Archive for category: Featured

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Freedom Is Not Free: What Happens When the State Comes for the Lawyer, Not Just the Client

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

On September 2, a Chinese lawyer named Ruth Wang arrived at Taoyuan International Airport in Taiwan with her husband and two young children, carrying little more than the knowledge that she could not go home. Her offense was never framed as a crime. No court charged her, no warrant named her. Her firm was simply told to dissolve, or be dissolved. Her mentor’s law license had already been revoked. Her colleagues had been suspended from practice for six months. The message required no indictment to be understood: stop representing Zion Church, or stop practicing law.

Wang’s case is worth sitting with — not only because it is a grave violation of religious freedom, which it plainly is, but because of where the state chose to apply pressure. Beijing did not simply prosecute the believers. It went after the people defending them.

That distinction is the whole story, and it is a pattern accountability journalists should learn to recognize wherever it appears, in whatever calibration a given system permits.

The Church, the Crackdown, the Deal

Zion Church is one of China’s most prominent unregistered Protestant congregations — a “house church” operating outside the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement that Beijing uses to keep Christianity under Communist Party supervision. In October 2025, Chinese authorities conducted one of the largest single-church crackdowns in decades, detaining more than twenty members and formally arresting eighteen, including founding pastor Ezra Jin.         Jin’s case eventually became a diplomatic bargaining chip. He was released this past July, after nine months in custody, following direct intervention by the Trump administration — reportedly raised personally with Xi Jinping. He is now believed to be in the United States with family.

But diplomacy freed one man. It did not free the church. Eight of Jin’s co-workers remain detained at Beihai Detention Center in Guangxi: pastors Wang Lin, Gao Yingjia, Yin Huibin, Liu Zhenbin, Lin Shucheng, and Wang Cong, elder Wang Zhong, and church worker Wu Qiuyu. Their release required no presidential phone call, because they had no equivalent leverage.

This is the quieter cruelty embedded in high-level diplomatic rescues: they tend to reach exactly as far as international attention does, and no farther.

Criminalizing the Defense

It is against this backdrop that Ruth Wang’s flight matters most. She was not a defendant. She was defense counsel — a partner at Beijing’s VDoor Law Firm, part of the legal team representing Zion Church figures since the arrests began. Her mentor, Zhang Kai, had his license revoked and was barred from leaving the country. Other VDoor lawyers were suspended from practice. When some tried to move to different firms, they were blocked from doing that too. Judicial authorities did not merely discourage the representation — they ordered the lawyers off the case and off the firm altogether.

This is what it looks like when a state decides that the right to counsel is itself the threat. Beijing did not need to convict Ruth Wang of anything. It needed only to make continuing her work impossible, and let the professional consequences do what a courtroom did not have to.

Even Wang’s escape carries the same lesson. Taiwan gave her “temporary accommodation” but was explicit that it cannot grant political asylum to mainland Chinese citizens — a bind produced entirely by cross-strait politics that have nothing to do with her case. She is now appealing to the United States or Canada for resettlement, a woman and her children rendered stateless not because she broke a law, but because she practiced one.

The Machinery Beneath the Headline

Wang’s case did not emerge in isolation. It sits atop a rapidly hardening legal architecture. On January 1, 2026, revisions to China’s Public Security Administration Punishment Law took effect, and for the first time explicitly listed “illegal religious activities” as grounds for administrative detention — five to fifteen days, plus fines, imposed without the safeguards of a criminal trial.

Administrative detention is a useful tool for a state that wants punishment without due process: it is fast, deniable, and difficult to appeal.

In the first half of 2026, more than a dozen Chinese cities built enforcement infrastructure on top of that legal foundation — infrastructure that depends not on police work, but on citizens turning on each other. In Yunnan’s Honghe prefecture, authorities published 35 categories of reportable “illegal religious activity,” reaching into private homes, WeChat sermons, and unapproved religious education. In Qinghai’s Haidong prefecture, the reporting obligation was extended to hotels and travel agencies, conscripting private businesses into state surveillance of religious life. In Chengdu, the state began paying for it outright — up to 800 RMB, roughly $120, for a verified tip.

None of this requires banning religion outright. It only requires making the administrative cost of practicing it, or defending someone who does, high enough that self-policing accomplishes what mass arrests once did.

That is the actual mechanism of “Sinicization”: not the abolition of faith, but its confinement to whatever narrow space the state finds convenient to permit today and can revoke tomorrow.

 Freedom Is Not Free

There is a version of this story that ends at outrage over religious persecution, and that version would already be worth telling. But the sharper accountability point is this: authoritarian systems rarely attack a right in the open. They attack the people who make the right usable — the lawyer willing to file the brief, the pastor willing to preach, the witness willing to talk. Punish the defenders, and the right survives on paper while dying in practice. Beijing can continue insisting, accurately in the narrowest technical sense, that its citizens are free to worship.

It is simply no longer true that they are free to be defended for doing so.

This is not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon, and it is not always this visible. Where a government’s institutions are large and its media loud, pressure on legal representation shows up as license revocations and firm closures, because the state does not fear being watched. Where institutions are smaller, more personal, and more easily obscured from public view, the same pressure can move quieter — through professional or employment consequences for a lawyer’s associates, never officially tied to the case, never confirmed on the record, and therefore never required to answer for itself.

The mechanism is the same. Only the visibility differs, and visibility is precisely what determines whether the public ever gets to hold anyone accountable for it.

That is the throughline worth carrying past this single case: freedom of religion, freedom of counsel, freedom of the press — none of them are self-executing. They exist only as far as someone is willing to exercise them, and stay standing only as long as someone else is willing to defend the ones who do. Ruth Wang’s children do not yet have a country.

That is the price this particular defense cost. Readers who take comfort in distance from Beijing’s methods should ask, plainly, whether they would still recognize the same mechanism if it arrived without a press release.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

THE SURVEILLANCE NO ONE VOTED FOR

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Twenty-five years ago this month, nineteen men turned commercial aircraft into weapons and murdered nearly three thousand people on American soil. Nothing written here disputes the scale of that grief, or the legitimacy of a state’s obligation to prevent its recurrence. But grief is not a blank check, and in 2001 Congress wrote one anyway. The USA PATRIOT Act passed both chambers and reached the President’s desk in six weeks — a bill that, as the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy observed at the time, moved through Congress faster than routine legislation raising no constitutional concerns, while gutting large sections of the Fourth Amendment.

Twenty-five years on, the law’s financial-surveillance architecture — expanded Know-Your-Customer mandates, a widened net of obligated institutions, and Section 314(a) information-sharing that lets federal agencies map a citizen’s entire banking footprint without a warrant, a subpoena, or a grand jury — is no longer used chiefly against terrorists. It has been redirected at immigrants and, this year, at protest movements, exactly as critics warned a permanent security state eventually would.

The American reckoning with that law is, at least, a live public argument. Reporters file to it. Cato writes about it. Talking Points Memo can publish an investigation into Homeland Security Investigations using Section 314(a) to surveil left-leaning organizing, and the story finds an audience prepared to be outraged.

Guyana has no equivalent public reckoning, because Guyana has no equivalent public knowledge of what its banks are actually doing — and this editorial exists to begin correcting that.

THE TRANSACTION THAT SHOULD NOT REQUIRE AN INTERROGATION

Here is the fact pattern, stated plainly, because plain facts are the strongest indictment available: a Guyanese customer sought a bank cheque. The funds were the customer’s own, already on deposit, already known to the institution, already accounted for on its books. There was no cash coming in from an unverified source. There was no foreign wire of uncertain origin.

There was, in the plainest sense available to a bank’s own compliance framework, no open question about where the money came from — the bank was already holding it.

The bank nonetheless demanded photo identification for the payee — a person who is not the bank’s customer, has no account relationship with the institution, and was not a party to any transaction the bank needed to evaluate for risk. The customer, whose funds and whose conduct are the actual subject of the transaction, is the one who is already fully documented, fully known, and fully compliant. The payee’s identity adds nothing to any legitimate assessment of that transaction’s risk. It cannot, because the money’s provenance was never in question.

This is not risk-based due diligence. Risk-based due diligence calibrates scrutiny to the actual uncertainty in a transaction — the FATF standard that Guyana’s own regulators claim to follow requires exactly that calibration, and explicitly warns against its opposite. This is something else: a reflexive demand for identification because demanding identification has become the institutional posture, regardless of whether the specific transaction in front of the teller presents any question that identification could answer.

NO ONE MADE THEM DO THIS

It would be a different editorial — a more familiar one — if Guyana’s banks could point to Basseterre, or to Paris, and say the FATF made them do it. That defense is not available to them. As of the June 2026 FATF plenary, Guyana is not on the Jurisdictions Under Increased Monitoring list. It is not grey-listed. It is not black-listed. It sits alongside the large majority of jurisdictions the FATF has not flagged for strategic AML-CFT deficiencies requiring international remediation.

This matters because the FATF’s own guidance is explicit that grey-listing is not an automatic trigger for enhanced due diligence, and that even where a jurisdiction is listed, the FATF discourages indiscriminate de-risking. In other words: even the architects of the global AML regime that grew out of America’s post-9/11 panic have had to formally warn financial institutions against exactly the behavior Guyanese banks are now engaged in — applying scrutiny with no proportion to actual risk.

Guyana’s banks are not merely over-complying with an international standard under pressure. They are manufacturing a standard that does not exist, on a jurisdiction that is not under the monitoring that would purport to justify it.

Two explanations remain, and neither reflects well on the institutions involved. Either this is a defensive posture; a bank inventing friction it can point to later as evidence of vigilance, at the direct expense of a customer’s time and a non-customer’s privacy, regardless of whether the friction accomplishes anything — or it is a Bank of Guyana-driven KYC requirement applied without the risk-calibration the framework itself demands, sweeping in payees who are not parties to any suspicious conduct because it is administratively simpler than assessing each transaction on its merits.

Both are failures of governance. Neither is counterterrorism, or counter-laundering, or anything the Bank Secrecy Act’s original 1970 drafters, or the PATRIOT Act’s 2001 authors, would recognize as their purpose.

THE PATTERN AMERICA IS ONLY NOW QUESTIONING

The lineage matters, and it is not flattering. Financial surveillance in the West did not begin with terrorism. It began with tax evasion, then annexed the war on drugs, then annexed counterterrorism after September 11, and is now — a quarter century later, in the same country that wrote the PATRIOT Act — annexing immigration enforcement and the policing of protest. Treasury’s recent directive requiring banks to report suspected undocumented immigrants, and Homeland Security Investigations’ use of Section 314(a) to map the finances of protest organizations without judicial process, are not aberrations from the system’s design.

They are what a permanent, expandable surveillance infrastructure does when the original justification runs out and a new one is needed to keep it staffed and funded.

Guyana should study that trajectory with more urgency than it currently does, because small states adopt these architectures with none of the institutional friction that at least slows the process in Washington. There is no Cato Institute publishing a dissent from the Bank of Guyana’s compliance posture. There is no investigative outlet with the resources of Talking Points Memo cataloguing which agencies request customer data and why. There is, in most cases, no statute a customer can cite back to a teller who has just demanded a stranger’s photo ID for a transaction the bank’s own records show presents no risk at all.

The asymmetry of power between an ordinary depositor and an institution that can simply say “regulations require it” — whether or not any regulation actually does — is the entire story, and it is a story Guyana’s banking public has had no occasion to hear told plainly.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES

This is not an argument against know-your-customer obligations, anti-money-laundering law, or the legitimate function of financial-crime enforcement. It is an argument that those obligations exist to answer specific questions about specific risks, and that a bank which cannot say what risk a payee’s photo ID resolves in a transaction it has already verified is not practicing compliance.

It is practicing theater, and billing the public for the performance in wasted time, needless friction, and the quiet normalization of surveillance for its own sake.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11 is an appropriate moment for the United States to ask whether the architecture Congress built in six weeks of 2001 still serves the purpose it was built for.

It is an equally appropriate moment for Guyana to ask a simpler and more answerable question: when a bank cannot show that a specific demand for identification actually resolves a specific question of risk, on whose authority — and for whose benefit — was that identification ever required?

The 592 Guardian has posed that question to the institutions concerned. It should not require an editorial to get an answer.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 The Substitution: How President Ali Answered a Question About Parliament With an Attack on One Man

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar –September 2026

A reading of the President’s Al Jazeera interview against Guyana’s own parliamentary record

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In an interview broadcast on Al Jazeera, President Irfaan Ali was asked a direct institutional question: given that his political opposition is accusing the administration of mismanagement and a lack of transparency over where oil revenues are going, how does he answer citizens who feel the wealth is bypassing them entirely? The question named no individual. It named a category — “your opposition” — doing what oppositions in a functioning democracy exist to do.

The President’s answer did not begin with an account of that scrutiny. It began by narrowing the category to a person, and disqualifying him: the opposition leader, he said, is sanctioned by the United States Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, and had been “long before he was even an opposition leader.”

“I want to address that accusation for a moment. First of all, you know that we have an opposition where the opposition leader is sanctioned by the United States, OFAC sanctioned, and that is long before he was even an opposition leader.”

A QUESTION ABOUT AN INSTITUTION, ANSWERED AS A QUESTION ABOUT A MAN

This is worth being precise about, because the move is easy to miss if the pivot is read as ordinary political deflection. It is not that. A deflection changes the subject. What happened here is narrower and more calculated: the President took a question about a plural, institutional actor — Parliament’s opposition benches, the accountability function they perform — and substituted a single sanctioned individual for it, as though one man’s US sanction status could stand in for, and dispose of, a question about the transparency of a national oil fund.

An opposition’s right to demand transparency does not rise or fall on the sanction status of any one member of it. Guyana’s Parliament has an Opposition Leader, but it also has a Public Accounts Committee, backbenchers, motions, and a constitutional scrutiny function that exists independently of who leads it.

To answer “your opposition is accusing you of mismanagement” with “the opposition leader is OFAC-sanctioned” is not a rebuttal of the accusation. It is a refusal to engage with it, dressed as one.

THE TRANSPARENCY CLAIM HE DID MAKE

Only after that substitution did the President offer his actual defence: that oil and gas revenue flows into the Natural Resource Fund, that the Finance Minister discloses what comes in, that spending is utilised “through the national budget” via “a parliamentary process where every single person is aware of what the resources are used for,” and that the fund is subsequently audited by the Auditor General.

“It goes through the parliamentary process, then it’s audited by the Auditor General. So in terms of transparency and the use of the oil and gas revenue, there’s a clear system.”

This is the claim that can actually be tested — and it does not survive contact with Parliament’s own published sittings record.

WHAT THE SITTINGS RECORD SHOWS

The 13th Parliament convened on November 3, 2025. By the end of August 2026; nearly 300 days later — the official sittings index recorded only four dated sittings, plus a fifth entry with no date attached at all. The first was for the swearing-in of members. The second, third, and fourth were each titled “Budget Presentation 2026.” By comparison, the 10th, 11th, and 12th Parliaments each held between 29 and 35 sittings over a comparable span of their terms.

The Guyana Development Bank Bill — a piece of legislation concentrating roughly $40 billion in lending discretion in the hands of the Finance Minister, with board appointments made solely at his discretion and no opposition or civil-society nominee requirement — was tabled at the June 5, 2026 sitting and passed on July 27, 2026. It does not appear as a dated entry in Parliament’s own official sittings index. Kaieteur News reported that when it came up for second reading and passage, it passed without debate: opposition MPs were on the floor protesting ministers Edghill and Indar’s refusal to resign over the MV Barima ferry disaster, the government side offered no response to that protest, and the Speaker suspended the sitting twice for disorder. Government backbenchers spoke on the Bill uncontested while the opposition benches were occupied by grief and a resignation demand the government did not answer.

This is what “the parliamentary process” the President described actually produced on the one occasion, within the sittings record available, that a major financial bill came to a vote: a sitting not listed by date, a bill passed without opposition argument, and a chamber where the accountability function he invoked in his own defence was, in that moment, not functioning at all.

THE COMMITTEE THAT CANNOT MEET

The Public Accounts Committee — Parliament’s standing mechanism for scrutinising exactly the audited expenditure the President cited — has not achieved quorum in years, a persistent absence tied to the governing party’s own members declining to attend.

An audited system that nobody sits down to examine is not a transparency system. It is the appearance of one, maintained by an institution that has been allowed to go dormant.

THE PATTERN, NOT THE INCIDENT

None of this is isolated. It sits alongside a now-familiar sequence in this administration’s public accountability record: announcements of review, task forces, and self-regulation that are not followed by enforcement or by the institutional machinery — quorate committees, debated legislation, published vetting records — that would make the announcement mean something. The Al Jazeera interview adds a new data point to that pattern, not a new argument. What is new is the President’s own words supplying the clearest available illustration of the substitution at the heart of it: when the institutional question comes, the answer is a named, not the institution’s record.

WHAT WAS NOT ASKED

It should also be said plainly: the Al Jazeera interviewer did not put the sittings count, the Development Bank Bill’s passage, or the PAC’s quorum failure to the President directly. Nothing in the broadcast interview obliged him to reconcile his transparency claim with his own Parliament’s calendar.

That reconciliation is the work this piece has done instead — using the President’s own recorded words, and Guyana’s own published parliamentary record, side by side.

Sourcing note: Direct quotations above are drawn from the broadcast Al Jazeera interview with President Irfaan Ali. Parliamentary sittings figures are drawn from Parliament of Guyana’s official sittings index (parliament.gov.gy) and Kaieteur News reporting (July 28, 2026) on the July 27, 2026 sitting. PAC quorum status reflects The 592 Guardian’s standing coverage.

— The Board

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Test of Power: Can Guyana Build Beyond Its Leaders?

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar— September 2026

In a widely circulated opinion piece titled “The Courage to become Unnecessary” Kojo M. Parris has done something unusual in Guyanese public life: he has publicly and forcefully challenged a man he plainly admires, knows personally, and credits with consequential achievements.

He is not an opposition voice – he served under the Jagdeo presidency as Guyana’s Honorary Consul in South Africa . 

That takes courage. It is easier to criticize a political opponent than to question a friend; easier still to remain silent when proximity, history and personal regard make criticism uncomfortable. Parris has instead placed a difficult proposition before the country: that Bharrat Jagdeo’s extraordinary political gifts, and the centrality he has acquired in Guyana’s affairs, may now be contributing to the institutional weakness that threatens the country’s democratic future.

His essay- part personal memoir, part political autopsy; deserves to be read closely, and argued with closely, rather than filed under either “hit piece” or “hagiography.” It is neither. It is a friend’s brief against a friend, and that makes it worth taking seriously on its own terms.

The question he raises is fundamental: is Guyana building institutions strong enough to outlast its leaders, or a political order increasingly dependent on the authority, access and intervention of a few?

Credit where it is due

No serious assessment of Guyana’s contemporary political history can deny Jagdeo’s formidable abilities or his record of achievement.

He has been among the most consequential political figures of the post-1992 era. His political energy, tactical discipline, command of complex policy matters and international visibility are undeniable. The Low Carbon Development Strategy gave Guyana a distinctive voice in global climate discussions long before the country’s petroleum wealth transformed its economic prospects. His influence in placing Guyana at the centre of climate, forest and energy conversations is part of the national record.

There is also a serious argument that the PPP’s return to office after 1992 helped restore political confidence and social inclusion to many Indo-Guyanese communities that had experienced long periods of marginalisation. Indigenous communities, too, became more central to national political and development discourse, even though major questions remain about land rights, consultation, representation and the distribution of benefits.

Under the present PPP-C administration, President Irfaan Ali can fairly point to visible development: roads, bridges, housing, schools, hospitals, energy projects, expanding private investment, and a country moving at a pace that would have been difficult to imagine a decade ago. For many Guyanese, particularly those who have obtained employment, contracts, new housing, improved roads, scholarships, training or other opportunities, the government’s case is not abstract. Development has a physical presence in their communities and in their lives. That reality must be acknowledged.

The other side of progress

Yet development is not only measured by concrete, cranes, new vehicles, hotels or the velocity of construction.

It is also measured by whether a citizen can obtain a birth certificate, pension, land document, police response, utility connection, business approval or medical service without a political contact, an influential intermediary, a public appeal, or an appearance at a ministerial outreach.This is where Parris’s warning has force.

Ministerial outreaches can be useful. They take officials directly into communities, sometimes resolve long-standing cases and can give voice to citizens who feel ignored by distant offices. In a country with difficult geography, uneven access to services and communities far from Georgetown, no responsible observer should casually dismiss face-to-face government intervention.

But there is another interpretation.

If thousands of citizens must wait for a minister, President, Vice President or politically connected figure to visit their region before routine matters can be resolved, then the problem is larger than the individual case. It suggests that the normal machinery of the State is either too slow, too opaque, too inaccessible or too unresponsive.

Outreach should be an addition to a functioning public service—not a substitute for one.

“A modern State is not one that brings government closer only when the cameras arrive. It is one that works when no minister, no party official and no social-media influencer is present.”

Jagdeo, Ali and responsibility

The public debate cannot be confined to Bharrat Jagdeo alone.

President Ali is the elected head of government and head of state. Jagdeo is the Vice President and the PPP-C’s most powerful strategist and political operator. Their partnership is central to the administration’s direction, its achievements and its failures.

It is therefore neither fair nor credible to praise President Ali for the roads, hospitals, housing programmes, international investments and energy agenda, while isolating Jagdeo as responsible for governance failures. Nor is it reasonable to credit Jagdeo for the administration’s political and economic gains while treating the President as merely ceremonial when difficult questions arise. They govern in tandem. They must be judged in tandem.

If Jagdeo represents the political machinery and strategic centre of the government, Ali represents its constitutional face and executive authority. Where the system works, both are entitled to credit. Where institutions appear weak, decisions seem excessively centralised, agencies lack independence, or citizens believe access is more valuable than procedure, both bear responsibility. The issue is not whether Guyana needs strong leadership. In a rapidly changing petroleum economy, it plainly does.

The issue is whether strong leaders are strengthening the State—or whether the State is becoming increasingly dependent on strong leaders.

“If Jagdeo laid the foundations of a politics centered on access, President Ali has had six years to decide whether to dismantle that structure—or furnish it, enlarge it and call it modern governance.”

Oil, opportunity and inequality

Guyana is experiencing an economic transformation unlike any in its modern history. Oil revenues, foreign investment and construction have created new wealth, new businesses and new ambitions. That cannot be wished away, nor should it be condemned simply because it is uneven.

Foreign investment is not inherently exploitation. Private enterprise is not inherently corruption. Wealth creation is not inherently injustice. Guyana needs investors, engineers, contractors, financiers, builders, entrepreneurs and international partners. It needs jobs beyond the public sector, productive businesses, technology transfer, infrastructure and global markets.

But the country also needs to ask who is benefiting most, who is being left behind, and whether the new economy is deepening a divide between those with capital, contracts, land, connections and information—and those who have only their labor.

The concern is increasingly visible: a new class of politically connected or commercially advantaged beneficiaries is emerging alongside workers, pensioners, small vendors, farmers, public servants and young people who still struggle with rising prices, housing costs, food bills, transport, insecure employment and limited bargaining power.  

“What we are witnessing is the steady emergence of a stark two-tiered society: a privileged bourgeois class accumulating wealth and influence, alongside a growing proletariat left to bear the burdens of economic insecurity.”

That does not mean every successful businessperson is a crony, every contractor is corrupt, or every foreign company is an imperialist predator. Such language can obscure more than it reveals. But neither should the country accept a development model in which public wealth becomes private privilege, and national prosperity is celebrated through luxury consumption while working people cannot feel secure in their daily lives.

The real question is whether oil wealth is creating broad-based social mobility—or merely moving Guyana toward a sharper class hierarchy.

“Oil has not merely expanded Guyana’s economy; it is rapidly rearranging its class structure, rewarding those nearest to contracts, capital, land and political access while many workers struggle to keep pace with prices.”

The Jagan question

This is where the legacy of Dr. Cheddi Jagan becomes relevant. Jagan’s politics were rooted in workers, peasants, social justice, national independence and a suspicion of economic arrangements in which Guyanese labour and natural wealth served interests beyond Guyana. He believed political independence was incomplete if economic power remained concentrated in the hands of a privileged few or controlled from outside the country.

That legacy does not require Guyana to retreat from the world, reject foreign capital or romanticize poverty. A small state with major development needs cannot prosper through isolation. But it does require vigilance.

“Cheddi Jagan’s political inheritance was not hostility to development or foreign engagement. It was a conviction that development must serve national independence, working people and the many—not foreign capital and a locally connected few.”

Guyana must negotiate firmly, regulate competently, protect its environment, collect what is owed, train its people, defend labour standards, build local capacity and ensure that the revenues from its resources produce lasting public goods.

“Anti-imperialism in the twenty-first century need not mean isolation. It means negotiating from strength, demanding transparency, protecting sovereignty, and ensuring that foreign investment serves a Guyanese social contract.”

Hospitals, schools, water systems, energy security, housing, reliable roads, pensions, competitive wages, safer communities, independent institutions and dignified work must be the practical proof that oil belongs to the people.

If the new economy enriches a narrow circle while the wider society becomes more anxious, more indebted and more dependent on patronage, then the country will have betrayed not only Jagan’s social-democratic and nationalist inheritance, but the promise of oil itself.

“The oil boom must not become a conveyor belt from public wealth to private privilege.”

A debate Guyana needs

Parris’s article can be challenged. It should be challenged.

Some will argue that his account understates the scale of development now underway. Others will say it does not sufficiently recognise the obstacles faced by any government governing a divided society with an overstretched public service, inherited institutional weaknesses and a sudden oil boom. Some will contend that Jagdeo’s political force is precisely what has allowed Guyana to negotiate confidently on the international stage and avoid being overwhelmed by powerful foreign interests. Others will argue that such concentration of influence, regardless of the individual’s intentions, weakens ministers, civil servants, boards, regulators and Parliament.

Both sides deserve to be heard.

But no side should evade the core democratic question: can a citizen obtain fair treatment from the Guyanese State without being politically aligned, personally connected, publicly visible or fortunate enough to catch the attention of someone powerful?

That is the standard against which every government must be measured.

The Mandela challenge

Nelson Mandela understood that even the most beloved leader must eventually prove that the country he helped shape can stand without him. By leaving office after one term, when he could have remained, Mandela demonstrated that the health of a democracy matters more than the permanence of an individual.

Guyana’s leaders need not imitate Mandela’s history; no country’s journey is identical to another’s. But they can emulate the principle.

“The test of reform is not how efficiently the powerful can intervene; it is how rarely ordinary people need them to.”

Bharrat Jagdeo has the stature, experience and influence to help build a Guyana in which ministries function without rescue, public servants serve without fear, regulators act without political instruction, Parliament scrutinises without ritual, and citizens receive what is due to them without having to seek the favour of a leader. President Ali has the constitutional authority and the political opportunity to insist that this becomes the defining work of his presidency.

If the Jagdeo-Ali era leaves behind stronger institutions, more equal citizenship, a capable public service, broader prosperity and a politics less dependent on personal access, it will deserve lasting credit.

If it leaves behind a richer country but a weaker republic—one in which power remains concentrated, opportunity remains uneven and public confidence depends on who knows whom—then the oil boom will have failed its most important test.

“The highest form of political achievement is not to become indispensable. It is to make oneself unnecessary.”

That is the debate before Guyana.

We invite readers to join it: Has the country’s development model strengthened the State and widened opportunity, or has it made too many citizens more dependent on political access and elite connections? What specific reforms would ensure that Guyana’s resource wealth builds a republic that serves every citizen, regardless of race, region, class or party allegiance?

 

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 The Adviser Who Discovered One-Party Rule

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Lenox Shuman says only the PPP/C is fit to govern Guyana. His own record — and a courtroom accusation he denies — complicate the claim.

Senior Government Adviser on Aviation Lenox Shuman told the Starting Point podcast this week that he does not believe any political party besides the People’s Progressive Party-Civic is currently capable of governing Guyana. He said it of We Invest in Nationhood specifically, accusing the party led by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed of “selfish, narrow interests” and no governing capacity. He extended the same verdict, more gently, to the People’s National Congress Reform, which he described as “but a shadow of its former self.”

Strip away the specific targets and what remains is a broader claim: every party that is not the PPP-C is unfit to govern. In a country where the PPP-C’s own vote share sits well short of unanimous, that is not a critique of WIN or the PNCR. It is an argument that roughly half the electorate backed parties are incapable of governance — which is to say, an argument for indefinite single-party rule, offered as a competence assessment rather than a preference.

A FAMILIAR ARC

Shuman’s own history complicates the position he now holds. He founded the Liberty and Justice Party in 2019, relinquishing his Canadian citizenship to meet the National Assembly’s citizenship requirement, and ran as its presidential candidate in the disputed March 2, 2020 general election. On August 22, 2020 — roughly three weeks after President Irfaan Ali’s government was sworn in — the Office of the President announced Shuman’s appointment as Advisor to the Minister of Public Works on Civil Aviation. Ten days later, on September 1, 2020, he was elected Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, becoming the first Indigenous Guyanese to hold that post.

The advisory role and the speakership arrived within the same fortnight, at the opening of a government Shuman had just finished running against.

 

For a period after, Shuman used his position to press the same government on Indigenous rights. In December 2021, he called the administration’s consultation process on mining in the Marudi area a “sham,” arguing it lacked genuine input from affected Amerindian communities. He went further, saying the PPP-C showed “no respect for Amerindians” in its handling of resource-extraction decisions affecting hinterland communities — remarks pointed enough that Prime Minister Mark Phillips issued a public rebuttal accusing Shuman of having “departed from facts.”

The same man who once accused the PPP/C of showing “no respect for Amerindians” now says no other party is fit to be trusted with the country at all.

 That is the reversal worth sitting with. The same man who once accused the PPP-C of showing “no respect for Amerindians” now says no other party is fit to be trusted with the country at all. Whatever changed between 2021 and 2026, it was not the PPP-C’s record on the specific grievance Shuman raised at the time; or if it was, that would itself be worth a public accounting rather than a blanket verdict on everyone else’s fitness to govern.

WHAT WAS PUT TO HIM, UNDER OATH

There is a further complication in the record, and it should be handled with precision. In September 2025, Shuman testified as a prosecution witness in the ongoing trial over alleged fraud in the 2020 general elections, describing his intervention during the disputed Region Four vote tabulation at the Ashmin’s Building. Under cross-examination, defence attorney Eusi Anderson put a direct accusation to him: “Your participation as a candidate in the elections was in effect as a proxy for the People’s Progressive Party Civic.” Shuman rejected it without hesitation. “That suggestion would be incorrect,” he said.

Anderson pressed further, suggesting Shuman had received financial or political benefit from the PPP-C in exchange for his role during the five-month post-election impasse. Shuman denied bias, denied financial links, and denied any arrangement. He did concede two narrower points: that since August 2020 he had never publicly supported the APNU+AFC coalition the way he has supported the PPP-C, and that he had never been employed by or received benefits from that coalition.

None of this establishes that Anderson’s accusation was true. It was a defence attorney’s theory, put to a prosecution witness, in a trial where the accused have an evident interest in undermining that witness’s credibility — and Shuman denied it under oath, on the record, without equivocation. The 592 Guardian is not asserting the proxy-candidate theory as fact. But it is a matter of public record that the theory was put, in open court, to the man who now tells the country which parties may be trusted to govern it. Readers assessing his current claim about WIN and the PNCR are entitled to weigh it against everything else in his public record, including this.

THE UNASKED QUESTION

Shuman built his political identity, before 2020, on Indigenous advocacy: chief of Pakuri, three years as vice-chairman of the National Toshaos Council, a campaign that centred on hinterland neglect. If his position — now restored, following a 2024 resignation to launch an airline venture — carries any of that original mandate, the honest test is not rhetorical. It is what has actually reached Indigenous and hinterland communities on his watch: reliable, affordable interior air service; transparent consultation on extraction projects in Amerindian territories; movement on the exact grievances he himself raised in 2021 and later set aside.

Guyana’s opposition parties are fair targets for scrutiny, and neither WIN nor the PNCR is above the kind of accountability this paper applies to the government.

But the claim that only one party is capable of governing is not a scrutiny of the opposition. It is a request that the public stop weighing alternatives at all.

Before that request is granted, the person making it might first answer what his own years inside the corridors of this government’s power has delivered for the people he was once elected, in part, to speak for.

— The Board