The Commissioner Answers to the Court

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 The Commissioner Answers to the Court

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

This is a consequential ruling because it does more than settle a dispute between Christopher Ram and the Commissioner of Information. It begins to restore a legal mechanism that successive administrations allowed to lie dormant for fourteen years.

For fourteen years, Guyana’s Access to Information Act 2011 sat on the statute book like an unopened letter: enacted, available, and ignored by the very institutions meant to give it life. The promise was clear enough. Citizens would have a lawful avenue to seek records held by the State; public authorities would have duties to respond; and Parliament would receive annual reports showing whether the system was working. 

In practice, however, the law became an ornament. The office established to advance access to information produced no visible culture of disclosure. Ministries remained accustomed to silence. Annual reports required by law were not laid before the National Assembly. Citizens seeking records encountered delay, deflection, or refusal.

This week, Justice Nicola Pierre opened that long-neglected statute, read its plain words, and delivered a judgment of importance to every Guyanese who has ever been told that public information is unavailable, inconvenient, confidential by habit, or simply not the business of the public.

Her findings are direct. The Commissioner of Information is a “public authority” within the meaning of section 2 of the Act. He is therefore subject to the same statutory obligations of openness and accountability that the law imposes on other bodies holding public records.

That point should never have required litigation. Yet it did.

The Commissioner had sought to send applicant Christopher Ram back to the ministries or agencies believed to hold the documents, effectively arguing that Mr. Ram first needed a refusal from the original record-holder before he could approach the Commissioner. Justice Pierre rejected that position. The Act contains no such precondition. A citizen does not have to run a bureaucratic obstacle course before invoking the law.

The ruling matters because bureaucracies often make rights inaccessible not by repealing them, but by adding hurdles that Parliament never enacted. They require the wrong form, the wrong office, the wrong sequence, or an unofficial preliminary refusal. Every such invented condition turns a legal right into a favour granted at administrative discretion.

Justice Pierre has now made clear that the Commissioner cannot manufacture a barrier that the law does not contain.

The Reporting Duty Ignored

The judgment also addresses an issue that goes to the heart of whether the Access to Information Act has been functioning at all. Section 44 requires an annual report to be prepared on the operation of the Act and laid before the National Assembly. That report is not optional. It is not a public-relations exercise. It is the accountability mechanism Parliament built into the legislation.

Through such reports, Parliament and the public should have been able to see how many information requests were made, which agencies complied, where delays occurred, what exemptions were invoked, what appeals or complaints arose, and whether the system was expanding or failing.

Instead, not one such report has reached the National Assembly.

Mr. Ram’s request for these reports was dismissed by the Commissioner as an “absurdity” and an invitation to “self-oversee.” But the court correctly recognized the request for what it was: a request for existing records relating to the administration of a statute. The Commissioner was not asked to invent a document. He was asked to account for documents the law already required.

That distinction is fundamental. A public officer cannot evade a disclosure request by disparaging the purpose of the request or by treating a statutory obligation as though it were an unreasonable personal demand.

If no reports exist, that fact itself demands explanation. If reports were prepared but not tabled, the public is entitled to know who withheld them, why they were withheld, and whether the Minister responsible took any step to ensure compliance.

A Troubling Finding on Candour

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Justice Pierre’s ruling is her finding concerning the Commissioner’s candour about whether he had received the requests.

The judge described the situation as “particularly ironic and lamentable” in proceedings concerned with access to information. That language deserves close attention. Courts do not lightly comment on the candour of a public official. When they do, it reflects a serious concern about the reliability of the explanation offered.

The irony is stark. The official entrusted with facilitating access to public records was unable, or unwilling, to give a clear and straightforward account to the court about requests made to his own office.

Access to information depends on more than legislation. It depends on public officers keeping records, acknowledging correspondence, providing reasons, meeting deadlines, and acting honestly when challenged. An information regime cannot function where silence is routine and accountability must be extracted through litigation.

The Commissioner’s office ought to set the standard for administrative transparency. Instead, it has now become the subject of a court order compelling it to do what the law required all along.

What the Court Ordered

It is important to state exactly what the ruling does and does not accomplish.

Justice Pierre did not order immediate disclosure of every record sought. The court ordered the Commissioner to process and determine Mr. Ram’s three requests within sixty days. One of those requests concerns the taxes the Government pays on behalf of ExxonMobil and its partners—a matter of substantial public interest in a country whose oil revenues, fiscal arrangements, and petroleum concessions affect every household and future generation.

The Commissioner must now make a lawful decision. If he grants access, the documents should be disclosed in accordance with the Act. If he refuses access, or says that the records cannot be located after a thorough and diligent search, section 23 requires him to provide written reasons and to notify the applicant of the right to return to the High Court.

That is the next test.

A decision cannot be a vague letter, an oral explanation, or another exercise in administrative avoidance. It must identify the legal basis for any refusal. It must explain whether records exist, where they were searched for, what exemption is being relied upon, and why that exemption applies. The public is entitled to reasons, not reflexes.

The sixty-day period is therefore not a courtesy. It is a judicially reinforced deadline. The Commissioner must now demonstrate whether his office can perform the basic functions for which it has been publicly funded.

Government Must Explain Its Silence

The failure of the Access to Information Act is not the Commissioner’s failure alone. It is a Government failure.

Year after year, public funds have been allocated to an office connected to the administration of access-to-information law. Yet year after year, the mandatory annual reports were not laid before Parliament. This year’s budget again voted funds, but the public has heard no adequate explanation for why the central reporting requirement in section 44 went unmet for more than a decade.

That silence cannot continue.

A Minister answerable to the National Assembly for this statutory scheme must explain why Parliament was denied the reports the law required. Was the Commissioner instructed to prepare them? Were they prepared? Were they submitted to the responsible Minister? Were they rejected, delayed, misplaced, or ignored? What money was allocated, how was it spent, what staff and systems were in place, and what measurable work did the office perform?

These are not partisan questions. They are elementary questions of public administration.

Guyana cannot claim to embrace transparency while allowing a transparency law to remain dormant for fourteen years. Nor can it celebrate oil wealth and national development while citizens are forced into court merely to establish that the official responsible for information is himself subject to the Act.

A Precedent for Every Citizen

Christopher Ram deserves credit for taking the matter beyond protest and into the courtroom. Where public complaint had failed to awaken the system, litigation has now produced a binding judicial clarification.

He has secured more than a personal victory. He has established a working precedent for every Guyanese journalist, researcher, community group, taxpayer, trade unionist, student, civil-society organization, and ordinary citizen seeking to know how public power is exercised and how public money is spent.

The Commissioner is reachable. He is bound by the Act. He is answerable to the court.

That principle may seem obvious, but in Guyana it has had to be fought for. It is a first step toward converting access to information from a slogan into an enforceable civic right.

The importance of this moment lies not only in the records Mr. Ram seeks. It lies in what can follow: questions about contracts, tax concessions, environmental approvals, procurement awards, state lands, public spending, policy decisions, audits, regulatory enforcement, and the management of the country’s natural wealth.

A functioning access-to-information system changes the balance of power. It reduces the ability of officials to govern through secrecy. It equips citizens and journalists to test official claims against records. It gives Parliament, the courts, and the public a stronger basis on which to demand accountability.

The Demands Are the Law

The demands now before the Commissioner and the Government are neither radical nor unreasonable. They are obligations already written into Guyana’s law:

⇒ Determinations on all three of Mr. Ram’s requests within sixty days, with written reasons for every refusal or claim that records cannot be found.

⇒ The preparation and laying before the National Assembly of the overdue section 44 annual reports.

⇒ A full public account from the responsible Minister explaining why those reports were never tabled.

⇒ Clear disclosure of the resources allocated to the Commissioner’s office, the work performed, and the measures now being taken to ensure compliance with the Act.

⇒ A public, accessible process through which citizens can make requests, receive acknowledgements, track deadlines, and challenge refusals.

The court has opened the door. The Commissioner must now walk through it, and the Government must stop pretending that an enacted law can be ignored without consequence.

This judgment will mean little if it is read once, applauded briefly, and shelved beside the Act itself. The real measure of its significance will be found in the next sixty days: in the quality of the Commissioner’s decisions, in the candour of the Government’s explanations, and in whether Parliament finally receives the reports it was legally entitled to receive years ago.

For the first time in a long time, Guyanese have gained real ground in the struggle to obtain information from those who govern in their name. That ground must now be defended, widened, and used. The clock is running. We will publish the count.

— The Board

 

When Deportation Comes Home

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 When Deportation Comes Home

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

Paul LePage built much of his political identity on a hard-line view of immigration. As Maine’s governor, he helped normalize the language of suspicion—casting migrants as burdens, outsiders, and threats to public resources. He now tells voters that he supports “legal, but not illegal, immigration.”

Then the machinery he applauded came close to his own family.

LePage says his son’s father-in-law has a work permit, is in the United States legally, and is nonetheless facing deportation. He says the man is being removed because he comes from a country disliked by people in Washington. “That’s not right,” LePage declared. No, it is not 

But that is precisely the point many immigrant families have been making for years—often without a microphone, a campaign platform, or the political influence of a former governor running for Congress.

For too long, immigration has been discussed as an abstraction: “illegals,” “criminal aliens,” “the border,” “the invasion.” Such language is useful to politicians because it erases people. It turns parents, workers, students, spouses, caregivers, and longtime neighbors into a faceless problem to be solved by raids, detention centers, deportation flights, and armed agents.

LePage’s family connection has momentarily exposed the lie beneath the slogan.

A work permit does not guarantee safety. A person can be authorized to work, pay taxes, raise a family, obey the law, and contribute to a community—and still be rendered deportable by a change in policy, the withdrawal of a humanitarian protection, or the cold discretion of an immigration bureaucracy. In today’s America, “legal” status can be fragile, temporary, and politically contingent.

That should trouble everyone.

The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration has long been deployed as a moral shortcut. It allows politicians to claim compassion while backing policies that cause fear and instability in immigrant communities. But immigration law is not a clean moral ledger. It is a maze of expiring permissions, pending applications, work authorizations, asylum claims, humanitarian protections, and bureaucratic delays. A person’s life can be upended not because he committed a violent crime, but because Washington changed the rules.

LePage now says enforcement should focus on gang members and serious criminals. That is a more defensible position than indiscriminate deportation. Yet it raises an unavoidable question: where was this concern when his own politics helped cultivate an atmosphere in which immigrant communities were broadly treated as suspect?

The painful truth is that mass enforcement does not remain neatly confined to the villains politicians invoke at rallies. It does not stop at the gang member or the violent offender. It reaches the father with a work permit. The grandmother who has lived in America for decades. The asylum seeker awaiting a hearing. The worker driving to a job. The young man who becomes a name in a news report after an encounter with armed immigration agents ends in death.

In Maine, the killing of Colombian immigrant Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero by an ICE agent has shaken the public conscience. A 25-year-old man is dead. Questions persist about the circumstances of the operation, whether he was even the intended target, whether deadly force was necessary, and whether the public will ever receive a full and credible accounting.

That is the danger of an enforcement culture that treats immigration control as a license for escalation.

The rule of law does not mean that government may do whatever it wishes in the name of law enforcement. The rule of law means that government itself is bound by law—by due process, judicial orders, constitutional rights, limits on force, and the principle that no agency is beyond scrutiny.

When judges warn that immigration authorities are disregarding court orders, the danger is larger than immigration policy. It is a warning about executive power. A government agency that can ignore a judge, deport a person despite credible claims of danger, punish dissent, or operate without meaningful transparency is not protecting the rule of law. It is eroding it.

And the moral issue cannot be avoided.

No country is strengthened by humiliating vulnerable people. No democracy is made safer by treating human beings as cargo for third-country detention schemes, as statistics for political speeches, or as expendable targets in an enforcement campaign.

A nation that prides itself on liberty cannot selectively apply dignity only to those who possess the right passport, the right accent, the right political connection, or the right family tie.

LePage’s appeal for his relative should be heard. But it should not be heard only because it comes from Paul LePage.

It should be heard because every immigrant family deserves the same consideration: an individualized hearing, respect for due process, protection from arbitrary state power, and recognition that a person’s worth is not erased by an immigration file.

The real test is not whether political leaders can find compassion when deportation knocks on their own door. The real test is whether they can show that compassion before it does.

Global Moral Voices, Local Silence?: The Diaspora Intellectual’s Dilemma.

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Global Moral Voices, Local Silence?: The Diaspora Intellectual’s Dilemma.

 OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan, the Guyanese scholar and former United Nations human-rights leader, has rightly raised alarm over the danger of Guyana being seen internationally as tolerant of Holocaust denial. But where is that same urgency when his own people are subjected to continuing -unhinged dehumanization at home—through official indifference, unequal treatment, avoidable hardship, and a political culture that too often treats ordinary Guyanese lives as expendable?  Is this a principled defense of human dignity everywhere, or a selective morality reserved for international stages and distant atrocities while the suffering of his own kin receives far less sustained attention? A human-rights conscience cannot be activated only when Guyana’s global image is at stake. It must be equally present when Guyanese dignity, safety, justice and humanity are being eroded in Guyana itself.

Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan is right to condemn Holocaust denial in a state-owned newspaper. There can be no moral ambiguity on that question: the Holocaust is historically documented, its victims deserve dignity, and a government-owned publication should not normalize antisemitic distortions behind the shield of a disclaimer.

But Ramcharan’s intervention also invites an uncomfortable question: where has this same urgency been when Guyanese people have faced their own modern-day catalogue of official indifference?

This is not to diminish his scholarship or deny the value of his warning. It is to insist that moral authority carries obligations close to home. Dr. Ramcharan is not an ordinary commentator. He is a Guyanese of international standing, a former acting UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a former Chancellor of the University of Guyana, and a scholar whose career has been built around human dignity, international law and the protection of rights.

That is precisely why the public is entitled to expect more than occasional interventions on Guyana’s domestic condition.

Selective moral urgency

Too often, Ramcharan’s writings appear more animated by global historical debates, international personalities and grand geopolitical questions than by the sustained, grinding realities facing ordinary Guyanese: grieving families, poverty amid oil wealth, institutional impunity, unequal access to state resources, abuse of public power, and the persistent feeling that the citizen exists only at election time.

Guyana does not lack “live” human-rights issues. They are all around us:

◊Families seeking justice after deaths connected to state failures or public negligence.

◊Citizens humiliated by weak public services while politically connected interests appear to prosper.

◊Communities struggling with the consequences of mining, environmental degradation, land insecurity and unequal development.

◊Public funds being spent amid recurring questions about transparency, procurement, priorities and accountability.

◊Victims of crime, domestic violence, police excesses, discrimination and bureaucratic cruelty who rarely receive the sustained advocacy that influential voices can provide.

The issue is not that Ramcharan must write only about Guyana. No serious person should demand that an international human-rights scholar ignore international questions. The problem is proportion and consistency.

A scholar who finds the voice to warn of Guyana’s reputational damage abroad should also be equally relentless about the damage being done to Guyanese lives at home.

The lived reality

What does it say when six Guyanese lives can be met with a proposed or offered compensation package of $5 million, as though loss, grief and human worth can be reduced to an administrative calculation?

What does it say when people see oil wealth rising, new announcements multiplying, and foreign investors being courted, while many citizens still confront inadequate roads, weak health care, poor drainage, job insecurity, low wages and a public sector that can feel inaccessible unless one has political connections?

These are not abstract governance concerns. They are the lived reality of Ramcharan’s own people—his kin in the broadest national sense.

A human-rights voice must not become most forceful only when the victims are distant, historical, international or diplomatically convenient.

The measure of human-rights commitment is not merely whether one can eloquently defend victims of Nazi atrocity eight decades later. It is whether one is prepared to challenge the powerful when present-day Guyanese are being neglected, dismissed, impoverished, intimidated or treated as expendable.

A challenge to Ramcharan

Dr. Ramcharan should not be asked to retreat from the Holocaust-denial issue. He should press it harder. The Guyana Chronicle must answer for how such material was published, why it was repeated, who approved it, and whether its editorial standards apply equally to all contributors.

But he should also widen his gaze. Guyana needs his voice on:

◊The adequacy and dignity of compensation for families who lose loved ones through institutional failure.

◊The accountability of public officials and state agencies.

◊Whether oil wealth is being translated into measurable improvements in ordinary people’s lives.

◊The protection of vulnerable communities against environmental harm and unequal development.

◊The culture of impunity, political favoritism and public contempt that citizens say has taken root.

◊The duty of a government to treat every Guyanese life as possessing equal worth.

Ramcharan himself has recently raised domestic governance questions, including concerns relating to legal and institutional arrangements in Guyana.  But the scale of Guyana’s current social and governance crisis demands something more sustained, more specific and more personally rooted than intermittent commentary.

The real warning

The danger to Guyana’s international image is not confined to an offensive column in the Chronicle. The deeper danger is a government culture that seems unable to understand the pain of ordinary people, and a national intellectual class that too often responds selectively, cautiously or after the damage has already been done.

Holocaust denial must be condemned without qualification. But so too must the quieter denial taking place in Guyana: the denial of citizens’ suffering, the denial of their right to accountable government, and the denial that national wealth must first serve the people whose resources created it.

Diaspora intellectuals have a legitimate and potentially vital role in Guyanese public life—but legitimacy must be earned through humility, consistency, evidence and solidarity with people living the consequences of political decisions every day. They must be more than overseas commentators summoned for prestige, remittances, investment and public relations.

The Ramcharan question

In Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan’s case, his international human-rights background gives special weight to his public interventions. His criticism of Holocaust denial in a government-owned newspaper is justified; such material can damage Guyana’s moral standing and must be repudiated.

But that same standing raises the public expectation that his concern for human dignity will be equally visible when Guyanese confront injustice at home. A diaspora intellectual cannot be satisfied merely with identifying a scandal that could embarrass Guyana internationally. He must also confront the domestic conditions—official indifference, impunity, weak accountability and unequal treatment;that injure Guyanese long before foreign observers take notice.

Guyana needs diaspora intellectuals who are neither cheerleaders nor detached moralists. It needs engaged citizens: people prepared to place expertise in the service of truth, insist that oil wealth serves the population, and stand with ordinary Guyanese even when doing so brings discomfort to governments, parties, friends and influential institutions.

Dr. Ramcharan has spoken powerfully about the dignity of victims abroad. Guyanese now need him to speak with the same persistence, clarity and moral impatience about the dignity of victims at home.

A Portal Before a Protector

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

A Portal Before a Protector

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

Guyana’s all-online passport appointment system, which becomes the only way to apply from October 1, has been welcomed in a recent editorial as “a big and welcome step forward.” The editorial is right about the queues. It is silent about the law.

It lists the legal groundwork for the digital state: the Digital Identity Card Act, in full force since March 2026, and “legislation on data protection.” It does not say that the Data Protection Act, passed in August 2023 alongside the e-ID law, has never been shown to have been commenced. That omission carries the weight of the whole argument.

What the record shows

The Digital Identity Card Act was brought into operation by a commencement order from Prime Minister Mark Phillips, published in the Official Gazette on March 26 and effective March 31. Demerara Waves reported the same day that the Data Protection Act had not been so commenced. Attorney-at-law Brenden Glasford, writing in Sidebar Guyana, argued that the two laws are “intrinsically linked” and that failing to commence the Data Protection Act affects the legality of the Digital Identity Card Act.

The government has not disputed the linkage. It has conceded the gap. The Prime Minister said the state is working to establish the mechanisms to bring the Data Protection Act into full effect, and promised that private and personal data would be requested only once it is. Data Protection Commissioner Aneal Giddings, in a May 15 piece published by the Guyana Chronicle and Kaieteur News, wrote that the government “is working to establish the necessary mechanisms to bring the Data Protection Act into full effect.” In the same piece he wrote that Guyana has a Data Protection Act that is “the law of the land,” and that his office is still “in the process of formally establishing the Data Protection Office.”

Both statements cannot describe the same fully operating regime. An Act that is the law of the land yet not in full effect is an Act on paper.

A Commissioner without an office

To be fair, a Commissioner exists. The Prime Minister told the National Assembly he was appointed on January 2. But the Commissioner is also the administrator of the Digital Identity Registry and the exclusive issuer of the cards, by his own account.

The office that runs the system is the office offered as its independent overseer. Independence does not describe an official who is both operator and regulator.

Mr Giddings lists purpose limitation, data minimization, restrictions on automated decision-making and independent oversight as protections “built into the architecture of the act.” Every one is a provision of a statute he says is still being brought into effect. A citizen cannot enforce a right that exists only in un-commenced text.

Why this matters on October 1

The Attorney General’s assurance for the e-ID was that only basic data already held by the state would be collected until the Data Protection Act operates. That was the government’s own admission that collecting more, without the Act, would be unsafe. The passport system, and the integrated portal the editorial praises, is the point at which that standard must be shown to hold. The editorial itself imagines a single framework through which citizens reach passports, driver’s licences, registry documents and tax services.

Integration multiplies the harm when safeguards are missing. A single breach or misuse would expose everything at once.

The editorial warns citizens about fake websites and urges the government to keep security measures in step. It names no enforcement body, no audit, no penalty and no complaint route. The warning places the burden on the citizen, while the state’s duties go unmentioned.

Questions the state must answer

We put these to the Prime Minister’s office and to the Data Protection Commissioner, and we will publish the answers, or the silence.

  1. Has a commencement order for the Data Protection Act been issued? If so, on what date, and where was it gazetted? If not, when will it be?
  2. If the Act has not been commenced, under what statutory authority is the Commissioner acting?
  3. Is the Data Protection Office established? Where is it, and how can a citizen contact it? Is there a phone number, a website and a complaint mechanism?
  4. Who is the data controller for the passport appointment platform, and what data does it collect? How long is it retained, who can access it, and is any of it shared across agencies or with foreign governments?
  5. Who audits access to this data, and what is a citizen’s remedy if it is misused or breached? Is there a duty to notify affected persons?
  6. Where is the platform hosted, and under what contract with which vendor?
  7. If the Act is not in force on October 1, what legal recourse does a citizen have?
  8. How does the Commissioner reconcile administering the Registry with the independent oversight the Act promises?

The standard

We do not oppose digital services. We oppose the sequence. A protector should come before a portal. The editorial that celebrates the removal of a queue should have asked what stands behind the screen when a citizen surrenders identity data to the state.

Efficiency without recourse is not reform. Until the Act is shown to be in force and the Office is open, every applicant is trusting the state’s word alone.

Digital government must not become a system in which citizens are compelled to give up control over their personal data simply because essential public services have been placed online. A passport is not optional. If an online procedure becomes mandatory, the State bears an even higher duty to ensure that every applicant has legal protection, clear information and meaningful recourse.

The test of Guyana’s digital transformation is not whether government can compel citizens to use a website. The test is whether the State has built the institutions, laws, safeguards and accountability mechanisms that make digital services safe and trustworthy.

Until those safeguards are visibly and legally in place, the rush toward compulsory online public services risks becoming not modernization, but digitized vulnerability.

 

 

 

Grief Is Not a Government Bargain

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Grief Is Not a Government Bargain: The MV Barima Families Must Not Be Pressured Into Silence

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

As reported in Kiskadee Watch in Sept 29 ,Leon Murray of Mabaruma was asked to accept $5 million for the loss of six relatives in the MV Barima catastrophe.

Six human beings. Six members of one family. Six lives abruptly taken in a maritime disaster that should trigger the highest level of national urgency, compassion, transparency and accountability.

Yet what Mr. Murray describes is an offer that works out to roughly $833,333 per life.

That is not a serious expression of national remorse. It is not justice. It is not an adequate response from a government presiding over an oil-rich country that repeatedly boasts of unprecedented revenues, transformational development and a brighter future for all Guyanese.

It is an insult to grief. 

Mr. Murray’s reported refusal deserves to be understood for what it is: a declaration that the relatives of the dead and missing are not seeking a quick payment in exchange for their silence, their legal rights, or their demand to know why their loved ones were placed in harm’s way.

“I am looking for justice,” he reportedly said.

That is the central issue. Not whether a government can put a figure beside a tragedy. Not whether lawyers can produce documents for traumatized families to sign. Not whether an official can characterize a settlement as assistance, relief or compassion. The issue is justice.

A Release Cannot Replace Accountability

Every bereaved family has the right to receive independent legal advice before signing any document that may compromise future claims or release the State, its agencies, operators, insurers or any other potentially liable party from legal responsibility. This is elementary fairness.

A family that has lost a breadwinner, a child, a parent, a sibling or several relatives at once must not be confronted with settlement papers while it is still grieving, while bodies remain unrecovered, while the vessel remains on the seabed, and while fundamental questions about safety, licensing, capacity, oversight, emergency readiness and regulatory failure remain unanswered.

The reported concern expressed by Paul  Seepersad’s- “the MV Barima chief engineer”-family is therefore entirely legitimate. They have said they do not want to sign away their rights. No reasonable person should fault them for that.

Indeed, relatives should be cautious of any agreement that requires them to accept a sum as “full and final settlement,” waive future legal action, or surrender their ability to seek further compensation if evidence later establishes negligence, misconduct or regulatory failure.

A compassionate government would ensure that every family is provided access to independent counsel of its own choosing, with the legal costs covered separately and without any condition requiring a family to accept a settlement.

Instead, the public is hearing reports that evoke the same anxiety and distrust that followed the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory fire: grieving families being asked to sign documents while serious questions of accountability remain unresolved. The circumstances may differ, but the concern is painfully familiar. Families fear that the State’s priority is not truth, justice and responsibility, but closure on terms designed by the State.

Oil Wealth, Yet Pennies for the Dead

Guyana is no longer a poor country pleading incapacity. This nation has entered an era of massive oil revenues. Government ministers speak constantly about prosperity, modern infrastructure, new highways, hospitals, hotels, stadiums and grand development schemes.

But when ordinary citizens die in a preventable or potentially preventable national disaster, their relatives are reportedly offered  $5  million to bring an end to the matter.

What, exactly, does the Government believe a Guyanese life is worth?

More importantly, what message does this send to citizens in the hinterland and riverine communities who depend on boats and ferries because there are no practical alternatives? Does it say that their lives matter equally? Or does it say that, once tragedy strikes, their families can be processed through a bureaucratic settlement exercise and expected to be grateful?

The loss of a relative cannot be reduced to a calculation. But compensation must at least reflect the gravity of the loss, the dependency created, the long-term impact on children and elderly parents, lost income, funeral costs, counselling, education, housing, medical needs and the possibility that negligence contributed to the tragedy.

In Mr. Murray’s case, the loss of six relatives may have devastated an entire family network. It may have removed income earners, caregivers, parents, children and the emotional foundation of a household.

To propose one $5  million payment for all six, if that account is accurate, reflects an astonishing absence of empathy and an even more disturbing casualness about human life.

Do Not Discourage Independent Counsel

The Government must also answer concerns about public comments attributed to the Attorney General discouraging surviving relatives from entertaining independent legal representation.

Why should families be warned away from independent lawyers?

Independent counsel is not an enemy of justice. It is one of the protections available to citizens confronting the unequal power of the State. The Government has the Attorney General’s Chambers, ministries, agencies, technical officers, insurers, legal advisers and access to public resources.

Bereaved families have grief, uncertainty and a document placed before them. The imbalance could not be more obvious.

No government that is confident in its conduct should fear families receiving competent, independent legal advice. If officials genuinely believe their offers are fair and their agreements transparent, then they should welcome scrutiny rather than create the impression that relatives ought to avoid counsel who may advise them not to sign.

The families must be allowed to make informed decisions—free from pressure, haste, intimidation, dependency or the fear that refusing to sign will result in the withdrawal of support.

The Wreck Still Lies Below

The deepest disrespect is that the wreck of the MV Barima remains submerged while relatives of the missing continue to wait.

For those whose loved ones have not been found, there can be no genuine closure while the vessel remains underwater and the Government’s salvage process appears mired in delay. Every passing day compounds the anguish of families who do not know whether the remains of their relatives are trapped inside, whether evidence is deteriorating, and whether the truth is being allowed to disappear beneath the sea.

Salvaging the vessel is not a public-relations exercise. It is a moral obligation, an evidentiary necessity and a fundamental duty owed to the dead, the missing, survivors and the country.

The vessel may contain answers about the disaster. It may reveal whether basic safety requirements were ignored, whether the craft was overloaded, whether lifesaving equipment was sufficient and functional, whether crew and passengers received proper safety instructions, whether inspections failed, and whether regulators looked away.     

The longer the wreck remains untouched, the stronger the public suspicion becomes that urgency is being reserved for settlement documents rather than for the recovery of evidence and human remains. 

The Commission Must Not Become Another Delay

 The Commission of Inquiry must also move with urgency, independence and transparency. It cannot become another state exercise that produces delay, legalistic obstruction and carefully worded findings that avoid identifying individual or institutional responsibility. 

The public deserves answers to clear questions: 

⇒ Who approved, certified, inspected and monitored the MV Barima? 

⇒ Was the vessel seaworthy, properly equipped and operating within its lawful passenger capacity?

⇒ Were all required safety protocols followed before and during the voyage? 

⇒ Did the relevant maritime authorities fail in their oversight responsibilities? style

⇒ Were warnings ignored, concealed or inadequately acted upon? style

⇒  What emergency response systems were in place, and why were they insufficient? 

⇒ When will the wreck be salvaged, and who will independently preserve and examine the evidence?

⇒ What support—financial, medical, psychological, educational and legal—has actually reached every affected family?

No amount of compensation can substitute for these answers. And no settlement should be used to close the door on accountability.

Justice Before Closure   

 The families of the MV Barima victims are not asking for charity. They are demanding recognition of their rights and respect for the value of the lives that were lost.

They deserve separate, fair and transparent assessments of compensation. They deserve long-term support that does not vanish after the cameras leave. They deserve independent legal advice. They deserve access to all relevant information. They deserve the recovery of the vessel. And they deserve an inquiry that names failures, identifies those responsible and recommends consequences that prevent another disaster. 

Most of all, they deserve a government that understands the difference between offering assistance and attempting to purchase closure 

A nation’s moral character is revealed in how it treats its people at their most vulnerable. The handling of the MV Barima tragedy is becoming a grave test of Guyana’s conscience.The Government must stop behaving as though grief can be managed with a standard figure, a signature and a press statement.

There were names behind those numbers. Families behind those names. Futures destroyed behind every family. 

And no oil-rich government has the right to treat the dead, the missing and the bereaved as though $5  million is the price of their silence.

   

When Popularity Begins to Challenge the Guardrails

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592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM GUYANA

When Popularity Begins to Challenge the Guardrails

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

There was something politically revealing about the September 24 diaspora gathering for President Irfaan Ali and the PPP/C in New York.

The event attracting  a major outpouring of Guyanese from NY, other states in the USA ,Canada and as far as Florida, began late. Attendees waited outside the venue in chilly conditions as organizers managed entry under security protocols, explaining that a large crowd could not be allowed to accumulate indoors before the President arrived. Some were understandably frustrated. But many stayed. The crowd built. The anticipation held.

That alone does not make a political argument. Crowds gather for many reasons: party loyalty, curiosity, access, networking, national pride, opposition, spectacle, or a genuine desire to hear from a head of government.

But what became clear in conversations with those waiting was that President Ali has something more than ordinary support among sections of the diaspora. He has a constituent that is alive, emotional, invested, and increasingly personal in its devotion.

Several people interviewed offered exceptionally generous praise. Some described him as Guyana’s best president. Others argued that he deserves a third term. When reminded that the Constitution imposes a two-term presidential limit, the response from some was immediate: “change the Constitution.”

Unfortunately, these same individuals along with everyone else who attended to either  express their support or voice their concerns were not afforded an opportunity as the format of the forum was uniquely structured around  any such mechanism.

 What the format tells us

There was no town hall. No microphone passed through the crowd for questions. No moment, structured or improvised, where an attendee — supporter or otherwise — could press the President on policy, on term limits, on anything at all. What existed instead was a social occasion: music, drinks, food, photographs.

That is a fact about the event’s structure, not a claim about anyone’s intentions. But it is a fact worth stating plainly, because of what it means in combination with everything else: a gathering large enough to draw travelers from two countries, animated enough to produce spontaneous talk of constitutional change, and structured in a way that built in no mechanism for the President to be questioned by the very people expressing that sentiment in front of him.

Whether that absence was by design is a fair question — one this publication cannot answer on the basis of one event. It is, at minimum, a pattern worth watching against future gatherings of this kind.

That is where this discussion must begin.

There is nothing wrong with citizens admiring a president. There is nothing undemocratic about believing that a government has performed well, that a leader has represented the country effectively, or that a president has brought a new energy to the office. Citizens are entitled to praise leaders, defend them, campaign for them, and reward them at the ballot box.

But democracy must become concerned when admiration for a leader evolves into the belief that constitutional safeguards should be removed to accommodate that leader.

Guyana’s presidential term limit exists for a reason. A person elected President after the year 2000 may be re-elected only once. The two-term limit is not a restraint designed for failed, unpopular, or ineffective presidents. Elections themselves can deal with those leaders. Term limits exist for leaders who are popular, powerful, resource-rich, deeply connected, and capable of building a political structure around themselves.

They exist precisely because popularity can become intoxicating—not only for the leader, but for the followers who begin to see one man as irreplaceable.

That is the point Guyana must confront honestly.

President Ali’s political stock is clearly rising. He has returned to office with an expanded parliamentary mandate. The PPP-C now holds 36 seats in the National Assembly, while WIN has 16 seats, APNU has 12, and Forward Guyana Movement holds one. The governing party’s victory, combined with the weakness and fragmentation of the opposition, gives the administration considerable room to set the political agenda.

But Ali’s strength is not confined to Parliament.

He has become the most visible face of Guyana’s oil-era ambitions. He is the President who travels, speaks internationally, meets investors, courts the diaspora, promotes infrastructure, presents Guyana as a country on the rise, and projects a modern image of national confidence. Whether one agrees with every policy of his administration or not, it is impossible to deny that Ali has become a major political asset to the PPP-C.

The diaspora gathering demonstrated that this asset is no longer merely institutional. It is personal.

That carries consequences.

A President who commands genuine public enthusiasm can become more powerful than the party machinery that elevated him. He can build a direct relationship with citizens at home and abroad. He can develop personal political capital that does not always depend on the approval of party executives, Central Committees, Cabinet colleagues, or traditional gatekeepers.

This is where the Ali–Jagdeo question becomes unavoidable.

Guyana’s Constitution makes the President the supreme executive authority. The President chairs  Cabinet, appoints ministers, represents the state, and holds the constitutional authority to direct the executive arm of government. Yet the PPP-C is not merely a collection of officeholders. It is a disciplined party with a long organizational history, a Central Committee, an Executive Committee, deep political networks, and a General Secretary in Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo who remains one of the most consequential political actors in the country.

This produces an unusual governing arrangement.

Ali possesses the constitutional authority of the presidency. Jagdeo possesses long-standing organizational authority within the party. One commands the office of state. The other commands deep experience, political networks, party machinery, and a strategic role as the central figure head  of the ruling establishment.

For a time, such an arrangement can work efficiently. A president and party leader can operate as partners. One can provide public stature and executive authority; the other can provide political organization, electoral discipline, strategy, and institutional continuity.

But every dual-power arrangement contains the possibility of tension.

The more President Ali develops an independent public constituency, the more he becomes politically significant beyond the structure that produced him. The more his name, image, international profile, diaspora support, and executive authority grow, the more the political equation inside the PPP-C may change.

That does not mean a rupture has occurred. It does not prove that a clash is underway. It does not establish that every policy disagreement, procurement question, appointment, or Cabinet debate reflects a personal conflict between the President and the Vice President.

Such assertions require evidence, not gossip.

But political analysis must be allowed to identify structural realities before they become public crises. And the structural reality is clear: a second-term president with growing popularity, control of the constitutional executive, and a personal support base can eventually become too politically substantial to remain merely the political product of another figure’s party machinery.

This is not only an Ali question. It is a Guyana question.

Guyana has lived through the dangers of party supremacy and maximum leader syndrome before. The Burnham era taught this country the grave consequences of allowing party and leader  dominance to eclipse the state, weaken institutions, and reduce public governance to the will of a narrow political center.

The present moment is not a copy of that era. Guyana still holds competitive elections. Opposition parties remain represented in Parliament, whenever the doors are opened .The courts function. The Constitution remains in force. The media remains contested, diverse, and active. The country is not under a formal doctrine of party paramountcy.

But we should not make the opposite mistake and assume that democracy is secure merely because elections are held.

Democratic erosion rarely announces itself with a single decree. It grows through habits: the normalization of unchecked executive authority; the blurring of state business and party interest; the elevation of loyalty over scrutiny; the treatment of criticism as disloyalty; the use of resources to consolidate political advantage; and the growing public belief that one leader is so essential that the rules must be changed for him.

The issue is not whether President Ali is popular. He plainly is among important sections of the Guyanese public and diaspora. The issue is whether Guyana is cultivating a political culture in which popularity becomes a license for permanence. I would call  it “ a competitive electoral democracy with a dominant-party governing culture.”

That is the danger of populism when it is left unexamined.

Populism tells the public that the leader alone understands them, that institutions are obstacles, that critics are enemies of progress, and that constitutional limits are technical inconveniences standing in the way of national advancement. It thrives on the seductive argument that if a leader is delivering development, attracting investment, building roads, speaking confidently for the country, and commanding loyalty, then why should anyone object to keeping him in office for as long as the public desires?

The answer is simple: because no democracy should depend on the virtue, popularity, or goodwill of one individual.

A country that changes its constitutional rules whenever a leader becomes beloved is no longer defending institutions. It is building a system around personalities.

Guyana’s oil wealth makes this question more urgent, not less. Oil has given the Government unprecedented fiscal power. It has expanded the scale of public projects, contracts, infrastructure, state spending, international engagement, and political expectations. In such an environment, incumbency is not an abstract advantage. It can become a formidable machine.

The leader at the center of that machine can appear larger than the party, larger than Parliament, and larger than the constitutional restraints meant to preserve balance. That is why citizens who admire President Ali should be the first to defend the two-term limit, not the first to demand its removal.

If Ali’s record is as strong as his admirers believe, then let that record become the foundation for institutional continuity, better governance, stronger public systems, an improved PPP-C, and a new generation of capable leadership. Let his legacy be the strengthening of Guyana’s democracy—not the weakening of its guardrails.

A great president does not need the Constitution bent around him. A great president leaves office having proven that the institutions of the Republic are stronger than any one man.

The same standard must apply to every party.

WIN cannot survive as a serious national alternative merely by exploiting public anger or presenting itself as the answer to PPP-C dominance. Its 16 parliamentary seats represent an important disruption of the old political order, but a movement is not yet a governing institution. It must build structure, transparency, internal democracy, policy competence, and a leadership culture that does not simply replace one form of political worship with another.

APNU, reduced to 12 seats, must also confront its crisis honestly. It cannot recover by behaving as though the political landscape has not. Its decline opened the space that WIN filled. If it cannot reform, reconnect, and offer credible leadership, it will continue to surrender the role of principal opposition to newer and less tested forces.

The PPP-C, meanwhile, faces its own test: whether it will use its mandate to strengthen democratic institutions or to deepen a political culture where party, government, leadership, and state resources increasingly appear inseparable.

Guyana does not need weaker leaders. It needs stronger institutions.It does not need less ambition from its President. It needs more accountability from every center of power.

It does not need a politics built around the question of who can remain in office longest. It needs a politics built around whether the Constitution, Parliament, Cabinet, courts, procurement systems, regulators, media, civil society, and citizens can remain strong enough to question anyone.

The diaspora gathering in New York was, in that sense, more than a meet-and-greet. The largest I have witnessed in over four decades in New York. And it was a clear political signal.

It showed that President Ali has an active and passionate following. It showed that he can generate anticipation and loyalty beyond Guyana’s shores. It showed that supporters are prepared to speak of him not simply as a President, but as an indispensable national figure.

That should not be ignored. Neither should it be feared irrationally. But it must be understood.

Guyana’s future cannot rest on whether one leader remains popular enough to stay. It must rest on whether the country is mature enough to ensure that no leader—however gifted, admired, connected, or successful—ever becomes larger than the constitutional democracy he was elected to serve.

Grief comes too easily to some, opening for new rehearsals

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Grief comes too easily to some, opening for new rehearsals

OPINION BY : GHK LALL September 2026

Ever encounter a professional mourner?  Guyana has some highly-placed ones.  They don’t have to be paid to mourn (sometimes).  They will weep for free.  To get in the practice, to keep in championship form.  The MV Barima catastrophe is a monument to Guyanese grieving.  Expected from impacted families and communities.  Intolerable for those that have endured multiple casualties.  There’s a lifetime of trauma waiting.  I take for granted, because that’s the essence of families, neighborhoods.  Expected also is the cabal of professional mourners, those who claim being overloaded with grief. 

Stricken with pain that will not go away.  How they live night and day with the horror of the last moments, the torments, of those who left home, never to come back again.

When I hear these professional mourners in action, on public display, a bad state overtakes.  So disgusted that there’s need for a grief counsellor.  To lessen the stench and weight of these masqueraders.  Those who claim how troubled they are by grief.  Confederate General, Robert E. Lee, said it well: “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”  I borrow: it’s helpful that grief is such a grave development, lest we get too comfortable around it.  Hence, when I hear professional mourners attesting to how much they are impacted by the loss of life (under the contradiction of avoidable, unforgivable circumstances), disgust arrives first, with dismissal following soon afterwards.

For what is a professional mourner if not a cunning, duplicitous, user of the pain of others, the tears of the genuinely grief wracked, for his or her benefit from those conditions?  In other words, a callous pretender who is low enough to sink to the gutter to enrich self at the expense of those tearing their hair out of their heads, and beating their breasts.  When grief is real, when wrenching trauma is felt, then every effort is expended to offer relief to those who need it, those who could be comforted by an authentic gesture.  Developments that speak for themselves because they have that distinctive human quality about them.  Heartfelt sincerity.  Humility that doesn’t have to be faked.  The absence of these are the chief hallmarks of the professional mourner, no matter the color of the clothing he or she wears.  The genuine mourner is more than a comforter; he or she will go the extra mile, remove obstacles, so that suffering is cushioned, given merciful closure. 

A professional mourner erects hurdles, talks from both sides of the mouth, while still selling himself or herself as the proverbial friend who is of deeds.  What deeds, but ruses and ploys?

In thinking of the MV Barima family, those now riveted together eternally by avoidable tragedy, my first consideration would be, what can I do to ease the grief of this national family fused by circumstances?  A roadblock wouldn’t be ordered; nothing that dilutes their expectations.  A shell game wouldn’t be played; where syrupy promises are made, only for those to be laced with nails that rip at commonsense, then shred it.  When there is honest-to-god intent to get to the bottom (literally) of the MV Barima tragedy, then the farces that have been seen and felt have no place in the pursuit of the facts.  By sheer effort of will, and accompanying impeccable honesty, mountains that stand in the way are leveled.  They would never be built. 

When one is a professional mourner, a sham operator, a Job’s comforter, then the barriers that Guyanese have seen and run into, are already neatly laid out in place.

Last, when morality and honesty fled from Guyana, then old cons and new cons came into their own.  A prime exhibit of them is the professional mourner; that ubiquitous presence that flits from one tragedy to the next.  Their grief fills their sleeves.  Grief that weighs.  Getting from under it is the problem.

The Container and the Communiqué

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 The Container and the Communiqué

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

A hemisphere is reorganzing itself around security communiqués while the people it displaces are received in shipping containers with no running water

There is a structure in Cap-Haïtien, built from converted shipping containers, with seating for about sixty people and two toilets outside. One of the toilets works. Neither has running water. This is where the United States government delivers Haitians it no longer wishes to have within its borders — at a rate, as of last month, of one planeload roughly every week, each carrying somewhere near two hundred people, into a city whose population has tripled in two years under the weight of exactly this kind of arrival.

Human Rights Watch’s account of what is happening in Cap-Haïtien is not an allegation. It is the product of researchers physically present at the airport, watching a flight land, watching people register their names against manifests that do not record why they are being removed, watching them receive a meal, a drink, and the equivalent of seventy-seven US dollars, and then watching them walk out of a shipping container into a country that the United States’ own State Department will not permit its citizens to enter. 

A government cannot simultaneously tell its own citizens a place is too dangerous to visit and tell a deported family it is safe enough to live in.

That is the contradiction sitting at the center of this policy, and it is not a subtle one. Haiti carries a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory — the highest classification the State Department issues, reserved for conditions judged to place American travellers at grave and immediate risk. The same government maintaining that advisory terminated Temporary Protected Status for Haitians on the stated basis that conditions had “improved sufficiently.” Both cannot be true. Either Haiti is dangerous enough to warn Americans away from, or it is safe enough to send families back to. The United States government has chosen, for administrative convenience, to hold both positions at once — and the people paying for that contradiction are not policymakers in Washington. They are a Miami hotel worker who trained new employees for seven years, deported without being permitted to say goodbye to a five-year-old son who still asks whether his father will be home from school. They are a woman detained at an interview for the very immigration status she had lawfully applied for, whose only crime was believing the process she had been told to follow would be honored.

What is most damning in Human Rights Watch’s account is not any single atrocity — it is the completeness of the abandonment. Nine Haitian government institutions were asked, separately, what capacity they had to receive, shelter, feed, protect, or reintegrate the people arriving on these flights. Nine gave, in substance, the same answer: none. No dedicated shelter. No sustained food assistance. No expedited path to the identity documents a person needs simply to exist administratively in their own country — a process that can otherwise take up to three months. No plan to enrol deported children who were educated in English, and who may not read or write in French or Creole. No mechanism for reuniting unaccompanied minors beyond ad hoc arrangements with private shelters, and no way to monitor those children once reunification happens.

This is not a gap in the system. It is confirmation that no system exists.

Washington’s own paperwork betrays the same carelessness. The manifests handed to Haitian migration officials; with roughly two days’ notice — list a name, a date of birth, a gender, a nationality, an A-number. Nothing about medical needs. Nothing about whether a person arrives with a disability, a chronic illness, or a documented fear for their safety in a specific neighbourhood. And even that thin manifest has proven unreliable: on both flights Human Rights Watch examined, more people arrived than the paperwork said would.

A government capable of tracking a person through a decade of tax filings, employment records, and immigration check-ins is, evidently, incapable of accurately counting how many of them it is putting on a single aircraft.

Nor can this be waved away as an unfortunate but lawful exercise of sovereign immigration authority. The people interviewed were not, in the main, individuals with exhausted legal options and clear removal orders they had simply ignored. They were people mid-process — asylum claims pending, permanent residence applications pending, court dates scheduled years into the future — swept up during scheduled check-ins, denied contact with counsel, and in some documented cases deported without ever being shown the removal order that supposedly authorised their return. One family, the Guardian notes from the Human Rights Watch record, fled to Canada rather than risk detention, was turned back to US custody within three days, separated on arrival, and told by an ICE officer that their US-citizen son could “stay” — but only into state custody, severed from his parents. This is not the incidental cruelty of an overburdened bureaucracy. It is a system that has stopped pretending due process is the point.

Fifteen of a hundred and sixty-one is not a rebuttal. It is an admission that the other hundred and forty-six had done nothing wrong.

When confronted, the US Department of Homeland Security’s defense was that fifteen of the 161 people on the August 20 flight had criminal convictions. Set aside, for a moment, that none of the people Human Rights Watch spoke to were among those fifteen. Notice instead what the statistic concedes: that the overwhelming majority — roughly ninety-one percent of that single flight — carried no criminal conviction at all. If public safety were the governing logic of this program, that number would be the scandal. Instead, it was offered as vindication.

It would be convenient, and it would be wrong, to treat this as a story that ends at the United States’ border and belongs entirely to its domestic politics. It does not. The Trump administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, told CNN in August that he did not know the conditions in Haiti and had never set foot there — and in the same breath said the administration was simply “enforcing the law.” That is the voice of a hemisphere’s most powerful government treating the return of desperate people to a collapsing state as a matter of paperwork rather than consequence.

It is worth asking what obligations, if any, attach to nations that sit at the same table as that government on questions of regional security, narco-terrorism, and “hemispheric resilience” — tables at which sovereignty is invoked constantly and accountability, rather less so.

A communiqué that commits a hemisphere to shared security cooperation says nothing, by itself, about whether that same hemisphere is prepared to ask hard questions when one of its members empties planeloads of people into a shipping container with no running water. Silence on that question is itself a position.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has already said, in plain terms, what international law requires here: individualized assessment, due process, an effective remedy, and — where a credible risk to life or safety exists — no return at all. Haiti’s own government has said, through nine separate institutions, that it cannot absorb what is being sent to it. The United States’ own diplomats say, through an unchanged Level 4 advisory, that the country remains too dangerous for their own citizens to enter. Only the deportation flights continue as though none of this were true.

This editorial board does not pretend to adjudicate the domestic politics of US immigration enforcement.

But accountability journalism does not stop at a border, and neither should the plain observation that a policy built on a factual contradiction — declaring a country simultaneously too dangerous to visit and safe enough to deport into — deserves to be named as what it is.

Congress has a bill in front of it that would extend protected status through 2029. Until it passes, or until the flights stop, the container in Cap-Haïtien will keep filling.

— The Board

 

THE ARCHITECT’S ALIBI

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

THE ARCHITECT’S ALIBI

On Kojo Parris, the Hard Rock Presidency, and the Cover That Makes It Work

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September  2026

Kojo Parris has done this newsroom the courtesy it least often receives: he has read a piece of ours closely enough to disagree with it precisely. In “From Manufacturing Consent to Manufacturing Discontent,” published in the pages of Kiskadee Watch  on September 25, and Parris builds a four-part test for whether any political party’s leadership can discipline itself — electoral recall, obligation to the enriched, portability of hostility, and the willingness of an architect to dismantle his own building; and applies it with real rigor to Bharrat Jagdeo’s standing at the center of the PPP-C. He cites our earlier argument that Guyana’s governance is better read in tandem, Ali and Jagdeo together, and he credits it as the strongest objection his framework has to answer. We take that seriously, and we owe him a considered reply rather than a defensive one.

Parris is correct on the point he presses hardest. President Ali holds a mandate the electorate can withdraw. Jagdeo’s authority runs through a party list he himself controls, and no ballot reaches him directly. That asymmetry is real, and no amount of tandem-governance framing dissolves it. We concede it plainly, because a newsroom  that only concedes what costs it nothing is not making an argument; it is performing one.

WHAT THE TEST MISSES

But the concession does not carry as far as Parris needs it to, because his four-part test measures where authority originates. It does not measure how authority is exercised once it leaves the room. And the pattern this newsroom has documented across a year of institutional coverage — the May 2026 REO and Permanent Secretary reshuffle, the September re-warning delivered nearly verbatim four months later, the National Toshaos Council meeting and the $930 million in village contracts that followed it, the procession of ministers, accounting officers and constitutional-commission consultations convened under Jagdeo’s chairmanship — is not the record of a man running a rival engine.

It is the record of a man running the President’s engine, on the President’s instruction, with the President’s immunity standing behind every warning he issues and every consequence he declines to enforce.

That is the structural detail Parris’s architecture leaves out, and it matters because it changes what kind of building the PPP-C actually is. Parris writes as though a single man occupies the center and the party radiates outward from him. We would put it differently: this is not a one-man show. It is a one-party show, engineered so that its senior figures can act on their own initiative while the Presidency stands ready to absorb whatever fallout follows. We have watched Ali extend precisely this cover to his ministers, repeatedly and without exception, whenever their conduct drew fire. Jagdeo’s convening power is not evidence that he has escaped accountability. It is evidence that accountability in this system was never designed to reach the convener — it was designed to stop at whoever gave the instruction, and the instruction, formally, always traces back to Ali.

“The architect who has to demolish the building is not necessarily the one whose name is on the cornerstone.”

A NOTE ON THE ARITHMETIC

Parris reads the 2025 register growth against falling turnout as evidence of a PPP-C base going quiet — seething, in his word, beneath a result that still delivered the party more votes and more seats. It is a compelling image, but the seat arithmetic does not by itself support it. The PPP-C’s net gain of three seats is consistent with a transfer running APNU to WIN, not PPP-C to WIN. A party ninety days old outpolling APNU in Regions Three and Six tells us APNU bled; it does not tell us to whom. If WIN drew disproportionately from APNU’s coalition rather than the PPP-C’s, then the “smoldering frustration” Parris locates inside the PPP-C’s own base is better described as a hypothesis than a finding — the turnout decline and register growth are real, but the seething is, at present, a reasonable guess dressed as a diagnosis. We would not discard Parris’s instinct here; the twelve-point turnout drop deserves an explanation, and demobilization and defection are not mutually exclusive.

But the piece is entitled to no more than what the numbers can bear, and right now they cannot distinguish a quiet PPP-C base from a definitively absent one.

A SECOND EDIFICE, RISING

This bears directly on the fourth and, as Parris rightly says, the hardest of his four tests — that the structure must come down by the hand of someone who did not build it. We agree that Jagdeo, as chief architect of the machinery Parris describes, is constitutionally unsuited to dismantle it.

Where we would push further is in asking whether Jagdeo remains the only architect standing. Ali is not merely occupying a mandate Jagdeo cannot claim; he is actively constructing a second edifice beside it — a larger public purse than any predecessor has commanded, visible domestic development to campaign on, and a run of international partnerships that looked past Guyana for decades before oil made the country impossible to ignore. Measured in leverage, both domestic and abroad, Ali is on a trajectory to surpass the man Parris identifies as his mentor, not remain permanently in his shadow.

A leader building an edifice of his own has reasons — reputational, historical, dynastic — to eventually distinguish his legacy from the structure he inherited. That is a different kind of pressure than the one Parris’s test anticipates, and it does not require Ali to be virtuous. It only requires him to be ambitious on his own account, which the record suggests he is.

We would also caution against assuming this structure resolves itself when Ali eventually demits office. Parris’s essay treats Jagdeo’s removal as the fulcrum on which PPP/C renewal turns. Our reporting suggests the more durable problem is the structure itself — the reshuffle-without-enforcement pattern, the accountability mandates re-delivered nearly word for word months apart with no accounting for the warnings that went nowhere the first time. Ali’s relative youth gives that structure room to outlast this presidency in whatever form suits whoever inherits it next. Changing the face at Freedom House, as Parris himself notes by way of Nyerere and the CCM, is necessary but not sufficient. We would add: it is not even guaranteed to be attempted, because the man with the clearest incentive to preserve the cover-and-instruction architecture is whoever currently benefits from standing inside it — and that list is not limited to one name.

WHERE WE AGREE, AND WHERE THE DEBATE SHOULD GO

None of this diminishes what Parris has accomplished. His reading of Democratic Centralism as the PPP-C’s only operative leadership rule, his arithmetic on the 2025 register growth against falling turnout, and his account of WIN as an unclaimed container for rural discontent are contributions this debate badly needed and had not, until his piece, received in such disciplined form. We differ on where the load-bearing wall sits inside the house he has so carefully mapped. He locates it in one man’s refusal to demolish what he built.

We locate it in a structure engineered so that no single demolition, of one man or one office, is sufficient — because the cover travels with the instruction, and the instruction can issue from more than one desk

We do not offer that as the last word. This is, as Parris’s own essay insists, a national conversation and not a private exchange of ideas  between two patriotic citizens. The 592 Guardian will continue to test the tandem-governance thesis against the institutional record as it develops — the next reshuffle, the next re-warning, the next contract award issued under whichever name signs it. We invite Parris, and anyone else willing to read the record as closely as he has, to keep testing it with us.

— The Board

THE SIX MONTHS HE DIDN’T MENTION

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 THE SIX MONTHS HE DIDN’T MENTION

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

President Ali spent a lengthy interview cataloguing every weakness in Guyana’s electricity system — except the US$759 million one bearing his own name

PRESIDENT DR. IRFAAN ALI wants Guyanese to understand that the next six months are critical. In a recent sit-down with News Room, he walked through nearly every strand of the country’s electricity crisis: units coming offline for overhaul, an estimated US$800 million required over five years just for transmission and distribution, 25 to 27 megawatts of stranded capacity in Essequibo, engagement with Qatar on financing, and recommendations from InterEnergy on how to fix what he called gaps in GPL’s “technical expertise.” He said he was “frustrated.” He said the government was “not satisfied.” 

What he did not say — in an interview built entirely around the question of why the lights keep failing — is Wales. Or Gas-to-Energy. Or Lindsayca. The single largest infrastructure undertaking in Guyana’s history — the project his own government promised would cut electricity costs in half by 2024; does not appear in his account of why electricity costs have not been cut in half.

A Pattern, Not an Omission

This publication has tracked the Wales Gas-to-Energy project’s slide from a 2024 completion promise through four successive revised timelines, a confidential arbitration award the Prime Minister denied existed before admitting it did, and a two-year delay now estimated to cost the country roughly US$884 million above the plants’ original cost. None of that is in dispute inside government. What is notable is who says it. The reassurances; no extra payment under discussion, some communities already receiving phased reductions — carry the President’s name. The numbers; the revised timelines, the contractor’s request for another US$170 million, the shift from fixed-price to cost-plus — are delivered by Prime Minister Phillips, Minister Indar, or task force head Winston Brassington. It is opposition MP Sherod Duncan, not the government, who has had to point out publicly that 57 megawatts of turbine testing is not delivery of the 300 megawatts promised.

That division of labor is not accidental. It is the same architecture this publication has documented elsewhere: a government that announces reviews it does not enforce, appoints reshuffles it later re-announces as new, and stages consultations in place of consequence. GTE fits the mould precisely; the President is present for the vision and the reassurance, and absent for the reckoning.

Who Pays For This

The people who cannot afford this arrangement are the ones reading electricity bills that were supposed to have fallen by half two years ago. Every month GTE slips is a month GPL keeps burning Heavy Fuel Oil and renting powerships at a premium the state has quietly absorbed into an import bill nobody campaigns on. The US$800 million transmission-and-distribution ask the President raised in this interview is real, and it is separate from — and additional to — the money already sunk into Wales. Guyanese are being asked to accept both bills without ever being told, by the man who signed the original promise, why the first one has not yet paid off.

A president who can itemize Essequibo’s stranded megawatts down to the decimal, and describe in detail his engagement with Qatari financiers, has the capacity to explain Wales. That he consistently chooses not to is itself the finding.

 Sidebar — Claim vs. Record

What the President said, set against the government’s own public record.

The Claim (Ali) The Record Source
“The next six months is critical” for the existing electricity system. True but incomplete: the 300MW Wales plant — meant to be operational by 2024 and to cut costs in half — is not mentioned as part of why the next six months are critical. News Room interview, Sept 2026
“No extra payment [to the Wales contractor] was under discussion,” Ali said mid-Sept 2026 Lindsayca has requested ~US$170M above the original US$759M contract (22% increase), with a proposal to shift from fixed-price to cost-plus, per Kaieteur News, Sept 6, 2026. Kaieteur News, Sept 6, 2026
PM Phillips, April 7, 2026: “There are no secret payments… there is no arbitration ruling… incorrect to suggest GoG has lost the arbitration.” Five weeks later, Phillips admitted DAAB had ruled in Jan 2025 on two matters, and GoG settled with Lindsayca for a ~12.8% increase (~US$97M) over the original contract sum. Kaieteur News editorial, May 18, 2026
GTE “will cut electricity costs in half,” government said, “firmly on track,” May 14, 2026 (OPM/PM Phillips statement). First turbine testing (57MW) now targeted for December 2026 — only 19% of the promised 300MW, and APNU’s Sherod Duncan says even that is not delivery. Full commissioning pushed to Q1 2027; Combined Cycle to June 2027 OPM/DPI (May 14); Kaieteur News (Sept 15, 2026)
Original 2022 government commitment: construction begins Q3 2022, GTE complete by 2024 Timeline revised at least four times — 2024 → April 2025 → end of 2025 → May 2026 → end of 2026 (partial). Delay estimated to cost Guyana ~US$884M above base plant cost.

 OP.gov.gy (Nov 2022); Kaieteur News, June 12, 2026

— THE BOARD

Sources: News Room (Ali interview); Office of the Prime Minister / DPI press statements (May 2026); Kaieteur News (June 12, Sept 6, Sept 15, 2026); Demerara Waves (Sept 8, 2026); Rio Times (Sept 2026); Guyana Chronicle (Sept 11, 2026).