Calls for Justice Bulkan to Recuse himself is Politically Charged , Not Grounded in Law 

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Mr. Quincy Anderson’s letter in the Chronicle  is not a serious contribution to jurisprudential debate; it is a politically loaded broadside dressed up as concern for judicial ethics—and it collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

At its core, the argument is both legally illiterate and strategically convenient.

The standard for judicial recusal is not built on guilt by association, nor on the political activities of a judge’s relatives. If that were the case, no judge in Guyana—or anywhere in the Commonwealth—could safely adjudicate politically sensitive matters without being subjected to endless, opportunistic disqualification campaigns.

Mr. Anderson leans heavily on “perception,” but weaponizes it in its most dangerous form: partisan suspicion masquerading as public concern. The law is clear. The test is whether a fair-minded and properly informed observer would conclude there is a real possibility of bias—not whether politically interested actors can manufacture doubt by invoking family connections.

By that standard, his argument fails completely.

Justice Arif Bulkan’s judicial record is unblemished. There has been no finding, no credible allegation, and no pattern of conduct suggesting bias. What Mr. Anderson offers instead is conjecture rooted in the independent political engagement of Justice Bulkan’s siblings—individuals over whom he has neither control nor legal responsibility. 

That is not an ethical breach; it is a reality of life in any democratic society.

More troubling, however, is the broader implication of this line of attack. If accepted, it would establish a corrosive precedent in which judges are assessed not by their rulings or conduct, but by the political identities of those around them. In a small, politically active society like Guyana, that standard would paralyze the judiciary and invite calculated efforts to disqualify judges for strategic gain.

Mr. Anderson also exposes a fundamental misunderstanding—or deliberate misrepresentation—of governance. The Government of Guyana is not synonymous with the PPP/C as a political party. Legal matters before the courts involve the State as a constitutional entity, not a partisan apparatus. 

Collapsing that distinction is not only inaccurate, it is dangerous, as suggests a view of governance in which party and state are indistinguishable.

Equally conspicuous is the timing. Justice Bulkan has served on the bench for years, including in matters of political sensitivity, without calls for recusal based on his family. Why now? 

Ethical concerns that emerge—only when politically convenient—invite skepticism about their true motivation.

Finally, there is the question of editorial judgment. Publishing such a thin, speculative attack on a sitting CCJ judge—without evidentiary grounding—does not elevate public discourse. It risks doing the opposite: normalizing the erosion of judicial credibility through insinuation rather than fact.

The integrity of the Caribbean Court of Justice is not safeguarded by entertaining arguments of this nature. It is preserved by adherence to established legal standards and by resisting attempts—however packaged—to undermine confidence in its judges without cause.

Justice Bulkan’s reputation has been built on decades of disciplined, ethical service. It cannot be undone by assertions that would not withstand even the most basic legal test.

A Bank Built To Serve Power.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL♦ACCONTABILITY♦ TRANSPARENCY

A Bank Built To Serve Power.

The proposed Guyana Development Bank is not a transparent institution. It is a patronage architecture dressed in development language — and its contempt for established governance frameworks is, by itself, a scandal.

There is a well-worn playbook in Guyanese governance. You announce an initiative with genuine popular appeal — flood relief, housing, scholarships, now small business financing — and you structure the delivery mechanism so that access flows through political loyalty rather than merit. The Guyana Development Bank Bill, in its current form, is that playbook with a prospectus attached.

Let us be precise about what this legislation proposes. It does not merely create a bank. It creates a financial instrument — potentially managing tens of billions in public resources — whose entire governance structure is constituted by a single minister. The Finance Minister appoints the board. The Finance minister appoints the chair. The Finance Minister determines what directors are paid. There is no parliamentary confirmation, no civil society seat, no private sector voice, no Opposition input. The institution exists at the pleasure of the Executive, accountable upward to the Cabinet and downward to no one.

This is not an oversight. It is a design.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this legislation is not what it contains but what it deliberately omits: any meaningful relationship with the Bank of Guyana.

The Bank of Guyana exists precisely for this purpose. Under the Financial Institutions Act, the BOG is the statutory regulator for deposit-taking and lending institutions operating in Guyana. It sets prudential standards. It conducts examinations. It demands capital adequacy compliance. It investigates governance failures. It licenses institutions that handle public money. When Guyana’s financial architecture was rebuilt after the catastrophic banking collapses of the 1990s — collapses that wiped out the savings of ordinary Guyanese — the entire remediation framework rested on a single principle: no institution handling the public’s money operates outside independent central bank oversight.

The Development Bank Bill, as currently drafted, creates precisely such an institution.

There is no provision for BOG licensing. No mandatory BOG examination schedule. No capital adequacy framework referenced. No prudential reporting requirement to the central bank. No trigger for BOG intervention if the institution becomes insolvent or if lending decisions expose it to systemic risk. The institution that will manage what the government itself is advertising as a transformative public financing vehicle sits entirely outside the regulatory architecture that governs every other financial institution in this country.

Ask the question plainly: why? Why would a government drafting legislation for a public bank — an institution that will hold public deposits and disburse public funds — deliberately structure it to avoid central bank supervision? There is no development finance rationale for this exclusion. Regional development banks across CARICOM operate under some form of central bank oversight or independent statutory regulation. Guyana’s National Development Strategy, the IDB’s own technical assistance frameworks, and the Caribbean Development Bank’s governance standards all contemplate central bank supervisory roles in national development finance. The exclusion of the BOG from this architecture is not a regional norm. It is a local choice. And it is a choice that produces a single outcome: an institution whose financial conduct cannot be independently examined by anyone outside the government that controls it.

This is the structural foundation upon which every other governance failure in this bill rests.

The Patronage Architecture, Named

Consider what Guyana has spent the better part of a decade building, unevenly and imperfectly, in the domain of public financial governance. The Public Procurement Commission. The Audit Office. Parliamentary oversight committees. The SARA framework. Whatever their operational failures, these institutions rest on a conceptual foundation: that public resources require independent scrutiny and that no single political actor should control both the allocation of those resources and the evaluation of that allocation.

The Development Bank Bill, as drafted, seats a ministerially appointed board making lending decisions without clear criteria, without independent audit triggers, and — most strikingly — without any explicit anti-corruption provisions governing the conduct of loan officers and directors themselves.

But this is not merely a legal deficiency. It is a political economy. To understand what this bank will actually do, you do not read the eligibility clauses. You read the appointment clause.

The Finance Minister selects every director. The Finance Minister sets every director’s pay. Directors serve at the Finance Minister’s pleasure. What follows from this is not complicated: the directors will make decisions consistent with the preferences of the Finance Minister. Not because they are necessarily corrupt individuals, but because no rational appointee, in the absence of independent tenure protection, makes decisions that displease their appointing authority. The institution’s governance structure guarantees alignment between lending decisions and executive preference before a single application is reviewed.

Now overlay the operational reality. This bank is being positioned as the primary financing vehicle for small and medium enterprise in a country approaching a LG election. The government has publicly advertised loan access — collateral-free, interest-free by its own account — to constituencies that have historically struggled to access formal credit. Rural communities. Hinterland entrepreneurs. Young professionals without property to pledge. These are also, not coincidentally, the swing constituencies whose mobilisation determines electoral outcomes in Guyana’s tight political arithmetic.

The combination of discretionary lending criteria, politically appointed gatekeepers, no BOG oversight, and an election cycle is not a governance risk. It is a governance blueprint.

Guyana has lived this pattern before. The National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited contracts. The Housing and Water Inc. allocations. The COVID-19 relief disbursements. The various grant and voucher programmes administered through regional democratic councils in election years. In each case the combination of political appointment, discretionary criteria, and weak anti-corruption architecture produced outcomes that bore a suspicious resemblance to electoral maps. The Development Bank Bill creates the same conditions at larger scale and with the additional moral authority of a mandate that is supposed to serve the economically marginalised.

The more genuine the need, the more powerful the patronage instrument becomes. When people are genuinely desperate for financing, they will tolerate conditions they would otherwise refuse. They will vote for access. They will not complain about the terms. Political patrons have always understood this. A development bank, structurally captured before it opens, does not reduce that vulnerability. It monetises it.

The Corruption Architecture, Clause by Clause

The bill prohibits false information and records destruction. It does not prohibit a director soliciting a kickback in exchange for approving a loan. Read that sentence again. An institution disbursing concessionary public financing, with no independent regulator, a politically appointed board, and discretionary lending criteria, contains no explicit statutory prohibition on its own officials demanding payment for access.

This is not a drafting oversight. Anti-corruption provisions are standard in development finance legislation globally precisely because development banks are understood to be structurally vulnerable to rent-seeking. They control access to a scarce and valuable resource — concessionary credit — that the market does not otherwise provide. Every applicant who cannot get a commercial loan has an incentive to pay for access. Every official who controls that access has an opportunity to extract value from it. The legislative response to this structural vulnerability, in every credible jurisdiction, is explicit: name the conduct, criminalise it, specify the penalties, create independent reporting channels.

The Development Bank Bill names none of this. It creates a corruption-permissive environment not through malice in any individual clause but through systematic architectural omission. There is no fit-and-proper test for directors referenced to any independent standard. There is no conflict-of-interest register requirement. There is no whistle-blower protection for loan officers pressured to approve politically connected applications. There is no independent complaints mechanism for rejected applicants. There is no publication requirement for approved loans above threshold values. There is no mandatory referral to SARA or the DPP for suspected corruption in the lending process.

Each omission is individually explicable. Together they describe an institution in which corruption, if it occurs, will be nearly impossible to detect, document, or prosecute. That is not an accident of drafting. It is an environment that has been carefully cleared.

An Insult Inscribed in Legislation

There is a final dimension to this bill that deserves to be stated plainly, because it has not been stated plainly enough: the manner in which this legislation was presented to Parliament is itself a form of institutional disrespect that should offend every member of the National Assembly, regardless of party.

Guyana has a constitutional framework. It has a financial management and audit act. It has a Bank of Guyana Act. It has procurement legislation. It has anti-money-laundering obligations under FATF review. It has commitments to the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force. It has loan covenants with the IDB, the World Bank, and the Caribbean Development Bank that contain governance conditionalities. Every one of these frameworks exists because Guyana, at various points, made formal commitments — some under duress, some voluntarily — to govern its public finances according to standards that could withstand independent scrutiny.

The Development Bank Bill was brought to Parliament in apparent disregard of the coherence demands of every one of these frameworks. It creates a financial institution outside BOG supervision, without FATF-compliant beneficial ownership requirements clearly specified, without procurement-consistent tender obligations for institutional contracts, and without the audit architecture that Guyana’s own Fiscal Management and Accountability Act contemplates for public entities. This legislation does not merely have gaps. It sits in active tension with the governance architecture Guyana has spent years — and significant donor and creditor resources — constructing.

To have brought this bill in this form to the National Assembly is not bold governance. It is crass disregard for the nation’s own laws. It signals that the Executive views Parliament not as the institution through which public financial frameworks are legitimately constructed, but as a ratification chamber for decisions already made elsewhere, on terms already fixed in favour of those who made them.

The National Assembly has not merely a right but an obligation to refuse that role.

What A Real Development Bank Looks Like

The underlying need is genuine. Guyana’s credit market fails small farmers, coastal fisherfolk, hinterland entrepreneurs, and young professionals with viable ideas and no collateral. That failure is real and it has real consequences for economic diversification and for the people who bear the cost of an oil boom that has not reached them. A properly structured development finance institution could address a gap that the private market has not filled and will not fill at accessible rates.

But credibility is the precondition for effectiveness.

The IDB, the Caribbean Development Bank, the IFC — every institution Guyana aspires to partner with built its legitimacy on precisely the independence and transparency this bill refuses. Independent governance. Published lending criteria. Central bank or equivalent prudential oversight. Explicit anti-corruption frameworks. Publicly disclosed loan portfolios. These are not bureaucratic impositions. They are what separates a development bank from a slush fund.

What is being proposed here is not a development bank. It is a disbursement mechanism under executive control, surrounded by development language and pointed at an election.

If it passes unchanged, it will not serve Guyanese small business owners. It will serve whoever controls the appointment power — and through them, it will serve the project of making those people impossible to vote out.

The question before the National Assembly is not whether Guyana needs a development bank. It does. The question is whether the Assembly will allow this government to build one that works for the country, or ratify one that works for the party. That question must be answered in the legislation itself. It will not answer itself on the floor of a board meeting chaired by a political appointee, supervised by no one, accountable to nothing but the next election.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering governance, transparency, and the political economy of Guyana.

WHEN THE RECORD SPEAKS: A RESPONSE TO AUBREY NORTON’S WISMAR REVISIONISM

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WHEN THE RECORD SPEAKS: A RESPONSE TO AUBREY NORTON’S WISMAR REVISIONISM

Editorial | The 592 Guardian June 2026

Aubrey Norton has written a letter. He has given it a title — End This Nonsense About a Wismar “Massacre” — and signed it with his full complement of titles: Leader of the PNCR, Chairman of APNU, and, pointedly, a Proud Lindener. He wants the public to understand this is not merely a private opinion. It is a political position, staked on a date that carries its own weight.

We take him at his word. And we respond accordingly.

Norton’s central argument is this: the Wismar Commission of Inquiry does not support the characterization of what occurred in May 1964 as a massacre. He cites the commission’s finding that violence was greater elsewhere in the country. He counts five deaths among Indo-Guyanese in the post-Sun Chapman period. He invokes comparative suffering — the Abraham family, the Sun Chapman victims — as though the mathematics of atrocity, carefully arranged, can dissolve the testimony of thousands.

It is a masterclass in selective citation. And it fails on its own terms.

What Norton cited — and what he left out

Norton reaches repeatedly for the Wismar Commission Report as his authority. What he does not tell his readers is what else that same report contains.

The commissioners — whose composition Norton himself notes included no African Guyanese — did not merely count bodies. They examined 86 witnesses over 19 days and produced findings that no honest reading can reduce to a body count. The commission concluded, in its own language, that the destruction of Indo-Guyanese property was not spontaneous. It was, the commissioners wrote, “organized, and well organized.” More than 200 homes and business premises were systematically looted and burned to the ground.

Over 3,000 Indo-Guyanese residents were forcibly evacuated from the region by river to Georgetown — an entire community, expelled.

The commission also documented what Norton’s letter does not acknowledge: harrowing accounts of physical assault and mass sexual violence, deployed deliberately as instruments of terror to drive the minority population out.

These are not the findings of Indian rights activists. These are the findings of the commission Norton himself holds up as definitive.

The resignation Norton does not mention

There is one fact conspicuously absent from Norton’s lengthy letter. When the evidence of security force conduct during the Wismar attacks became undeniable — when it was clear that local law enforcement had stood aside as arsonists burned 200 homes and failed to apprehend a single perpetrator — the then Minister of Home Affairs resigned from Cabinet in protest.

That minister was Janet Jagan.

A sitting Cabinet minister, wife of the Prime Minister, walked out of government because the evidence of institutional collusion with or indifference to the atrocities could not be squared with her conscience or her office. The violence only subsided when British soldiers arrived to establish order — not the local forces whose mandate was to protect all residents equally.

Norton is a senior political figure with decades of experience in Guyanese governance and history. He is not unaware of Janet Jagan’s resignation. Its absence from his letter is not an oversight. It is a choice. And choices of omission, in matters of historical record, are their own form of testimony.

On the question of method

Norton accuses those who use the term “massacre” of race baiting. He frames accountability as divisiveness. This inversion deserves naming plainly.

It is not divisive to document what happened. It is not race baiting to insist that the forced expulsion of 3,000 people, the systematic destruction of their homes and livelihoods, the documented use of sexual violence as a weapon, and the institutional failure to protect them — constitutes an event of historical gravity that demands accurate language and honest reckoning.

What is divisive is the deliberate suppression of that record. What corrodes national fabric is not the naming of wounds but the insistence that the wounded are lying.

The record is being assembled

Norton writes as though the historical ledger on Wismar is closed. It is not.

Dr. Baytoram Ramharack’s recently released work THE WISMAR MASSACRE  details — the culmination of more than two decades of archival research, hundreds of oral history interviews, and examination of documents from the Guyana and British Archives — has now placed in the public domain a 825-page account of what occurred in May and July of 1964. It draws on eyewitness testimony, including survivors who have carried this history in silence for sixty years. It examines the geopolitical machinery — American and British cold war maneuvering against Cheddi Jagan — that created the conditions in which Wismar became possible. It uses the framework of ethnic cleansing, not casually, but with the evidentiary weight that two decades of scholarship can bring.

Cheddi Jagan called it a massacre. Janet Jagan called it genocide. The commissioners themselves, in an unguarded moment of their own report, reached for the word “holocaust” to describe the collective acts.

Norton wants the public to believe these are the hysterics of partisans. What he cannot explain away is that the commission he cites used that language too.

A note to Mr. Norton

The 592 Guardian does not adjudicate historical debates for sport. We engage them because the public record matters, because survivors deserve accuracy, and because those who hold positions of political leadership bear a particular responsibility for the claims they make in public about contested history.

Norton ends his letter by declaring it is “time to end this nonsense.”

We respectfully disagree. It is time, rather, to tell the truth — fully, without omission, and without the arithmetic of comparative suffering that transforms a community’s expulsion into a footnote.

The record exists. It is being uncovered and un-silenced. And this publication will continue to ensure that those who attempt to bury it know that fact checkers are paying close attention.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet committed to the full and accurate documentation of Guyana’s public record.

SEEDS OF DECEIT

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

INDEPENDENT ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM • GUYANA

EDITORIAL

SEEDS OF DECEIT:

How a $54 Billion Supplementary Bill

Exposes the Ali Administration’s Fiscal Fiction

Four months. That is all it took for Guyana’s largest-ever national budget to run dry — or so the Ali administration now asks us to believe. The President tours the Dominican Republic press circuit, proclaiming Guyana the region’s anchor of fiscal responsibility, even as his government returns, hat in hand, with a $54 billion supplementary request so vague in its particulars that it raises a question far graver than incompetence: is this the oil-funded war chest for the Local Government Elections?

                           THE EDITORS • 592 GUARDIAN • JUNE 2026                             

1. THE IMPLAUSIBILITY IS THE MESSAGE

On 26 January 2026, the National Assembly passed a record-breaking national budget. The Ali administration marketed it as a monument to transformational governance — the material proof that oil wealth was being translated into generational uplift. The numbers were staggering. The rhetoric was soaring. President Ali spoke of planting ‘forests of opportunity that will shelter generations to come.’ The international press was invited to witness Guyana’s arrival as a serious fiscal actor.

By June 2026 — roughly sixteen weeks later — the same administration had returned to the National Assembly with a supplementary appropriation bill seeking more than $54 billion in additional spending authority.

Let that sink in.

In the time it takes a secondary school student to complete a single term, Guyana’s government exhausted whatever buffer it had built into a historic spending plan. And not by a small margin. Fifty-four billion dollars is not a rounding error. It is not an emergency provision for a natural disaster or a regional economic shock. It is a sum that demands a full accounting — of what was miscalculated, what was deliberately omitted from the original budget, and what new priorities have emerged that are so urgent they cannot wait for the next fiscal cycle.

Instead, the nation has received vagueness. Generalities. Political boilerplate.                                                                         

11.THE COMPETENCE QUESTION CANNOT BE AVOIDED

There are two possible explanations for a government returning for a $54 billion supplementary appropriation within four months of passing its largest-ever budget. The first is incompetence. The second is dishonesty. Neither inspires confidence.

If the explanation is incompetence — if the Ministry of Finance and the administration’s technocrats genuinely failed to anticipate spending needs that materialized within a single quarter — then we are confronted with a profound indictment of the government’s planning capacity. Budget preparation in Guyana is not an ad hoc exercise. It involves months of ministry submissions, macroeconomic modelling, revenue projections, and Cabinet deliberation. The entire apparatus of the state is mobilized to produce the document that the government then presents to the nation as evidence of its stewardship.

If that document is wrong by $54 billion inside of sixteen weeks, one of the following must be true: the projections were wildly inaccurate; the assumptions underpinning the budget were known to be unrealistic when they were made; or the government is spending in areas it did not disclose to the National Assembly or the public. Any of these scenarios constitutes a failure of governance at the highest level.

President Ali presents himself internationally as the steward of a sophisticated oil economy, a leader who understands ‘deliberate diversification’ and ‘permanent transformation.’ His administration cannot simultaneously claim that competence while being unable to project spending needs four months into the future.

III. THE VAGUENESS IS NOT ACCIDENTAL

The opacity surrounding the supplementary bill is, this Editorial Board submits, the most damning feature of the entire exercise. In a functioning democracy, a supplementary appropriation of this scale would be accompanied by granular detail: which line items are being augmented and why; what original projections proved wrong; which projects are being accelerated; and which emergent obligations necessitate additional spending.

What Guyanese have received instead is the political equivalent of a blank cheque.

Vagueness in public finance is never neutral. It is a choice. Governments that are spending in the public interest invite scrutiny because scrutiny validates their claims. Governments that are spending for political purposes obscure details because exposure would reveal the true beneficiaries. The Ali administration’s refusal to provide itemized justifications for $54 billion in additional expenditure — in an election year — is not an administrative oversight. It is a red flag of the highest order.

The nation is owed specific answers to the following questions, and this Board demands they be answered on the floor of the National Assembly and in public written submissions to the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee:

THE QUESTIONS THIS ADMINISTRATION MUST ANSWER
1.  Which specific budget lines are being supplemented, by how much, and why did original projections fail?
2.  What procurement processes, if any, will govern the expenditure of these additional funds?
3.  Are any of these funds earmarked for infrastructure projects in constituencies targeted in the upcoming Local Government Elections?
4.  Who authorized the spending commitments that necessitated this request, and when were those commitments made?
5.  Has the Ministry of Finance revised its full-year revenue and expenditure projections in light of this shortfall?
6.  What is the draw-down status of the Natural Resource Fund, and what disbursement approvals have been made since 1 January 2026?

IV.THE ELECTION HYPOTHESIS

The 592 Guardian does not make accusations lightly. We are, however, compelled by the available evidence to state what many Guyanese are already saying in their homes, on their minibuses, and on social media: this supplementary bill has the appearance — and the timing — of an electoral financing vehicle.

The Local Government Elections are approaching. The Ali administration is acutely aware of the legitimacy it derives from constituency-level victories. The pattern of large, vaguely justified expenditure coinciding with electoral cycles is not novel in Guyanese political history — and it has not been unique to any single party. What is novel is the scale. Fifty-four billion dollars in supplementary spending authority, sought from a compliant National Assembly majority, with minimal public itemization, in the months before a national vote, represents a qualitatively new threshold of fiscal-political risk.

The government will, predictably, deny this. It will cite development imperatives, emergent capital needs, and the accelerating pace of transformation. It will point to visible projects — roads, hospitals, solar installations — as evidence that the money is going where it should. It will accuse critics of playing politics.

But accusations do not require guilt — they require accountability. And accountability requires transparency. Show us the line items. Show us the procurement records. Show us the disbursement schedule. If the spending is legitimate, the documentation will vindicate the government. If it is not, the Guyanese people deserve to know before they cast their votes, not after.

V.THE FORTRESS AND THE FICTION

President Ali told the Dominican Republic’s energy press that the Natural Resource Fund is Guyana’s ‘fortress of fiscal responsibility.’ It is a fine phrase. It is the kind of language that sounds authoritative in a glossy magazine feature or an investor roadshow. But a fortress that requires a $54 billion emergency drawdown four months into the fiscal year is not a fortress. It is a façade.

The President speaks internationally of ‘deliberate diversification’ and ‘long-term transformation.’ He invokes future generations. He promises forests of opportunity. But one cannot credibly plan for future generations while demonstrating an inability to project spending needs over a single fiscal quarter. These two positions — visionary stewardship of intergenerational wealth and chaotic, opaque supplementary demands — are irreconcilable. The international audience hearing the inspiring version of this story deserves to know the domestic reality.

Guyana’s oil wealth is real. The developmental opportunity it represents is real. The damage that fiscal recklessness, elite capture, and political manipulation of that wealth can inflict is equally real. The resource curse that President Ali so confidently claims to be defying is not conjured by pessimists — it is documented, in granular detail, in the economic histories of Nigeria, Angola, Venezuela, and a dozen other states where the rhetoric of transformation preceded decades of squandered potential.

The antidote to that curse is not confident rhetoric. It is institutional transparency, robust parliamentary oversight, independent auditing, and a media and civil society willing to ask uncomfortable questions even when — especially when — the government’s international image is riding high.

VI.OUR DEMAND

The 592 Guardian calls on the National Assembly’s Opposition to refuse passage of this supplementary appropriation until the government tables a fully itemized breakdown of every line item, the originating ministry, the contractual basis for each expenditure, and the specific projects or programs to be funded.

We call on the Auditor General’s office to immediately flag this request for priority review and to publish a preliminary assessment of its consistency with the fiscal rules governing Natural Resource Fund disbursements.

We call on civil society organizations, the Private Sector Commission, and the academic community to add their voices to the demand for transparency. The silence of institutions in the face of fiscal opacity is itself a form of complicity.

And we call on every Guyanese citizen to remember, when they go to vote in the Local Government Elections, that a government which cannot explain where $54 billion went in sixteen weeks is not a government that has earned the right to speak of ‘forests of opportunity for generations to come.’

The seeds being planted today may indeed shelter generations — but they will be the wrong generation’s forest.

This editorial represents the independent position of The 592 Guardian Editorial Board. The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability publication committed to social justice journalism in Guyana and the wider Caribbean region.

© 2026 The 592 Guardian •  All rights reserved

A Bridge for Foreigners

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM | EDITORIAL

EXTRACTIVE ECONOMY | PUBLIC INTEREST

A Bridge for Foreigners

The US$6M Puruni River crossing is being sold as national development. The evidence suggests it is national infrastructure in the service of foreign extraction.

“When a government’s flagship infrastructure projects are routed through mining corridors rather than communities, the priorities are not a mystery — they are a policy.”

A Ribbon-Cutting in a Resource Corridor

The announcement of a US$6 million bridge across the Puruni River arrived, as these announcements usually do, dressed in the language of national progress. Infrastructure. Connectivity. Development. The government’s enthusiasm was unmistakable. What was somewhat less visible, buried beneath the promotional framing, was the answer to the simplest of editorial questions: development for whom?

The Puruni River sits inside Region 7, Cuyuni-Mazaruni — one of Guyana’s most mineral-rich districts and, not coincidentally, one of its most infrastructure-starved. Gold is the defining industry. Canadian-controlled mining giants have staked claims there that, at current commodity prices, represent potential earnings in the billions. The Puruni bridge, by the government’s own accounting, will service thousands of mining properties, ease the movement of extraction equipment, and accelerate the throughput of gold. What it will not do, at least not by design, is address the chronic absence of adequate schools, functional healthcare facilities, or paved roads that serve the daily lives of Guyanese citizens who have lived alongside this wealth for generations.

The Pattern Is the Policy

Isolated, this bridge could be a footnote. In context, it is a case study.

The Ali administration has developed a consistent infrastructure logic: public capital flows toward extraction corridors; Guyanese communities receive the rhetoric of the trickle-down. The government celebrates the expansion of foreign mining operations as a national achievement — as if the flag on a press release constitutes a share in the profits. It does not.

The arithmetic is not complicated. Guyana is, by macroeconomic measure, one of the fastest-growing economies on the planet. It is also a country where flood response is chronically mismanaged, where regional hospitals lack basic equipment, where schoolchildren learn in structures that would fail any building inspection, and where the rural poor — overwhelmingly Indigenous and Afro-Guyanese — remain structurally excluded from the oil and mineral wealth extracted from or near their ancestral territories. A government that can mobilize US$6 million for a mining corridor bridge within a single budget cycle has made a choice. That choice has a name: it is called prioritization, and this government’s priorities are legible.

The State as Enabler-in-Chief

The deeper problem is structural. When a state’s infrastructure investments systematically reduce the operating costs of foreign extractive capital, the state is not acting as a neutral development agent — it is acting as a subsidizer of private profit.

The Puruni bridge does not merely facilitate gold movement; it de-risks the logistics chain for multinational mining operations that will repatriate the bulk of their earnings offshore. Guyanese taxpayers will maintain this bridge. Guyanese communities will bear its environmental and social externalities. The companies whose bottom lines it fattens will file their dividends in Toronto and London.

This arrangement has a technical term in development economics: regulatory capture applied to public investment. When the infrastructure budget reads like a wish list drafted by the mining sector, the question of whose government this actually is becomes something other than rhetorical. The government will object, of course. It will cite royalties, tax revenues, employment figures. These are not nothing. They are also not the whole story, and a government that produces only the flattering parts of the ledger is not being transparent — it is being selective.

What Genuine Development Looks Like

The 592 Guardian does not oppose infrastructure. We oppose infrastructure whose primary function is to lower the overhead of foreign capital while communities that share the same geography wait decades for a functioning clinic.

Development that cannot be explained to a mining-adjacent community in terms of what it materially delivers to that community is not national development. It is a subsidy wearing a hard hat.

Genuine resource nationalism — the kind this government invokes when it suits — would require that the profits generated by Guyanese mineral wealth remain, in meaningful proportion, in Guyana: not in the capital’s patronage networks, not in foreign shareholder accounts, but in communities.

In roads that lead to hospitals, not ore pads. In schools that produce engineers capable of operating the mines that are already here. In governance frameworks that put Guyanese citizens, not Canadian mining companies, at the centre of infrastructure planning.

ACCOUNTABILITY DEMANDS

The 592 Guardian calls on the Government of Guyana to:

  1. Publish a full cost-benefit analysis of the Puruni River bridge, disaggregated by beneficiary — identifying which concessions, companies, and communities will be served — before any further public funds are disbursed.
  2. Disclose the ownership structures of all mining operations that will directly benefit from this infrastructure, including any beneficial ownership registered in jurisdictions outside Guyana.
  3. Table a community infrastructure equivalency commitment: for every dollar invested in extraction-linked infrastructure in Region 7, a matching allocation to schools, healthcare, and potable water in directly adjacent communities.
  4. Establish an independent Infrastructure Prioritization Audit, with civil society and Indigenous community representation, to assess whether national infrastructure spending reflects public interest or private extraction interest.
  5. Answer plainly, in Parliament, the following question: what percentage of the projected lifetime earnings of operations served by the Puruni bridge will remain within Guyana’s domestic economy?

A government that builds bridges for foreigners while Guyanese wait for clinics is not developing a nation. It is managing an extraction site.

— The Editors, The 592 Guardian

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

GOLD SHARES FOR GUYANESE?

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or Another Elite Capture in the Making?

GOLD SHARES FOR GUYANESE?

Or Another Elite Capture in the Making?

Guyana is once again being asked to believe in a promise: that ordinary citizens will finally get a meaningful stake in the country’s vast natural wealth. This time, the vehicle is a proposed junior stock exchange, with the President announcing that a major gold developer has agreed to reserve shares for Guyanese investors.

On its face, the idea is compelling. For decades, the country’s extractive sectors—gold included—have generated immense value with limited broad-based ownership. If structured properly, a junior exchange could democratize investment, deepen the capital market, and give small and medium-sized Guyanese businesses a foothold in industries historically dominated by foreign capital and a narrow domestic elite.

But that “if” is doing a lot of work.

The first red flag is the absence of detail. Who exactly qualifies as “Guyanese investors”? Will there be caps to prevent politically connected insiders from cornering these reserved shares? What safeguards will ensure that this does not become another paper opportunity—announced with fanfare but captured quietly by those with privileged access to capital and information?

Guyana does not lack for cautionary tales. From land allocations to oil service contracts, the pattern has often been the same: public rhetoric about inclusion, followed by concentrated benefits for a well-positioned few

 

Without transparent allocation mechanisms, clear eligibility rules, and independent oversight, a “reserved shares” scheme risks becoming just another avenue for elite accumulation.

The second concern lies in timing and institutional readiness. A junior stock exchange is not simply a political announcement—it requires a robust regulatory framework, investor protections, disclosure standards, and enforcement capacity. The Guyana Securities Council, already operating in a limited market environment, will need significant strengthening to oversee what could quickly become a high-risk, speculative space.

Junior exchanges globally are notorious for volatility and, in some cases, manipulation. If Guyana rushes this process without building regulatory muscle, it could expose inexperienced local investors to predatory practices, inflated valuations, and eventual losses. In that scenario, “participation” becomes a liability rather than empowerment.

Then there is the broader policy coherence question. The President has linked this initiative to local content expansion beyond oil and gas, alongside plans for a development bank and diaspora bonds. While each of these instruments has merit, taken together they suggest a rapidly expanding state-led financial architecture that may outpace the country’s governance capacity.

A development bank without strict lending discipline can become a political slush fund. Diaspora bonds, if not transparently managed, can erode trust among overseas Guyanese whose remittances already sustain large parts of the economy. Layering a junior stock exchange onto this mix raises the stakes considerably.

None of this is to argue against the idea of wider ownership. In fact, Guyana urgently needs mechanisms that allow its citizens to build wealth from the country’s resource boom. But inclusion cannot be performative—it must be structured, enforceable, and transparent.

If the government is serious, several principles should be non-negotiable.

First, full public disclosure of any agreement with the gold developer, including how many shares are being reserved and under what conditions.

Second, clear and enforceable allocation rules that prioritize broad participation—potentially through limits per investor, priority windows for small investors, or pooled investment vehicles.

Third, independent oversight, not political supervision, of the allocation process.

Fourth, accelerated strengthening of financial regulation, investor education, and market surveillance before the exchange becomes operational.

Without these, the promise of “massive participation” risks becoming another slogan—one that masks a familiar outcome.

Guyana stands at a defining moment. The country’s leaders can either build systems that genuinely distribute opportunity, or they can continue to preside over a model where wealth is concentrated, even as the language of inclusion grows louder.

The difference will not be in the announcements, but in the architecture behind them—and in who ultimately ends up holding the shares.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

Appealing to Excellencies Ali, Phillips, Jagdeo: UGGI Report -Pt II

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592 GUARDIAN ♦OPINION♦ TRUTH♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY

Appealing to Excellencies Ali, Phillips, Jagdeo: UGGI Report -Pt II

BY: GHK LALL 

This is a public appeal to every leader and minister in the Government of Guyana.  Excellencies Ali, Phillips, and Jagdeo, and the entire cabinet is included.  In fact, this courtesy is extended to the ruling party’s Central Executive, all voting and nonvoting members.

I regret to inform you that trust in the national government is low.  Quite frankly, and most respectfully, Excellencies and honorable Guyanese, the trust of the Guyanese people for their national government could not be lower.  Please refer to the University of Guyana Green Institute (UGGI) Independence 60 Survey, and the Preliminary Report captioned: “Trust, Oil, and the Society being Built.”  Though the sample is small (134), the area narrow (Region Four), and the age and education spread could be much wider, the finding on trust for the national government is remarkable.

On a scale of 1 to10, with the latter representing great, almost total, trust, national government received a meager 3.72 score.  Not good at all.  It is my belief that an expanded survey would yield close to the same trust score, if not worse.  Shabby and trashy for a country that is frequently in the news globally.

This means, dear leaders and ministers that the visions, mentality, policies, procedures, approaches, standards, and practices of the national government are all in need of a massive overhaul.  It means, honorable gentlemen and ladies, that the Guyanese people are not buying One Guyana nor all Guyana.  Nor that national government is doing the right things.  It means that the ethics of the national government leaves much to be desired.  It means, it must be said, that from the president to the vice presidents to the ministers are viewed mostly distrustfully, found wanting.  Undoubtedly, hardcore national government insiders would have an opposite view.  Namely, that the national government in place today is the most trusted ever.  Those who have benefited immensely and unfairly can be expected, reflexively to scorn what the UGGI Independence 60 Survey found, because their bread has been richly buttered.  I think it would be wise, practical, self-enhancing for the Survey to be absorbed, taken with utmost seriousness, by national government.  With honest intention to do something about what the people think, how they see where national government is.

For the information of Excellencies Ali, Phillips, Jagdeo and all ministers: playing to selected and captive crowds, preaching to the faithful flock has its benefits.  But the utility is limited, and misleading.  For there is more to Guyana, that other side of Guyana.  It is not of those against current national government or wanting others to be the national government.  It is of Guyanese who are seeking substance behind the words, quality leadership from those who hold those positions, and to experience the effects of living in this glorious Oil Republic.

 Try this reality.  My own experience with traditional, diehard, supporters of this national government has been almost overwhelmingly negative.  The negativity begins and ends with distrust.

The lament is that piracies are too much, that accepting responsibility is alien to the culture of national government, that taking genuine action to right the ship of state is yet another trick played on citizens, and that being answerable to the people has distilled to either mocking or ignoring them altogether.  Note: this is not from the UGGI Survey, but from my own encounters with those who trusted enough to vote into national office.

Trust means that someone is seen as dependable, because he or she has delivered, proven true to their promises.  A track record that’s its own best recommendation.  Trust in national government, especially in this time of an unprecedented, unmatched, bonanza, means that its principals are seen as honest, honoring oaths, fighting for the Guyanese people, and not first for what benefits themselves, circle.  No spins; just doing honest things.

 In closing, I wish I could trust the names mentioned and their companions. Most unfortunately, I cannot.  When they prove themselves worthy of all Guyanese, rich and poor, I trust.  Guyana would be a better society.  I am better.  National government is held in high esteem.

 At bottom, citizens make countries, decide on and evaluate national government. Their assessment carries the most weight.  There’s the survey, its findings.  The national government should resolve.  Separately, oil investors can expound freely, smartly, about Guyana’s democracy, and its sweet business environment.  But they themselves are held in the lowest repute by Guyanese. 

Next: trust and foreign oil companies, with Excellencies Woods and Routledge featuring prominently.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

FOOLS GOLD AT THE LENDING WINDOW

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

Accountability. Without Apology.

EDITORIAL  |  JUNE 2026

FOOL’S GOLD AT THE LENDING WINDOW

The PPP’s ‘Development Bank’ Is Not a Lifeline for Small Business — It Is a Slush Fund with a Press Release

Floyd Haynes, Chairman of Newhaven Merchant Bank, concluded his recent op-ed on the proposed SME Development Bank with a quiet prayer dressed up as policy analysis: “If we get this right…”

If.

That single syllable, tucked into the closing paragraph of an otherwise enthusiastic endorsement, contains more honesty than anything else in the piece. Because the question Haynes cannot bring himself to answer — and the question every Guyanese citizen should be demanding an answer to — is this: When, precisely, have we ever gotten this right?

Not once. Not in any institution of consequence built by this administration or its predecessors under this governing arrangement. Not in the road contracts that ballooned and stalled. Not in the housing schemes that became patronage lotteries. Not in the public procurement processes that enriched the well-connected while the public waited. Not in the regional administrations where accountability travels in one direction — upward, to party headquarters — and never back to the people.

The record is not ambiguous. It is not contested. It is carved into the landscape of every region in this country in the form of unfinished projects, overpriced contracts, and quietly shelved reports. And yet, here we are again — presented with a US$200 million institution and asked to believe that this time will be different.

“If we get this right” — Mr. Haynes, that conditional is not a caveat. It is a confession.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE FAMILIAR

Strip away the language of inclusion — the seamstress in Sophia, the agro-processor in Berbice, the wheelchair-using developer in Linden, all of them deployed as rhetorical furniture to make a political instrument sound like social policy — and what you have is a lending institution that will be capitalised with public money, governed under political oversight, and staffed, at the decision-making level, by individuals whose primary qualification will not be credit analysis or development economics.

It will be loyalty.

That is not cynicism. That is the operational pattern of every quasi-public institution this government has touched. The question of who makes the final lending decisions is not addressed anywhere in the Haynes piece, nor in any of the administration’s announcements. There is talk of governance frameworks, transparency pillars, and independent credit assessment. There is no talk of who appoints the board. There is no talk of what protections exist against ministerial interference in individual loan decisions. There is no talk of what happens when a party financier’s cousin applies for GY$3 million to start a business he has no intention of running.

These omissions are not oversights. They are the design.

ZERO INTEREST, ZERO ACCOUNTABILITY

Mr. Haynes is correct that commercial lending rates of 10 to 14 per cent are prohibitive for micro-enterprises. He is correct that collateral requirements exclude women, young people, and persons with disabilities at disproportionate rates. These are real structural failures of the Guyanese financial system, and they deserve a real structural response.

But a zero-interest loan pool administered by a politically appointed institution, without enforceable arm’s-length governance, is not a structural response. It is a structural opportunity — for the party, not the public.

Zero interest and reduced collateral are not just pro-small-business features. They are also the precise combination of conditions that make a lending institution maximally attractive as a vehicle for politically directed disbursement. The lower the barrier to lending, the wider the discretion available to those controlling the tap. The less collateral required, the less documentation needed to justify a decision. The more that decisions can be framed as serving the bank’s social mandate, the harder it becomes to challenge any individual disbursement.

This is the cobra effect Mr. Haynes references — but he applies it narrowly, to borrowers who might default. He does not apply it to the institution itself, which faces every incentive to lend politically and no enforceable constraint to prevent it.

The lower the barrier to lending, the wider the discretion available to those controlling the tap.

APPEASEMENT INFRASTRUCTURE

Let us be direct about what this bank is in the context of Guyanese political economy.

The PPP has, over the course of this oil boom, constructed a vast machinery of resource distribution. Contracts, jobs, housing allocations, scholarships, cash grants — each instrument serves a dual function: a stated public purpose and an unstated political one. The stated purpose is what gets written into op-eds and ministerial speeches. The unstated purpose is what keeps the base mobilized, keeps the loyalists rewarded, and keeps the opposition constituencies just comfortable enough not to organize.

A development bank with GY$3 million zero-interest loans is not a departure from this machinery. It is the most sophisticated addition to it yet. It is targeted at demographics — youth, women, small business owners — whose support is politically valuable and whose economic precarity makes them susceptible to cultivation. It offers enough real benefit to the base that the political dividend is genuine, while the institutional structure ensures that the discretionary benefits flow to those who matter.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is how patronage democracies function. They do not distribute nothing — they distribute selectively, visibly, and with just enough reach to sustain the narrative that the party governs for everyone. The seamstress in Sophia gets her loan. The party agent gets ten.

THE UNTOUCHABLE CLASS

There is a deeper structural point that the Haynes analysis — earnest though it may be — entirely misses. The establishment of this bank is not simply a policy decision. It is another layer of the oligarchic architecture that this administration has been building, methodically and with considerable sophistication, since it returned to power.

That architecture operates on a simple principle: enough money and enough loyalists, deployed across enough institutions, creates a class that is untouchable regardless of electoral outcomes. When the contracts are awarded to your allies, the boards are populated by your supporters, the lending decisions are made by your appointees, and the beneficiary lists contain enough ordinary names to create plausible deniability — you are not merely governing. You are constructing a permanent infrastructure of advantage that survives government.

In or out of power, the class that controls these flows is the untouchable class. The development bank, far from being a challenge to that structure, is one of its most elegant expressions. It takes the credibility of financial inclusion — a cause with genuine moral weight — and uses it to launder the distribution of resources to the network.

Mr. Haynes calls for vigilance. We agree. But vigilance directed at the borrowers — will they default, will they use the money wisely — is precisely the misdirection the architects of this institution are counting on. The vigilance that matters is directed at the lenders: Who appointed them? Who do they answer to? When a politically connected applicant’s file moves to the top of the queue, who pushes back, and at what personal cost?

WHAT DUE DILIGENCE ACTUALLY REQUIRES

The 592 Guardian does not oppose access to credit for small Guyanese businesses. We have consistently argued that the formal financial sector’s exclusion of women, youth, and rural entrepreneurs is one of the most consequential structural failures in this economy. The principle behind this bank is not wrong. The problem is that principles do not govern institutions — people do, and the people who will govern this institution have not been named, have not been subjected to any public vetting, and have not been required to operate under any governance framework that exists independently of the executive branch.

Before a single loan is disbursed, the public is owed answers to the following:

Who appoints the board, and can the President or Cabinet remove a board member without parliamentary approval? What is the explicit prohibition on current or former party officers serving in decision-making roles? What is the independent complaints and appeals mechanism for rejected applicants who believe political criteria influenced their outcome? What are the quarterly public reporting obligations, and who has the legal standing to enforce them? Who conducts the external audit, and does that auditor report to Parliament rather than the Ministry?

None of these questions are addressed in the government’s announcements. None are addressed in the Haynes piece. Their absence is not incidental.

GETTING IT RIGHT HAS NEVER BEEN THE PLAN

Mr. Haynes writes that “if we get this right, a decade from now we will look back on the establishment of this bank as the moment Guyana decided that prosperity would be built from the bottom up.”

It is a stirring vision. It also assumes that getting it right is the objective.

The record of this administration — on public procurement, on oil revenue governance, on the management of state enterprises, on the awarding of infrastructure contracts, on the population of every board and commission of consequence — suggests that getting it right, in the sense Mr. Haynes means, has never been the primary objective. The primary objective has been getting it done in a way that consolidates power, rewards loyalty, and constructs durable institutional advantage for the ruling class.

A development bank, given that objective, is not a vehicle for financial inclusion. It is a vehicle for financial control. The inclusion is the cover. The control is the point.

The seamstress in Sophia gets her loan. The party agent gets ten.

— The Editors

The 592 Guardian | Georgetown, Guyana

STATE CAPTURE BY DESIGN

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592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 –𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 ♦𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮♦𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮

A 592 GUARDIAN | ACCOUNTABILITY EDITORIAL

State Capture by Design

Guyana is being governed increasingly by the logic of concentration, not consultation. What on the surface is sold as development is often, on closer inspection, the careful assembling of political, financial and institutional power into fewer and fewer hands.

The latest evidence is not subtle. A government-backed effort to place the Development Bank under the direct control of the Finance Minister, without meaningful oversight from the Opposition, transparency bodies or civil society, is not reform in any democratic sense.

It is centralization. And when a state centralizes control over credit, appointments and lending discretion, it is not merely reorganizing administration; it is deciding who gets to rise and who must remain excluded.

That is why the new aircraft story, acquired by XEN Aviation- which some will present as a sign of private-sector confidence and national progress, deserves a more skeptical reading. Yes, Guyana needs improved domestic connectivity. Yes, hinterland aviation matters. But in a society where access to state power, finance and regulatory advantage increasingly appears to follow the same narrow corridors, even legitimate business expansion can become part of a larger architecture of privilege.

This is how oligarchic systems mature. They do not announce themselves with slogans. They arrive through appointments, lending power, procurement channels, regulatory softness and institutional capture. They arrive when the gates of opportunity are opened wide for the connected but remain locked for the ordinary citizen. They arrive when the small entrepreneur is told to wait, comply and queue, while the well-connected are ushered forward with speed, access and approval.

A Development Bank controlled directly by the Finance Minister, with weak or absent independent oversight, is not just an administrative concern. It is a constitutional and democratic one.

Development finance is supposed to widen participation in the economy, not become another instrument through which influence is distributed to the already powerful.

If the bank’s directors, chairperson and deputy chair are all appointed by the very political authority that stands to benefit from its operations, then the institution is compromised at its foundation.

And once that foundation is compromised, the rest follows predictably. Lending decisions become opaque. Due diligence becomes selective. Favoritism acquires the appearance of policy. Those with access to the inner circle move faster, borrow easier, and expand more aggressively, while everyone else is left to compete in a rigged environment dressed up as market freedom.

This is why the debate cannot be reduced to personalities. It is not enough to say one businessman is expanding, or one aircraft has entered the fleet, or one project is commercially sensible. The deeper question is whether Guyana is building an economy that is open, competitive and rule-bound, or one in which the state quietly functions as a mechanism for consolidating wealth among the politically adjacent.

That question matters because institutions do not collapse all at once. They are hollowed out gradually. Oversight is weakened first. Then rules are bent. Then exceptions become routine. Then the public is told that every concentration of power is necessary for efficiency, every objection is obstruction, and every critique is somehow anti-development.

By the time citizens realize what has happened, the machinery of advancement has already been converted into the machinery of exclusion.

Guyana is now at risk of exactly that trajectory. A class is emerging—wealthy, insulated and politically protected—whose reach may soon exceed the practical limits of democratic accountability.

 When people accumulate enough money, leverage and institutional influence, elections remain necessary but no longer sufficient. Ballots still exist, but the terrain on which voters stand has already been tilted.

That is the danger. Not merely corruption in the conventional sense, but state capture in the deeper sense: the bending of institutions to preserve wealth, shield influence and determine outcomes in advance. When the judiciary, regulators, financial institutions and development agencies all begin to reflect the preferences of a narrow circle, democracy survives only as a ceremony.

This is why vigilance matters now, before the architecture hardens. A nation does not need to formally abolish democracy to weaken it beyond recognition. It only needs to make sure that the most important levers of power are no longer meaningfully accessible to scrutiny, competition or dissent.

That is the real story. Not merely an aircraft. Not merely a bank. Not merely one appointment or one expansion. It is the gradual conversion of the state into a tool of accumulation for a privileged few, while the language of development is used to disguise the transfer.

Guyana must not mistake growth for inclusion, nor activity for fairness. If the country is serious about building a modern economy, then development institutions must be insulated from partisan control, lending must be transparent, and oversight must be real. Otherwise, the promise of national advancement will be captured long before ordinary citizens ever reach the runway.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

The Mesmerizing Flamboyancy of Suman Kalyanpur

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592 GUARDIAN♦ SPECIAL FEATURE

The Mesmerizing Flamboyancy of Suman Kalyanpur

OPINION 

BY: JAI LALL

The golden era of Indian artistes is lingering on the threshold of a fading twilight. Engulfed in the long shadow of refined Indian artistry comprising voices, vocals and vintage, there remain only but a few darlings who have gracefully traversed the iconic age of candor courtesy, charismatic challenges and couth culture. An entertaining memory lane from the 1930’s, endowed with the talented personalities featuring songs and music for the black and white movies in particular, has set sail after completing their musical sojourn on this earthly abode.

A name synonymous with the auspices of a good disposition, Suman Kalyanpur, a legendary playback singer from the filmy world of Bollywood, was born as Suman Hemmady on 28th January,1937 in Kolkata but brought to Dhaka (now Bangladesh), at the age of 3. She was bred in Bombay from 1943. This flower, interested in painting and music, burgeoned into a student initially learning classical music from Pandit Keshav Rao Bhole of Pune’s Prabhat Films, a close family friend. She later had other Gurus.

The versatile maestro who sang in over ten languages including Hindi, got her first chance to sing publicly for the All-India Radio in 1952. Her opportunity to break into the film industry was in 1953 in the Marathi Film, “Shukrachi Chandni.” Singing a lullaby in 1954, “Koi Pukaree Dheere Se Tujhe” from the movie “Mangu,” Suman Kalyanpur made her debut in the Hindi film world.

She then sang “Mohabbat Kar Lo Ji Bhar Lo Aji Kisne Rokha Hai” with Mohammed Rafi and Geeta Dutt for the film Aar Paar.

This veteran singer who became popular in particular in the 1960’s and 1970’s, spanned a recording three-decade famous career, perhaps was thankful to Talat Mahmood who was impressed with her singing after listening to her in a musical concert. Agreeing to do a duet with her, the film industry sat up and took notice of her and from then on, she blossomed into that velveteen voice with over 3,000 recordings to her credit.

Suman Ji sang duets with all the big-time playback singers and joined the elite group of India’s maestros with distinction including the romantic Mohammed Rafi, the sentimental Mukesh, the rollicking Kishore Kumar, the classical Manna Dey, the emotional Talat Mahmood and the sensational Hemant Kumar. This touching description qualifies the performing arts of Suman Ji’s capabilities.

Despite her unique gift, she was overshadowed with her touch, tone and tenderness similar to Lata Mangeshkar and often mistaken for this close semblance. This provided a limited negativity but an advantage when Lata’s “feud” and reluctance to sing with Rafi ji for a while, opened a flood —gate of performances because of her nuanced voice with Lata ji.

With the advent of award-winning stars from the big screen, Suman Kalyanpur stamped her authority as one of India’s favorite past time singers in Baat Ek Raat, Dil Ek Mandir, Dil Hi to Hai,Sanjh Aur Savera, Noor Jehan, Saathi, Pakeeza etc. Suman ji performed a rare duet with Lata ji with the classical song “Kabhi Aaj Kabhi Kal” from the 1959 movie “Chand.” In quite an entertaining scene, Balraj Sahni and Meena Kumarie witnessed the explosive, expressive and exclusive dancing ordeal by Helen and Sheila Waz.

Her visit to Guyana would shed tears in remembering her fantastic, feathery and famous finesse while performing the crazed twister Aajkal Tere Mere Pyaar Ke Charche, the moving Na Na Karte Pyaar, the electrifying Tumse Ho Hasinha, the thrilling Rahen Na Rahen Hum, the romantic Tumne Pukara Aur Hum Chale Aye, the emotional Dil Ne Phir Yaad Kiyya, the melodious Mera Pyar Bhi Tu Hai, the classical Manamohan Man Mein Ho Tumhi etc. This never forgotten voice of exquisite exuberance and soft somberness was the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including; the three times Sur Sringar Samsad for the best classical song in Hindi movie; the Lata Mangeshkar Award by the Government of Maharashtra (2009); Ga Di Ma Award by Ga Di Ma Pratishthan; Mirchi Music Lifetime Achievement Award (2022); Padma Bhushan by the Government of India on 26th January 2023 and the Maharashtra Bhushan Ma Ta Sanman Puraskar by Maharashtra Times (2024).

The voice of the world fell quiet when Suman Kalyanpur bade us farewell on 31st May 2026 at her residence in Lokhandwala at the beautiful age of 89. She expired from age related issues while listening to her own recordings. Despite her often-mistaken voice for Lata ji, Suman Ji made her indelible articulation in her own resonating manner, silently but distinctly distinguishable in her own romantic, royal and resonating right.

Thank you Suman Kalyanpur ji for providing music lovers with your refreshing and rich recordings which will remain remnants of the haunting past of Indian melodious appeasement in a delicate era, dedicated and devoted to the cultural preservation of refined idolized musical artistry.