The Architecture Before the Amendment

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA 

The Architecture Before the Amendment

PART I OF A TWO-PART SERIES

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

What Forty Years of Term-Limit Evasion Teaches Guyana About the Number 44

 A Washington advocacy group— Freedom House newest accounting of global democratic backsliding contains a finding that should unsettle anyone tracking Guyana’s National Assembly arithmetic: in at least thirty-six countries, sitting heads of state have altered term-limit law or benefited directly from someone else altering it. Not one of those thirty-six woke up an autocrat. Each became one through a sequence — and the sequence, almost without exception, begins in the legislature, not the constitution.

Presidents are increasingly circumventing term-limit restrictions. In at least 36 countries worldwide, current heads of state have altered the rules or benefited from such changes to remain in power.

That distinction is the subject of this piece. Guyana is not among Freedom House’s thirty-six. No government minister has proposed touching Article 90’s two-term presidential limit, and this Board makes no claim that one intends to. What this op-ed does claim, and will document here, is that the precondition for every rewrite Freedom House catalogued — a legislative supermajority assembled by whatever means available — is the same precondition now being assembled in Guyana’s own Assembly, seat by defected seat. Part II of this series will apply that arithmetic directly. Part I exists to prove, with named precedent, that the arithmetic matters at all.

THE SEQUENCE, NOT THE SYMPTOM

It is tempting to read term-limit evasion as a single dramatic act; a referendum, a coup, a strongman’s signature. Freedom House’s cases show the opposite.

The removal of a term limit is almost always the last step in a longer process of legislative capture, and by the time it happens, it is close to a formality.

Cameroon is the cleanest illustration. Paul Biya’s 1996 constitution gave him two terms. He did not challenge that limit directly. Instead, in 2008, his National Assembly; not Biya himself — passed the constitutional amendment that cleared his path to a third term and, eventually, a seventh. The vote came first. The presidency-for-life came after, almost as an afterthought once the votes existed to deliver it. Biya is now ninety-three and has governed Cameroon for over four decades under a system his own legislature, not the streets or the courts, made possible.

El Salvador offers a faster version of the same sequence. President Nayib Bukele did not need a referendum or a coup. He needed a legislature he controlled outright. Once his party held that supermajority, the amendment — extending terms from five to six years and abolishing limits altogether passed as legislative business, not national crisis. The Assembly vote was the event. Everything after was administration.

Togo went further still, and its case is the most structurally relevant one here. Rather than amend a presidential term limit, Togo’s National Assembly rewrote the constitution in 2024 to abolish the presidential system itself, replacing it with a parliamentary one. President Faure Gnassingbé; already twenty years in power, having inherited the office from his father — simply became “President of the Council of Ministers,” an unelected post created by the same legislative majority that had kept his family in power, carrying no term limit at all. No one voted to extend Gnassingbé’s presidency. The legislature that already answered to him voted to make the presidency, and its limits, irrelevant.

Three countries. Three different final instruments. One identical precondition: control of the chamber that writes the rules.

WHAT THE CHAMBER REQUIRES

Freedom House’s report is explicit that democratic institutions with genuine checks and balances tend to arrest this sequence before it completes — Senegal’s Constitutional Council blocking Macky Sall’s election delay in 2024, Indonesia’s coalition brokers denying Joko Widodo a third-term run, are cited as the cases where the mechanism was tried and failed. What separated those failures from Cameroon, El Salvador, and Togo’s successes was not public sentiment, which opposed the incumbent in all five cases. It was arithmetic. Sall and Widodo did not command the legislative numbers to force the question past institutions built to stop them. Biya, Bukele, and Gnassingbé did.

This is the mechanism this analyst has been tracking under a different name. In “The Carrot and the Count,” published on these pages, this publication documented a pattern of PPP-C absorption of opposition-aligned figures — James Bond, Shurwayne Holder, Daniel Seeram, Samuel Sandy, Wayne Maison, among others  and argued that the pattern functions as coordinated entrenchment strategy rather than isolated career moves. The government’s coalition currently holds 36 of the National Assembly’s 65 seats.

Guyana’s constitutional amendment threshold is a two-thirds majority: 44 seats. The distance between 36 and 44 is not abstract. It is eight defections, or some combination of defection and coalition, away from being closed.

Guyana’s president already operates under a two-term limit written into Article 90 after the 2000 constitutional reforms. That limit stands. This publication is not suggesting otherwise, and readers should treat with skepticism anyone on either side of the aisle — who claims a rule change is imminent. It is not, on present evidence.

What Freedom House’s cross-country record establishes is something more precise and, this writer would argue, more urgent to name early: nowhere in the thirty-six-country dataset did the rule change arrive before the votes to pass it existed. The votes came first, accumulated gradually, often over years, often through mechanisms — defection, patronage, coalition absorption  that looked unremarkable in isolation and were reported, where they were reported at all, as routine political horse-trading rather than as the architecture of anything. Cameroon’s amendment took twelve years of legislative consolidation to arrive at its 2008 vote. Togo’s took nearly two decades. The pattern this analyst has documented in Guyana’s Assembly did not begin this year, and the number 44 did not appear from nowhere — it is the same number every one of these cases eventually had to reach, under a different flag, in a different hemisphere, for the same structural reason.

WHY THIS IS PUBLISHED NOW, NOT LATER

There is an argument for waiting — for writing this piece only if and when a constitutional amendment is actually tabled, when the case is undeniable and the reporting uncontestable. This Board rejects that argument on the same grounds Freedom House’s own report implicitly makes: by the time the amendment is tabled in countries where this sequence completes, the votes to pass it are already secured, and the public conversation that might have mattered is already over. Cameroon’s National Assembly vote in 2008 was not a surprise to anyone counting seats in 2006. Togo’s 2024 constitution was not a surprise to anyone who had watched Gnassingbé’s coalition consolidate through the 2010s. The utility of naming a mechanism is entirely in naming it before it completes, not after.

Part II of this series will set Guyana’s arithmetic against this comparative record directly — the 2031 election timeline, the defection pattern by name and date, and what a closed eight-seat gap would actually permit under Guyana’s own constitutional amendment procedure.

This piece has been about establishing that the concern is not speculative alarmism. It is a documented global pattern, with a name, a sequence, and thirty-six governments’ worth of precedent — and Guyana’s National Assembly is currently closer to the threshold that pattern requires than it was a year ago.

— The Board

This report looks solely at presidential and semipresidential systems. While parliamentary systems generally lack term-limit requirements for the prime minister, parliamentary democracies feature many ways to hold the office to account. For example, a prime minister who is indirectly elected by a directly elected legislature is only able to stay in office as long as they maintain lawmakers’ confidence. If they lose popularity lawmakers can vote to replace them.

 

Source: Cathryn Grothe and Grady Vaughan, “Overstaying Their Welcome: The Problem of Presidential Term Limit Evasion,” Freedom House.

Democracy for Sale?

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Democracy for Sale?

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

The United States is preparing to use the Organization of American States to isolate Nicaragua after Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo pushed through constitutional changes designed to extinguish what remained of democratic competition in the country. The changes reportedly ban most political opposition, target parties with foreign funding, and extend the presidential term from 6 to 7 years—renewable, of course.

Washington’s condemnation is justified. Ortega’s regime has earned no presumption of good faith.

Since the 2018 protests, Nicaragua has endured a brutal and sustained campaign of political repression: demonstrators killed, opponents imprisoned, journalists silenced, civic groups dismantled, universities shuttered, religious institutions harassed, and hundreds of citizens forced into exile or stripped of nationality.

Elections have been hollowed out. Independent public life has been placed under siege. The state increasingly serves not the Nicaraguan people but the political survival of one ruling family

.There is no credible democratic defense of this record. Ortega and Murillo are not protecting a revolution from foreign sabotage; they are protecting their hold on power from the judgment of their own people.

But the United States cannot credibly present itself as the uncompromising guardian of democratic principle while treating democracy as a slogan in Managua and a bargaining chip in Caracas.

That is the central indictment.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Ortega and Murillo are waging a “war on democracy” that threatens the stability and prosperity of the hemisphere. True enough. But where does that standard go when Washington pursues enormous commercial arrangements with Venezuela’s ruling apparatus, represented by Delcy Rodríguez?

Rosario Murillo and Daniel Ortega

Rodríguez is not the product of a transparent, competitive, internationally credible electoral mandate. She did not rise to authority through a free contest in which Venezuelans had an unfettered ability to organize, campaign, vote, and see their votes respected. Yet the United States has demonstrated its willingness to conduct high-stakes energy and economic business with the Venezuelan state when oil markets, migration pressures, geopolitical calculations, or corporate interests dictate it.

This is not a demand that the United States refuse all contact with Caracas. Diplomacy is not a purity test. Governments sometimes must negotiate with adversaries and authoritarian governments. They do so to secure the release of prisoners, protect citizens, reduce migration pressures, prevent armed conflict, stabilize energy markets, or advance humanitarian access.

The problem is not diplomacy. The problem is hypocrisy dressed as principle.

If Washington wishes to deal with Venezuela pragmatically, it should say so plainly. It should acknowledge that national interest is influencing its choices. It should not then mount a moral crusade against Nicaragua as though the United States applies one consistent rule across the hemisphere: democratic legitimacy for all, or preferential treatment for none.

The distinction becomes even more glaring because the same tools used to justify pressure on Nicaragua—political exclusion, institutional capture, suppression of dissent, and the erosion of electoral legitimacy—are the very concerns that have long defined the Venezuelan crisis. The United States cannot insist that Ortega’s manipulation of institutions makes him untouchable while accepting arrangements with officials empowered by a political system Washington itself has repeatedly described as authoritarian and illegitimate.

That is not principled statecraft. It is selective enforcement.

And selective enforcement has consequences. It gives Ortega the propaganda he needs. It allows Managua to dismiss legitimate criticism as another exercise in US imperial preference. It reinforces the claim—frequently made by authoritarian governments—that Washington’s concern for rights and elections evaporates whenever oil, security cooperation, migration control, or commercial access is on the table.

Ortega’s arguments may be cynical, but US inconsistency makes them easier to sell.

The OAS Test

The OAS now faces its own credibility test.

Nicaragua formally withdrew from the organization, a process completed in 2023 after years of conflict over the regime’s human rights record. That means the OAS has limited direct leverage over Managua. It cannot simply compel democratic reform through a resolution or restore political rights through condemnation alone.

But it can still matter.

The organization can create a clear hemispheric record of Nicaragua’s democratic collapse. It can coordinate diplomatic pressure. It can call on member states to limit normal political engagement with the Ortega-Murillo government. It can support independent documentation of abuses, amplify the voices of exiled Nicaraguans, defend political prisoners and their families, and press for the restoration of citizenship and civil rights to those arbitrarily stripped of both.

Most importantly, it can refuse to normalize the destruction of an entire political system.

Yet the OAS must avoid becoming merely a stage on which Washington performs outrage against an adversary it has already chosen to punish. If the body is to retain authority, its members must make clear that their concern is not obedience to the United States. Their concern must be the basic democratic rights of Nicaraguans: the right to organize, speak, worship, report, protest, compete for office, and remove a government peacefully.

That standard cannot be negotiable.

 A Hemispheric Double Standard

The United States has enormous influence in the Americas. With that influence comes a choice.

It can support democracy consistently, even when doing so complicates energy deals, migration agreements, security arrangements, and corporate ambitions. Or it can continue applying democratic standards selectively—harshly against governments deemed hostile, flexibly against governments deemed useful.

The second path may yield short-term transactions. It will not create long-term credibility.

A foreign policy based exclusively on moral posturing is naïve. A foreign policy based exclusively on commercial and strategic expediency is corrosive. Responsible statecraft requires both interests and values—but it also requires honesty when the two collide.

Washington should condemn Ortega without qualification. It should press Nicaragua’s government to restore political pluralism, free political prisoners, halt persecution of journalists and civic organizations, and permit genuinely competitive elections. It should support Nicaraguan civil society, refugees, and exiles without imposing suffering on ordinary citizens already trapped under an increasingly authoritarian state.

But it should also stop pretending that democracy is an inviolable principle when confronting Ortega and an optional consideration when making billion-dollar arrangements with Venezuela’s unelected governing class.

The people of Nicaragua deserve more than rhetorical solidarity. They deserve coherent action.

And the hemisphere deserves something better than a democracy doctrine that changes according to who controls the oil, who controls the migration routes, and who is useful to Washington at a given moment.

The United States can be the leader of a principled democratic coalition—or it can be the manager of a transactional sphere of influence. It cannot convincingly be both.

Energy Is Economics — Until the Bill Comes Due in Linden

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Energy Is Economics — Until the Bill Comes Due in Linden

OPINION BY: Staff Writer— September 2026

The Chief Investment Officer’s Caribbean Energy Week pitch treats the equation as a matter of national competitiveness. Region Ten has been living the same equation as a matter of survival, and no one in government has offered it the same theory of value.

Peter Ramsaroop stood before Caribbean Energy Week and delivered a formula clean enough to fit on a slide: “Energy is economics.” The cost, reliability and availability of power, he said, determine what a nation can produce, what it can export, and how competitive it becomes. He is not wrong. It is, in fact, one of the more honest sentences to come out of a Guyanese government platform this year. The trouble is that Mr. Ramsaroop delivered it as an investment thesis for 2027, aimed at capital, LNG buyers and regional integration planners — while the government he speaks for has spent 2026 failing to apply that same formula to a town two hours down the highway.

If energy is economics for a refinery, a data centre or a manufacturing cluster courted at a Marriott ballroom, it is economics for a Linden household running a freezer off a generator during rolling blackouts. It is economics for the shop that cannot keep product cold, the clinic that cannot guarantee refrigerated medicine, the student doing homework by phone-light. The Chief Investment Officer’s framework does not stop being true at the Soesdyke-Linden Highway. It simply stops being applied there.

THE NUMBER THE SLIDE DECK SKIPS

This newsroom has already put the arithmetic on the record. At roughly 900,000 barrels a day and a government take of 39.8 percent post-cost-recovery, Guyana’s oil revenue runs near $26.9 million a day — better than $1.1 million an hour. Linden’s power shortfall, by GPL’s own numbers, is under 1 megawatt against a town of roughly 40,000 people. This is not a resource-constrained state pleading capacity limits.

This is a treasury collecting over a million dollars an hour that could not, on its own initiative, close a sub-megawatt gap; until a private mining company, Bosai, stepped in with generators the government itself is supposed to regulate.

A government does not get to lecture the region on the economics of energy while outsourcing its own energy obligations to the companies it regulates.

That is not partnership. That is abdication dressed up afterward as ceremony — and it was this newsroom’s own framing when GPL, Bosai and Guyana Manganese Inc. signed their generator donation in August. The same logic applies here with more force, because Mr. Ramsaroop’s speech makes the omission harder to excuse. He has now put the state’s own theory of energy value on paper. He has conceded, on the government’s behalf, that energy access is the precondition for competitiveness, for participation, for wealth creation.

Region Ten is entitled to ask why that precondition has been denied to it for years while GPL’s own solar pipeline for the area stretches out toward 2028.

WHOSE COMPETITIVENESS, EXACTLY?

Read closely, the Caribbean Energy Week pitch is addressed to a very specific audience: policymakers, investors, energy leaders, industry stakeholders. It promises that lower energy costs will make “industries that were previously difficult to establish or expand” commercially viable — manufacturing, agro-processing, logistics, tourism. Every one of those sectors requires ordinary citizens as workers, suppliers and consumers before it requires foreign capital. A poultry cluster, a bean storage facility, a hinterland tourism circuit; all recent government initiatives this news media  has tracked ; depend on the same reliable power the state cannot yet guarantee its own regions.

You cannot build the industries of the energy dividend on top of a population still waiting for the energy.

 

So we ask it plainly, in the prosecutorial terms this policy invites: Is “energy is economics” a governing philosophy, or is it a marketing line reserved for foreign delegations? If the formula is real, does it apply to the citizen of Linden with the same weight it applies to the LNG investor being courted for July 2027? If the government believes, as it now says it does, that energy determines competitiveness, participation and wealth — what is its account of the years Linden spent without that competitiveness, that participation, that wealth, while the state collected record hydrocarbon revenue in the interim?

Mr. Ramsaroop closed his remarks by framing the real question as” no longer how much energy Guyana can produce, but what can be built because of it, and how ordinary people participate in the wealth it creates?” This publication agrees with the question. It simply notes that Linden has been asking it for longer, and has yet to receive an answer that did not arrive by way of a mining company’s donated generators.

Energy is economics. The government has now said so itself. It owes the country an explanation for why that principle governs its pitch to investors and not its obligations to its own citizens.

— THE BOARD

The View From Next Door

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The View From Next Door

What Venezuela’s Oil Surrender Should Teach Guyana

EDITORIAL◊ANALYSIS BY: Hem Kumar —September 2026

There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from watching a neighbor’s house catch fire and realizing your fence shares a boundary line with the blaze. That is the position Guyana now occupies, watching Washington and Caracas;  or what remains of governance in Caracas — carve up 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oi in a deal that Elliott Abrams, no stranger to the machinery of US Venezuela policy, has called something close to a betrayal of the very people Washington claims to be liberating.

Abrams’s analysis, published in the Washington Post, deserves to be read in Georgetown with the kind of discernment that only proximity can sharpen. He is not a hostile critic of American power in the region. He is a former Trump administration official; the special representative for Venezuela in Trump’s first term;  writing from inside the tent, and even he cannot dress this up as anything other than what it is: a hundred-year grant of a nation’s mineral wealth, negotiated with an unelected government, delivered to a businessman under a Swiss arrest warrant, with no payment to the Venezuelan people and no mandate from them either.

The paradox is not subtle. The same administration that toppled Maduro in January under the banner of restoring democracy has now pivoted to guaranteeing the permanence of his successor, Delcy Rodríguez;  installed, unelected, and by every credible polling measure deeply unpopular against opposition leader María Corina Machado. Abrams’s framing is precise: Trump wanted stability and democracy in January; six months later, he wants oil, and stability has become a euphemism for whichever government signs the paperwork.

WHY GUYANA CANNOT WATCH THIS AS A BYSTANDER

Guyana’s instinct — understandable, even sensible in the short term ; will be to treat this as a Venezuela story. It is not. It is a story about the terms on which Washington is now willing to transact for hydrocarbons in this hemisphere, and Guyana is the other petrostate in the room.

Three flags belong on Georgetown’s desk, not Caracas’s:

First, the equity-versus-royalty distinction matters more than it did a month ago. The Venezuela structure — a 35 percent US equity stake in a private company plus rights to 20 percent of output for a century, without payment  is a materially different animal from a production-sharing agreement negotiated with an elected government under its own hydrocarbons law, however imperfect that law’s terms may be. Guyana has spent years litigating, publicly and otherwise, the adequacy of the 2016 Stabroek PSA. That fight, whatever its outcomes, has occurred inside a framework of elected government and — a nominally  domestic legal process. Venezuela shows what the alternative looks like when the government signing is not accountable to anyone who can vote it out.

Second, watch who Washington is willing to sit across the table from. Abrams is explicit that officials in this administration lobbied to help Alejandro Betancourt — the businessman at the centre of the deal,  resolve a Swiss money-laundering warrant and clear his travel restrictions. That is not a detail. That is a data point about how far commercial expedience now travels inside US foreign policy when oil is the prize. A government willing to launder a crony’s legal exposure in Caracas is a government worth watching closely wherever else it is negotiating extraction rights.

Third, the elections test is the tell:  and it applies regionally, not just to Venezuela. Abrams names it directly: if Washington starts arguing that 2027 elections in Venezuela are “too difficult,” that will be proof the oil deal was the sellout it appears to be. Guyana should apply the same test to its own relationship with Washington — not because anyone is predicting an equivalent scenario here, but because the instinct to treat electoral timelines as negotiable when commercial interests are at stake is exactly the instinct this deal reveals. It is worth asking, publicly and often, whether any accountability language in Guyana’s own security and economic MoUs with the US carries teeth, or whether it is aspirational the way Trump’s January democracy pledge to Venezuela turned out to be.

THE DISTINCTION GUYANA MUST HOLD ONTO

None of this is an argument that American capital or American security cooperation is inherently corrosive to Guyana. The free flow of investment, under rule of law, is precisely what Abrams credits for Guyana’s own oil expansion;  he cites it approvingly as the model Venezuela should have followed. That is worth Georgetown’s attention too: the piece treats Guyana as the positive counterexample to what is happening in Venezuela.

But a model only holds if the underlying conditions that earned the compliment stay true — elected government, functioning legal process, deals that survive public scrutiny. Guyana’s task, watching this fire next door, is not to assume immunity because a foreign policy op-ed happened to name-check it favourably. It is to ask, with the same discernment Abrams is applying to Venezuela, whether every one of its own arrangements: port financing, security MoUs, the Stabroek PSA’s unresolved terms — would survive the same test if the names were changed.

Tread softly does not mean tread silently. It means Guyana’s institutions: parliamentary, civil society, and press  need to be doing the auditing work now, while the comparison is instructive and cheap, rather than after the fact, when it becomes merely descriptive.

THE INSTRUMENTS THAT DESERVE THE TEST, NAMED

Abstraction is easy to nod along to and easy to forget. Guyana’s own instruments should be named, not gestured at:

The air domain awareness — drone MoU (August 12, 2026). A US$2 million agreement, signed by Foreign Minister Hugh Todd and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, for unmanned aerial systems and surveillance cooperation, framed around counter-narcotics and organized crime. No public detail exists on data-sharing architecture, who controls the surveillance feed, or what operational access Washington gains in exchange. A modest dollar figure should not be mistaken for a modest arrangement — the Betancourt precedent shows Washington’s willingness to extend far more than money buys when the strategic prize is right. This MoU has never been tested publicly against the question: what does the US get, precisely, and does Guyana’s Parliament know the answer?

The Bechtel/Hess Berbice deepwater port arrangement (2025-26). A feasibility study cost-shared between the Guyanese government and Hess Corporation — itself a Stabroek Block consortium partner;  for a port whose Chinese pre-feasibility predecessor (2015, China State Construction Engineering Company) appears to have simply lapsed rather than been formally superseded. A port financed and built by the same commercial interests that hold the offshore concession is not automatically corrupt, but it is automatically a conflict worth naming, and worth asking whether the Modern Port Act contains any provision addressing foreign operational control.

The underlying Stabroek PSA itself. Years of accountability argument about the adequacy of its terms have proceeded on the assumption that the signatory government was elected and answerable. Venezuela is the demonstration of what changes when that assumption fails. Guyana’s advantage is that the assumption currently holds — which is precisely why it is worth defending rather than taking for granted.

None of these three should be read as accusations. They should be read as the specific, named list of things Georgetown’s press, Parliament, and civil society owe scrutiny to now, while the Venezuela comparison is fresh enough to be instructive rather than merely retrospective.

THE PATTERN, AND WHAT IT MAY PREVIEW

Here the Venezuela deal stops being an instructive analogy and starts being a warning. Abrams’s elections test — watch whether Washington argues 2027 is “too difficult” for Venezuela;  is not a one-off tell. It is a pattern, and patterns repeat with the players who set them.

The precedent sits uncomfortably close to home already. The Venezuela oil arrangement was made possible in part because Chinese and Russian commercial presence was displaced from the field first — the ground was cleared before the deal was cut. That sequencing is not incidental. It is close to a playbook: reduce the rival power’s footprint, then negotiate the resource access that follows.

Guyana should read its own moment through that lens rather than assume immunity. If murmurs begin circulating from within the Trump administration  officials, envoys, or surrogates encouraging or applying pressure toward the reduction of Chinese investment, infrastructure participation, or commercial presence in Guyana, that should not be read as an isolated ask. It should be read as a prompt, consistent with the pattern next door, and it raises questions Georgetown cannot afford to leave rhetorical:

What, specifically, does Washington want from Guyana in exchange for its continued strategic backing? What would the Ali administration be asked to concede — access, equity, basing rights, surveillance data, port control — and on what terms? Would such concessions be structured as genuine partnership, or would they follow the Caracas model: an arrangement that entrenches the current government’s convenience rather than the country’s long-term interest, granted in exchange for facilitation rather than earned through accountable governance? And beneath all of it, the harder question: is Washington’s interest in Guyana’s stability conditional on this particular government remaining in power indefinitely — or would it, as in Venezuela, tolerate real democratic contestation even if that contestation produced an outcome less convenient to American commercial interests?

These are not accusations either. They are the legitimate questions a country watching its neighbour’s house burn should be asking about its own wiring, before the smoke reaches this side of the fence.

— The Board

A Minister Cannot Deny a By-Law and Revoke It on the Same Day

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

A Minister Cannot Deny a By-Law and Revoke It on the Same Day

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

The revocation of the Linden Town Council’s 2016 toll by-laws is not merely a dispute over a toll point at Kara Kara. It raises grave questions of ministerial consistency, statutory authority and respect for the autonomy of elected local-government institutions.

 On September 1, 2026, the Minister of Local Government and Regional Development wrote to Linden Town Clerk Lennox Gasper asserting that the Ministry had “not authorized the imposition of or collection of any toll-charges at Kara Kara Public Road or anywhere else in Linden.” More strikingly, the letter declared that “no By-law or Order was issued and published” by a Minister responsible for Local Government to authorize such collection.

Yet, on that same date, the Official Gazette carried Order No. 172 of 2026, signed by the same Minister. The Order expressly revoked the Linden Town Council (Toll) By-Laws 2016—By-Laws No. 1 of 2016—which had been published in the Official Gazette on August 20, 2016.

That contradiction demands an answer.

If no by-law existed, as the Minister’s letter represented, what precisely was she revoking? A non-existent law cannot be annulled. A Minister does not issue a formal revocation order, publish it in the Official Gazette, and invoke statutory provisions to extinguish something that never existed.

The Minister’s own Order acknowledges what her letter denied: that there was a Linden Town Council toll by-law, that it was made in 2016, and that it had been published in the Official Gazette. The 2016 instrument was not an informal arrangement or a roadside invention. It imposed tolls for road use, prescribed payment arrangements, identified the classes of vehicles liable to pay, and carried the record that it was made by the Linden Town Council and approved by the responsible Minister before gazetting.

The Schedule to those by-laws prescribed charges for 18 categories of vehicles, ranging from G$2,000 to G$7,000. This was plainly a legislative scheme—not an unauthorized collection exercise operating outside the law.

The issue is therefore not whether a by-law existed. The documentary evidence makes that question impossible to evade. The real issue is whether the Minister possessed lawful authority to revoke an approved and gazetted municipal by-law in the manner she chose.

Order No. 172 invokes sections 304 and 305 of the Municipal and District Councils Act, Cap. 28:01. Those provisions are associated with the authority of councils to make by-laws and the process by which proposed by-laws are submitted for ministerial consideration and approval.

But a power to approve, amend or reject a proposed by-law is not automatically a power to later repeal or revoke a by-law after it has received approval, been gazetted and taken effect as subsidiary legislation

That distinction lies at the heart of lawful government. Public office-holders do not possess authority merely because they desire a particular result. They must identify the legal source of their power. Where Parliament has granted the Minister a power to approve a proposed by-law, it does not necessarily follow that Parliament also granted an unrestricted power to erase an existing by-law by ministerial decree.

The Minister may believe that the Linden toll was undesirable, burdensome, improperly applied, or inconsistent with national policy. Those are matters for public debate and, where necessary, lawful intervention. But disagreement with a local council’s policy is not itself a legal power of revocation.

The Act reportedly contains mechanisms through which ministerial intervention may occur where a council is in default, exceeds its authority, neglects statutory obligations or acts improperly. Such safeguards matter because they require government to act through the procedures Parliament established, rather than by simply substituting ministerial preference for the authority of elected local organs.

This is particularly serious because the Minister is an Attorney-at-Law and an officer of the court. That professional status carries an enhanced duty to precision, candour and fidelity to the law. The public is entitled to expect that a lawyer serving as a Minister will distinguish between what is politically expedient and what is legally authorised; between a by-law whose validity is disputed and one said not to exist at all; and between a statutory power expressly granted and one simply assumed.

It is not enough to say that the Government wishes the tolls to stop. Nor is it enough to cite statutory sections without demonstrating that they confer the exact power being exercised. The Minister’s letter and her Gazette Order must be read together. One says no relevant by-law or order was issued and published. The other revokes a named by-law that it admits was published in the Official Gazette in 2016.

That is not a trivial inconsistency. It goes to the credibility of the Government’s stated legal position and to the validity of the action taken against the Linden Town Council.

Local democratic organs are not departments of a Ministry to be managed at ministerial whim. They are elected statutory bodies with defined responsibilities, including responsibilities relating to municipal administration, revenue and the welfare of their communities. Their autonomy has meaning only if their lawful acts cannot be undone without clear authority, due process and respect for the limits imposed by Parliament.

The Linden toll controversy must therefore be tested not by political convenience, but by law. The Government should identify, plainly and precisely, the statutory provision that authorised the revocation of the 2016 by-laws. Until it does, Order No. 172 will remain open to the compelling question it has created for itself:

If the 2016 by-laws did not exist, why did the Minister find it necessary to revoke them?

CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR THE 2106 GAZETTED BY-LAWS THAT THE MINISTER SAID DIDNT EXIST BUT SHE SUBSEQUENTLY REVOKED ⇒

  

 

GUYANA DOES NOT NEED TO COUNT MIGRANTS. IT NEEDS TO ASK WHAT THEY CAN BUILD.

/0 Comments/in , , /by
  592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY INJOURNALISM◊GUYANA

GUYANA DOES NOT NEED TO COUNT MIGRANTS. IT NEEDS TO ASK WHAT THEY CAN BUILD.

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

A Caribbean engineer’s “Friction Economy” theory names the question Guyana has never asked about its migrant workforce — not who authorized them, but what they could build if anyone looked

A Jamaican born engineer living in Brazil recently gave the Business Guardian an economic vocabulary Guyana badly needs and does not have. Kimroy Bailey, with his wife Sherika Trott Bailey, has spent the last six years  across South Korea, Brazil, and now a still-unrealized interest in Trinidad and Tobago, developing what they call the Trott Bailey Friction Economy Theory: the idea that a country can be sitting on capability, need, and resources simultaneously, and still generate nothing, because nothing connects them.

Kimroy and Sherika Trott Bailey

Bailey’s illustration is deliberately small. A builder needs a tool. A welder needs a workspace. Between them, both problems are solvable. But if neither has capital, the transaction defaults to a market that doesn’t exist, and both needs go unmet, not because the value isn’t there, but because nothing in the system is designed to notice it.

Guyana should sit with that example longer than a headline allows, because it describes, almost exactly, the shape of the country’s migrant labor problem — a problem this paper has been documenting piece by piece for over a year, and one Guyana has no functioning framework to answer.

THE GAP HAS A PAPER TRAIL

Start with what is not disputed. In February 2024, Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs authorized a company called Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc. to recruit up to 500 healthcare workers from Bangladesh, at Sigma’s own request. Government later confirmed zero recruits were ever brought in under that authorization. The shortages it was meant to address were filled instead by Cuban medical personnel — an entirely separate migration channel, with its own unresolved allegations of labor exploitation that this paper has tracked independently.

Meanwhile, the same Sigma entity was executing a very different kind of contract: multi-billion-dollar water treatment infrastructure work for Guyana Water Inc., beginning just seven days after its Guyana incorporation in October 2022. Photographic evidence obtained by this paper — including GWI’s own published Facebook post — shows work crews at these plant sites that are visibly, overwhelmingly South Asian, standing beside a caption claiming the team comprised “several Guyanese staff.” No Guyanese face is identifiable in the image GWI chose to publish alongside that claim.

Guyana’s own laws require labor market testing before a foreign worker is hired: an employer must show the position could not be filled locally. The Local Content Act names engineering and technical services explicitly among the sectors covered by local-hiring obligations. Whether that testing was done for this workforce, whether it was done at all — is not publicly documented anywhere. Nobody has been made to show their work.

This is not a story about Sigma’s guilt or innocence in a separate procurement scandal, which is its own matter and still unfolding.

It is a story about a state that has built an elaborate machinery for awarding contracts and no comparable machinery for accounting for the labor those contracts pull into the country, where it comes from, what it can do beyond the single task it was imported for, or what it leaves behind when the contract ends

REGISTRATION IS NOT THE SAME QUESTION AS CAPABILITY

Bailey’s caution to Trinidad applies with equal force here: a government’s instinct, faced with a migrant population it does not understand, is to register it – for identity and security reasons that are genuinely legitimate. But registration answers only who is here. It says nothing about what they can do, and worse, when skills-mapping does happen, it is almost always aimed at slotting migrants into existing vacancies.

As Bailey put it, if a Guyanese and a migrant are both qualified for one job, mapping both of their abilities doesn’t create a second position.      Someone still loses, and the country stays locked inside the same “local versus migrant” argument, just with better paperwork.

That argument is precisely where Guyana’s migrant labor discourse has been stuck, a discourse of suspicion in one direction (are jobs being taken) and pretext in the other (is a healthcare authorization actually cover for engineering labor), with almost no public attention paid to what either group of workers, Guyanese or migrant, is actually capable of beyond the narrow occupational box a work permit or an NPTAB bid document assigns them.

WHAT THE FRICTION ECONOMY WOULD ASK INSTEAD

Bailey’s reframe is not naive about capital — he is explicit that machinery, land, and credit still matter, and that money should not be pretended out of the picture. But he insists money should not be the only mechanism a country has for connecting a need to a solution that already exists nearby.

Applied to Guyana’s Bangladeshi and Cuban migrant populations, that reframe produces sharper questions than any Ministry of Foreign Affairs authorization letter has yet asked. Cuban medical personnel brought in to cover healthcare shortages – do they carry skills beyond the specific clinical role they were slotted into, that Guyana’s own strained health system could use if anyone had asked? A South Asian workforce imported for water-treatment plant construction, once the plants are commissioned and the contract ends, does that capability simply leave the country, or could it be connected to Guyana’s next infrastructure need, the next repair, the next skills gap in a sector far from GWI? Nobody has asked, because nobody has built a system designed to notice the answer.

Guyana does not currently have Bailey’s Pacorips — the AI capability-mapping system he has piloted informally in Brazil, matching people, needs, and idle resources without reducing anyone to one official occupation. It does not need to import his software to import his discipline. What Guyana lacks is not technology. It is the prior decision to ask the question at all: not is this person authorized to be here, and not did this company follow the rules that got them here, but what can these people, together with the Guyanese working alongside or instead of them, build that does not currently exist.

THE PIE QUESTION

Bailey’s closing formulation is the one worth sitting with longest: a country cannot build lasting prosperity by endlessly relitigating who gets the remaining slice of a fixed pie. Guyana’s public conversation about migrant labour — Cuban, Bangladeshi, Venezuelan, has been almost entirely a pie-slicing conversation: who authorized this, who benefited, who was cut out, who lied about when the first contract was signed. Those questions matter, and this paper will keep asking them, because accountability for the how is not optional.

But Bailey’s theory names the question sitting underneath all of it, one Guyana has not asked even once in public: what has arrived in this country, alongside the thin paper trail of authorization letters and NPTAB awards, that nobody has yet tried to use.

— The Board

The Willing Participants

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN♠ACCOUNTABILITY♠INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♠GUYANA

The Willing Participants

EDITORIAL BY: Hem Kumar— September 2026

How Guyana’s Resource Curse Gets Built, One Unanswered Question at a Time

Christopher Ram has, in his 198th column on Guyana’s oil economy, given the country a diagnosis it has been resisting for a decade: the Resource Curse is no longer a risk on the horizon. It is a condition already present, and its symptoms are everywhere Ram points — G$4.19 trillion in central government spending between 2021 and 2025 un-audited by a Public Accounts Committee still working through 2016; a Public Procurement Commission that has had no sitting commissioners since July 2025, a vacancy that was foreseeable three years out and was allowed to happen anyway; an Integrity Commission whose composition Ram calls a textbook case of loyalty over competence; and a presidency trailed by questions;  about an academic record, about Pradoville 2, about a farm — that have never been answered so much as outlasted.

Ram is careful, and this newsroom  intends to be equally careful in extending his argument. He does not accuse. He asks why the machinery built to answer these questions keeps failing to run. That is the right frame, and it is the one this editorial applies to two files The 592 Guardian has spent months building ; one on the contracts that has flowed toward a company employing the President’s brother, and one on the farm the President has never definitively explained.

AN INSTITUTIONAL DIAGNOSIS, CONFIRMED FROM THE GROUND UP

Our own reporting has spent the better part of this year tracing the same disease Ram diagnoses from the top down, from the bottom up. The Stabroek Surrender series examined the 2016 ExxonMobil Production Sharing Agreement and found a state that had bargained away ring-fencing — the one structural safeguard that would have kept new, cheaper-to-produce fields from resetting the cost-recovery clock on the whole contract area. The result, as we reported in “More Money, Weaker Guardrails,” is that the newly reached 50% profit-share milestone means less than it appears to: Uaru, Whiptail and Hammerhead, worth a combined $32.2 billion, now enter the same undivided pool the $55 billion cost bank just emptied from. Ram’s framing and ours converge on the same point from different directions — the problem was never only the split. It was the absence of the institutional architecture, ring-fencing among it, that would have made the split durable.

This is what Ram means, in blunter terms, by “institutions unable or unwilling to keep pace.” A Petroleum Commission proposed nearly a decade ago still does not exist. The Ministry of Natural Resources still leans on the same oil companies it is meant to regulate for technical direction and basic sector information.

And when a state cannot independently verify what its own regulated industry tells it, the same failure of verification tends to show up everywhere else government contracts money.

THE SIGMA CONTRADICTION

It shows up, for instance, in the case of Sigma Engineers Ltd Inc, a company incorporated in Guyana on October 6, 2022; and awarded its first government contract seven days later. Since then, Sigma has been the beneficiary of at least five Guyana Water Inc. contracts this newsroom has independently documented and priced: the Region Four Lot 3 plants at Caledonia, Cummings Lodge and Bachelor’s Adventure ($3.95 billion, amended); the Hope Plant ($3.57 billion); the CDB-funded Leguan/Wakenaam project ($1.49 billion); well-drilling works ($411.6 million); and the Shelter Belt rehabilitation ($2.44 billion). That subtotal, just above $11.8 billion, sits close to the $12.3 billion figure Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has publicly alleged.

Mohamed’s allegations named a second fact Sigma itself has since confirmed rather than denied: Mohamed Aqtar Ali, the President’s brother, is engaged by Sigma as a “senior technical consultant.” Sigma disputes the allegation’s framing and has threatened legal action over what it calls misrepresentation; but the substance of its rebuttal is not a denial that it received these contracts. It is a claim that the locally incorporated entity, specifically, received only one contract, awarded in 2026.

That claim runs directly into the paper record: the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board’s own approval letter for the Shelter Belt contract is dated December 31, 2025, and the original Region Four contract carries a signed date of October 13, 2022;  a week after incorporation. GWI’s own chief executive, for his part, has stated the utility was unaware of any Aqtar Ali involvement in procurement at all.

A company did not deny receiving billions in state contracts. It disputed the count — and the paper trail disputes it back.

This is precisely the gap Ram’s column names: not proof of wrongdoing, but the absence of a body capable of resolving the contradiction. A functioning Public Procurement Commission;  the one that has sat without commissioners since last July; exists for exactly this purpose.

In its absence, the public is left comparing a company’s legal letter against a regulator’s own paperwork, one contradicting the other, with no independent referee in sight.

 

THE QUESTION THAT OUTLASTS THE NEWS CYCLE

The same pattern holds for Long Creek. This publication has obtained and published a 2011 State Lands lease naming Bharrat Jagdeo as lessor and a lessee recorded as “Mohamed Ali,” covering roughly 20 acres later measured by satellite trace at closer to 155 acres than the sub-75-acre figure implied publicly. We have been careful, as Ram is careful with the allegations he catalogues, to hold the lessee’s identity as an open question rather than a settled one. What is not open to question is that the President has had ample opportunity to close that question himself, and has not. Ram’s own words on this apply without alteration: “presidential denial is not independent investigation either.” Neither, this newsroom would add, is silence.

A PATTERN, NOT A COINCIDENCE

None of this, taken piece by piece, proves capture. A brother’s consulting arrangement is not, by itself, corruption. A disputed contract count is not, by itself, fraud. An unresolved lease is not, by itself, evidence of anything beyond what it shows on its face. But Ram’s larger point is that the Resource Curse does not require a single smoking gun — it requires a pattern of institutional non-response, repeated often enough and across enough fronts that the absence of an answer becomes the answer. A Public Accounts Committee seven years behind. A Procurement Commission with no one sitting on it. A GWI contract history that contradicts a contractor’s own sworn account of itself. A presidential lease whose named lessee has never been publicly confirmed or denied by the one person positioned to end the question in a sentence.

Guyana is not cursed by its oil. It is being un-built, quietly, by the accumulating cost of questions nobody in a position of authority is required to answer. That is the grip Ram describes tightening. It tightens because, at every level examined here, someone with the power to loosen it has instead chosen not to.

— The Board

 

 

ONE LAW, TWO STANDARDS: GGMC WARNS SMALL MINERS ON TENURE TRANSFERS

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

ONE LAW, TWO STANDARDS: GGMC WARNS SMALL MINERS ON TENURE TRANSFERS — WHILE A $2.2 BILLION FOREIGN CHANGE OF CONTROL GOES UNEXPLAINED

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar- September 2026

The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) issued a public advisory this week warning tenure holders against selling, assigning, or transferring mining lands outside the law — naming Irrevocable Powers of Attorney specifically as an instrument the Commission will not recognize as proof of ownership. The advisory is framed as a defense of “the integrity of the mining tenure system.” The 592 Guardian agrees the concern is legitimate. But the same statute GGMC invokes against small holders — Section 18 of the Mining Act — applies with equal force, and considerably higher stakes, to the largest corporate concession holders in the country. The record shows no evidence it has been applied to them at all.

THE LAW, AS WRITTEN

Section 18 of the Mining Act (Cap. 65:01) is unambiguous. A body corporate holding a mining license “shall not, without the prior consent in writing of the Minister” register a share transfer, or enter any arrangement, that has the effect of giving a person “control” of that body corporate. Control is defined precisely: twenty percent or more of issued equity shares, the power to appoint or block half the board, or command of two-fifths or more of voting rights. On an application for consent, the Minister must be satisfied that “the public interest would not be prejudiced by the change of control” before granting it and the Minister “may call for and obtain such information as he considers necessary” to make that decision.

This is not an obscure or discretionary courtesy. It is the statute’s central mechanism for ensuring that when control of a Guyana mining license changes hands, the State has been asked, has looked at the transaction, and has said yes.

THE TRANSACTION THAT SHOULD HAVE TRIGGERED IT

In April 2026, Canadian miner G Mining Ventures Corp. (GMIN) announced a definitive agreement to acquire all issued and outstanding shares of G2 Goldfields Inc. — not a fraction, not a stake, but total ownership; in a deal valued at approximately US$2.2 billion. The acquisition combined G2’s Oko-Ghanie project with GMIN’s Oko West project into what the companies themselves describe as a Tier-1, district-scale gold mining hub spanning over 362 square kilometres in Region Seven. G2 shareholders approved the arrangement in June 2026 with 99.99 percent of votes in favor; the Ontario Superior Court of Justice granted final approval later that month; the transaction closed in July.

Oko West mining claim.

At every stage of that process — the shareholder vote, the court hearing, the closing — the approving authority was Canadian: the Ontario Superior Court and G2’s own shareholders, voting under Ontario corporate law. Nowhere in the extensive public record of this transaction; the joint press releases, the investor filings, the trade press coverage — does the Ministry of Natural Resources or the GGMC appear as a party whose written consent was sought or obtained under Section 18, despite this transaction constituting control many multiples over every threshold the section defines.

If a small miner needs the Commission’s approval to arrange a joint venture on a single claim, a foreign public company does not get to acquire total control of a license many times the scale of that claim by simply filing paperwork in Toronto.

THE QUESTION GGMC’S ADVISORY DOES NOT ANSWER

GGMC’s advisory this week is addressed to “tenure holders” in general terms, but its practical target is unmistakable: individual and small-scale operators using private agreements, receipts, and IPOAs to move claims informally. The Commission is right that these instruments are not lawful proof of tenure transfer, and right to insist that Joint Venture arrangements be “properly structured, documented, and submitted to the GGMC for consideration and approval.”

But the advisory is silent on the one class of transaction where Section 18 was written specifically to apply — corporate change-of-control among mining license holders  and where the value at stake is not a single claim but a national gold district. If the Commission expects a small operator to submit a JV agreement for approval before any beneficial occupation occurs, it owes the public an equivalent account of how it satisfied itself, under Section 18(2), that “the public interest would not be prejudiced” by GMIN’s acquisition of G2 — a transaction of a scale the drafters of the Mining Act plainly had in mind when they wrote the twenty percent and two-fifths thresholds into law.

President Irfaan Ali was asked directly, at a recent press conference, whether the pattern of foreign firms “flipping” large-scale mining assets concerns his administration, and whether stronger policy is needed to ensure Guyana benefits directly from such transactions. He defended the practice, characterizing the transfer and sale of mineral properties among foreign mining companies as ordinary global mining industry activity, not unique to Guyana.

That answer addresses the economics of the deal. It does not address whether Section 18 consent was sought, reviewed, or granted

WHAT THIS PUBLICATION IS ASKING

The 592 Guardian is not asserting that Section 18 consent was withheld or ignored. We are asserting that no public record shows it was obtained; and that the absence of that record, set against an advisory publicly disciplining small holders under the same Act, creates the appearance of a two-tiered enforcement regime: one standard, rigorously stated, for Guyanese operating at the level of a single claim; a second, unstated and unevidenced, for foreign public companies restructuring national mineral assets worth billions. If that appearance is wrong, the remedy is simple — publish the proof.

FORMAL REQUESTS FOR THE RECORD

1, Confirm whether an application for Ministerial consent under Section 18 of the Mining Act was submitted in connection with G Mining Ventures Corp.’s acquisition of all issued and outstanding shares of G2 Goldfields Inc., and if so, the date of that application.
2.If consent was granted, produce the written instrument of consent, the date it was issued, and the public-interest determination the Minister made under Section 18(2) in reaching that decision.
3.If no application was made or no consent was granted, state on what legal basis the change of control affecting G2’s Guyana-registered mining licenses was permitted to proceed and be given effect within Guyana.
4.Disclose whether the Commission or Ministry has, in the past five years, required Section 18 consent for any other change-of-control transaction involving a foreign-incorporated mining license holder — and if so, name the transaction and the date consent was granted, for comparison against the record sought above.
5.State whether the Commission intends to apply the same documentation and approval standard it is now demanding of small tenure holders under threat of non-recognition of their instruments; to future changes of control among corporate concession holders operating at district scale.

These are not rhetorical questions. Section 18 gives the Minister the express statutory power to call for whatever information is necessary to make a consent determination; the Commission maintains records of licenses, their holders, and the conditions attached to them. The proof, if it exists, is a matter of producing a document already required by law to exist. Its absence would itself be the story.

The 592 Guardian will publish the Ministry’s and Commission’s response, in full, alongside this piece.

— The Board

Linden Toll By-Laws Revoked: Questions Over Ministerial Authority and Due Process

/0 Comments/in , /by
592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Linden Toll By-Laws Revoked: Questions Over Ministerial Authority and Due Process

Minister’s Same-Day Gazette Order Contradicts Her Notice on Linden Tolls

Former Minister Ronald Bulkan challenges Minister Priya Manickchand’s authority to revoke Linden’s toll by-laws, pointing to a same-day contradiction between the Ministry’s public notice and a gazetted ministerial order.

Dear Editor,

On 1st September 2026, Local Government Minister, Manickchand, wrote Linden Town Clerk, instructing that the Linden Mayor and Town Council “cease and desist immediately from the imposition and collection of any toll/charges at Kara Kara Public Road.”

The Minister’s missive stated the Ministry has not authorized the imposition of or collection of any toll/charges at Kara Kara Public Road or anywhere else in Linden, and “further, no By-law or Order was issued and published by any Minister with responsibility for Local Government.”!

Letter to Town Clerk and Gazetted Order dated Sept 01 2026

On the very day, the Official Gazette published Order No. 172 of 2026 signed by the very (Hon.) Minister, wherein it states under marginal note “Revocation of By-Laws No. 1 of 2016”, “The Linden Town Council (Toll) By-Laws 2016, being By-Laws No. 1 of 2016 and published in the Official Gazette on the 20th day of August, 2016, are revoked.”

The only possible explanations for the above contradictory positions, are either (i) that the (Hon.) Minister set out to deliberately deceive the Linden municipality, or (ii) that the (Hon.) Minister’s left hand was unaware of what her right hand was doing.

The foregoing notwithstanding, the aforementioned Minister’s Order in which she cited Sections 304 and 305 of the Municipal and District Councils Act, Cap. 28:01, as the basis for her revocation, are sections that do not confer any such authority by which she seeks to act.

I am reminded that the Minister is an Attorney-at-Law, but it appears that it is a case of her desire to operate as an overlord of statutory autonomous constitutional organs, superseding her obvious knowledge of the law.   

The Minister would do well to properly acquaint herself of legislative changes which strengthen the autonomy of local democratic organs, and which severely curtail the role of the subject Minister and designed to prevent undue interference. One such change is the insertion of Section 8 A to Cap. 28:01, Act No. 15 of 2013, Municipal and District Councils (Amendment) Act 2013, an amendment passed while the Minister was a sitting Minister of Government. 

The above-stated section granted municipalities the authority to promote the welfare of the municipality, to develop and evaluate policies and programs, ensure that the municipality is managed in a professional manner by a qualified Town Clerk, amongst other functions without the necessity of Ministerial approval.

Further, I direct the Hon. Minister to the deletion of Sections 157 and 158 as well as the insertion of Sec. 206 (2), to Cap. 28:01, all of which are designed to reduce the Ministerial role as that of a caretaker as opposed to a manager. 

While I’m at it, I wish to advert to the current undemocratic situation whereby the region itself -Upper Demerara-Berbice/Region 10 – is without a Chairman, one year after General and Regional Elections were held, entirely due to unlawful actions of the Regional Executive Officer. The subject Minister, again who I point out, is a lawyer, is not merely silent in the face of this defiance of the law but part and parcel of the dictatorial and rogue behavior of the current regime.

The intent of the current administration is clear, and it is to deny local government organs their constitutional authority and to starve local councils of a revenue base that allows them to effectively discharge their functions. It is a wicked agenda.

Editor, in the interest of brevity, I’ll end this correspondence now, though I hardly expect this will be  the end of it!

CLICK THE LINK  BELOW FOR FURTHER  CLARIFICATION:⇓

⇒ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ncvK0xcv7_OTTn-U9-  V792NBww1KyW9O/view?usp=drivesdk  

Sincerely,

Ronald Bulkan

Former Minister of Communities

 

 

 

 

Four Sittings, Two Bills: What Guyana’s Parliament Actually Did With Its Time

/0 Comments/in , , /by
  592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Four Sittings, Two Bills: What Guyana’s Parliament Actually Did With Its Time

A Parliament convened for government business

OPINION BY: Staff Writer— September 2026

The issue is not simply that Guyana’s 13th Parliament has met remarkably infrequently. It is that, when it has met, the public record suggests a chamber convened principally to receive, process and pass the executive’s agenda—not to test it. Parliament’s own homepage listed the fourth sitting, on June 5, 2026, as a “Budget Presentation 2026” sitting, while external reporting records that the Development Bank Bill was passed at the fifth sitting on July 27.

That distinction matters. A legislature is not measured only by whether bills eventually become Acts. It is also measured by whether ministers are questioned, decisions are explained, spending is scrutinized, opposition voices are heard, and the public can reliably see when and how national decisions are made.

The calendar tells a story

Four dated sittings across 299 days would already be an extraordinary statistic for a National Assembly charged with oversight of a rapidly expanding oil-producing state. But the more troubling point is qualitative: the sessions identified so far appear overwhelmingly tied to inauguration, budget business and the movement of government legislation.

One sitting swore in MPs. Two were designated budget presentations. The June 5 sitting introduced major financial business, including the Guyana Development Bank Bill and supplementary spending. Then, 52 days later, the bill was passed in a fifth sitting that was visible in Parliament’s video and social-media footprint but apparently not readily available as a dated entry in the published sittings index.

A public institution cannot expect citizens to follow its work if its own official record leaves them having to reconstruct fundamental events from news reports, livestream titles, or social-media posts.

Lawmaking without deliberation

The July 27 sitting is especially revealing because it was not a minor procedural matter. The Guyana Development Bank Bill established the legal framework for a state development bank that may provide loans with or without collateral and with or without interest—powers that plainly require robust safeguards, transparent criteria and serious parliamentary examination.

Yet Kaieteur News reported that the bill passed without debate or arguments from the Opposition, while opposition MPs were protesting over the MV Barima tragedy and calling for the resignations of Ministers Juan Edghill and Deodat Indar. The Speaker reportedly suspended proceedings twice amid disorder, and government backbenchers proceeded with their contributions unchallenged.

That is not meaningful legislative deliberation. It is a bill being carried through at a moment when the chamber’s capacity for adversarial scrutiny had effectively collapsed.

More than a procedural complaint

The government may say, with some justification, that parliamentary work is not confined to the floor of the National Assembly. Committees exist. Ministries answer questions through other channels. The budget process itself may involve extensive administrative preparation and sectoral review.

But none of that erases the special constitutional role of plenary sittings. The chamber is where ministers must account publicly, where votes are recorded, where alternative views are stated for the national record, and where citizens can watch their representatives confront the decisions made in their name.

Committee work cannot become a substitute for a Parliament that rarely assembles. Nor can a livestream substitute for a properly maintained, searchable and complete official record.

 The development-bank test

The Development Bank Bill was precisely the kind of measure that required more, not less, open scrutiny. A state-backed lender handling tens of billions of dollars raises unavoidable questions:

♦ Who selects the board, and what limits exist on political influence?

♦  What disclosure rules will govern loans, beneficiaries, defaults and related-party transactions?

♦ What independent oversight will ensure that credit is not distributed as patronage?

♦ What appeal or review mechanism will protect applicants from arbitrary decisions?

♦ Will Parliament receive regular reports sufficient to examine whether public funds are reaching productive enterprises rather than preferred interests?

The reported framework allows the bank to support small and medium-sized enterprises through loans that may be unsecured and interest-free. Those objectives may be defensible, even desirable, but they heighten; not reduce—the need for clear eligibility rules, published decisions, audited accounts and independent supervision.

A development bank can become a useful engine for productive investment. Without strong guardrails, it can also become a politically managed dispenser of favors. Parliament was the place to draw that line in public.

Accountability cannot be incidental

The July 27 sitting also exposes a deeper failure of parliamentary scheduling. A maritime disaster that reportedly claimed 73 lives had become the immediate political emergency. The Opposition used the sitting to demand ministerial accountability. The government, according to the report, did not substantively answer those calls before its legislation moved forward.

That sequence should concern even those who support the Development Bank Bill. It suggests that national emergencies and executive legislation are not being given the separate, sustained parliamentary time they deserve. Instead, a crisis of public accountability became background noise while the government’s financial business continued.

A confident government should welcome a full sitting devoted to the Barima disaster: ministerial statements, documentary disclosures, direct questioning, motions, and a public accounting of what failed, who knew what, and what corrective action followed. If Parliament cannot create room for that, it is hard to argue that it is functioning as the country’s central forum of democratic accountability.

Questions Parliament must answer

The immediate demand is not theatrical confrontation. It is administrative clarity and constitutional seriousness. Parliament should publish, in one accessible place:

♦ A complete dated calendar of every sitting of the 13th Parliament.

♦  The Order Paper, Hansard, votes and video for the July 27 sitting.

♦ The texts, amendments, committee referrals and voting record for the Guyana Development Bank Bill and Supplementary Financial Paper No. 1.

♦  A forward calendar showing when questions, private members’ motions, opposition business and ministerial statements will be heard.

♦  Regular committee reports on the Development Bank’s governance, lending portfolio, beneficiaries, defaults and audited financial statements.

The government should also explain why a bill of such financial and institutional consequence was passed in circumstances where full opposition engagement did not occur. “Passed” is not the same as “scrutinized.” A parliamentary majority can lawfully carry a vote; it cannot turn the absence of examination into proof that examination was unnecessary.

 A sharper editorial close

Guyana does not need a Parliament that merely opens, presents, tables and passes. It needs one that sits often enough and openly enough—to ask difficult questions before the money is committed, before the contracts are signed, before the agencies are empowered, and before public grief becomes another item displaced by government business.

The central concern is not that the government won a vote. Governments with parliamentary majorities win votes.

The concern is that the National Assembly appears to be meeting so seldom, and so narrowly around executive priorities, that scrutiny itself is becoming an exception rather than the ordinary business of democratic government.

Five sittings in ten months is already an alarming number. But the real indictment lies in what those sittings reveal: a Parliament increasingly used to authorize power, rather than examine it.

Sources

1. Development Bank Bill rushed through Parliament without … https://kaieteurnewsonline.com/2026/07/28/development-bank-bill-rushed-through-parliament-without-debate

2. National Assembly of the Parliament of Guyana | Parliament of … https://parliament.gov.gy

3. Parliament of Guyana https://www.youtube.com/@parliamentofguyana1710

4. Guyana Development Bank Bill

5. Guyana | IPU Parline: global data on national parliaments https://data.ipu.org/parliament/GY/GY-LC01

6. Guyana Development Bank 2026: Zero-Interest SME Loans https://592hub.com/guides/development-bank-guide

7. 3RD SITTING – 13TH PARLIAMENT |2026 BUDGET- … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGUeBT8Pbpo

8. Development bank risks becoming welfare agency – former … https://kaieteurnewsonline.com/2026/06/11/development-bank-risks-becoming-welfare-agency-former-ambassador

9. National Assembly (Guyana) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assembly_(Guyana)

10. The Guyana Development Bank Bill was today passed … https://www.facebook.com/100064540276050/posts/the-guyana-development-bank-bill-was-today-passed-during-the-5th-sitting-of-the-/1464167832411212