MAC MAHARAJ  and the Discipline of Revolution

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  592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 

 Mac Maharaj and the Discipline of Revolution

OP-ED BY : Hem Kumar August 2026

There was a time when political commitment was not measured by a Facebook post, a motorcade, a press release, or the ability to speak loudly at a public meeting. It was measured by what a person was prepared to endure—and whether, after prison, torture, isolation and exile, that person still remained committed to the cause.

Sathyandranath “Mac” Maharaj. A South African Revolutionary .

Sathyandranath “Mac” Maharaj’s life belongs to that tradition. Arrested in July 1964 during apartheid South Africa’s repression of the African National Congress and its allied underground, Maharaj was convicted in the so-called Little Rivonia Trial and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. He spent most of that sentence on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and other figures who would come to embody South Africa’s liberation struggle.

The record of his interrogation is not precisely documented in the sources this newsroom  could verify, but multiple independent accounts agree he was subjected to sustained torture during that period and gave his interrogators nothing that broke the underground network he had helped build.

The prison sentence was not merely imprisonment. It followed brutal state repression and torture. Yet Maharaj emerged neither politically broken nor personally detached from the struggle. That fact is central to understanding him. Many persons can speak about sacrifice after the danger has passed; Maharaj lived through the danger when apartheid still controlled the courts, the police, the prisons, the borders and the machinery of everyday life.

On Robben Island, Maharaj became part of another extraordinary act of political resistance: preserving Mandela’s prison manuscript. Mandela wrote what would later form the basis of  Long Walk to Freedom in secret. When prison officials discovered the original manuscript hidden in the garden, a transcribed copy had already been prepared. Maharaj had copied the text in tiny handwriting and concealed it within a study file among his academic materials. When he was released in December 1976, the hidden manuscript left prison with him.

That distinction — between what can be footnoted and what cannot — matters more with Maharaj than with most subjects, because his life’s work depended on exactly that kind of discipline: what to reveal, what to withhold, and when.

That episode tells us something larger than an ingenious prison escape for a set of papers. It reveals the discipline of serious political work. The men on Robben Island understood that a struggle is fought not only with speeches and demonstrations, but with memory, organization, education, trust and patience. They understood that the written record of a movement mattered. They understood that history itself could become a battlefield.

After his release, Maharaj left South Africa in 1977 and was assigned by the ANC to work in exile. But exile did not become retirement.

It was from exile that he became the authenticating link in one of the most audacious acts of sabotage of the entire anti-apartheid campaign.

A young South African contractor named Rodney Wilkinson, who had gained access to South Africa’s Koeberg nuclear power station near Cape Town, smuggled out the plant’s building plans and delivered them to the ANC. Maharaj vetted the material and the man. He then made an unusual call: rather than send a trained guerrilla into Koeberg, he judged that Wilkinson himself — already inside, already trusted by the plant’s engineers — gave the operation its best chance of reaching the reactor’s most vulnerable points. The mission was named, after him, Operation Mac.

On the night of 18–19 December 1982, Wilkinson planted four limpet mines at Koeberg — two on the reactor heads, two in cabling beneath the control rooms — timed to detonate after the plant’s reactors were shut and, according to the ANC’s own account, after independent nuclear experts had been consulted to rule out any radiation risk to civilians. The devices, aged and imperfectly engineered, went off in a staggered sequence over roughly twelve hours rather than simultaneously. No one was injured. Wilkinson had already arranged his own farewell party from the plant for the same week — sitting through the send-off, by his own account, while wondering whether the mines beneath the building would hold their timing.

This publication  has not been able to verify specific damage or delay figures sometimes attached to the Koeberg attack, and does not print unverified numbers. What is documented, corroborated on the record by both Maharaj and Wilkinson decades later, is the operation itself: a nuclear facility under construction for the apartheid state, penetrated and struck by a insider recruited and directed from exile.

Maharaj’s most sustained act of discipline came in 1988, when the ANC decided to send serving leadership back into South Africa itself — not as visitors or infiltrators passing through, but to live and command from inside the country they had been exiled from. Maharaj, by then a member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee, was chosen alongside Umkhonto we Sizwe commander Siphiwe Nyanda to go first.

The preparation took months. In Amsterdam, an operative built Maharaj a new identity from nothing — disguise specialists trained him to alter his walk, padded clothing to change his build, and the city’s opera-house wigmaker built him a wig from a foam cast of his own skull. The cover story given to his own ANC colleagues in Lusaka, who were not told the truth, was that Maharaj had gone to Moscow for a kidney operation.

“Not even his colleagues in Lusaka could be let in on what he was about to do.”

In August 1988, travelling in disguise, Maharaj and Nyanda were smuggled into Swaziland and walked across the border into South Africa on foot. A car was waiting, driven by an ANC sympathizer who had not been told what the operation was. It dropped them outside the Carlton Hotel in central Johannesburg. Maharaj later described the state he and Nyanda were in as they crossed: on a high state of alertness, ready, as he put it, to see ghosts on every street corner.

What followed was Operation Vula — Vulindlela, ‘to open the way’ — an underground project to connect the ANC’s exiled leadership directly to its structures inside South Africa, using acoustic modems and one-time-pad encryption relayed through a London flat to reach Lusaka in real time, smuggled equipment carried in by sympathetic air crew, and a growing number of returning operatives, each fitted with a disguise of their own.

The historian Stephen Ellis would later call it the most effective and impressive project the ANC ever mounted. It ran until the ANC’s unbanning in 1990, when Maharaj was detained by security police just three days before he was due to appear publicly as a relaunched South African Communist Party leader — arrested, that final time, in the open, under his own name.

He does not need the embellishment. The documented record already describes a man convicted at twenty-nine, imprisoned for twelve years, and sent back into the country that had jailed him wearing another man’s face and walk, to build, from inside, the network that helped end the system that built Robben Island in the first place.

This is where the lesson becomes uncomfortable for many contemporary politicians and activists.

Maharaj did not build a political reputation through convenience. He did not become relevant only when power was within reach. He did not enter struggle as a career path, then treat public service as a route to contracts, status, personal enrichment or permanent entitlement. His political life was marked by a sustained line: underground work, imprisonment, education in prison, exile, clandestine return, organization, democratic transition and, later, public office.

When apartheid fell and South Africa held its first democratic election in 1994, Maharaj became Minister of Transport in Nelson Mandela’s first cabinet. From prisoner to minister was not simply a personal triumph. It reflected an idea that is now too often forgotten: those who demand the right to govern must first show the capacity to serve, organize and sacrifice for something beyond themselves.

Maharaj eventually left frontline electoral politics and government office, though he later returned to public service as spokesperson to President Jacob Zuma. But whether one agrees with every political association or decision made in his later years is not the central point. The record from 1964 through the democratic transition is a record of sustained commitment under conditions that most of today’s political actors would find unimaginable.

The missing quality in Guyana

Guyana’s political culture urgently needs this kind of consistency—not the reproduction of another country’s struggle, and certainly not romantic slogans about revolution, but a return to the ethics that gave liberation politics its meaning.

Too much of what passes for activism today is episodic. A crisis appears; voices rise. A controversy trends; commentators mobilize. An election approaches; principles suddenly become fashionable. Then the moment passes, attention moves elsewhere, and the public is left with the same unaccountable systems, the same secrecy, the same political patronage and the same institutional decay.

There is a difference between protest and political work.

Protest can be necessary. Outrage can be justified. Public criticism can expose wrongdoing. But sustained political work requires more: study, institutional memory, documentation, community organization, courage under pressure, financial independence, internal democracy and a willingness to remain engaged after the headlines disappear.

That is the distinction that Maharaj’s story brings into sharp relief.

In Guyana, we have no shortage of persons prepared to condemn corruption when it is politically useful, denounce discrimination when it affects their constituency, or speak of justice when they are outside the corridors of power. What remains scarce is a culture of principled consistency: people willing to challenge wrongdoing no matter who commits it; to build organizations that outlive personalities; to maintain public records; to defend citizens who bring inconvenient information; and to resist the temptation to trade conviction for access.

The country’s oil era makes this deficiency even more dangerous.

A society receiving enormous resource revenues cannot afford a political class that thinks only in five-year electoral cycles, nor activists who mobilize only around personal ambition or partisan instruction. Guyana needs citizens and leaders who can sustain scrutiny of contracts, public procurement, environmental protection, land allocation, infrastructure spending, local-government authority and the integrity of public institutions over decades—not merely until the next appointment, contract, candidacy or coalition arrangement.

Courage without consistency is performance

The mythology of politics often celebrates the dramatic moment: the arrest, the protest, the confrontation, the speech. But Maharaj’s example suggests that the deeper test is what comes after.

What do you do after you are released?

Do you return to the work? Do you educate yourself? Do you preserve the movement’s record? Do you build networks quietly? Do you accept personal risk without converting sacrifice into a lifelong claim for privilege? Do you remain accountable when your side acquires power?

Those are harder questions than asking whether someone can denounce an opponent at a rally.

Maharaj’s life does not require us to erase complexity, overlook disputed episodes, or turn any political figure into a saint. Serious history does not work that way. But it does require honesty about a generation that understood commitment as an extended discipline, rather than a temporary performance.

That is what Guyana must recover.

Not blind loyalty. Not political violence. Not personality cults. Not imported revolutionary theatre.

What is needed is a democratic revolutionism of principle: sustained public education, organized citizens, fearless journalism, honest advocacy, transparent institutions and leaders who understand that the public good cannot be pursued only when it is safe, popular or profitable.

Mac Maharaj’s journey—from arrest and Robben Island, to exile and underground organization, to the first democratic government—reminds us that meaningful political change is rarely made by those who appear only when there is applause.

It is made by those who remain when there is a cost.

 

THE ASSET —When Washington Says the Quiet Part Aloud

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  592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

THE ASSET —When Washington Says the Quiet Part Aloud

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar— August 2026

There is a particular kind of admission that no investigative reporter can manufacture: the one a government makes about itself, on the record, because it no longer sees anything to hide.

That is what happened when Mauricio Claver-Carone — until recently the Trump administration’s informal envoy to Venezuela, operating with what sources describe as outsized influence behind the scenes — was asked by Reuters to explain why Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman under active criminal investigation in two European jurisdictions, was being used as a channel between Washington and Caracas.

He did not deny it. He confirmed it. Betancourt, he said, understood the oil business in both countries and could build the bridge the administration needed. A diplomatic source went further in comments to EL PAÍS: “He’s a U.S. asset and they use him. Betancourt has understood how to sell himself and the Americans are buyers.”

Set that sentence beside what has now been documented, and the picture stops being a matter of inference.

THE INTERVENTION

Betancourt is not a marginal figure awaiting the outcome of routine due diligence. He is the founder of Derwick Associates, the company that received at least eleven no-bid Venezuelan thermoelectric contracts worth roughly $5 billion under Hugo Chávez — contracts that, according to Transparencia Venezuela, were overpriced by some $2.9 billion, and several of which never delivered the power they were paid to generate. He is, by name, the reason the term “bolichico” exists in Venezuelan political vocabulary: the young, connected operator enriched by the Bolivarian state without the burden of prior experience.

He is also, as of this writing, the subject of a reopened Spanish National High Court case alleging that he and his partners bribed three PDVSA officials with $42 million to help defraud $4.85 billion through currency-exchange manipulation — a case built on an earlier Swiss money-laundering investigation, which was itself built on a U.S. inquiry whose defendants have already been convicted.

Zurich prosecutors confirmed to Global Investigations Review in May that their underlying probe into Betancourt remains active. Switzerland froze his assets, alongside those of Nicolás Maduro and other politically exposed persons, in January of this year.

None of that has been resolved. None of it has been dropped.

What has changed is narrower, and far more revealing: according to reporting by the Washington Post, senior U.S. officials — Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Landau, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, and former Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche among them — made direct contact with Swiss authorities to press for exactly one outcome.

Not Betancourt’s innocence. Not the closure of the investigation. His freedom of movement. Bondi and Blanche, per that reporting, explicitly asked Switzerland to resolve the matter without criminal charges or prison time. In May, Zurich’s prosecutor’s office withdrew the extradition order that had confined Betancourt to bail in the United Kingdom.

The State Department, around the same time, issued him a multiple-entry U.S. visa.

Read the sequence plainly. Named American officials, operating through named channels, asked a European justice system to let a man facing a $4.85 billion fraud allegation walk free of the mechanism that would have compelled him to answer for it — not because the case lacked merit, but because his liberty served a policy objective.

Zurich did not clear him. It removed the tool that would have brought him before a court.

THE OBJECTIVE

That objective is not obscure. It is, if anything, the one part of this story Washington has been willing to state outright: a functioning intermediary between the United States and the post-Maduro government of Delcy Rodríguez, at the precise moment both governments are negotiating the restructuring of Venezuela’s oil sector, its mining concessions, and its sovereign debt.

Betancourt has obliged. Flight records reviewed by EL PAÍS place him back in Caracas on June 27, days after two earthquakes killed more than 6,000 people, traveling with his wife and a small entourage on a private aircraft from Palm Beach. He returned in July — though the paper trail for that second trip is, by any editor’s standard, strange enough to warrant its own scrutiny.

One flight plan places Betancourt and a party of Spanish investors aboard a Venezuela-bound charter on July 22. A second version of the same flight — same aircraft, same crew, same route, filed while the plane was airborne — replaces every name on that list with two others: Laura Hietamies, a Finnish financier, and her husband Jacob Hirshman, co-founder of the crypto- and defense-linked digital bank Erebor, who has himself made repeated trips to Caracas this year to link Venezuela to the U.S. financial system.

Neither Hietamies nor Hirshman responded to EL PAÍS’s questions. Neither did Betancourt. A source familiar with the case called the substitution a deliberate attempt to obscure his presence in the country.

By July 30, Betancourt was flying out again — this time alongside the co-founders of Heeney Capital, a mining-focused investment firm that in May signed advance purchase agreements for Venezuelan gold and mineral projects as part of a White House-backed push to revive the sector.

The pattern that emerges is not one of a private citizen quietly managing his own legal exposure. It is a state-adjacent operator moving between Washington’s diplomatic apparatus and Caracas’s oil, mining, and debt portfolios, on flights whose paperwork does not consistently agree with itself, at the same time his own government’s investigators — in a country whose president has publicly promised to clean up precisely this kind of arrangement — decline to press the matter, and whose American sponsors have taken active steps to see that no other jurisdiction does either.

WHAT THIS ESTABLISHES — AND WHAT IT DOES NOT

It would overreach to say Washington’s conduct here proves personal financial gain for the officials involved; nothing in the record supports that, and accountability journalism loses its force the moment it claims more than its sourcing carries. What the record does support, on named officials and on-the-record institutional confirmation rather than anonymous insinuation, is narrower and no less serious: that the United States government, through its most senior law-enforcement and diplomatic officials, treated a foreign criminal investigation as an obstacle to strategic access — and moved to clear it, not by contesting the evidence, but by asking the investigating state to look past it.

That is not a footnote to hemispheric policy. It is the policy, stated by the men who made it.

— The Board

The Certificate Cannot Certify What the State Won’t Publish

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The Certificate Cannot Certify What the State Won’t Publish

EDITORIAL · OPEN DATA & INSTITUTIONAL ACCOUNTABILITY 

 A government training agency wants to claim a “world-class workforce” for Guyana. It cannot, because the state has built no mechanism for anyone outside it to check the claim — and the one office created to force that disclosure has been left to fail by design.

By the Editor – August, 2026

The Board of Industrial Training’s Chief Executive Officer, Richard Maughn, returned from a U.S. State Department leadership program this month with an assessment that Guyana is “on track in building a world-class labour market,” missing only greater collaboration between agencies to complete the picture. The claim was carried, uncontested, in the Guyana Chronicle. It should not have been.

Not because the training programs Maughn describes are fictional, and not because collaboration between agencies is a bad idea. The claim should not have gone uncontested because there is no way for a member of the Guyanese public, an academic, a civil society organisation, or an independent journalist to verify it. Guyana has no statutory requirement that any public agency — the Board of Industrial Training included — publish the workforce data, disaggregated by sector, nationality, and employer, that a claim like “world-class workforce” would need to survive contact with evidence. What exists instead is an architecture of non-disclosure, anchored by a single office that has spent more than a decade demonstrating what happens when transparency is optional.

A DECADE OF DORMANCY, PRICED AT $40 MILLION

That office is the Commissioner of Information, established under the Access to Information Act of 2011 to give the Guyanese public a statutory right to demand records from public bodies. Kaieteur News reported on February 10, 2026 — during the first day of consideration of the 2026 Budget Estimates — that the office has produced no annual reports, engaged in little to no meaningful contact with media, and given little to no response to citizens or civil society seeking public information, for more than a decade.

The government’s response to that record, per the same report, was to allocate $40 million to the office in this year’s budget, $33.5 million of it earmarked for the Commissioner’s own salary and benefits. The allocation was challenged on the floor of the National Assembly by an opposition parliamentarian during budget scrutiny; a government minister present committed to writing the Commissioner to press for compliance.

An office with no annual reports for over a decade was budgeted $40 million to continue operating exactly as it has.

Kaieteur News’s reporting adds a detail that sharpens the accountability failure: the ruling party’s own 2025 election manifesto promised full enforcement of the Access to Information Act if returned to office, and the Vice President said publicly that improvement should follow a win. The party won. Kaieteur News reports no notable change followed.

This is not an absence of promises. It is an absence of consequence for breaking them.

That finding is corroborated independently. A press freedom assessment published in April 2026 by the Inter American Press Association’s affiliated monitoring project found that the Access to Information Act, passed in 2011, is not functioning in practice; that numerous information requests from civil society and media have gone unanswered; and that the government added resources to the Commissioner’s office in the 2026 budget without attaching any guarantee of accountability.

Two independently reported sources — a domestic outlet covering a budget debate, and a regional press freedom monitor assessing the state of Guyanese journalism — arrive at the same conclusion by different routes.

THE PICKET, THE PRE-ACTION NOTICE, AND THE JUDICIAL REVIEW

The clearest demonstration of what that dormancy costs in practice belongs to Christopher Ram — chartered accountant, attorney, and one of Guyana’s most persistent civic advocates on matters of public disclosure. Ram is a public figure who has made his advocacy on this issue a matter of open record, and his effort to force the Commissioner’s office to function is worth tracing in full, because it shows an escalation, not a single complaint.

Citizens picketing Commisioner of Information Office

In late March and early April 2025, Ram organized a picket outside the Commissioner’s office at 340 East Street, Georgetown, joined by lawyers, opposition Members of Parliament, independent media, and transparency organizations, according to Kaieteur News’s contemporaneous coverage. Ram said the group’s information requests had been rebuffed on what he characterized as absurd grounds — including, he said, the Commissioner’s insistence on being addressed by his full honorific title before engaging with a request at all. Ram announced the picket would run for four weeks, escalating to the Office of the President — which holds portfolio responsibility for the Commissioner’s office — if the government did not respond.

The government did not respond in the way Ram sought. On April 23 and 24, 2025, Demerara Waves and Stabroek News reported that Ram had escalated to formal legal action: pre-action notices served on the Minister of Natural Resources and on the Commissioner himself, over the continued withholding of records related to the 2016 ExxonMobil Production Sharing Agreement — an agreement governing the disposition of Guyana’s single largest natural asset. By May 16 and 17, 2025, Stabroek News reported that Ram had filed what was described as Guyana’s first judicial review action under the Access to Information Act, alleging that the Commissioner’s conduct amounted to a systematic refusal to enforce the nation’s transparency law and constituted, in Ram’s words as reported, a constitutional crisis in government accountability.

That litigation remains a live thread in Ram’s public advocacy more than a year later. In a column published by Kaieteur News in May 2026, Ram named the Commissioner of Information’s continued, functionally unoccupied status alongside a dormant Constitutional Reform Commission and an opposition-chaired Public Accounts Committee that has not been permitted to meet — leaving years of Auditor General findings on public expenditure in the range of four to five billion United States dollars unexamined by the body constitutionally tasked with examining them.

Ram’s own assessment, as reported, was that Guyana’s democratic and accountability institutions are decaying under the weight of oil-era public spending, precisely because no institution with the power to compel disclosure is being permitted to use it.

FROM ARCHITECTURE TO WORKFORCE DATA

This publication has argued before — in response to a Stabroek News commentary on inter-agency information silos — that Guyana’s information failures are not a matter of institutional culture that better collaboration can fix. They are a matter of architecture. There is no statutory mandate compelling public agencies to produce and publish machine-readable data on a regular schedule. There is no independent regulator empowered to compel disclosure or sanction its refusal.

The Commissioner of Information was meant to be exactly that regulator. The record above is what happens when the office is funded to exist and not funded, staffed, or held accountable to function.

The Board of Industrial Training’s claim to a “world-class workforce” has to be read inside that architecture, not outside it. No labour force survey, sectoral employment breakdown, or work-permit disclosure accompanying Maughn’s remarks is available to the public through any standing government data channel. What is publicly available instead comes from two sources: international bodies, whose reports on Guyana’s labour and governance conditions are cited precisely because they are the only figures anyone outside government can obtain — and direct, physical observation of who is actually working on the ground.

This publication’s own reporting on Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc., the Bangladesh-linked contractor holding a portfolio of Guyana Water Inc. contracts now confirmed at close to twelve billion Guyana dollars, is illustrative of the second category. Photographic evidence obtained in the course of that investigation — including an image published by Guyana Water Inc.’s own official account, captioned as showing “several Guyanese staff” — shows a workforce that is visually, overwhelmingly South Asian, standing alongside Guyana Water Inc.’s own Chief Executive Officer at a completed plant site.

Whether that composition reflects lawful work permits, documented labour-market testing, or compliance with the local-hiring obligations that apply to engineering and technical contracts under Guyana’s legal framework has not been disclosed by any government agency and cannot currently be verified against any published dataset.

That is not a gap in this publication’s reporting. It is the gap the state has left standing.

A workforce claim that cannot be checked against published data is not a finding. It is an assertion, made by the same government that funds an information office to sit idle and answers civic advocacy with a promise to write a stern letter. Guyana does not need another certificate, another training pipeline announcement, or another appeal for inter-agency collaboration to reach a world-class workforce.

It needs a legal obligation to publish the data that would let the public judge whether one exists — procurement records, work-permit issuances by sector and nationality, labour-market testing outcomes, and the Commissioner of Information’s own annual reports, filed on schedule, for the first time in over a decade.

Until that obligation exists in law, with a penalty attached to its breach, claims like Maughn’s will keep arriving exactly as this one did: unaccompanied by evidence, unchallenged by the outlet that carried it, and unverifiable by anyone the claim was supposedly made to.

— The Board

SOURCES

Guyana Chronicle, “BIT CEO says, emphasises need for greater collaboration,” August 2026.

Kaieteur News, “‘$40M for silence’ – Govt. allocates millions for unresponsive office of commissioner of information,” February 10, 2026.

Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa (SIP-IAPA) affiliated press freedom report on Guyana, April 20, 2026.

Kaieteur News, “Protest against Commissioner of Information continues today,” April 4, 2025.

Demerara Waves, “Christopher Ram threatens legal action over no information on oil agreement,” April 23, 2025.

Stabroek News, “Ram serves pre-action notices to Bharrat, Ramson over failure to provide oil info,” April 24, 2025.

Stabroek News, “Ram files judicial review case against Commissioner of Information,” May 17, 2025.

Kaieteur News, “Resource curse has taken root in Guyana – Ram warns,” May 4, 2026.

The 592 Guardian, prior reporting: “Beyond Polite Suggestions: Guyana Needs Open Data by Law, Not by Goodwill”; ongoing Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc. investigation.

 

The State That Cannot Say No: Part II

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 The State That Cannot Say No: Part II

Mediation by Ambush

OPINION BY: Staff Writer August 2026

A follow-up to “The State That Cannot Say No” · 

Six days into the Tassawini standoff, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission finally moved — not to enforce the law, but to schedule a meeting. On August 26, GGMC Commissioner Newell Dennison proposed mediation talks in Georgetown between the Chinese Landing Village Council and miner Wayne Vieira, to be held the following day. Toshao Nikita Miller said no.

She was right to.

AN INVITATION ISSUED IN BAD FAITH

The proposal arrived with a glaring omission: at no point did GGMC require that Vieira’s equipment be withdrawn from Tassawini as a precondition for talks. Nine excavators, two bulldozers, and dredge engines remained staged at the contested backdam, blocked only by round-the-clock human presence — villagers who have now held that line for six days.

Around the clock Blockade

Miller’s response to Dennison was procedurally unimpeachable: mediation, she said, cannot produce a fair outcome where a power imbalance exists between the parties, or where undue pressure is placed on one side. She could not leave her village to negotiate a settlement while the thing being negotiated over sat idling at her people’s doorstep, its operators waiting for her back to turn.

That is not obstruction. That is a Toshao who understands, from decades of dealing with this specific miner, exactly what “mediation” has meant before

THE BARGES ANSWER THE QUESTION

Whatever ambiguity remained about GGMC’s good faith — or Vieira’s — dissolved last Monday night. As villagers held the blockade at Tassawini, operators loaded the heavy equipment onto barges and shipped it to Kariako, attempting to reach Tassawini by an alternate route while the Commissioner’s invitation to talk was still on the table. Miller called it plainly: not a show of good faith. The attempt was stopped again, but the sequence speaks for itself. A mediation offer was extended with one hand while the other hand tried to flank the blockade it was ostensibly meant to resolve.

This is not a case of miscommunication between GGMC and its permit-holder. It is a case of GGMC proposing talks while the party it regulates conducted, in parallel, exactly the kind of unilateral action mediation is supposed to prevent. If the Commissioner did not know about the Kariako maneuver, GGMC has no operational visibility into the conduct of a permit-holder it claims to be reasonably managing. If he did know, the invitation to mediate was theater.

“The moment my back turn, those machines are going to walk in the backdam.” — Toshao Nikita Miller

A PATTERN, NOT AN INCIDENT

This community has been here before. Village leadership recalls mining activity resuming in the past while a Toshao was away attending a National Toshaos Conference — the exact year lost to the accumulated weight of a dispute now running for decades, but the shape of it unmistakable to anyone who has followed Chinese Landing’s history with this permit-holder.

Miller’s insistence on a precondition — machinery off the land before talks begin — is not a negotiating tactic. It is a lesson paid for once already, now being applied so it does not have to be paid for again.

That history sits alongside a public record this newsroom has already documented: Minister Bharrat’s mischaracterization of the 2017 CCJ ruling as a merits victory for Vieira, when the Court explicitly declined to rule on the legitimacy of his permits or the Council’s standing; the March-to-July gap between mining’s resumption and the village even being informed the ban had lifted; a GGMC mines officer stationed on-site during an earlier equipment confrontation who neither stopped nor was able to stop the incursion.

Each incident, alone, might be read as bureaucratic failure. Together, they describe an institution that treats consultation with Indigenous communities as a formality to be scheduled around, not a precondition to be honoured.

 

WHAT GOOD FAITH WOULD LOOK LIKE

The Village Council has not refused to talk. It has refused to talk under duress — and it has said, in writing, what would change that. In formal correspondence to the Ministry of Natural Resources and to GGMC, the Council requested a cease work order on all preparatory mining activity and the suspension of any permission granted for equipment and operations in the area. Neither has been granted. That request, not the mediation invitation, is the test of whether government intends to act as an honest broker or merely as an usher for private mining interests.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights already told Guyana what good-faith engagement with Chinese Landing requires: formal entry-permission requests to the Toshao and Council, joint consultation on protective measures before they are imposed, and a permanent community-based monitoring mechanism — commitments the state has not implemented in the three years since the Commission ordered them. GGMC’s Thursday proposal met none of that standard. It asked a sitting Toshao, in the sixth day of a live blockade, to leave her people and negotiate the terms of her own community’s exposure while the equipment in question tried to slip in the back way.

Toshao Miller has said the Council remains open to mediation on the basis of mutual respect and fairness. The obligation to meet that standard sits with GGMC and with Vieira — not with the community holding the line at Tassawini.

The 592 Guardian will continue to track this story as it develops.

— THE BOARD

BOOK LAUNCH: ENTER THE POLITICAL KINGDOM BY MOSES BHAGWAN

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JOIN US IN WASHINGTON D.C. AS:

Moses Bhagwan’s Journey Continues: Washington, D.C. Launch of Enter the Political Kingdom

Following two highly successful book launches in New York and Guyana, Moses Bhagwan’s political memoir, Enter the Political Kingdom: A Guyanese Political Memoir, now comes to Washington, D.C.

This third engagement continues an important journey of remembrance, reflection, and public conversation around a life devoted to political activism, justice, democracy, and the continuing struggle for a better Guyana. Bhagwan’s story reaches beyond the personal: it speaks to generations who have witnessed, participated in, or inherited the consequences of Guyana’s political and social struggles.

Join Moses Bhagwan, the editors, supporters, members of the Guyanese diaspora, students, scholars, activists, and friends for an evening marking the launch of this significant work at the University of the District of Columbia on Thursday, September 10, 2026  @ 5.30 pm. 

 Let us continue the journey with Moses as he shares the lessons, experiences, and life’s work that have shaped his enduring contribution to Guyana and its people.

 Available on Ian Randle Publishers : https://ianrandlepublishers.com/product/moses-bhagwan-enter-the-political-kingdom/

LEARN MORE: https://youtu.be/uXztBywol8Q 

On the APA, Carbon Financing, Chinese Landing, and FPIC

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592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

On the APA, Carbon Financing, Chinese Landing, and FPIC

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar August 2026

Do you remember the narrative that the Amerindian Peoples Association (APA) was somehow trying to block climate finance — carbon credits money — from reaching Amerindian communities?

That was never how 592 Guardian  understood the issue. If you understand what Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) actually means, the position becomes much clearer.

When we read APA’s submission to the ART Secretariat at the time, we understood where they were coming from. It was not a position against Indigenous communities receiving funding or benefiting from development. Why would an Indigenous rights organisation want to prevent Indigenous communities from benefiting from resources intended for their development? That interpretation, to 592 Guardian, was absurd — but it certainly supported a political narrative, one the government itself actively cultivated.

Vice President Jagdeo publicly attacked the APA over its complaint; the Guyana Chronicle ran a piece titled “They do not speak for us,” quoting a government-aligned figure accusing APA of the very consent violation it had alleged; and a pro-government outlet later framed APA’s failed appeal as “a failed political attempt to stymie the development of Amerindian Villages,” pointedly noting Guyana earned US$150 million in 2023 ART-TREES payments — as if the size of the payment were itself an answer to the process question APA was asking.

The issue, to our understanding, was how the decision was made, who made it, and whether Indigenous peoples had actually consented to it. And this is where FPIC becomes important.

FPIC is not a mechanism to say “yes” or “no” after everything has already been decided. It is a safeguard for Indigenous self-determination.

Learn More: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1HkHyJoCG2/?mibextid=wwXIfr

THE SEQUENCE MATTERS

Free, Prior and Informed Consent means consent must come before the decision.

You cannot make the fundamental decisions about a project, program, policy or activity, begin implementing it, and then approach communities afterwards and call that FPIC. That is consultation after the fact. And consultation is not the same thing as consent.

Similarly, you cannot decide that mining concessions should be issued within or affecting Indigenous lands, conduct lotteries, issue concessions and allow activities to commence, and then approach Indigenous communities — as an agency or a miner — afterwards asking whether they consent to mining or entry to mine. By then, a critical decision has already been made. The consent was supposed to come before the decision to permit the activity, not after it.

This is why we have always found the criticism that organizations such as APA are simply “talking about consultation, consultation, consultation” to be somewhat simplistic. APA was attempting to apply FPIC as it is understood as an international standard, rather than treating it as another box to tick after a decision has already been taken.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED WITH THE CARBON CREDITS

This is not an abstract dispute. The documented timeline of Guyana’s ART TREES carbon credit program is, in fact, a textbook case of what FPIC is meant to prevent.

According to the Forest Peoples Program’s case study on the certification — first published on apaguyana.com and drawing directly on APA’s own account — the Government of Guyana submitted its proposal for carbon credit certification to the ART Secretariat in December 2020, before any prior consultation with Indigenous Peoples took place.

The proposal covered carbon credits generated from all forests nationally, including forests on Indigenous Peoples’ titled lands. Government did hold information-sharing sessions on the broader Low Carbon Development Strategy, of which the ART proposal was one component — but per APA and FPP’s account, these sessions did not amount to consultation in the sense required under international human rights law, and no Indigenous Peoples were asked for, or gave, their free, prior and informed consent to the proposal itself.

The National Toshaos Council did endorse the wider LCDS policy framework. But the NTC is not a body empowered to give FPIC on behalf of individual Indigenous communities for a scheme monetising carbon on their specific titled lands — a distinction government has repeatedly treated as immaterial, and one that goes to the heart of what “consent” is supposed to mean under FPIC. Consent is community-specific and land-specific.

A national council endorsing a national strategy is not the same thing as the villages whose titled forests are being sold into a carbon market agreeing to that sale.

Aster Global Environmental Services then conducted the validation and verification for ART’s certification — but its review, per FPP, was structurally limited to assessing government’s own self-reported compliance with the TREES standard, not an independent assessment of whether Indigenous communities had actually consented. ART certified the credits in December 2022. A portion was sold to Hess Corporation.

Only after all of that — the proposal, the endorsement, the validation, the certification, the sale — did APA’s formal complaint arrive, filed with ART’s grievance mechanism in March 2023. And even then, the complaint was dismissed twice: first in May 2023, then again on appeal in October 2023, both times without the Secretariat ever substantively engaging the FPIC question APA had raised. Government’s own framing of that outcome was that APA had failed on procedural grounds — questions about who APA represented, whether APA itself had consent to file.

Whatever the merits of that procedural dismissal, one fact remains: to this day, no independent body has actually adjudicated whether Guyana’s process met the FPIC standard. The complaint was dismissed on threshold grounds, not defeated on the merits.

 

That is the sequence problem in its purest form. The credits were designed, proposed, endorsed by a body without the authority to consent, validated against government’s own self-reporting, certified, and sold — and only at the very end of that chain was an Indigenous rights organization’s objection even heard, and then dismissed without reaching the substance.

592 Guardian understanding of APA’s position, then and now, was never that Indigenous communities should not receive the benefits of carbon financing. It was that the conditions for consent were never met before the money moved. That is a fundamentally different argument. It is the difference between saying: “Do not give Indigenous communities this funding,” and saying: “Before decisions are made about Indigenous lands and resources, Indigenous communities must have the opportunity to determine whether and how they consent to those decisions.” Those are not the same thing.

CHINESE LANDING

This brings us to mining, and to the standoff currently unfolding at Chinese Landing.

The question there cannot simply be whether the community was eventually consulted before a miner entered their lands with heavy equipment. We have to ask when they were consulted about the decision to mine from the inception, what information they had, what decision had already been made, and whether they actually had the ability to influence or withhold consent before that decision was taken.

The record at Chinese Landing shows exactly this pattern. A 1999 agreement gave the miner permission to work in exchange for tribute, employment and services — but by 2009 the Village Council had refused to renew that agreement and told the miner to cease work and remove his equipment. What followed was over a decade of legal proceedings that never actually resolved whether the village’s consent was required at all: a 2017 CCJ ruling that was narrowly procedural — it struck down a cease-work order on jurisdictional grounds and expressly left undecided whether the Village Council had standing to enforce consent requirements — followed by a 2021 High Court ruling, still on appeal, holding that minerals vest in the state and that the miner did not need village permission to access his permits in the first place.

That 2021 ruling is the sharper and more uncomfortable version of the argument this publication is  making here. It is not merely that consent was sought too late in that case. A court has held, as the law currently stands, that consent was never legally required at all — that the Mining Act’s vesting of minerals in the state overrides the Amerindian Act’s consent provisions. Notably, that reading contradicts an earlier ruling by the very same judge in a different case, where prospecting permits granted before the Amerindian Act’s commencement were held to require consent on renewal — a contradiction that has never been explained and remains unresolved on appeal.

If concessions have already been issued — which is often the case — the process has already moved considerably beyond the point at which consent should have been sought. And if our courts are, in live cases, reading our own laws as not requiring that consent in the first place, then the problem is not simply implementation. It is the law itself.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE CONVERSATION

Our existing laws may not fully reflect the FPIC standard. And perhaps that is precisely the uncomfortable conversation we need to have.

If our legal framework allows decisions affecting Indigenous lands to be made first and consent to be sought later — or, as the Chinese Landing litigation suggests, allows those decisions to be made without requiring consent at all — then perhaps the problem is not with the principle of FPIC. Perhaps the problem is that our laws need to catch up with the rights they are supposed to protect.

This is why this publication do not see FPIC as an obstacle to development, nor do we blame the APA for the positions it has held on either carbon financing or mining. What we do find a reasonable and open question is how to practically apply FPIC without jeopardizing Indigenous peoples’ rights in the process — and we believe the NTC and District Councils are trying to address exactly this through the development of FPIC guidelines and protocols.

Good intentions do not remove the requirement for consent. A project can be designed to bring jobs. A program can be designed to bring development. A policy can be designed with the best intentions. But good intentions do not automatically create consent.

FPIC exists precisely because even well-intentioned decisions can undermine Indigenous self-determination when Indigenous peoples are excluded from making those decisions.

SOURCES

Forest Peoples Programme, “ART’s Controversial Certification of Carbon Credits to the Government of Guyana” (29 Feb 2024, first published apaguyana.com); Kaieteur News reporting on APA’s March 2023 ART complaint and government response; Guyana Chronicle, “They do not speak for us” (15 Apr 2023); Vieira v. Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, [2017] CCJ 20 (A.J.); reporting on the 2021 High Court ruling and pending Court of Appeal proceedings; IACHR Precautionary Measures No. 196-23.

— The Board

Born Leaders? The Data Manning Cited Says Otherwise

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Born Leaders? The Data Manning Cited Says Otherwise

OPNION BY: Hem Kumar August 2026

A regional examining body’s own chief operating officer built a claim of male biological entitlement on statistics that disprove it.

At the August 18 launch of the 2026 CXC results in Anguilla, Dr. Nicole Manning, the Caribbean Examinations Council’s Chief Operations Officer, told the region something she framed as self-evident: that men are born leaders. She said it while standing in front of the numbers that refute it.

Dr. Nicole Manning COO – CXC

Manning was addressing a real and worthwhile subject — the growing gender gap in regional exam participation. Females made up 62 per cent of CAPE entries this year against 38 per cent for males; at CSEC level the split was 59-41. That gap deserves the “deeper assessment” she called for. What it does not support is the conclusion she drew from it.

AN ARGUMENT THAT DEFEATS ITSELF

Follow Manning’s own logic for a moment. Girls are outperforming boys in participation and, by extension, in the pipeline toward tertiary education and professional life, across two major regional examination levels. Manning’s response to that female outperformance was to declare that leadership is a male birthright which society has a duty to protect.

That is not an assessment of the data. It is a conclusion that arrived before the data did, and then bent the data to fit it.

If anything, the numbers Manning cited make the opposite case: whatever “natural” leadership capacity is supposed to look like, it is not tracking with the sex she says was born to hold it.

This is also, notably, an argument made by a woman who has herself risen to the chief operating officer’s chair of the region’s principal examining authority — a position that, on her own stated theory, she should not by nature occupy.

THE COALITION’S RESPONSE

The Caribbean Family Planning Affiliation, IGNITE, Youth Advocacy Movement Grenada, and Caribbean Religious Voices for Justice issued a joint statement the following day, and it is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as reflexive offense. Their central distinction is the correct one: children are born with potential, not with rank. What later gets described as innate male leadership is, on their account, privilege exercised long enough and consistently enough that it comes to look like nature.

“Men are not born leaders any more than women are born followers.”

The coalition’s sharpest question is not rhetorical. Who built the structures that hand boys authority and teach girls accommodation? Who benefits from calling that arrangement natural rather than constructed?

A claim that something is innate is, among other things, a claim that it cannot be changed and should not be interrogated. That is precisely why the claim needs interrogating.

The groups also reached for a Caribbean-specific counter-history, and it holds up: across the region, women have run households, churches, schools, ministries, and movements, frequently absorbing the labor that men’s absence left behind, with little institutional credit for having done so. A regional examining body’s own COO erasing that record in a single sentence, at an official results launch, is not a minor rhetorical slip.          It is a senior education official using her platform to naturalize the very hierarchy the participation data is busy dismantling.

WHY THIS IS NOT A PRIVATE OPINION

Manning did not offer this as a personal reflection over dinner. She said it at the formal launch of CXC’s 2026 results, in her capacity as the Council’s Chief Operations Officer, addressing the exam performance of the region’s children. CXC sets and certifies the qualifications that determine university admission and employment prospects across the Caribbean. Its senior officers are not incidental voices in the region’s education conversation; they are among its most consequential ones.

That is what makes the coalition’s demand for “serious and constructive engagement” the right one, and the minimum one. An institution entrusted with certifying the academic futures of Caribbean boys and girls alike cannot have a chief operating officer telling the region, on the record, that one sex was born to lead and the other was not — especially not while her own slide showed the opposite trend.

The gender gap in exam participation is real and deserves the region’s full attention: why boys are falling away from CAPE and CSEC entry, what support structures are missing, what a coordinated response looks like. None of that requires, or is helped by, a theory of male biological destiny.

It requires the same thing every other education policy problem requires: evidence, structural analysis, and officials willing to follow the data rather than narrate over it.

— The Board

Kaneville Must Not Become Another Land Grab by Another Name

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

 Kaneville Must Not Become Another Land Grab by Another Name

OPINION BY: Hem  Kumar • AUGUST 2026

The eviction notices served on residents of Kaneville, East Bank Demerara, are not merely notices to vacate. They are a test of whether Guyana has one land policy for all citizens—or one policy for the poor and another for the politically protected.

Residents were reportedly given (14) days to remove themselves from land they have occupied, developed and called home. That deadline is now closing in. The public expects what usually follows: State vehicles, heavy equipment, police presence, demolished homes, displaced families and official statements about illegality, order and development.

But Guyanese are entitled to ask the question the authorities would prefer to avoid: Once Kaneville is cleared, who gets the land?

Will it remain for the public purpose now being invoked? Will it be used for roads, drainage, schools, hospitals, housing or other properly disclosed development? Or will the removal of poor families create an opening for persons with the right party ties, business relationships, surnames, telephone numbers and access to decision-makers?

This is not cynicism. It is the product of experience.

For too long, land administration in Guyana has operated under a cloud of public distrust. Ordinary citizens endure long waits, unclear procedures, shifting requirements and unanswered applications. Meanwhile, people perceived to be politically connected appear to obtain access to valuable State lands with a speed and ease that ordinary Guyanese can only envy.

That perception is devastating. It tells the poor man that a formal application is not enough. It tells the young family that hard work is not enough. It tells the unemployed mother that citizenship is not enough. It tells the citizen that the real title deed is not a transport, lease or allocation letter, but a connection.

That is not land policy. That is patronage.

Bulldozers Cannot Be the Policy

Let us be clear: illegal occupation must not be encouraged. Public land is not a free-for-all. Land reserved for roads, drainage, public utilities, schools, hospitals, agriculture, environmental protection and planned housing cannot be casually occupied without consequences.

But law enforcement without justice is not governance. It is simply power.

The State cannot solve a housing crisis by waiting until poor people build homes, establish families, spend years improving a community and then arrive with machinery to erase their lives. If the occupation is unlawful, the State must act. But it must also explain why families were allowed to settle, build and remain for so long; what notice and assistance were provided; whether relocation is available; whether regularization was considered; and whether the land will truly serve the public interest after the evictions.

A family living without title may have no legal right to remain. But that does not mean the State has no duty to act humanely, transparently and consistently.

 

The question is not whether the law applies to Kaneville. It does. The question is whether it applies with equal force to those who obtain land through influence, insider information, preferential treatment or political intervention.

The Public Is Entitled to Answers

Before a single structure is demolished, the responsible agencies should publicly disclose:

◊ The exact legal status and boundaries of the land at Kaneville

◊ The statutory authority under which the evictions are being pursued

◊ The purpose for which the land is required

◊ The full development plan, including timelines and the agency responsible

◊ Whether the land is intended for public infrastructure, housing, commercial development, private leasing or allocation

◊ The names of any current or proposed beneficiaries, developers, lessees or allottees

◊ The method by which any future allocation will be made

◊ The valuation of the land and the basis upon which prices, leases or concessions will be determined

◊ Whether occupants were assessed for regularisation, relocation or alternative housing

◊ The criteria used to decide who receives assistance and who does not

◊ The safeguards against the land being transferred, allocated or occupied by politically favoured persons after residents are removed

There is no valid reason for secrecy. If the exercise is lawful, necessary and in the public interest, transparency can only strengthen it. If transparency is resisted, the public is entitled to ask what exactly is being concealed

No official should be offended by those questions. Public land is held in trust for the people of Guyana. Ministers, agencies and officials do not own it. They administer it. And administration without accountability is merely discretion waiting to be abused.

Squatting, Poverty and Privilege

Guyanese must stop allowing the word “squatter” to shut down every conversation about justice.

Being uprooted after settling for years?

There is a profound difference between an organized scheme to steal or fraudulently transfer land and a poor family occupying land because formal housing is unaffordable, inaccessible or unavailable. Both situations may require legal intervention, but they do not demand the same response, carry the same moral weight or reveal the same failure of the State.

Many informal settlements are not evidence of a people who reject the law. They are evidence of a housing system that has failed to meet human need.

A person who cannot afford a plot, cannot secure a mortgage, cannot navigate the bureaucracy and cannot wait indefinitely for a land allocation will often do what desperate people have always done: find a place to live. That does not create legal ownership. But it does expose the State’s failure to provide an accessible path to lawful ownership.

The poor must not be permitted to capture public lands. But neither should the influential be permitted to capture public lands through boardrooms, back channels, political offices and undisclosed arrangements.

Land theft does not become respectable because the thief wears a suit, owns a company, attends fundraisers or has friends in high office.

One Law Must Govern All

There must not be bulldozers for the weak and accommodation for the well-connected.

There must not be eviction notices for struggling families and quiet land deals for those who can call a Minister, a senior official, a party operative or a powerful business associate.

There must not be public condemnation of informal settlers while choice State lands are allocated, leased, rezoned, regularized or transferred under arrangements the public cannot see and cannot test.

◊ Every State-land allocation should be publicly traceable.

◊ Every beneficiary should be known.

◊ Every valuation should be independently defensible.

◊ Every waiver, concession, lease, regularisation and transfer should be subject to clear written criteria.

◊ Every conflict of interest should be disclosed.

◊ Every credible allegation of favouritizm should be independently investigated.

That is not radical. It is the minimum standard of a functioning democracy. The people of Kaneville are not above the law. But neither are those close to power.

If the State intends to remove them, it must show the public—not merely assert—that the land will be used lawfully, fairly and transparently. It must demonstrate that this is not another cycle in which the vulnerable are removed and the connected later arrive to harvest the opportunity.

Because once that occurs, the eviction is no longer simply an exercise in enforcement.                                                                                                   It becomes State-assisted dispossession.                                                 And no Government that claims to govern for all Guyanese can justify that.

 

The Border Is Not a Constitutional Vacuum nor Federal Fiefdom

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

The Border Is Not a Constitutional Vacuum nor Federal Fiefdom

OP-ED BY: Hem Kumar–August 2026

At America’s Borders, CBP Has Claimed the Power to Make Rights Disappear

“It’s not indefinite,” the Customs and Border Protection officer said after an American citizen, held for hours at an airport, asked how long the government intended to keep him. “We’ll let you know.”

That is not an answer. It is a declaration of power.

It is the sound of a federal agency informing a citizen that time, information, counsel, explanation, and even the basic dignity of knowing why he has been seized by the state are now privileges to be dispensed with—or withheld—at the government’s pleasure.

Customs and Border Protection calls this “secondary inspection.” It calls the process “administrative.” It says lawyers are not permitted during secondary examinations because an international-arrivals inspection is not a criminal proceeding.

But the label is a legal convenience, not a moral defense.

If a person is ordered into a controlled area, separated from family, unable to leave, denied access to a telephone, interrogated about private associations and work, and given no explanation of the accusation or timeline for release, he is experiencing state coercion. Calling that coercion “administrative” does not make it less coercive. It merely reveals how easily government lawyers can use technical language to conceal a profoundly unequal exercise of power.

The reporter at the center of this account was an American citizen returning home with his wife. His passport was taken, locked in a container, and he was directed to secondary screening. His wife was admitted. He was held for approximately four hours. He asked to call a lawyer. He was refused. He was not told why he had been detained. And when he was finally cleared to enter his own country, the officer who processed him reportedly did not know why he had been held either.

Think about that.

The government confined a citizen without telling him why. The government denied him official means to speak with counsel. And the government employee who finally released him could offer no explanation because, apparently, the decision may have been made somewhere else—in a database, a hidden list, an automated targeting system, or an opaque bureaucratic chain that no individual officer could or would explain.

This is not accountable law enforcement. It is algorithmic bureaucracy armed with badges, detention rooms, and the presumption that the public has no right to ask questions.

CBP has substantial authority at the border. Nobody serious disputes that the government can inspect baggage, enforce customs law, identify fraud, intercept contraband, and investigate real threats. The issue is not whether a border exists. The issue is whether the Constitution, democratic accountability, and basic human decency cease to exist at that border.

For CBP, the answer increasingly appears to be yes.

A citizen’s right to return to the United States is fundamental. The government may demand proof of citizenship and may carry out lawful border inspections. But it cannot turn the right to come home into a conditional favor, dependent upon whether a traveler submits quietly to limitless uncertainty, invasive questioning, data extraction, and unexplained suspicion.

The danger is especially acute in the age of hidden databases and automated risk scoring. DHS acknowledges that it maintains extensive systems containing traveler data, including the Automated Targeting System and Secure Flight-related screening records. Yet Americans have no practical way to know whether they have been flagged, why they have been flagged, which agency entered the information, whether the data are wrong, or how to correct it before the next humiliating encounter at an airport.

That is the architecture of unaccountable power: the government knows, the citizen does not; the government records, the citizen cannot inspect; the government accuses by implication, the citizen is denied a meaningful chance to respond.

And those most vulnerable to this system are often those least able to fight it.

The American citizen delayed for four hours ultimately entered his country. A lawful permanent resident may instead be pressured to surrender a green card. A visitor may be placed on the next flight out. An asylum seeker may face a life-altering decision in a sterile interview room, far from a lawyer, family member, or any realistic opportunity to understand the consequences of what an officer places before them.

The account of an older Jordanian woman reportedly being pressured to sign away her permanent-resident status while her husband struggled to reach counsel illustrates the human cost. A decision that may separate families and alter the course of a life should never be treated as airport paperwork to be signed under distress, isolation, and official intimidation.

Nor should journalists, lawyers, advocates, academics, or diaspora communities be expected to accept special scrutiny because of their work, religion, ethnicity, travel history, foreign relationships, or political associations. Questions about journalism and media work may be presented as casual curiosity. But when those questions come from an armed federal authority holding a traveler incommunicado, “curiosity” carries the force of compulsion.

The First Amendment does not become a decorative suggestion at the arrivals gate.

CBP’s position is effectively this: the agency can compel waiting, demand answers, deny clarity, restrict access to counsel, and invoke sealed systems and undisclosed intelligence rationales—all while dismissing the matter as merely administrative. That proposition should alarm every American who believes government power must be explainable before it is excusable.

The response cannot be limited to sympathy after the fact. Congress must impose enforceable safeguards.

CBP should be required to provide travelers with a written record of their referral to secondary inspection, including the start and end time, the responsible office, and a meaningful explanation when disclosure would not compromise a legitimate investigation. Travelers should have prompt access to a telephone, family contact, medication, restroom facilities, disability accommodations, and legal advice. No lawful permanent resident should be pressured to abandon status without a genuine opportunity to consult counsel and understand the consequences.

DHS must also disclose how frequently U.S. citizens are sent to secondary inspection, how long they are held, how many are subjected to device searches, and how automated systems, watch lists, and database matches influence those decisions. An independent watchdog—not CBP itself—must audit the agency’s systems for error, bias, political retaliation, and unconstitutional targeting.

Finally, citizens must have a clear, rapid, and enforceable process to learn whether they have been placed on a government list, challenge false information, and obtain correction. A Freedom of Information Act request is important, but it is not enough. FOIA is slow, heavily redacted, and too often defeated by the very secrecy that enables abuse. Rights that can be exercised only after months or years of bureaucratic delay are rights already diminished.

The airport border is not a constitutional vacuum. It is not a federal fiefdom. It is not a place where the government may reduce citizens to data points, suspected names, travel patterns, and silent entries in a database.

 

A democracy is tested not by how it treats the powerful, well-connected, or politically favored. It is tested by whether an ordinary person can ask, “Why am I being held?” and receive an answer; whether he can call someone for help; whether he can challenge a government error before it becomes a punishment.

“We’ll let you know” is not due process. It is the language of unaccountable power

 

 

Constitutional Reform Comm. -Ram on the Rampage

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

Constitutional Reform Comm. -Ram on the Rampage

OPINION BY :GHK LALL– August 2026

Chartered Accountant, attorney-at-law, and civil society watcher, Mr. Chris Ram, certainly went to town on the Constitutional Reform Commission (CRC) in Kiskadee Watch (“Carl Singh-led Constitutional Reform Commission is already a colossal failure with no reasonable prospect of redemption”) -August 24,2026.  A hammer to the head, that one is.  Mr. Ram’s list of failures is exhaustive, a commission far from reform mode, one afflicted by crises.  It would be interesting to hear how the CRC’s members respond.  I stand this way.

Two years post its swearing-in, there must be something to show.  Nothing.  Chairman Singh, SC, has a duty to differ, set the record in order.  Attorney General Nandlall, SC, spoke of holding people’s feet to the fire (my words), i.e., they must deliver.  Not on their timecard.  But through what gives value for money, moves the CRC forward.  Talk about money, and I swear.  Jesus Christ! Public service has always been bemoaned as an impoverishing undertaking. 

In contrast, public service is delicious in Guyana.  I look at Mr. Ram’s monthly compensation numbers and curse.  For doing what?  It’s a blasted parttime job done halftime, and the monthly payment numbers are in six figures, with the chair benefiting from an extra zero.  It’s a sweet setup.  The CRC had delivered, produced some substance, and I still would not agree at the level of remuneration for its members.  Where’s the output for the annual outlay of $74.4 million in compensation alone?  From my distance, it seems that real money only circulates at certain elevations.  I am only commenting on this, and I’m embarrassed at the abundance of riches.  If a minimum wage worker in Guyana delivered as much as the CRC, he would be out of a job.  It’s my take.

Also, why are some of them on the CRC?  Who in Guyana’s population are they representing?  Then, there’s the other side of that question.  A group that garnered almost 110,000 votes a year ago is locked out of the CRC, forced to look on. 

How can Guyana still be considered a democracy, when the state of the CRC and many other areas of vital national importance are this ramshackle? 

Personally speaking, Guyana is now nothing but a house of disputed repute.  I appreciate that when the CRC came into being political conditions were different.  No one saw coming what has been rightly labeled the seismic change.  It’s now a year since the last elections, and Guyanese voters have shown where they stand.  Why are the people with 110,000 votes effectively barred from being around the CRC table?  Why are others inside of the body, collecting what equates to free money?

Two more points before I go.  Mr. Ram mentioned that “the commission and its members are entitled to the same privileges and immunities as the National Assembly and its members.”  I am trying to grasp the extent of his meaning.  Does this mean that the 21 members of the CRC are each entitled to a duty-free concession?  If so, it’s the equivalent of sleeping on the job, then springing awake to run to the wharf to clear the next Mercedes on Guyanese taxpayers’ backs.  The CRC has gravitated to being an assignment with all the rewards, but with no returns forthcoming.  I would hide my face, leave through a backdoor.

Last point, recall my prior take about keeping the money in the family.  There’s the CRC secretary.  Given his attachment to the MV Barima Commission of Inquiry, he must be Guyana’s Superman and Spiderman combined.  A saver of distressed souls; and a scaler of vertical fortifications, through stockinged feet.  He is in the middle of a human tragedy and a boardroom catastrophe.  I think he’s the right man for both jobs. 

The output of the CRC gives an indication of what could be had from the Barima COI.  Guyana isn’t a country.  It’s a tragicomedy.  Ram presented splendid testimony.  I do some mopping up work.