Ambition and Infrastructure: A Necessary Alignment

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THE 592 GUARDIAN OPINION

Recent developments in Kenya offer a timely and instructive lesson for emerging economies seeking to position themselves within the global digital and artificial intelligence landscape. The suspension of a proposed US$1 billion Microsoft-backed data center—on the grounds that it would place unsustainable pressure on the national electricity grid—underscores a fundamental principle of modern development: ambition must be matched by infrastructure.

Kenya, with an installed electricity capacity of approximately 3,000 megawatts and a comparatively advanced renewable energy portfolio, was compelled to acknowledge that a single hyperscale data facility could consume a substantial share of its national supply. The implications were clear. Without adequate surplus capacity and grid resilience, even the most prestigious investments become untenable.

This reality bears direct relevance to Guyana.

In recent public pronouncements, President Irfaan Ali has advanced the vision of establishing a “Silicon Valley” in Guyana—a concept that, while aspirational, appears disconnected from the country’s present infrastructural conditions. Guyana remains in the process of bringing its 300 MW Gas-to-Energy (GtE) project to operational status, a development that is itself critical to stabilizing domestic supply and reducing energy costs. Yet this project, foundational as it is, does not represent surplus capacity; it represents a long-overdue baseline.

Hyperscale data centers—the backbone of any genuine technology hub—are among the most resource-intensive facilities in existence. Their demands extend well beyond electricity. A single large-scale facility can require between 100 MW and 300 MW of continuous power, alongside extensive cooling systems that depend on significant volumes of water. These are not marginal increases in demand; they are industrial-scale requirements that must be sustained without interruption.

Guyana’s current realities raise serious questions about readiness on both fronts.

Electricity supply, while improving, remains constrained and in transition. The completion and integration of the GtE project are prerequisites for stability, not indicators of excess. Equally pressing is the issue of water. Across Georgetown and other regions, citizens and businesses continue to face persistent challenges with water pressure, reliability, and distribution. The notion of diverting large volumes of treated water to support energy-intensive data infrastructure—while sections of the population experience daily shortages—demands careful scrutiny.

Modern data centers often rely on water-based cooling systems that can consume millions of gallons annually, depending on scale and technology. In jurisdictions where such facilities are successfully deployed, water management systems are robust, redundant, and carefully regulated to prevent competition between industrial and domestic needs. 

Guyana has yet to demonstrate that such systems are in place or even in advanced planning.

The broader issue, therefore, is not whether Guyana should aspire to participate in the global digital economy. It should. The issue is sequencing.

Sustainable technological development is built on a hierarchy of prerequisites: reliable and expandable energy generation, resilient transmission networks, secure and sufficient water supply, regulatory clarity, and a skilled workforce. These elements are not optional; they are foundational. Without them, high-level visions risk becoming detached from operational reality.

Kenya’s recent decision illustrates the importance of confronting these constraints early and transparently. It is a reminder that credibility in development policy is earned not through declarations, but through demonstrated capacity and disciplined execution.

Guyana stands at a pivotal moment in its economic trajectory, buoyed by significant resource revenues and international attention. This moment demands not only vision, but precision. Grand announcements must be anchored in verifiable infrastructure plans, with clear timelines, financing strategies, and independent oversight.

A technology-driven future for Guyana is achievable. However, it will not be realized through rhetoric alone. It will require sustained investment in energy and water systems, careful prioritization, and a commitment to aligning national aspirations with material capabilities.

Until such alignment is achieved, proposals of a “Silicon Valley” remain premature. What is required now is not the language of transformation, but the work that makes transformation possible.

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

Two Ambassadors, One Prize:

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EDITORIAL

Guyana as Battleground in the US–China Great Power Contest

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

May 2026

I.  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TIMING WHEN TWO EMPIRES SPOKE

Within days of each other in May 2026, two of the world’s most powerful nations addressed Guyana directly — not through back channels or diplomatic cables, but through the public press, in signed op-eds crafted with evident care and deliberate purpose.

US Ambassador Nicole Theriot marked sixty years of bilateral relations with a warm tribute to partnership, shared history, and the promise of “deeper democracy.” Nine days prior, Chinese Ambassador Yang Yang published a sweeping defense of Beijing’s relationship with Georgetown, titled “Facts Speak Louder Than Words: The Real Story of China–Guyana Cooperation” — using detailed data and pointed language to firmly refute what she called “groundless accusations” by a US congressman about so-called “Chinese influence” in Guyana.

Two ambassadors. Two op-eds. One small nation sitting atop one of the most significant oil discoveries of the twenty-first century.

Coincidence is not a concept that applies to great power diplomacy. What Guyana witnessed in May 2026 was not two friends sending greetings. It was two empires — each with a hundred-year strategic horizon — publicly competing for the allegiance of a nation that has suddenly become indispensable.

Georgetown must read both documents not as tributes, but as bids. And it must read them with eyes wide open.

II.  THE AMERICAN BID: WARMTH WITH CONDITIONS

Ambassador Theriot’s op-ed is eloquent, warm, and genuinely appreciative of a partnership that has delivered real benefits to the Guyanese people. But diplomacy, like oil contracts, requires reading the fine print.

Just weeks before her anniversary tribute, Ambassador Theriot sat before a Guyanese television audience and delivered what can only be described as a threat dressed in diplomatic clothing. As the representative of the US Government, she declared it “incredibly dangerous” to start talking about renegotiation of the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil — warning that doing so “sends a terrible signal to international investors all over the world.”

The numbers make the stakes plain. In 2024 alone, ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC collectively earned US$8.4 billion in profits from Guyana’s Stabroek Block, while Guyana — despite owning the resource — received just US$2.6 billion. Under the 2016 PSA, 75 percent of oil produced is set aside for the international oil companies to recoup their investments, with only the remaining 25 percent split equally between Guyana and the consortium, alongside a mere 2 percent royalty.

The 2016 agreement prohibits the Government from imposing any windfall tax — and requires Guyana to pay Exxon’s corporate income tax liabilities out of its own share of profit oil.

What makes this position especially extraordinary is its sharp departure from prior US diplomatic posture. In April 2019, then-Ambassador Sarah Ann Lynch stated clearly that “it is within Guyana’s right to renegotiate the controversial Production Sharing Agreement” and that the US “certainly wouldn’t interfere with that.” Ambassador Theriot in April 2026 calls even thinking about renegotiation “incredibly dangerous” and “a very bad idea.” Same flag. Dramatically different instructions.

What changed? The scale of the discovery. With Guyana now producing nearly 900,000 barrels per day and the block proven to hold over 11 billion barrels, the stakes for ExxonMobil — and by extension for Washington — are existential. So serious is the US position that when Undersecretary for Economic Affairs Jacob Helsberg visited recently, though he chose softer language than the Ambassador, his meaning was identical: Washington will not countenance any maneuver that upsets the current arrangement.

III.  THE DOUBLE GAME IN PLAIN SIGHT

Ambassador Theriot assures Guyana that Washington stands “firmly” behind its territorial integrity, invoking Secretary Rubio’s 2025 visit to Georgetown as evidence of commitment. And yet, simultaneously, the United States has been engaged in one of the most consequential geopolitical pivots in the Western Hemisphere — a systematic re-engagement with Venezuela, the very nation whose territorial aggression against Guyana the Ambassador so eloquently condemns.

Following the capture of Nicolás Maduro by US forces in January 2026, a 50-million-barrel oil supply deal was announced with the remaining Venezuelan government, new hydrocarbons privatization laws were passed, and the US lifted sanctions on Venezuelan oil trade. By February 2026, OFAC had issued the broadest easing of Venezuela-related sanctions in years. Chevron mentioned Venezuela twelve times in its 2025 lobbying filings. White House meetings with oil executives about Venezuelan reconstruction investment followed days later.

Let the significance of this sink in. Washington’s security guarantee to Guyana and Washington’s commercial re-engagement with Venezuela are not contradictory policies in the minds of American strategists. They are complementary ones. The United States wants stable oil flows from both nations, leverage over both capitals, and the indispensable role of arbiter between them.

This is not cynicism. It is the most rational foreign policy imaginable — from Washington’s perspective. It is only naïve from Georgetown’s.

Washington’s ideal outcome is a Western Hemisphere in which it controls access to two of the region’s most significant oil jurisdictions — Guyana through commercial dominance and security partnership, Venezuela through post-Maduro reconstruction and investment. In that scenario, the United States is not Guyana’s partner. It is Guyana’s landlord

1v.THE CHINESE BID: INFRASTRUCTURE WITH STRINGS UNACKNOWLEDGED

Ambassador Yang Yang’s op-ed is a masterpiece of soft power framing. The facts she presents are largely accurate, and genuinely impressive. By the end of 2025, cumulative Chinese investment in Guyana had reached approximately US$13 billion, while bilateral trade totaled US$2.89 billion — more than double the previous year. Chinese companies built the Bharrat Jagdeo Demerara River Bridge, six regional hospitals now fully operational, and the China–Guyana Joe Vieira Friendship Park. Since 1993, over 300 Chinese medical professionals have treated more than 1.3 million Guyanese patients.

These are not phantom achievements. They are tangible contributions to Guyanese life, and they deserve honest acknowledgment just as the US contributions do.

But Ambassador Yang’s eloquence carefully omits what her government’s global track record makes impossible to ignore. In 2025 alone, developing countries owed China US$35 billion in BRI-related repayments — a record — with US$22 billion of that burden falling on the world’s 75 poorest nations. China’s outstanding overseas BRI debt has surpassed US$1 trillion, with infrastructure projects across multiple regions struggling to meet even interest payments.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port was also built under principles of “mutual benefit and win-win cooperation.” It was leased to China for 99 years after debt default.

Guyana is not Sri Lanka. Its oil revenues provide a cushion that most BRI recipients do not have. But a nation flush with new wealth is also a nation newly attractive to predatory partnership structures — and US$13 billion in cumulative Chinese investment, against a Guyanese GDP that was barely US$14 billion as recently as 2022, represents a level of economic penetration that warrants serious scrutiny.

Ambassador Yang’s article was triggered not by goodwill alone, but by a specific challenge: US Congressman Gabe Evans had publicly raised concerns about Chinese influence in Guyana. The fact that a sitting US congressman felt compelled to write about Chinese influence, and that the Chinese Ambassador responded within days through the Guyanese press, tells you everything about what Georgetown has become: a theatre of great power competition being conducted, politely but intensely, on Guyanese soil.

V.  CNOOC: THE SILENT PLAYER IN THE ROOM

There is a dimension of the China–Guyana relationship that Ambassador Yang’s lyrical op-ed does not address, and which Ambassador Theriot’s partnership language deliberately obscures: CNOOC — China National Offshore Oil Corporation — is a direct partner in the very Stabroek Block that Washington is so anxious to protect.

CNOOC holds a 25 percent stake in the Stabroek consortium alongside ExxonMobil and Chevron. This means that every barrel produced from Guyana’s most valuable oil asset flows simultaneously to American and Chinese state interests. The two powers publicly competing for Guyana’s geopolitical allegiance are already, quietly, business partners in Georgetown’s oil field.

The battle for Guyana’s allegiance is not merely political. It is a battle over who controls — and who profits from — the extraction of a finite and extraordinary natural resource.

VI. THE PROPOGANDA PARALLEL : READING BOTH OP-EDS TOGETHER

Placed side by side, the Theriot and Yang op-eds reveal a structural similarity that is both instructive and troubling for Guyanese readers.

Both ambassadors lead with history and friendship. Both marshal specific projects and achievements as evidence of benevolent partnership. Both invoke shared values — democracy and sovereignty in Theriot’s case, mutual respect and the Global South in Yang’s. Both are responding, at least in part, to the other power’s moves. And crucially, both are silent about the ways their respective nations’ interests diverge from Guyana’s own.

Theriot does not mention the lopsidedness of the Stabroek contract. Yang does not mention BRI debt diplomacy. Theriot celebrates Exxon’s community investment signs in Mabaruma without noting that Exxon earned US$4.7 billion from Guyana in 2024 alone. Yang celebrates the Demerara River Bridge without disclosing the full terms of the financing that built it.

Both documents are truthful in what they include. Both are strategic in what they omit. That is the definition of propaganda — not fabrication, but selective presentation in service of national interest.

VII.  THE GEOPOLITICAL TRAP: CHOOSING SIDES IN SOMEONE ELSE’S WAR

The deepest danger facing Guyana in this moment is not Venezuela’s territorial aggression, though that is real. It is not the lopsided oil contract, though that requires correction. It is the gravitational pull toward choosing sides in a US–China rivalry that Guyana did not start, does not control, and could be badly damaged by.

Washington wants Guyana firmly in the Western camp — a reliable partner against Chinese influence in the Caribbean and a secure platform for American energy interests. Beijing wants Guyana as a Belt and Road success story, a CNOOC-holding ally, and a demonstration that the Global South can build prosperity outside the US-dominated financial architecture.

Both wants are legitimate from their respective perspectives. Neither is primarily about Guyana’s wellbeing.

The nations that have fared best in this rivalry are those that have refused to be captured by either pole — that have taken infrastructure from China while maintaining security ties with the West, extracted investment from both without surrendering sovereign decision-making to either. Vietnam. Indonesia. Brazil, under its more strategically coherent moments. These are the models Georgetown should study.

Lord Palmerston settled the matter in 1848: nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Both Washington and Beijing operate on that doctrine. So must Georgetown.

VIII.  WHAT SOVEREIGN GUYANA LOOKS LIKE

Genuine sovereignty in Guyana’s current position looks like this:

It takes the US security guarantee seriously while refusing to become a wholly owned subsidiary of American foreign policy. It welcomes Chinese infrastructure investment while insisting on transparent loan terms, competitive bidding, and contractual protections against asset seizure. It renegotiates the Stabroek Block agreement toward terms that reflect the now-known scale of the discovery — not because it is anti-American, but because it is pro-Guyanese. It builds military and intelligence relationships with Brazil, the United Kingdom, India, and CARICOM alongside its American MOU. And it uses its Natural Resource Fund as a genuine sovereign wealth instrument, not a political tool.

It reads every op-ed published by a foreign ambassador — however eloquently written, however warmly intended — as what it is: a bid, not a gift.

One American ambassador said Guyana had every right to renegotiate its oil contract. Another called it “incredibly dangerous” even to raise the subject. One Chinese ambassador builds hospitals and bridges while her government’s BRI architecture has placed dozens of developing nations in unsustainable debt. The world’s most powerful nations have revealed, through these contradictions, that their relationship with Guyana is fundamentally transactional.

There is no shame in that. Transactional relationships can be enormously beneficial — if both parties understand the transaction clearly. Guyana must understand the transaction clearly.

IX.  A MESSAGE TO BOTH AMBASSADORS

To Ambassador Theriot: We value the sixty-year relationship. We honor the highway, the vaccines, the security partnership, and the genuine commitment to our sovereignty against Venezuelan aggression. We ask only that you extend to us the same honest respect you would give a true sovereign partner — including the acknowledgment that Guyana has every right, as your predecessor confirmed, to seek fair terms for its own natural resources.

To Ambassador Yang: We are grateful for the hospitals, the bridge, the medical brigades, and the trade relationship that has grown impressively. We ask only that you accompany those gifts with full transparency about loan terms, contract conditions, and the documented experience of other nations that walked the Belt and Road before us.

To both: Guyana is not a prize. It is not a theatre. It is not a demonstration project for your competing visions of world order.

It is a sovereign nation, newly wealthy, historically overlooked, and finally in a position to demand that the world treat it accordingly.

We intend to collect on that demand — from Washington and Beijing alike.

The 592 Guardian — Editorial Board

Georgetown, Guyana  |  May 2026

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

# A Man Who Has Forgotten: Ali, the Nimitz, and the Betrayal of Memory

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Opinion | The 592 Guardian

There is a particular kind of political sin that does not announce itself with scandal or corruption. It arrives quietly, dressed in the language of progress and partnership, wearing a smile cultivated for cameras and handshakes. It is the sin of ingratitude — and President Irfaan Ali committed it in full view of the world when he stood aboard the USS Nimitz and beamed.

Let us be precise about what that image represents. The Nimitz is not a diplomatic vessel. It is not a hospital ship or a vessel of goodwill. It is among the most lethal instruments of power ever constructed by human hands — a floating airfield capable of projecting destruction to any corner of the earth. It is the embodiment of the very military-economic architecture that has strangled Cuba for over six decades, enforcing a blockade that has denied ordinary Cuban people medicine, food, and the basic dignities of modern life. To stand aboard it — not quietly, not reluctantly, but with visible pride and enthusiasm — is to make a statement. Whether Ali intended it or not, the statement was made.

And that statement lands like a slap across the face of every Guyanese who was kept alive, educated, or healed by the hands of a Cuban.

 What Cuba Did When No One Else Would

This is not nostalgia. This is not romanticism. This is recorded history.

When Guyana’s hospital wards were understaffed and its patients were dying for want of qualified physicians, it was not Washington that answered the call. It was Havana. Cuban doctors arrived in communities that had never seen a specialist, in regions where the nearest clinic was a day’s journey away. They did not come on short-term contracts with generous compensation packages. They came under the banner of solidarity — a word that has grown unfashionable in an era of transactional diplomacy, but which once meant something real.

When classrooms across this country sat empty for want of teachers, Cuban educators filled them. When Guyanese students had neither the finances nor the connections to access quality higher education, Cuban scholarships opened doors that would otherwise have remained permanently shut. The professionals produced by those opportunities — the doctors, engineers, teachers, and public servants who have contributed to this country’s development — are a living monument to what that partnership meant.

That relationship was built not on oil or military strategy or leverage. It was built on the simple, radical idea that a small nation should help another small nation because it is right to do so. Cuba asked for nothing that Guyana could not give. And for decades, Guyana benefited enormously from that generosity.

Now, the man who leads this country stands on the deck of the vessel most associated with the power that has tormented Cuba, and he poses for photographs.

 The Captured Head of State

There is a phrase in the language of postcolonial political analysis: state capture. It typically refers to the corruption of institutions by private interests. But there is another form of capture — subtler, more insidious — in which a leader becomes so thoroughly absorbed into the worldview, the ambitions, and the validation framework of a more powerful foreign patron that he loses the ability to see himself, his country, and its history through his own eyes.

Irfaan Ali has the look of a man so captured.

Watch how he performs on the international stage. Watch the eagerness to be seen in proximity to American military and economic power. Watch the carefully calibrated language that never discomforts Washington, never challenges the prevailing orthodoxies of the hemisphere’s dominant power. Watch how his government’s rhetoric has quietly drifted from the Non-Aligned tradition that once defined Caribbean and Caricom foreign policy, toward something that increasingly resembles client-state diplomacy dressed up as strategic partnership.

A leader grounded in his own history does not need to perform allegiance to the powerful. A leader who remembers where he came from does not need to be told that gratitude is a political value, not merely a personal virtue. A leader with a genuine foreign policy vision would know that the strength of small nations lies precisely in their ability to maintain relationships across ideological lines — to be friends with everyone without being owned by anyone.

But Ali does not appear to know this. Or if he knows it, he does not appear to care.

 Pragmatism Is Not the Alibi It Pretends to Be

The apologists will invoke pragmatism. They always do. They will say that Guyana must protect its oil wealth, that it faces real security threats, that aligning with the United States is a matter of national survival. They will speak of Venezuela, of regional instability, of the need for a powerful friend.

All of this contains a measure of truth. No serious analyst denies that Guyana’s security environment has changed dramatically with the discovery of oil, or that the country requires credible defence arrangements. The United States is a natural partner in that equation, and engagement with American military forces is not, by itself, a matter for condemnation.

But pragmatism is not a moral blank cheque. It does not erase obligation. It does not permit a government to court a new patron with such theatrical enthusiasm that it implicitly signals contempt for an old friend. It does not excuse the complete absence of any balancing gesture, any acknowledgment, any word of continued respect for the nation that staffed Guyana’s hospitals when Washington was indifferent to their condition.

If Ali’s government had paired its American engagement with even a quiet reaffirmation of Guyana’s relationship with Cuba — a statement, a visit, a diplomatic expression of continued solidarity — the Nimitz photograph would have read differently. It would have read as the act of a confident, balanced statesman navigating a complex world. Instead, it reads as the act of a man who has decided which side his bread is buttered on, and who no longer feels the need to pretend otherwise.

That is not pragmatism. That is opportunism. And in a region with a long memory of what opportunism costs small nations, it is a dangerous and shameful thing.

 Memory as a Political Obligation

There is a broader principle at stake here, one that extends beyond Guyana’s relationship with any single country

A nation that allows its foreign policy to be dictated entirely by present-tense power calculations — that discards old alliances the moment they become inconvenient, that forgets the names of those who stood with it in its hour of need — is a nation that cannot be trusted. It signals to every future partner: we will abandon you too, when the calculus changes. It hollows out the very concept of international solidarity, replacing it with pure transaction.

For Guyana — a small, developing nation navigating a world in which it is perpetually at risk of being overwhelmed by larger powers — this is not merely an ethical failure. It is a strategic one. The nations that earn respect in the international community are not those that grovel most effectively before the powerful. They are those that demonstrate consistency, principle, and the kind of moral seriousness that makes them reliable actors. Guyana once had a claim to that reputation. The Nimitz photograph puts it in question.

 The Image He Should Carry

President Ali would do well to remember a different image than the one now circulating from the Nimitz.

He should remember the image of a Cuban doctor in the Guyanese interior, treating patients who had no other option. He should remember the image of a Cuban teacher in a Guyanese classroom, shaping minds that would go on to build this country’s institutions. He should remember the image of a Guyanese student arriving in Havana on a scholarship, with nothing but promise and the generosity of a small island nation that asked nothing in return but solidarity.

Those images built Guyana. They deserve more than to be quietly retired the moment a more glamorous partnership becomes available.

A head of state who has forgotten this has not merely made a diplomatic misstep. He has revealed something about his character — about what he values, what he remembers, and what he is willing to discard when the lights are bright and the cameras are rolling.

In the end, how a leader treats those who helped him when he was weak tells you everything about who he is when he is strong.

On the deck of the USS Nimitz, Irfaan Ali told us exactly who he is

The 592 Guardian publishes independent commentary on Guyanese civic and political affairs.*

US Ambassador on Guyana’s Independence

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BY: GHK Lall

I really thought that the script had changed.  I really have to stop making these mistakes.  I erred about America’s regret over its role in changing the history of this country.  What could have been but now can never be known.  US Ambassador, Excellency Nicole D. Theriot, did the honors.  In an OP: Ed piece in Kaieteur News, this is what the now energetic and increasingly vocal American plenipotentiary had to say on Guyana’s Independence Diamond Jubilee: “I am honored to reflect on six decades of friendship, partnership, and shared progress between our two nations.  President Lyndon B. Johnson, welcoming Prime Minister Burnham to the White House just weeks after Guyana’s independence in July 1966, captured the spirit of that moment.”  I am sorry, Excellency, to be the party pooper.  But clinically, this must be dissected, dealt with cards face-up on the table.

President Johnson welcoming Prime Minister Burnham so shortly after Guyana gained Independence was the icing on America’s cake.  Recognition and reward for Guyana holding the line against the spread of communism.  Guyana is not contributing as one more fallen domino in the heat of the Big Power faceoff.  America’s AFL-CIO did its part.  So did America’s CIA and those it cultivated in the local environment to thwart communism’s march.  The PPP was then heart and soul for communism, Marxism, and socialism.  Thus, it lost out on that first battle.  Today, it is proud to count among its own, right up there in the Office of the President, those who were among communism’s (and Jagan’s) vilest enemies.  My word shouldn’t be taken.  The archives are there.

Without giving him any inch than I do, LFS Burnham did what he had to do to cultivate that “friendship and partnership” of which Ambassador Theriot spoke so engagingly, so lushly.  It came at a price, which he wasn’t ready to pay.  Regardless of what was and is still thought of him, there was a line that Mr. Burnham couldn’t and wouldn’t cross.  Not when country and people have to be betrayed and sold down the drain.  He became an enemy.  So, the script was scrubbed.

The PPP of Dr. Jagan first, then Dr. Jagdeo, studied that same script.  In this context, Dr. Ali is of no value, merely a hanger-on, who is in the right place and right time to be a beneficiary, one of the biggest.  Dr. Jagdeo more than Dr. Jagan decided that since the Americans couldn’t be beaten in a head-on fight, then beat them with tricks at their own game.  Become bigger capitalists than the capitalists themselves.  What can be bigger, brighter and more beautiful than “sanctity of contract?”  Now, there’s “friendship and partnership” of the kind that neither Burnham nor Jagan would ever kneel before, come within 100 years of considering, much less approving.  Pres Ali is the one doing the parroting about “sanctity of contract.”  But the credit belongs to Dr. Jagdeo.  When power and its consolidation and retention are part of the equation, then “sanctity of contract” is what it will have to be.

It is fasconating to watch Excellency Theriot manifest some of that famed Louisiana fire, when she lit that Independence bonfire about 60 years of “friendship and partnership.”  To whose advantage, to whose loss?  There is Exxon, redder and whiter and bluer than America.  More Golden Arrowhead nowadays than Guyanese.  Take a bow, Ambassador of Oil, Mr. Alistair Routledge.  With friends and partners of this caliber, I will take my chances with Dr. Guillotin.  It is better to lose my head for standing for what is believed.  It would be a crime inconceivable to join with those who hang themselves by the nuts from their betrayals of people and patrimony.  And for what, but the harlotry of power?  I urge my fellow Guyanese to review what it is that harlots do.  What they surrender.  What they sell.  And to whom they sell.  Those who come and go.  Those who take, then leave.  Whether corporate or country, this is the friendship and partnership between Guyana and America, as I see it, appalled by it, and am sickened by it.  Thanks, Ambassador Theriot for speaking to truth in a funny, most likely unwitting way.

The EPA Joined Exxon’s Side — Now It Wants Credit for “Protecting” You

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Editorial

After siding with the world’s most profitable oil company to gut an unlimited environmental guarantee, Guyana’s regulator breaks its silence with a statement of breathtaking audacity. The 592 Guardian is not buying it.

592 Guardian. Opinion

There is a particular kind of institutional dishonesty that does not lie outright, but instead arranges carefully chosen truths into a structure designed to mislead. The Environmental Protection Agency’s statement welcoming the Court of Appeal’s ruling on financial assurance for offshore petroleum operations is a masterwork of exactly that genre. It is, in plain language, spin dressed in the clothing of principle — and the people of Guyana deserve to see it for what it is.

Let us begin with what the EPA’s statement conspicuously omits: the EPA was not a passive observer of this ruling. It was an active and willing participant in the effort to achieve it. When Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL) — the Exxon subsidiary that holds the environmental permit for Stabroek Block operations — appealed the High Court’s landmark ruling requiring an unlimited Parent Company Guarantee, the EPA did not stand aside in its duty as regulator. It did not file submissions defending the position that an unlimited guarantee was appropriate. It joined the appeal. Alongside Exxon and the Government of Guyana, Guyana’s own environmental watchdog argued in court to replace an unlimited liability mechanism with a capped financial assurance of $2 billion USD. That is the fact the EPA’s carefully worded statement never once states plainly.

“2 billion cap is not protection. It is a ceiling placed on what Guyanese citizens can ever recover when the worst happens.”

The High Court ruling that was overturned was not a technicality. It was a considered judicial determination that the scale of environmental risk posed by deepwater offshore operations in Guyana’s waters warranted the most robust financial protection available under law — an unlimited guarantee backed by Exxon’s parent company. That ruling was described as landmark precisely because it placed Guyanese law and Guyanese interests at the centre of petroleum regulation in a way that this country has rarely seen. The Court of Appeal has now reversed it. And the EPA, rather than offering any honest accounting of what has been lost, offers a press release telling us not to worry.

 THE DISTINCTION THAT DECEIVES
The EPA's statement makes much of the legal distinction between "financial assurance" and "liability." It is technically accurate. Liability is indeed the underlying legal obligation. Financial assurance is the mechanism that makes that obligation real and enforceable. But in making this distinction, the EPA reveals — whether it intends to or not — exactly why the High Court's original ruling mattered so profoundly.

Consider what it means in practice. Under Section 14 of the Environmental Protection Act, a company that causes environmental harm can be held “liable for the cost of any necessary restoration or remedial measures.” The EPA quotes this provision proudly, as though it settles the matter. It does not. A legal liability without a funded guarantee is a judgment against a company that may, when the catastrophe comes, restructure, withdraw, or simply be incapable of meeting an obligation of the scale that a Stabroek-level blowout would demand.

THE NUMBERS DO NOT LIE
The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico — a single blowout from a single well — ultimately cost BP in excess of $65 billion USD in cleanup costs, fines, settlements and economic damages. The Stabroek Block contains multiple active deepwater wells operating in one of the world's most ecologically sensitive marine environments, adjacent to Guyana's entire coastline and neighbouring Caribbean states.

The EPA and the Government of Guyana fought in court to limit the financial guarantee for this entire operation to $2 billion USD. Let that figure sit alongside $65 billion and ask yourself: whose interests were being protected?

Liability without enforceability is a promise written on water. It is precisely the function of financial assurance — an unlimited parent company guarantee — to ensure that if Exxon’s subsidiary in Guyana causes catastrophic harm, the parent’s full resources are legally committed to making Guyana whole. That is what was stripped away. The EPA’s statement that liability “remains” is true. The statement that Guyanese citizens are therefore protected is a misdirection of the highest order.

REGULATORY CAPTURE IN PLAIN SIGHT

This episode is perhaps the most explicit illustration yet of what independent analysts, civil society organisations and this publication have long observed: the regulatory framework governing Guyana’s oil sector has been structured not to maximise protections for the Guyanese people, but to minimise friction for the oil companies extracting Guyana’s wealth.

The EPA is not a neutral body that happened to share the same legal position as Exxon. It is the regulator — the institution specifically empowered by law to act as the guardian of Guyana’s environment against the risks posed by exactly this kind of industrial operation. When a regulator joins its regulated company in court to defeat a protection that a judge found appropriate and necessary, something has gone profoundly wrong with the regulatory relationship. That is not a minor procedural matter. It is a fundamental question about whether the EPA serves Guyana or serves the industry it is supposed to oversee.

The Government of Guyana’s presence in the same appeal carries its own implications. The government is, simultaneously, the licensing authority for petroleum operations, a shareholder through its National Resource Fund, and — through the EPA — the environmental regulator of those same operations. When all three capacities align to reduce the financial burden on a foreign oil company, the public is entitled to ask plainly: who in this arrangement speaks for the people of the Essequibo coast, the fishermen of the Demerara, the communities whose livelihoods sit downstream of whatever a blowout would bring?

 “The EPA broke its silence only to celebrate a ruling it helped engineer. That is not transparency. That is a victory lap.”

   THE SILENCE, THEN THE SPIN

It is telling that the EPA “broke its silence” — as it is being characterised — only after the ruling came down in its favour. There was no public communication from the Agency during the period between the High Court’s decision and the Appeal Court’s reversal explaining to the public why it believed an unlimited guarantee was inappropriate. There was no public interest statement. There was no engagement with the civil society voices arguing that unlimited guarantees are the global standard in high-risk offshore operations precisely because the consequences of failure are unlimited in nature.

Instead, the Agency waited for its preferred outcome, and then issued a statement framed not as accountability to the public it serves, but as a public relations exercise designed to pre-empt criticism. “The EPA wishes to make it absolutely clear,” the statement declares, that permit holders remain fully liable. One would wish the EPA had been equally eager to make things absolutely clear before the ruling — when transparency might have invited scrutiny rather than deflected it.

  WHAT MUST NOW BE DEMANDED

The ruling has been made. The court has spoken. The 592 Guardian does not litigate final judgments. But what comes after a ruling matters as much as the ruling itself, and what comes after this one must not be silence dressed as satisfaction.

The National Assembly must now demand a full accounting from the EPA of the basis on which it determined that a $2 billion cap constitutes adequate financial assurance for the Stabroek Block operations. That determination must be made public, subjected to independent technical review, and tested against international benchmarks. The Environmental Protection Act, if it is genuinely silent on the level of financial assurance required — as the Court found — must be amended to speak clearly and ambitiously, not quietly and conveniently.

Civil society, the legal community, and the Opposition must use every available avenue to ensure that the gap between “liability” and “enforceability” does not become the gap through which Guyana’s future is swallowed if the unthinkable occurs. And the EPA must be made to understand — by public pressure if not by institutional conscience — that its mandate is to the Guyanese people, not to the companies whose operations it permits.

Guyana is now an oil-producing nation of genuine global consequence. Its institutions must rise to that consequence. The EPA’s statement this week demonstrated that, so far, they have not.

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

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Opinion  /  Independence at 60

Flags, Flags
Everywhere —
But Whose
Nation Is This?

“Sixty years after Britain lowered the Union Jack, Guyana remains ensnared in a new colonialism — one dressed not in pith helmets, but in production-sharing agreements, Washington points, and the comfortable silence of leaders who long ago confused personal interest with national sovereignty.”

COMMENTARY• 592 GUARDIAN•
INDEPENDENCE 2026•

Every year on May 26, we are invited to celebrate. We are told to wave the Golden Arrowhead, to sing of one people and one nation, to feel something warm and unambiguous about what it means to be Guyanese. And every year, the honest among us feel the same quiet discomfort — the nagging sense that the ceremony is performing something that does not yet fully exist.

A colleague recently asked, in these very pages, whether sixty years on we have become a nation. It is a fair and searching question. He pointed, rightly, to our unresolved ethnic narratives — the competing claims of suffering, arrival, and contribution that keep our six peoples orbiting one another with wary eyes rather than drawing closer. He suggested that what we need is a shared story, a modus viv end i, a national narrative we can all inhabit.

He is not wrong. But he has diagnosed only half the illness. The other half — the half that makes the first half so intractable — is that Guyana has never been permitted to be sovereign in the fullest sense of that word. And until we reckon with that truth, no amount of narrative-crafting will save us.

The Poisoned Chalice of 1966

Let us begin where the original sin lies. The Independence that Burnham accepted on May 26, 1966 was not wrested from empire through the moral force of a unified people. It was a managed transition, engineered in no small part by Washington and London to ensure that Cheddi Jagan — the man who had actually won democratic elections — would not be the one holding the flag.

The CIA’s role in destabilising Jagan’s government throughout the early 1960s is not conspiracy theory. It is documented history. The United States deemed a democratically elected socialist too dangerous for their hemisphere, and so they broke him — through covert funding of strikes, through racial polarisation, through the quiet elevation of Forbes Burnham as a more manageable alternative. The man who received independence on our behalf had been, in a very real sense, selected for us by a foreign power.

This is the founding trauma that our national narrative must eventually absorb — not merely the date chosen to forever remind Indian Guyanese of Wismar’s violence, but the deeper wound: that our independence was a gift from the same hands that had spent centuries extracting everything of value from this land. Gifts from such hands come with strings. They always have.

“Our independence was a gift from the same hands that had spent centuries extracting everything of value from this land. Gifts from such hands come with strings. They always have.”

When Oil Was Supposed to Change Everything

When ExxonMobil announced the Liza discovery in 2015, something shifted in the Guyanese imagination. Here, finally, was the material basis for genuine sovereignty. Here was the lever by which a small nation of fewer than a million people could demand — and receive — a seat at the table of its own future.

What we got instead was the Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement — widely regarded by independent oil economists as among the most disadvantageous resource contracts signed by any developing nation in the modern era. A contract negotiated in secret, the terms of which our own citizens were not permitted to scrutinise until civil society and the press forced partial disclosure. A contract that, by its cost-recovery provisions, ensures that ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC can recoup virtually all operating costs before Guyana sees its full share of profit oil.

The government will tell you that revenues are flowing, that roads are being built, that per-capita income statistics are rising impressively. All of this is true. None of it answers the fundamental question: on whose terms is this prosperity being constructed? When the contract cannot be renegotiated; when the dispute resolution mechanism sits in a foreign jurisdiction; when the corporation’s annual revenue dwarfs Guyana’s entire GDP — in what meaningful sense is the nation sovereign over its own primary resource?

The Washington Alignment and the Illusion of Friendship

Observe, in recent years, how reflexively our leadership has oriented itself toward Washington’s preferences — in its posture toward Venezuela, in its silence on matters where American interests and Guyanese interests do not align, in the speed with which senior officials travel to conferences, summits, and bilateral meetings to signal their reliability as partners.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having relationships with powerful nations. Small states must navigate the world as it is, not as they might wish it to be. But there is a difference between strategic engagement and dependency — and there is a difference between partnership and performance. What we too often witness is performance: the performance of alignment, the performance of shared values, the performance of being a good neighbour in a neighbourhood whose rules were written entirely by one party.

Lord Palmerston’s observation, made in the British Parliament in 1848, has lost none of its force in the intervening century and three-quarters: nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. The United States’ current warmth toward Georgetown is a function of geography, oil, and the Monroe Doctrine applied to a twenty-first century where China and Russia are seeking footholds in the hemisphere. When those calculations change — and they will — so will the warmth. The question our leaders should be asking is not “how do we deepen this friendship?” but “what protections have we built for when it cools?”

“The United States’ warmth toward Georgetown is a function of geography, oil, and a Monroe Doctrine applied to a century where China and Russia seek footholds in the hemisphere. When those calculations change — and they will — so will the warmth.”

The Nation We Have Not Yet Chosen to Build

Return, then, to the question of national narrative. Our columnist is right that we need one. But a national narrative built on the foundation of foreign dependency is not a narrative — it is a press release. You cannot tell your people a story of dignity and self-determination while a multinational corporation holds the master lease on your most strategic asset. You cannot ask African Guyanese and Indian Guyanese to reconcile their histories of suffering while the contemporary architecture of extraction goes unexamined. You cannot speak of one people and one nation while that nation’s most consequential decisions are ratified in Houston boardrooms and Washington policy rooms.

The unresolved ethnic tensions in Guyana are real and serious and demand engagement. But they have also served, whether by accident or design, as a permanent distraction — keeping our eyes fixed on one another rather than on the structures above us both. Every political cycle in which the primary narrative is “which group controls the state” is a cycle in which the deeper question — “who controls the state’s resources, and on whose terms?” — goes unasked.

True independence requires more than a flag and an anthem. It requires the institutional courage to audit every agreement made on the nation’s behalf; to insist on transparency in resource contracts; to build the sovereign wealth fund protections that ensure oil wealth does not simply recreate the plantation economy with different masters; and to be willing, when necessary, to say to powerful friends — with courtesy, but without apology — that Guyana’s interests must come first.

The Foundational Compromise
  • Cheddi Jagan won free elections in 1953, 1957, and 1961 — and was removed or undermined each time with Western backing.
  • The CIA funded opposition strikes and media during 1962–64 to prevent a Jagan-led independence.
  • Burnham’s PNC lost the popular vote in 1964 but formed government via a coalition engineered under a proportional system Britain imposed specifically for that outcome.
  • The Independence of May 26, 1966 was therefore handed to a government that had never won a parliamentary majority.

Two-Percent— 2%

Guyana’s estimated effective government take in early Stabroek Block production phases, per some independent analyst projections — among the lowest for any oil-producing nation.

~$900B

Estimated total recoverable resource value in the Stabroek Block. The contract governing its extraction was negotiated without public consultation or parliamentary scrutiny.

What Sovereignty Actually Looks Like

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global — built from North Sea oil — now holds over $1.7 trillion, is fully publicly audited, and invests entirely abroad to prevent domestic inflation. Guyana’s Natural Resource Fund has been amended multiple times and faces ongoing transparency concerns.

The difference is not luck. It is political will — and who the government ultimately answers to.

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

Another Warning, Another Performance — GuySuCo and the Politics of Pretence

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President Irfaan Ali’s latest threat to “shake up” the management of GuySuCo lands with a familiar thud—loud in declaration, hollow in consequence. Guyanese have heard this refrain before. Heads would roll. Targets must be met.

Accountability is coming. Yet, year after year, failure persists, targets are quietly revised, and the same cycle of underperformance continues under the protective umbrella of political convenience.
Let us be clear: GuySuCo is not suffering from a sudden lapse in management discipline. It is drowning under a model that is politically engineered, structurally inefficient, and economically unsustainable. No amount of rhetorical posturing from the Executive can mask that reality.

The numbers tell a story the administration refuses to confront. In 2024, production collapsed to 6,739 metric tonnes against a 16,000-tonne target for the first crop. In 2025, even after targets were reduced, GuySuCo still failed—producing approximately 59,200 metric tonnes against a lowered 60,000 target, itself a retreat from an initial 80,000. This is not underperformance; this is systemic failure dressed up as progress.

And yet, billions more in taxpayers’ dollars continue to be poured into the corporation. The 2026 budget increases allocation yet again, with promises of “financial viability” and “long-term sustainability.” These phrases have now become ritualistic—recited annually, believed by few.
What exactly is being sustained? It is certainly not profitability. It is not efficiency. It is not competitiveness in a global sugar market that rewards innovation and punishes stagnation.
What is being sustained is a political apparatus.

GuySuCo has effectively become the country’s most expensive welfare program—one carefully maintained to preserve rural voting blocs while avoiding the political fallout of genuine reform. The administration speaks of employment numbers and community revival, but refuses to admit that these gains are being artificially propped up by state subsidies with no credible pathway to independence.

Even more troubling is the continued deflection of responsibility. When targets are missed, the blame is redirected—to management, to technical gaps, to external conditions. Never to policy. Never to the flawed governance model. Never to the political interference that industry insiders and critics alike have repeatedly identified as the root cause.

The President now signals “discussions” about ownership and “technical teams” waiting in the wings. But these are not new ideas—they are recycled talking points, deployed each time the pressure mounts. Without structural reform, without insulating the corporation from political control, without a transparent and commercially grounded strategy, these measures amount to little more than administrative reshuffling.

The truth is uncomfortable, but unavoidable: GuySuCo, as currently configured, is under water—and the tide is rising faster than the government is willing to admit.
Guyanese deserve honesty, not theatrics. If the industry is to be saved, it will require more than threats and press conference declarations. It will require political courage—the kind that prioritizes national interest over electoral arithmetic.

Until then, the cycle will continue: missed targets, renewed promises, and another round of warnings that lead nowhere.
The country is watching. And increasingly, it is no longer convinced.

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

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Mr. President the Constitution is,

Not Optional

When the Head of State dismisses the Leader of the Opposition as an irrelevance, he does not diminish the Opposition — he diminishes the office he swore to uphold.

The Editors | The 592 Guardian | Editorial Board

There are moments when a leader’s character is revealed not in a grand speech, but in a single, careless dismissal. President Irfaan Ali delivered one such moment when, asked the straightforward question of whether he intended to meet with Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed, he swatted it away with the observation that there were “more relevant questions” to be answered. The remark was brief. Its implications are not.

To treat the question of whether the President will engage with the constitutionally recognized Leader of the Opposition as somehow beneath consideration is not an exercise in executive confidence. It is an exhibition of constitutional contempt — and the people of Guyana deserve to name it plainly.

“The Leader of the Opposition is not a courtesy call the President may choose to schedule or ignore. That office is woven into the fabric of our supreme law.”

An Office Rooted in the Supreme Law

The Leader of the Opposition is not a courtesy call the President may choose to schedule or ignore. That office is woven into the fabric of our supreme law. Guyana’s Constitution does not merely acknowledge the existence of an opposition; it assigns that office concrete, irreplaceable roles in the architecture of governance. The President is constitutionally required to obtain the agreement of the Leader of the Opposition before appointing the Chancellor of the Judiciary and the Chief Justice — the two individuals who sit atop the legal system that every Guyanese citizen depends upon for impartial justice.

These are not procedural niceties. They are deliberate constraints, written into the Constitution precisely to prevent any one administration — however large its electoral majority — from making unilateral appointments to offices that must remain above partisan capture. The requirement for the Opposition’s concurrence is the framers’ insurance policy against the tyranny of the momentary majority. To treat the person who holds that constitutional function as an afterthought is to treat the Constitution itself as an afterthought.

Constitutional Framework — What the Law Demands

Guyana’s Constitution requires the President to act in agreement with the Leader of the Opposition for the appointment of the Chancellor and Chief Justice. This is not consultation — it is co-determination. Neither official may be appointed over the objection of the LOO.

Beyond the judiciary, the Constitution mandates meaningful consultation with the LOO on a range of other judicial and service commission appointments. “Meaningful” is the operative word: a phone call after the decision is made does not satisfy this obligation.

Both offices carry democratic mandates. The President’s is the broader one; it is not the higher one. The Constitution recognises no hierarchy of mandate — only a division of constitutional duty.

The Arrogance of the “More Relevant” Framing

President Ali’s choice of words — “more relevant questions” — is worth dwelling on. It does not say “I have already arranged a meeting.” It does not say “we are in dialogue.” It says, in effect: your question about whether I will fulfil my constitutional obligations is not worthy of a serious answer. That framing is not the language of a statesman. It is the language of a partisan who has confused the power of office with the purpose of office.

A president governs for all citizens — including those who voted against him. The constitutional requirement to engage the Leader of the Opposition is not a burden imposed on the PPP/C government by its political enemies. It is a duty owed to every Guyanese, because the offices and institutions those consultations protect belong to every Guyanese. When the President signals that he considers that duty a distraction, he is not speaking only to one opposition politician. He is speaking to the rule of law itself — and his tone is one of dismissal.

Mandates Do Not Supersede the Constitution

It would be uncharitable — but not entirely unfair — to suspect that the dismissiveness toward the LOO flows from a belief that a decisive electoral mandate renders constitutional formalities somewhat redundant. This is a dangerous and historically recurring mistake. Electoral mandates confer the right to govern; they do not confer the right to govern without constitutional constraint. The two are fundamentally different propositions, and confusing them is the first step on a road that Guyanese history knows well.

Azruddin Mohamed arrived at his position through the democratic process. His office carries with it the voice of the parliamentary opposition and, by constitutional design, a share of responsibility for the integrity of key national appointments. Treating him as less relevant than the President’s preferred agenda items is not strength; it is an abdication of the statecraft the office demands.

“Electoral mandates confer the right to govern. They do not confer the right to govern without constitutional constraint. The two are fundamentally different propositions.”

Symptoms of a Broader Posture

This news — platform has observed, with growing concern, an executive posture that appears to regard Guyana’s constitutional checks as obligations for others to honour, rather than disciplines to which the presidency is equally subject. The refusal to provide a straightforward answer about meeting the LOO is not an isolated gaffe. It is consistent with a pattern in which consultation is treated as performance, agreement is treated as acquiescence, and the Opposition is treated as an inconvenience rather than a constitutionally embedded counterpart.

That pattern matters beyond the chambers of Parliament. It matters because the Chancellor and Chief Justice positions remain unfilled through the constitutionally prescribed process. It matters because citizens watching their President brush off questions about dialogue with the Opposition receive a clear message about whose voices count. And it matters because constitutional cultures are built or eroded incrementally — one dismissive remark, one bypassed consultation, one “more relevant question” at a time.

What Is Required of the President

The 592 Guardian calls upon President Ali to do what his office demands: engage meaningfully, formally, and without further delay with Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed. Not as a political concession. Not as a favour to the PPP/C’s critics. But because the Constitution of Guyana requires it, and because the people of this nation — all of them — deserve a president who honours his oath fully, not selectively.

The mark of a true statesman is not the ability to win elections. It is the wisdom to govern in a manner that strengthens institutions even when those institutions inconvenience you. By that measure, the President’s dismissal of a question about the LOO was not simply an undiplomatic moment. It was a small but consequential failure of constitutional leadership — and this country cannot afford to normalise such failures.

The Constitution does not ask for the President’s agreement with the Leader of the Opposition. It demands his engagement. There is a difference. It is time the President learned it.

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

CARICOM’s Anti-Trump Protest Cost the Region Its Integrity

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By endorsing a corruption-tainted candidate for the OAS, Caribbean leaders chose politics over principle — and the region’s citizens will pay the price

Georgetown, Guyana — May 2026

There is a particular kind of that flourishes in the Caribbean — the kind that dresses itself in the language of democracy and sovereignty while quietly betraying both. CARICOM leaders demonstrated this hypocrisy in full view of the hemisphere when they threw their collective weight behind Albert Ramdin as Secretary-General of the Organization of American States (OAS), a man trailing a cloud of serious corruption allegations from his own country, Suriname. They did so not because he was the best candidate for the hemisphere’s premier democratic body, but because he was not Donald Trump’s candidate.

The consequences of that choice deserve far more scrutiny than regional leaders are prepared to invite.

A Region Already Failing Its Citizens

The endorsement did not occur in a vacuum. Transparency International has documented what Caribbean citizens already know in their bones: CARICOM governments are failing them. Bribery significantly obstructs access to basic public services — health care, education, housing — with the heaviest burden falling on society’s most vulnerable. The International Corruption Perceptions Index records little meaningful progress in the region over the past decade. The private sector, too, has been indicted as a willing partner in this culture of corruption.

This is the context in which CARICOM leaders made their OAS decision: not as reformers seeking to clean up regional institutions, but as political actors calculating advantage. Their candidate of choice, Albert Ramdin, was not an antidote to the region’s corruption problem. He was, arguably, a symptom of it.

The Allegations Against Ramdin

During his five years as Suriname’s Foreign Minister, Ramdin accumulated a record that should have disqualified him from leading any institution charged with upholding democratic governance. Surinamese media and the country’s own Public Prosecution Service have documented his alleged involvement in multiple corruption scandals. The most damaging centres on his relationship with Xaviera Jessurun, who has since become an advisor in his OAS office.

Jessurun has been formally designated as a suspect by Suriname’s Attorney General in connection with fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, and forgery. She has been summoned to appear in court. Yet rather than distance himself from a figure under active criminal investigation in his own country, Ramdin brought her to Washington as a senior advisor. And when Suriname’s Foreign Minister Melvin Bouva publicly revealed that Ramdin had improperly issued Jessurun a diplomatic passport — a passport that allowed her to travel to Washington while legal proceedings against her remained active in Suriname — the Caribbean leaders who had vouched for Ramdin said nothing.

Their silence was not accidental. It was a choice.

Politics Dressed as Principle

CARICOM’s defence of its endorsement has centred on the claim that its leaders were protecting the OAS from the influence of Donald Trump, whose preferred candidate was Rubén Ramírez Lezcano. There is no question that Trump’s interventions in hemispheric affairs warrant resistance. But resistance to one problematic actor cannot justify installing another. The OAS exists to defend democracy and human rights across the Americas. Its Secretary-General must be a figure of unimpeachable integrity — or at minimum, one who has not been linked by his own country’s law enforcement to abuse of office.

CARICOM performed no meaningful investigation into the allegations against Ramdin before casting its votes. Reports from Surinamese media were available. The Public Prosecution Service’s actions were a matter of public record. The Foreign Minister’s statement about the diplomatic passport was documented. The leaders of the region’s most corrupt member states simply looked away.

The Cost Borne by Ordinary People

Perhaps the most troubling dimension of this episode is what it reveals about where Caribbean leaders place their priorities. Former Surinamese President Santokhi, a close ally of Ramdin, reportedly directed millions of US dollars toward securing Ramdin’s OAS appointment — funds that could have been directed toward poverty reduction, crime prevention, healthcare, and education in one of the hemisphere’s poorest nations. Whether those reports can be fully verified, the pattern they describe is one the Caribbean knows well: public resources quietly redirected to serve elite political interests.

This is the same pattern Transparency International has catalogued across CARICOM for a decade. The bribery that blocks a mother from accessing her child’s medical records, the corruption that diverts school funds into private pockets, the culture that allows the powerful to obtain diplomatic passports for allies facing criminal prosecution — these are not separate phenomena. They are expressions of the same institutional rot.

Guyana Must Answer for Its Role

Guyana’s government has not been transparent with its citizens about its position on the Ramdin appointment. The 592 Guardian calls on the Ali administration to state clearly: did Guyana support Ramdin’s candidacy? If so, on what basis? What due diligence, if any, was conducted into the allegations against him? The Guyanese people, who are themselves living under the burden of inadequate public services and unresolved institutional corruption, deserve a direct answer.

A government that cannot answer those questions credibly has no standing to lecture its citizens about accountability.

Integrity Cannot Be An Afterthought

The OAS under Albert Ramdin’s leadership begins its tenure under a shadow that CARICOM itself helped cast. The institution’s credibility as a guardian of democratic norms will be tested from its first day. Whether Ramdin can overcome the allegations that followed him from Suriname to Washington remains to be seen. What is already clear is that the Caribbean leaders who installed him chose political expediency over rigorous scrutiny, and dressed that choice in the language of regional sovereignty and anti-imperialism.

The citizens of this region — the ones waiting in corrupt queues for public services, the ones watching their governments’ development budgets evaporate into patronage networks, the ones who never had millions of dollars to spend securing anyone’s appointment to anything — deserved better from their leaders. They deserved due diligence. They deserved transparency. They deserved the truth.

Instead, they got Albert Ramdin.

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

Parliament Is Not a Privilege. It Is a Duty.

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And Everyone in That Chamber Has Failed It.

Guyana’s Parliament has not sat for more than 100 days. Let that settle. Not a scheduling hiccup. Not an administrative delay. A governance failure — sustained, deliberate, and inexcusable.

The sudden announcement of a June 5 sitting, arriving conveniently on the heels of pointed remarks from representatives of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, should not be met with relief. It should be met with fury. Because what it confirms is this: the machinery of Guyanese democracy does not move on constitutional obligation. It moves on diplomatic pressure. That is a humiliation dressed up as a concession.
Minister Gail Teixeira’s response — that the diplomats should have first “engaged the Government” — is as revealing as it is tone-deaf.

Parliamentary democracy is not a private arrangement to be managed behind closed doors by the politically convenient. It is a public institution. Constitutionally mandated. Non-negotiable. Its prolonged dormancy is not an internal matter to be shielded from outside eyes. It is a public failure to be answered to — by citizens first, and by international partners second.
But here is where this editorial must turn — because the Government cannot be allowed to stand alone in the dock.

The Opposition Has Questions to Answer Too.
One hundred days. Where was the thunder? Where were the emergency press conferences, the legal challenges, the sustained and relentless public pressure that this constitutional crisis demanded? The Opposition — including the lone seat of the Forward Guyana Movement — sounded alarm, yes. But alarm without escalation is just noise.

One must ask, plainly and without apology: if their emoluments had been withheld — if their salaries, allowances, and benefits had been suspended for every day Parliament failed to sit — would they have waited this long? Would the outrage have been so measured, so periodic, so politely contained?

The question answers itself.
Opposition members are not volunteers. They are elected representatives, paid from the public purse, entrusted with the sacred function of holding power accountable. If they treated this constitutional crisis with anything less than maximum urgency, they too have failed the people who sent them there. Silence in the face of institutional collapse is not opposition. It is complicity in slow motion.

The Deeper Crisis: A Parliament That Can Be Paused at Will
The most dangerous truth exposed by these 100 days is not that one party abused its power. It is that the system permitted it.

A Parliament that can be suspended at the political convenience of the executive is not a co-equal branch of government. It is a decorative institution — convened when useful, shuttered when inconvenient. That is not democracy. That is theatre.

And this theatre has played out against a backdrop of unprecedented national expenditure. Guyana is an oil-producing nation now, channelling revenues of a scale this country has never before managed. The Public Accounts Committee — the very body mandated to scrutinise how that money is spent — has been non-functional. Let us be direct: governance without scrutiny at this scale, with this volume of public funds in motion, is not just negligent. It is an invitation to plunder.
Governance without scrutiny is not governance. It is control.

The Reform That Must Now Follow
The resumption of Parliament on June 5 should not be celebrated. It should be the beginning of a reckoning. Because if history is any guide, this is not a correction — it is a recalibration. A temporary concession to external pressure, after which the status quo reasserts itself.
That cannot be allowed to happen again.

Guyana urgently needs — and the Opposition must now table — a Parliamentary Sittings (Fixed Schedule) Bill. Its purpose would be singular and unambiguous: to remove, permanently, the unilateral authority of any person, party, or executive to defer, delay, or dissolve parliamentary sittings at will.

The National Assembly must sit on a constitutionally fixed, publicly published roster. Not subject to ministerial discretion. Not contingent on political appetite.

Not moveable by Cabinet decree. The people’s business must be conducted on the people’s schedule — not the Government’s.
Such a Bill would do more than prevent future abuses. It would signal to every Guyanese citizen, and to every international observer, that this nation is serious about institutional governance.

That it does not require diplomatic nudges to honour its own Constitution.
Let the Opposition bring this Bill. Let them table it the moment Parliament reconvenes. Let every member — Government and Opposition alike — be forced to vote on whether they believe democracy should function inevitably or merely intermittently. Let that vote be on the record, in Hansard, for the people to judge.

The Standard Must Be Inevitability, Not Convenience
Guyanese must now move beyond outrage — because outrage without reform is just catharsis. What this moment demands is structural change, enforceable by law, binding on every administration that follows.

Democracy must not function when it is politically expedient. It must function because it cannot be stopped.

A Parliament that sits only when pressured is a Parliament that has already surrendered its purpose. A Parliament that sits on schedule, by law, regardless of who is in power — that is a Parliament worthy of the name.

Anything less is a betrayal. Of the Constitution. Of the electorate. Of the very idea of self-governance.
The people of Guyana did not elect a Parliament to meet at someone’s pleasure. They elected it to meet — period.

It is time to make that non-negotiable. In law. Without exception. Without delay.

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