The EPA Joined Exxon’s Side — Now It Wants Credit for “Protecting” You

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Editorial

After siding with the world’s most profitable oil company to gut an unlimited environmental guarantee, Guyana’s regulator breaks its silence with a statement of breathtaking audacity. The 592 Guardian is not buying it.

592 Guardian. Opinion

There is a particular kind of institutional dishonesty that does not lie outright, but instead arranges carefully chosen truths into a structure designed to mislead. The Environmental Protection Agency’s statement welcoming the Court of Appeal’s ruling on financial assurance for offshore petroleum operations is a masterwork of exactly that genre. It is, in plain language, spin dressed in the clothing of principle — and the people of Guyana deserve to see it for what it is.

Let us begin with what the EPA’s statement conspicuously omits: the EPA was not a passive observer of this ruling. It was an active and willing participant in the effort to achieve it. When Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL) — the Exxon subsidiary that holds the environmental permit for Stabroek Block operations — appealed the High Court’s landmark ruling requiring an unlimited Parent Company Guarantee, the EPA did not stand aside in its duty as regulator. It did not file submissions defending the position that an unlimited guarantee was appropriate. It joined the appeal. Alongside Exxon and the Government of Guyana, Guyana’s own environmental watchdog argued in court to replace an unlimited liability mechanism with a capped financial assurance of $2 billion USD. That is the fact the EPA’s carefully worded statement never once states plainly.

“2 billion cap is not protection. It is a ceiling placed on what Guyanese citizens can ever recover when the worst happens.”

The High Court ruling that was overturned was not a technicality. It was a considered judicial determination that the scale of environmental risk posed by deepwater offshore operations in Guyana’s waters warranted the most robust financial protection available under law — an unlimited guarantee backed by Exxon’s parent company. That ruling was described as landmark precisely because it placed Guyanese law and Guyanese interests at the centre of petroleum regulation in a way that this country has rarely seen. The Court of Appeal has now reversed it. And the EPA, rather than offering any honest accounting of what has been lost, offers a press release telling us not to worry.

 THE DISTINCTION THAT DECEIVES
The EPA's statement makes much of the legal distinction between "financial assurance" and "liability." It is technically accurate. Liability is indeed the underlying legal obligation. Financial assurance is the mechanism that makes that obligation real and enforceable. But in making this distinction, the EPA reveals — whether it intends to or not — exactly why the High Court's original ruling mattered so profoundly.

Consider what it means in practice. Under Section 14 of the Environmental Protection Act, a company that causes environmental harm can be held “liable for the cost of any necessary restoration or remedial measures.” The EPA quotes this provision proudly, as though it settles the matter. It does not. A legal liability without a funded guarantee is a judgment against a company that may, when the catastrophe comes, restructure, withdraw, or simply be incapable of meeting an obligation of the scale that a Stabroek-level blowout would demand.

THE NUMBERS DO NOT LIE
The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico — a single blowout from a single well — ultimately cost BP in excess of $65 billion USD in cleanup costs, fines, settlements and economic damages. The Stabroek Block contains multiple active deepwater wells operating in one of the world's most ecologically sensitive marine environments, adjacent to Guyana's entire coastline and neighbouring Caribbean states.

The EPA and the Government of Guyana fought in court to limit the financial guarantee for this entire operation to $2 billion USD. Let that figure sit alongside $65 billion and ask yourself: whose interests were being protected?

Liability without enforceability is a promise written on water. It is precisely the function of financial assurance — an unlimited parent company guarantee — to ensure that if Exxon’s subsidiary in Guyana causes catastrophic harm, the parent’s full resources are legally committed to making Guyana whole. That is what was stripped away. The EPA’s statement that liability “remains” is true. The statement that Guyanese citizens are therefore protected is a misdirection of the highest order.

REGULATORY CAPTURE IN PLAIN SIGHT

This episode is perhaps the most explicit illustration yet of what independent analysts, civil society organisations and this publication have long observed: the regulatory framework governing Guyana’s oil sector has been structured not to maximise protections for the Guyanese people, but to minimise friction for the oil companies extracting Guyana’s wealth.

The EPA is not a neutral body that happened to share the same legal position as Exxon. It is the regulator — the institution specifically empowered by law to act as the guardian of Guyana’s environment against the risks posed by exactly this kind of industrial operation. When a regulator joins its regulated company in court to defeat a protection that a judge found appropriate and necessary, something has gone profoundly wrong with the regulatory relationship. That is not a minor procedural matter. It is a fundamental question about whether the EPA serves Guyana or serves the industry it is supposed to oversee.

The Government of Guyana’s presence in the same appeal carries its own implications. The government is, simultaneously, the licensing authority for petroleum operations, a shareholder through its National Resource Fund, and — through the EPA — the environmental regulator of those same operations. When all three capacities align to reduce the financial burden on a foreign oil company, the public is entitled to ask plainly: who in this arrangement speaks for the people of the Essequibo coast, the fishermen of the Demerara, the communities whose livelihoods sit downstream of whatever a blowout would bring?

 “The EPA broke its silence only to celebrate a ruling it helped engineer. That is not transparency. That is a victory lap.”

   THE SILENCE, THEN THE SPIN

It is telling that the EPA “broke its silence” — as it is being characterised — only after the ruling came down in its favour. There was no public communication from the Agency during the period between the High Court’s decision and the Appeal Court’s reversal explaining to the public why it believed an unlimited guarantee was inappropriate. There was no public interest statement. There was no engagement with the civil society voices arguing that unlimited guarantees are the global standard in high-risk offshore operations precisely because the consequences of failure are unlimited in nature.

Instead, the Agency waited for its preferred outcome, and then issued a statement framed not as accountability to the public it serves, but as a public relations exercise designed to pre-empt criticism. “The EPA wishes to make it absolutely clear,” the statement declares, that permit holders remain fully liable. One would wish the EPA had been equally eager to make things absolutely clear before the ruling — when transparency might have invited scrutiny rather than deflected it.

  WHAT MUST NOW BE DEMANDED

The ruling has been made. The court has spoken. The 592 Guardian does not litigate final judgments. But what comes after a ruling matters as much as the ruling itself, and what comes after this one must not be silence dressed as satisfaction.

The National Assembly must now demand a full accounting from the EPA of the basis on which it determined that a $2 billion cap constitutes adequate financial assurance for the Stabroek Block operations. That determination must be made public, subjected to independent technical review, and tested against international benchmarks. The Environmental Protection Act, if it is genuinely silent on the level of financial assurance required — as the Court found — must be amended to speak clearly and ambitiously, not quietly and conveniently.

Civil society, the legal community, and the Opposition must use every available avenue to ensure that the gap between “liability” and “enforceability” does not become the gap through which Guyana’s future is swallowed if the unthinkable occurs. And the EPA must be made to understand — by public pressure if not by institutional conscience — that its mandate is to the Guyanese people, not to the companies whose operations it permits.

Guyana is now an oil-producing nation of genuine global consequence. Its institutions must rise to that consequence. The EPA’s statement this week demonstrated that, so far, they have not.

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

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Opinion  /  Independence at 60

Flags, Flags
Everywhere —
But Whose
Nation Is This?

“Sixty years after Britain lowered the Union Jack, Guyana remains ensnared in a new colonialism — one dressed not in pith helmets, but in production-sharing agreements, Washington points, and the comfortable silence of leaders who long ago confused personal interest with national sovereignty.”

COMMENTARY• 592 GUARDIAN•
INDEPENDENCE 2026•

Every year on May 26, we are invited to celebrate. We are told to wave the Golden Arrowhead, to sing of one people and one nation, to feel something warm and unambiguous about what it means to be Guyanese. And every year, the honest among us feel the same quiet discomfort — the nagging sense that the ceremony is performing something that does not yet fully exist.

A colleague recently asked, in these very pages, whether sixty years on we have become a nation. It is a fair and searching question. He pointed, rightly, to our unresolved ethnic narratives — the competing claims of suffering, arrival, and contribution that keep our six peoples orbiting one another with wary eyes rather than drawing closer. He suggested that what we need is a shared story, a modus viv end i, a national narrative we can all inhabit.

He is not wrong. But he has diagnosed only half the illness. The other half — the half that makes the first half so intractable — is that Guyana has never been permitted to be sovereign in the fullest sense of that word. And until we reckon with that truth, no amount of narrative-crafting will save us.

The Poisoned Chalice of 1966

Let us begin where the original sin lies. The Independence that Burnham accepted on May 26, 1966 was not wrested from empire through the moral force of a unified people. It was a managed transition, engineered in no small part by Washington and London to ensure that Cheddi Jagan — the man who had actually won democratic elections — would not be the one holding the flag.

The CIA’s role in destabilising Jagan’s government throughout the early 1960s is not conspiracy theory. It is documented history. The United States deemed a democratically elected socialist too dangerous for their hemisphere, and so they broke him — through covert funding of strikes, through racial polarisation, through the quiet elevation of Forbes Burnham as a more manageable alternative. The man who received independence on our behalf had been, in a very real sense, selected for us by a foreign power.

This is the founding trauma that our national narrative must eventually absorb — not merely the date chosen to forever remind Indian Guyanese of Wismar’s violence, but the deeper wound: that our independence was a gift from the same hands that had spent centuries extracting everything of value from this land. Gifts from such hands come with strings. They always have.

“Our independence was a gift from the same hands that had spent centuries extracting everything of value from this land. Gifts from such hands come with strings. They always have.”

When Oil Was Supposed to Change Everything

When ExxonMobil announced the Liza discovery in 2015, something shifted in the Guyanese imagination. Here, finally, was the material basis for genuine sovereignty. Here was the lever by which a small nation of fewer than a million people could demand — and receive — a seat at the table of its own future.

What we got instead was the Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement — widely regarded by independent oil economists as among the most disadvantageous resource contracts signed by any developing nation in the modern era. A contract negotiated in secret, the terms of which our own citizens were not permitted to scrutinise until civil society and the press forced partial disclosure. A contract that, by its cost-recovery provisions, ensures that ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC can recoup virtually all operating costs before Guyana sees its full share of profit oil.

The government will tell you that revenues are flowing, that roads are being built, that per-capita income statistics are rising impressively. All of this is true. None of it answers the fundamental question: on whose terms is this prosperity being constructed? When the contract cannot be renegotiated; when the dispute resolution mechanism sits in a foreign jurisdiction; when the corporation’s annual revenue dwarfs Guyana’s entire GDP — in what meaningful sense is the nation sovereign over its own primary resource?

The Washington Alignment and the Illusion of Friendship

Observe, in recent years, how reflexively our leadership has oriented itself toward Washington’s preferences — in its posture toward Venezuela, in its silence on matters where American interests and Guyanese interests do not align, in the speed with which senior officials travel to conferences, summits, and bilateral meetings to signal their reliability as partners.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having relationships with powerful nations. Small states must navigate the world as it is, not as they might wish it to be. But there is a difference between strategic engagement and dependency — and there is a difference between partnership and performance. What we too often witness is performance: the performance of alignment, the performance of shared values, the performance of being a good neighbour in a neighbourhood whose rules were written entirely by one party.

Lord Palmerston’s observation, made in the British Parliament in 1848, has lost none of its force in the intervening century and three-quarters: nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. The United States’ current warmth toward Georgetown is a function of geography, oil, and the Monroe Doctrine applied to a twenty-first century where China and Russia are seeking footholds in the hemisphere. When those calculations change — and they will — so will the warmth. The question our leaders should be asking is not “how do we deepen this friendship?” but “what protections have we built for when it cools?”

“The United States’ warmth toward Georgetown is a function of geography, oil, and a Monroe Doctrine applied to a century where China and Russia seek footholds in the hemisphere. When those calculations change — and they will — so will the warmth.”

The Nation We Have Not Yet Chosen to Build

Return, then, to the question of national narrative. Our columnist is right that we need one. But a national narrative built on the foundation of foreign dependency is not a narrative — it is a press release. You cannot tell your people a story of dignity and self-determination while a multinational corporation holds the master lease on your most strategic asset. You cannot ask African Guyanese and Indian Guyanese to reconcile their histories of suffering while the contemporary architecture of extraction goes unexamined. You cannot speak of one people and one nation while that nation’s most consequential decisions are ratified in Houston boardrooms and Washington policy rooms.

The unresolved ethnic tensions in Guyana are real and serious and demand engagement. But they have also served, whether by accident or design, as a permanent distraction — keeping our eyes fixed on one another rather than on the structures above us both. Every political cycle in which the primary narrative is “which group controls the state” is a cycle in which the deeper question — “who controls the state’s resources, and on whose terms?” — goes unasked.

True independence requires more than a flag and an anthem. It requires the institutional courage to audit every agreement made on the nation’s behalf; to insist on transparency in resource contracts; to build the sovereign wealth fund protections that ensure oil wealth does not simply recreate the plantation economy with different masters; and to be willing, when necessary, to say to powerful friends — with courtesy, but without apology — that Guyana’s interests must come first.

The Foundational Compromise
  • Cheddi Jagan won free elections in 1953, 1957, and 1961 — and was removed or undermined each time with Western backing.
  • The CIA funded opposition strikes and media during 1962–64 to prevent a Jagan-led independence.
  • Burnham’s PNC lost the popular vote in 1964 but formed government via a coalition engineered under a proportional system Britain imposed specifically for that outcome.
  • The Independence of May 26, 1966 was therefore handed to a government that had never won a parliamentary majority.

Two-Percent— 2%

Guyana’s estimated effective government take in early Stabroek Block production phases, per some independent analyst projections — among the lowest for any oil-producing nation.

~$900B

Estimated total recoverable resource value in the Stabroek Block. The contract governing its extraction was negotiated without public consultation or parliamentary scrutiny.

What Sovereignty Actually Looks Like

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global — built from North Sea oil — now holds over $1.7 trillion, is fully publicly audited, and invests entirely abroad to prevent domestic inflation. Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund has been amended multiple times and faces ongoing transparency concerns.

The difference is not luck. It is political will — and who the government ultimately answers to.

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

Another Warning, Another Performance — GuySuCo and the Politics of Pretence

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President Irfaan Ali’s latest threat to “shake up” the management of GuySuCo lands with a familiar thud—loud in declaration, hollow in consequence. Guyanese have heard this refrain before. Heads would roll. Targets must be met.

Accountability is coming. Yet, year after year, failure persists, targets are quietly revised, and the same cycle of underperformance continues under the protective umbrella of political convenience.
Let us be clear: GuySuCo is not suffering from a sudden lapse in management discipline. It is drowning under a model that is politically engineered, structurally inefficient, and economically unsustainable. No amount of rhetorical posturing from the Executive can mask that reality.

The numbers tell a story the administration refuses to confront. In 2024, production collapsed to 6,739 metric tonnes against a 16,000-tonne target for the first crop. In 2025, even after targets were reduced, GuySuCo still failed—producing approximately 59,200 metric tonnes against a lowered 60,000 target, itself a retreat from an initial 80,000. This is not underperformance; this is systemic failure dressed up as progress.

And yet, billions more in taxpayers’ dollars continue to be poured into the corporation. The 2026 budget increases allocation yet again, with promises of “financial viability” and “long-term sustainability.” These phrases have now become ritualistic—recited annually, believed by few.
What exactly is being sustained? It is certainly not profitability. It is not efficiency. It is not competitiveness in a global sugar market that rewards innovation and punishes stagnation.
What is being sustained is a political apparatus.

GuySuCo has effectively become the country’s most expensive welfare program—one carefully maintained to preserve rural voting blocs while avoiding the political fallout of genuine reform. The administration speaks of employment numbers and community revival, but refuses to admit that these gains are being artificially propped up by state subsidies with no credible pathway to independence.

Even more troubling is the continued deflection of responsibility. When targets are missed, the blame is redirected—to management, to technical gaps, to external conditions. Never to policy. Never to the flawed governance model. Never to the political interference that industry insiders and critics alike have repeatedly identified as the root cause.

The President now signals “discussions” about ownership and “technical teams” waiting in the wings. But these are not new ideas—they are recycled talking points, deployed each time the pressure mounts. Without structural reform, without insulating the corporation from political control, without a transparent and commercially grounded strategy, these measures amount to little more than administrative reshuffling.

The truth is uncomfortable, but unavoidable: GuySuCo, as currently configured, is under water—and the tide is rising faster than the government is willing to admit.
Guyanese deserve honesty, not theatrics. If the industry is to be saved, it will require more than threats and press conference declarations. It will require political courage—the kind that prioritizes national interest over electoral arithmetic.

Until then, the cycle will continue: missed targets, renewed promises, and another round of warnings that lead nowhere.
The country is watching. And increasingly, it is no longer convinced.

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

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Mr. President the Constitution is,

Not Optional

When the Head of State dismisses the Leader of the Opposition as an irrelevance, he does not diminish the Opposition — he diminishes the office he swore to uphold.

The Editors | The 592 Guardian | Editorial Board

There are moments when a leader’s character is revealed not in a grand speech, but in a single, careless dismissal. President Irfaan Ali delivered one such moment when, asked the straightforward question of whether he intended to meet with Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed, he swatted it away with the observation that there were “more relevant questions” to be answered. The remark was brief. Its implications are not.

To treat the question of whether the President will engage with the constitutionally recognized Leader of the Opposition as somehow beneath consideration is not an exercise in executive confidence. It is an exhibition of constitutional contempt — and the people of Guyana deserve to name it plainly.

“The Leader of the Opposition is not a courtesy call the President may choose to schedule or ignore. That office is woven into the fabric of our supreme law.”

An Office Rooted in the Supreme Law

The Leader of the Opposition is not a courtesy call the President may choose to schedule or ignore. That office is woven into the fabric of our supreme law. Guyana’s Constitution does not merely acknowledge the existence of an opposition; it assigns that office concrete, irreplaceable roles in the architecture of governance. The President is constitutionally required to obtain the agreement of the Leader of the Opposition before appointing the Chancellor of the Judiciary and the Chief Justice — the two individuals who sit atop the legal system that every Guyanese citizen depends upon for impartial justice.

These are not procedural niceties. They are deliberate constraints, written into the Constitution precisely to prevent any one administration — however large its electoral majority — from making unilateral appointments to offices that must remain above partisan capture. The requirement for the Opposition’s concurrence is the framers’ insurance policy against the tyranny of the momentary majority. To treat the person who holds that constitutional function as an afterthought is to treat the Constitution itself as an afterthought.

Constitutional Framework — What the Law Demands

Guyana’s Constitution requires the President to act in agreement with the Leader of the Opposition for the appointment of the Chancellor and Chief Justice. This is not consultation — it is co-determination. Neither official may be appointed over the objection of the LOO.

Beyond the judiciary, the Constitution mandates meaningful consultation with the LOO on a range of other judicial and service commission appointments. “Meaningful” is the operative word: a phone call after the decision is made does not satisfy this obligation.

Both offices carry democratic mandates. The President’s is the broader one; it is not the higher one. The Constitution recognises no hierarchy of mandate — only a division of constitutional duty.

The Arrogance of the “More Relevant” Framing

President Ali’s choice of words — “more relevant questions” — is worth dwelling on. It does not say “I have already arranged a meeting.” It does not say “we are in dialogue.” It says, in effect: your question about whether I will fulfil my constitutional obligations is not worthy of a serious answer. That framing is not the language of a statesman. It is the language of a partisan who has confused the power of office with the purpose of office.

A president governs for all citizens — including those who voted against him. The constitutional requirement to engage the Leader of the Opposition is not a burden imposed on the PPP/C government by its political enemies. It is a duty owed to every Guyanese, because the offices and institutions those consultations protect belong to every Guyanese. When the President signals that he considers that duty a distraction, he is not speaking only to one opposition politician. He is speaking to the rule of law itself — and his tone is one of dismissal.

Mandates Do Not Supersede the Constitution

It would be uncharitable — but not entirely unfair — to suspect that the dismissiveness toward the LOO flows from a belief that a decisive electoral mandate renders constitutional formalities somewhat redundant. This is a dangerous and historically recurring mistake. Electoral mandates confer the right to govern; they do not confer the right to govern without constitutional constraint. The two are fundamentally different propositions, and confusing them is the first step on a road that Guyanese history knows well.

Azruddin Mohamed arrived at his position through the democratic process. His office carries with it the voice of the parliamentary opposition and, by constitutional design, a share of responsibility for the integrity of key national appointments. Treating him as less relevant than the President’s preferred agenda items is not strength; it is an abdication of the statecraft the office demands.

“Electoral mandates confer the right to govern. They do not confer the right to govern without constitutional constraint. The two are fundamentally different propositions.”

Symptoms of a Broader Posture

This news — platform has observed, with growing concern, an executive posture that appears to regard Guyana’s constitutional checks as obligations for others to honour, rather than disciplines to which the presidency is equally subject. The refusal to provide a straightforward answer about meeting the LOO is not an isolated gaffe. It is consistent with a pattern in which consultation is treated as performance, agreement is treated as acquiescence, and the Opposition is treated as an inconvenience rather than a constitutionally embedded counterpart.

That pattern matters beyond the chambers of Parliament. It matters because the Chancellor and Chief Justice positions remain unfilled through the constitutionally prescribed process. It matters because citizens watching their President brush off questions about dialogue with the Opposition receive a clear message about whose voices count. And it matters because constitutional cultures are built or eroded incrementally — one dismissive remark, one bypassed consultation, one “more relevant question” at a time.

What Is Required of the President

The 592 Guardian calls upon President Ali to do what his office demands: engage meaningfully, formally, and without further delay with Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed. Not as a political concession. Not as a favour to the PPP/C’s critics. But because the Constitution of Guyana requires it, and because the people of this nation — all of them — deserve a president who honours his oath fully, not selectively.

The mark of a true statesman is not the ability to win elections. It is the wisdom to govern in a manner that strengthens institutions even when those institutions inconvenience you. By that measure, the President’s dismissal of a question about the LOO was not simply an undiplomatic moment. It was a small but consequential failure of constitutional leadership — and this country cannot afford to normalise such failures.

The Constitution does not ask for the President’s agreement with the Leader of the Opposition. It demands his engagement. There is a difference. It is time the President learned it.

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

CARICOM’s Anti-Trump Protest Cost the Region Its Integrity

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By endorsing a corruption-tainted candidate for the OAS, Caribbean leaders chose politics over principle — and the region’s citizens will pay the price

Georgetown, Guyana — May 2026

There is a particular kind of that flourishes in the Caribbean — the kind that dresses itself in the language of democracy and sovereignty while quietly betraying both. CARICOM leaders demonstrated this hypocrisy in full view of the hemisphere when they threw their collective weight behind Albert Ramdin as Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS), a man trailing a cloud of serious corruption allegations from his own country, Suriname. They did so not because he was the best candidate for the hemisphere’s premier democratic body, but because he was not Donald Trump’s candidate.

The consequences of that choice deserve far more scrutiny than regional leaders are prepared to invite.

A Region Already Failing Its Citizens

The endorsement did not occur in a vacuum. Transparency International has documented what Caribbean citizens already know in their bones: CARICOM governments are failing them. Bribery significantly obstructs access to basic public services — health care, education, housing — with the heaviest burden falling on society’s most vulnerable. The International Corruption Perceptions Index records little meaningful progress in the region over the past decade. The private sector, too, has been indicted as a willing partner in this culture of corruption.

This is the context in which CARICOM leaders made their OAS decision: not as reformers seeking to clean up regional institutions, but as political actors calculating advantage. Their candidate of choice, Albert Ramdin, was not an antidote to the region’s corruption problem. He was, arguably, a symptom of it.

The Allegations Against Ramdin

During his five years as Suriname’s Foreign Minister, Ramdin accumulated a record that should have disqualified him from leading any institution charged with upholding democratic governance. Surinamese media and the country’s own Public Prosecution Service have documented his alleged involvement in multiple corruption scandals. The most damaging centres on his relationship with Xaviera Jessurun, who has since become an advisor in his OAS office.

Jessurun has been formally designated as a suspect by Suriname’s Attorney General in connection with fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, and forgery. She has been summoned to appear in court. Yet rather than distance himself from a figure under active criminal investigation in his own country, Ramdin brought her to Washington as a senior advisor. And when Suriname’s Foreign Minister Melvin Bouva publicly revealed that Ramdin had improperly issued Jessurun a diplomatic passport — a passport that allowed her to travel to Washington while legal proceedings against her remained active in Suriname — the Caribbean leaders who had vouched for Ramdin said nothing.

Their silence was not accidental. It was a choice.

Politics Dressed as Principle

CARICOM’s defence of its endorsement has centred on the claim that its leaders were protecting the OAS from the influence of Donald Trump, whose preferred candidate was Rubén Ramírez Lezcano. There is no question that Trump’s interventions in hemispheric affairs warrant resistance. But resistance to one problematic actor cannot justify installing another. The OAS exists to defend democracy and human rights across the Americas. Its Secretary-General must be a figure of unimpeachable integrity — or at minimum, one who has not been linked by his own country’s law enforcement to abuse of office.

CARICOM performed no meaningful investigation into the allegations against Ramdin before casting its votes. Reports from Surinamese media were available. The Public Prosecution Service’s actions were a matter of public record. The Foreign Minister’s statement about the diplomatic passport was documented. The leaders of the region’s most corrupt member states simply looked away.

The Cost Borne by Ordinary People

Perhaps the most troubling dimension of this episode is what it reveals about where Caribbean leaders place their priorities. Former Surinamese President Santokhi, a close ally of Ramdin, reportedly directed millions of US dollars toward securing Ramdin’s OAS appointment — funds that could have been directed toward poverty reduction, crime prevention, healthcare, and education in one of the hemisphere’s poorest nations. Whether those reports can be fully verified, the pattern they describe is one the Caribbean knows well: public resources quietly redirected to serve elite political interests.

This is the same pattern Transparency International has catalogued across CARICOM for a decade. The bribery that blocks a mother from accessing her child’s medical records, the corruption that diverts school funds into private pockets, the culture that allows the powerful to obtain diplomatic passports for allies facing criminal prosecution — these are not separate phenomena. They are expressions of the same institutional rot.

Guyana Must Answer for Its Role

Guyana’s government has not been transparent with its citizens about its position on the Ramdin appointment. The 592 Guardian calls on the Ali administration to state clearly: did Guyana support Ramdin’s candidacy? If so, on what basis? What due diligence, if any, was conducted into the allegations against him? The Guyanese people, who are themselves living under the burden of inadequate public services and unresolved institutional corruption, deserve a direct answer.

A government that cannot answer those questions credibly has no standing to lecture its citizens about accountability.

Integrity Cannot Be An Afterthought

The OAS under Albert Ramdin’s leadership begins its tenure under a shadow that CARICOM itself helped cast. The institution’s credibility as a guardian of democratic norms will be tested from its first day. Whether Ramdin can overcome the allegations that followed him from Suriname to Washington remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the Caribbean leaders who installed him chose political expediency over rigorous scrutiny, and dressed that choice in the language of regional sovereignty and anti-imperialism.

The citizens of this region — the ones waiting in corrupt queues for public services, the ones watching their governments’ development budgets evaporate into patronage networks, the ones who never had millions of dollars to spend securing anyone’s appointment to anything — deserved better from their leaders. They deserved due diligence. They deserved transparency. They deserved the truth.

Instead, they got Albert Ramdin.

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

Parliament Is Not a Privilege. It Is a Duty.

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And Everyone in That Chamber Has Failed It.

Guyana’s Parliament has not sat for more than 100 days. Let that settle. Not a scheduling hiccup. Not an administrative delay. A governance failure — sustained, deliberate, and inexcusable.

The sudden announcement of a June 5 sitting, arriving conveniently on the heels of pointed remarks from representatives of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, should not be met with relief. It should be met with fury. Because what it confirms is this: the machinery of Guyanese democracy does not move on constitutional obligation. It moves on diplomatic pressure. That is a humiliation dressed up as a concession.
Minister Gail Teixeira’s response — that the diplomats should have first “engaged the Government” — is as revealing as it is tone-deaf.

Parliamentary democracy is not a private arrangement to be managed behind closed doors by the politically convenient. It is a public institution. Constitutionally mandated. Non-negotiable. Its prolonged dormancy is not an internal matter to be shielded from outside eyes. It is a public failure to be answered to — by citizens first, and by international partners second.
But here is where this editorial must turn — because the Government cannot be allowed to stand alone in the dock.

The Opposition Has Questions to Answer Too.
One hundred days. Where was the thunder? Where were the emergency press conferences, the legal challenges, the sustained and relentless public pressure that this constitutional crisis demanded? The Opposition — including the lone seat of the Forward Guyana Movement — sounded alarm, yes. But alarm without escalation is just noise.

One must ask, plainly and without apology: if their emoluments had been withheld — if their salaries, allowances, and benefits had been suspended for every day Parliament failed to sit — would they have waited this long? Would the outrage have been so measured, so periodic, so politely contained?

The question answers itself.
Opposition members are not volunteers. They are elected representatives, paid from the public purse, entrusted with the sacred function of holding power accountable. If they treated this constitutional crisis with anything less than maximum urgency, they too have failed the people who sent them there. Silence in the face of institutional collapse is not opposition. It is complicity in slow motion.

The Deeper Crisis: A Parliament That Can Be Paused at Will
The most dangerous truth exposed by these 100 days is not that one party abused its power. It is that the system permitted it.

A Parliament that can be suspended at the political convenience of the executive is not a co-equal branch of government. It is a decorative institution — convened when useful, shuttered when inconvenient. That is not democracy. That is theatre.

And this theatre has played out against a backdrop of unprecedented national expenditure. Guyana is an oil-producing nation now, channelling revenues of a scale this country has never before managed. The Public Accounts Committee — the very body mandated to scrutinise how that money is spent — has been non-functional. Let us be direct: governance without scrutiny at this scale, with this volume of public funds in motion, is not just negligent. It is an invitation to plunder.
Governance without scrutiny is not governance. It is control.

The Reform That Must Now Follow
The resumption of Parliament on June 5 should not be celebrated. It should be the beginning of a reckoning. Because if history is any guide, this is not a correction — it is a recalibration. A temporary concession to external pressure, after which the status quo reasserts itself.
That cannot be allowed to happen again.

Guyana urgently needs — and the Opposition must now table — a Parliamentary Sittings (Fixed Schedule) Bill. Its purpose would be singular and unambiguous: to remove, permanently, the unilateral authority of any person, party, or executive to defer, delay, or dissolve parliamentary sittings at will.

The National Assembly must sit on a constitutionally fixed, publicly published roster. Not subject to ministerial discretion. Not contingent on political appetite.

Not moveable by Cabinet decree. The people’s business must be conducted on the people’s schedule — not the Government’s.
Such a Bill would do more than prevent future abuses. It would signal to every Guyanese citizen, and to every international observer, that this nation is serious about institutional governance.

That it does not require diplomatic nudges to honour its own Constitution.
Let the Opposition bring this Bill. Let them table it the moment Parliament reconvenes. Let every member — Government and Opposition alike — be forced to vote on whether they believe democracy should function inevitably or merely intermittently. Let that vote be on the record, in Hansard, for the people to judge.

The Standard Must Be Inevitability, Not Convenience
Guyanese must now move beyond outrage — because outrage without reform is just catharsis. What this moment demands is structural change, enforceable by law, binding on every administration that follows.

Democracy must not function when it is politically expedient. It must function because it cannot be stopped.

A Parliament that sits only when pressured is a Parliament that has already surrendered its purpose. A Parliament that sits on schedule, by law, regardless of who is in power — that is a Parliament worthy of the name.

Anything less is a betrayal. Of the Constitution. Of the electorate. Of the very idea of self-governance.
The people of Guyana did not elect a Parliament to meet at someone’s pleasure. They elected it to meet — period.

It is time to make that non-negotiable. In law. Without exception. Without delay.

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

The Beijing Summits: Words Without Weight

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BY: Staff— Writer

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣.         

Three men who between them command the world’s most formidable economies and the most lethal military arsenals met in Beijing. They talked. They posed for cameras. They issued statements. And when they left, the wars continued, the Strait of Hormuz remained contested, and the price of oil held its grip on the throats of ordinary people from Georgetown to Guangzhou.

That is the uncomfortable truth behind the diplomatic pageantry that unfolded in China’s capital this week — two separate summits, one involving the United States and China, the other China and Russia, both freighted with global expectation and both, ultimately, light on delivery.
To be fair, no serious observer of international affairs expects a single summit to resolve conflicts decades in the making. Agreements between sovereign states are forged through repetition, not revelation. But the world’s patience is not unlimited, and its tolerance for diplomatic theatre grows thinner with each body counted.

Tariffs, Trade and the Theatre of Trump

On the US-China front, the most pressing item for America’s corporate class was trade — and understandably so. Trump’s tariff war has rattled supply chains and stoked inflationary pressure far beyond American shores. Small, open economies like Guyana’s are not insulated from those tremors.

President Trump returned claiming victory: 200 aircraft to be purchased by China, agricultural products to follow. Beijing, notably, confirmed none of it. Whether these are genuine commitments yet to be formalised or political theatre for domestic consumption in Washington remains to be seen. What is certain is that no new trade agreement was announced, and the tariff war shows no signs of formal resolution.

For Guyana and the Caribbean region, this matters. The broader global trading environment shapes the conditions under which we sell our oil, attract investment, and manage our import bills. Instability at the top of the international economic order cascades downward. We do not have the luxury of watching from a distance.

Taiwan: The Collision Course Neither Side Can Afford

The most consequential exchange of the US-China summit may well have been President Xi Jinping’s unambiguous warning: Taiwan is “the most important issue in China-US relations,” and if mishandled, the two nations could “collide or even come into conflict.”
President Trump’s response was, by his standards, measured — urging Taiwan against seeking independence and signalling that America has little appetite for a war fought 9,500 miles from its shores. He has also reportedly withheld his signature from an US$11 billion arms sale to Taipei.

This restraint, if it holds, is not nothing. But restraint is not a policy. And the absence of clear red lines, binding commitments, or a framework for crisis management leaves a dangerous vacuum. One miscalculation — a naval incident, a provocation, an election — could ignite a confrontation that no subsequent summit could contain.

Russia, China and the Architecture of a New Order

The China-Russia summit produced more paperwork — reportedly over 20 agreements signed across energy, transport and international cooperation, with 20 more pending. More significantly, the two leaders signed a document calling for a “multi-polar world order” and “a new type of international relations,” explicitly positioning themselves against what they characterise as unilateral and hegemonic excess.

The language is pointed and deliberate. Russia, perhaps the most militarily and economically exposed of the three powers, finds in China both a market and a shield. President Xi, for his part, gains strategic depth and a counterweight to Western pressure.

But what was conspicuously absent from those 20-plus agreements was any document addressing the war in Ukraine — no ceasefire framework, no peace roadmap, no announced effort to end a conflict that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions. The multi-polar world order Xi and Putin envision apparently does not yet include a shared responsibility to stop a war that one of its architects started.

The Numbers Behind the Silence

The editorialising of summits should never lose sight of the human ledger. Across Gaza and the Russia-Ukraine theatre, an estimated 140,000 people have been killed. A further 8,000 are missing in Gaza. In the killing fields of Eastern Europe, 90,000 remain unaccounted for.

These are not statistics. They are sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers — consumed by conflicts that the three most powerful leaders on earth have, thus far, chosen to manage rather than end.
Neither Beijing summit produced an announced, immediate effort to halt either war.

What Beijing Told Us

The summits were not without value. The mere fact that Washington and Beijing sat across the table signals that both powers understand uncontrolled escalation serves no one. That both agree, at least in principle, that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open for the free passage of the 20 per cent of global oil supply that flows through it is a floor, not a ceiling — but it is a floor.

What Beijing told us, however, is that the world’s most powerful men are managing crises, not resolving them. They are preserving options rather than making choices. And in the space between managed tension and resolved conflict, people die, prices rise, and smaller nations absorb shocks over which they have no control.

For Guyana — a nation now firmly positioned in the global energy conversation — the instability of the Hormuz corridor, the volatility of global oil markets, and the uncertainty of great-power trade relations are not abstract concerns. They are budget lines, development timelines, and the cost of goods on the shelves of our people.

The Course Must Be Reset

The 592 Guardian is under no illusion that summits alone move mountains. But we insist on this: acknowledgement without action is not diplomacy — it is delay with better lighting.

The three leaders who gathered in Beijing this week carry between them the capacity to end both wars, stabilise energy markets, and chart a trading order that does not immiserate the Global South. Whether they possess the will to exercise that capacity is the defining question of this moment in history.

The 21st century is not yet lost. But it is being squandered, one carefully worded joint statement at a time.

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

When the Algorithm Waits: The Six-Month Silence That Exposes Guyana’s AI Enforcement Illusion

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Opinion | The 592 Guardian

There is a particular kind of deception that does not lie outright. It does not fabricate facts or invent events. It operates instead through selective emphasis — parading the gleaming face of progress while quietly shielding its contradictions from scrutiny. Guyana’s rollout of artificial intelligence in traffic enforcement has become a masterclass in exactly this kind of deception.
We are told that the system is sophisticated. We are told it is modern, efficient, and — most importantly — fair. And yet, 1,600 drivers identified by that very system as suspected violators waited six months to receive so much as a notification letter. Six months. In a world where artificial intelligence can scan a vehicle travelling at highway speed, cross-reference its plate against a national database, and generate an enforcement flag in fractions of a second, it apparently cannot send a letter in less than half a year.
That contradiction is not a minor administrative footnote. It is the story.

The Promise That Built the Narrative

To understand how deeply troubling this delay is, one must first appreciate the scale of what was promised — and what was sold to the Guyanese public.
AI-powered enforcement was not presented as a modest upgrade to existing traffic systems. It was framed as a transformational leap — a decisive break from the era of arbitrary roadside stops, inconsistent policing, and enforcement that depended too heavily on the discretion, and sometimes the appetite, of individual officers. The technology would be neutral. It would be tireless. It would see everything and treat everyone the same.

The language used in official communications about the system was careful but unmistakable in its ambition. Real-time detection. Automated flagging. Instant database integration. These were not the words of a department piloting a modest tool — they were the vocabulary of a government staking its modernization credentials on a technological promise.

That promise had real political currency. In a society where the belief that enforcement is selective — that who you know determines whether the law applies to you — remains deeply entrenched, the idea of a machine-driven system carried genuine appeal. A camera does not accept a handshake. An algorithm does not respond to a phone call. If the technology is what it claims to be, then the rules truly do apply to everyone.
That was the bargain offered to the public. The six-month silence is proof that the bargain was not honoured.

What Artificial Intelligence Actually Does — and Doesn’t — Explain

It is worth being precise here, because the government’s defenders will reach for a familiar rebuttal: that even with AI detection, downstream enforcement processes involve human steps that take time. Letters must be drafted, addresses verified, decisions reviewed. Technology, they will argue, does not eliminate the need for administrative procedure.

This argument is not entirely without merit. It is, however, entirely insufficient.
Artificial intelligence, at its core, is a tool for compressing time. It eliminates the bottlenecks that arise when human judgment must be applied to each individual case. A system that can flag 1,600 violators does not require 1,600 separate human decisions to generate 1,600 notification letters. That is, in fact, the entire point. A functioning AI enforcement system would have the capacity to automate the notification pipeline with the same efficiency it applies to detection. If such automation was not built in — if the detection engine was wired to a manual, paper-shuffling bureaucracy on the back end — then the system as deployed is not what it was described to be. It is a camera with a filing cabinet.

More pointedly: if the technology is capable of triggering enforcement responses on the spot — if, as has been suggested, it can interface in real time with officers in the field — then the claim that notifications to flagged drivers required six months of processing collapses under the weight of its own implausibility. You cannot tell the public that your system can alert a patrol officer to a flagged vehicle in motion, and then explain that generating a mailed notification to the same vehicle’s registered owner requires half a year.
One of these claims must give way. And the public is entitled to know which one.

The Silence That Speaks

Six months is not a delay. It is a decision.
In public administration, especially in matters of law enforcement, timelines are never purely accidental. Resources are allocated. Priorities are set. When an action that should be routine — notifying individuals that they have been flagged for a potential offence — takes six months to execute, it is because something, or someone, chose not to expedite it.
The question that follows from that observation is the one the government has been conspicuously reluctant to answer: what happened during those six months?

Who held the list of 1,600 flagged drivers? Who had access to it? Was it reviewed by anyone outside the technical enforcement team? Were any names removed before notifications were issued? Were any names added? Were the 1,600 who eventually received letters the same 1,600 originally flagged by the system — or had the list been quietly adjusted along the way?

These are not hypothetical concerns born of cynicism. They are the natural and reasonable questions that arise any time sensitive enforcement data is held in bureaucratic limbo without accountability or transparency. The longer the silence, the more weight those questions carry.
And they are carrying considerable weight.

The Whispers That Grow into Walls

Across Guyanese civil society, in the conversations that happen between citizens rather than in official briefings, a particular suspicion has taken root. It is not yet a verified allegation. It has not been confirmed by any whistleblower or official source. But it has spread with the stubborn persistence of ideas that feel intuitively true to the people who hold them.
The whisper is this: the delay was not administrative. The list required “scrubbing.” Certain names — names attached to individuals with the right connections, the right relationships, the right proximity to power — were quietly removed before the letters went out.

Again: this has not been proven. It may not be true. But the extraordinary danger of this moment is that, true or false, the suspicion is entirely plausible given what the public has been shown of how enforcement works in Guyana. And a government that has spent years promising a new, transparent, technology-driven era of equal treatment has done nothing — nothing — to proactively foreclose that suspicion.

No audit of the flagged list has been published. No independent verification of the notification process has been announced. No explanation for the delay that goes beyond vague administrative reference has been offered. In the vacuum of credible official explanation, the whisper does not merely survive — it thrives.
This is the corrosive power of perceived selective enforcement. It does not require proof to do its damage. It only requires the absence of transparency. And on that front, the government has been remarkably, perhaps recklessly, generous.

Artificial Intelligence Cannot Survive Artificial Fairness

There is a term that deserves wider circulation in this debate: artificial fairness.

Artificial fairness is what you get when you deploy a genuinely neutral technology — a system that, left to its own outputs, would apply the same standard to every vehicle that passes before its sensors — and then introduce human discretion back into the process after the fact. The detection may be real. The flagging may be real. But if what comes out the other end of the pipeline has been filtered through human judgment that is susceptible to influence, then the neutrality of the machine is merely cosmetic.

This is not a hypothetical risk. It is the specific vulnerability that the six-month delay has exposed. AI systems produce outputs. Those outputs then enter a human-administered pipeline. If that pipeline operates without transparency, without independent oversight, and without verifiable timelines, then the AI’s integrity guarantees nothing. You have simply moved the point of potential manipulation further downstream, where it is harder to see and easier to deny.

The administration has built its modernization narrative on the premise that AI enforcement represents a structural departure from the culture of discretion. But discretion does not disappear when a camera is installed. It migrates — to the person who controls the database, to the official who reviews the flagged list, to the bureaucrat who decides which letters go out and when. If those human nodes in the enforcement chain are not bound by the same transparency and accountability standards applied to the technology itself, then the system as a whole is no more trustworthy than its weakest human link.

Right now, that link is invisible, and it has been invisible for six months.

The Standard That Must Be Applied

What would credible AI-powered enforcement actually look like? It would look like this:
Detection events would be logged in a tamper-evident, time-stamped system that is subject to independent audit. The interval between a flag being raised and a notification being issued would be defined in advance, published publicly, and enforced consistently. Any deviation from that interval would require a documented justification, accessible to oversight bodies. The composition of any flagged list — who is on it, when they were added, and whether any names were ever removed — would be auditable by a body that is genuinely independent of the enforcement apparatus.

None of this is technically complicated. All of it is politically demanding. It requires a government willing to be held accountable not just to its own stated standards, but to external verification of whether those standards are being met.
The question before the Guyanese public is not whether AI enforcement is, in theory, a good idea. It may well be. The question is whether the specific deployment currently underway can be trusted — and whether the administration responsible for it is willing to do what trust requires.

At present, the evidence suggests the answer is no.

Modernization Is Not a Marketing Exercise

Guyana is at a genuine inflection point. The country’s economic transformation over the last several years has created real capacity for institutional modernization. Resources exist that did not exist before. The appetite for a more functional, more equitable state apparatus — particularly among younger Guyanese — is real and should not be squandered.

But modernization is not achieved by acquiring technology. It is achieved by building institutions capable of deploying technology in ways that genuinely serve the public interest. An AI camera on a highway is hardware. The culture that governs what happens to its outputs is the institution. And it is the institution — not the hardware — that determines whether the system produces justice or merely produces the appearance of it.

A country that installs cutting-edge detection technology and then subjects its outputs to an opaque, unaccountable, six-month human filtering process has not modernized. It has digitized its old habits. It has made them faster, more scalable, and — if the technology’s reputation for neutrality is successfully leveraged — considerably harder to challenge.

That is not progress. That is the old order in new clothes.

The Questions That Cannot Be Deferred

The administration owes the public answers. Not reassurances — answers. Specific, verifiable, documented answers to questions that are neither unreasonable nor hostile. They are the questions that any functioning democracy asks of its enforcement apparatus:

Why were the 1,600 flagged drivers not notified within days of being identified? What is the documented justification for the six-month interval?

Who had access to the flagged list between the time it was generated and the time notifications were issued? Was that access logged?

Were any names removed from the original flagged list before notifications were sent? If so, on what authority, under what criteria, and with what documentation?

What independent oversight body has visibility into the enforcement pipeline, and what are its powers to audit, challenge, or publicise its findings?

Until those questions are answered — publicly, specifically, and with supporting documentation — the rollout of AI-powered traffic enforcement cannot be accepted as the transparent, technology-driven modernization it has been presented as.

It remains, for now, a performance. An expensive, technically impressive, and politically convenient performance — but a performance nonetheless.

What Guyana Deserves

The people of Guyana deserve enforcement that is credible. Not enforcement that is claimed to be credible. Not enforcement that is credible in its technology while opaque in its administration. Credible in the full and demanding sense: where the rules apply equally, timelines are consistent and published, the data is protected from interference, and the institutions responsible for it are genuinely accountable to the public they serve.

That is not a utopian standard. It is the baseline expectation of a functioning rule of law. Other countries meet it. Guyana can meet it too.

But it will not be met by installing cameras. It will be met by the hard, unglamorous, politically costly work of building institutions that cannot be quietly negotiated with — where the algorithm’s output is as binding on the well-connected as it is on everyone else, and where the word “enforcement” does not carry an asterisk.

Anything less is not modernization. It is not efficiency. It is not justice.
It is digitized inequality — and it insults the intelligence of every Guyanese citizen who was told the machine would be different.

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

Phased Reform, Permanent Damage: How Guyana’s Constitution Is Being Held Hostage

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A Response to AG Nandlall views on Electoral Reform

Part 2 of 2

The Constraints That Must Be Named

To achieve genuine constitutional reform in Guyana, the following structural barriers must be surmounted — not managed, not deferred, but confronted:

First: The self-amending trap.

The Constitution can only be meaningfully reformed by the very Parliament that benefits from its current configuration. The PPP/C holds a majority. The National Assembly — over which the ruling People’s Progressive Party has control — will be called upon to reform itself. No ruling party in history has eagerly reformed itself out of advantage. This requires, at minimum, a cross-party constitutional compact, international witnessing, and a referendum mechanism that returns ultimate authority to the people rather than the legislature.

Second: The closed-list party capture problem.

Because Guyanese voters vote for party slates rather than individual candidates, every MP in the National Assembly owes their seat not to a constituency but to a party executive. This fundamentally corrupts the reform dynamic: MPs who vote against the party line on constitutional amendments risk being dropped from future lists. The reform of the electoral system is therefore a prerequisite to the reform of everything else — but it is also the reform the governing party is least likely to initiate.

Third: GECOM’s structural incapacity.

The Carter Center has long recommended that Guyana reform GECOM’s structure to increase its independence, effectiveness, and professionalism, and to reduce the direct influence of Guyana’s two leading political parties. The current appointment formula embeds partisan rivalry into the Commission’s DNA. Any reform of GECOM that does not break that formula at the root — replacing party-aligned appointees with genuinely independent commissioners selected through a transparent, civil society-vetted process — will merely reproduce the problem under a new name.

Fourth: The transparency vacuum.

Meetings of the commissioners are closed to the public and observers, and there is no public record of the agenda, minutes, or votes and decisions taken. This creates a vacuum that generates suspicion and can be filled with disinformation. A reform commission that deliberates in secret is not building public confidence — it is undermining it. Every session must be open, minuted, and published. Every draft recommendation must be released for public comment before finalisation.

Fifth: The oil-wealth distortion.

Strengthening Guyana’s democracy while the nation’s oil wealth booms is not merely an opportunity — it is an existential test. Resource wealth historically accelerates the consolidation of executive power. A government with access to oil revenues has less need for parliamentary approval, less dependence on a diversified tax base, and less accountability to the citizenry. Constitutional reform must therefore include robust natural resource governance provisions — transparent sovereign wealth fund oversight, parliamentary approval of major contracts, and independently audited oil revenue reporting — or else the Constitution, once reformed, will be hollowed out by economic reality within a generation.

The Path Forward: What Alacrity Actually Requires

Moving forward from a constitution under executive duress requires more than goodwill. It requires architecture — institutional, political, and civic — that does not depend on the goodwill of the executive in the first place.

Parliament must be reconvened on a fixed, publicised schedule with constitutional and electoral reform as standing agenda items. No prorogation, no indefinite suspension, no Speaker exercising unchecked discretion to shelve the people’s business. If Article 184(1) enables such abuse, then its amendment must be the first item on the reform agenda, not the last.

The Constitutional Reform Commission must publish, within sixty days, a timetable for completing its mandate, a schedule of national consultations open to the public, and its first periodic report to the National Assembly as required by Article 119A. If the Commission cannot meet that standard, its membership must be reconstituted with a clear mandate and a binding deadline.

The amendment process must include a referendum pathway. Constitutional changes of fundamental importance — the electoral system, GECOM’s structure, the powers of the President, the rights of citizens — should not be decided solely by a Parliament elected under the very rules being changed. The people of Guyana must be the final authors of their own constitutional settlement.

Civil society, the media, and the legal profession must treat the Carter Center’s June 2026 visit not as the government’s opportunity to perform compliance, but as the nation’s opportunity to hold the government accountable before international witnesses. Submissions must be prepared. Failures must be documented. The international community’s attention is finite; when it moves on, the government’s incentive to act moves with it.

Conclusion: The Covenant Cannot Wait

Phased reform is acceptable only if the phases are visible, bounded, and moving toward a definable end. What Guyana currently has is not a phase — it is a holding pattern, maintained at altitude indefinitely, while the democratic infrastructure below continues to deteriorate.

The Constitution is not the government’s document. It is the nation’s covenant. It belongs to the cane-cutter in Berbice, the fisherwoman in Essequibo, the young professional in Georgetown who left the polls in 2020 not knowing whether her vote would count. They are all still waiting. They cannot afford to wait through another election cycle, another round of manifesto promises, another commission without a deadline.

Reform must move with alacrity not because the Carter Center says so, but because the people of Guyana have already paid too high a price in broken trust. Phased reform is acceptable only if it is visibly, and rapidly, moving toward completion. Anything less is not reform at all. It is the slow annexation of democracy by the executive — and the most dangerous feature of that annexation is how unremarkable it has been made to appear.

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

Safekeeping or Silence? Ekaa Hrim, the Passport Question, and the Smell of a Cover-Up

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BY: Staff— Writer

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣.   

Ekaa Hrim Quarry’s response to the allegations against it has the unmistakable odor of a cover-up in motion, not a company determined to confront wrongdoing. What began as serious complaints from 38 Indian workers about long hours, poor living conditions, low pay, and the handling of their passports is now being dressed up in the language of reassurance, bureaucratic process, and selective explanation. But the central question remains unanswered: if the passports were handed over voluntarily for safekeeping, why did it take intervention from outside the company to get them back? That is not how ordinary employer-employee “safekeeping” works; that is how pressure gets applied until the optics become too dangerous to ignore.

Even more troubling is the eagerness with which the company appears to be preempting the most sensitive parts of the inquiry. A worker has died. The company says it was a heart attack. Perhaps it was. But in a matter this serious, nobody with any sense of public responsibility should be rushing to wrap a final ribbon around a death that ought to be properly examined by the competent authorities. When a company is under scrutiny for possible exploitation, any attempt to present a cause of death as settled before the investigation is complete raises immediate suspicion. It is not transparency. It is narrative management.

And then there is the political choreography. In cases like this, power rarely announces itself bluntly. It shows up as delay, dilution, soft language, and official faces standing between the public and the truth. The Minister of Labour, in this instance, has been forced into the role of front-facing shield, the public buffer through which the matter is being processed and softened. That in itself should concern the country. If intervention was needed to return passports, then the problem was never administrative housekeeping. It was control. If workers had to complain before action was taken, then the system did not detect the abuse; it responded to pressure after the fact.

This is how these matters are so often buried: not by outright denial alone, but by procedural fog, managed statements, and the quiet hope that public attention will move on before accountability takes root. That cannot be allowed here. The allegations are too grave, the power imbalance too obvious, and the explanations too convenient. A company does not get to invoke “safekeeping” after documents are withheld. It does not get to pronounce on a cause of death as though it were the final medical authority. And it does not get to treat the ministry’s intervention as proof that the matter has been handled. If anything, the intervention proves the opposite: that without outside pressure, the workers’ complaints might have remained exactly where the powerful prefer such complaints to be—buried, diluted, and forgotten.

What is required now is not more performative calm. It is a transparent, independent, and uncompromising inquiry into every allegation raised by these workers. Anything less would confirm what many already suspect: that when the accused have access to power, the system bends first, and explains later.

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