Venezuela Must Not Be Denied the Vote Again

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

  Venezuela Must Not Be Denied the Vote Again

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

Venezuela has entered a dangerous period in which the removal of Nicolás Maduro has not yet produced democratic restoration. It has instead created a contested interim order—one in which the former ruling structure remains in place, Washington exercises unusual leverage, and Venezuelans are again being asked to wait for the right to choose their own government.

The Venezuelan people have returned to the streets with a demand that should not be negotiable in any society claiming to be in transition: set a date for free and credible elections. The removal of Nicolás Maduro has not, by itself, delivered democracy; it has instead opened a perilous interval in which power remains concentrated, institutions remain compromised, and Venezuelans are still waiting to exercise their sovereign right to choose their government. 

Thousands demonstrated in Caracas and cities including Valencia, Maracay, San Cristóbal and Maracaibo in the first nationwide opposition mobilization in nearly two years. Their demands were direct: a presidential-election timetable, the return of opposition leader María Corina Machado and the release of political prisoners.

Venezuelans are demanding something more fundamental: a credible, scheduled, inclusive election administered by institutions that can be trusted and conducted without intimidation, political imprisonment, censorship, or manipulation of the vote.The uncertainty is profound

A transition without a date

Donald Trump and interim President Delcy Rodríguez have both said that elections will be held. Yet no date has been set for a vote to choose Maduro’s successor, and no clearly binding public timetable has been presented to the Venezuelan people. 

That omission is not a minor administrative delay. A transition without a timetable can become an arrangement without an end, especially where the party that governed under Maduro still holds the levers of the state

.Rodríguez has led the country since January 3, but she is not politically detached from the former governing order. She is a leading figure in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or PSUV, the same movement that has exercised power since the Chávez era and that has faced sustained accusations of repression against critics and political opponents. 

Venezuelans therefore have every reason to insist that an election date be announced publicly, promptly and with enforceable safeguards. A promise of an election is not democracy. A democratic transition begins when people can see, verify and prepare for the moment in which power must answer to the ballot.

 Maduro is gone; the system remains

The danger for Venezuela is that the fall of one president may be mistaken for the dismantling of an authoritarian political structure. Nicolás Maduro’s removal changed the occupant of the presidency, but it did not automatically remake the courts, the electoral authority, the security services, the public media or the institutions through which the previous order maintained itself.

US-backed discussions are reportedly focused on reshaping the Supreme Tribunal of Justice and the National Electoral Council before an eventual vote. Those reforms are necessary, but the process has already demonstrated why Venezuelans cannot simply be told to wait patiently while political elites negotiate the terms of their future. 

Institutional reform cannot be allowed to become a pretext for institutional delay.

A credible electoral process requires more than the announcement of a polling day. It requires an impartial electoral authority, a judiciary that does not act as an arm of the governing party, freedom for political parties and candidates, protections for journalists and civic groups, equal access to public space, and independent scrutiny of the vote.

It also requires the release of political prisoners, an end to political persecution and meaningful arrangements for Venezuelans abroad to participate in determining the future of their country.

The exclusion problem

 The political negotiations underway between the interim government and a faction of the opposition have not included Machado’s Vente Venezuela movement. That exclusion weakens the legitimacy of any process that claims to be building a national democratic settlement. 

Machado remains outside Venezuela after a period in hiding following the disputed 2024 election. Her movement organized the latest nationwide protest, and she has called for elections by July 2027, with activists pressing for July 24, the birthday of independence figure Simón Bolívar. 

No democratic transition can be designed by selecting which voices are permitted into the room and which are expected to accept decisions made in their absence. Dialogue is necessary in divided societies. But dialogue cannot become an elite substitute for public consent.

If the government and its international partners are serious about national reconciliation, they must ensure that all major democratic forces can participate meaningfully in the process. That means creating conditions for Machado’s safe return, lifting arbitrary political restrictions, protecting opposition organizers and allowing Venezuelans themselves—not only negotiators—to determine who represents them.

 Washington’s responsibility

The United States now occupies an unusually powerful position in Venezuela’s political landscape. US forces captured Maduro in January, and Washington has since worked closely with Rodríguez’s interim government while supporting talks about political reforms. 

This gives the Trump administration influence, but it also creates a serious obligation: the United States must not replace Venezuelan authoritarianism with Venezuelan dependency.

A transition cannot credibly be called democratic if Venezuela’s political timetable, economic direction or oil resources are shaped principally by external strategic interests. Washington may support a lawful, peaceful and verifiable democratic process, but it should not determine Venezuela’s leadership, choose which opposition leaders are acceptable or treat the country’s petroleum wealth as the price of political cooperation.

The Venezuelan people are not a bargaining chip between foreign governments and local elites. Venezuela’s oil belongs to Venezuela. Its democracy belongs to Venezuelans.

What a real vote requires

A legitimate election should be based on clear and public commitments:

♦ A fixed and publicly announced presidential-election date, with no open-ended postponement.

♦ A reconstituted and genuinely independent National Electoral Council.

♦ Judicial reform that prevents the courts from excluding candidates or dissolving parties for political reasons.

♦ The release of political prisoners and guarantees against arbitrary arrest, intimidation, torture and retaliation.

♦ Full legal recognition and freedom of operation for political parties, civil-society organizations and independent media.

♦ Safe participation by exiled leaders, candidates and Venezuelan voters overseas.

♦ Robust international observation with access before, during and after polling day.

♦ Transparent publication and verification of vote tallies at every stage of the process.

These are not extravagant demands. They are the minimum conditions for a result that Venezuelans—and the world—can accept as legitimate.

The people have spoken

The protests show that fear has not extinguished the Venezuelan public’s democratic aspirations. The crowds in Caracas, Maracay, Valencia, San Cristóbal and Maracaibo are demanding neither chaos nor revenge. They are demanding the ordinary right that authoritarian systems fear most: the right to vote freely, to organize openly and to replace those in power.

Uncertainty has taken hold of Venezuela. But uncertainty need not become surrender. The will of the Venezuelan people—their right to self-determination, dignity and democratic choice—must prevail over political convenience, party preservation and foreign interference.

The protesters who gathered across Venezuela were not demanding chaos, revenge or another cycle of political vengeance. They were demanding a date, a voice and a future.

Their return to the streets is a reminder that democratic aspiration has survived repression, economic hardship, exile and years of manipulated political processes. The sight of citizens mobilizing again, despite the country’s uncertainty, carries a message for the interim government, the PSUV, opposition negotiators and Washington alike: Venezuelans will not indefinitely surrender their right to decide who governs them.

Venezuela cannot be permitted to drift from one imposed political arrangement into another. Uncertainty has taken hold, but uncertainty need not become resignation. The will of the Venezuelan people—their right to self-determination, democratic dignity and genuine political choice—must prevail.

The way forward is clear. Reform the institutions. Free political prisoners. End exclusion. Guarantee the rights of every political force. Set the election date.

The first test is simple: set the date, reform the institutions, guarantee the freedoms, and let Venezuela vote.

 

Sixteen Lives Lit a Fire in Serbia. More Than One Hundred Could Not Stir Guyana’s Students

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Sixteen Lives Lit a Fire in Serbia. More Than One Hundred Could Not Stir Guyana’s Students.

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

For the first time in Serbia, they have managed to lead protests entirely without violence,”  “What we see daily represent a new culture – one defined by irony, laughter, and the deliberate disregard for primitivism and political depravity.” The student movement does possess a transformative potential – the capacity to drive social change, break with the past, and alter a political climate where  family, friends and favorites are celebrated”

In Serbia, the deaths of  16 people in the collapse of a railway-station canopy did not disappear beneath official condolences, routine inquiries and the passage of a few news cycles. Students recognized the tragedy for what it was: a possible indictment of neglect, corruption, weak oversight and a political system insulated from the consequences of its failures.

They did not merely mourn. They mobilized.

Serbian students transformed public grief into a sustained national challenge to power. They widened the lens beyond one catastrophe and connected it to the wider wounds of their society: decaying institutions, alleged corruption, economic insecurity, the erosion of democracy, failing public services, rural decline and the arrogance of entrenched political power. They seized a moral moment, organized peacefully, built democratic structures and placed themselves at the centre of a movement now capable of changing Serbia’s political landscape.

That is what civic consciousness looks like.The comparison with Guyana is devastating.

More than 100 Guyanese died in the MV Barima sinking—a catastrophe of such magnitude that it should have permanently altered the national conscience. Entire families and communities bore the grief. Children lost parents; parents lost children; breadwinners, workers, travellers and ordinary citizens vanished beneath the water.

Yet the disaster did not produce the sustained national agitation that such a mass loss of life demanded. It should have forced relentless questions about the safety of public transport, vessel certification, inspections, overloading, enforcement, rescue capacity, regulatory failure, and the role of officials entrusted with protecting human life. Instead, Guyana mourned, the news cycle moved on, and too many citizens—including those who should be the country’s most questioning generation—returned to silence.

Guyana’s students had every reason to rise—not for spectacle, not for partisan theatre, but for truth, justice, accountability and reforms that could prevent another family from enduring such horror.

Instead, there was a brief, subdued and largely symbolic presence. A few days of silence. A passing display of sympathy. Then, for too many, a return to ordinary life as if 100- plus deaths were just another event to be processed, posted about and forgotten.

Sixteen deaths ignited a firestorm in Serbia. More than 100 deaths failed to ignite sustained student outrage in Guyana.

That is not merely a difference in political culture. It is a disturbing measure of how far civic responsibility, compassion and moral courage appear to have receded among a section of Guyana’s educated youth.

A Generation Detached From Its Country

The failure was not simply one of organization. It was a failure of empathy.

The people who died aboard the MV Barima were not an old headline, a historical footnote or an inconvenient death toll to be recalled only on anniversaries. They were Guyanese whose lives were placed in the hands of systems that were supposed to regulate safety, prevent avoidable danger and respond when danger came. Their deaths ought to have become a permanent demand for answers: Who failed? What rules were ignored? What warnings went unheeded? Who was held responsible? What safeguards were put in place so that no other family would have to receive the same unbearable news?

Yet Guyana’s campuses did not become centers of sustained remembrance, investigation or public pressure. There was no enduring student campaign calling for the official record to be fully laid bare; no sustained demand for stronger maritime-safety laws, independent vessel inspections, emergency-rescue readiness, passenger protections, or consequences for negligence and official failure.

The silence was not harmless. It helped allow a national tragedy to be packed away into memory, while the deeper conditions that make ordinary Guyanese vulnerable remained insufficiently confronted.

Why not?

Were students too afraid to speak? Too politically aligned to confront the Government? Too accustomed to outsourcing public responsibility to a handful of activists, journalists, families and civil-society advocates? Or has a culture of resignation taken hold—a learned belief that nothing changes, that protest is futile, and that survival requires silence?

These questions are uncomfortable. They should be.

Education Is a Right, Not a Favour

The popular political language around “free education” has done real damage when it is used to cultivate gratitude and compliance among young people.

Education in Guyana is not a favor granted by any government. It has long been enshrined as a basic right. Publicly funded education is not benevolence, patronage or a personal gift from politicians. It is a constitutional and social obligation, funded by the people of Guyana.

Students must reject any suggestion that their access to education requires silence about injustice, corruption, incompetence or preventable tragedy. A government cannot invoke free education as a shield against criticism, particularly when the State itself bears responsibility for ensuring that such tragedies should have never occurred in our “world -class ecosystem”

A student who asks why people died in a sunken ferry is not ungrateful. A student who demands accountability for public money is not disloyal. A student who protests unsafe infrastructure, poor services, environmental destruction, corruption or inequality is not an enemy of the State.

That student is doing what citizenship requires.

The Indictment

Guyana’s students cannot continually reserve their activism for matters that touch them personally—fees, accommodation, registration problems, delayed stipends, examinations, Wi-Fi access or campus administration—while treating the anguish of poorer, rural, Indigenous and politically unconnected Guyanese as somebody else’s burden.

That posture is morally indefensible.

A society cannot claim to be developing when its university and college population is insulated from the suffering around it. It cannot speak of national transformation when the young people expected to inherit the republic show little sustained interest in whether public institutions work, whether the vulnerable are protected, or whether those in authority answer for failure.

If students can be mobilized only when a problem reaches their doorstep, they are not being prepared for national leadership. They are being conditioned for private survival.

Guyana’s students must understand the cost of that conditioning. The same indifference that permits a dormitory tragedy to fade from national memory will permit public money to disappear without explanation, communities to remain underserved, land and rivers to be compromised, health systems to fail, and political elites to govern without meaningful restraint.

Silence is not neutrality. In a country where power is concentrated and accountability is fragile, silence is permission.

More Than Mourning Is Required

No one is demanding that Guyanese students replicate Serbia or import another country’s political culture. Guyana has its own history, divisions and challenges. But our students must recover the elementary principle that an injury to citizens—especially children—demands more than a vigil, a social-media post or a momentary expression of grief.

It demands sustained civic action.

Students should be organizing forums and research initiatives, monitoring the implementation of official recommendations, demanding access to information, partnering with affected communities, questioning ministers and public agencies, and mounting peaceful, independent campaigns for public safety and accountability.

This is the indictment of a student population that too often awakens only when its own immediate comfort, fees, registration, accommodation or campus privileges are affected. It is not enough to display grief briefly, post a black image, attend a vigil, and return to private ambitions untouched by the suffering of fellow citizens. If the loss of more than 100 Guyanese could not produce sustained compassion, moral outrage and civic action among the country’s educated youth, then what exactly will? A generation unwilling to demand accountability when human life is lost cannot credibly claim it is prepared to lead a nation.

The young people of Serbia turned 16 deaths into a national reckoning. Guyana’s students allowed the deaths of more than 100 people to pass without a sustained reckoning.

That should trouble every parent, lecturer, policymaker and student in this country.For it raises a grave question: if the death of over 100 fellow  citizens cannot awaken a generation to public responsibility, what will?

“Change is clearly necessary. The state must belong to its people, not to the mafia and criminals. ” “The way they treat the judiciary, the catastrophic conditions at the local level, NDC ‘s resorting to violence and gangsterism, dying villages – along with dubious privatizations, money laundering, the erosion of every single institution, police being reformed into thugs, and an education system vanishing before our eyes… these are some of the reasons why change is needed,” 

 

The MV Barima Inquiry Must Follow the Chain of Command

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 The MV Barima Inquiry Must Follow the Chain of Command

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

The Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima tragedy is exposing what increasingly appears to be more than an operational failure at sea. It is revealing a dangerous pattern of institutional neglect, weak oversight, inadequate preparedness and an apparent willingness to rely on improvised arrangements when lives were on the line.

The inquiry must not end with blame assigned to the vessel’s crew, individual Coast Guard ranks, MARAD officers or technical staff. Those who worked at the operational level may have made mistakes, but the evidence emerging from the hearings raises a larger and more troubling question: who was responsible for ensuring that Guyana had a competent, equipped and accountable maritime-safety system before the tragedy occurred?

Lives were not lost simply because individuals were incompetent. They were lost in circumstances that point to gross negligence at several levels of public administration.

The testimony concerning search-and-rescue operations is particularly alarming. Rear Admiral Hayden Pritchard’s questioning of Acting Harbour Master Romain Seurattan laid bare an extraordinary situation: a private civilian vessel, operated by Westzyde Marine—a contractor reportedly engaged in Coast Guard vessel maintenance—became involved in a search-and-locate operation coordinated through the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre.

Why was a private contractor in that position? Was its involvement formally authorized? Were its personnel qualified and its vessel properly equipped for emergency response? Was the assistance rendered at no cost, or under an arrangement that could create financial or operational conflicts? What records exist of the deployment, communication, instructions and expenses?

Most importantly, why were coordinates and operational information apparently accepted without independent verification by the responsible maritime authorities?

These are not minor procedural questions. In a search-and-rescue operation, unverified information can cost lives. Every minute lost because responders are sent to an incorrect location, every breakdown in communication and every failure to independently confirm distress information can turn an emergency into a catastrophe.

The fact that a Coast Guard officer was reportedly aboard the private vessel does not settle the matter. It raises further questions. Who authorized that officer’s deployment? What authority did he exercise? Was he operating under a written command structure? Did the MRCC maintain direct and documented control over the search? Was this an established emergency protocol or an improvised response born out of a shortage of public assets?

If Guyana’s maritime authorities had to depend on a private maintenance contractor during a major rescue operation, then the country must confront the obvious reality: the State was not adequately prepared

MARAD’s own acknowledged resource constraints must be examined in their full administrative and political context. The department had limited assets available at the time, despite being responsible for supervising a maritime sector that includes passenger vessels carrying ordinary Guyanese across waterways that can become deadly within minutes.

Guyana operates several passenger vessels, including ferries and riverine services on which workers, schoolchildren, elderly passengers, families and residents of hinterland and riverine communities depend. Safety cannot be reduced to paperwork issued at a desk, nor can emergency response be left to chance, private goodwill or last-minute improvisation.

The COI has reportedly heard troubling evidence about the absence of safety drills, gaps in maintenance arrangements, missing operating manuals, an unregistered emergency beacon, communications failures, limited capacity for nighttime searches and outdated Coast Guard standard operating procedures. It has also heard that rescued passengers were not wearing life jackets.

Taken together, these failures paint a picture of an institution that may have been permitted to operate without the basic systems required to prevent a disaster or respond effectively once one occurred.

That is why the Commission must examine the entire administrative chain.

The inquiry must summon and question those who held ministerial and executive responsibility for maritime transport, regulation, rescue readiness, budgeting, staffing, procurement and compliance enforcement during the relevant period. This includes Public Works Minister Juan Edghill and former minister Deodat Indar, as Civil Society groups and  APNU has rightly demanded.

Ministerial responsibility does not disappear because a minister is represented by an attorney at a public inquiry. Legal representation is not testimony. It cannot explain what ministers knew, what warnings they received, what requests for resources were made, what decisions were taken, what deficiencies were reported and why corrective action was either delayed or not taken at all.

The Commission should require a full account of:

– The annual budgets allocated to MARAD, the Coast Guard and the MRCC for vessel inspection, emergency communications, training, rescue equipment and maintenance.

– Requests for additional vessels, engines, radios, navigation systems, life-saving equipment, fuel, personnel and nighttime search capacity.

– MARAD inspection reports, deficiency notices, certification records and enforcement actions involving the MV Barima and other passenger vessels.

– The legal and operational basis for involving private contractors in State-led search-and-rescue operations.

– Contracts, invoices, communications and authorizations connected to Westzyde Marine’s role in the response.

– The registration, inspection and operational readiness of emergency position-indicating radio beacons and other distress-alert systems.

– Coast Guard and MRCC standard operating procedures, including the date they were last updated and the reasons joint search-and-rescue exercises were not conducted.

– The availability and enforcement of life jackets, passenger manifests, safety briefings, emergency drills and trained crew requirements across the passenger-vessel fleet.

– The corrective measures introduced since July 18, and evidence that they are actually being implemented rather than merely announced.

The inquiry must also investigate whether the weaknesses exposed in the MV Barima case exist elsewhere in the country’s passenger-vessel system. A disaster involving one vessel may be the symptom of a wider regulatory failure. Every state-operated, subsidized, licensed or certified passenger boat and ferry should now be subject to an urgent, independent safety audit.

That audit should assess seaworthiness, maintenance records, crew certification, passenger capacity, life jackets, emergency lighting, communication equipment, distress beacons, navigation systems, manifests, safety drills and access to a competent rescue response at all hours.

The Government cannot wait for the final COI report before acting. It should immediately publish a national maritime-safety corrective-action plan with firm deadlines, named responsible agencies and regular public progress reports. That plan must include modern rescue assets, functional communications systems, mandatory joint emergency exercises, independent inspections, properly registered distress beacons and enforceable standards for every passenger vessel.

Guyana’s growing oil wealth has made repeated claims of resource scarcity increasingly difficult to accept. If the country can finance major infrastructure projects and rapidly expanding development plans, it can equip its maritime agencies to protect citizens travelling on public waterways. This should be an absolute non-negotiable demand mirroring our Safe-streets, Safe- city initiative.

No family should have to discover, after losing a relative, that a public rescue operation depended on an inadequately equipped agency, uncertain communication, unverified coordinates or a private contractor stepping in because the State lacked the capacity to respond.

The MV Barima tragedy must not become another inquiry that identifies failures but shields those with the authority to prevent them. Accountability must travel upward—from the vessel, to the regulator, to the rescue agencies, to the permanent secretaries, senior administrators and ministers who controlled policy, funding and oversight.

The Commission’s duty is not merely to explain what happened on July 18. It must establish why Guyana’s maritime-safety architecture was allowed to become so vulnerable—and who must answer for it.

 

Is Guyana Surrendering Its Sovereignty by Installment?

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 Is Guyana Surrendering Its Sovereignty by Installment?

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

The controversy over US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s India visit offers Guyana a warning that it cannot afford to ignore. The issue is not merely where a foreign official chooses to meet another country’s representatives. It is about who sets the agenda, who defines the terms of engagement, whose commercial interests are advanced, and whether a supposedly sovereign government retains the confidence to say that national decisions will be made in the national interest.

India, with its population, military weight, industrial base and geopolitical importance, was affronted when Washington publicly suggested that its foreign minister was expected to travel to Mumbai to meet Rubio. The diplomatic optics mattered because they suggested an unequal relationship: Washington summons, India accommodates.

Guyana should study that moment carefully.

For years, this country has watched foreign officials, foreign companies and foreign-backed institutions become unusually prominent in defining what is presented as Guyana’s development agenda. The concern is not that Guyana should reject cooperation with the United States or any other partner. Guyana needs trade, technology, investment, markets and international alliances. But cooperation becomes dependency when the foreign partner appears to set priorities, select projects, announce commitments, and publicly lead a national agenda before Guyanese have received full disclosure from their own government.

That distinction is no longer academic. It is at the center of the country’s political economy.

The UN Meeting That Raises Questions

The meeting between President Irfaan Ali and John Jovanovic, chairman and president of the United States Export-Import Bank, on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York deserves far more public scrutiny than it has received. Following those discussions, six major Guyanese initiatives were publicly identified: completion of Gas-to-Energy Phase One, Gas-to-Energy Phase Two, a Berbice deep-water port, the Amaila Falls hydropower project, expansion of Lethem Airport, and an affordable-housing construction program involving US companies.

These are not marginal undertakings. They touch the electricity system, national energy policy, port infrastructure, hinterland connectivity, housing, industrialization, public debt and the country’s long-term development model. In effect, they constitute a substantial portion of what has been described as Guyana’s transformational agenda.

The public must therefore ask a plain question: how did such an extensive portfolio of strategic projects come to be discussed, selected and publicly advanced during a meeting on the sidelines of a major international event?

A meeting at the United Nations may be convenient for diplomacy. It is not, however, a substitute for a transparent national planning process. It cannot replace feasibility studies, parliamentary disclosure, competitive procurement, public consultation, debt-sustainability analysis, environmental review, independent technical evaluation, and a clear explanation of the alternatives considered.

When an external financier emerges from a short high-level encounter describing a broad slate of projects in which it is prepared to participate, citizens are entitled to wonder whether the decisions were already substantially made. Was the New York meeting principally an occasion to formalise an arrangement that had been negotiated elsewhere? If so, when did those negotiations begin, who participated, what undertakings were made, and what conditions were attached?

Finance Is Not Free

US EXIM is not a charitable institution. It is the export-credit agency of the United States government, created to facilitate American exports, American companies and American jobs. Its own previous announcement of the approximately US$527 million financing for Guyana’s Gas-to-Energy project explicitly said that the transaction would support US jobs and more than a dozen US companies.

That is not inherently improper. Every lending country and export-credit agency seeks advantages for its own businesses. Guyana would be naïve to expect otherwise. But that reality must be spoken plainly: American financing is normally structured to advance American commercial interests alongside Guyana’s stated development objectives.

The question for Guyana is not whether it should accept external financing. The question is whether the financing is being assessed on Guyana’s terms.

What are the interest rates, repayment conditions, grace periods, sovereign guarantees and currency risks? Which American companies are positioned to benefit? What local-content commitments are binding rather than promotional? Are Guyanese contractors, professionals and suppliers genuinely equipped to participate? What happens if projects overrun their budgets or fail to produce their projected returns? What independent studies demonstrate that each project is the best available use of public borrowing capacity?

Those questions become even more important when the same foreign lender is being invited into energy, ports, housing, security and transport infrastructure. A country can wake up one day and discover that a large share of its strategic assets are tied, directly or indirectly, to the preferences and suppliers of one foreign power.

That is not diversification. That is concentration of influence.

From Diplomacy to Technocratic Overreach

The matter is more troubling because it goes beyond conventional diplomacy. A foreign ambassador making policy pronouncements is one thing; a foreign development-bank technocrat appearing to identify, prioritize and publicly champion a suite of national projects is another.

Jovanovic’s remarks and the government’s own reports made clear that US EXIM was looking beyond the second Gas-to-Energy project to the deep-water port, affordable housing and other national priorities. The government also listed Amaila Falls and the Lethem Airport project among the initiatives discussed.

Again, there is nothing wrong with a lender expressing interest. The problem begins when interest is treated as direction; when access to foreign credit is treated as a substitute for independent national planning; and when the political leadership appears prepared to align itself with every initiative a powerful external institution is willing to finance.

A lender’s preferred project list is not a national development plan.

Nor should Guyana mistake the availability of money for proof that a project is sound. International financiers do not make decisions solely because a proposal will transform the lives of Guyanese. They consider repayment prospects, political relationships, export opportunities, supply-chain advantages, strategic influence and the commercial prospects of their own firms.

Guyana must do the same: calculate its own interests first.

The Oil Connection

This question cannot be separated from oil. Guyana is now one of the world’s fastest-growing oil producers, and the dominant oil operator is ExxonMobil, an American multinational. US EXIM’s earlier financing for the Gas-to-Energy project was linked to a project structure involving Texas-based Lindsayca, Puerto Rico-based CH4 Systems and services provided by ExxonMobil.

That does not prove wrongdoing. It does, however, underscore why Guyana must build stronger safeguards around public decisions. When oil production, gas supply, power generation, US export-credit financing, US contractors and US geopolitical interests all converge, Guyana must be especially vigilant that its public interest is not quietly subordinated to a single external ecosystem.

A country cannot declare itself sovereign while allowing its central development choices to be shaped principally by the commercial orbit of the dominant foreign oil company and the government of that company’s home state.

Guyana must not become a place where the existence of a US company is treated as sufficient reason to accept US policy preferences, US financing structures and US corporate priorities without rigorous challenge. ExxonMobil is a private corporation. It is not Guyana’s development ministry, its environmental regulator, its treasury, its Parliament or its electorate.

Democracy Cannot Mean Dependency

Washington frequently presents itself as a guardian of democracy, transparency, rule of law and sovereignty. Those principles should be welcomed. But they lose moral force when powerful countries practice them selectively.

There is a profound contradiction when a major power lectures smaller states about democratic governance while using its commercial, financial and diplomatic reach to steer their development choices. Sovereignty is not only threatened by military force, authoritarian neighbors or territorial claims. It can also be weakened through financial dependence, tied lending, corporate leverage, elite accommodation and decision-making that takes place beyond meaningful public scrutiny.

Democracy is not strengthened because foreign money is available. Democracy is strengthened when a country’s citizens and institutions can understand, debate and influence decisions about their national assets, debt obligations, environment and future.

Guyana has no reason to apologize for demanding that standard.

The Government must stop presenting foreign support as though it is automatically a national triumph. Financing is neither a gift nor an endorsement of competence. It is a transaction. Guyana has a duty to determine whether the transaction serves Guyanese first, and whether it preserves room for the country to make independent decisions later.

Questions the Government Owes

Before Guyana moves further into this expanding US EXIM relationship, the Government should make a comprehensive statement to Parliament and the public addressing the following:

♦ When did discussions on the six identified projects begin, and which Guyanese officials, advisers and agencies participated?

♦ Were the projects selected through Guyana’s national planning and public-investment systems, or were they substantially identified through discussions with US EXIM and US companies?

♦ What specific financing has been approved, what remains only exploratory, and what terms have been proposed for each project?

♦ What debt exposure, sovereign guarantees, procurement conditions and US-content requirements would Guyana assume?

♦ Will each project undergo independent feasibility, environmental, social and value-for-money assessments before any commitment is made?

♦ What alternative financiers, technologies, contractors and project models were evaluated?

♦ Why are projects of such scale being announced around side meetings at the UN rather than first being fully disclosed through Guyana’s constitutional institutions?

♦ What binding requirements will ensure that Guyanese workers, firms, communities and taxpayers receive measurable benefits?

These are not anti-American questions. They are pro-Guyana questions.

Partnership, Not Submission

Guyana should pursue constructive relations with the United States, China, India, the Caribbean, Europe, Latin America and every country willing to engage on fair terms. It should welcome foreign capital, but never confuse access to foreign capital with the surrender of national judgment.

The country should neither pick fights for theatrical purposes nor bow for approval. It should negotiate firmly, diversify its partnerships, strengthen its domestic technical capacity, protect procurement integrity, and ensure that its Parliament and people are not spectators to decisions that will bind them for decades.

The lesson from India is clear. Diplomatic status is not measured only by speeches about partnership. It is revealed in the details: who sets the meeting, who controls the agenda, who makes the announcement, who selects the projects and whose interests are ultimately served.

Guyana cannot allow its development agenda to be written in Washington, negotiated in New York, announced by foreign officials and merely implemented at home.

A sovereign Guyana must insist on something better: Guyanese priorities, Guyanese scrutiny, Guyanese institutions and Guyanese control over Guyana’s future.

Corruption’s Convenient Silence in the Americas

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 Corruption’s Convenient Silence in the Americas

OPINION BY :Hem Kumar October 2026

The strongest argument is not that the OAS should not discuss corruption, but that its institutional response exposes a deeper contradiction: the states most affected by corruption—and whose political elites may benefit from weak enforcement—too often lack the will to lead an uncompromising regional campaign against it.

Secretary General Albert Ramdin is right: progress against corruption cannot be measured by the number of conventions signed, agencies established, reports filed, or speeches delivered. Its true measure is whether ordinary people can see better government, fairer access to opportunity, honest delivery of public services, and consequences for powerful people who abuse public office.

But the setting of Ramdin’s remarks in Washington carries its own uncomfortable lesson. A regional conference on corruption at the Organization of American States was hosted by France—through its Embassy and Permanent Mission to the OAS—rather than driven by the member states of the hemisphere most loudly affected by graft, state capture, impunity, and the diversion of public wealth.

France is a mere Permanent observer, not an OAS member state. Yet it took French diplomatic initiative to help prompt a discussion inside the hemisphere’s principal political organization on one of the hemisphere’s most enduring governance failures.

That is an indictment.

The OAS has long possessed the legal language. The Inter-American Convention against Corruption was adopted in Caracas in 1996, making it the first major regional anti-corruption treaty of its kind. Member states have created integrity commissions, financial-intelligence units, anti-corruption prosecutors, procurement rules, asset-declaration regimes, and parliamentary oversight committees.

There is no shortage of documents, institutions, seminars, commitments, or carefully worded declarations.

What remains scarce is political resolve—particularly where scrutiny reaches ministers, parliamentarians, party financiers, senior public officials, politically connected contractors, and other powerbrokers who may be direct or indirect beneficiaries of corruption.

That is the central problem: corruption survives not merely because states lack laws, but because the people with the greatest power to enforce those laws can have the greatest interest in limiting their effect.

A government may welcome investigations into junior officials while quietly resisting disclosure, delaying prosecutions, narrowing reporting requirements, starving oversight bodies of resources, or attacking investigators when an inquiry approaches the political class. It may celebrate convictions in peripheral cases while the investigations that matter most—those involving elected officials, major contracts, unexplained wealth, campaign financing, land, extractive resources, or public procurement—remain permanently “ongoing.”

This is why Jamaica’s experience deserves close attention. The Integrity Commission has recorded real results, including convictions and matters recommended for prosecution. Jamaica’s removal from the Financial Action Task Force grey list was also a meaningful achievement. Those outcomes demonstrate that institutions can work when the state applies sustained effort.

Yet the harder test remains unfinished. Investigations involving sitting parliamentarians and a senator are still open. Cases involving statutory declarations have lingered, including files deemed dormant because former officials could not be located. Legal challenges and interim injunctions have increased pressure on the Commission. Meanwhile, political debate continues over whether the public should receive meaningful information about the status and nature of investigations.

That debate is not simply administrative. It goes to the heart of public trust.

Calls to limit disclosure because it might create an impression of widespread corruption invert the public-interest principle. The answer to public concern is not less transparency. It is timely, fair, and responsible disclosure; efficient investigations; due process; clear reasons where matters do not proceed; and prosecution where the evidence warrants it.

Secrecy does not protect confidence in public institutions. It protects uncertainty. And uncertainty is where impunity thrives.

There must, of course, be safeguards against prejudicing investigations or unfairly branding persons who have not been charged. But secrecy cannot become a shield behind which politically consequential investigations disappear into institutional delay.

A democracy cannot demand public confidence while withholding enough information to make accountability impossible to assess.

Ramdin’s standard—improved lives rather than institutional paper—must therefore be applied directly to the OAS itself. The organization cannot credibly call corruption a common threat while its member governments remain selective about confronting it. It cannot treat corruption as a technical governance concern when, across the region, it intersects with poverty, crime, migration, environmental destruction, drug trafficking, illegal mining, public contracting, and the capture of natural-resource revenues.

For Caribbean and Latin American societies, the cost is tangible. Every corrupted contract means poorer roads, unfinished hospitals, inferior schools, unsafe infrastructure, inflated energy costs, and fewer resources for vulnerable communities.

In resource-rich countries, corruption can convert national wealth into private enrichment while citizens are told to accept austerity, delayed development, and weak public services.

The deeper irony is that countries routinely invoke sovereignty when outside actors demand stronger governance standards, yet remain dependent on external pressure, foreign technical assistance, international monitoring, donor conditions, and diplomatic initiative to advance reforms they should have championed themselves.

Sovereignty without accountable institutions is not independence in its fullest sense. It can become a protective slogan for those who control the state and benefit from its opacity.

France’s role in convening this discussion should therefore be read as a challenge, not merely a diplomatic courtesy. Why did the initiative not visibly emerge from a coalition of OAS member states? Why are the countries whose citizens bear the daily cost of corruption not leading the hemisphere’s most forceful demand for transparent procurement, beneficial-ownership disclosure, protected whistleblowers, independent prosecutors, timely trials, and public reporting on high-level cases?

The answer is uncomfortable but plain: many leaders are willing to condemn corruption in principle because the word costs nothing. They become far less willing when anti-corruption enforcement threatens political financing, patronage networks, elite contracts, family interests, party allies, or their own tenure in office.

That is intransigence. It is not simply institutional weakness. It is a political choice.

The OAS should now move beyond ceremonial concern. Its member states should insist on measurable regional standards: publication of major procurement data, accessible asset-declaration systems, beneficial-ownership registers, protections for journalists and whistleblowers, independent investigative bodies, strict limits on unjustified delay, and transparent reporting on high-level corruption cases.

Compliance must be assessed not by the number of agencies created, but by whether powerful offenders are investigated, prosecuted, and—where guilt is proven—punished.

 

Jamaica’s Integrity Commission is correct that prosecutions and convictions alone cannot be the only measure of success. Anti-corruption work should change public culture and deter abuse before it occurs. But social change requires visible proof that power does not place anyone beyond scrutiny.

The machinery exists. The treaties exist. The rhetoric exists. What the hemisphere still lacks is the political courage to pursue corruption where it is most protected: at the summit of power.

 

When Protest Changes a Country: India’s Lesson for a Quiet Guyana

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Guyana-focused comparative commentary:When Protest Changes a Country: India’s Lesson for a Quiet Guyana

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

India’s record shows that sustained, organized public action has repeatedly changed laws, governments, public policy, and the political careers of seemingly untouchable leaders. Guyana’s history offers comparable lessons—but also exposes how often public outrage dissipates before it produces structural reform.

A  powerful Guyana-focused comparative commentary: India’s record shows that sustained, organized public action has repeatedly changed laws, governments, public policy, and the political careers of seemingly untouchable leaders. Guyana’s history offers comparable lessons—but also exposes how often public outrage dissipates before it produces structural reform.

India’s recent wave of protests over alleged electoral irregularities is not an isolated event. It belongs to a long national tradition in which citizens, students, workers, farmers, women and marginalized communities have confronted governments—and, at crucial moments, forced them to retreat.

From the anti-Hindi protests of  1965 to  the farmers’ uprising that compelled Narendra Modi’s government to repeal three agricultural laws in 2021, India demonstrates a basic democratic truth: power rarely concedes simply because citizens are right. It concedes when citizens are organized, persistent, visible and impossible to ignore.

That lesson should resonate in Guyana.

For too long, Guyanese have watched major national questions unfold as if they are spectators rather than citizens: oil revenues and spending; contracts and procurement; environmental risks; land, mining and forestry concessions; police conduct; public-sector accountability; constitutional reform; the rising cost of living; and the widening distance between political officeholders and ordinary people.

The country has not lacked grievances. What it has often lacked is sustained, broad-based, disciplined mobilization around clearly defined demands.

India: Protest as Democratic Pressure

India’s history makes clear that protests do not always win everything. Some fail to stop unpopular policies. Others achieve only partial reforms. But even movements that fall short can alter public debate, build leaders, reshape electoral politics, delay harmful policies, expose abuses, and make complacent governments pay a political price.

The anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu changed the country’s language politics. Southern Indians feared that Hindi would become a gatekeeper for government employment, education and national administration. The protests were fierce, costly and politically consequential. The central government retained English alongside Hindi, while the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam later ended Congress dominance in Tamil Nadu.

The lesson is not that Guyana should import India’s linguistic struggle. It is that communities facing perceived exclusion can organize around a concrete issue, build political consciousness and permanently alter the balance of power.

The Jayaprakash Narayan movement of the \(1970s\) began with anger over inflation, corruption and poor governance. It grew into a national confrontation with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government. The state responded with an Emergency: civil liberties were suspended, political opponents were detained and the press was censored. Yet when elections returned, the government was defeated in 1977.

No government, however powerful or entrenched, is beyond political consequence when public discontent becomes organized national resistance.

India’s Mandal protests also showed a harder truth: demonstrations may represent competing visions of justice. Upper-caste students protested the expansion of employment reservations for disadvantaged communities. But the Supreme Court upheld the policy, which became one of the most consequential affirmative-action measures in modern India.

The point is not that every protest demand should prevail. Democracy requires more than noise. It requires constitutional principle, evidence, public dialogue and a willingness to confront long-standing inequalities. But public mobilization forces the country to reckon with questions it might otherwise evade.

The anticorruption movement led by Anna Hazare in \2011 channeled public disgust at major scandals into nationwide protests, hunger strikes and demands for an independent watchdog. Its institutional results were uneven. Yet it changed politics, created new political actors and helped bring Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party into being.

The Nirbhaya protests after the 2012 gang rape and murder of a young woman similarly pushed India into urgent legal reform. The protests did not end sexual violence. No law alone could do that. But they compelled the state to expand definitions of sexual offences, increase penalties and acknowledge that its existing protections had failed women.

Then came the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, and later the historic farmers’ agitation. The latter is especially relevant to Guyana because it involved citizens who believed that government policy threatened their economic survival. Farmers stayed at Delhi’s borders for more than a year. They endured harsh weather, police barricades, vilification and loss of life. Their mobilization was disciplined, collective and rooted in clearly stated demands.

In November 2021, Prime Minister Modi repealed the farm laws. That was not a gift. It was extracted through collective action.

Guyana Has Its Own History

Guyana is not India. It is smaller, more ethnically polarized, has a different constitutional history, and has endured a political culture in which governments and opposition parties often seek to convert public concerns into partisan advantage.

Yet Guyana has never been devoid of protest traditions.

The anti-colonial struggles of workers, sugar laborers and political activists established the foundation for self-government and independence. The disturbances of 1905, the Enmore martyrdom of 1948, and the labor struggles associated with Hubert Nathaniel Critchlow all show that Guyanese workers did not receive dignity, representation or improved conditions merely because those in authority developed a conscience.

They demanded them.

The 1953 suspension of Guyana’s constitution by the British colonial government also stands as a warning. When popular political mobilization threatened colonial interests, the response was not democratic accommodation but constitutional repression. The period reminds Guyanese that rights are fragile when power is unchecked.

There have also been mass mobilizations around elections and constitutional government. Ethnic uprising and clashes in 1964.  The 1997 post-election protests, the prolonged political unrest of the early 2000s, and the sustained public conflict surrounding the 2020 elections all underscored that elections are not simply administrative exercises. They are central tests of whether citizens accept the legitimacy of the state.

But Guyana’s protest history has often been scarred by ethnic insecurity, political manipulation, violence and distrust. Those conditions have made citizens hesitant to take collective action unless a matter is seen through a party-political or ethnic lens.

That is precisely the trap Guyana must overcome in the oil era.

The Oil Era Requires a New Civic Culture

Guyana is now managing wealth that earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. Yet vast petroleum income has not automatically produced equally vast public confidence, transparency or shared prosperity.

Citizens have every right to ask:

♦ Where is every dollar of oil revenue going, and who independently verifies the accounts?

♦ Are oil contracts, tax concessions and project approvals sufficiently transparent?

♦ Why do citizens still confront high food prices, poor roads, unreliable infrastructure, weak public services and inadequate housing despite unprecedented national revenues?

♦ How are local-content rules being enforced, and who benefits in practice?

♦ What safeguards exist to protect communities, rivers, forests, fisheries and public health from extractive-industry damage?

♦ Why do major national decisions so often appear to be presented to citizens after the substance has already been decided?

♦ When will constitutional and governance reforms move from discussion to delivery?

These are not opposition questions. They are citizen questions.

A government should not treat every protester as unpatriotic, externally directed, destabilizing or hostile to development. Nor should an opposition party treat public mobilization merely as a route back to office. Protest loses legitimacy when it becomes a tool for ethnic intimidation, partisan theatre, violence or misinformation.

But peaceful protest, petitioning, public meetings, court challenges, community organizing, investigative reporting and direct demands for disclosure are legitimate democratic tools. They are not threats to the country. They are ways of protecting it.

A Contrast in Results

India’s protest movements show several paths to impact:

♦ The anti-Hindi agitation protected regional identity and reshaped state politics.

♦ The JP Movement helped end an authoritarian period and defeated a dominant ruling party.

♦ The Mandal-era conflict forced a national reckoning with caste inequality and affirmative action.

♦ The Nirbhaya movement drove legal reform on sexual violence.

♦ Anna Hazare’s campaign elevated anticorruption into a decisive national political issue.

♦ The anti-CAA movement delayed implementation and created an enduring record of constitutional dissent.

♦ The farmers’ protests forced the repeal of laws passed by a powerful central government.

Guyana’s movements have produced real results too, particularly in labor rights, anti-colonial advancement and the defense of electoral legitimacy. But too many current-day grievances remain fragmented.

One group protests the cost of living. Another protests land issues. Another raises concern over flooding. Another seeks information about oil revenue. Another wants justice for an abandoned road, a delayed bridge, poor drainage, a mining dispute, a procurement controversy or a neglected hospital.

Each issue may be valid. Yet isolated grievances are easier for governments to wait out, dismiss, divide or manage through announcements. A united civic agenda would be harder to ignore.

What Guyanese Must Demand

The country does not need reckless confrontation. It needs organized citizenship.

A modern Guyanese civic movement should be multiethnic, nonviolent, evidence-based and independent of control by any political party. It should set practical demands that are difficult to evade or distort, such as:

♦ Full, accessible and routinely updated disclosure of petroleum revenues, withdrawals, investments, contracts and beneficiaries.

♦ Stronger independent oversight of the Natural Resource Fund and public procurement.

♦ Publication of major extractive-sector agreements, environmental approvals, impact assessments and compliance reports.

♦ Enforceable protections for communities affected by mining, logging, oil development and infrastructure projects.

♦ Clear reporting on local-content beneficiaries, including the ultimate beneficial owners of companies receiving major contracts.

♦ A timetable for constitutional, electoral and governance reforms.

♦ Regular town halls at which ministers, regulators and senior public officials must answer citizens directly.

♦ Protection for whistleblowers, journalists and public-interest advocates.

♦ Independent monitoring of major public projects, including costs, timelines, variations and outcomes.

The demand should not be “remove one person and replace them with another.” Guyana has seen enough politics built around personalities. The demand must be: build institutions that cannot be casually captured, ignored or manipulated by anyone.

Complacency Has a Cost

A population that remains silent while decisions are made in its name will eventually be told that silence amounted to consent.

Guyanese should not wait until the oil has been pumped, the contracts have expired, the forests have been damaged, the money has been spent and the opportunities have been distributed among the already connected. By then, outrage will be historically accurate but politically late.

India’s experience does not prove that protest always succeeds. It proves something more important: citizens who organize can force a country to confront what those in power would rather avoid.

Guyana’s future will not be secured merely by producing more oil, announcing more projects or celebrating larger national budgets. It will be secured when ordinary citizens recognize that democracy does not operate only on election day.

It operates whenever people refuse to be spectators in decisions that determine their lives, their children’s future and the national inheritance.

The question is not whether Guyanese have reasons to speak .The question is whether they will organize early enough, broadly enough and bravely enough to be heard.

 Guyana Must Not Sleepwalk Into a Migration and Security Crisis

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 Guyana Must Not Sleepwalk Into a Migration and Security Crisis

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026

The France unrest is a warning about how legitimate public grievances can expand into a national crisis when poor services, cost-of-living pressure, political distrust, and opportunistic violence converge. But Guyana must avoid a dangerous leap: migrants are not a collective security threat; the real risk is weak governance, poor border management, exploitation, misinformation, and any actor—domestic or foreign—seeking to manipulate vulnerable people or public fear.

France’s protests began around conditions in schools and broadened around living costs, with most participants peaceful even as a minority engaged in violence and looting.

France is learning, at enormous social cost, that public disorder seldom begins with one event, one grievance, or one group of people. It begins when legitimate anxieties are allowed to accumulate—when public services deteriorate, livelihoods become more precarious, citizens lose confidence in institutions, and government appears either absent, evasive, or unprepared.

The demonstrations in France began with students demanding better school conditions: adequate teachers, safer buildings, and classrooms fit for learning. They widened as cost-of-living pressures, political distrust, labor grievances, and organized agitation entered the streets. Most people who demonstrated did so peacefully. Yet a smaller violent element turned portions of the unrest into scenes of looting, arson, confrontation, and fear.

Guyana should study that lesson carefully.

This country is undergoing historic transformation. Oil wealth, construction, expanding commerce, and new foreign investment are attracting workers and migrants from throughout the region and beyond. Venezuelans are among those seeking refuge, employment, safety, and survival.

They are human beings, not a faceless threat, and Guyana must never abandon its obligations of decency and humane treatment.

But compassion without policy is not governance.

The question Guyana must confront is not whether Venezuelan migrants, as a people, should be feared. They should not. The question is whether the State has developed a transparent, credible, and properly resourced framework to know who is entering the country; where they are living; whether they are safe from trafficking, coercion, and labor exploitation; whether children can access education; whether adults can work lawfully; and whether criminal, political, or foreign actors could exploit gaps in our systems.

That is where the national-security concern lies.

Venezuela’s government maintains an aggressive and illegitimate claim to Guyana’s Essequibo region. Against that backdrop, Georgetown cannot afford complacency, secrecy, or a patchwork approach to border administration. A disorderly migration system—one marked by porous entry points, undocumented labor, weak registration, inadequate community support, and unclear coordination between immigration, police, health, education, local government, and social services—creates vulnerabilities that no responsible government should ignore.

Those vulnerabilities can be exploited in many ways: by traffickers looking for desperate workers; by employers seeking cheap and silent labor; by criminal networks moving people, contraband, or money; by political operatives spreading division; or by outside interests attempting to deepen suspicion between communities.

The answer is neither cruelty nor collective blame. It is competent statecraft.

Guyana needs a public, national migration-management framework that does not leave communities guessing and does not leave migrants in the shadows. It should include verifiable registration, humane screening, transparent data, work-permit pathways, anti-trafficking enforcement, access to emergency health and child-protection services, and meaningful coordination with border communities. It must also include a clear security architecture: intelligence-led monitoring of cross-border risks, stricter scrutiny of suspicious networks, and full parliamentary and public oversight of policies affecting the country’s territorial integrity.

The public deserves facts, not whispers. How many Venezuelan nationals are registered in Guyana? How many are undocumented? Where are the pressure points? What resources have been allocated to border regions? What agencies are responsible? What protocols govern vetting, settlement, employment, and enforcement? And how is the government ensuring that neither migrants nor Guyanese communities are left exposed to manipulation, exploitation, or insecurity?

These are not xenophobic questions. They are questions of administration, sovereignty, and public accountability.

France’s turmoil should remind Guyana that social peace cannot be assumed. It must be protected through institutions that work, information that is shared honestly, borders that are competently managed, and policies that address hardship before frustration becomes a weapon in somebody else’s hands.

Guyana’s duty is twofold: protect vulnerable people from abuse and protect the Republic from preventable risk. We must not criminalize desperation. But neither can we allow disorder, silence, and institutional neglect to become the doorway through which insecurity enters the nation.

 

 

MV  Barima: A World-Class Economy Cannot Run a Guesswork Rescue Service

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 MV  Barima: A World-Class Economy Cannot Run a Guesswork Rescue Service

OPINION BY :Hem Kumar October 2026

MV Barima: a prosecution of state failure

The MV Barima tragedy is not merely a story of a vessel that sank. It is an exposure of a State that could receive repeated distress data, mobilize assets, rescue people, and still fail to establish the vessel’s precise location until approximately 14 hours after the initial alert—during the most decisive window for saving lives at sea. The record described to the Commission of Inquiry points to courage by responders on the water, but it also points to a system that was forced to improvise when it should have been executing a rehearsed, technology-led and time-critical national rescue plan.

Guyana must not confuse bravery at sea with competence at the command center.

The Coast Guard ranks, local fisherfolk, civilian boat operators and others who went into the waters after the MV Barima disaster deserve recognition. They operated in darkness, against currents, amid incomplete information and in an unfolding mass-casualty emergency. Their work saved lives.

But individual bravery cannot erase institutional failure.

The evidence emerging from the Commission of Inquiry is devastating in its implications. A passenger ferry issued a distress alert late on July 18. Multiple coordinates followed. Assets were deployed from Pomeroon, Ruimveldt and Fort Island. Yet the actual wreck site was reportedly formally pinpointed only at 13:51 hours on July 20—well after the critical early survival window had passed for passengers thrown into the sea or left adrift.

That is the central indictment: in an oil-rich country proclaiming “world-class” ambitions, a maritime disaster response depended in part on reconstructing a likely vessel route and resorting to Google Earth because the distress alert could not immediately and reliably identify the vessel or direct rescuers to its exact location.

A modern maritime-rescue architecture should not have to guess.

The operational breakdown

The known facts demand hard questions, not public-relations comfort.

◊ The emergency beacon aboard the vessel was reportedly not registered with the international satellite system, meaning the distress signal did not immediately identify the vessel, its owner or emergency contact information.

◊ A distress signal was received through the rescue system at about 22:51 hours on July 18, and the ferry was subsequently confirmed to have departed Georgetown.

◊ Search assets were deployed in the late evening and early morning, while the first major group of survivors was rescued between approximately 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. on July 19.

◊ Despite the search effort, the wreck was only later identified on the seabed off the Essequibo coast, in shallow but difficult waters.

◊ The final toll reported after the operation included 73 deaths, 76 survivors and roughly 30 people missing or presumed dead.

These facts do not support an argument that nothing was done. They support a far more troubling conclusion: what was done was not enough for the risks Guyana already knew existed.

The issue is preparedness

The State will understandably point to vessels dispatched, agencies activated, aircraft deployed, foreign help received and survivors recovered. Those facts matter. They demonstrate effort.

But a Commission of Inquiry must distinguish between effort after catastrophe and preparedness before catastrophe.

A rescue system is not judged only by how many assets it can list after an incident. It is judged by whether it can promptly answer five basic questions:

1.What vessel is in distress?

2.Where precisely is it?

3.How many people are on board?

4.What rescue assets can reach it fastest?

5.Who has command, communications control and real-time situational awareness?

On the MV Barima  record, those answers appear to have been uncertain, fragmented or dangerously delayed.

When a State relies on passenger vessels serving remote communities, it has a special duty to ensure that emergency beacons are registered, vessel manifests are accessible in real time, tracking systems work continuously, communications are redundant, and the nearest rescue platform is properly equipped and ready.

Those are not luxuries. They are the minimum infrastructure of a functioning maritime State.

“World class” requires proof

Guyana’s leaders regularly invoke the language of transformation: world-class development, modern infrastructure, regional leadership and oil-funded progress.The MV Barima disaster puts that rhetoric on trial.

A country cannot credibly claim world-class status while families depend on an emergency architecture that appears unable to instantly identify a passenger ferry from its distress beacon, reliably locate a sinking vessel, or swiftly establish the operational picture necessary for a concentrated rescue. The reported limitation that a GDF helicopter could not conduct an offshore search because of single-engine operational restrictions underscores the gap between national aspiration and available capability.

Oil wealth has made Guyana more visible, more strategically important and more financially capable. It has also raised the standard by which the country must be judged. A resource-rich State cannot plead resource scarcity when the failure concerns basic life-saving systems for citizens travelling on a regular domestic route.

Questions the COI must answer

The Commission should produce clear, named findings on the following:

◊ Why was the MV Barima permitted to operate with an emergency beacon that was reportedly unregistered?

◊ Which agency was responsible for auditing beacon registration, vessel tracking, passenger manifests and safety compliance?

◊ Why could rescuers not immediately establish the vessel’s verified identity and precise location?

◊ Which authority had real-time access to the vessel’s voyage plan, route, passenger list and emergency contacts?

◊ Why were repeated coordinates so far apart, and what validation system existed for assessing their reliability?

◊ What was the response standard for the nearest rescue asset, and was that standard met?

◊ Why were aerial assets unable to search the relevant offshore area in the early hours?

◊ What rescue-capable vessels, aircraft, radar, satellite-tracking tools and trained personnel were actually available that night?

◊ Why did the country require international assistance for a foreseeable domestic ferry emergency?

◊ Who will be disciplined, removed, sanctioned or referred for further investigation if the inquiry finds regulatory or operational breaches?

The public does not need a report that hides behind phrases such as “lessons learned,” “challenges encountered” or “areas for strengthening.” Those formulations are often bureaucratic camouflage for failures that had names, offices, budgets and warning signs.

The required remedy

The outcome cannot be another shelf report. It must include enforceable reforms:

◊ Mandatory, verified registration and periodic testing of all EPIRBs and other distress beacons

◊ Continuous GPS/AIS tracking for every licensed passenger ferry, visible to the MRCC in real time

◊ Digitized passenger manifests transmitted before departure and updated at every embarkation point

◊ A dedicated, properly staffed 24-hour maritime command centre with a unified operational picture

◊ Offshore-capable rescue helicopters or contracted aviation capacity, with clear night-search protocols

◊ Permanently positioned, properly crewed rescue craft along high-risk riverine and coastal corridors

◊ Mandatory independent safety audits of public passenger vessels, published in full

◊ Annual national mass-casualty maritime exercises, with results disclosed to the public

◊ A public incident-log protocol showing alert time, confirmation time, deployment time, arrival time and rescue outcomes

◊ Personal accountability for officials and operators who ignore or circumvent safety requirements

The central truth

The rescuers may have done their best. That is not the same as the State having done its duty.

Operation Hawkeye should be remembered not simply as a rescue mission, but as evidence of the distance between Guyana’s development narrative and the lived security of its people. The men, women and children who boarded the MV Barima  were not asking for luxury. They were entitled to a transport system in which a distress call triggered immediate identification, accurate location, rapid rescue and competent command

.Anything less is not world class.It is abandonment dressed up as aspiration.

Guyana Cannot Call Itself a Flourishing Democracy While Its Safeguards Are Eroding

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 Guyana Cannot Call Itself a Flourishing Democracy While Its Safeguards Are Eroding

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

The Government of Guyana may continue to speak in the language of democratic progress, economic transformation and international respectability. But the latest World Justice Project Rule of Law Index delivers a sobering counterpoint: Guyana is ranked 81st out of 143 countries globally, 18th out of 32 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 50th among 51 high-income countries.
That is not the profile of a flourishing democracy. It is the profile of a country whose wealth may be rising while its democratic safeguards remain weak, vulnerable and increasingly questioned.

The World Justice Project is not an opposition party, a local activist group, or a newspaper with a political axe to grind. Its Rule of Law Index draws on more than 214,000 household and expert surveys worldwide and assesses how people experience the rule of law in daily life—from accountability and transparency to fundamental rights, justice and constraints on power.  When such an international benchmark records Guyana’s decline, responsible leaders should not dismiss the finding. They should confront it.

Wealth is not democracy

Guyana’s placement near the bottom of the high-income grouping is especially revealing. A country can possess vast oil revenues, boast unprecedented growth figures and host high-level international delegations, yet still fail to establish the institutions that make democracy real for ordinary people.

Democracy is not measured by ribbon-cuttings, public-relations campaigns or the frequency of government announcements.

It is measured by whether citizens can criticize those in authority without intimidation; whether journalists can investigate public spending without obstruction; whether civil society can organize freely; whether public information is accessible; and whether the executive is subject to genuine oversight.

Those are not peripheral questions. They are the foundation of constitutional government.

If Guyana’s economy is being recast by petroleum wealth, then its democratic institutions should be strengthening at an even faster pace. Instead, the WJP’s findings point to concern over the very safeguards meant to prevent concentrated power from becoming unchecked power.

Freedom cannot be selective

The warning signs surrounding freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association, and civic participation deserve special attention. These are not abstract indicators devised for international reports. They describe the practical space available to citizens to speak, organize, protest, question and participate in public life.

A government confident in its record does not fear scrutiny. It does not treat disagreement as disloyalty. It does not equate criticism with sabotage, nor should it tolerate the use of state authority, public resources or partisan networks to marginalize dissenting voices.

Citizens understand this from lived experience. They see it when information is withheld or delayed. They see it when public consultation is reduced to ceremony. They see it when important decisions are announced after the fact rather than debated before they are made. They see it when public criticism is met with hostility instead of answers.

That lived reality matters. The rule of law is not only about what is written in statutes or proclaimed at podiums. It is about whether a citizen feels protected when challenging power and whether institutions act independently when the powerful are involved.

Executive power needs real checks

The WJP has warned globally that executive interference and improper government influence are driving declines in civil and criminal justice, while deterioration in checks on government authority remains a defining feature of the worldwide rule-of-law recession.

Guyana must take that warning seriously.

No democracy is secure when oversight institutions appear weak, delayed, politically influenced or unwilling to act with equal force across political and social lines. No democracy is secure when accountability depends on who is being investigated, who holds office, who has connections, or whose interests are at stake.

The question is not whether Guyana has agencies, commissions, courts and constitutional offices on paper. The question is whether they work independently, consistently and transparently in practice.

The country requires institutions that can investigate without political direction, regulators who publish decisions and reasons, procurement systems open to public examination, police and prosecutors trusted to act fairly, and courts equipped to deliver justice without delay or influence.

Oil heightens the risk

Guyana’s oil boom makes these concerns more urgent, not less.

Resource wealth can build a country when it is managed transparently, invested wisely and governed under firm public oversight. But it can also concentrate power, expand patronage, weaken scrutiny and create an official culture in which access to public resources is treated as political entitlement.

That is why transparency, free expression, public participation and institutional independence are not obstacles to development. They are protections against the capture of development.

A nation receiving billions in petroleum revenues cannot ask its people to accept secrecy, limited consultation or weak oversight as the price of progress. The public has a right to know how national resources are managed, which commitments are being made in its name, how contracts are supervised, and whether the benefits of the country’s wealth are reaching communities fairly.

The government must answer

The appropriate response to the WJP findings is not denial. It is reform.

The Government should publicly address Guyana’s ranking and set out measurable steps to strengthen democratic accountability. Those steps should include:

♦ Publishing timely and complete information on public spending, procurement, contracts, concessions and oil-revenue management.

♦ Protecting the right of journalists, citizens, trade unions, community organizations and political opponents to criticize the state without intimidation or retaliation.

♦ Strengthening independent oversight bodies through adequate resources, transparent appointments and public reporting.

♦ Ensuring meaningful—not symbolic—consultation on major national projects, legislation and policies.

♦ Improving access to justice, reducing case backlogs and protecting the operational independence of the courts and legal institutions.

♦ Treating government information as a public asset rather than a privilege to be selectively released.

♦ Establishing clear consequences for misconduct, corruption, abuse of office and interference with public institutions.

These are not radical demands. They are the minimum standards expected of a government that claims to lead a democratic society.

A democratic test

Guyana should not be content to compare itself only with countries in deeper crisis. It should compare itself with the democratic standard it promises its own people.

The WJP notes that Uruguay, Costa Rica and Barbados remain among the region’s stronger rule-of-law performers, while 19 of the 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries registered declines during the past year.  Guyana must decide whether it will accept erosion as normal, or undertake the difficult work of building institutions capable of resisting political pressure and protecting citizens’ rights.

A flourishing democracy is not one that merely holds elections. It is one in which citizens can question authority, organize without fear, obtain information, seek justice, expose wrongdoing and expect the law to apply equally to those with power and those without it. Guyana’s 2026 rule-of-law ranking is therefore more than a number. It is a warning. And it should be treated as one.

 

A World-Class Claim Meets a Callous Reality

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 A World-Class Claim Meets a Callous Reality

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

The most damning testimony before the Commission of Inquiry into the MV “Barima disaster did not come from a hostile critic of the Government. It came from the Commander of the Guyana Defense Force Coast Guard himself. Commander David Shamsudeen reportedly told the Commission that joint search-and-rescue exercises had not been conducted “in a while” because there was “no need for it.” Pressed by Commission Chairman Justice Godfrey Smith on whether that was truly his position, the Commander confirmed it: Guyana had not had such an incident, therefore there was no need for the exercise.

That answer should alarm every Guyanese.

Search-and-rescue exercises are not held because disaster has already occurred. They are held because disaster can occur at any time. They are designed to ensure that, when lives are at risk at sea, agencies do not meet for the first time in the middle of darkness, bad weather, panic, confused communications and mounting casualties.

To say there was “no need” for joint training because no major disaster had recently occurred turns emergency preparedness upside down. It treats prevention as optional, readiness as unnecessary and training as a luxury to be considered only after tragedy has exposed the consequences of its absence.

That is not preparedness. It is complacency.

A Commander’s Own Evidence

The testimony becomes even more disturbing when placed beside the Commander’s reported acknowledgement that the Coast Guard’s standard operating procedures were not updated during his three-year tenure, and that he was unfamiliar with the specific International Aeronautical and Maritime Search and Rescue manual and how it applies in Guyana

.No citizen should have to hear that a Coast Guard commander, leading a service responsible for maritime response, could not point to current operational procedures, regular joint exercises and familiarity with the internationally recognized framework specifically developed for aeronautical and maritime search-and-rescue coordination.

The IAMSAR framework exists because maritime disasters do not announce themselves politely. Distress alerts, missing vessels, survivors in the water, severe weather, night operations, communications failures, uncertain coordinates and multiple agencies are precisely the conditions in which prior training, tested procedures and coordinated command structures matter most.

A country does not wait for a catastrophe to learn how to manage one.

The MV Barima inquiry has already heard evidence that distress coordinates were relayed to the Coast Guard within minutes of the initial satellite alert. It has also heard that the wreck was formally located more than 39 hours after the first coordinates were received. Those are matters for the Commission to assess fully and fairly, but they underline why a nation cannot approach emergency coordination casually.

Seven Years of Offshore Oil

This is where the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.

Guyana became an oil-producing state on 20 December 2019, when the Liza Destiny began production offshore. Since then, offshore oil activity has transformed the country’s economy, expanded its international profile and placed growing numbers of workers, vessels and critical facilities in the maritime environment.

Yet, by the Commander’s own account, there was supposedly no need during his three-year tenure to conduct a joint search-and-rescue exercise.

♦ No need—despite offshore production.

♦ No need—despite foreign and Guyanese workers operating far from shore.

♦ No need—despite supply vessels, helicopters, support craft, commercial fishing, passenger boats and cargo traffic sharing Guyana’s waters.

♦ No need—despite the obvious prospect of an offshore medical emergency, fire, collision, evacuation, man-overboard incident, aviation mishap, severe-weather event or oil-sector emergency.

What exactly does the Government mean when it speaks of building a “world-class” Guyana?

A world-class country does not merely acquire oil revenues, modern buildings, international conferences and expensive public-relations slogans. A world-class country builds competent institutions. It trains its responders before lives are lost. It keeps standard operating procedures current. It knows the international rules. It tests communication systems. It practises unified command. It reviews its failures honestly and corrects them urgently.

A world-class country does not tell its people that emergency training was unnecessary because the emergency had not happened yet.

Questions That Demand Answers

The CoI must be allowed to complete its work without prejudice, and no final finding should be made before all evidence is examined. But the testimony already disclosed raises urgent public-interest questions that cannot be brushed aside.

The Government, the Guyana Defense Force and the Coast Guard must tell the country:

♦ When was the last full joint national search-and-rescue exercise involving the Coast Guard, Air Corps, Maritime Administration Department, port authorities, police, civil defense, health authorities, private maritime operators and offshore oil-sector stakeholders?

♦ If no such exercise was held during Commander Shamsudeen’s three-year tenure, who decided that one was unnecessary?

♦ What current Coast Guard SOP governs a major maritime emergency, and when was it last reviewed, revised and tested?

♦ Does Guyana have a functioning national maritime search-and-rescue plan, and is it aligned with IAMSAR standards?

♦ Which agency has lead responsibility for coordinating a mass-casualty maritime event?

♦ How many Coast Guard officers have been trained in IAMSAR procedures, incident command and multi-agency search coordination?

♦ What readiness obligations are imposed on offshore operators and contractors, and when were they last tested jointly with Guyanese emergency services?

♦ Will the Government publish a timetable for regular, independently assessed national SAR exercises?

These are not partisan questions. They are life-and-death questions.

The People Deserve Better

The men and women who work offshore deserve to know that, if an emergency happens, Guyana has a trained, rehearsed and coordinated response—not an improvised one.

Passengers who use river and coastal transport deserve to know that distress alerts will trigger a system that has been tested before—not a chain of agencies forced to discover their roles after a vessel sinks.

Families deserve to know that public authorities have treated preparedness as a duty, not an afterthought.

And Guyanese taxpayers deserve to know how a country transformed by oil wealth could allow a critical national security and public-safety function to operate without regular joint exercises, updated procedures and a demonstrated command familiarity with core search-and-rescue standards.

The revelation is a callous embarrassment. It punctures the rhetoric of “world-class” development and exposes a far more troubling possibility: that Guyana is building wealth faster than it is building institutional competence.

The MV Barima tragedy must not be reduced to another cycle of condolences, hearings, promises and official defensiveness. It must force a national reckoning.

Preparedness is not measured by what leaders say after lives are lost. It is measured by what they ordered, funded, trained, tested and audited before the emergency came.