The Sovereign Trap: Why Guyana Must Choose Innovation Over Digital Imitation

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦Accountability Journalism 

EDITORIAL  |  JULY, 2026

The Sovereign Trap: Why Guyana Must Choose Innovation Over Digital Imitation

A senior U.S. State Department official has challenged the world to rethink what digital sovereignty actually means. Guyana — awash in oil revenues, chronically short on digital literacy, and absent any coherent national technology strategy — should be paying very close attention.

Jacob Helberg, the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs has written a pointed rebuke of what he calls “digital sovereignty evangelism” — the fashionable global movement in which governments pour billions into building national AI models, sovereign cloud infrastructure, and domestic digital champions that, in the end, merely replicate what already exists elsewhere. His argument is as elegant as it is unsettling: copying yesterday’s breakthrough while the world races toward tomorrow’s is not independence. It is expensive irrelevance.

Guyana should read this not as an American manifesto — which it partly is — but as a mirror held up to our own digital condition. Because if there is a country that has perfected the art of announcing transformations it has not yet started, it is ours.

The Oil State Without a Digital Guyana will extract over 1,000,000 barrels of oil per day by the end of this year. The sovereign wealth fund is accumulating. The Ali administration speaks, at every opportunity, of transformation, diversification, and a knowledge economy. Yet the country has no published national digital strategy, no functioning data protection framework — indeed, the sole officer of the Data Protection Commission appears to have emigrated — no publicly accountable AI policy, and a digital literacy rate that leaves the majority of Guyanese unable to participate meaningfully in the economy that their own petroleum is financing.

Helberg’s essay warns against nations that race to build “a sovereign cloud, a sovereign model, a national champion of their very own,” only to discover they have achieved “not digital sovereignty but a kind of synchronized mediocrity.” Guyana has not even reached that stage. We have not built the imitation. We have barely registered the ambition.Helberg introduces a concept worth internalizing: innovation sovereignty. Not the power to reproduce what others have built, but the capacity to create what does not yet exist. A country becomes digitally sovereign, in this framing, not by hoarding a model that will be obsolete within the year, but by developing the institutional capacity — the human capital, the research ecosystem, the regulatory intelligence — to generate original advantage.

By that measure, Guyana’s digital sovereignty is approximately zero. We are not even in the race being described. While the Government announces “smart city” pilots in a capital still struggling with persistent flooding and electricity cuts, the deeper question — whether Guyanese citizens possess the digital competence to be active agents rather than passive consumers of the technologies being rolled out around them — goes entirely unasked.

This newspaper has raised the alarm repeatedly. We are not performing journalism about technology in the abstract. We are pressing a civic case: that a citizenry that cannot navigate, interrogate, and hold accountable the digital systems governing their lives is a citizenry permanently vulnerable to capture — by foreign corporations, by patronage-driven state procurement, and by a political class that understands, very well, that an informationally dependent population is an electorally compliant one.

When the Government selected India’s UPI digital payments architecture over Brazil’s PIX — a decision this publication examined in depth — the technical and economic justification offered to the public was essentially nil. A decision with decade-long consequences for how millions of Guyanese will transact, save, and borrow was taken without parliamentary scrutiny, without published procurement criteria, and without any public consultation about digital infrastructure sovereignty. That is not the behavior of a government building innovation capacity. It is the behavior of a government treating its citizens as spectators to decisions made elsewhere and handed down here.

Helberg is correct that the prize is not a model but an ecosystem — one in which value flows outward to every firm, institution, and citizen it touches. Guyana’s current trajectory builds no such ecosystem. It imports finished products, signs long-term contracts that lock in dependency, and congratulates itself on the modernity of the acquisition.

What Guyana needs is not a sovereign large language model. What it needs, urgently, is a generation of citizens who understand data rights, can interrogate a government contract published online, know how to identify disinformation, understand the implications of facial recognition in public spaces, and can participate in democratic life in a world that has moved decisively onto digital platforms.
The 592 Guardian is, to our knowledge, the only media platform in this country that pursues digital literacy as a sustained editorial commitment — not as a technology column or a gadget review, but as an accountability imperative.Other outlets report on digital announcements. We interrogate digital structures, because the structures determine who benefits and who is excluded.This is not a boast. It is a statement of the gap. In a country of this size, with this much capital now flowing through it, there should be a chorus of voices pressing citizens to understand what is being built in their name. There is near silence.

  
Pax Silica Is Real — and Guyana Has No Seat at the Table

Helberg describes Pax Silica — the emerging American-led coalition of trusted technology partners — as a framework built on comparative advantage: one partner’s compute, another’s minerals, a third’s talent, a fourth’s capital, multiplied together. Guyana has minerals. We sit on rare earth potential, on gold, on bauxite. What we have not done is convert resource endowment into negotiating leverage in digital infrastructure partnerships.

CARICOM has no seat at the Pax Silica table. Guyana has not sought one. The G2 Goldfields merger — a US$2.2 billion transaction executed through Canadian capital markets with no visible Guyanese government role — is emblematic: our assets participate in global value chains; our citizens and our institutions do not.

Helberg writes that a country becomes digitally sovereign by owning “the loop that turns its own experience into advantage.” Every time a Guyanese oil field is assessed by a foreign algorithm, every time a Guyanese voter’s data passes through a foreign platform’s architecture, every time a state contract is negotiated by a government official who does not understand what they are signing, that loop runs elsewhere. The advantage compounds abroad.

What Must Change                                                       
 
Guyana does not need to build a national AI model. But it does need to do several things it has conspicuously refused to do.

  
→It needs a published, debated, parliamentary-approved national digital strategy.
→It needs a Data Protection Commission that is staffed, funded, and independent.
→It needs digital literacy integrated into the national curriculum from primary school through university. It needs transparent, competitive procurement for all digital infrastructure — every sole-source technology contract is a compounding liability.
→And it needs an opposition, a civil society, and a press that treats digital governance as the sovereignty question it actually is.

 The champions of performative sovereignty — those who cut ribbons on servers they do not understand, sign cloud contracts they have not read, and announce digital transformations they have not resourced — are, in Helberg’s withering phrase, “marching their nations, in perfect and well-funded formation, into the past.”

Guyana is not yet marching. We have not yet decided to move. The oil money buys time, but it does not stop the clock .Every year that passes without a digitally capable citizenry is a year in which the gap between what Guyana owns and what Guyana understands grows wider — and the terms on which others will eventually exploit that gap grow more favorable to them.

This publication will continue to close that gap, one editorial at a time. We invite our readers, our institutions, and our government to join us — before the frontier moves so far ahead that catching it requires more than courage. It requires a generation we have not yet educate — The 592 Guardian Editorial Board                  


ACCOUNTABILITY ♦INTEGRITY ♦TRUTH

 

The Choice to Serve, Not the Right to Profit

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY ◊OBJECTIVITY  JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

The Choice to Serve, Not the Right to Profit

On Freddie Kissoon’s defense of the President’s farm — and what he leaves out about public trust

The Editorial Board   |   July , 2026

Freddie Kissoon’s latest column asks Guyanese to accept a strange inversion: that scrutiny of a sitting president’s expanding commercial farm is not accountability journalism but an imported Western prejudice, and that the proper comparison is a US senator’s index fund. It is worth taking the argument seriously enough to show precisely where it fails, because the failure is instructive — not just about the President’s farm, but about the model of public service some of Guyana’s most prominent commentators are now asking the country to accept.

THE CATEGORY ERROR AT THE CENTER OF THE ARGUMENT

Kissoon’s entire case rests on a single comparison: Western cabinet ministers and senators hold shares and stocks, so why shouldn’t a Guyanese president hold and expand a business? The comparison collapses on inspection, because it treats two entirely different things as identical.

A senator’s shareholding is passive capital. It sits in a portfolio, often in a blind trust precisely so the office-holder cannot direct it, and it generates no interaction with the daily machinery of the state that the senator does not also control through public, recorded votes.

An actively expanding agricultural estate is not passive capital. It requires land, financing, inputs, and market access — every one of which touches an apparatus the President himself sits atop: land allocation and titling, agricultural licensing and subsidy regimes, financial sector oversight, and public procurement.

 The question was never whether a Head of State may own property. It is whether a Head of State can expand a commercial enterprise while he alone controls the levers that determine whether that expansion succeeds, without the public being able to see whether those levers were touched.

That is not a cultural argument about the Global South versus the West. It is a structural one about where power and profit intersect, and it applies with equal force in Washington, London, or Georgetown. The reason Western democracies build disclosure regimes around exactly this intersection is not colonial condescension. It is because they learned, the hard way and often through scandal, that this is precisely the point where public office curdles into private enrichment.

The question was never whether a Head of State may own property. It is whether he can expand a commercial enterprise while alone controlling the levers that determine its success.

A CIVICS LESSON KISSOON SKIPPED

Kissoon invokes “almost every Cabinet Minister in the Western world” as though the comparison ends with the fact of outside income. It does not begin there — it begins with the machinery built around that income. US federal officials file public financial disclosures annually, itemizing assets, liabilities, and outside positions, reviewed by ethics offices with statutory teeth. Many jurisdictions require divestment or blind trusts for holdings that could be affected by official decisions. Ministers in the UK register interests in a public record any citizen can inspect. Recusal from decisions touching a personal financial interest is not a courtesy in these systems; it is frequently a legal obligation with consequences for breach.

None of this is a favour these democracies extend to their officials. It is the price those officials pay for the public’s continued trust — a trade-off, not an exemption.        Kissoon’s own aside about “open source data” gestures at exactly this without following it to its conclusion: the reason Western officials can hold outside interests with less public alarm is that the interest, its scale, and its interaction with official decisions are open to inspection by design. Remove the disclosure architecture and keep only the outside income, and you have not imported the Western model. You have taken the one part of it that benefits the office-holder and discarded the part that protects the public.

Guyana does have an Integrity Commission and an asset-declaration regime on paper. Whether that regime functions as a genuine check or as a formality that can be preempted or left unenforced is a separate question — and it is the operative one. A disclosure law that exists in statute but is not meaningfully enforced does not give a public official the protection of the Western model Kissoon invokes. It gives him the appearance of that protection while leaving the public with none of its substance.

WHAT PUBLIC SERVICE ACTUALLY IS

Kissoon’s column is, at bottom, a plea on behalf of officials who sacrifice their health and years to public life and deserve a secure retirement. That plea deserves a serious answer, not a dismissive one: a modest, publicly-funded pension for former Heads of State is a legitimate policy question, and reasonable people can debate its design.

But that is a different question entirely from whether a sitting president may grow a private commercial enterprise, in real time, while he holds the very authority that could make or break it.

Public office in a democracy is not entered into as a business opportunity deferred. It is a choice — freely made, never coerced — to place the machinery of the state at the service of the public rather than the office-holder’s private interests for the duration of the term. That is the whole of the bargain. An official who wanted to build a commercial empire unconstrained by conflict-of-interest scrutiny remained free, at every point before taking the oath of office, not to seek it. Having sought it, and having accepted the trust that comes with it, the obligation runs toward the public that conferred it — not toward a theory, borrowed or otherwise, that recasts personal enrichment in office as trailblazing.

This publication has reported separately, and in detail, on the specific financing and provenance questions surrounding the President’s Long Creek estate. This editorial does not restate that reporting. It responds to Kissoon’s argument on its own terms, because the argument — that scrutiny itself is the imported prejudice, and that expansion of commercial interests by a sitting Head of State is a matter of pride rather than disclosure — is one Guyanese should be wary of accepting regardless of what the underlying facts of any single case turn out to be.

Weaken the principle to defend one presidency, and it will not be there to constrain the next.

— The Editorial Board, The 592 Guardian

Super El Niño threatens to unleash one of the most destructive Seasons

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊ FOR GUYANA

Super El Niño threatens to unleash one of the most destructive Seasons

As a Super El Niño threatens to unleash one of the most destructive seasons in recent memory, a provocative scientific paper asks a difficult question: if we can’t stop the planet from warming fast enough, should we consider temporarily dimming the sun to blunt the worst impacts?

A team at Scripps Institution of Oceanography used climate models — and lessons from the 2019–20 Australian “Black Summer” fires — to test whether marine cloud brightening, a form of solar geoengineering, could tamp down a powerful El Niño. The idea is simple in concept and fiendishly complex in execution: spray sea-salt aerosols into low ocean clouds so they reflect more sunlight, cool the tropical Pacific, and reduce the spike in global temperatures that a Super El Niño would bring.

Their models show it might work — at least partially. Targeted cloud brightening applied early could shave roughly 40 percent off peak El Niño warming in the simulations. That could translate into fewer heatwaves, smaller wildfires, reduced crop failures, and less pressure on overstretched health and emergency systems. For regions like the Caribbean and Guyana, where livelihoods depend on stable rainy seasons, fisheries and agriculture, and where disasters quickly overwhelm limited response capacity, any tool that lowers immediate harm is tempting.

But temptation is not policy. The paper is a proof of concept, not a policy prescription — and for good reason. The gulf between a model result and a safe, effective technology is vast. Engineers currently lack sprayers capable of delivering the right quantity and size of particles over the required ocean areas. Models still struggle to predict the cascading, remote effects of changing cloud reflectivity on global rainfall patterns. And there is real risk of overcorrection: a “too strong” intervention could trigger a mega La Niña with its own catalogue of floods, storms and agricultural disruption.

Beyond technical uncertainty lie profound ethical and geopolitical questions. Who decides to dim the sun for months or years? A handful of wealthy states, private funders, or an international process that includes the most vulnerable voices? The distributional stakes are enormous: a change that reduces heat in one place might reduce rain in another, hitting small island states, farmers, or urban poor who already carry the heaviest climate burdens. Then there’s the moral hazard: the more credible a techno-fix becomes, the more it risks blunting the political urgency to cut greenhouse gas emissions — the only durable solution to the climate crisis.

So what should policymakers, civil society and the public in the Caribbean and Guyana take from this study? First: don’t be distracted. Geoengineering research must be watched, regulated and debated transparently, but it is not a substitute for rapid emissions cuts or for costly, necessary adaptation. Second: demand a voice. Any international discussion of geoengineering governance must include the countries most at risk. We cannot allow decisions about global sunlight to be taken behind closed doors by institutions or corporations with little stake in our futures. Third: invest in readiness. Whether or not marine cloud brightening ever becomes viable, this decade will bring some of the highest-stakes weather in living memory. Strengthening water management, resilient agriculture, early-warning systems and health infrastructure is non-negotiable.

Finally, treat this science as what it is: an alarm bell. The study underlines a brutal truth — climate change is not a gradual nuisance; it is pushing natural systems like El Niño into new, more dangerous regimes. If a high-tech intervention is even being discussed as a possible emergency tool, that is evidence of failure, not ingenuity. Our response should be proportionate: accelerate deep emissions cuts, fund adaptation where lives and livelihoods hang in the balance, and build inclusive, binding governance for any research into planetary-scale interventions.

We cannot let the lure of a quick technical fix derail our political will. The choice before us is stark: commit to the long, difficult work of decarbonisation and resilience now, or gamble with untested manipulations of the very system that sustains life on Earth.

THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL BOARD, JULY 2026

The Uranium Blindspot.Guyana Is Licensing What It Cannot Regulate

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 THE 592 GUARDIAN♦Independent Accountability Journalism♦Governance, Politics & Extractive Industry
 July 2026

The Uranium Blindspot: Guyana Is Licensing What It Cannot Regulate
As U92 Energy Corp. advances drill programmes at the Kurupung uranium project, the government has yet to answer a foundational question: who, in Guyana, can actually tell if something is going wrong?

I. THE WARNING CANNOT BE DISMISSED
Dr. Vincent Adams is not a critic of mining. He is a former head of Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency and a professional who has overseen uranium remediation programmes in the United States — a country that spent decades and hundreds of billions of dollars confronting contamination legacies it did not anticipate when licences were first issued. He has chaired international conferences on uranium mining’s environmental footprint, drawing participants from more than sixty countries, including Kazakhstan, one of the world’s largest uranium producers. When Dr. Adams says Guyana does not have what it takes to regulate uranium mining — that the country’s institutions have no clue what they are getting into — he is not raising a theoretical concern.
He is delivering a professional judgment grounded in direct comparative experience. And this government has not answered it.

“Guyana just based on their track record do not have it, they do not understand what it takes to have it, and they have no interest in providing that capacity to take on such an operation. They have no clue what they are getting into. Have no clue whatsoever.” — Dr. Vincent Adams, former EPA Head

That silence is the story. Not because uranium mining is inherently incompatible with Guyana’s development — Dr. Adams himself does not argue that — but because the government has issued licences, approved exploration, and allowed a foreign junior mining company to consolidate a decadeof technical data on Guyanese soil without publicly demonstrating that any regulatory body in this country can independently verify what that company is doing, or will be doing, in the interior of Region Seven.

II. WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN LICENSED
The facts on the ground are specific and deserve to be stated precisely. On 19 April 2024, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission granted Exclusive Prospecting Licences to LIA (Guyana) Inc. — a wholly-owned subsidiary of Singapore-registered LIA Industries Pte. Ltd., incorporated in Guyana in March 2023, just one month before the licences were issued. Those licences cover not only uranium but other radioactive minerals and rare earth elements across 92.2 square kilometres of Region Seven.
The licences run for three years to 18 April 2027 with the possibility of two additional one-year extensions — meaning this project could remain active and expanding through April 2029 without any new licensing decision by the government.

Adam Clode CEO – U 92 Corp.

Canada-based U92 Energy Corp. has since acquired the complete historical technical and exploration dataset for the Kurupung project, which it describes as carrying a historical resource estimate of 20.6 million pounds of uranium. This is U 92’s only listed project. The company has finalised a commercial agreement for a Phase One 5,000-metre diamond drilling programme and submitted the required environmental application for drill pad preparation. The company’s entire commercial existence rests on this single Guyanese concession.
The GGMC issued licences to an entity incorporated one month before the grant date. It has offered no public account of what due diligence was conducted on LIA Industries’ technical capacity, financial standing, or environmental track record.
The GGMC has offered no public account of what due diligence was conducted on LIA Industries’ technical capacity, financial standing, or environmental track record prior to that April 2024 grant. The Environmental Protection Agency has not published any environmental impact assessment, baseline study, or radiation monitoring protocol for the Kurupung project. The Guyana Nuclear Energy Authority — the body nominally responsible for radiological matters — has not issued a public statement on the project’s regulatory framework. Parliament has not been briefed. The public has not been consulted.

III. THE REGULATORY INDEPENDENCE PROBLEM
Dr. Adams identified the core structural failure with precision. It is not simply that Guyana lacks technical personnel with uranium expertise — though that is true. The deeper problem is the absence of what he calls regulatory independence: the institutional capacity for the government to independently verify what an operator is doing, rather than relying on operator-reported data.
In every sophisticated resource jurisdiction, regulatory independence is the foundational safeguard. It requires trained government scientists and engineers who can read drill logs critically, interpret radiological readings independently, identify anomalies in waste management, and assess water contamination risks without being dependent on the company’s own consultants for their understanding of what is happening. It requires laboratory infrastructure, monitoring networks, and institutional knowledge built over time.
Guyana has none of this for uranium. It does not exist. It is not being built. No minister has announced a timeline for its construction. The 2024 licences were issued into a regulatory vacuum.

The government has adopted a model in oil and gas where operators submit their own environmental compliance data to agencies that lack the independent capacity to contest it. That same model, applied to radioactive mineral extraction, is not a governance shortcut — it is a liability being transferred permanently onto the Guyanese people.
Dr. Adams drew explicit parallels to the oil and gas sector, where Guyana’s environmental governance record is already a subject of documented concern. The Environmental Protection Agency has been criticised by civil society and international observers for its limited capacity to independently audit Exxon, Hess, and CNOOC compliance data. The GGMC’s own audit trail is in a state of chronic disrepair — a matter this outlet documented in its investigation into the Commission’s nine-year audit backlog.

The pattern is institutional, not incidental.
The government has adopted a model in extractive industry governance where operators submit their own environmental compliance data to agencies that lack the independent capacity to contest it. That model, applied to uranium and radioactive mineral extraction, is not a governance shortcut. It is a liability being transferred — permanently and multi-generationally — onto the Guyanese people.
IV. URANIUM IS NOT OIL
There is a reason Dr. Adams specified that countries which engaged in uranium mining decades ago are still spending heavily on contamination and rehabilitation today. Uranium mining’s legacy contamination problem is structural. Tailings — the waste material left after uranium extraction — remain radioactive for thousands of years. Acid mine drainage from uranium operations can travel through groundwater systems in ways that are difficult to predict, harder to reverse, and catastrophic in communities dependent on river water. Radon gas exposure poses chronic health risks to workers and surrounding populations. The Kurupung basin sits in a region of significant biodiversity and within watersheds that feed communities across Cuyuni-Mazaruni.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission maintain distinct, technically staffed regulatory bodies for uranium mining. Australia’s regulatory framework for uranium is administered under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act with site-specific environmental management plans, independent auditing, and bonding requirements calibrated to decommissioning costs. Canada — the country of U92’s own domicile — requires that uranium mining operators demonstrate financial assurance for the full cost of remediation before a single shovel breaks ground.
Guyana has no equivalent framework. It has not announced one. It has not committed to a timeline for developing one. It has issued the licences and proceeded.
V. WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES
This editorial makes five specific demands of the government of Guyana, each proportionate to the scale of what is being licensed:
1. The GGMC must publish the full due diligence record supporting the April 2024 licence grant to LIA (Guyana) Inc., including financial assurance documentation, technical capacity assessments, and any independent environmental baseline studies conducted prior to the licence decision.
2. The Environmental Protection Agency must publish its environmental compliance framework for radioactive mineral exploration and extraction — if one exists. If it does not exist, the EPA must state that publicly and provide a timeline for its development before drill pad preparation proceeds.
3. The Guyana Nuclear Energy Authority must issue a public statement on its regulatory mandate over the Kurupung project, the staffing and laboratory capacity it currently possesses for uranium oversight, and what additional capacity it requires. This statement must be made before Phase One drilling commences.
4. The Natural Resources Committee of the National Assembly must convene a hearing at which Dr. Adams, the GGMC, the EPA, and the GNEA are required to appear together and answer questions about the regulatory gap on the public record. The opposition has both the right and the obligation to demand this hearing.
5. U92 Energy Corp. must be required to post full remediation bonding — calibrated to worst-case decommissioning costs by an independent environmental engineering firm — before any exploratory drilling occurs. A junior mining company whose sole listed project is this concession cannot be permitted to internalise the upside of resource extraction while externalising the remediation liability onto Guyanese taxpayers and communities.
VI. THE PATTERN THIS GOVERNMENT MUST ACCOUNT FOR
This is not the first time The 592 Guardian has documented the government’s approach of licensing what it cannot regulate. The Wales Gas-to-Energy project was advanced through procurement structures involving Venezuelan-linked entities and an intermediary payroll vehicle before any credible independent environmental audit of the site was published. The GGMC’s own institutional audit trail has not been reconciled in nearly a decade. The GPL-InterEnergy sole-source contract was executed without the competitive tendering that Guyanese law requires. The Guyana EITI validation process — meant to provide at least a minimum standard of extractive industry transparency — was convened under circumstances that this outlet documented firsthand as procedurally compromised.

The uranium sector is being opened in exactly this context. Not as an isolated governance failure but as a continuation of a documented institutional posture: licence first, regulate never, audit retrospectively if at all, and frame any accountability demand as an obstacle to development.

Dr. Adams did not frame his warning as opposition to development. He framed it as a prerequisite for responsible development. That distinction matters. It forecloses the government’s default deflection — that criticism of the regulatory framework is criticism of resource extraction itself. It is not. It is a demand that the government of Guyana demonstrate that it can protect its own people from the consequences of what it is authorising on their behalf.

If the government cannot demonstrate that it possesses the regulatory capacity to independently monitor uranium mining operations at Kurupung, then it has no legal, moral, or constitutional basis to allow those operations to proceed.
If the government cannot demonstrate that it possesses the regulatory capacity to independently monitor uranium mining operations at Kurupung — to detect contamination before it becomes irreversible, to hold an operator accountable for radiological breaches, to protect workers and downstream communities from exposures they will never consent to — then it has no legal, moral, or constitutional basis to allow those operations to proceed.

The burden of proof is on the government. It has not discharged it. The 592 Guardian will continue to report on this matter until it does.
— The Editorial Board, The 592 Guardian
The 592 Guardian | Accountability Journalism for Guyana | www.592guardian.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.  Transparency International Guyana calls for independent investigation into President Ali’s Long Creek livestock farm.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.   

Transparency International Guyana calls for independent investigation into President Ali’s Long Creek livestock farm

Georgetown, Guyana — July 2026  — Transparency International Guyana (TI Guyana) is alarmed by recent reports indicating that President Mohamed Irfaan Ali owns a substantial livestock farm at Long Creek. These revelations raise urgent and serious questions about conflicts of interest, misuse of public resources, and violations of the Public Integrity Act.

TI Guyana has long stood as Guyana’s leading anti-corruption watchdog, committed to the principles of transparency, accountability, and the rule of law. The allegations surrounding the Long Creek facility risk further eroding global confidence in Guyana’s governance and investment climate. If left unaddressed, these matters will have long-term negative consequences for the nation’s reputation as a stable, transparent, and attractive investment destination.

TI Guyana calls for an immediate, fair, and impartial investigation that addresses the following core pillars:

1.Conflict of interest and transparency

– Determine whether the President’s ownership of the Long Creek farm creates a conflict with official duties.

– Establish whether the ownership was disclosed in accordance with applicable law and public sector transparency standards.

2.Use of state resources and personal enrichment

– Investigate any use of state property, personnel, funds, or privileges that may have benefited the farm or the President personally.

– Identify any instances where state resources were diverted for private gain.

3.Compliance with the Public Integrity Act

– Assess whether actions related to the farm violated the Public Integrity Act or other relevant statutes and codes of conduct.

– Recommend corrective or disciplinary measures where breaches are found.

4.Abuse of state privileges and official duties

– Examine any evidence of preferential treatment, regulatory leniency, or other advantages afforded to the farm because of the President’s position.

– Evaluate whether official duties were performed in a manner that improperly advantaged private interests.

To ensure impartiality and to remove any perception of bias, TI Guyana invites Transparency International member chapters and independent experts from other jurisdictions to lead and conduct the investigation. TI Guyana will serve strictly in a consultative and facilitative capacity, providing local context and logistical support while ceding investigative independence to external experts.

TI Guyana reiterates its commitment to:

– The orderly, transparent, and structured development of Guyana.

– The rule of law, public accountability, and equal application of ethics standards for all public officials.

– Protecting Guyana’s reputation as a country that respects governance norms and fosters investor confidence.

The Government of Guyana must address these allegations with alacrity. Continued obfuscation or attempts to gaslight the public will only deepen domestic mistrust and further damage Guyana’s international standing. The evidence published to date is serious and demands full, transparent scrutiny.

About Transparency International Guyana

Transparency International Guyana is an independent, non-partisan organization dedicated to preventing corruption, promoting transparency, and strengthening public integrity in Guyana. We advocate for accountable governance and provide support for investigations that advance the public interest.

Transparency International Guyana

Media contact: THE 592 GUARDIAN.                                                                                                 Website: 592guardian.com

 

 

 

 

President Ali Should Not Stand in His own Defense

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Pres Ali should not stand in his own defense

Pres Ali has had a considerable amount of work to do as a leader. The work of being a defender of his own people. Comrades and ministers who have raised questions, suspicions, condemnations. Lands. Assets. Riches. Lapses leading to what has looked less than righteous. Not quite, not anywhere near, the up and up. How did they come into so many emblems of wealth in such a short space of time? How out of nothing there is so much of so many opulent gems? Those are on the material, the tangible, side. The president has also served as defender-in-chief of those who allegedly erred morally and grievously. Through what led to great emotional stigmas and traumas to the weak and vulnerable of Guyana.

In fact, it would be closer to the wicket, to assert that Excellency Ali appointed himself to the role of serial defender-in-chief for his own. The old me would have said, he arrogated unto himself what did not belong. The old gives way to the new.

Now, Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali, master defender, and defender of first call and last resort, for PPP Govt notables, for PPP Govt slippers and tricksters and impostors, has a matter before him that calls for the best of him. He must make a defense. Vast lands. Prized herds. Lavish architecture. Lush arrangements. In his favor, from his first response(s), Pres Ali has identified a line of planks that he insists stand in defense of his holdings.     All fair. All square. All due to the works of fresh air, clean hands. I commend him. I would commend him more if he takes to heart what’s now recommended. For though he must defend himself, he cannot be the sole defender of himself.

First, Pres Ali should consult with his learned and honorable Attorney General, Senior Counsel, Anil Nandlall. His advice should be swift in coming. He who stands as counsel for himself has chosen a fool for counsel. Respectfully inserted into the public record, of course. The president is not on trial. Of that let me be clear. But he cannot stand in the public dock as a trier of his own facts. For the edification of the Guyanese people, I repeat the recommendation made in Demerara Waves on Sunday, July 5 (“Mr. Mohamed asserted; Pres Ali rejected, should do more”). Not an easy call. But what sound judgement and the call of circumstances compel.

Pres Ali has made his initial verbal defenses. Now, he has a duty to follow-up. He must produce his package of corroborating evidence. In all of its slips of paper. In all of its documents and statements from official and commercial sources.                            In the impeccable nature of his estate and ranch story. And in its entirety. Half-measures will not be enough. Half-cocked and half of the story will not suffice. They will fuel more fury, lead to more of the uneasy. For, after all the clamors and curses, this is more than Irfaan Ali on the wire and making the news. This is about the office of the presidency of Guyana.

At a time, when the world is its watching and listening audience. When the world of investors and other interested parties sit around the table as its tribunal.

 Recent history has furnished evidence of Pres Ali developing a veritable cottage industry of his own. Its primary business has been defending his own stumblers. Snatching their feet from consuming fires. Then, massaging them back to some life. It has been a scarred and tainted and odious life. For a secondary servant or a dozen, that may be overlooked. But not for the supreme servant of the people of Guyana in whose hands so must has been placed, so much entrusted.

The short and long, the sweet and sour (and savaging) is that Pres Ali cannot and should not stand in his own defense. In this instance of land and billions, as alleged, such action on his part would be measured as dubious, found wanting. In the circumstances, this whole matter involving what the president has insisted is the result of years of industry and integrity belongs in the domain of open-air inspection and the most thorough dissection.

It is my humble duty to offer this counsel my commander-in-chief.

The Arithmetic of Exclusion

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦OBJECTIVITY♦JULY 2026                                         

The Arithmetic of Exclusion: Why WIN’s Absence From the CRC Is a WARNING,Not  an Oversight   

There is a particular kind of institutional dishonesty that hides behind procedure. Ganesh Mahipaul’s defense of WIN’s exclusion from the Constitutional Reform Commission is a textbook case: technically accurate, substantively evasive, and revealing precisely because of what it doesn’t say.

Mahipaul’s argument is that WIN has “meaningful oversight” through the Parliamentary Standing Committee, where proportional representation gives the PPP/C five seats and WIN and APNU two each. This is true. It is also beside the point. The Standing Committee reviews what the Commission produces. It does not shape what gets consulted on or which reforms get framed as viable before the bill ever reaches Parliament. 

By the time WIN’s voice enters the process under Mahipaul’s model, the architecture of reform has already been built without them.

David Patterson’s rebuttal cuts to the arithmetic that actually matters: any constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly. A commission that excludes the party whose votes are mathematically necessary to pass anything is not pursuing reform. It is pursuing the appearance of reform, with the real negotiation deferred to a later stage where consensus will have to be manufactured under time pressure rather than built through consultation.

But there is a harder problem here than optics, and it has gone largely unremarked. The Constitution Reform Commission Act itself — the 2022 law establishing the current CRC — allocated its 20 seats by naming specific parties: five for the PPP/C, four for what was then the APNU+AFC coalition, and one each to a list of civil society sectors. The seats reserved for the parliamentary opposition were written into statute as belonging to the PNC-led coalition, because at the time of drafting, the PNC-led coalition was the opposition. 

It no longer is. WIN is. This is not a matter of fairness or good faith gone missing — it is a matter of a law whose own operative terms no longer match political reality.

 When the Guyana Human Rights Association raised this in September, the observation was precise: the statute’s language has been overtaken by an election result, and the Commission’s composition has not been adjusted to match it. That is not a commission choosing to be generous or ungenerous toward a newer party. That is a commission arguably operating on a legal fiction.

History offers two instructive, and very different, precedents for how Guyana has handled moments like this.

The 1999–2001 reform process — the one that produced the current Standing Committee mechanism WIN is now told should be sufficient — was itself born out of the 1997 Herdmanston Accord, a CARICOM-brokered settlement following contested elections that explicitly required broad-based commission representation as the price of political legitimacy. The resulting Commission, and the constitutional amendments it produced in 2000–2001, were widely accepted precisely because the major electoral contenders of that moment were seated at the table from the start, not consulted after the fact. 

Guyana’s political class did not resolve the disputes of that era by asking the newly empowered actors to wait for a downstream committee. It resolved them by rebuilding the table.

The 1980 Constitution is the precedent that should concern everyone invoking “process” today, because it shows what constitutional change looks like when it is engineered without the participation of whoever holds inconvenient political weight. 

Burnham’s Constituent Assembly was built on a 1978 referendum that abolished the need for referendums to alter entrenched constitutional provisions in favor of a two-thirds parliamentary vote, and postponed scheduled elections so the sitting Parliament could reconstitute itself as the body empowered to write the new constitution. It did not lack a process. It had an elaborate one. What it lacked was the participation of anyone capable of contesting the outcome. 

Guyanese across the political spectrum still treat that document, and the manner of its making, as the cautionary tale by which all subsequent reform is measured. It is not a comparison to invoke lightly, and this Commission is obviously not that. But the underlying principle — that the legitimacy of a constitutional process is measured by who was in the room when the terms were set, not by how many public hearings followed afterward — is exactly the principle Patterson is arguing, and exactly the one Mahipaul’s defense sidesteps.

Patterson’s disclosure that Nigel Hughes resigned his Commission seat specifically to let the new Leader of the Opposition nominate a replacement removes any claim that this is logistically complicated. The seat is legally vacant. The mechanism to fill it already exists. And when even a former PPP MP tells Kaieteur News that the government “would do well” to include WIN, and that doing so “would not require much,” the silence from those with the actual authority to act stops looking like caution and starts looking like calculation.

None of this resolves every legitimate question about the Commission’s composition — that’s a separate conversation. But the test for whether a reform process is genuine has never been whether it eventually produces a document. It’s whether the people who must vote it into law were in the room when its terms were written. On the government’s own account, and arguably on the plain text of the Commission’s founding statute, they were not.

The seat is empty. The law creating it may no longer even describe the Parliament that exists.

The only question left is why nobody with the power to fix that has moved to.

THE ARITHMETIC OF SURRENDER

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦Accountability Journalism for Guyana

EDITORIAL
The Arithmetic of Surrender: How Guyana’s Profit Oil Was Promised Away Before It Arrived.

Christopher Ram’s 2025 financial statement analysis reveals a structural betrayal embedded in the 2016 Stabroek Agreement — and a government that has broken its own contract while claiming to honour it

Georgetown, Guyana | July ,2026 | The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

When President Irfaan Ali’s administration speaks of the Natural Resource Fund as Guyana’s intergenerational patrimony — a sovereign store of wealth to be held in trust for generations yet unborn — it speaks in the language of stewardship. Chartered Accountant and Attorney Christopher Ram now compels us to examine that language against the arithmetic. The result is not merely unflattering. It is a structural indictment.
Ram’s analysis of the 2025 audited financial statements of ExxonMobil Guyana Limited, filed alongside the already-reviewed statements of Hess and CNOOC, provides for the first time a complete picture of six years of Stabroek Block production. That picture should be required reading in every secondary school economics classroom in this country — because what it reveals is that the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement, celebrated by successive administrations as the framework for national transformation, was designed to ensure that Guyana would always finish last.

THE NUMBERS THAT CANNOT BE ARGUED AWAY                   

Let us state the figures plainly. In 2025 alone, ExxonMobil — holding a 45% interest in Stabroek — recorded revenue of G$1.713 trillion and profit before tax of G$1.214 trillion, approximately US$5.8 billion. Guyana’s entire 50% share of profit oil for that year: G$451 billion, approximately US$2.1 billion. ExxonMobil’s 45% interest yielded nearly three times what the sovereign nation earned on its nominal half-share.
Across all three companies combined — ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC — 2025 total revenue reached G$3.59 trillion with combined profit before tax of G$2.52 trillion, approximately US$12 billion. For every dollar Guyana earned on its so-called 50% share, the three operators earned $5.50 in profit. The ratio is not incidental. It is structural. It is the Agreement operating as designed.
The six-year aggregate is more damning still. From 2020 through 2025, the three companies recorded combined revenue of G$12.30 trillion and combined profit before tax of G$8.58 trillion — approximately US$41 billion. After tax, they retained G$7.02 trillion. Guyana’s accumulated profit oil over the same period: G$1.58 trillion, approximately US$7.57 billion. The ratio across six years averages 4.89 to one, climbing to nearly six to one in 2024. Guyana holds the majority interest in name. In reality, it is a minority beneficiary.                                                                 

ARTICLE 15.4: THE CLAUSE THAT CONSUMED THE FUND     But Ram does not stop at the revenue disparity. He arrives at a finding that should have provoked ministerial resignations, emergency parliamentary sessions, and a formal audit demand from the Public Accounts Committee. He has not received any of these responses. The country has received silence.
Article 15.4 of the 2016 Agreement stipulates that the State — meaning the Government of Guyana — pays the income tax of the oil companies. The mechanism: the appropriate portion of the Government’s share of profit oil is accepted as payment in full of that tax liability. The companies do not write a cheque to the Guyana Revenue Authority. Guyana’s profit oil is simply routed back to extinguish the companies’ tax obligations.
Over the six-year production period, the three companies recorded income tax of G$1.56 trillion. Guyana’s total accumulated profit oil: G$1.58 trillion. The differential — the residual that remains after the nation’s profit oil is consumed by the companies’ tax liability — is G$22 billion. Not G$22 billion per year. G$22 billion across six years. A rounding error on ExxonMobil’s quarterly earnings call.

This is what the Natural Resource Fund was built upon. Not a surplus. Not a patrimony. A remnant

 The Fund, as Ram correctly identifies, retains in substance only the two-percent royalty and whatever interest the balance earns. A two-percent royalty on one of the world’s fastest-growing oil productions is not a foundation for intergenerational wealth transfer. It is a consolation prize, dressed in the language of sovereignty.

A GOVERNMENT THAT CANNOT CHOOSE BETWEEN ITS VIOLATIONS
Ram identifies the consequent legal paradox with surgical precision, and this editorial endorses his framing without reservation. One of only two conclusions is available. Either the Agreement has been honoured — in which case nearly the entirety of the nation’s profit oil has been transferred back to the companies in satisfaction of their tax obligations, and the Natural Resource Fund holds almost nothing of substance — or the Agreement has been violated, and the oil companies have been issued tax certificates for payments that the National Estimates show were never remitted to the Guyana Revenue Authority.

President Ali’s administration cannot occupy both positions simultaneously. It has claimed, repeatedly and forcefully, that the 2016 Agreement is sacred, that it respects the rule of law, and that the Agreement cannot and will not be renegotiated. If that is so, the Fund is a fiction. If the Fund contains something, it is because the Agreement is being systematically breached — not by ExxonMobil, not by Hess, not by CNOOC, but by the Government of Guyana itself, which has been issuing tax certificates as instruments of political theatre while silently declining to honour Article 15.4 in the national accounts.

This platform has documented, across multiple investigations, the PPP/C administration’s pattern of treating contract sanctity as a rhetorical weapon — invoked against citizens, indigenous communities, and civil society organisations when convenient, and quietly set aside when the obligation falls upon the state. The Article 15.4 mechanism is the most consequential instance of that pattern yet identified.

THE RENEGOTIATION CLAUSE AND THE COURAGE IT REQUIRES                                            Ram notes that the Agreement contains a renegotiation clause — and that the Government has not invoked it. This publication notes that the Government’s refusal to invoke that clause, while simultaneously breaching other provisions, represents the worst of all possible outcomes.

It preserves the fiction of contract sanctity for public consumption while delivering none of its protections in practice. It denies Guyana the benefit of a renegotiated agreement that might reflect the extraordinary scale of production now realised, while also denying the nation the full benefit of the existing agreement’s own terms.
Finance Minister Ashni Singh has repeatedly cited the Agreement’s stability provisions as justification for inaction. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo has framed any challenge to the Agreement as an assault on investor confidence. These are not arguments. They are deflections. The question before the nation is not whether investors should have confidence. It is whether the citizens of Guyana — the 800,000 people in whose name this Agreement was signed — are receiving what the Agreement itself promises them. Ram’s arithmetic says they are not.

THE PUBLIC ACCOUNTS COMMITTEE MUST ACT
This editorial makes the following formal accountability demands, addressed to the institutions that carry the constitutional obligation to respond.
The Public Accounts Committee must immediately summon the Commissioner-General of the Guyana Revenue Authority to provide a public accounting of whether tax certificates were issued to ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC in respect of income tax obligations under the 2016 Agreement, and whether corresponding receipts appear in the National Estimates. The discrepancy Ram identifies — tax certificates issued, no GRA receipt recorded — is, on its face, a falsification of public financial records. The PAC cannot remain silent.

The Natural Resource Fund’s Board of Directors must publish a formal reconciliation of the Fund’s actual receipts against the theoretical entitlement under Article 15.4. If the Government’s profit oil share has been used to discharge the companies’ tax liability, that disbursement must appear in the Fund’s audited statements. If it does not, the Board is maintaining accounts that do not reflect the Agreement’s actual operation. That is not stewardship. That is concealment.

The Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services — which this publication has previously documented as operating on a drastically reduced meeting schedule — must treat Ram’s analysis as urgent business and convene a special session with the Ministry of Finance, the NRF Board, and the GRA in attendance. The reduction of that Committee’s oversight function during the precise period in which Guyana’s oil revenues reached their highest levels is not a coincidence this editorial is prepared to leave unexamined.

WHAT THE FUND WAS PROMISED TO BE
When the Natural Resource Fund Act was amended in 2021, the PPP/C government argued that its new architecture was superior to the Coalition’s framework — more transparent, more rule-bound, more protective of future generations. Vice President Jagdeo made that case publicly and repeatedly. The Board was appointed. The advisors were retained. The structure was celebrated.

Ram’s analysis renders that celebration hollow. Not because the Fund’s architecture is poorly designed. Because the underlying Agreement that was supposed to fill the Fund was designed — or has been administered — to ensure that the Fund would receive, in net terms, almost nothing from six years of one of the most productive offshore oil operations in the Western Hemisphere.
An intergenerational fund with no meaningful assets to transfer between generations is not a patrimony. It is a liability — a political instrument designed to create the appearance of responsible resource governance while the substance of that governance is surrendered, clause by clause, to the two largest economies in the world.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY STANDARD THIS EDITORIAL APPLIES
This news outlet does not adjudicate legal disputes. But it does apply an accountability standard: when a government claims that a contract is sacred, it must honour that contract; when it claims to protect the national interest, its financial statements must confirm that protection; and when a credentialed analyst produces documented arithmetic demonstrating that neither claim withstands scrutiny, the government must answer — publicly, specifically, and promptly.

President Ali, Finance Minister Singh, and Vice President Jagdeo have not answered Ram’s previous analyses. They have not answered the GGMC audit backlog. They have not answered the Wales Gas-to-Energy budget variance. They have not answered the diaspora bond’s missing enabling legislation. They will not, on present form, answer this.
That silence is itself an answer. And this publication will continue to record it.

— The Editorial Board, The 592 Guardian | June 2026
This editorial is based on the published analysis of Christopher Ram, Chartered Accountant and Attorney, as reported in Kaieteur News, June 28, 2026, and on The 592 Guardian’s independent review of publicly available audited financial statements of the Natural Resource Fund and the Stabroek Block operators.

Ancestors of the RiverA Nation Built From Below

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BOOK REVIEW

Ancestors of the River ♦ BY Moses Bhagwan.          A Nation Built From Below

The 592 Guardian | Books & Culture

Moses Bhagwan’s Ancestors of the River  is more than a family chronicle.

It is a restoration project — an effort to recover the dignity, labour and intelligence of ordinary Guyanese families whose lives helped shape this country long before history began to flatter the powerful.

The book tells of four families struggling through the hard economic conditions of early colonial British Guiana — clearing land, planting crops, raising poultry, fishing — in order to survive with a measure of independence.  That is already a compelling premise. But the deeper value of the work lies in what it argues about nation-building from below. These were not passive rural survivors. They were families who used education, discipline and faith to push their children into teaching, preaching, medicine, law and engineering.

The professional Guyanese middle class did not arrive by colonial grace. It was carved out by people who had nothing but purpose and one another.

That theme gives Ancestors of the River a social meaning well beyond the personal. It reminds us that colonial society was not only a system of extraction and control. It was also a place where Black and Indian working families, through sacrifice and collective purpose, converted hardship into mobility and self-respect. The detail Bhagwan offers of two patriarchs who were riding preachers — men who moved district to district teaching Hindi — adds an especially valuable cultural layer. Here is the transmission of language, religion and identity operating entirely outside the formal institutions of the colonial state: a quiet, determined act of civilisational preservation.

Bhagwan’s strength is that he writes with memory rather than abstraction. He is not observing history from a safe distance. He is part of the history he is recounting, and that insider position gives the narrative its honesty, its warmth and its authority. The book reads as both family testimony and social record simultaneously, and the combination is rare.

There is also something notably humane about the way the story is presented. The blurb emphasises family cooperation, mutual support, humour, fondness, passion and pathos — and that matters. Too many accounts of colonial life reduce people to victims, statistics or stereotypes. Ancestors of the River insists on something more truthful: that colonial peoples were complex, resourceful and fully human, capable of building institutions, preserving culture and sustaining one another even under conditions designed to break them.

If there is a limitation, it may be that the book’s sweep — family, plantation society, culture, religion and the first stirrings of political consciousness — is so broad that the narrative must work hard to avoid becoming episodic. But that is a reasonable risk for a work of this historical ambition, and the breadth may be precisely its appeal, particularly for readers in Guyana and the diaspora who are searching for a story that reflects not only private memory but a shared social inheritance.

In the end, Ancestors of the River is a book of remembrance, but not nostalgia alone. It looks backward in order to recover the meanings of labour, education, faith and family cohesion in the making of modern Guyana — and by recovering them, it makes an implicit demand on the present. Guyana’s public conversation about nationhood is still too often dominated by elites, by party machines, by the comprador class that inherited the colonial architecture and called it independence. This book is a corrective. The real foundations of this country were laid by humble people whose names history has not always treated with fairness.

Moses Bhagwan has treated them with fairness. That is no small thing.

Ancestors of the River is available through Amazon-https://a.co/d/07cOe9JT

 

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, politics and extractive industry.

THE EMPTY CHAIR AS GOVERNMENT POLICY

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The 592 Guardian
Accountability Journalism for a Nation That Deserves Better

The Empty Chair as Government Policy

How the PPP administration has turned parliamentary absenteeism into a structural guarantee of impunity
Editorial | June 2026

Less than two weeks after its long-overdue formation, Guyana’s Public Accounts Committee is dead in the water. Not because of procedural confusion. Not because of resource constraints. Because the government’s elected members will not show up.
Four dates were proposed for the PAC’s inaugural session: June 22, June 23, June 24, and June 26. The Clerk’s office made the calls. The government benches were unavailable. Every single time. PAC Chairman Vishnu Panday has now confirmed publicly what anyone following Guyanese parliamentary governance has understood for years: the administration’s absence is not coincidence. It is method.

“The Government members’ reluctance to respond positively tells us that the affairs of proper governance are compromised,” Panday stated. The word he chose — compromised — deserves to sit without decoration. He is not describing a scheduling conflict. He is describing a political decision to prevent the one committee constitutionally empowered to hold the executive’s finances to account from doing its work.

The Architecture of Impunity
The mathematics of this dysfunction are more damning than any single allegation. The PAC has completed its examination of public financial records only through fiscal year 2018. Six full years — 2019 through 2024 — remain entirely unscrutinized. At the committee’s historical meeting frequency, clearing one fiscal year per calendar year, the backlog will not be resolved until 2031. By then, six new years will have accumulated behind it. The audit gap becomes permanent. That is not a consequence of this government’s behaviour. It is the design.
The previous parliamentary term, 2021 to 2025, produced its own indictment: 25 of 51 scheduled PAC meetings were cancelled. The reason cited, each and every time, was the unavailability of government members. This administration has now reproduced the same pattern within the first fortnight of a new term, before a single hearing has been held. The new parliament, same as the old.

Consider what those six unexamined years contain. They span the full arc of Guyana’s oil windfall: the first production revenues, the Gas-to-Energy project’s contested procurement, the proliferation of sole-source contracts, the expansion of state-linked commercial enterprises, and an infrastructure spending programme that has drawn repeated questions about oversight, competitive tendering, and beneficial ownership. The Auditor General has filed his reports. Parliament has received them. The PAC cannot examine them because the government will not attend.

Transparency as Rhetorical Performance
President Irfaan Ali and Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo have made transparency and prudent financial management cornerstones of their public communications. The administration advertises Guyana’s economic transformation to international investors, development partners, and multilateral lenders as evidence of disciplined, accountable governance. The language is fluent and well-rehearsed.

What Panday’s statement exposes is the gap between the rhetoric and the institutional reality. An administration genuinely committed to financial transparency does not need to be compelled to attend the PAC. It attends because transparency is not a communication strategy — it is a practice. The PPP government’s elected representatives will attend ribbon-cuttings, press conferences, and regional investment summits. They will not attend the committee that examines whether public money was spent as Parliament authorised.                                                The contradiction is not subtle. Panday made it explicit: the same government that “publicly champions transparency, accountability, and prudent financial management” is the same government whose members will not take their seats at the only table where those claims can be tested. The chair is empty. It has been empty, structurally and deliberately, for years.

What Investors With Integrity Should Note
Guyana markets itself as open for business. On the narrow question of whether capital can enter and whether contracts will be honoured, the answer is largely yes. But the business being conducted is not Guyana’s business. It is business transacted by a governing party that has systematically disabled the parliamentary mechanisms through which citizens verify how public resources are managed.

Responsible institutional investors, development finance institutions, and sovereign wealth fund counterparts operate under governance due-diligence requirements that extend beyond deal terms. They assess the quality of the public accountability ecosystem in which they are placing capital. A country where the PAC has a six-year audit backlog — not because the institution lacks capacity, but because the government refuses to attend — is a country that has answered a material governance question. The answer is not reassuring.

Some capital will come regardless. Capital without integrity always does, and the terms on which resource economies attract it are themselves a governance story. But those investors and development partners who weight institutional accountability should register what is being demonstrated here, with consistency and with impunity, in full public view.

The Constutional Stakes
The PAC is not a preference. It is a constitutional mandate. Its function — scrutinising the Auditor General’s annual reports to ensure public funds are spent as Parliament authorised — is the primary mechanism by which elected representatives exercise oversight of the executive’s use of public money. An administration that prevents that mechanism from functioning is not simply being evasive about individual expenditures. It is undermining the constitutional architecture of democratic accountability itself.

Panday has called on government members to attend and fulfil their obligations to the citizens who are their paymasters. The framing is deliberately civil. This editorial will be less so. Citizens of this country are owed six years of public accounts. Those years encompass billions of dollars in oil revenue, infrastructure spending, and state procurement conducted with minimal competitive constraint. The people whose names are on those contracts know that the committee empowered to examine them has been reliably, systematically, and deliberately prevented from meeting.
That is not a coincidence anyone should accept as such.

— The Editorial Board, The
Georgetown, Guyana | June 2026