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EDITORIAL RESPONSE

A Line Kissoon Invented, Then Accused Others of Crossing

Freddie Kissoon’s July 30 column builds its entire moral case on a rule that does not exist. What follows is worse than a factual lapse.

By The Board  ·  July, 2026

Freddie Kissoon’s July 30 column opens with a premise stated as settled fact: that children do not belong in Guyana’s Parliament, that their presence on July 27 was “unheard of in the world,” and that Azruddin Mohamed therefore crossed a line that is, in Kissoon’s word, “unforgivable.”

The premise is false, and not in a way that requires specialist knowledge to correct.

School civics tours through the National Assembly are a routine feature of parliamentary systems, including Guyana’s own — a fact available to anyone who attended secondary school within walking distance of the Public Buildings.

Stakeholder and special-interest hearings that bring affected families before a legislature to address the matter that concerns them are likewise unremarkable practice, not a Guyanese or global anomaly.

Kissoon’s rhetorical question — “in which country has that happened?” — has an answer, and it is: most of them, regularly.

This matters because the column’s entire architecture depends on the premise holding. Strip out “children are categorically barred from Parliament” and what remains is not a violated rule but a policy dispute over optics — whether it was wise or exploitative for the Opposition Leader to bring grieving family members, including children, into the House in connection with a disaster that killed their parents and siblings.

That is a legitimate question. It is not the question Kissoon asked. He asked it as though the answer were already written into the Standing Orders, and built a column’s worth of moral certainty on top of an assertion he never verified.

TWO DIFFERENT THINGS, COLLAPSED INTO ONE

The column treats “children in the public gallery” as interchangeable with “victims’ family members, including children, present in connection with a matter that killed their relatives.”

These are not the same category. A school tour and a stakeholder appearance by bereaved families are both examples of children in a legislature; neither is “the public wandering in to watch a sitting for entertainment,” which is the image Kissoon’s column works to conjure.

Collapsing the distinction is either careless or convenient. Given the rest of the column, convenient seems the likelier reading.

THE UNASKED QUESTION

Kissoon asks “for what purpose?” four times in various forms, treating it as rhetorical — a question with no honest answer, only a cynical one. He does not engage with the stated purpose: that these were relatives of MV Barima victims, present to make their concerns known to a government whose response to the disaster — from the handling of funeral arrangements to the timeline on salvage to the circulation of a memorial-site “Declaration of Agreement” ahead of any genuine consultation — has itself drawn sustained and specific scrutiny.

A columnist confident in his own premise does not need to ignore the competing one.

Kissoon ignores it entirely, then fills the vacuum with motive he has not demonstrated: ego, bandwagon politics, “crass mentality.”

THE PRESUMPTION OF BAD FAITH, APPLIED SELECTIVELY

The column’s roll call — Kaieteur News, Kiskadee Watch, Demerara Waves, the Guyana Human Rights Association, Transparency International Guyana, Red Thread — is presented as a list of organizations that will stay silent because they “need” Mohamed.

This is asserted, not shown. It is also asserted before any of those organizations had published anything on the matter, which means the column is not describing a silence that occurred but predicting one, and then treating the prediction as evidence of the bad faith it has not yet observed.

That is not analysis. It is a script written in advance of the facts it claims to interpret.

WHAT THE COLUMN NEVER ASKS

A column genuinely concerned with the welfare of grieving children might have asked whether the government’s own conduct in the days after July 18 — the disputed account of remarks about burial costs, the reported instruction not to photograph or film, the pre-drafted memorial declaration circulated to families ahead of a stated “consultation” process — contributed to families feeling they had no avenue but a public one. Kissoon’s column asks none of this.

It reserves its outrage entirely for the opposition’s optics and none for the government conduct that gave families cause to seek an audience in the first place.

None of this requires taking a position on whether bringing children to Parliament was, on balance, wise. Reasonable people can disagree on that. What they cannot do honestly is invent a rule that does not exist, use it to declare a line “unforgivably crossed,” and then spend a column’s remaining length assigning motive to everyone who might question the premise.

WHOSE POSITION, EXACTLY

One further point deserves the record. The column runs in the Guyana Chronicle, a state-owned newspaper, under a standard disclaimer identifying Kissoon as a paid columnist whose views are his own and not the outlet’s official position.

That disclaimer exists precisely because Chronicle is state property, and it is boilerplate practice for compensated contributors at any paper. It does not by itself prove alignment with government messaging.

But it is a fact worth placing beside the column’s own accusation — that the opposition and civil society are motivated by what they “need,” never principle — because that accusation arrives from a paid platform of the state, aimed at people writing for free.

Readers can weigh that asymmetry for themselves.

— The Board

Thirty-One Toshaos, Nine Hundred Thirty Million Dollars, and No Bids: The Threshold That Vanished in a Week

Gtown, Guyana — July, 2026

On Saturday, thirty-one village leaders from Regions Eight and Nine stood in the boardroom of the Ministry of Public Works and signed their names to Community Participation Contracts worth roughly $30 million apiece — a combined $930 million in public money, delivered without a single open bid.

Permanent Secretary Vladim Persaud called it capacity-building. It is also, on the public record, the single largest expansion of uncompeted procurement discretion this administration has exercised in the hinterland in recent memory, and it happened in under a week.

The mechanism is not new. Community Participation Contracts have existed for years as a deliberate, defensible exception to open tendering — a way to let villages execute their own road and bridge maintenance with local labour rather than importing an outside contractor. Nobody at this newspaper disputes that the underlying idea has merit.

What changed, abruptly and by ministerial announcement rather than by any visible legislative or regulatory process this newspaper can locate, is the ceiling on what that exception now covers.

A THRESHOLD RAISED AT A PODIUM

At the National Toshaos Council Conference, Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo told delegates the government would raise the CPC threshold from $5 million to $30 million — a sixfold increase — and instructed, in terms that left no room for bureaucratic delay, that it be done “before you leave.” It was. Within days, thirty-one contracts at or near the new ceiling were signed in a Georgetown boardroom.

A threshold that took years to sit at $5 million was multiplied sixfold at a podium and operationalized into $930 million of signed contracts before the conference delegates had returned home.

This news-media has covered enough hinterland procurement to recognize the shape of what is being described here. The prior $5 million ceiling was not an oversight; it was a guardrail sized to what village councils — most of which are not incorporated companies with standard contracting capacity — could plausibly execute and account for without a formal open-tender evaluation. As recently as May 2025, villages were being urged by the Ministry of Public Works to consider incorporating precisely so they could handle larger sums. That advice was still being given a little over a year before the ceiling was raised sixfold and $930 million moved.

WHAT CRITERIA? WHAT QUALIFICATIONS?

Minister of Local Government and Regional Development Priya Manickchand has said contracts will only be awarded where villages have “demonstrated capacity to complete the work successfully.”

This publication takes no position on the sincerity of that statement. What it observes is that “demonstrated capacity” is not a criterion; it is a conclusion. No published scoring rubric, no engineering pre-qualification standard, no capacity audit methodology, and no evaluation committee composition has been made public for the thirty-one contracts signed on Saturday.

The 592 Guardian was unable to identify, in any government statement, DPI release, or ministry publication, a single objective standard against which a Toshao’s village was measured before receiving an award of up to $30 million.

That absence is not a technicality. It is the entire question. When $930 million moves through a channel exempt by design from the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board’s open-tender rules, the exemption is only defensible if something else — publicly stated, consistently applied criteria — stands in for the market discipline that competitive bidding would otherwise provide. As of this writing, nothing has.

ON THE OPEN-BID QUESTION, PRECISELY

Readers have asked directly whether these contracts were advertised for open bids. They were not, and under the CPC framework as constituted, they were never going to be — that is the defined character of a Community Participation Contract, not a deviation from it. The relevant failure is therefore not procedural evasion but design: a mechanism built for modest, locally-executed maintenance work has just had its ceiling raised sixfold with no accompanying publication of the safeguards that would ordinarily substitute for competition at that scale. NPTAB’s own procurement guidance draws an explicit line between what falls below threshold, subject only to internal record-keeping, and what rises above it, subject to Board-level scrutiny and public notice. This administration has, in a single week, moved $930 million from one side of that line’s practical effect to the other without moving it formally at all.

IS THIS PATRONAGE?

We are conscious that some in the hinterland will read any scrutiny of this initiative as an attack on Indigenous communities’ right to development finance, and we reject that framing in advance. Toshao Russian Dorrick’s own appeal at the NTC conference — asking the ministry directly, “why not give us the contract, we will do it” — is on the public record and deserves to be taken at face value as a legitimate demand for self-determination in how hinterland infrastructure money is spent. That demand is not the problem.

The problem is a government that answered it by removing competitive and evaluative safeguards rather than building new ones suited to the larger sums now in play.

This news media will will not accuse the administration, on the present record, of purchasing political loyalty in Regions Eight and Nine. That is a serious charge and we have not seen the evidence to sustain it.

What we will say, plainly, is that a $930 million disbursement, announced and executed within a single conference cycle, timed precisely to a gathering of the political constituency it benefits, with no published evaluation criteria and no NPTAB oversight role disclosed, is patronage-shaped whether or not it is patronage-intentioned.

Guyanese taxpayers, and the Indigenous communities this initiative claims to serve, are entitled to know which of the two it is — and the only way to know is for the government to publish what it has so far kept to itself.

WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN NOW

The equipment and training components of this initiative — $1 billion across seven Region Eight clusters, $50 million in technical training, a funded road-safety and signage programme — are, on their face, sound public investment.

None of what follows is a call to unwind them. It is a demand that they be made auditable.

1. The Ministry of Public Works should publish the evaluation criteria and scoring methodology used to select the thirty-one awardee villages, including whether any village that applied was declined and why.
2. The Ministry should publish the individual contract value, scope of works, and completion timeline for each of the thirty-one CPCs, not merely the aggregate $930 million figure.
3. The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board should state, on the record, what oversight role — if any — it retained over CPC awards following the threshold increase from $5 million to $30 million, and whether that increase was formalized in regulation or remains a ministerial instruction.
4. The Public Procurement Commission, established under Article 212W of the Constitution specifically to guard against exactly this category of risk, should confirm whether it reviewed the threshold change before or after it was announced at the NTC conference.
5. Village councils that registered as companies to access these contracts should have that corporate and financial structure disclosed, so that beneficial ownership and any contractor relationships are transparent to the communities the money is meant to serve.

None of these five demands require the government to slow down hinterland development. They require it to show its work. An administration confident that thirty-one Toshaos were selected on merit and capacity, rather than proximity to the podium at Arthur Chung, should have no objection to publishing the record that proves it.

— The Board