procurement, even when some of its members fear the response. It lives in a civil society organisation that files the report, holds the press conference, and publishes the data regardless of who finds it inconvenient. It lives in the journalist who runs the story, the religious leader who names the injustice from the pulpit, the trade unionist who refuses to trade worker dignity for institutional access, and the ordinary citizen who decides that their children’s inheritance—the inheritance of a functional democracy—is worth defending even when the personal cost is real.

This is not a call for recklessness, or for confrontation without purpose, or for the kind of performative outrage that generates heat but no light. It is a call for something far more demanding: sustained, principled, institutional responsibility.

WHAT IS REQUIRED NOW
The Bar Association must speak—not in hedged, qualified, deliberately ambiguous language designed to satisfy everyone and challenge no one, but with the clarity and force that the legal tradition demands when constitutional order is genuinely at risk.

Their silence is not neutrality. It is professional abdication.

The private sector must decide whether it is building a business community or a clientele. The distinction matters enormously. A business community defends the conditions of fair competition because it understands that rigged markets ultimately destroy the commercial vitality of everyone inside them. A clientele simply negotiates its position within a system of favour—and in doing so, surrenders the independence that gives business its social legitimacy.

Civil society and activists must reclaim their function as watchdogs, not as managed participants in a governance performance. The moment advocacy organisations begin self-censoring to protect their seat at tables controlled by those they should be scrutinising, they have ceased to perform their fundamental role. There are no neutral positions available in this environment. Choosing not to speak is itself a choice—and it will be recorded as such.

Citizens must understand, with absolute clarity, that silence today mortgages accountability tomorrow.

Every normalisation accepted, every outrage swallowed, every resignation disguised as pragmatism, narrows the space within which future challenge becomes possible. Democracies do not collapse in dramatic moments of obvious tyranny. They are surrendered incrementally, in the accumulation of small acceptances, small silences, and small retreats that individually seem manageable and collectively prove fatal.

NOTHING ABOUT THIS IS INEVITABLE — EXCEPT THE COST OF INACTION. The lie that must be rejected is not merely political. It is existential. If we accept that the current trajectory is “cast in stone,” that the oil money is too powerful, that the networks are too entrenched, that the consequences of speaking are too severe—then we have not simply lost a political argument. We have surrendered the agency that defines what a democracy actually is. We have made ourselves subjects rather than citizens. And we will have done so not under duress, but by choice.

Nothing about this moment is inevitable. The pattern can be interrupted. Institutions can be reinvigorated. Accountability can be restored. Civil courage, when enough people choose to exercise it simultaneously, becomes something that even the most entrenched systems cannot simply absorb or ignore.

But that interruption requires people—real people, in real institutions, with real professional standing—to decide that their mandate matters more than their comfort.

That the country they will leave behind matters more than the contracts they might lose today. That the judgment of history is a more serious consideration than the approval of those currently in power.

The consequences of doing nothing are not abstract. They are not distant. They are already accumulating, in the distorted markets, in the silenced institutions, in the fearful calculations, in the slow erosion of the democratic infrastructure that every generation inherits and every generation is responsible for passing on.
Those consequences will not spare the silent. They never do.

The only question that remains is not whether Guyana will pay a price for this moment—it is whether enough people will choose, while the choice is still genuinely available, to ensure that the price is not the democracy itself.

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

BY: Hem Kumar                                

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣

There is no question that the recent intervention by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr. Azruddin Mohamed, and members of the WIN parliamentary group in the matter involving 38 exploited Indian workers deserves recognition. At a time when serious allegations of labour abuse surfaced—passport confiscation, excessive working hours, coercive contractual terms, and unsafe living conditions—their presence and persistence helped bring visibility and, ultimately, some measure of relief to those affected.

Advocacy in the face of exploitation, regardless of nationality, is not only commendable but necessary. It reinforces a broader principle: that Guyana must not become a safe haven for labour abuses, whether against citizens or foreign workers. On this front, Mr. Mohamed and his colleagues demonstrated that they are capable of mobilizing attention, applying pressure, and standing on the side of justice.
However, leadership is not defined solely by moments of visibility—it is measured by consistency, responsibility, and fidelity to mandate.

Eight months after the electorate of Region 10 cast their votes, the seats won remain unfilled. This is not a peripheral issue. It is a direct affront to democratic representation. The people of Region 10, having exercised their constitutional right under Article 59 of the Constitution of Guyana— which guarantees participation in the democratic process—are still awaiting the leadership and representation they were promised.

While there are indications of administrative resistance—particularly at the level of the Regional Executive Officer—such obstacles do not absolve political leadership of responsibility. Article 13 of the Constitution emphasizes inclusionary democracy, while Article 149 protects fundamental rights, including protection from discriminatory or arbitrary denial of participation in public affairs. When elected representatives are prevented from taking their seats, these principles are not merely strained—they are potentially violated.

The legal framework provides clear and enforceable remedies, and Guyana’s own jurisprudence shows that courts have intervened where the will of the electorate is frustrated or obstructed. In electoral‑related disputes, the High Court has consistently treated the filling of seats as a matter of constitutional import. For example, in decisions dealing with nominations and the Representation of the People Act, the High Court has affirmed that the Chief Election Officer and related authorities must act in conformity with the law, and that appeals or orders of mandamus may be brought where there is unlawful delay or refusal.

More broadly, the jurisprudence in Guyana on fundamental rights and constitutional remedies confirms that a citizen or group can bring a motion under Article 153 seeking a declaration that a right has been violated and consequential orders compelling compliance. Where administrative action (or inaction) effectively denies representation, the courts have, in analogous cases, recognized that such conduct can engage the protection of fundamental rights. That precedent is not theoretical; it is operational.

In practical terms, the following remedies are, in fact, available and have been tested in similar contexts:
• An application for an order of mandamus to compel the Regional Executive Officer or any other authority to perform its statutory duties in relation to the declared results, where there is unlawful delay or refusal.
• A constitutional motion under Article 153 seeking a declaration that the prolonged failure to seat elected representatives infringes the rights of the people of Region 10 to participation and representation, and demanding consequential orders to enforce compliance.
• recourse to the Representation of the People Act, Chapter 1:03, which spells out the duty of the Chief Election Officer and related bodies to ensure that seats are properly filled in accordance with the declared results. Where there is deviation or obstruction, the courts remain the ultimate arbiter.

The uncomfortable question, therefore, is not whether there are barriers—but why those barriers have not been decisively confronted using the very legal tools and precedents that Guyana’s own jurisprudence has made available.

Mr. Mohamed has shown that he can act with urgency, that he can advocate forcefully, and that he understands the power of sustained engagement. That same intensity must now be brought to bear on the unresolved matter of Region 10. The mandate given by the people is not symbolic—it is binding.
To advocate on behalf of others, while one’s own constituents remain without representation, creates a perception that is difficult to ignore. It is not the act of advocacy that is in question—it is the imbalance in its application.
The people of Region 10 are not asking for attention; they are demanding what is already theirs by right: representation.

If leadership is to carry credibility, it must begin at home.

Mr. Mohamed has demonstrated that he can lead. The time has come for him to pursue, with equal fervor and constitutional precision, the remedies and judicial precedents available to ensure that the voices of Region 10 are finally heard, seated, and respected.

FOOTNOTE:

Legal precedents and provisions relevant to the Region 10 vacancy

1 Constitutional foundation
• The people of Region 10 derive their right to representation from Article 59 of the Constitution of the Co‑operative Republic of Guyana, which guarantees participation in the democratic process, and Article 13, which enshrines inclusionary democracy.
• Article 149 protects fundamental rights, including protection from arbitrary or discriminatory denial of participation in public affairs. Where administrative action (or inaction) effectively blocks elected representatives from taking their seats, these provisions are engaged.

2. Role of the High Court in electoral and mandamus matters
• Guyana’s High Court has repeatedly confirmed that the Chief Election Officer and related bodies must act in conformity with the Representation of the People Act, Chapter 1:03, and that appeals or orders of mandamus may be issued where there is unlawful delay or refusal.
• In electoral‑related disputes, the High Court has affirmed that seats must be filled in accordance with declared results, and that judicial review is available to ensure that the process is not undermined by administrative fiat or obstruction.

3. Constitutional remedies under Article 153
• Article 153 provides that any person whose fundamental rights have been violated may apply to the High Court for a declaration of rights and consequential orders.
• In analogous cases where the conduct of authorities has frustrated democratic participation or representation, the High Court has recognized that such conduct can engage Article 153 protections, making it possible to seek declaratory orders and enforcement of electoral outcomes.

4. Regional and appellate precedents
• In Attorney General of Guyana v Monica Thomas & Others; Bharrat Jagdeo v Monica Thomas & Others CCJ 15 (AJ) GY, the Caribbean Court of Justice addressed the scope of jurisdiction in election‑petition matters, underscoring that election‑related disputes are to be handled within strictly defined constitutional and statutory frameworks.
• In other Guyana‑based electoral‑system and nomination cases, the High Court has consistently held that the Representation of the People Act and the Constitution operate in tandem, and that where there is a failure to comply with statutory procedures, the courts may intervene to uphold the integrity of the process.

Taken together, these authorities establish that the prolonged failure to seat representatives for Region 10—where the electorate’s mandate is clear—is not merely a political inconvenience. It is a matter that falls squarely within the domain of constitutional and electoral justice, and for which remedies such as mandamus, constitutional motion, and judicial enforcement of the Representation of the People Act are available and, in fact, precedented.

Disclaimer:
The author is not a licensed attorney-at-law and this piece is not intended as legal advice. The constitutional provisions, case law references, and procedural remedies mentioned are offered for informational and advocacy purposes only, and are not a substitute for professional legal counsel. Readers are encouraged to consult a qualified legal practitioner before taking any legal action based on the information contained herein. All references to case law and constitutional texts have been used in good faith but should be independently verified in the official reports and statutes.

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

When Power Goes Unchecked and Opposition Goes Quiet, the Nation Must Speak for Itself

BY: Hem Kumar                               

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣

There is a dangerous silence settling over Guyana.

It is not the silence of contentment. It is not the silence of a people at peace with their government, satisfied with the direction of their country, or reassured by those who lead it. 

It is something far more troubling. It is the silence of resignation — the particular quiet that descends on a population that has begun to believe, however reluctantly, that its voice no longer carries weight.

That silence is not accidental. It is the natural consequence of two simultaneous failures: a government that has grown comfortable operating beyond scrutiny, and an opposition that has grown comfortable offering none.

Both failures are dangerous. Together, they are corrosive.

The Government: Authority Without Accountability

Democracies do not die in moments of obvious rupture. They erode — steadily, quietly, through the gradual normalisation of conduct that would once have triggered outrage.

What we are witnessing in Guyana today is not a sudden authoritarian turn. It is something more insidious: the slow, methodical expansion of executive confidence. Decisions are made with less consultation. 

Institutions are tested for their limits rather than respected for their purpose. Public disclosure is managed, not offered. Questions are deflected, not answered. And those who raise concerns are increasingly dismissed — not rebutted, but dismissed.

This is how democratic backsliding works. Not through a single dramatic act, but through accumulation. Each unchallenged overreach becomes the new baseline. Each unanswered question signals that questions need not be answered. Each institution that bends without breaking teaches power that bending is acceptable.

The oil wealth that was meant to be Guyana’s generational opportunity has instead become the political class’s most powerful instrument of control. Resource revenue creates the conditions for dependency. Dependency erodes dissent. And the erosion of dissent is precisely the environment in which authority without accountability takes root and grows.

This is not speculation. It is the observable pattern of resource-rich states across history, across continents, across political systems. Guyana is not immune to those patterns simply because it wishes to be. It is immune only if its citizens, its institutions, and its press refuse to allow them to take hold.

The Opposition: A Silence That Cannot Be Excused

But accountability cannot rest with the press and civil society alone. 

In a functioning democracy, the primary instrument of political accountability is an active, disciplined, and courageous opposition.

What Guyana has instead is a political opposition that appears to have confused survival with effectiveness.

Statements are issued. Press releases are distributed. Condemnations are offered. But the kind of organised, sustained, visible pressure that forces a government to reckon with consequence — that remains largely absent. And absence, in politics, is never neutral. It is always read as permission.

There is no shortage of legitimate grievances for an opposition to anchor itself to. There is no absence of public concern, no scarcity of issues that demand urgent and focused attention. The material for a serious accountability movement exists in abundance. What is missing is the will to build one.

That absence is a political failure of the first order. An opposition that does not hold the government to account is not merely ineffective — it is complicit. Not in intention, perhaps, but in effect. And in politics, effect is what matters.

The people of Guyana did not elect an opposition to manage their own irrelevance. They elected it to be the institutional voice of scrutiny, challenge, and alternative vision. When it falls short of that mandate, it does not merely fail itself — it fails every citizen who counted on it to speak when speaking was difficult.

The opposition must understand: the nation is watching not for what it says, but for what it does. Consistency, courage, and organisation are not optional features of an effective political movement. They are its foundation.

The Void That Is Created

When a government expands unchecked and opposition contracts in silence, a void is created.

And voids do not remain empty.

They are filled — by fatalism, by cynicism, by the creeping conviction that participation is pointless and engagement is futile. They are filled by the quiet withdrawal of citizens who once believed in the possibility of accountability and have slowly been taught not to. They are filled, eventually, by a political culture in which power is the only thing that matters because it is the only thing that appears to work.

That is the real danger now facing Guyana. Not a single scandal. Not a single policy failure. Not a single act of overreach. But the cultural shift that occurs when a population decides, collectively and quietly, that holding power to account is someone else’s problem — or no one’s problem at all.

Four years from the next election is not merely a timeline. For too many citizens, it has become an excuse for disengagement — a reason to wait rather than to act. But democracy does not operate on election cycles. It operates every day, in every institution, in every conversation, in every question asked and every demand made.

The space between elections is not a void. It is where accountability either lives or dies.

The Fourth Estate: Consequential, Not Comfortable

Into this space, the press must step — not cautiously, not partially, but fully and without apology.

Journalism was never designed to be a passive recorder of official positions. It was designed to be the mechanism by which citizens understand what power is doing in their name. When that mechanism functions well, accountability is possible. When it functions poorly — when it normalises silence, when it reports without interrogating, when it mistakes access for independence — democracy suffers consequences it may not immediately see but will eventually feel.

This is not a call for recklessness. It is not an invitation to abandon fairness, accuracy, or proportion. On the contrary, it is a demand for a deeper commitment to all three — because it is precisely the rigour of good journalism that gives it the moral authority to challenge power without apology.

What it does require is courage. The willingness to ask the questions that those in authority would prefer remain unasked. The discipline to follow a story not merely when it is convenient, but when it is difficult. The editorial resolve to resist the twin temptations of access journalism on one hand and performative outrage on the other — and instead pursue, consistently and seriously, the truth of what is happening to this country and why.

The press must connect the dots that official narratives leave disconnected. It must amplify the voices that power has learned to ignore. It must frame the stakes of what is happening with sufficient clarity that citizens who feel distant from politics can understand, concretely, what they stand to lose.

And it must do all of this with the moral seriousness that the moment demands — not as advocacy for any political faction, but as an act of service to the public whose right to know is not a courtesy extended by the powerful, but a cornerstone of democratic life.

A Nation That Must Choose

But ultimately — and this must be said plainly — no institution can substitute for the will of the people themselves.

The Guyanese people are not powerless. They are, in the most fundamental sense, the source of all legitimate authority in this country. The government derives its mandate from them. The opposition earns its relevance from them. Even the press operates at the pleasure of an informed and engaged readership.

When citizens disengage, they do not merely step back from politics. They step back from the source of their own power. And power, once ceded, is rarely returned without effort.

The task before the nation is not to wait for the right leader, the right election, the right moment. It is to refuse — now, consistently, loudly where necessary and quietly where effective — to allow the normalisation of silence to become permanent.

It is to demand accountability not as a political preference but as a civic obligation. To recognise that the erosion of democratic norms, however gradual, has consequences that compound over time. To understand that a generation that grows up without witnessing meaningful accountability learns, from that experience, not to expect it.

This is the inheritance that is at stake. Not merely the next election cycle. Not merely the next policy decision. But the political culture that will define what kind of country Guyana becomes — and what kind of citizens its children learn to be

The Measure of This Moment

History will not remember who was most comfortable during this period. It will remember who was most consequential.

It will remember whether the institutions designed to check power did so. Whether the voices charged with informing the public chose honesty over convenience. Whether ordinary citizens, in the face of what felt like overwhelming indifference, chose engagement over resignation.

The silence settling over Guyana is not inevitable. It is a choice — one being made, or not made, every day by those who govern, those who oppose, those who report, and those who simply live here and care about the country they inhabit.

The question this nation must answer — not in four years, but now — is whether that silence will be accepted, or whether there remain enough people willing to insist, with clarity and without apology, that Guyana deserves better.

It does.

And the time to say so is not later.

It is now.

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