BOOK LAUNCH. REMINDER ♦ SATURDAY JULY 18 2026:

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BOOK LAUNCH. REMINDER ♦ SATURDAY JULY 18 2026

Enter the Political Kingdom- By   Moses Bhagwan 

On Saturday, July 18, 2026, readers, thinkers, and admirers of Guyanese political history will gather at Global Christian Ministries in Richmond Hill, New York, for the launch of Moses Bhagwan’s Enter the Political Kingdom: A Guyanese Political Memoir. More than a book presentation, this event marks the arrival of a compelling public voice whose life, reflections, and political memory have long carried the weight of experience, conviction, and controversy.

Bhagwan is not merely the author of a memoir; he is a witness to, and participant in, the turbulent political currents that have shaped Guyana’s modern history.

This is the kind of launch where people may come for the book, but stay for the writer. Bhagwan’s story, voice, and perspective invite deeper questions about power, struggle, memory, and the enduring meaning of political engagement in Guyana and the wider diaspora. With introductions by distinguished scholars and commentators, and a programme that includes readings, remarks, and audience interaction, the evening promises both intellectual substance and human drama. It is, in every sense, a rare occasion — one that places the author, his ideas, and his lived history squarely at the center of public attention.

Washington’s Selective Sovereignty

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY◊TRANSPARENCY ◊ INTEGRITYY◊ GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

EDITORIAL

Washington’s Selective Sovereignty

The Secretary of State’s campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court asks the world to accept a jurisdiction Washington polices for others but refuses for itself — a demand small states like Guyana should recognize immediately, because we have heard it before.

JULY 2026

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has published a declaration of war against the International Criminal Court, framing the institution as an assault on American sovereignty and pledging to “dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.” The argument is dressed in the language of constitutional fidelity and revolutionary inheritance. Strip away the rhetoric, however, and what remains is a simpler proposition: the world’s most powerful state wants the benefits of an international accountability architecture — using it to legitimize sanctions, indictments and diplomatic pressure against Sudanese, Russian and other officials — while claiming permanent immunity from that same architecture for itself.

This is not a new argument, and it is not one that small, resource-dependent states like Guyana can afford to treat as a distant American squabble. The doctrine Washington is asserting — that a state may stand outside the very legal order it invokes against others, on the grounds that its own institutions are sufficient and its own conduct beyond meaningful external review — is the same doctrine that has, in various forms, justified extractive contracts written to Guyana’s disadvantage, oversight bodies stripped of teeth, and accountability mechanisms treated as optional once the powerful party has secured what it wanted.

THE CASE RUBIO DOES NOT MAKE

The Secretary’s op-ed is legally coherent on one narrow point: the United States never ratified the Rome Statute, and a state that has not consented to a treaty’s jurisdiction has a defensible claim to reject it. President Clinton declined to submit the treaty for Senate ratification; a bipartisan Senate majority subsequently passed legislation authorizing the president to use force, if necessary, to prevent the detention of American citizens by the Court. These are facts, not fabrications, and this news outlet does not dispute them.

What the Secretary’s argument omits is everything that complicates it. The United States has, across decades, selectively embraced international tribunals when they served its interests — Nuremberg, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ad hoc bodies convened with Washington’s blessing and often its funding. The objection, then, has never truly been to the principle of international criminal accountability. It has been to the application of that principle to Americans. Sovereignty, in this framing, is not a universal right claimed equally by all 125 ICC member states — it is a privilege reserved for the powerful, extended selectively to smaller states when their compliance is useful and withdrawn the moment scrutiny turns homeward.

A state that champions accountability for Khartoum and Moscow, while declaring itself permanently exempt from the same court, is not defending sovereignty. It is asserting a hierarchy.

COMPLEMENTARITY, NOT CONQUEST

It is also worth stating plainly what the Rome Statute actually requires, since the Secretary’s language of a court with “near-unlimited reach” obscures rather than clarifies. The ICC operates on a principle of complementarity: it may act only where a state is unwilling or genuinely unable to prosecute serious crimes through its own courts. This is not a tribunal seeking to supplant the American judicial system. It is a backstop designed for precisely the circumstance the Secretary insists could never occur — a state declining, for reasons of political convenience, to hold its own personnel to account.

Reasonable critics, including many who support the Court’s existence, have raised legitimate concerns about prosecutorial overreach — particularly the extension of jurisdiction over nationals of non-member states through the territorial acts of member states, as in the Afghanistan and Palestine matters. These are genuine questions of institutional design deserving serious reform debate. They are not, however, the same as the categorical claim Secretary Rubio advances: that any external review of American state conduct is inherently illegitimate. One is an argument about calibration. The other is an argument for exemption.

GUYANA’S STAKE IN THIS FIGHT

Readers of this publication will recognize the shape of this argument because they have watched Georgetown deploy versions of it domestically. When the Guyana Elections Commission’s composition is disputed, when the Auditor General’s findings on state contracts are met with silence rather than answers, when the Public Accounts Committee cannot achieve quorum, when a Commission of Inquiry into presidential landholding is demanded by senior counsel and ignored by the state — the underlying claim is identical to Washington’s. It is the claim that domestic institutions, controlled by domestic power, are sufficient unto themselves, and that external or independent scrutiny is an affront rather than a safeguard.

Small states do not have the luxury of asserting this doctrine and being believed. Guyana’s institutional credibility, its capacity to attract investment on fair terms, and its standing in CARICOM and before bodies such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights all depend on accepting — not resisting — external accountability mechanisms as a complement to weak or captured domestic ones. Washington’s attempt to exempt itself from the very architecture it uses to discipline weaker states is not merely hypocritical. It is a preview of the argument every unaccountable power, in every jurisdiction, eventually makes: that scrutiny is for others.

WHERE THIS PUBLICATION STANDS

This news outlet takes no position on whether any specific American service member, officer or official has committed a prosecutable offense; that determination belongs to evidence and due process, not to editorial pages on either side of the debate. But the structural argument advanced in Secretary Rubio’s essay — that a state’s power should determine its exposure to accountability, rather than the reverse — is one this publication has spent years opposing in the Guyanese context, and we will not pretend it becomes principled simply because it is dressed in the language of American revolutionary inheritance.

The test of any accountability framework, international or domestic, is whether it applies to the powerful as readily as to the weak. Secretary Rubio’s campaign fails that test by design. Small states watching Washington’s brick-by-brick demolition of the ICC should understand precisely what is being modeled for them, and should decline the invitation to consider it sovereignty rather than what it is: the oldest argument the powerful have ever made against being watched.

— The Board

Kaieteur’s Baldeo Whitewash: An Editor’s Note on Ethics and Accountability

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY   •   TRANSPARENCY   •   GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

Kaieteur’s Baldeo Whitewash: An Editor’s Note on Ethics and Accountability

This is not a paean; it is a correction. Kaieteur News’ recent portrait of Albert Baldeo as the quintessential immigrant exemplar — a steady font of courage and civic devotion — collapses under a simple, unromantic fact: Baldeo’s public life is marked not only by service but by criminal conviction, incarceration, and the loss of his professional licence.

Those are not incidental footnotes to a life of triumph; they are central facts that materially reshape how the public should assess his record and any praise that ignores them is journalistic malpractice

 Immigrant stories of resilience matter because they teach accountability as well as aspiration. Calling someone a model of the immigrant spirit while eliding criminal culpability does a disservice to the communities who look to public figures for ethical leadership. The immigrant experience is not a shield against scrutiny; it is the reason scrutiny must be exacting. When a community elevates a leader, it deserves honesty about both the achievements and the missteps so that praise does not become a cover for the harms that followed.

Baldeo’s supporters will point to a life of public service — his roles as attorney, prosecutor, magistrate, and community advocate. Those public roles heighten the obligation to wrestle with his fall from professional grace. A conviction and subsequent imprisonment are not private failings; they are civic facts that diminish the moral authority required of those who once wielded the law on behalf of others.

Disbarment is a regulatory finding that a lawyer no longer meets the ethical standards of the profession. To omit those outcomes from a celebratory profile is to redact key context that readers need.

Good journalism adheres to two twin responsibilities: to celebrate civic achievement and to hold leaders to account. The balance between the two is not a matter of taste; it is the measure of press integrity.

Profiling must not become hagiography. When a news outlet elevates reputation over record, it abandons its duty to the public and to the very democratic values it purports to honor.

Kaieteur News has a long reach and a responsibility to the Guyanese and Caribbean diaspora. With that reach comes the duty to correct the record when omissions mislead. If the editorial choice was to emphasize redemption or community contributions, that should have been explicit and anchored to a full account of the legal findings and their consequences. Readers deserve transparent sourcing: the criminal judgment, the sentencing, the disciplinary order that resulted in Baldeo’s disbarment. Without it, the profile reads as advocacy dressed as journalism.

Communities can forgive, and societies must allow for rehabilitation. But forgiveness is earned, not assumed. Rehabilitation must be visible and accompanied by accountability. Reporting that blithely frames a convicted and disbarred former official as an unblemished exemplar risks normalizing the erasure of legal responsibility from public memory.

Kaieteur and other outlets should revisit the piece, publish a corrective or an addendum with the omitted facts, and explain the editorial rationale. Journalists who cover governance and community leadership must apply the same rigor to sources and backgrounding that they demand of public officials. 

Kaieteur News owes its readers a full, unvarnished record of Albert Baldeo’s public life, including his criminal conviction, imprisonment, and professional disbarment, not a sepia‑toned hagiography of “immigrant spirit.”

Anything less undermines both the craft and the civic trust that sustains it.

Editor’s Note: The Record We Cannot Ignore

Albert Baldeo is not only a former Guyanese magistrate and Queens district leader; he is also a convicted federal offender, sentenced to prison by the United States District Court for obstructing justice in connection with a straw-donor campaign finance probe.  In February 2015, Judge Paul Crotty in Manhattan federal court sentenced Baldeo to 18 months’ imprisonment on multiple counts of conspiracy to obstruct justice, alongside a US$15,000 fine and a term of supervised release.  He was found guilty of witness tampering and instructing “straw donors” to lie to or refuse cooperation with FBI agents investigating his 2010 New York City Council campaign contributions

The conviction did not arise from a private dispute; it was the result of a federal prosecution led by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who described Baldeo’s conduct as intimidation and harassment deployed to thwart a lawful corruption investigation.  While Baldeo was acquitted of certain mail and wire fraud counts, the court entered judgment on multiple obstruction charges, and subsequent collateral attacks on that conviction have been rejected by the federal courts.  These are material facts that any profile presenting him as an exemplar of civic virtue must squarely confront.

Professional Discipline and Loss of Licence

Baldeo’s criminal record carried direct consequences for his standing as a legal practitioner.  In Matter of Baldeo, the Appellate Division, Second Department, addressed his discipline as a New York attorney, with the proceedings leading to his removal from the roll of attorneys authorized to practice.  Separately, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review lists “Albert Baldeo – New York – Disbarred – 9/30/14” among currently disciplined practitioners, confirming his disbarment in the immigration courts system.

Disbarment is not a mere administrative note; it is an institutional finding that an attorney has violated professional and ethical norms so severely that continued practice would undermine public trust in the justice system.  Any serious account of Baldeo’s “legacy” must acknowledge that his legal career ended not by retirement, but by sanction.

Campaign Finance and Regulatory Findings

Beyond the criminal case, Baldeo’s political activity attracted regulatory scrutiny from New York’s Campaign Finance Board.  In Campaign Finance Board v. Baldeo, the Board pursued enforcement action related to his City Council bid, addressing irregularities surrounding contributions and public funds.  Taken together with the federal obstruction judgment, this pattern underscores that Baldeo’s story is as much about the misuse of political processes as it is about representation of immigrant communities.

These records—federal judgments, appellate disciplinary decisions, and regulatory findings—are a matter of public law and policy, not partisan gossip.  For a newspaper committed to ethical journalism, they must anchor any narrative that touches his public career.

A Necessary Correction in the Public Interest

When Kaieteur News carries a piece that casts Albert Baldeo as a pure symbol of courage, resilience, and immigrant virtue, while omitting that he is a convicted felon who served federal prison time and has been disbarred, it presents readers with a dangerously incomplete portrait.  Immigrant communities, Guyanese readers, and the broader Caribbean diaspora deserve a standard of reporting that honors both service and accountability, especially where legal findings have registered human and civic harm.

This Editor’s Note is therefore appended to ensure that our record reflects the full arc of Baldeo’s public life: the offices he held, the communities he claimed to champion, and the criminal and disciplinary judgments that followed.  Future coverage of his activities will be guided by the principle that journalistic celebration must never come at the expense of truth, context, and the public’s right to know.

The Cuban migrant crisis Guyana has no policy to answer

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM

PART I: WHERE THE OIL MONEY DOESN’T REACH

The Cuban migrant crisis Guyana has no Policy to answer

By Staff Writer  | The 592 Guardian Investigative Desk

Armando no longer has a bathroom. His family’s house in Havana collapsed three years ago, and he now sleeps in a makeshift shelter inside an abandoned office building, using a plastic bag where a toilet used to be. He has not spoken out publicly about it, not the way a man who spent his life painting portraits of his country might once have wanted to. “I’m already hungry here,” he told a Human Rights Watch researcher this year. “If I speak out, I’ll just end up being hungry in prison.”

That is the calculation facing millions of Cubans: a state that cannot keep the lights on, the water running, or the pharmacy shelves stocked, but that can still find the resources to imprison a man for painting “how long, they are killing us” on a wall. An oil blockade imposed by the United States in January 2026 has driven that collapse into a new phase, cutting off the fuel Cuba depends on for electricity, water pumping, garbage collection, and the transport of flour to its bakeries. Roughly 800 Cubans are currently held as political prisoners for saying so.

Some of those who can leave are choosing, of all places, Guyana.

It is an unlikely destination on paper — a country of fewer than a million people, on the edge of the Caribbean, better known until recently for emigration than immigration. But Guyana is now the world’s fastest-growing economy, propelled by offshore oil discoveries that have transformed it from one of the hemisphere’s poorest nations into one of its most cash-flush. It does not require Cubans to obtain a visa before arrival. And its construction boom needs workers faster than its own population can supply them.

This desk’s investigation — including direct testimony from a Cuban migrant who escaped exploitative conditions in Guyana’s interior, published in these pages in April — found that need has not translated into protection. What we found instead was a labor recruitment pipeline operating in a legal vacuum, and a government response defined by jurisdictional shrugging.

A LABOR FORCE WITH NO STATUS

The people building Guyana’s boom are, increasingly, Cuban. Bloomberg has reported that construction firms behind the country’s roads, bridges, and infrastructure projects are turning to Cuban migrants as a primary new labor source, drawn by an economy supercharged by the same oil wealth connected, in a roundabout way, to the crisis pushing them out of Cuba. One government official told a television crew this year that Guyana now needs its migrant workforce as much as that workforce needs Guyana — filling gaps in construction, security, and cleaning that the domestic labor market cannot.

But Cuba is not a CARICOM member state, so its citizens arrive without the automatic work authorization and freedom of movement afforded migrants from within the Caribbean bloc. What has emerged instead is a large, informal labor force operating largely outside the system Guyana has built to register foreign workers — a system the government has itself acknowledged it is unprepared to manage at this scale.

The consequences of that informality are documented, and not only by this desk. One Cuban migrant who publicly warned others considering the move described working construction from seven in the morning to seven at night for roughly 6,000 Guyanese dollars a day — well under a dollar an hour, and well below Guyana’s minimum wage. He described street violence targeting migrants.

Migrant workers on the move

Our own reporting found conditions considerably worse than underpayment. A Cuban migrant who spoke to The 592 Guardian after escaping through Brazil described being recruited under a “work now, pay later” scheme: passage to Guyana in exchange for eight months of labor. On arrival, his passport was confiscated without explanation. He was housed with others in a room he described as having no privacy, air, or light, then rotated between construction sites and illegal mining operations. When his eight months elapsed, he was told he now owed for food and transport on top of the original debt — a balance that, he said, was never designed to reach zero. He escaped after a year and a half. Two women who had traveled with him in the same transport did not.

WHAT THE US STATE DEPARTMENT ALREADY DOCUMENTED

This vulnerability is not new, and it is not undocumented. The State Department’s most recent Trafficking in Persons report on Guyana states plainly that migrants — including Cubans, alongside Haitians, Venezuelans, and others — are among the primary victims of trafficking in the country, concentrated in mining, forestry, agriculture, and domestic service. The report notes that women and children from Cuba are at heightened risk of sex trafficking in Guyana’s mining communities specifically. It also documents hundreds of Cuban workers in Guyana understood to be affiliated with state-run labor missions, whose wages the Guyanese government has paid directly to the Cuban state — an arrangement the report identifies as one Havana has historically used to withhold earnings from the workers who did the work.

The same report recommends Guyana increase labor inspections at high-risk worksites, eliminate recruitment fees charged to workers, and screen vulnerable migrant populations for trafficking indicators before deportation — recommendations that describe, by implication, a system currently failing to do those things.

Our own findings corroborate that failure from the inside. The recruitment networks operating this pipeline advertise openly on Facebook, Instagram, and encrypted WhatsApp groups under banners like “Passage to Guyana: Work and Pay Later.” The operators pose as travel facilitators or small business agents; this desk found little evidence any are legally registered or subject to oversight. Guyana’s labor laws contain no comprehensive framework for regulating foreign recruitment agencies. Once inside the country, migrants exist in a status that is neither documented employment nor formal residency — a vacuum multiple migrants said is enforced by fear as much as by law.                                              “They keep us quiet with fear,” one Venezuelan worker told this desk. “Who will we go to? The police? They are friends with the same people who brought us.”

ENFORCEMENT AIMED THE WRONG WAY

Where the Guyanese state has acted, it has acted against the migrants, not the networks that traffic them. In April, a Cuban national was fined and deported within days of entering Guyana irregularly; a Guyanese official warned that “those who violate the law will face the full weight of the law.” A year earlier, another Cuban migrant was sentenced to three years in prison for the same category of offense — a marked escalation from the simple deportations once applied. Guyana has become, alongside its role as destination, a transit corridor migrants pass through en route to Brazil, and the state’s response to that flow has been prosecutorial toward arrivals, not toward the recruiters who profit from them.

When this desk raised the pattern of confiscated documents, unpaid wages, and confinement with officials, the response was jurisdictional deflection. “We need more data,” one senior agency source said. “We can’t regulate what we can’t track.” Labor points to immigration; immigration points to private enterprise. The cases fall between ministries, and in that gap, the recruitment networks operate undisturbed.

THE FRAMEWORK THAT DOESN’T EXIST

What Guyana has not built, in the middle of an oil boom it did not expect and a migration wave it did not plan for, is a coherent policy answer to the question of who these arrivals are and what they are owed. There is no dedicated Cuban migration framework — nothing analogous to the CARICOM free-movement provisions governing arrivals from Jamaica or Trinidad, nothing that formally distinguishes an economic migrant from an asylum seeker from a trafficking victim. What exists instead is an employer-driven work permit system built for a smaller, slower-moving economy, straining under a labor force arriving faster than the Ministry of Home Affairs can register it — a vacuum that recruitment networks have learned to exploit as reliably as any construction firm.

WHAT THIS DEMANDS OF GUYANA

Guyana did not create the crisis driving Cubans to its shores. That responsibility sits with a Cuban state that would rather imprison a protester than fix a water main, and with a US blockade that has turned an already-decayed economy into a humanitarian emergency. But responsibility for what happens to people once they arrive on Guyanese soil belongs to Guyana — specifically to the ministries with the authority to prevent exploitation and the standing capacity, and so far the unused capacity, to build the machinery to do it.

That machinery is not exotic: registration systems migrants can access without fear of immediate deportation; labor inspections at the sites the State Department has already flagged as high-risk; a licensing and prosecution regime for recruitment operators, not merely for the people they recruit; a legal pathway that does not force a Cuban fleeing a collapsed state into the same unprotected status as an employer’s convenience hire.

Armando, weighing his options from the wreckage of his own collapsed house, put it starkly: whether the extractive power is Washington or Havana, ordinary people do not benefit either way.

Guyana has the chance, uniquely, to be neither — to take the oil wealth reshaping its economy and use some measure of it to ensure the people building that economy are not also being quietly consumed by it. So far, the government has not shown it intends to.

Part II of this investigation examines the recruitment networks directly, the fate of migrants who disappear inside them, and what accountability — if any — has followed.

The 592 Guardian is continuing to investigate conditions facing Cuban migrant workers in Guyana. Readers or sources with direct knowledge are invited to come forward.

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.