Guyana’s Uranium Gamble

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦RESOURCE ACCOUNTABILITY♦ JUNE 2026

Guyana’s Uranium Gamble: Strategic Resource, Weak Safeguards

The announcement that Canadian junior explorer U92 Energy Corp. has acquired a decade’s worth of technical data for the Kurupung uranium project should not be treated as routine mining news. It is, in fact, a development that exposes a glaring policy vacuum, raises serious regulatory questions, and signals that Guyana may be drifting into a strategically sensitive sector without the institutional readiness to manage it.

Uranium is not gold, nor is it bauxite. It is a strategic mineral tied directly to nuclear energy and global security frameworks.

 Countries that permit uranium exploration and production do so under strict legislative regimes, layered oversight, and international safeguards aligned with institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Guyana, by contrast, appears to be approaching uranium under the same legal and administrative architecture used for conventional minerals. This approach is, at best, outdated, and at worst, dangerously insufficient.

At the center of this issue is U92’s acquisition of a comprehensive historical dataset underpinning a 20.6 million-pound uranium resource estimate. The dataset—comprising geological mapping, drill records, assay results, geophysical surveys, and metallurgical analyses—represents the intellectual and technical foundation of the project. Control of this data is not incidental; it determines how the resource is valued, developed, and ultimately monetized.

Yet this critical asset was secured through a CA$500,000 transaction settled entirely in shares.

 

This raises immediate red flags. Share-based transactions of this nature often obscure true valuation and bypass the financial transparency that accompanies cash deals. They can signal limited liquidity on the part of the acquiring company, while simultaneously transferring significant value through speculative equity instruments. In practical terms, a decade of strategic geological intelligence has now changed hands without a clear indication of its real market worth.

More troubling, however, is the layered corporate structure through which control of this uranium project has been assembled. U92, a Canadian entity, acquired a Singaporean company—LIA Industries—which in turn controls a Guyanese subsidiary holding the prospecting licenses. Now, through a separate agreement, U92 consolidates ownership of the project’s technical data.

This multi-jurisdictional arrangement complicates oversight and raises legitimate questions about beneficial ownership, regulatory scrutiny, and accountability.

 It is precisely the type of structure that demands heightened due diligence from state agencies, particularly when the underlying asset involves a mineral of strategic importance.

There is no public indication that such scrutiny has been applied.

Equally concerning is the apparent absence of a national uranium policy. Guyana has not articulated how it intends to regulate uranium exploration, manage its environmental risks, or comply with international nuclear material safeguards. There is no evidence of a dedicated legal framework governing the handling, storage, transport, or export of radioactive materials. Nor is there clarity on whether existing institutions possess the technical capacity to oversee such a sector.

Instead, what is unfolding suggests that Guyana is allowing a foreign junior explorer—whose primary asset is speculative capital—to establish early control over both the physical resource and the data that defines it.

The timeline adds further pressure. The prospecting licenses issued for the Kurupung property expire in April 2027, with possible extensions to 2029. This creates an inherent incentive to accelerate drilling and resource validation, potentially outpacing environmental oversight and regulatory preparedness. Already, a 5,000-metre diamond drilling program is being mobilized, with infrastructure development underway.

The pace of activity stands in stark contrast to the silence on policy.

This is not an argument against resource development. It is an argument for coherence, transparency, and strategic awareness

 Countries such as Canada and Australia permit uranium mining, but only within robust regulatory systems that integrate environmental protection, national security considerations, and international compliance obligations. Others, including Kazakhstan and Namibia, maintain strong state involvement in uranium projects to ensure national interests are preserved.

Guyana, on the other hand, appears to be entering this sector without a declared framework, while permitting complex offshore ownership structures and opaque transactions to define its trajectory.

This raises unavoidable questions.

What due diligence was conducted on U92 Energy Corp. and its affiliated entities? Did the Government of Guyana assess the implications of transferring control of a decade’s worth of uranium exploration data through a share-based transaction? Is there a national policy governing uranium exploration and potential production? Are Guyana’s laws aligned with international nuclear safeguards and export control regimes? And critically, who is ultimately accountable for ensuring that this sector develops in a manner consistent with national security and environmental protection?

These are not abstract concerns. They go to the heart of sovereignty, governance, and long-term national interest.

Guyana cannot afford to treat uranium as just another line item in its extractive portfolio. The decisions being made now—quietly, and with limited public scrutiny—will shape not only the future of this resource, but also the country’s credibility in managing strategically sensitive industries.

If there is a policy, it must be stated. If there are safeguards, they must be demonstrated. And if there is oversight, it must be visible

Anything less would suggest that Guyana is not managing its uranium potential—but surrendering it.

 

GHOSTS OF THE PHANTOM SQUAD       

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THE 592 GUARDIAN   |   INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL

SPECIAL INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL

 GHOSTS OF THE                PHANTOM SQUAD           

AK-47s, Venezuelan Gangsters, and a Government That Has Seen This Before

The 592 Guardian  |  Accountability Journalism for the Guyanese Citizen Georgetown, Guyana  ·  June  2026

Thirty-three AK-47 assault rifles. Two separate seizures. In less than a month. One government that has, so far, said almost nothing of substance — and one city businessman with a record that reads less like a dossier and more like a warning that was never heeded. The 592 Guardian submits that what Guyana is witnessing is not an isolated law enforcement story. It is the re-emergence of a structural pathology that this country has paid for before in blood, impunity, and institutional decay. And the current administration’s silence is not merely politically inconvenient. It is, given what history has already documented, an indictment in itself.

On June 5, 2026, a routine-sounding police search in Farm, East Bank Demerara became anything but. Officers acting on intelligence intercepted a vehicle at Schoonard, West Bank Demerara, and found 23 AK-47 rifles and 503 rounds of matching ammunition. A Venezuelan national, Jonathan Gans, was arrested at the scene. Days later, a wanted bulletin was issued for city businessman Randy Jagdeo and one Orlando Gabriel. Jagdeo — now 40 years old — surrendered to the Criminal Investigation Department on Sunday, accompanied by his attorney. He remained in custody as of press time.

This was the second such seizure in less than  a month. In late May, ten AK-47-style rifles were intercepted in Berbice. Three Guyanese nationals are currently before the courts in connection with that matter. The serial numbers on most of the June cache had been obliterated. Deputy Police Commissioner Wendell Blanhum confirmed the weapons were manufactured in the United States.

Thirty-three military-grade rifles in sixty days. The GPF has no comment of substance. The Minister of Home Affairs says she is ‘still assessing.’ Guyanese have heard this cadence before.

When Demerara Waves asked Minister of Home Affairs Oneidge Walrond about the apparent motive behind two major arms seizures in rapid succession, she responded: “Still assessing. The investigation is active.” Her advisor, former minister Robeson Benn, offered only: “Guyanese always have to be concerned when guns are being pushed around.” That was it. From a government managing a country with one of the most valuable oil discoveries in the Western Hemisphere, two cabinet-level figures could not produce a single sentence about what 33 assault rifles are doing circulating through Guyanese wharves.

I.WHO IS RANDY JAGDEO — AND WHY DOES HIS RECORD MATTER

The AFC press release framing this story as a PPP protection scandal deserves scrutiny before it deserves amplification. Randy Jagdeo is not a PPP loyalist. His recent history suggests precisely the opposite political alignment — which makes the story considerably more complex and considerably more alarming than opposition talking points allow.

In May 2025, Jagdeo was charged with inciting treason following a Facebook post in which he declared that Essequibo belongs to Venezuela — a statement made, notably, while displaying signage at his ‘Thousand Dollar Store’ on the East Bank of Demerara that featured Guyana’s map with the Essequibo region excised. The charge carried the possibility of life imprisonment. In January 2026, the Diamond Magistrate’s Court threw the case out entirely, with Magistrate Dylon Bess upholding a no-case submission, finding the charge legally flawed and unsupported by sufficient evidence.

Tren De Aragua

Step back and read that sequence again. A Guyanese businessman publicly expressed sympathy for Venezuela’s territorial claims over Essequibo. His treason charge collapsed in court. Months later, he surfaces in connection with 23 AK-47s being transported by Venezuelan nationals. One of those nationals — Jonathan Gans — was arrested at the scene. Security officials, speaking on background to Demerara Waves, said they believe the weapons were destined for mining sector gangs or border networks, and that Tren de Aragua — the Venezuelan criminal organization with transnational reach — may be extending its footprint westward into Guyana.

A man who publicly sided with Venezuela on Essequibo. A treason charge that dissolved. Then Venezuelan nationals and 23 AK-47s. The 592 Guardian does not assert guilt. We assert that these facts demand answers no one in authority is providing.

The 592 Guardian does not assert that Randy Jagdeo is guilty of anything beyond what has been proven. What we do assert is this: the convergence of a pro-Venezuela public posture, a collapsed treason prosecution, and a subsequent arms trafficking investigation involving Venezuelan co-accused is not a coincidence that a responsible government can afford to treat with ‘still assessing.’ It is a national security threat that demands transparent, publicly communicated investigation — and it is receiving neither.

II.THE GHOST IN THE ROOM: ROGER KHAN AND THE PHANTOM SQUAD

The AFC’s invocation of Roger Khan is not mere electioneering. It is a reference to a chapter of Guyanese governance that was proven, prosecuted in a United States federal court, and never domestically reckoned with. For any reader unfamiliar with that chapter, The 592 Guardian submits the following record — not as historical color, but as living institutional precedent.

Between 2002 and 2006, Guyana was in the grip of a crime wave triggered by the escape of five prisoners from Camp Street Prison on February 23, 2002. Criminal gangs, most notoriously that of Rondell ‘Fineman’ Rawlins, conducted robberies, murders, and massacres. The Guyana Police Force was outmatched. Into that vacuum stepped Shaheed ‘Roger’ Khan — an Indo-Guyanese cocaine trafficker with construction and forestry businesses as cover, Colombian supply lines, and connections that reached into the highest offices of the People’s Progressive Party government led by President Bharrat Jagdeo.

What Khan ran was not a private security firm. It was an extrajudicial killing unit — the Phantom Squad — staffed largely by former police officers, armed with military-grade weapons, and operating with what prosecutors and WikiLeaks cables later established was de facto state protection. The squad’s primary targets were Afro-Guyanese criminal figures. The ethnic geometry of that targeting was not incidental. It was the entire point.

Khan later advertised in local newspapers — in his own name — that he had been fighting crime on behalf of the Bharrat Jagdeo-led government. The government denied it. The US federal court record told a different story.

The evidentiary record is not circumstantial. In December 2002, Khan and associates were intercepted by a Guyana Defense Force patrol driving an armored vehicle. Inside: military arms, and a Cellular Protocol Analyzer — a Smith Myers CSM 7806, sophisticated telephone interception equipment that is sold only with government authorization. The GDF detained them. They were released hours later on direct orders from Presidential Secretariat Head Roger Luncheon, who directed the return of all equipment.

In US federal court proceedings, Smith Myers co-director testimony confirmed the cellular intercept equipment used by Khan’s network had been sold to the Government of Guyana. Court exhibits showed the purchase was received on behalf of the government by then Health Minister Dr. Leslie Ramsammy. An independent contractor subsequently traveled to Guyana to train Khan and his associates in the equipment’s use. Dr. Ramsammy denied any knowledge of Khan or the surveillance device. The exhibits bearing his signature were entered into the court record regardless.

Among those killed as a direct result of communications intercepted using that equipment: Ronald Waddell, a popular Afro-Guyanese political talk show host, shot outside his East Bank Demerara home on January 30, 2006. And Donald Allison, youth organizer and boxing coach. A former Phantom Squad member turned DEA and FBI informant, Selwyn Vaughn, testified under oath to the operational details of Waddell’s execution — the surveillance, the call to Khan, the four former police officers who arrived in a burgundy Toyota AT 192 armed with automatic weapons.

A WikiLeaks cable from the US Embassy in Georgetown, later made public, is unambiguous: it states that Home Affairs Minister Ronald Gajraj orchestrated Guyana’s death squads in 2002-03, certainly in close collaboration with Khan,’ and that Luncheon ‘intervened and ordered the authorities to release Khan and return his equipment.’ The cable also notes that PPP government leaders ‘were comfortable with Khan because they thought he was on their side,’ and expressed anxiety about the prospect of a criminal kingpin aligned with the political opposition.

The PPP was not merely tolerant of a drug lord. According to a US Embassy cable, a US federal court record, and Khan’s own public statements, it was his client. The question in 2026 is whether the institutional appetite for that arrangement was ever truly extinguished.

What happened to the principals? Gajraj resigned under international pressure and was appointed High Commissioner to India — a soft landing that became a template. A presidential commission of inquiry, chaired by then Acting Chief Justice Ian Chang, found ‘no credible evidence’ of Gajraj’s involvement in extrajudicial killings. The inquiry’s conclusions were contested by virtually every independent observer and contradicted by the US Embassy’s own assessment. Gajraj served in India until the government changed in 2015.

Roger Khan himself fled to Suriname in June 2006 as police closed in. Then-Justice Minister Chan Santokhi — now Suriname’s President — declared him a threat to national security. Khan was eventually extradited to the United States. He was convicted of narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling, money laundering, and witness tampering. He was sentenced to fifteen years. He returned to Guyana in September 2019 after serving approximately ten years. He was questioned about the murders of Ronald Waddell and Donald Allison. He was released on station bail days later. The charges were dropped. No evidence, it was said.

Roger Khan, as of the date of this editorial, is a free man in Guyana. The 592 Guardian formally asks: has he been questioned in connection with, or eliminated from, the current investigation into 33 AK-47 rifles moving through Guyanese wharves?

III. THE VENEZUELAN VECTOR: TREN DE ARAGUA AND GUYANA’S EXPOSED FLANK

The Roger Khan framing, while historically essential, must not be allowed to obscure the distinct and equally alarming security dimension of this crisis: the Venezuelan criminal penetration of Guyanese territory. These may be related phenomena — or they may be parallel tracks that intersect at the point of arms supply. Either possibility is grave.

Tren de Aragua is not a street gang. It is a transnational criminal organiZation that originated in the Tocoron Prison in Aragua state, Venezuela, and has since expanded across at least a dozen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Its documented activities include arms trafficking, narcotics distribution, human trafficking, contract killing, and — increasingly — the provision of coercive services to state and non-state actors in territories where Venezuelan influence is being projected. Security analysts have documented its relationship with elements of the Maduro government as instrumentally symbiotic: the organization operates freely where it serves state interests and is contained where it does not.

Against that backdrop, the presence of Venezuelan nationals as primary movers in both the May Berbice seizure and the June Schoonard seizure is not a footnote. It is the story. Background sources cited by Demerara Waves believe the weapons were destined for mining sector networks or border gangs — and express the view that Tren de Aragua is actively expanding westward into Guyana. This aligns with the documented pattern of incidents along the Cuyuni River, where a GDF patrol boat was fired upon by unidentified gunmen as recently as May 29, 2026, injuring a soldier — the second such incident that month.

A GDF patrol boat fired upon on the Cuyuni. Venezuelan nationals moving AK-47s through Georgetown wharves. A businessman with public pro-Venezuela sympathies in police custody. This is not a crime story. It is a sovereignty story.

The ICJ proceedings on the Essequibo matter have not resolved the underlying pressure Venezuela applies through non-military means. Caracas has long understood that coercive presence in disputed territory — through mining networks, criminal infrastructure, and allied local facilitators — is a tool of territorial politics that costs far less than conventional military action and produces deniability that ICJ proceedings cannot easily pierce. The question The 592 Guardian raises is this: are the weapons now circulating in Guyana part of a criminal supply chain, a political intimidation infrastructure, or both? Because the answer to that question determines whether this is a GPF matter or a matter of national defense.

The GPF, to state the obvious, is not equipped to answer that question on its own. Its capacity limitations are institutional and resource-driven — not a criticism of individual officers but a structural reality. What is required is a joint intelligence assessment involving the GDF, the GPF’s organized crime unit, the DEA (which has maintained a Georgetown office since 2017), and CARICOM’s regional security architecture, to the extent that architecture can be activated. None of that has been publicly announced. The government has said it is ‘still assessing.’

IV.THE SILENCE DOCTRINE: WHAT INSTITUTIONAL NON-RESPONSE REVEALS

The AFC is wrong to frame this primarily as a PPP-protection story about Randy Jagdeo, because Jagdeo’s own public record does not support the claim that he is a PPP asset being shielded. But the AFC is entirely right to identify the government’s silence as a scandal in its own right — and the Roger Khan precedent is precisely why that silence cannot be given the benefit of the doubt.

The operating manual of PPP crisis management, as established across two decades of governance, follows a predictable sequence: initial silence, followed by minimal acknowledgment, followed by institutional process (inquiry, investigation, review) that produces findings convenient to the government, followed by the quiet resolution of the matter through reassignment, soft exile, or legal collapse. Ronald Gajraj went to India. Roger Khan’s murder charges evaporated. The Camp Street massacre inquiries produced no convictions of political significance. The pattern is not conspiracy theory. It is documented institutional history.

The silence of the Ali-Jagdeo government on 33 AK-47s is not uncertainty. It is a posture. And that posture has a name: it is called impunity management.

 

The specific questions that silence must be made to answer are these.

First: how did rifles — US-manufactured, with obliterated serial numbers — pass through Guyanese port infrastructure in not one but two transactions within sixty days? Wharves are regulated. Customs is a state function. Someone either missed this or facilitated it. The government owes the public a customs and port-of-entry audit, publicly disclosed.

Second: what is the status of Randy Jagdeo’s prior case — the treason matter — in relation to this investigation? The collapse of that prosecution deserves re-examination in light of his current circumstances. The 592 Guardian does not suggest the earlier charge was validly framed — the magistrate’s ruling suggests otherwise. But the pattern of a man with documented pro-Venezuela public positions being in proximity to a Venezuelan-linked arms network is a pattern that prosecutorial authorities have an obligation to examine in its totality, not in isolated case files.

Third: what is the current status of Roger Khan in Guyana, and has he been interviewed as part of any intelligence assessment related to the current arms proliferation? The 592 Guardian acknowledges this question may seem like a reach to some readers. We submit that given Khan’s documented history of arms procurement, his established criminal networks, and the fact that he has been a free man in this country for seven years with no accountability for any of the acts he admitted to, the question is not a reach. It is due diligence.

V.WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY DEMANDS

The 592 Guardian does not traffic in conspiracy. We traffic in documented pattern, institutional precedent, and the editorial obligation to ask what powerful entities prefer not to answer. On the basis of what has been established — in US federal courts, in WikiLeaks cables, in the public record of the Phantom Squad era, and in the current facts of two arms seizures and a government that cannot find its voice — we make the following editorial demands.

The Ministry of Home Affairs must provide a public briefing — not a press statement — on the results of its ‘assessment,’ including a timeline of both seizures, the known movement of the weapons through Guyanese territory, and the status of all persons in custody. ‘Active investigation’ cannot be a shield against public accountability on matters of this gravity.

The Guyana Revenue Authority and the Customs Anti-Narcotic Unit must commission and publish an audit of port-of-entry controls that speaks directly to how military-grade weapons are entering Guyana undetected. If that audit reveals systemic failure, the responsible officials must be identified. If it reveals facilitation, those individuals must be prosecuted.

The National Assembly must hold an emergency session on national security. The Speaker — whose own record of institutional responsiveness The 592 Guardian has previously documented — must convene that session within fourteen days. Parliamentary oversight of the security apparatus is not optional in a constitutional democracy.

And the government must answer, publicly and on the record, whether any domestic intelligence assessment has been made of Tren de Aragua’s presence in Guyana — and if so, what its findings are and what response has been authorized.

THE ROT IN THE PLOT

Guyana has been here before. A crime wave it could not contain. A state that found it more convenient to outsource violence than to build institutions. A drug lord with an armored vehicle, military weapons, and government-restricted surveillance equipment — released the same day he was detained, by order of the Presidential Secretariat.

That chapter did not end cleanly. It ended with unmarked graves, with a talk show host shot in his driveway, with a boxing coach killed on intelligence gathered by equipment the Health Minister signed for, and with a drug lord who served ten years in an American prison and returned to Guyana to face — nothing.

We do not know, as of this writing, whether Randy Jagdeo is a criminal, a facilitator, a dupe, or a man in the wrong place at the wrong time. The courts will determine that. What we do know is that 33 military-grade rifles have entered this country in sixty days, that Venezuelan nationals are the primary movers, that a man with documented pro-Venezuela public sympathies is in custody, that the border is being probed with live fire, and that the government’s response to all of it is silence dressed up as process.

The light is in. The rot is visible. What remains to be seen is whether any institution in this country has the will to act on what it illuminates — or whether Guyana will wait, as it has before, for an American federal court to tell us what happened in our own wharves.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, public finance, and regional geopolitics.

Editorial correspondence: editor@the592guardian.com

 

Aubrey Norton’s Unearned Throne

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦OPINION♦POLITICS                OP- ED                                                                                              BY: Hem Kumar

Aubrey Norton’s Unearned Throne

Defeated, deserted, and demoted to third place, the PNCR/APNU leader still acts as though the mandate never left him — and Guyana’s democracy is paying the price.

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board  |  June, 2026

Aubrey Compton Norton answers to several titles. He is Leader of the People’s National Congress Reform. He is Chairman, and Representative of the List of Candidates, for A Partnership for National Unity. What he is not, and has not been since the night of September 6, 2025, is Leader of the Opposition. That office now belongs to Azruddin Mohammed, whose three-month-old We Invest in Nationhood party did what six decades of PNC machinery never expected : it  pushed Norton’s coalition into third place. The titles Norton still holds describe a man running a smaller and smaller room.

The title he lost described the only one that mattered constitutionally. He has conducted himself ever since as though the distinction were beneath his notice

 The numbers are not contestable, because they are GECOM’s own. APNU went from 31 seats in the previous National Assembly to 12 in this one — the worst result in the coalition’s history, and the first time since its founding that it failed to carry a single region. Georgetown, the capital the PNC effectively owned for the better part of six decades, fell to the PPP/C for the first time, by a margin of nearly two to one. WIN’s 16 seats made it the country’s new official opposition. Norton’s APNU, with its 12, is now the third force in a parliament it once dominated.

This was not a setback. It was a dismantling, and Norton was the man at the wheel when it happened.

What followed was supposed to be a reckoning. Instead it has been a kind of stage management. Norton has not called a single General Council meeting of his own party since the defeat. The PNCR’s Congress — the one body with actual authority to replace him — has been pushed back to 2027, on his own say-so, in the name of “consolidation.” In June, with the wreckage of September still being swept up, he told a WPA-aligned broadcast that he is prepared to stand for the party leadership again, having already ruled himself out only for the presidency. A man who led his party to its historic floor has positioned himself as the only person qualified to lead its recovery. That is not humility. That is occupancy.

The exodus continued anyway, and it has not gone where a healthy opposition’s defectors should go.

In May, a fresh group of former APNU parliamentarians and sitting regional councillors — Ricky Ramsaroop, Shurwayne Holder, Dinesh Jaiprashad, Ravoldo Birbal, Sheik Yaseen, Prince Holder, and Gangadai Lloyd — sat down with PPP General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo and declared themselves part of his party’s political family. They joined a list that already included former PNC stalwarts James Bond, Jermaine Figueira, Geeta Chandan-Edmond, Richard Van West Charles, Daniel Seeram, and Samuel Sandy.

Notice the direction of travel. These were not disillusioned PNC supporters drifting toward WIN, the upstart that actually defeated Norton’s coalition at the polls. They walked directly into the government’s camp. For the party’s base, this has landed as a double shot of sobriety: a historic loss at the ballot box, compounded by a leadership that keeps quietly handing the winners more of its own people. Every PNC defector who lands at Freedom House rather than at WIN’s door is not a wandering vote. He is a transfer payment from the opposition to the government — and Norton’s coalition has been making those payments on a near-monthly basis.

Norton’s own account of all this is that nobody should be surprised, that the departing members had signaled their intentions for some time, that defection is simply what happens to parties out of power. He is, in other words, narrating his own hemorrhage as background noise. His party’s General Secretary, Sherwin Benjamin, called the May defections an act of “personal aggrandizement.” Norton called it predictable. Neither man called it a leadership failure — which is the one explanation the evidence actually supports.

He has not lacked for warning. Former Georgetown Mayor Ubraj Narine resigned from the PNCR in November, saying the party had been “hemorrhaging internally and externally.” In May, in a public letter, he went further, telling Norton plainly that he had to step aside or watch the PNCR lose the one stronghold it has held since Forbes Burnham built it — City Hall itself. Norton’s answer was silence, followed by a renewed bid for his own job.

The title he lost described the only one that mattered constitutionally. He has conducted himself ever since as though the distinction were beneath his notice.

 It is against this backdrop — third place, a bleeding caucus, a postponed Congress, a leader the public record shows clinging rather than rebuilding — that Norton has chosen to assert himself on a matter of real constitutional consequence. As this media outfit  reported this week, Azruddin Mohamed, the man who now holds the office Norton lost, has moved to replace the three long-serving opposition-nominated GECOM commissioners, arguing that their tenure traces to a parliamentary mandate that no longer exists. Norton’s reply, offered without engaging the constitutional argument Mohamed actually made, amounted to a flat denial: “no vacancy exists,” he said, unless a sitting commissioner dies or resigns.

That is not a constitutional position. It is a veto, asserted by a leader the architecture of the Constitution no longer recognizes as the opposition’s voice.

A claim made over commissioners who were never his appointees to begin with — Charles Corbin, Desmond Trotman, and Vincent Alexander were advised upon by a previous opposition leader representing a different party and a different mandate entirely. Norton wants the authority of an office he does not hold, exercised over appointments he did not make, to outlast an election he comprehensively lost. That is the kind of unchecked, informal power this board has in mind, and it is not an isolated incident. It is the pattern.

It would be one thing if Norton’s caution were a strategic choice his own coalition endorsed. It is not. Within APNU itself, voices including parliamentarians Terrence Campbell and David Hinds have called for the kind of social mobilization an opposition reduced to twelve seats might actually need to make itself heard against a government with thirty-six. Norton has offered no comparable urgency — only consolidation, only continuity, only himself.

None of this serves the PNC’s supporters, the generations of Afro-Guyanese voters whose loyalty built the party Norton now administers. It serves the government he is nominally there to check.

 

A demoralized, third-place opposition that cannot hold its own councillors, cannot convene its own Congress, and spends its remaining credibility defending GECOM appointments nobody currently mandates him to defend is not an obstacle to the PPP/C’s continued dominance. It is a convenience. Whatever Norton intends, the effect of his refusal to leave is to aid and abet the very consolidation of power his party was founded to resist.

A leader who will not yield the chair, in a moment that calls for renewal, is not protecting the opposition. He is one of the quiet guarantees of its continued weakness — and in a country where unchecked executive power is the actual and growing danger, that guarantee is itself a clear and present danger to the growth of any credible check on the state.

Someone in the PNC needs to bell this cat. The party, and the country, cannot wait much longer for that someone to arrive.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

STOLEN FROM THE INTERIOR:

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        THE 592 GUARDIAN     

INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL | ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

STOLEN FROM THE INTERIOR:

How the State Has Looted, Ignored, and Buried the Amerindian Purpose Fund for Twenty-Five Years

The 2024 Auditor General’s Report does not merely flag irregularities in the Amerindian Purpose Fund. It confirms — once again, with the numbing patience of a system that no longer expects to be heard — that a fund established for Guyana’s most marginalized communities has been allowed to dissolve into a legal void, a financial black hole, and a graveyard of undelivered promises. This editorial names the failure, traces its architecture, and holds its custodians to account.

The 592 Guardian   | Investigative Desk | June 2026

Let us begin with what the law says — or rather, what it no longer says. The Amerindian Purpose Fund was created under Section 28 of the Amerindian Act Chapter 29:01. In 2006, that Act was repealed. The successor legislation, the Amerindian Act 2006, made no provision for the Fund’s continued operation. From that moment, the Amerindian Purpose Fund ceased to have a legal foundation.

That was nineteen years ago.

In nineteen years, no administration — not the APNU+AFC coalition, not the PPP/C government that succeeded it — has seen fit to pass the enabling legislation that would give this Fund a lawful basis. Money has continued to move through it. Cheques have been written in its name. Communities have been told projects are funded. And the legal infrastructure to govern any of it has simply never existed.

A fund created to serve Indigenous communities has operated without law, without accounts, and without consequence — for nearly two decades. That is not negligence. That is policy.

The 2024 Auditor General’s Report, paragraphs 208 through 210, confirms what previous reports have confirmed in 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and before that. Financial Statements for the Amerindian Purpose Fund were not presented for audit. The finding, the AG notes with understated precision, echoes “similar observations noted in previous years.” This is the language of an institution that has stopped expecting accountability and begun merely recording its absence.

The 592 Guardian will not accept that framing. We place the evidence before the public as a prosecutor places it before a jury — methodically, without embellishment, and with the full weight of what it means.

II.THE FOURTEEN COUNTS — EVIDENCE OF INSTITUTIONAL BETRAYAL

The following findings are drawn directly from the 2024 AG Report and corroborated by the AG’s prior annual reports. Each constitutes a discrete, documented failure. Together they form a pattern so consistent, so repeated, and so unaddressed that no honest observer can attribute it to circumstance.

|COUNT 1: OPERATING WITHOUT LEGAL AUTHORITY

Source: 2024 AG Report, Para. 209; Amerindian Act 2006

Finding: The Fund’s enabling legislation was repealed in 2006. No replacement provision was enacted.

Duration: 19 years of unlawful operation

Every transaction processed through the APF since 2006 has occurred in a legal vacuum. No minister, no permanent secretary, no budget officer authorized to disburse public funds through this vehicle had — or has — a valid statutory basis to do so. The question that neither the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs nor the Attorney General’s Chambers has been asked to answer publicly is this: what is the legal status of every dollar disbursed through this fund since the repeal? The 592 Guardian asks it now.

|COUNT 2: TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. ZERO FINANCIAL STATEMENTS.

Source: 2024 AG Report, Para. 210; AG 2014 Report

Finding: No audited financial statements have been produced since the Fund opened in 2000.

Pattern: Flagged repeatedly — including as a “similar observation” from prior years in 2024

The Amerindian Purpose Fund was opened in 2000. It has never — not once in twenty-five years — produced an audited financial statement. Section 29 of the Act explicitly requires the Ministry to prepare annual financial statements subject to audit by the Auditor General. This requirement has been consistently violated across multiple administrations. The Ministry’s response to the 2024 finding? Staff shortages. The same response given last year. The year before that.

|COUNT 3: BANK ACCOUNT LAST RECONCILED: 2009

Source: AG 2020 Report, as reported by Stabroek News

Finding: The Fund’s bank account has not been balanced against its books in over 15 years.

Implication: No one in government can say with certainty how much money is in this Fund or where it went.

Bank reconciliation is not an advanced financial practice. It is the most basic act of fiscal stewardship — matching what the ledger says against what the bank statement shows. The APF’s account has not been reconciled in over fifteen years. This means that the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs has been authorizing expenditures from an account whose balance it has never verified. The Ministry does not know what it holds. It does not know what it has spent. And it has told the nation’s auditors, in effect, that this is acceptable.

|COUNT 4: GYD $647.6M OUT THE DOOR. NO RECEIPTS.

Source: 2024 AG Report

Amount: GYD $647.6M (approx. US$3.1M)

Finding: 109 cheque orders from 2023 and 2024 remain uncleared — money paid in advance, proof of delivery never returned.

One hundred and nine cheque orders. Nearly three million US dollars. Disbursed in advance. Not one receipt confirmed what the money purchased. Under standard financial regulations, cheque orders must be cleared within thirty days. These have not been cleared. In some cases they have been outstanding for well over a year. The rules exist precisely to prevent public money from disappearing without trace. Those rules have been systematically ignored.

|COUNT 5: GYD $352.6M STILL UNCLEARED AS OF SEPTEMBER 2025

Source: 2024 AG Report

Amount: GYD $352.6M (approx. US$1.7M)

Finding: 74 cheque orders from 2023 remained uncleared as of September 2025 — nearly two years overdue.

These are not recent disbursements. These are 2023 cheque orders that had still not been accounted for as of September 2025. The rules gave 30 days. Two years passed. The Ministry issued no public explanation. No official was disciplined. No money was recovered. The Audit Office issued a recommendation. The Ministry said it would follow up.

|COUNT 6: GYD $101.5M IN STALE CHEQUES — 19 VILLAGES LEFT WITHOUT CAPITAL FUNDS

Source: 2024 AG Report, Para. 208

Amount: GYD $101.5M (approx. US$487,000)

Finding: 25 cheques for capital projects across 19 Village Councils written, recorded as spent, and allowed to expire undisbursed.

This is the finding that should have triggered a parliamentary emergency. Twenty-five cheques. Nineteen communities. Nearly half a million US dollars designated for capital projects — roads, drainage, water, community infrastructure — written, recorded in the public accounts as expenditure, and then allowed to go stale in a government drawer. The money was never delivered. The projects were never built. The communities were never told.

Half a million dollars for nineteen Indigenous communities — written, recorded as spent, and left to expire. Not one village was named. Not one official was held accountable.

And this is where the failure compounds into something uglier still: the AG Report does not name the nineteen communities. Nineteen Indigenous villages are owed capital project money that went stale. They are owed the basic dignity of being identified as victims of this failure. The 592 Guardian demands their names be published. If the Ministry will not publish them, we will use every available mechanism to obtain and print them.

|COUNT 7: THE MINING MONEY THAT NEVER CAME

Source: Stabroek News, February 2022; Public record

Finding: GGMC — the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission — is required to contribute to the Fund from mining activity. In 2020 and 2021, it paid nothing.

While Guyana’s mining sector generated tens of billions in revenue and the country celebrated oil-era GDP growth, the statutory contributions owed to a fund for Indigenous communities from that very extractive activity were simply not made. No penalty was levied. No corrective transfer was ordered. The GGMC, a state entity, violated its statutory obligation to the APF without consequence. The government that presides over both entities said nothing.

|COUNT 8: THE LOGBOOK NOBODY KEPT

Source: 2024 AG Report

Finding: The Cheque Order Register — the basic ledger tracking every advance — was not maintained. Auditors could not measure the full scale of the problem.

The Cheque Order Register is not a complex financial instrument. It is a logbook. It records every advance made against the Fund so that auditors — and the public — can follow the money. It was not kept. This means the scale of the uncleared cheques problem documented in this report is a floor, not a ceiling. The true extent of what has been disbursed and not accounted for cannot be determined because the Ministry did not maintain the records that would make determination possible. This is not a filing error. It is the destruction — through inaction — of the evidentiary basis for accountability.

|COUNT 9: THE MINISTRY DOES NOT KNOW WHAT IT OWNS

Source: 2024 AG Report

Finding: Asset inventories not updated — a breach of the Stores Regulations. Flagged in previous years.

The Ministry of Amerindian Affairs cannot produce an accurate inventory of the assets it holds. This is a violation of the Stores Regulations. It means that equipment, vehicles, and materials procured through this Fund — paid for with public money designated for Indigenous communities — cannot be verified as existing, functioning, or located. The Ministry is a steward that cannot account for what it holds in trust.

|COUNT 10: FIVE RECOMMENDATIONS. ONE IMPLEMENTED.

Source: 2024 AG Report

Finding: Of the 2023 audit’s 5 recommendations, only 1 was fully implemented. The remaining 4 were partially addressed at best.

Pattern: Identical scorecard to prior years.

The Audit Office does not make recommendations casually. Each recommendation represents a documented failure of governance with a prescribed corrective action. Of five recommendations issued after the 2023 audit, four remain unimplemented entering 2025. This is not a ministry struggling to comply. This is a ministry that has calculated — correctly, so far — that non-compliance carries no cost.

|COUNT 11: FLAGGED SINCE 2014. TWO GOVERNMENTS. SAME FINDING.

Source: AG Reports 2014–2024; Public record

Finding: These failures predate the current administration. The PPP/C and APNU+AFC both presided over this fund without correcting its structural deficiencies.

This editorial does not spare the previous administration. The APNU+AFC coalition governed from 2015 to 2020 and produced the same audit findings, the same non-responses, and the same institutional inertia. The APF’s condition is not a partisan problem. It is a problem of the Guyanese state’s relationship with its Indigenous citizens — a relationship in which accountability has never been demanded and has therefore never been delivered. Both governing parties bear responsibility. The current administration bears current responsibility.

|COUNT 12: “WRONG TIME TO DISCUSS” — THE MINISTER’S WORDS ON RECORD

Source: Stabroek News, December 2021

Finding: When APF failures made the news in 2021, the subject minister told the press it was the ‘wrong time to discuss’ the matter.

In December 2021, the Amerindian Purpose Fund’s failures became newsworthy. Communities were asking questions. Journalists were filing queries. The minister responsible for the Fund’s oversight told the press — on record — that it was the “wrong time to discuss” the matter. Four audit reports later, the finding reads identically. The 592 Guardian asks: when is the right time? After five more reports? Ten? When has the last cheque gone stale and the last community has stopped asking?

III.THE EVIDENCE — BY THE NUMBERS
FINDING
AMOUNT
 
 
STATUS

 
Uncleared cheque orders (2023–24)

 GYD $647.6M / US$3.1M

 109 orders — no receipts returned
Stale cheques — Village Councils

 GYD $101.5M / US$487K

 25 cheques expired; 19 communities unserved
Long-outstanding orders (to Sept 2025)

 GYD $352.6M / US$1.7M

 74 orders from 2023 — nearly 2 years overdue
GGMC statutory contributions unpaid

 Unknown

 Zero paid in 2020 and 2021
Financial statements produced (since 2000)

 None

 25 consecutive years — zero audited accounts
Bank reconciliations (since 2009)

 None

 16+ years — no balance verification
Prior recommendations implemented (2023)

 1 of 5

 4 outstanding — same pattern as prior years
IV.THE ACCUSED — NAMING INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSIBILITY

Accountability journalism requires more than the passive voice. It is not enough to say that “the Fund failed” or that “statements were not produced.” Institutions do not fail in the abstract. People make decisions — or fail to make them — and those decisions have consequences. The 592 Guardian names the institutional actors who bear direct responsibility for the condition of the Amerindian Purpose Fund.

|THE MINISTRY OF AMERINDIAN AFFAIRS

As the line ministry responsible for the APF, the Ministry bears primary institutional culpability. Its permanent secretary and budget officers have presided over twenty-five years without financial statements, fifteen years without bank reconciliation, and a cheque register that was simply never maintained. Its formal responses to audit findings — “staff shortages,” “will follow up,” “ongoing” — constitute a studied contempt for the oversight function of the Audit Office. The Ministry does not lack the resources to comply. Guyana is the fastest-growing economy in the Western Hemisphere. What it lacks is the will.

|THE MINISTER OF AMERINDIAN AFFAIRS

Political accountability sits above administrative accountability. The minister who told the press in 2021 that the APF’s failures were the “wrong time to discuss” is on record. That deflection was not a one-time lapse of judgement. It was the public expression of a governing philosophy: that the Amerindian communities served by this fund are not a constituency whose grievances require urgent attention. The minister responsible for the APF — then and now — must answer publicly for the condition of this institution.

|THE OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL

The legal vacuum at the heart of the APF is not a mystery. It is a known deficiency that has existed since 2006. The Office of the Attorney General advises the state on legal compliance. It has had nineteen years to advise that the Fund requires enabling legislation. Either that advice was given and ignored — in which case, the public deserves to know — or it was never given, which is a dereliction of institutional duty.

|THE GUYANA GEOLOGY AND MINES COMMISSION

The GGMC has a statutory obligation to contribute to the Amerindian Purpose Fund from mining revenues. In 2020 and 2021, it contributed nothing. In years when Guyana’s extractive sector was generating record revenues — revenues derived in significant part from activity on and near Indigenous lands — the state entity tasked with channeling a portion of those revenues back to affected communities simply did not do so. No penalty was imposed. No public explanation was offered. This is not a compliance failure. It is a choice.

V.THE VERDICT — WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW

The 592 Guardian does not issue verdicts in the judicial sense. We issue them in the democratic sense: we place the evidence before the public and call upon those with the power to act to exercise it. The following is not a wish list. It is a minimum standard of governance in a country that calls itself a constitutional democracy.

1.Immediate enabling legislation

The National Assembly must pass legislation giving the Amerindian Purpose Fund a lawful operational basis. Every month this is delayed is another month of unlawful disbursement. Cabinet must bring the bill. The opposition must support it. There is no legitimate grounds to oppose it.

2.Publish the nineteen villages

The Ministry of Amerindian Affairs must immediately publish the names of the nineteen communities owed capital project money that went stale. These communities have a right to know. The 592 Guardian will pursue this through access to information mechanisms if the Ministry declines.

3.Full forensic audit of all APF transactions since 2006

The Audit Office, in cooperation with independent forensic accountants, must trace every transaction through the APF since the legal basis for the Fund was repealed. The public is entitled to know the full extent of what has been disbursed, to whom, and whether it reached its intended recipients.

4.Recover the GGMC arrears

The government must calculate and recover the statutory contributions owed to the APF by the GGMC for the years in which it paid nothing. These are not discretionary payments. They are legal obligations.

5.Name and discipline the officers responsible

The permanent secretaries, budget officers, and administrative officials who presided over the destruction of the Cheque Order Register, the failure to maintain asset inventories, and the non-production of financial statements must be identified and subjected to appropriate disciplinary proceedings under the Public Service Rules.

6.Parliamentary oversight hearing

The Standing Committee on Public Accounts must convene a dedicated hearing on the APF, at which the Minister, the Permanent Secretary, and the Auditor General must all appear. The hearings must be public and broadcast.

VI.CLOSING ARGUMENT

Guyana is producing over 900,000 barrels of oil per day. The Natural Resource Fund holds billions. The government speaks, at every international forum, of transformation, of prosperity, of a new Guyana. Meanwhile, nineteen Indigenous communities wait for capital project money that was recorded as spent years ago. A fund created in their name has no legal standing, no audited accounts, and a bank balance that no one has verified since 2009.

This is not a resource problem. Guyana is awash in resources. This is a prioritization problem — a revelation of who, in the hierarchy of the state’s concern, is considered worth accounting for.

The Amerindian communities of Guyana’s interior did not consent to being governed by institutions that cannot account for the money held in their name. They did not agree that their capital projects could be written into the budget and then allowed to expire in a Georgetown drawer. They did not accept that the legal framework governing their fund could dissolve without replacement and that no one in twenty years of governance would notice — or care enough to act.

No law. No oversight. No answers. Our communities deserve better. — Concerned Guyanese

The 592 Guardian will continue to report on this matter until the nineteen villages are named, the forensic audit is conducted, and the ministers and officials responsible are held to public account. We note, for the record, that the Amerindian Act 2006 — the very legislation that repealed this Fund’s legal basis — was passed under a government that celebrated itself as a champion of Indigenous rights. The hypocrisy of that record belongs in the history of this country.

The Interior is not a footnote. Its people are not a rounding error. And their money is not the state’s to lose.

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ Investigative Desk ♦ All findings sourced from the 2024 Auditor General’s Report and corroborated prior AG reports.

©2026 The 592 Guardian. All rights reserved. Reproduction for non-commercial public interest purposes permitted with attribution.

A Bill for Themselves

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦EDITORIAL

A Bill for Themselves

How Guyana’s Political Class Is Cashing Out on Oil Wealth — and What Parliament Must Do About It

Veteran trade unionist Lincoln Lewis did not mince words. In a letter to the editor published this week, Lewis observed what many Guyanese already feel but rarely see stated so plainly: politics in this country increasingly resembles a lifetime investment plan. While workers battle rising costs, stagnant wages, and crumbling public services, Parliament is being asked to restore — and expand — a buffet of unlimited perks for former presidents. Lewis was right to raise the alarm. This editorial takes his intervention as its starting point and goes further.

The Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill is not a pension measure. It is not a matter of dignified retirement. It is, stripped of its institutional language, a wealth transfer — from the Guyanese public to a small class of individuals who have already benefited enormously from the offices they held. In a country seven years into one of the largest oil booms in the Western Hemisphere, this bill reveals, with unusual clarity, exactly who this government believes the state is for.

Oil “wealth is plentiful when politicians are spending it on themselves.”

I. What the Bill Actually Proposes

Lewis is careful to note — and this editorial agrees — that reasonable retirement benefits for former heads of state are legitimate. The issue is not pension. The issue is the specific catalogue of entitlements this bill would codify at public expense, indefinitely and without accountability.

Proposed Entitlements Under the Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill
Unlimited household utility payments (electricity, water, telecommunications)
Full complement of household staff — funded by the state
State-provided vehicles and fuel allocation
Comprehensive medical care — no ceiling, no review mechanism
Security detail and residential security infrastructure
Office allowances and administrative support — indefinitely
Travel allowances for official and semi-official engagements

Each item, taken individually, might be argued on its merits. Taken together, they constitute a publicly funded lifestyle guarantee for a tiny political class — unlimited in duration, uncapped in cost, and insulated from any form of public oversight. There is no sunset clause. There is no means test. There is no accountability mechanism. There is only the entitlement itself, permanently inscribed in law.

This is not institutional dignity. This is institutional self-dealing.

II.Seven Years of Oil — and This Is the Priority

Guyana struck first oil in commercial quantities in December 2019. In the years since, the country has become one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. Offshore oil revenues have transformed the government’s fiscal position. The Natural Resource Fund has received billions. GDP has surged. The projections are extraordinary.

And yet. Seven years into the oil era, too many Guyanese still cannot afford the basic necessities of a dignified life. The power cuts continue. The roads in hinterland regions remain impassable. Public hospitals operate under chronic resource constraints. Teachers and nurses earn wages that have not kept pace with the inflation that oil-linked construction booms have seeded into the cost of living. The Demerara Harbour Bridge replacement — a project of fundamental national infrastructure — has lurched through procurement delays and cost escalations that have never been satisfactorily explained.

The question this bill forces upon the public is not whether former presidents deserve comfort. The question is: when the government decides how to spend, who is always first in line? The answer, across seven years and dozens of procurement decisions, has been consistent. It is not the nurse. It is not the cane worker. It is not the Region 7 community waiting for a functional bridge. It is the political class — and those connected to it.

“The pattern is not the exception. The pattern is the policy.”

III. This Bill Does Not Stand Alone

This editorial has documented, across a sustained body of investigative work, a recurring architecture of governance in Guyana under the Ali administration. Individual cases may be dismissed as isolated errors or administrative oversight. Taken together, they constitute a pattern — and patterns do not lie.

The GPL-InterEnergy sole-source contract awarded power supply arrangements without competitive tender, insulating a preferred counterparty from scrutiny. The Karpowership agreement — negotiated in opacity, with contract terms that remain only partially public — committed the Guyanese treasury to a long-term liability whose full cost the public still cannot verify. The NDIA audit failures revealed systematic weaknesses in how infrastructure funds are tracked and reported, failures that benefit those who prefer accountability not to be exercised. The G-Mining and Reunion Gold transactions involved indirect asset transfers that raised serious questions about whether the state’s resource interests were adequately protected. The Puruni bridge routing — with its curious alignment toward certain private landholdings — suggested that even physical infrastructure decisions are not immune to private interest.

Now the Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill. Add to this the Guyana Development Bank Bill — which this outlet has separately examined — with its exclusion of Bank of Guyana oversight, its absence of an independent audit mandate, and its governance structure that creates institutionalized space for patronage. Each individual bill, each individual contract, can be argued in isolation. But the aggregate tells a story that no single item can conceal: a political class systematically using state instruments to secure wealth for itself and its network, dressed in the language of governance, development, and institutional necessity.

 

The Pattern Ledger: A Partial Record
GPL–InterEnergy: Sole-source power contract — no competitive tender
Karpowership/Karadeniz: Opaque contract terms, unverified liability exposure
NDIA audit failures: Systemic tracking failures enabling procurement opacity
G-Mining/Reunion Gold: Indirect asset transfer — taxation gap unaddressed
Puruni bridge routing: Infrastructure alignment serving private land interests
Guyana Development Bank Bill: BOG oversight excluded; patronage architecture embedded
Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill: Unlimited public-funded entitlements for the political class

IV.Naming the Architecture

What we are describing has a name. It is elite capture — the process by which a small political and economic class colonizes the institutions of the state and redirects their outputs toward private benefit. Elite capture does not announce itself. It does not draft legislation titled ‘A Bill to Enrich the Political Class.’ It drafts legislation that sounds reasonable, that invokes dignity and precedent, that appeals to the language of governance norms. The Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill sounds institutional. It is not. It is the latest mechanism in a long project.

The comparison with other resource-rich democracies is instructive. Botswana, often cited as a model of resource governance on the African continent, has structured its Pula Fund with explicit parliamentary oversight, published audits, and expenditure rules that link state spending to development indicators. Norway’s Government Pension Fund — the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund — operates under a statutory ethical framework that explicitly prohibits the kind of opacity that characterizes Guyana’s procurement environment. Indonesia, following the resource nationalism reforms of the 2000s, built anti-corruption institutional capacity as a deliberate counterweight to the patronage networks that had dominated the Suharto era.

None of these comparisons are perfect. But they share a common element: a deliberate decision that resource wealth belongs to the public, and that institutional design must enforce that principle against the natural gravity of elite capture. Guyana has made no such decision. Instead, it has made the opposite one — repeatedly, systematically, and now with a bill that asks the public to fund, in perpetuity, the comfort of the people who made those choices.

“In a country still battling poverty, such entitlement is not dignity. It is greed dressed up as governance.”

V.What Parliament Must Do

The 592 Guardian calls on Parliament to take the following actions, without delay and without equivocation:

 

1.Reject the Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill in its current form. No unlimited entitlements. No open-ended public liability. No perks package that cannot be audited and capped.

2.If retirement provisions for former heads of state are to be considered, bring a revised bill that specifies fixed ceilings on every category of expenditure, a review mechanism tied to national development benchmarks, and full transparency of cost to the public.

3.Commission an independent audit of all sole-source procurements awarded since January 2020, with findings tabled in Parliament and published in full within ninety days.

4.Amend the Guyana Development Bank Bill to restore Bank of Guyana oversight authority and mandate an independent external audit function before the institution is operationalised.

5.Establish a parliamentary select committee with cross-party composition and a public reporting mandate to review all contracts — energy, infrastructure, extractives — where competitive tender was waived.

6.Publish, in full and without redaction, the complete contractual terms of the Karpowership agreement and all GPL third-party power supply arrangements, so that the Guyanese public can assess what liabilities have been incurred in their name.

VI.The Bill Is the Message

Lincoln Lewis ended his letter with a moral observation, not a legal one. He was right to do so. The Former Presidents’ Benefits Bill is not primarily a budgetary matter, though it has budgetary implications. It is not primarily a constitutional matter, though constitutional questions surround it. It is, at its core, a statement about what this government believes the state exists to do — and who it believes the state exists to serve.

When oil revenues flow and the question is how to spend them, the answer this bill provides is: on us. On the people who already had power. On the class that already benefited from holding office. On the network that is already comfortable, and that would like to be comfortable forever, at public expense, without limit, without audit, without shame.

The Guyanese people deserve better than this. They deserve a state that invests oil wealth in nurses and roads and schools and bridges — in the infrastructure of a dignified life for ordinary citizens, not the infrastructure of permanent comfort for an extraordinary few. They deserve Parliament to look at this bill and call it what it is.

Lincoln Lewis called it greed dressed up as governance. He was right. This editorial stands with him — and demands that Parliament stand with the people.

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

Accountability Journalism for Guyana

DEMOCRACIES UNDER PRESSURE

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THE 592 GUARDIAN |EDITORIAL

ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY  ♦  UNDP DEMOCRACY REPORT 2026

The Stability Illusion: Guyana in the UNDP Democracy Mirror

A landmark regional report finds Caribbean democracies resilient. Read against Guyana’s actual record of governance failure, resource capture, and institutional decay, the picture is rather more troubling.

The 592 Guardian — Editorial Board Georgetown, Guyana  ·  June 2026

The United Nations Development Program has released its Democracy and Development Report 2026, covering Latin America and the Caribbean. In its Caribbean chapter, the report extends a qualified but meaningful endorsement: electoral democracy in the region remains stable, institutionally grounded, and internationally legitimate. Haiti and Cuba are noted as the chronic outliers. Countries like Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana appear in the V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index chart as solid performers, their trend lines sitting comfortably in the upper half of the index.

The 592 Guardian reads that chart with some unease. Because what the index measures — free and fair elections, freedom of association, elected officials, inclusive suffrage, freedom of expression — is not the same thing as what Guyanese citizens actually experience when they try to hold their government to account. Electoral proceduralism and substantive democratic governance are not synonyms. And nowhere in the Caribbean region is that gap more consequential than in a country that is now, per capita, one of the largest oil producers on earth.

Electoral proceduralism and substantive democratic governance are not synonyms — and in oil-rich Guyana, the gap between them has never been more consequential.

THE REPORT’S FRAMEWORK, APPLIED HONESTLY

The UNDP report identifies five critical areas for democratic renewal across the region. We propose to apply each of them to Guyana without the diplomatic softening that a multilateral institution is, by its nature, required to deploy.

The first priority the report identifies is restraining the conversion of economic power into political influence. It calls for ‘greater transparency, oversight and fairness in political funding‘ and warns against ‘both legal and illegal resources‘ distorting democratic competition. In Guyana, this concern is not theoretical. The administration of President Irfaan Ali and Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo has overseen a procurement environment in which the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board has repeatedly awarded contracts — in energy, infrastructure, and services — under circumstances that independent observers have found difficult to reconcile with competitive, transparent tendering. The GPL-InterEnergy sole-source power contract, the Karpowership arrangement, and the Gas-to-Energy project’s ballooning budget variances all represent, in the UNDP’s own terminology, the conversion of economic adjacency into political arrangement.

The second priority is strengthening State capacity so that political participation is not subject to coercion by non-state actors. The report cites organized crime and violence as the central threat here, and the data it presents are sobering: the Caribbean now records a homicide rate of 27.9 per 100,000 — the highest of any region tracked, exceeding Central America. Guyana is embedded in that figure. Interior regions and border communities face security environments in which the state’s presence is at best intermittent, at worst captured. The Auditor General’s repeated documentation of unretired cash advances and phantom project expenditures across NDIA and regional administrations is not merely a fiscal footnote — it is evidence of a state that has chosen to be absent from the lives of the citizens who most need it.

WHAT THE UNDP REPORT ACTUALLY FOUND ON CARIBBEAN DEMOCRACY

→  Electoral Democracy Index scores remain high and stable for most Caribbean states

→  Homicide rates in the Caribbean (27.9/100k) now exceed Central America and are the highest globally tracked

→  Fiscal constraints and climate vulnerability create structural limits on State capacity

→  Political polarization is lower than Latin America — but the report notes this does not preclude governance capture

→  The report calls for limiting economic power’s conversion into political influence as a top reform priority

→  Figure 16 (V-Dem) shows Guyana’s Electoral Democracy score dipped notably in the 2010s with incomplete recovery

THE V-DEM LINE NOBODY IN GEORGETOWN IS DISCUSSING

The UNDP’s Figure 16 is perhaps the report’s most important visual artefact for Guyanese readers. The Electoral Democracy Index trend lines for Caribbean states chart forty years of democratic development. Guyana’s line is distinctive: it rises sharply in the 1990s following the end of the Forbes Burnham-era distortions, climbs through the Cheddi Jagan restoration and its aftermath, then experiences a visible and documented dip — precisely during the decade in which the PPP consolidated its administrative dominance before losing power in 2015. It recovers partially after 2020 but does not return to its earlier trajectory.

We note this not to score partisan points — the PNC/APNU-AFC’s behavior during the 2020 election recount was itself a democratic crisis of the first order, and one this publication has documented at length. We note it because the UNDP report’s optimistic framing of Caribbean electoral stability must be read alongside that specific curve. The curve tells a story of institutional fragility that formal electoral outcomes can temporarily mask.

Guyana’s V-Dem curve dipped precisely during the decade the PPP consolidated administrative dominance — and has not fully recovered. The UNDP’s optimism does not erase that line.

OIL, SOVEREIGNTY, AND THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT

The UNDP report’s deepest structural argument is one that Guyanese citizens should internalize urgently: the quality of democracy depends on the State’s ability to deliver tangible human development outcomes that reinforce democratic legitimacy. Where the State fails to do so, legitimacy erodes — and that erosion creates the conditions for authoritarian consolidation, whether it arrives in the form of electoral manipulation, institutional capture, or the simple exhaustion of civil society.

Guyana now generates, through the Stabroek Block, revenues that would transform virtually any small Caribbean economy. The Natural Resource Fund has been capitalized. The Gas-to-Energy project, whatever its procurement irregularities, is premised on a genuine infrastructure ambition. But the governance framework around these revenues has been systematically insulated from meaningful parliamentary scrutiny. The National Assembly — the institution that in Westminster systems is meant to be the democratic counterweight to executive excess — has been rendered functionally inert. Speaker Manzoor Nadir has presided over a chamber that has failed in its core accountability function: scrutinizing public expenditure, interrogating contracts, and holding ministers to account in real time.

The UNDP report warns explicitly against ‘the concentration of power’ and calls for ‘reinforcing institutional checks and balances and protecting the autonomy of oversight institutions.’ In Guyana in 2026, that warning reads as a diagnosis, not a prescription. The Auditor General’s reports document, year after year, a pattern of procurement irregularity, unretired advances, and audit evasion that would trigger executive crisis in any Westminster democracy with functional oversight. In Georgetown, they are tabled, noted, and forgotten.

THE ETHNIC POLITICS VARIABLE THE REPORT CANNOT NAME

There is one structural feature of Guyanese democracy that no multilateral institution can comfortably address in a regional report but which is essential to any honest accounting of the country’s democratic health: the role of ethnic bloc voting as both the foundation of PPP dominance and the ceiling of opposition viability.

The UNDP report speaks of ‘reconnecting citizens with politics by strengthening the capacity of political parties to structure competition and channel social demands in a sustained and programmatic manner.’ In Guyana, political parties have never primarily competed on programmatic grounds. The PPP’s electoral floor is Indo-Guyanese communal solidarity; the PNC/APNU’s is Afro-Guyanese communal solidarity. The result is a democracy in which electoral competition is formally free and fair but substantively structured by demographic arithmetic rather than policy debate. This is not a recent development — it is the original wound of colonial labour importation, never healed by the postcolonial state. But it is a wound that the current administration has shown no interest in healing, because ethnic loyalty is the administration’s most reliable governance asset.

Into this environment, the country is injecting oil revenues at a scale that has no precedent in Caribbean history. The risk the UNDP report identifies — economic power converting into political influence — is, in Guyana’s specific context, not a general concern about corporate lobbying. It is a concern about whether oil rents will be used to entrench ethnic patronage networks so deeply that competitive democracy becomes structurally impossible regardless of what the V-Dem index records.

In Guyana, oil revenues risk deepening not just corruption but ethnic patronage — converting a structural democratic weakness into a permanent electoral architecture.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM OWES THIS MOMENT

The UNDP report closes with a call for ‘broad, purposeful, and multi-stakeholder national dialogues’ to reconnect democracy, the State, and development. It is the kind of recommendation that sounds procedurally sound and is politically unenforceable. No government that benefits from the current configuration of power has an incentive to convene a dialogue designed to limit that power.

What exists — what must exist — are independent institutions willing to document the gap between the report’s framework and the country’s reality. Courts that adjudicate without deference. Auditors who report without fear of consequence. A press that publishes without calculating what the administration will accept.

The 592 Guardian does not operate under the illusion that editorial scrutiny alone is sufficient to close Guyana’s democratic deficit. But we do operate under the conviction that naming the deficit precisely — rather than allowing it to disappear behind the warm light of a V-Dem index score — is a precondition for anything that follows.

Guyana is not, by the UNDP’s reckoning, a democracy in crisis. By the reckoning of the citizens who cannot access public contracts, cannot hold their National Assembly accountable, and cannot see where their oil revenues are going, the assessment requires more work.

Guyana is not, by the UNDP’s reckoning, a democracy in crisis. By the reckoning of the citizens who cannot access public contracts, cannot hold their National Assembly accountable, and cannot see where their oil revenues are going, the assessment requires more work.

The report has given us a useful framework. The country deserves honest application of it.

 

—  The 592 Guardian  |  Independent Accountability Journalism  |  Georgetown, Guyana  —

 

A Giant in the Dock of Cowardice

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JUDICIAL INTEGRITY  |  ACCOUNTABILITY

A Giant in the Dock of Cowardice:

The Campaign to Recuse Justice Arif Bulkan and What It Reveals About Guyana

The Editors  |  The 592 Guardian | June 2026

I.THE ACHIEVEMENT THEY WOULD RATHER YOU FORGET

Before a single word is written about the grotesque campaign to drive Justice Arif Bulkan from the Caribbean Court of Justice, Guyana owes itself a moment of honest accounting. Not because the attacks warrant the dignity of a direct refutation—they do not—but because the contrast between what Dr. Bulkan has built and what his detractors have deployed is itself the story.

Justice Arif Bulkan is one of the most decorated Caribbean legal scholars of his generation. His academic formation spans the University of the West Indies and the University of London, where he pursued advanced study in international human rights law—a field that demands not partisan loyalty, but unflinching commitment to the dignity of persons across all political circumstances. He returned to the region not as a man seeking comfort or convenience, but as a practitioner who chose to engage with its structural imperfections from the inside.

His scholarship is not decorative. He has written with distinction on gender-based discrimination, sexual orientation and the law, constitutional rights in the Caribbean, and the jurisprudential inheritance of colonialism in regional legal systems. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and contributed to the intellectual architecture that underpins how Caribbean courts reason about fundamental rights today. He served as a lecturer at UWI’s Faculty of Law, where he shaped the minds of a generation of Caribbean lawyers—including, one suspects, some who now argue matters before the very court on which he sits.

 In 2025, Justice Bulkan was appointed a judge of the Caribbean Court of Justice—the regional apex court that serves as the final court of appeal for member states and the original jurisdiction court for matters arising under the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. His appointment was the culmination of a career defined by intellectual rigour, ethical consistency, and a record of service to the law as a civilising force. It was, as the columnist rightly observed, a moment in which all Guyanese—regardless of ethnicity, party affiliation, or political persuasion—might have paused to acknowledge that one of their own had ascended to the peak of regional jurisprudence.

Justice Bulkan’s appointment to the CCJ was a moment in which all Guyanese might have paused to acknowledge that one of their own had ascended to the peak of regional jurisprudence. Instead, a campaign was assembled to remove him.

Instead, a campaign was assembled to remove him.

II.THE NATURE OF THE ATTACK: GUILT BY FAMILY

The argument advanced by Mr. Quincy Anderson in the Stabroek News—and amplified by State media and at least one outlet with demonstrable proximity to the ruling People’s Progressive Party/Civic administration—is not a legal argument. It does not identify a ruling in which Justice Bulkan departed from established law. It does not point to a recusal application that was improperly refused. It does not cite a pattern of conduct, a conflict of interest declared or undeclared, or a single credible instance of bias in the record.

What it does instead is invoke the political activities of Justice Bulkan’s siblings.

This is not jurisprudence. This is familial guilt by association, and it would not survive ten minutes before any competent tribunal in the Commonwealth. The legal standard for judicial recusal—rooted in cases ranging from R v Bow Street Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate, ex parte Pinochet Ugarte (No. 2) to Porter v Magill in the United Kingdom, and affirmed across Caribbean jurisdictions—is whether a fair-minded and properly informed observer would conclude there is a real possibility of bias. That observer is not a partisan actor with a litigation interest. That observer is not a newspaper columnist with political sympathies. That observer is a hypothetical person who knows the law, understands judicial independence, and is not susceptible to manufactured outrage.

By that standard, the Anderson submission fails entirely. No informed observer—understanding that judges are independent actors with no legal responsibility for their relatives’ political engagements—would conclude that Justice Bulkan is incapable of adjudicating fairly a matter in which the Government of Guyana is a party. The suggestion to the contrary conflates constitutional governance with partisan administration, and it conflates judicial independence with familial political sterility.

No judge in Guyana—or anywhere in the Commonwealth—could safely adjudicate politically sensitive matters if the political activities of relatives constituted grounds for disqualification. The campaign against Justice Bulkan, if accepted, would paralyse the entire regional bench.

If accepted as a standard, the implications for Caribbean jurisprudence would be catastrophic. Guyana is a small, politically saturated society. Virtually every professional family in Georgetown has members distributed across the political spectrum. If a judge’s siblings’ civic or party engagements constitute disqualifying associations, then no judge drawn from that society can ever hear a politically significant matter. The result would be a judiciary engineered not for impartiality, but for partisan convenience—recused into irrelevance whenever the party in power finds the bench’s composition inconvenient.

 

III. STATE COMPLICITY: THE SILENCE THAT SPEAKS

More troubling than the letter itself is the institutional silence that surrounded it.

The call for Justice Bulkan’s recusal originated in State media—a medium that operates under conditions of editorial influence, if not outright direction, from the governing administration. It was subsequently amplified by at least one additional outlet with documented proximity to the PPP/C. In a well-functioning democracy with a genuinely independent press, such a charge against a sitting apex judge would have triggered immediate, vigorous responses: from the Bar Association, from legal scholars, from the editorial boards of independent newspapers, from the Attorney General’s chambers, and from the President himself.

None of that happened.

The Guyana Bar Association—the professional body whose entire institutional purpose is to uphold the integrity of the legal system and protect the administration of justice from political manipulation—issued no statement. The press, with the exception of two columnists and a letters-to-the-editor section, treated the matter as routine. The Attorney General, Anil Nandlall SC—a man of genuine legal capability who knows perfectly well that the Anderson argument is without merit—made no public pronouncement in defence of the institution or the jurist under attack.

This silence is not neutral. In the context of a State-adjacent campaign targeting a judge whose rulings may affect Government interests, silence from the Government’s chief law officer is a form of complicity. It allows the attack to circulate, to gain legitimacy through repetition, and to do its corrosive work on public confidence without the authority of the State intervening to correct the record.

This silence is not neutral. In the context of a State-adjacent campaign targeting a judge whose rulings may affect Government interests, silence from the Government’s chief law officer is a form of complicity. It allows the attack to circulate, to gain legitimacy through repetition, and to do its corrosive work on public confidence without the authority of the State intervening to correct the record.

The columnist cited in these pages noted with precision that Attorney General Nandlall could clothe himself with honour by coming out sharply against this effort. He has not done so. The consequence of that inaction is that the State, which has every reason to wish Justice Bulkan sidelined from matters affecting its interests, has allowed a third party to do the work of disqualification while maintaining plausible deniability.

This is how institutional cowardice operates in Guyana: not through open orders, but through strategic silence.

The Guyana Bar Association issued no statement. The Attorney General made no public pronouncement. The press was largely silent. In a small society where everyone knew what was happening, the institutional silence was not neutrality — it was complicity.

IV.THE TIMING QUESTION: WHY NOW?

Justice Bulkan has served on the CCJ bench since 2017. In that time, he has adjudicated matters of political sensitivity involving Caribbean governments, including matters touching on constitutional rights, treaty obligations, and governance. His family ties—including the political engagements of his siblings—have existed throughout that period.

The question that neither Mr. Anderson nor the outlets amplifying his argument have chosen to answer is: why now?

Ethical concerns about judicial impartiality do not ripen on a politically convenient schedule. If Justice Bulkan’s family relationships constituted a genuine ground for recusal, that ground existed in the several years he would have occupied the bench. It exists in matters that have already been decided. If it is a real concern, it implicates the validity of every ruling in which those relationships existed and were not disclosed as a disqualifying factor.

The fact that this argument has emerged now—at a moment when matters affecting the Guyanese government’s interests are before or approaching the CCJ—invites only one conclusion: this is not an ethics argument. It is a litigation strategy dressed in ethical language. It is an attempt to shape the composition of the bench in advance of rulings that the government or its associates fear may not go their way.

That strategy is not unprecedented in Caribbean legal history. It is, however, among the more brazen applications of it in the modern era of the CCJ, and it deserves to be named plainly as what it is.

V.THE DEPRAVITY OF THE STANDARD BEING PROPOSED

Let us be precise about what is actually being proposed in the Anderson letter and the campaign it represents.

The proposal is that a judge of Caribbean apex standing—a man whose scholarly record on human rights is internationally recognised, whose career was built in service to the law rather than to any political formation, and against whom no credible allegation of bias has ever been sustained—should be removed from cases because his relatives engage in political life.

This is a new low.

Guyana has, in recent years, positioned itself on the world stage as a country of emerging consequence: a petrostate with democratic institutions, a rights-respecting legal system, and a commitment to the rule of law that makes it a credible partner for foreign investment and international engagement. The Government has traded heavily on these credentials. The President invokes them. The Foreign Minister deploys them. The oil companies cite them.

Against that backdrop, the campaign against Justice Bulkan is not merely an attack on one man. It is an attack on the credibility of every institutional claim the Government of Guyana has made to the international community. You cannot simultaneously claim world-class governance standards and orchestrate—or permit—a campaign to recuse one of your country’s finest jurists from the regional bench using arguments that would embarrass a first-year law student.

The two positions are incompatible. And the world is watching.

You cannot simultaneously claim world-class governance standards and permit a campaign to recuse one of your country’s finest jurists using arguments that would embarrass a first-year law student. The two positions are incompatible.

Guyana has expelled its most promising—that observation has been made across generations, by writers from Wilson Harris to the columnist quoted in these pages. The pattern repeats: a figure of genuine distinction rises, and the society that produced them finds a way to make the achievement feel unsafe. Justice Bulkan chose to return, chose to serve the region from its highest bench, and is now subjected to a campaign that would insult the dignity of a man of far lesser stature.

That Guyana is capable of producing a Justice Arif Bulkan is a source of pride. That it is also capable of producing a Quincy Anderson letter—and an institutional silence willing to let it stand—is a source of shame.

VI.THE INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE OF THE BAR AND THE PRESS

We return to an observation that warrants its own reckoning: the Guyana Bar Association said nothing.

The Bar exists not merely to regulate the admission and discipline of attorneys-at-law. Its broader mandate, recognised in bar associations across the Commonwealth, includes the protection of the administration of justice and the independence of the judiciary. When a sitting judge of the regional apex court is subjected to a public campaign for recusal grounded in legally untenable arguments, the Bar has an institutional responsibility to respond—not as a partisan defender of the judge, but as a defender of the legal standards that the campaign is systematically misrepresenting.

Its silence here is a dereliction.

Equally notable is the failure of the media. The Guyana Times published the Anderson letter; it is not clear that it subjected the letter to the editorial scrutiny its legal claims required before doing so. The State-owned and State-adjacent outlets amplified it without the counterpoint that professional journalism demands. The response—two columns and some letters—came not from institutions, but from individual writers acting on their own conscience.

That is not a functioning ecosystem of accountability journalism. That is a society in which institutional courage has been quietly evacuated, leaving only the courage of individuals to fill the space. The 592 Guardian notes this not with contempt for those individuals—their contributions were serious and principled—but with alarm at what their solitude reveals about the broader institutional landscape.

 

VII.WHAT JUSTICE BULKAN REPRESENTS

 

In his 1960 first inaugural, John F. Kennedy—himself the son of a man whose biography included rum-running, stock manipulation, and worse—asked not what his country could do for him, but what he could do for it. The columnist invoked that parallel pointedly and correctly.

Justice Arif Bulkan was not obligated to remain in the Caribbean. His scholarly credentials would have opened doors in London, Toronto, New York, or any number of jurisdictions where Caribbean legal talent is welcomed and compensated accordingly.

He chose instead to remain, to teach, to publish, and ultimately to serve on the bench from which regional law is made.

The attacks on his integrity are not merely unfair. They are, in a precise sense, ungrateful—ungrateful to a man who gave his professional life to a region that has now, through some of its most powerful voices, chosen to question whether he can be trusted to do the job he has been doing for nearly a decade without complaint.

A fair-minded and properly informed observer—the legal standard, it is worth repeating—would see in Justice Bulkan’s record nothing but cause for confidence: a jurist who has adjudicated across the spectrum of Caribbean legal life, who has written with scholarly distinction on the rights of the most vulnerable, and who has conducted himself throughout with the ethical consistency that judicial life demands.

That observer would see in the campaign against him something quite different: the architecture of a political project, assembled from conjecture, amplified by complicit media, and sustained by the institutional silence of a Bar and an Attorney General who know better.     

★  ★  ★

The Caribbean Court of Justice’s integrity is not preserved by entertaining arguments of this nature. It is preserved by the adherence of judges like Arif Bulkan to standards that the campaign against him has failed to impeach. It is preserved, too, by the willingness of an independent press to say plainly what institutions have been too timid to say: that this attack is without legal merit, without evidentiary foundation, and without moral standing.

Justice Bulkan’s reputation was built over decades of disciplined, ethical, intellectually serious service. It will not be undone by a letter that does not withstand even the most elementary scrutiny—provided the country’s institutions find the courage to say so.

Guyana produced him. That is something. The question now is whether Guyana will protect what it produced—or continue, in its characteristic fashion, to consume it.

Editorial Note:

This editorial draws on two published columns responding to the recusal campaign against Justice Bulkan, as well as the original letter by Mr. Quincy Anderson published in the Guyana Chronicle. No response was issued by the Attorney General’s chambers, the Guyana Bar Association, or the State Media at the time of writing. The 592 Guardian editorial board stands by the legal and institutional analysis presented here and invites any correction on the factual record.

The Cost of Silence in the Caribbean: CUBA?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN|ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM|GTOWN ,GUYANA

The Cost of Silence in the Caribbean: CUBA?               

As Cuba deepens its diplomatic engagement across CARICOM, one response has been as loud as it is troubling: silence.

Timing, in geopolitics, is rarely accidental.

Cuba’s re-engagement with CARICOM comes at a moment when the region itself is rethinking energy sovereignty. From Trinidad and Guyana’s hydrocarbons to Barbados and Dominica’s renewable ambitions, the Caribbean is searching—urgently—for pathways out of dependence and vulnerability. Havana’s outreach fits squarely within that conversation: technical cooperation, medical diplomacy, energy collaboration.

Washington’s response, however, suggests discomfort with that alignment.

The Caribbean has seen this pattern before: pressure applied incrementally, justified rhetorically, and absorbed quietly—until it becomes precedent.

And precedent, once set, is rarely confined.

The question confronting CARICOM is not whether to align with Cuba politically. It is whether to defend a principle that underpins its own survival: that small states cannot be coerced into submission through economic strangulation without consequence.

Because if that principle erodes, then sovereignty itself becomes conditional.

 Cuba’s diplomacy across the region is not merely outreach—it is a test. Not of alliances, but of resolve.                                                                                         And in that test, silence will not be read as neutrality. It will be read as permission.

Let us dispense with the diplomatic euphemisms. When a policy is designed to deprive a population of electricity, cooking gas, and basic energy stability, it crosses from strategy into coercion. When its stated or foreseeable outcome is widespread civilian hardship—heat without relief, food without preservation, hospitals under strain—it edges dangerously close to collective punishment.

The timing is telling. Just as Cuba signals incremental technological progress—developing methods to refine its own difficult crude and cautiously expanding production partnerships—the sanctions arrive, not as coincidence, but as interruption.

Progress, however modest, is treated as provocation. Self-sufficiency becomes a threat.

This is not about democracy. It has not been for decades.

Nowhere is that silence more pronounced—and more consequential—than in Guyana

 At a moment when Washington escalates economic pressure against Cuba by targeting CUPET, the backbone of its energy survival, Georgetown has chosen not caution, but quiet alignment. There has been no meaningful expression of concern, no reaffirmation of principle, no recognition of the broader implications for small states navigating power asymmetries. Instead, what emerges is a posture of intransigence—one that places geopolitical convenience above historical memory and regional responsibility.

This is not a neutral stance. It is complicity by omission.

Guyana, of all nations, does not have the luxury of historical amnesia. Cuba was not a distant observer during Guyana’s formative struggles. It was a partner—offering medical support, education, technical training, and solidarity at a time when such gestures were neither fashionable nor strategically convenient. That relationship was not transactional; it was foundational.

To now stand inert as Cuba faces intensified economic strangulation is not pragmatism. It is abandonment dressed as diplomacy.

President Irfaan Ali’s government has, in recent years, cultivated an increasingly close alignment with Washington—one driven in part by Guyana’s rising profile as an oil-producing state. Strategic partnerships are neither unusual nor inherently problematic. But when alignment hardens into reflex, and reflex overrides principle, foreign policy begins to lose its independence.

What is unfolding is precisely that erosion.

The absence of a clear, principled stance on measures that target Cuba’s civilian energy infrastructure suggests a leadership more attuned to external approval than to the values Guyana has historically claimed as its own: sovereignty, non-interference, and regional solidarity.

These are not abstract ideals; they are the very safeguards small states rely on in a world defined by unequal power. To disregard them now is to weaken the very framework that protects Guyana itself.

There is also an uncomfortable truth that cannot be ignored. The current posture of Guyana’s leadership reflects not strategic balance, but strategic deference. The optics—and increasingly, the substance—suggest a government captivated by proximity to power, particularly in a U.S. political climate where hardline positions on Cuba are rewarded, not questioned.

This is not diplomacy anchored in confidence. It is diplomacy shaped by accommodation.

And while Washington’s political winds may shift—from administration to administration, from tone to tone—the consequences of these positions within the Caribbean endure. Relationships fray. Trust erodes. And the region’s ability to act collectively weakens.

Guyana’s silence does not occur in isolation; it resonates.

It signals to CARICOM that principles can be selectively applied. It signals to external powers that pressure tactics carry little regional cost. And it signals to Cuba that even those who once benefited from its solidarity may no longer find it politically convenient to speak.

That is a dangerous precedent.

Because the logic underpinning the sanctions against CUPET—the use of economic pressure to force political outcomes—does not end with Cuba. It establishes a model. And models, once normalized, expand.

Today, Cuba’s energy lifeline is the target. Tomorrow, any state pursuing policies outside the accepted orbit may find itself similarly exposed

Guyana, now flush with oil wealth and geopolitical attention, should understand this better than most. The question, then, is not whether Guyana must agree with Cuba on governance or ideology. That is beside the point. The question is whether it is prepared to defend a principle that once defined its own place in the world: that small nations deserve the space to determine their path without being economically suffocated into submission.

At present, the answer appears uncertain.

And in that uncertainty lies the deeper concern—not just for Cuba, but for the integrity of Caribbean diplomacy itself.

Because when silence replaces principle, it is not neutrality that prevails.It is surrender

 

 

Arms bust: Guyanese perils amid unknowns

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THE 592 GUARDIAN| OPINION| GTOWN GUYANA JUNE 2026

Arms bust: Guyanese perils amid unknowns

BY:GHK LALL
It’s a ton of guns.  Twenty-three machine guns and over 500 rounds seized from a vehicle with a Venezuelan driver represent some serious tonnage.  The quantity and type of guns (AK-47) make them a frightening proposition.  Throw in over 500 rounds of ammo, and somebody was readying for a war.  The Venezuelan component makes the seizure even more ominous.  I am hoping that the intelligence has it right with that across-the-border connection.  While that may be so, what to think of one man with 23 machineguns notorious for their killing power language?  He may be superman.  He was certainly daring to drive around with that stash that fills up a passenger vehicle.  But he alone is not capable of using all those weapons simultaneously.

 

Guyana law enforcement net(s) captured a nest of guns.  But there has to be a network of engaged Venezuelans somewhere in the area.  How many and where?  Meaning, networks and men at the ready.

 So far, I have been accepting at face value a Venezuelan connection of some sort, and going along.  But what if it is really not so?  What if there are a few Guyanese hands in the mix?  The Regent Street gas station bombing had a Venezuelan as the number one accused.  There were, however, a couple of Guyanese in supporting roles.  Is the same program in action here?  And, if (a big if) Guyanese are involved in this big gun bust, are they of the market garden variety?  In other words, run-of-the-mill, street corner, citizens of this republic.

I think that it is a reasonable place, fair questions.  How can it not be, when Guyanese inhabit an environment that is trapped in secrets?  And, when so many pieces of information (if any) that come from public institutions are made up of more secrets.  And, when the Guyanese people, having been fed so many deceptions by their own folk, absorb what may be the whole truth, but cannot bring themselves to believe that what they are getting is only part of the story, a half-truth.  By definition, there’s no such animal as a half-truth; and, if that is considered, it’s really a disguised lie.

Time to zero in some more on this insinuated Caracas connection.  First, the lead accused in the Regent Street gas station bombing, a Venezuelan, admitted to the crime, only to reverse himself in court.  What to make of that mystery development?  I recommend that Guyanese watch out for some report of one of those cellblock suicides by hanging.  The issue, then, would be whether that was by his own hand, or that of those helping along, accelerating his departure.  Second, some Venezuelans are struggling to make it here, for different reasons.  To be in such a situation makes a man desperate; especially when he has debts here, and a family across the border.  A desperate man will grab at any opportunity that offers a quick, sweet, payoff for a couple hours of work. 

Especially, if it comes with assurances of there being no loose ends, and everything is under control.  Recall those instances that became public and involved drug mules recruited to do some transportation for a nice piece of change.  They take that chance, when the odds of getting past watching eyes are high.  Third, I have some difficulty believing that Caracas is so unsophisticated, so reckless, as to put 23 machineguns all in one bag and in only one operator’s hands.  When something is too good to be true, it usually isn’t.  Couple that to a thoroughly untrustworthy regime, with willing and powerfully-placed supporting players, and my interpretation is that Guyanese are in a terrible place.

Couple that to a thoroughly untrustworthy regime, with willing and powerfully-placed supporting players, and my interpretation is that Guyanese are in a terrible place.

The concern for me is that there are these seizures of machineguns-10 in Berbice recently and now 23 across the Demerara River close to each other, who are the real people behind these gun busts?  And, where is all of this leading, towards —what objective(s)?  The latest is two others, one with a Guyanese sounding name, now in police custody.  What does that say?  Confirmation of who’s who could still be long in coming.  And, when all is said and done, Guyanese are in a dangerous place.

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

THE GLITTER OF AMBITION

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

GOVERNANCE & ACCOUNTABILITY

THE GLITTER OF AMBITION

When foreign appointments can’t mask domestic failures

The Ali administration has perfected the art of international optics. But a closer look at the legislative record at home — including a sexual offenders registry sealed from public view — raises questions that no UN nomination can answer.

There is a species of political theatre that confuses visibility with virtue. The Ali administration has become expert at staging it.

The nomination of Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett for the position of UN Secretary-General and the election of Human Services Minister Dr. Vindhya Persaud to the executive body of the OAS Inter-American Commission of Women have been received in certain quarters as proof of Guyana’s ascending global stature. Commentators speak of a “quiet but unmistakable internationalism,” of Guyana earning a seat at the tables where the rules of food, energy, climate and finance are written. It makes for elegant copy.

But elegance is not analysis.

Everyone in the diplomatic community wants proximity to petro-wealth. The offshore fields do not confer wisdom on their beneficiaries — they confer access.

Let us be direct: the international bodies offering appointments to Guyanese politicians are not doing so as recognition of governance excellence. They are doing so on the premise of Guyana’s economic standing. Everyone in the diplomatic community wants proximity to petro-wealth. The offshore oil fields do not confer wisdom on their beneficiaries — they confer access. These are two very different things, and the distinction matters enormously when we are asked to evaluate whether our government’s reach abroad reflects genuine diplomatic capital or merely the gravitational pull of a resource windfall that any administration, competent or otherwise, would have inherited.

The Rodrigues-Birkett nomination for UN Secretary-General is a case study in ambition mistaken for vision. The Secretary-Generalship is among the most demanding executive roles on the planet — part moral arbiter, part crisis manager, part institutional statesman. It demands a record of multilateral leadership that commands consensus across adversarial blocs. We wish Ambassador Rodrigues-Birkett no personal ill; she is a capable diplomat. But the nomination, originating from President Ali’s desk, tells us far more about his appetite for symbolic gestures than about a sober assessment of what the position requires and what any Guyanese candidate can currently offer in this crowded field.

— ◆ —

The more troubling case, however, is that of Minister Persaud.

Her appointment to the OAS Inter-American Commission of Women has been celebrated as placing “Guyana at the centre of regional decision-making on gender policy for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century.” What has gone conspicuously unremarked is what Minister Persaud brought to Parliament in her domestic portfolio: a Sexual Offenders Registry that would be closed to the public.

A closed registry serves, above all else, the registered — which is to say, it protects predators from the social consequences of their crimes.

Let that register fully. A registry of sexual offenders — a tool whose entire logic rests on community awareness and the protection of vulnerable people, particularly children — was proposed as a document to be sealed from the very public it is designed to protect.

One must ask, with full seriousness: for whose benefit is a secret sexual offenders registry? It does not serve survivors. It does not serve parents. It does not serve communities.

A closed registry serves, above all else, the registered — which is to say, it protects predators from the social consequences of their crimes.

Had the OAS Inter-American Commission of Women been fully briefed on this legislative proposal when it was weighing its appointment, the outcome may well have been different. International bodies operate on representations and reputations.

They see the press release, not the bill. They see the nomination, not the fine print. And the Ali administration is extraordinarily skilled at managing what international bodies see.

This is the core deception at work. When a government’s domestic record on gender protection is a closed sexual offenders registry while its international profile features an appointment to a hemispheric gender commission, we are not witnessing statesmanship. We are witnessing brand management.

The 592 Guardian has consistently argued that resource wealth tests the character of governments more severely than poverty does, because it supplies the means to perform competence without ever having to demonstrate it. You can host summits. You can fund alliances. You can nominate your diplomats to prestigious offices. And you can do all of this while failing the woman in Berbice who cannot access justice, while failing the child in a Region Seven community who deserves to know where registered offenders live, while continuing the pattern of legislation drafted for the protection of the powerful rather than the governed.

Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful” has been invoked in defense of the Ali administration’s vision. But Schumacher’s argument was precisely that scale divorced from human welfare is not development — it is displacement.

A humane economy is not measured by where your nominees sit at the UN. It is measured by whether your laws protect the most vulnerable people in your society.

By that measure, the glitter dims considerably.

The 592 Guardian calls on the OAS Inter-American Commission of Women to request a full briefing on the Sexual Offenders Registry Bill and its provisions before Minister Persaud assumes her executive responsibilities. We further call on civil society organisations to elevate this legislative contradiction to every regional and international gender body that was presented with Guyana’s nomination materials.

Ambition dressed as vision is still ambition. And a secret sexual offenders registry is not a footnote. It is a verdict.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet focused on Guyanese governance, public finance, and regional geopolitics.