The Elephant Professor Khemraj Walked Past

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

The Elephant Professor Khemraj Walked Past

      A Reply on Cost of Living, the Cantillon Effect, and the Politics of  Explaining Away

OPINION  BY– HEM KUMAR– August , 2026

Professor Tarron Khemraj’s letter this week (“President Ali, food choices, and the elephant in the room”) does something worth taking seriously before it is taken apart: it distinguishes, correctly and usefully, between inflation as a rate and cost of living as a level. It traces, correctly, how the war-driven disruption of Strait of Hormuz shipping has pushed up global fertiliser and urea prices in a way no Guyanese policy could have prevented. It restates, as the professor has for over a decade, a genuine structural argument about why Guyana’s coastal ecology constrains the supply of non-tradable goods — housing, local transport, construction — relative to demand. None of that is in dispute here, and none of it should be dismissed simply because of where the professor eventually takes it.

The trouble is where he takes it. A learned, 1,500-word tour through monetary theory, comparative political history, and international commodity markets is marshalled, in the end, to defend a single presidential remark: that citizens should cook at home instead of buying restaurant food, offered as a response to public anger over the cost of living. The economics is largely sound. The use to which it is put is not.

AN ELEPHANT NAMED, THEN LEFT ALONE

The professor titles his own key section “The Elephant in the Room” and, to his credit, identifies it precisely: cost-of-living pressure that goes beyond what oil-financed spending alone would produce comes from monetising the fiscal deficit — expanding the domestic money supply faster than non-oil GDP and import capacity can absorb it.

He states plainly that this monetary channel, not spending oil revenue as such, is what worsens inflation and strains the exchange rate.

Having named the mechanism, the professor does not ask the one question a Guyanese reader most needs answered: is that mechanism operating now, under this government’s actual financing choices? A letter that diagnoses the disease with precision and then declines to check whether the patient has it is not restraint. It is the exact point at which analysis stops and cover begins.

THE CANTILLON EFFECT THE FRAMEWORK ALREADY CONTAINS

This is where a reader’s instinct — that stagnant wages sit at the center of this story — deserves to be taken more seriously than Professor Khemraj takes it. Oil- and deficit-financed spending does not arrive in every household’s pocket simultaneously or proportionally. It reaches state contractors, importers, and asset-holders first, bidding up the price of rent, services, and non-tradables well before wage income has any chance to catch up.

That sequencing — the Cantillon effect — is not a fringe theory. It is a standard implication of exactly the monetary-financing channel the professor’s own letter identifies as the elephant.

 

Framed correctly, then, the cost-of-living squeeze is not merely “the price of success,” borne evenly as the unavoidable byproduct of a growing economy. It is a distributional outcome, with winners who receive the new spending early and losers — wage earners — who absorb the price effects last, after their earning power has already been diluted. Government financing decisions, not household lifestyle choices, determine who ends up on which side of that line. The professor’s own framework has room for this. The letter does not go there.

A letter that diagnoses the disease with precision and then declines to check whether the patient has it is not restraint. It is where analysis stops and cover begins.

AN ANALOGY THAT DOES NOT HOLD

Professor Khemraj places President Ali’s remark alongside Forbes Burnham’s buy-local ethic, Narendra Modi’s Vocal for Local campaign, Jimmy Carter’s sweater speech, and Gerald Ford’s Whip Inflation Now button, concluding that a president urging thrift is neither unusual nor illegitimate. But each of those examples was a proactive national campaign — announced as policy, backed by government programming, sustained over time.

President Ali’s remark was none of those things. It was an aside that went viral precisely because, to a public already anxious about prices, it read as a head of state locating the problem in citizens’ kitchen habits rather than in his own government’s fiscal choices.

Placing a viral gaffe inside a lineage of deliberate national campaigns does rhetorical work. It does not do descriptive work.

“NOT PASSIVE” CUTS BOTH WAYS

To his credit, the professor credits the Ali administration with a real record of relief measures since 2021: zero-rated VAT on key food items, VAT removed on fertiliser and farm machinery, excise duty removed on fuel, freight benchmarked to pre-pandemic levels. Fair enough — these are verifiable and worth stating plainly rather than waving away.

But if the deficit-monetization channel the professor identifies as the real driver of excess inflation and currency strain is itself a financing choice made across these same years, then the same government that earns credit on one ledger owes an answer on the other. A letter willing to list five years of relief measures in the government’s favour but unwilling to ask a single question about the government’s own financing conduct is not applying one standard.                                      It is applying two, and choosing which one to use by which direction it points.

WHAT THIS PUBLICATION  IS NOT ARGUING

This is not a claim that Professor Khemraj is wrong about inflation, about the Hormuz shock, or about the constraints of a small open economy. He is not. Nor is it a claim that a food buffer stock, which the professor proposes and which has real merit, would fail to help. It is a narrower and sharper complaint: a professor capable of distinguishing a rate from a level, capable of tracing fertiliser prices through a war eight thousand miles away, chose not to spend a single paragraph asking whether his own government’s deficit financing is the mechanism turning an oil boom into a wage earner’s squeeze.

That is the elephant. The professor named it, in his own words, in his own headline — and then wrote around it for fourteen paragraphs. This newsroom asks him, and asks the government whose account he was carrying, to walk back and actually look at it.

— The Board

A MINISTER WHO SHOULD HAVE LEARNED TO ZIP IT.

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

A MINISTER WHO SHOULD HAVE LEARNED TO ZIP IT.

Edghill’s Canawaima Claim Is Not a Jurisdictional Dispute. It Is the Same Pattern That Failed Barima’s Victims.

OPINION BY :— Staff Writer ♦ August 2026

NOT A CONTRADICTION. A PATTERN.

When the MV Canawaima was pulled from service for the second time in ten days on 22 August, Public Works Minister Bishop Juan Edghill offered the public an explanation: two technical inspections by Guyanese and Surinamese experts had concluded, in writing, that the vessel could safely remain in operation until dry-docking within three months. The Maritime Authority Suriname (MAS), he said, had simply insisted on fixing immediately what could have waited. It read, on its face, like an ordinary dispute between two regulators over timing.

We do not think that is the right way to read it, and we do not think the public should either. This is not a contradiction. It is a pattern — the same pattern this news media  has already documented in exhaustive detail on the M.V. Barima, playing out again on a different vessel, in front of the same minister, who by now had every reason to have learned restraint.

THE BARIMA PRECEDENT, IN THE MINISTER’S OWN WORDS

On 19 July, less than 24 hours after the Barima capsized with dozens still missing, Edghill told grieving families at the Umana Yana that the vessel “was not overloaded by passengers or by cargo” and that there was “no engine problem or any mechanical problem.” On 20 July, at a formal press briefing, he went further: “There was no report of any kind that suggested the vessel was unseaworthy. It was in line for dry docking in keeping with the schedule.”

Those were not hedged, provisional remarks. They were confident, specific, technical assertions, delivered to a public in shock, by a minister with no maritime engineering background, about a vessel whose wreck had not yet been examined by anyone. On 13 August, Kaieteur News published a paper trail of internal maintenance logs, stamped requisitions, and urgent technical reports — the same defect record this news outlet  has independently corroborated — spanning nearly a year before the disaster, including repeated “urgent” flags on generator, heat-exchanger, and exhaust failures. The minister’s 20 July claim did not survive that record. It was not a matter of interpretation. It was simply false, and it took weeks and an outside document trail to establish that.

A minister who was wrong about Barima’s seaworthiness in July had no standing to be confident about Canawaima’s in August.

 

SAME MINISTER, SAME VOICE, SAME VESSEL TYPE

Now compare that to Edghill’s Canawaima statement. He again spoke with certainty about a technical seaworthiness determination — “the experts concluded the vessel can remain in operation” — on a matter that was, by his own account, contested by the actual regulator with jurisdiction over the vessel’s maintenance. And once again, a document surfaced almost immediately that complicated the minister’s reassurance: Marine Consulting and Surveyor Waldo Liauw Kwie Fong’s own 21 August report — the report Edghill’s statement appears to rest on — found the Canawaima’s hull in “poor” condition with heavy corrosion, stated plainly that the 30-year-old vessel’s “economic and service life has expired,” and listed the vessel as lacking a valid safety construction certificate, tonnage certificate, registry certificate, and load line certificate, with the Surinamese crew missing STCW certification and the vessel missing its ISM certificate despite running an international route. The same document Edghill cites for reassurance is, on a plain reading, a document that catalogues serious non-compliance.

We want to be precise about what we are and are not saying. We are not saying Edghill fabricated anything, and we are not saying the surveyor’s three-month operability window was wrong on its own terms — that is a technical judgment for qualified surveyors, not for this publication  or for a Minister of Public Works. What we are saying is narrower and, we think, harder to dispute: a minister who has already been publicly and documentarily proven wrong once this year about a vessel’s seaworthiness has no business speaking with the same unqualified confidence a second time, about a second vessel, while the government’s own cited document lists exactly the kind of certification gaps that turned out to matter on the Barima.

THE DISCIPLINE A MINISTER OF PUBLIC WORKS REQUIRES

A Minister of Public Works is not expected to be a marine surveyor. No one demands that of him. What is reasonably demanded — of any minister, in any government, anywhere — is the discipline to say “I am relaying what the surveyor’s report states” rather than personally vouching for a technical conclusion in his own voice, particularly on a subject where he has already gotten it wrong once, publicly, with fatal consequences attached.

That distinction is not pedantic. It is the entire difference between a minister who communicates and a minister who improvises, and it is precisely the discipline Edghill has now failed to exercise twice in five weeks.

This matters beyond Edghill’s own standing, though that standing is fair game — the call for his removal from office has stood, unresolved, since the week of the Barima disaster, and this publication  does not consider it settled. It matters because every time the minister overspeaks and is later proven wrong, the credibility cost is not paid by him personally. It is paid by the next set of passengers who are told a vessel is fine, and by the CoI, the audit team, and every other accountability mechanism this government has stood up since 18 July — each one a little less trusted, because the minister whose ministry oversees all of them keeps needing correction by outside document trails rather than by his own candor.

THE PATTERN, SET OUT PLAINLY

19 Jul 2026  Edghill: Barima “was not overloaded… no engine problem or any mechanical problem.”

20 Jul 2026  Edghill: “There was no report of any kind that suggested the vessel was unseaworthy.”

13 Aug 2026  Kaieteur News publishes a documented paper trail of nearly a year of urgent, unresolved defect reports on the Barima, directly contradicting the 20 July claim.

21 Aug 2026  The surveyor’s report underlying Edghill’s reassurance documents hull corrosion, an expired service life, and multiple missing statutory certificates.

22 Aug 2026  Canawaima suspended again; Edghill states Guyanese/Surinamese experts concluded the vessel can safely operate for three more months pending dry-docking — the same report cited above.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR

  1. That Minister Edghill cease personally characterizing technical seaworthiness findings in his own voice, and instead publish the underlying surveyor and inspection reports in full, in real time, so the public can read the primary document rather than the minister’s summary of it.
  2. That the Ministry of Public Works issue a public accounting of every instance since 18 July in which a ministerial statement on vessel condition was later contradicted by a primary document, so the pattern can be assessed on the full record rather than piecemeal.
  3. That the standing calls for Edghill’s resignation or removal — unresolved since late July — be answered by government on the merits, rather than left to lapse through the passage of time and the arrival of the next news cycle.

Suriname’s regulator did its job on the Canawaima. Whether Guyana’s minister did his is now, for the second time this year, a fair and documented question — and this time, the public should not have to wait for another paper trail to surface before getting the answer.

— The Board

The 592 Guardian

The State That Cannot Say No

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

The State That Cannot Say No

 EDITORIAL · INDIGENOUS RIGHTS & EXTRACTIVE GOVERNANCE

 BY : Hem Kumar –August 2026

At Tassawini, four days of blockade have exposed a legal architecture built to let mining outrun consent — and a government that keeps citing a ruling that never said what it claims.

For four days and nights, the residents of Chinese Landing have stood in the road at Tassawini, Region One, between excavators  and the land their community has held under absolute title since 1991. They are not there because the law is silent on their right to be consulted. They are there because the law has been read, again and again, in a way that makes their consent optional — and because the people responsible for closing that gap have spent a decade choosing not to.

Land Title, dated 24th April 1976, referenced on Plan #23703 Mining permit # 47798 with Annex 1 dated SEPT.25 1998.

This is not a new story, and that is precisely the point. Chinese Landing received communal title to its lands under the Amerindian Act in 1976, converted to an absolute grant in 1991. Between 1995 and 2001, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission issued a prospecting license and four Medium Scale Mining Permits inside those titled boundaries to a Georgetown businessman, Wayne Vieira, without the consent of the Village Council. A short-lived agreement in 1999 saw Vieira pay tribute to the council for roughly a decade; it collapsed in 2009 over a disputed rate increase, and the conflict that has defined Chinese Landing for a generation began in earnest.

A RULING THAT SETTLED NOTHING, CITED AS THOUGH IT SETTLED EVERYTHING

The government’s standing defense, repeated by Minister of Natural Resources Vickram Bharrat as recently as this month, is that its hands are tied by a 2017 ruling of the Caribbean Court of Justice. On August 5, at a community outreach in Tassawini, Bharrat told villagers that Vieira’s mining permit predated the village’s land title. Toshao Nikita Miller, present at that meeting, corrected him on the spot, on the record: title came in 1976; Vieira’s rights were purchased in 1995. The documentary record bears her out, and Bharrat’s own ministry’s history of the case says the same.

But the deeper misrepresentation is not about dates. It is about what the CCJ actually decided in Vieira v. Guyana Geology and Mines Commission. In 2010, the GGMC issued Vieira a Cease Work Order for lacking a village agreement, as required under Section 48 of the Amerindian Act. Vieira challenged it, and won, all the way to the CCJ. But the Court’s ruling was narrow to the point of technicality: a mines officer’s power to issue a Cease Work Order, the Court held, can only be used to enforce breaches of the Mining Act itself — not the Amerindian Act, which is a separate statute the Minister of Natural Resources has no power to make regulations for. The Cease Work Order was quashed on that basis alone.

“The CCJ did not validate Vieira’s permits. It did not rule on whether the Village Council had standing to enforce its own consent rights. It found only that GGMC used the wrong legal instrument — and left the underlying question of who is right entirely open.”

The Court said as much itself, noting that the Amerindian Act already provides its own mechanism for resolving tribute disputes between miner and village — meaning that, in the CCJ’s own reasoning, no enforcement gap was created by its ruling. GGMC simply reached for a tool that belonged to a different statute. Two of the three legal questions the case raised — whether the Amerindian Act could apply retroactively to Vieira’s permits, and whether the Village Council had the standing to enforce its consent rights at all — were expressly left undecided as unnecessary to the outcome.

For the government to describe this judgment, as Minister Bharrat has, as a ruling made “in favor of Wayne Vieira” and his “rights to the mining concession” is not a defensible summary of the case.

It is a rhetorical upgrade of a jurisdictional technicality into a substantive vindication that the judgment itself declined to provide.

THE LOSS THAT WAS REAL, AND THE CONTRADICTION BENEATH IT

This is not to say Chinese Landing has never lost. In 2021, the Village Council brought its own claim against Vieira and GGMC, seeking to be heard directly after being shut out of the 2010–2017 proceedings entirely. The High Court dismissed it — and did so on the merits, holding that all minerals within Guyana vest in the state under Section 6 of the Mining Act, and that Vieira did not require the village’s permission to access the areas covered by his permits. That ruling, delivered by Chief Justice Ian Chang, is real, and any honest account of this dispute has to reckon with it rather than around it.

Map of Chinese Landing & Schedule of mining land

But reckoning with a ruling is not the same as accepting it as settled law, and there is good reason not to. In an earlier case, Daniel Dazell, Chief Justice Chang had ruled that a prospecting permit holder — even one granted before the Amerindian Act came into force — is required to observe Section 48 consent when the permit comes up for renewal after the Act’s commencement. In Vieira’s case, confronting substantially the same question, Chang ruled the opposite way, without stating any reason for the departure. The Court of Appeal upheld him with no written decision at all.

Eight years on, that contradiction has never been explained by any court, and the appeal against the 2021 ruling has sat before the Court of Appeal, unheard, for more than three years.

A state that vests minerals in itself is not, by that fact alone, a state entitled to ignore the consent provisions it wrote into its own Amerindian Act for exactly this kind of land. Mineral ownership and the right of entry to extract it are two different legal questions. Chinese Landing’s case has always turned on the second — and no court has yet resolved it consistently.

FOUR DAYS AT TASSAWINI

What has unfolded this week is what happens when that unresolved question meets machinery. According to the Village Council’s own account and independent reporting, at least nine excavators, two bulldozers and several dredge engines were moved onto Tassawini by barge without the operators notifying the Village Council. Residents blocked the equipment; one operator, after being called a “jackass” by residents accusing him of disrespect, had his machine switched off from the operator’s seat by a man and a woman who climbed aboard rather than let it pass. He turned around. The equipment operators say the machinery was brought in to repair roads. The village believes, not unreasonably given the volume of equipment involved, that this is cover for an expansion of mining activity the council has not approved.

The confrontation, per the council, began after a GGMC mines officer stationed at the site indicated he was either unable or unwilling to stop the equipment from entering Vieira’s blocks — meaning a state officer was present, and did not intervene. No representative of the Ministry of Natural Resources or the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs has made direct contact with the village since. Toshao Miller’s own account of the standoff’s third day captures the substance of what the state has offered instead: word, secondhand, that “talks” are underway between the Minister and GGMC, with nothing further communicated since.

Mining, according to the council, resumed at Tassawini in March. The village says it was not told the government had lifted its own mining ban until July — at the National Toshaos Council Conference, four months after the fact, and even then only in the form of vague references back to the CCJ ruling rather than a direct answer to a direct question.

A community whose consent the law requires learned, months after the fact, that the machinery it never consented to had already returned.

THE PATTERN BENEATH THE PRECEDENT

None of this is unique to Chinese Landing, and that is what should trouble anyone inclined to read it as an isolated land dispute rather than a structural feature of how Guyana governs its interior. In April 2024, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued its report on Isseneru, an Akawaio community in the Middle Mazaruni whose experience mirrors Chinese Landing’s in almost every particular: incomplete recognition of titled territory, mining permits issued without consultation or benefit-sharing, and — critically — a finding that Guyana’s Mining Act itself, not merely its enforcement, failed to incorporate the human-rights guarantees owed to Indigenous peoples. The Commission found that Isseneru’s own participation in mining did not waive its territorial rights or authorize the state to permit outside mining without consultation. The parallel to Chinese Landing’s Section 48 consent requirement, and to the state’s insistence that a mineral-vesting clause overrides it, is not subtle.

Nor is Chinese Landing’s experience of institutional avoidance unusual. The Inter-American Commission granted precautionary measures for the community in July 2023, citing threats, harassment and documented violence, including a 2018 incident in which a family was forced from its home under threat by a Tactical Services Unit officer and the mine’s general manager, and a 2021 incident in which a nineteen-year-old was allegedly slapped and pursued by mine security. Those measures required Guyana to establish a permanent, community-based monitoring mechanism, to conduct joint consultations with the village on protective measures, and to carry out comprehensive scientific environmental studies of the Barama River — steps this news outlet has found no evidence the government has taken.

What the government has done, instead, is write to the Commission asking that the measures be withdrawn, characterizing the original complaint as a misrepresentation.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY BEING ASKED

The Village Council has not asked for the impossible. It has asked that Vieira’s operations halt while mediation is completed and the community’s own case is finally heard — a modest request made considerably less modest by the fact that Vieira, per the council, has continued to prepare for and carry out mining activity while those very discussions are ongoing, which the council rightly characterizes as undermining the legitimacy of the process itself.                                          It has asked, too, that the Court of Appeal do what it has not done in more than three years: rule.

An abandoned mining pit with mining waste spilling over into the Barama river

The Barama River, meanwhile, does not wait on legal argument. Residents report that fish from the river now carry mercury, and that water once safe to drink is not. A medical team dispatched after Toshao Miller’s formal reports to the Regional Toshao Conference confirmed a link between the river’s turbidity and a local outbreak of diarrhea and vomiting.

This is the material cost of a legal architecture that has spent sixteen years failing to decide, cleanly and finally, whether a Village Council’s absolute title means what the word absolute suggests it should.

THE STANDARD THIS PUBLICATION APPLIES

This editorial draws a firm line between what the record supports and what remains contested, and that line matters here. The 2021 High Court ruling against Chinese Landing is real, stands as the current law pending appeal, and cannot be wished away by advocates on any side of this dispute. What this writer does dispute is the government’s characterization of the 2017 CCJ ruling as a merits victory for Vieira, when the judgment’s own text confines itself to a question of statutory authority and leaves the questions that matter to Chinese Landing undecided. That is not interpretation. It is what the ruling says.

A government that wished to close the legislative gap the CCJ identified in 2017 — the absence of any mechanism by which GGMC can enforce Amerindian Act consent requirements against a mining permit — has had eight years and a parliamentary majority to do so. It has not. A government that wished to give the Court of Appeal reason to move has had three years since the Village Council’s case was dismissed. It has not compelled that either. What it has done is stand up a mines officer at the very site of the dispute, watch him decline to intervene, and then refer the Toshao back to the same 2017 ruling that never answered her question in the first place.

The residents of Chinese Landing are not asking the state for something new. They are asking it to answer a question it has spent sixteen years avoiding.

Until it does, the road into Tassawini will continue to be guarded not by the law, but by the people the law was written to protect and has, so far, declined to

The Board 

This editorial draws on the full text of Vieira v. Guyana Geology and Mines Commission [2017] CCJ 20 (A.J.); IACHR Resolution 41/2023 (Precautionary Measures No. 196-23); IACHR Report No. 8/24 (Isseneru v. Guyana); reporting by Kaieteur News, Stabroek News, Mongabay and the Department of Public Information; the Village Council’s public statements of August 21 and prior; and a direct video interview with Toshao Nikita Miller conducted during the standoff. The 2021 High Court judgment itself was not directly reviewed by this board; its holding is reported here as characterized consistently across three independent news sources and is presented as contested pending the outcome of the Village Council’s appeal.

Segregating, Steering, and Weeding out Undesirables

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Segregating, Steering, and Weeding out Undesirables

OPINION BY: GHK LALL – August 2026

What are those people doing here?  Yes, those people!  Why does space have to be shared with them in restaurants and supermarkets?  This great, sweaty, unwashed mass of bottom-of-the-barrel Guyanese.  I don’t think that Exxon’s people, others in that classification, would be so undiplomatic. They wouldn’t be caught dead pronouncing so vehemently (what could be interpreted otherwise) on ordinary Guyanese seeking a glimpse of what it is to live large.  How locals and foreigners live on the cream of oil rich Guyana. 

Not one would do so publicly in these politically correct, supersensitive times.  The PPP Govt, however, is concerned about the masses intruding in places with special ambience.  Coming uncomfortably close to Guyana’s rich and famous.  Upscale supermarkets and restaurants should be off-limits for those who can’t afford them.  If supermarkets and restaurants today, is the PPP Govt’s scheme to segregate, to steer, and to weed out Guyanese undesirables could it  spread to real estate.  Guyanese receive early clues of a bunker mentality, a state where silos proliferate.  Or, as said in another writing, a creeping form of economic eugenics.  Cull the unworthy.  Oust Guyana’s ordinary.

Inviting affordability but Forbidden?

Poor Guyanese aspire.  They have oil.  They wish to elevate themselves.  A bag of foreign bread; cookies for the kids.  Ow, let the people sample nah maan.  They may not have the money, but they have ambition.  Who doesn’t want better?  Who does want for their children to have a better life than them?  Now, even that’s frowned upon, found fault with, denounced.  What’s the objective?  If the foreigners have serious problems with their own compatriots in their native lands, how much tolerance can they have for Guyanese?  Raucous, boisterous, Guyanese.

Frankly, what I see underway is a push to separate the rich from the poor, the princely from the pathetic, and the people in the penthouses from the people on the pavement.  Objections, anyone?  The word from above is, forget about sharp, slick malls, with wide aisles and lushly stocked shelves.  Even the shopping carts have an air about them.  Stick to the Bourda Market Mall.  Fetch basket and stay there. 

The richest class in Guyana has the money.  They should be able to spend in comfort in the supermarkets and restaurants of their choice.  Not have to mix and mingle with Guyanese minions.  Nothing sours a slug of Johnnie Walker Blue than contemplating the closeness of commoners.  Adolf called them undesirables.  Uncle Joe termed them parasites.  In India and Rwanda, cockroach has gained traction.

So, what is beginning to take shape in Oil Guyana?  I think it is segregating, steering, and weeding out the multitudes from the midst of the majestic.  Stay in corner.  Be contented among own kind.  It came glossily packaged.  Care and concern for the welfare of Guyanese overdoing things.  It’s a sign of the future.  The segregated Guyana state is becoming more audible.  They only thing left to be done, to communicate what should be, is to hangout a three-word notice in front of restaurants and supermarkets.  No coloreds allowed.  Real estate communities were the first casualties.  Now it’s exclusive eateries (or what should stay that way) and shopping emporiums that Guyana’s poor better not set foot inside.  Not even the parking lot.  A subtle warning was already given.

 

Follow the facts.  Separate schools for the moneyed class and foreign contingents.  Queen’s College isn’t good enough.  Separate places for giving birth for PPP highfliers.  Guyana’s world-class medical facilities, not so world-class, after all.  The rich cabal wants their own reserved spaces.  The upwardly mobile wants more oil action for themselves.  Both hold their noses around the lower orders, seek to keep them at a distance.  Keep them in the barrios and ghettoes.  Let them frolic there. 

Nudge them away from plush restaurants and fancy supermarkets.  It’s how Guyana’s higher side lives.  The segregating and steering of Guyanese have begun.  Weeding out of undesirables more vocal. 

I submit, Guyana is now a bunker state.  A state of silos.  One hell of a sick, sorry, state.

 THE NUMBERS GUYANA DIDN’T GIVE YOU

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 THE NUMBERS GUYANA DIDN’T GIVE YOU

       A Region Published Its Exam Results. Georgetown Held a Ceremony             Instead.

 Accountability Desk | August,2026

Every other education ministry in the Caribbean Examinations Council’s catchment let the numbers speak. Guyana’s Ministry of Education gave a ceremony, three headline figures, and a table of seventeen vocational trades — and called it a results release.

On August 18, 2026, the Caribbean Examinations Council convened its annual results ceremony in Anguilla, hosted for the first time in a decade outside the region’s larger capitals. CXC’s Registrar and CEO, Dr. Wayne Wesley, and its Director of Operations, Dr. Nicole Manning, presented the 2026 May-June cycle’s performance to the full region at once: candidate counts, subject entries, grade distributions, absenteeism, examination irregularities, and the regional pass rate for every major certification CXC administers.

The presentation was public, it was itemized, and it was the same for every territory sitting in that room.

Guyana’s Ministry of Education held its own event that same day, at the Pegasus Suites and Corporate Centre in Georgetown. Minister of Education Sonia Parag and Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain delivered remarks. What Guyana’s students, parents and press received from that event was not a report. It was a set of talking points — a national pass rate, a Mathematics improvement figure, a candidate count, and an unverified projection of vocational certifications still awaiting confirmation from the very council that had, that same day, published a complete regional accounting.

This is not a story about a failing grade. It is a story about a government that had access to the same comparative data as every other CARICOM ministry and chose not to publish it — and about what that choice, examined against the numbers CXC did release, looks like it was built to avoid.

WHAT CXC PUBLISHED, ON THE RECORD

CXC’s regional release on August 18 gave every territory a full comparative baseline. The figures below are CXC’s own, delivered from its own podium, to the full region simultaneously:

  • Regional CSEC overall performance: 72.18 percent, a slight increase over 2025.
  • Regional CSEC Mathematics acceptable-grade rate: 42 percent, a 4-point improvement.
  • Regional CAPE acceptable grades (Grades I–V): 93.52 percent.
  • Regional CVQ candidates: 4,977, across 37 occupational areas.
  • Region-wide CSEC absenteeism: more than 32,000 candidates did not sit their exams — a trend CXC officials themselves called “worrying.”
  • Region-wide examination irregularities: 128 recorded, up from 80 the prior cycle, including the first-ever official categorization of AI misuse as a form of exam malpractice.

Every one of those figures came from CXC’s own ceremony, delivered the same day, in the same format, to every member state. Guyana’s delegation was in a position to hear all of it. None of it appeared in what Guyana’s Ministry told its own public.

WHAT GUYANA PUBLISHED, ON THE RECORD

Compare that to the complete inventory of what Georgetown’s ceremony produced, as reported:

  • A national CSEC pass rate of 67 percent — with no stated methodology for what counts as a “pass” in that figure, and no breakdown by subject, school, region, or gender.
  • A Mathematics pass rate of 34.5 percent, framed only against Guyana’s own 2025 figure of 32 percent — never against the region CXC had just placed it inside.
  • A CAPE claim of broad “stability and growth,“ specified only as “seven examined units” recording declines of 1 to 3 percent — with no regional CAPE figure offered for comparison, and no full subject table released.
  • A CVQ projection of 2,813 certifications — a number the Ministry’s own Chief Education Officer acknowledged was not yet official, pending CXC confirmation, at the moment he announced it.
  • No absenteeism figure. No SBA non-submission figure. No irregularity count. No mention of AI misuse, despite CXC formally introducing the category this cycle.

Nothing in Guyana’s release was false, so far as this desk has been able to verify. That is precisely the point. Every figure Georgetown chose to publish was accurate, favorable, and incomplete — and every category CXC flagged as a regional concern was a category Guyana’s ceremony did not mention at all.

CXC gave the region a report. Guyana gave its public a ceremony.— The 592 Guardian

METRIC  REGION  AUG .18 TH MIN. OF ED. GAP
CSEC overall pass rate 72.18% 67% -5.18 pts
CSEC  Mathematics 42% 34.5% -7.5 pts
CAPE acceptable grades 93.52% NOT  DISCLOSED UNKOWN
Absenteeism disclosed 4,977 (confirmed) 2,813 (projected) UNVERIFIABLE
Absenteeism disclosed 32,000+ region-wide not disclosed UNKOWN
Irregularities disclosed 128 region-wide not disclosed UNKOWN

SIDE BY SIDE: THE COMPARISON GUYANA DID NOT MAKE

Where a figure is marked “not disclosed,” that is not this desk failing to find it. It is the complete record of what was and was not said at a nationally covered government press event. Where a comparable regional figure exists and Guyana’s does not, the silence is not neutral — it is a choice made available by CXC’s transparency and declined by Guyana’s Ministry.

THE QUESTION THIS DESK IS PUTTING ON THE RECORD

The Ministry of Education has both the data and the obligation to publish it. CXC hands every territory the identical breakdown Guyana’s delegation heard in Anguilla. Nothing prevented the Ministry from releasing a comparable document — a subject-by-subject table, a regional benchmark, an absenteeism figure, an irregularity count — the same day, in the same format CXC itself used.

It did not. It held a ceremony, named its top performers, and moved on to seventeen vocational trades before a single comparative figure could be asked about.

 

This desk is not asserting why. We are asserting what happened, on the record, and putting the question to the Ministry directly: if the underlying results support the celebratory framing offered at Pegasus, what is the rationale for withholding the very comparative data CXC placed in the public domain that same day? A Ministry with nothing to qualify has no reason to publish less than the region it answers to.

The 592 Guardian has written to the Ministry of Education and to Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain requesting the complete, subject-by-subject 2026 results — regional comparison included — and will publish any response in full.

A NOTE ON WHAT THIS PIECE DOES NOT CLAIM

This desk sought a regional teacher-salary comparison to test whether compensation helps explain the performance gap identified above. It does not exist in usable form. Crowdsourced salary aggregators return sample sizes too small to be meaningful — eleven data points for Barbados, thirty-seven for Jamaica, a single submission at one point for Guyana — and in at least one case returned a figure for Barbados equivalent to roughly five US dollars a day, which is not a real wage and was discarded.

A comparative review of what regional governments publish on public-sector pay found that most, including Guyana and Jamaica, disclose only aggregate ministry compensation spending, not post-level salary scales — meaning no like-for-like regional comparison currently exists in the public record.

What is verifiable is that Guyana’s own teacher salaries rose substantially over the 2024–2026 cycle under the negotiated agreement with the Guyana Teachers’ Union — a graduate teacher on the 2026 scale earns GYD 277,882 monthly, part of a phased increase the government has described as a 57 percent cumulative rise since 2021. That spending is real, it is documented, and it is fair to ask what it purchased. This desk declines to assert a wage-to-outcome causal link the data cannot currently support — and will pursue the regional salary comparison as its own investigation, sourced to government pay scales rather than crowdsourced estimates, rather than force an unverified number into this piece.

SOURCING

CXC regional figures: Caribbean Examinations Council, Official Release of Results Ceremony, Anguilla, August 18, 2026, as reported. Guyana figures: Ministry of Education press briefing, Pegasus Suites and Corporate Centre, Georgetown, August 18, 2026, as reported by Guyana Chronicle, Guyana Times, News Room Guyana, and HGPTV. Teacher salary figures: Ministry of Education–Guyana Teachers’ Union agreement, as reported by the Department of Public Information; 2026 salary scale as compiled by 592Hub from GRA and Ministry of Finance notices.

Sanctity of Contract Is a Choice, Not a Clause

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Sanctity of Contract Is a Choice, Not a Clause

 OPINION BY :Staff Writer –August 2026

Guyana confirmed this week that ExxonMobil has recovered every cent of its $55 billion cost bank. The President still won’t ask for a better deal — and the same contract he calls untouchable is quietly rewritten every time it suits the operator.

On Tuesday, President Irfaan Ali stood before reporters and delivered good news dressed as inevitability. ExxonMobil, he confirmed, has recovered the full US$55 billion it sank into the Stabroek Block. Guyana’s share of profit oil has jumped from 12.5 percent to 39.8 percent. The operation, by every measure that matters to an oil major, is now risk-free.

Asked directly whether risk-free operations might finally be grounds to renegotiate a contract that has drawn criticism since the day it was signed, the President said no. Not because the law forbids it. Not because Exxon has refused. But because, in his words, the “sanctity of contract” forecloses the conversation before it starts.

That framing does not survive contact with the contract itself, with the record of this administration’s own past statements, or with the government’s own selective conduct under the very agreement it now calls sacred.

THE CANDIDATE WHO WOULD RENEGOTIATE

Six years ago, as a presidential candidate, Irfaan Ali held a very different position on the Exxon deal his predecessors had signed.

Candidate Ali — March 2020

 President Ali — August 2026
“We have made it very clear that we have to go towards, we’re looking at these contracts, renegotiating these contracts, looking at contract management and all of these things. Everything we have to relook at because we have to ensure that our country does not get the wrong end of the stick.”

 “The difficulty with doing that from a legal perspective one and from the perspective of the sanctity of contract — that hasn’t changed.”

The shift is not subtle. In 2020, renegotiation was a promise. In 2026, with the single largest justification for renegotiation now sitting in the public record — full cost recovery, reduced risk, a windfall confirmed by Exxon’s own executives — renegotiation is a legal impossibility. Nothing about the contract changed in the interim. What changed is who benefits from calling it untouchable.

ARTICLE 32.1 SAYS OTHERWISE

Chartered Accountant and Attorney Christopher Ram has pointed to the specific clause the President’s framing obscures. Article 32.1 of the 2016 Petroleum Agreement does not prohibit renegotiation. It states that government shall not “require renegotiation of” the agreement without the Contractor’s prior written consent — language that permits renegotiation by mutual agreement, and simply denies Guyana the unilateral right to force it.

As Ram put it: government must “call Exxon to the table and say, look we must renegotiate this contract now.”

That is a negotiating posture, not a legal wall. Energy strategist Anthony Paul, who has advised multiple governments including Guyana’s on oil and gas policy, made the same point in blunter terms: contracts get renegotiated constantly, and companies ask for changes whenever they have, in his words, “the backbone to do so.” Paul cited Tanzania’s renegotiation of a similarly structured deal, under a similarly worded stability clause, as precedent that political will — not legal architecture — is the actual constraint here.

“Every contract presumes some level of justice — and if things have changed materially, and made it more unjust, then there may be a basis for renegotiating.”

 

— Anthony Paul, energy strategist

A CONTRACT ALREADY REWRITTEN — JUST NEVER FOR GUYANA

The government’s insistence on sanctity of contract would carry more weight if the contract had, in fact, been treated as sacred. It has not.

  • Audit deadlines:  The Petroleum Agreement requires Exxon’s cost expenses to be audited within two years of being incurred. That deadline has been extended repeatedly and without public consequence — Guyana’s first cost audit, covering 1999–2017, was completed years late, and the dispute over its US$214 million in flagged overcharges remains unresolved more than five years after the report was delivered.
  • The gas feasibility study:  Stakeholders have noted that the agreement’s requirement for a feasibility study on the use of Stabroek’s associated gas resources was never conducted at all — not delayed, not renegotiated, simply skipped.
  • The royalty addendum:  An addendum was signed after the fact to clarify that Guyana’s 2 percent royalty would not itself be recovered by the contractor — proof that when a change favours the operator’s clarity or the state’s convenience, amending this “sacred” document is entirely possible.

Sanctity of contract, in practice, has meant sanctity for Exxon’s deadlines and Exxon’s interests. It has never once meant sanctity for Guyana’s audit rights or Guyana’s revenue protections. The doctrine is not being applied. It is being invoked — selectively, and only when the alternative would cost the operator money.

THE REAL COST OF “SANCTITY”: NO RING-FENCING

Nowhere is the price of this selective sanctity clearer than in the single structural defect Ram and others have identified as the most consequential in the entire agreement: the absence of ring-fencing.

Guyana’s Petroleum Agreement treats the Stabroek Block as one undivided cost pool. Every dollar Exxon and its partners spend — on any project, at any stage — drains into the same cost bank and is recovered from the same production stream, at up to 75 percent of monthly output, before Guyana sees its share. There is no requirement that a project’s costs be recovered only from that project’s own revenue.

There is no wall between what is finished and what is still being built.

This is precisely why the announcement that the $55 billion bank has hit zero deserves more scrutiny, not less. The bank did not close. It reset. ExxonMobil’s own Vice President for Business Services, John Colling, confirmed to reporters in June that the cost bank figure reflects spend across the entire consortium portfolio — not merely the four producing projects, but “relevant spend on projects which are being developed.” Uaru’s construction costs have already been flowing into the same pool that just emptied. Whiptail and Hammerhead are next.

Project Status Cost Treatment Ring-Fenced?
Liza Phase 1 Producing= 2019 In$55B bank -recovered NO 
Liza Phase 1 Producing- 2022 In$55B bank -recovered NO
Payara Producing- 2024 In$55B bank -recovered NO
Yellowtail Producing -8/2025 In$55B bank -recovered NO
Uaru -Errea Wittu First -oil 2026 Q4 $12.7 B -same pool NO
Whiptail First -oil 2027/28 $12.7 B -same pool NO
Hammerhead First -oil 2029 $6.8 B -same pool NO

Three sanctioned projects — worth a combined US$32.2 billion in announced capital commitments — are now approaching or entering that undivided pool, with no legal partition separating their costs from the profit oil Guyana was just promised. Every new well drilled on Uaru, every dollar spent finishing Whiptail’s FPSO, every cent Hammerhead’s construction requires between now and 2029, is money that can be deducted from production before Guyana’s 39.8 percent share is calculated — exactly as it was for the first four projects, and exactly as it will be until the day, if it ever comes, that this contract requires otherwise.

Ram’s proposed remedy is precise: treat each production licence as its own cost centre, recoverable only from its own output, and cut the recovery ceiling itself from 75 percent to 50 percent — a figure common across comparable producing jurisdictions.

Ring-fencing would not eliminate cost recovery. It would simply stop new developments from resetting the clock on the developments that already paid for themselves. Without it, the 50 percent profit-oil milestone the government is currently celebrating is not a plateau — it is a moving target that every future sanction pushes further away.

WHAT RENEGOTIATION WOULD ACTUALLY ASK FOR

Ram’s full renegotiation framework extends beyond ring-fencing alone, and none of it requires reopening the entire 2016 agreement from scratch:

  • A time-limited tax concession:  a tax waiver with a defined sunset — a ten-year exemption running from first oil in December 2019 and expiring in December 2029, rather than the open-ended concession currently in force.
  • Royalty escalation:  lifted from 2 percent to at least 6 percent, rising to 10 percent within five years.
  • Ring-fencing:  each production license its own cost center, cost recovery drawn only from that project’s own output.
  • A lower recovery ceiling:  cut from 75 percent to 50 percent, in line with comparable jurisdictions.
  • Decommissioning security:  borne solely by the companies, expressly excluded from cost recovery, and funded in cash held in a Guyana-based account — not a paper undertaking — with guarantees issued by the ultimate parent companies rather than an unnamed affiliate.

None of these require Guyana to act unilaterally, and none require Exxon’s total surrender. Article 32.1 already contemplates exactly this kind of negotiated adjustment. What it requires is a government willing to sit down and ask — something this administration has not done in six years, through a pandemic, a war-driven price spike, three cost audits, and now the very milestone it claims validates its stewardship of the sector.

THE PATTERN THIS FITS

This is not an isolated failure of nerve. It is the same shape this Guardian has documented across the government’s petroleum governance — an audit process running years behind schedule and largely undisclosed, an announced 50 percent profit-oil milestone immediately offset by new projects entering the same undivided cost pool, and now a renegotiation clause the government insists does not exist, dressed up as legal necessity rather than acknowledged as political choice.

Guyana does not need to tear up the Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement to get a fairer share of what lies beneath it. It needs a government prepared to use the leverage the contract itself provides — and prepared to say, plainly, why it has chosen not to.

— The Board

Cold and cruel, there stands the PPP Govt

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

  Cold and cruel, there stands the PPP Govt

OPINION BY :GHK LALL –August 2026

Observe people riddled with insecurity.  Brutalized by broad swaths of poverty.  Upended by their own naivety.  Made into sitting ducks by their own vulnerability (and their own heroes).  Always ready game, never less than prone, to their dependency.  Play with their minds.  Shower them with barrels of self-guilt.  Prompt them to feel shame.  Feel sorry for themselves.  Use them to abuse themselves, a flogging first, then flapping about uncertainly.  What to do?  Why even this tiny luxury taken away?  This cannot be life in an oil rich country, the Guyana Oil Eldorado.  Just can’t be.  But the man said so, and the man must know.  This much I know.  What is being dished out to poor, hurting, scrambling, dragging, giving up Guyanese is representative of the cold and cruel.  It is an essential element of the PPP Govt’s barbarous calculus.  Throw the cost-of-living burden, price agonies, right back at them, into their sad, sick faces.

Eating out in tony restaurants is for the well-bankrolled, the superrich PPP political class.  Don’t hang hat where hand can’t reach.  Low-class and working-class are low-class and working-class.  Know thy place.  Understand thy limits. 

It’s a real smaat maan who speaks.  Plenty university.  The man in control of the money.  Enough has been given.  Government isn’t the answer.  Government isn’t a babysitter.  The PPP certainly isn’t, has not a scrap of interest. 

There is the contractor class to be taken care of; and big private sector operators to assist towards greater prosperity.  Have a care people.  They provide the jobs.  So, what if they are minimum wage, unlivable wage, jobs?  Just start thinking of, begin working on, abandoning those once-a-month, often once-a-quarter, dreams and plans to eat out and give the children some joy.  Even the little that those pushed into the category of losers in Guyana have is taken away from them. 

Cold and callous.  It’s part of the PPP Govt calculus.  Which government that still has its head on, desires to take ownership of cost-of-living crises, and its wide trail of devastation?  Maybe the government of leading men in sacred texts.  But none should look to the PPP Govt to embrace that duty.  What’s in it for the PPP, other than less money to pilfer, less milk for its fat cats?

Eating in swanky restaurants is bad enough.  But shopping in pricey supermarkets is an uber horror.  Very risky business.  Especially in a cost-of-living country that destroys its people, and a PPP Govt that eats its young, and all those that it afflicts and cripples.  Guyana is a cold and cruel place.  Capitalism devouring, taking no prisoners.  At the pinnacle of the pyramid is a PPP Govt that publicly cheers its own predatory nature.  Buy at the greens and veggie markets.  Kiss supermarkets goodbye.  Are some owners of some of those bigshot establishments not friends of the farmlands (and its products) that have caused such uproars?  Special invitees of the PPP Govt?  Apparently, their only utility is when it’s time for financial support.  Or the force of a shakedown. 

Recall what is repeated, emphasized: the PPP Govt is cold and cruel.  A stalker.  Then bushwhacker.  Collect millions from donors.  Then harass ordinary people for only window shopping at foreign and local supermarkets.  It takes a government of exceptionally low and dirty character to engage in such double-cross.  I believe that the PPP Govt is refining its own form of economic eugenics.  Start with segregating and weeding out the undesirable classes.  (More on this coming).

Reality check.  Can sane Guyanese see street level, entry level, minimum wage level locals even thinking of exchanging bhagee for Brussel sprouts?  Or cassava for caviar and pumpkin for mushrooms?  I feel for fellow Guyanese.  Whipped and flayed by their own to keep them in their place.  Their lot is worse than that of children.  Grown Guyanese shouldn’t be seen nor heard.  Nor should they be seen shopping and eating where the higher classes that have arrived now thrive. 

Like I said, the PPP Govt is extraordinarily infused with the cold and callous.  It’s the ultimate in political savagery.

The Rate They Won’t Say Out Loud: How a President’s Grocery-Cart Economics Collides With Guyana’s Currency Reality

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Rate They Won’t Say Out Loud: How a President’s Grocery-Cart Economics Collides With Guyana’s Currency Reality

BOARD EDITORIAL–August,2026

President Irfaan Ali has, in the span of a single public conversation, offered Guyanese two explanations for why their money buys less than it used to. First, that the problem is where they shop — that a shift toward supermarkets and restaurants, rather than traditional markets, is itself inflating the cost of living. Second, and relatedly, that the habit of eating out is part of what is driving households into difficulty.

Both explanations share a structure: they locate the cause of a national affordability crisis inside the consumer’s own choices, rather than inside the policy environment that shapes what those choices cost.

This editorial does not dispute that some Guyanese, like consumers everywhere, spend imperfectly. What it disputes is the substitution of a behavioural narrative for a currency and supply-chain reality that is measurable, documented, and largely outside any household’s control.

THE NUMBER THE PRESIDENT IS NOT CITING

Guyana’s official, Bank of Guyana-referenced exchange rate has held in a narrow band around G$207 to G$209 to the US dollar through the first half of 2026 — a rate that has been remarkably stable for over a decade. That is the number that appears in Customs Act notifications, commercial bank forex boards, and the mental arithmetic most Guyanese still use: divide by two hundred, add a little, and you have the dollar value.

It is not, however, the rate importers are actually paying when they go looking for US currency to bring in the goods that stock a supermarket shelf or a market stall. When the commercial banking system is short of forex — as it has been for stretches of this year — importers are pushed toward parallel channels where the price of a US dollar runs meaningfully higher, into the G$230–240 range by trader account. That gap between the published rate and the street rate is not a rounding error. It is a second, informal exchange rate that Guyana’s importers absorb silently and pass forward, and that the public conversation about “consumer behaviour” never mentions.

The dollar is already beaten up before the item reaches the shelf — and the country is still doing the math at a rate that hasn’t applied for months.

 

This is the mechanism the President’s framing skips entirely. A trader who cannot access US dollars at the official window through a commercial bank, and who must instead source them on the parallel market, is not paying an inflated price because Guyanese suddenly prefer supermarkets to markets. He is paying it because the forex is not there at the rate the country believes is still in effect. That cost does not stay with the importer. It travels through the wholesale margin, through the retail margin, and lands — fully loaded — on the price tag a consumer blames on the cashier.

WHERE THE REGIONAL COMPARISON ACTUALLY POINTS

The government has reached for a regional comparison of its own on the inflation question, and on paper it is a favourable one: the IMF’s April 2026 outlook placed Guyana’s projected 2026 inflation at 5.7 percent, against a projected Caribbean regional average of 6.6 percent. Read in isolation, that comparison suggests Guyana is managing price growth better than most of its neighbours, and a government spokesperson would not be wrong to cite it.

But a headline CPI figure measures the average change in a broad consumer basket against a prior year. It does not measure whether a specific, forex-exposed food and household-goods basket — the one working households actually buy weekly — is moving in line with that average, or well ahead of it. Guyana’s exceptional case is precisely what makes the regional comparison misleading rather than reassuring: this is an economy where GDP grew by more than 40 percent in 2024 and close to 20 percent in 2025, driven by oil revenue that has not required the exchange rate, the forex supply chain, or the import market to modernise at anywhere near the same pace. A country can post a favourable CPI average and still have a currency-access problem that hammers importers and, through them, ordinary households, month over month.

The two facts are not in tension. They are describing different layers of the same economy.

Put plainly: citing a 5.7 percent inflation figure against a 6.6 percent regional average answers a question nobody struggling to fill a grocery cart is asking. The question is not how Guyana’s basket compares to Barbados’s or Jamaica’s on paper. It is why a basket bought with oil-boom prosperity still requires importers to hunt for scarce dollars at a rate 15 to 20 percent above the one the country is still mentally using.

WHAT THE FRAMING OBSCURES

None of this is to say every household budget in Guyana is being managed flawlessly, or that personal overspending never happens. It happens everywhere, in every economy. But a national cost-of-living conversation is not well served by collapsing a structural, currency-driven, supply-chain problem into a story about where people choose to shop or whether they occasionally eat out.

That framing is not just imprecise. It is convenient — for a government that has yet to publish retailer mark-up data, has yet to lay out a public timeline for expanding market infrastructure at the pace demand requires, and has yet to explain what, if anything, is being done to close the gap between the official exchange rate and the one importers are actually paying.

If prosperity from Guyana’s oil wealth is reaching ordinary citizens, it should be visible first at the exchange rate they depend on to buy the ordinary things they need. Until the government is prepared to speak as plainly about that rate as it is about consumer behaviour, this newsroom will keep insisting on the distinction: the problem was never the restaurant table, or the shopping cart, or the cashier. It is whether prosperity is reaching the people — and at what rate they are being made to pay for the wait.

— The Board

A Decibel Meter Is Not a Deterrent: The Kingston Seawall Pilot and the Enforcement Guyana Keeps Skipping

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592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

A Decibel Meter Is Not a Deterrent: The Kingston Seawall Pilot and the Enforcement Guyana Keeps Skipping

OPINION BY : Staff Writer –August 2026

The Kingston Seawall now has decibel-meter signs, blinking out real-time noise readings as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest effort to confront the nuisance that has long tormented nearby residents, disturbed public spaces, and tested the patience of citizens who simply want peace after dark.

On its face, the initiative is sensible. Noise is not imaginary. It is measurable. And it is entirely reasonable for operators, patrons and the public to know when the sound they are producing has crossed from entertainment into intrusion.

But Guyana has reached the stage where the public must ask a harder question: is the Government building an enforcement system—or merely installing another public display of official concern?

A decibel sign cannot issue a warning. It cannot stop a reckless operator from turning a public space into a private nightclub. It cannot seize equipment, suspend an authorization, prosecute a repeat offender, or comfort a family whose children cannot sleep because someone has decided that their profits outrank the public’s right to peace.

A meter can measure the problem. It cannot solve it.

The law already exists

This is what makes the latest announcement so troubling. The country is not suffering because nobody has ever heard of noise regulation. Guyana already has noise-management rules. There are permissible limits. There are Environmental Authorization requirements. There are penalties. There is an Environmental Protection Agency. There is a Guyana Police Force.

So why is excessive noise still treated in far too many places as a mere inconvenience—something for citizens to endure, complain about repeatedly, and ultimately surrender to?

The answer lies not in the absence of laws, but in the absence of dependable enforcement.

Too often, the public is told to report noise. Then the report is made. The music continues. The police may or may not arrive. The operator may lower the volume for ten minutes, then turn it back up once the patrol vehicle disappears around the corner. The residents are left with the same disturbance, the same exhaustion, and the same sinking realization that the law seems firm only on paper.

That is not regulation. That is a ritual of complaint without remedy.

EPA and police: Who does what?

The EPA’s role should be clear: establish the lawful standard, monitor and document breaches, regulate environmentally authorized operations, impose compliance conditions, and take administrative or legal action against repeat offenders.

The police role should be equally clear: respond quickly where public peace is being disturbed, require the offending activity to be reduced or stopped, identify those responsible, preserve the peace, and support prosecution where an offence has been committed.

Neither agency can perform the other’s role alone. The EPA may have the technical capacity to measure noise, but it does not have the everyday street-level presence required to stop an escalating nuisance at midnight. The police may have the power to intervene on the ground, but they need reliable standards, certified readings, and a clear regulatory basis for action.

That is why the partnership matters. But collaboration must mean more than both agencies appearing in the same press release.

It must mean one functioning chain of accountability:

Alert. Response. Measurement. Warning. Order. Follow-up. Sanction.

If that chain breaks after the meter records the noise, then the entire exercise becomes little more than a taxpayer-funded electronic witness—watching the breach occur, displaying the breach in public, and doing nothing meaningful to stop it.

The missing public answers

The EPA and the National Data Management Authority must now provide the public with more than polished language about “education,” “awareness,” and “voluntary compliance.”

Those are admirable words. But they become empty words when they are used to soften the consequences for persistent offenders while residents continue to suffer.

The public deserves direct answers:

⇒ What is the precise noise limit at the Kingston Seawall during the day and at night?

⇒ Is that limit displayed beside the real-time reading so that people can understand whether the noise is lawful or excessive?

⇒ How long must a sound level remain above the threshold before the EPA and police are alerted?

⇒ Who receives that alert, and what response time is expected?

⇒ What happens when an operator refuses to comply?

⇒ How many warnings will be issued before enforcement begins?

⇒ Will repeat offenders face permit conditions, suspension, closure, charges, or prosecution?

⇒ Will the agencies publish monthly data showing alerts, inspections, complaints, warnings, repeat offenders, and cases brought before the courts?

⇒ What did the system cost to buy, install, maintain, calibrate, connect, monitor, and staff?

These are not hostile questions. They are the ordinary questions taxpayers are entitled to ask whenever public money is spent and public authority is exercised.

Voluntary compliance has limits

There is room for education. A first-time operator may not understand the applicable standard. A public display can encourage prompt adjustment. A reasonable warning can correct conduct without turning every nuisance into a confrontation.

But voluntary compliance is a beginning, not an enforcement policy.

The man who has already ignored residents, ignored warnings, ignored the law, and ignored repeated complaints does not need another educational opportunity. He needs consequences.

The business that profits from disturbing an entire neighborhood should not be allowed to treat a modest warning as a cost-free operating expense. The promoter who advertises a night of noise, congestion and disorder should not be permitted to hide behind the excuse that nobody told him the music was too loud while a decibel meter glows in plain sight.

The right of one operator to make money ends where the public’s right to sleep, study, work, recover, worship and live in peace begins.

Value for money, not technology theatre

No sensible person should oppose the use of technology to improve regulation. Real-time monitoring can be useful. Data can expose patterns. Sensors can identify repeat hotspots. Public signs can make operators more accountable. A properly designed system could make enforcement faster, fairer and less dependent on who knows whom.

But technology is only value for money when it produces measurable public benefit.

The EPA must therefore show whether the investment leads to fewer sustained breaches, fewer complaints, faster responses, stronger compliance and meaningful action against repeat offenders. If the Government cannot demonstrate those results, then the question will be unavoidable: what exactly did the taxpayer purchase—noise control, or another shiny symbol of concern?

Guyana has had enough of governance by announcement. Enough of initiatives that are launched with fanfare, photographed for publicity, and then quietly left to gather dust while the underlying problem remains untouched.

The seawall does not need a decorative scoreboard for disorder. It needs a system that works.

The public must not be the enforcement arm

Residents should not be forced to become nocturnal evidence-gatherers—recording videos from their homes, begging for intervention, making repeated calls, confronting operators at personal risk, and then being told to “report the matter” again next weekend.

That is an abdication of state responsibility.

Citizens pay taxes for agencies to regulate. They pay taxes for police to enforce the law. They should not be required to beg for the peace and quiet that the law already promises them. Let the decibel signs remain. Let the sensors collect the data. Let operators see, in real time, the point at which their activity becomes unlawful or unreasonable.

But let there be no confusion: the real test is what happens after the number turns red.

If the alert brings a rapid response; if the response produces compliance; if repeat offenders are identified and punished; if the data are published and the costs are justified—then the EPA and the police would have built something useful.

If not, the public will be left staring at another digital monument to a familiar Guyanese failure: a Government capable of measuring the nuisance, but unwilling to enforce against it.


—The Board

A House in Scarborough, a Regulator’s Own Rulebook, and the $1.49 Billion Question GWI Won’t Answer

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

A House in Scarborough, a Regulator’s Own Rulebook, and the $1.49 Billion Question GWI Won’t Answer

How NPTAB’s published joint-venture standards square with a Toronto residential address, a chairman’s spouse, and a public utility’s defense that never mentions its own contracting partner

OPINION BY: — Investigations Desk –August 2026

When Guyana Water Incorporated moved to publicly defend itself last week against corruption allegations levelled by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed, it offered a specific, sourced account of how one of its most scrutinized contracts was won. “Under the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) Water Supply Improvement Programme,” GWI stated, “international competitive bidding guidelines resulted in Sigma Engineers receiving Lot 2 to construct treatment plants at Leguan and Wakenaam.”

It is a clean, confident sentence. It is also incomplete in a way that matters.

The contract GWI is describing — Contract Agreement dated October 28, 2024, for GYD $1,486,448,800 — was not awarded to “Sigma Engineers.” It was awarded to a joint venture: “Sigma Engineers Ltd & Hebei Wansheng Environmental Protection Engineering Co. Ltd. JV.” The contract document itself describes this JV as “a company under the Laws of Canada,” with its principal place of business listed at 6 Poplar Road, Toronto, Ontario.

This publication visited that address, virtually. It is a single-family detached house in Scarborough — a driveway, a garage, personal vehicles parked outside. There is no signage, no visible office, nothing to distinguish it from any other home on the street.

WHAT THE TITLE RECORDS SHOW

A parcel register search through Ontario’s ONLAND system traces the property’s ownership. In 2005, Tom and Helen Zoubaniotis purchased the parent lot for $405,000. The lot was subdivided in 2015. On March 1, 2017, the Zoubaniotis family sold the subdivided parcel — what is now 6 Poplar Road — to a woman named Maleka Azim, for $1,465,000, financed through a mortgage with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

The registered mortgage instrument, filed the same day, contains a routine disclosure required under Ontario law when a property owner is married: the name of the consenting spouse. That name is Syed Arshed Reza.

Syed Arshed Reza is not an unfamiliar name to anyone who has followed Sigma Engineers’ history. He is one of three men who founded Sigma Engineers Ltd in Bangladesh in 1985, and he currently serves as the company’s chairman. He is also one of three Sigma executives — alongside managing director Syed Md Kamal — named in a 2020 Bangladesh Anti-Corruption Commission case alleging the embezzlement of Tk 34.42 crore ( approx.$4m USD) through an inflated water-pump procurement under the Manu River Irrigation Project. Public reporting has not identified a resolution to that case in the six years since it was filed.

To be precise about what the documents do and do not establish: they confirm that the chairman of Sigma Engineers’ Bangladesh parent company is married to the woman who owns the house listed as the principal place of business of the Guyana-contracted joint venture. They do not establish that Maleka Azim holds any formal role in Sigma Engineers, in the JV, or in the GWI contract. A marital consent signature is a legal formality, not evidence of corporate involvement. This newsroom is not asserting a connection the documents do not support — we are reporting what the public record shows, and what it does not yet show, so readers can weigh it for themselves.

“The lead partner of the JV clearly identified and properly authorized… all partners in the JV legally liable, jointly and severally, during bidding and execution of the contract.”

— NPTA Standard Evaluation Criteria Handbook, 2009

WHAT NPTA’S OWN RULES REQUIRE

Whatever the answer to that question turns out to be, a separate and more immediately answerable question sits underneath it: did anyone at the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board verify any of this before awarding a Guyanese public utility contract worth nearly $1.5 billion?

NPTA’s own published standards say they were supposed to. The agency’s Standard Evaluation Criteria Handbook for Prequalification and Bidding, in force since May 2009 and still linked from NPTA’s official website today, devotes an entire section to joint-venture bidders. It requires that each partner in a JV submit the complete documentation a company would submit if bidding alone. It requires a signed Joint Venture Agreement, or at minimum a Letter of Intent to execute one, establishing that all partners are “legally liable, jointly and severally.” It requires a description of each partner’s proposed responsibilities and financial contribution. And it requires the JV to designate a lead partner, “clearly identified and properly authorized.”

The handbook’s own evaluator checklist — the literal form NPTA’s evaluation committees are meant to complete — asks these questions in writing: “Is the lead partner of the JV clearly identified and properly authorized? Are the JV’s sharing provisions in compliance with the minimum participation specified? Are all partners in the JV legally liable, jointly and severally, during bidding and execution of the contract?” A companion instruction to evaluators could not be more direct: “Particular attention should be given to issues related to eligibility and JV requirements.”

NPTA’s companion Guide to the Public Procurement Procedures adds a second layer. Whatever was verified at the prequalification stage, the Guide states, “shall be confirmed at the time of award of contract, and award may be denied to a bidder that is judged to no longer have the capability or resources to successfully perform the contract.”

Verification, in other words, is not a box ticked once and forgotten. It is meant to hold at the moment the government’s signature goes on the page.

Both documents are dated 2009 and show no recorded amendments in their own version-control pages — but they remain the standing manuals NPTA publishes today, and there is no indication any newer version has superseded them.

A PUBLIC DEFENSE THAT SKIPS THE QUESTION

GWI’s statement rejecting Mohamed’s allegations was, on its own terms, thorough. It walked through five separate contracts — the Region 4 plants, the Hope Surface Water Treatment Plant, the Shelter Belt rehabilitation, well-drilling packages, and Leguan/Wakenaam — citing bidder counts and competing prices for each. It is a document written to project procedural rigor.

But at no point does it engage with the fact that one of those five contracts was not awarded to a Guyana-registered company at all. It was awarded to a Canadian joint venture whose declared headquarters is a house in Scarborough, and whose only public link to Sigma’s ownership runs through a chairman’s wife’s name on a mortgage document.

If GWI’s own account of its due diligence has no room for that fact, it raises the question of whether NPTAB’s evaluation process had room for it either — or whether, as this newsroom’s review of the record to date suggests, Sigma Engineers’ Guyana registration was treated as sufficient proof of the whole joint venture’s standing.

This newsroom has not yet obtained NPTA’s Board Approval letter for the CDB Lot 2 award specifically — the document that would show, in NPTA’s own words, how the awardee was named and what was verified. Comparable approval letters obtained for two other Sigma contracts (the Hope plant and the Shelter Belt rehabilitation) name only “Sigma Engineers Ltd” as awardee, with no reference to any joint-venture partner. Whether the Leguan/Wakenaam approval letter follows the same pattern is, for now, an open question. NPTA’s own rules require such awards to be published on its website within two days of contract signing; this newsroom is continuing to seek that record and will publish it in full once obtained.

Ongoing works at one of the sites.-(2024)

Construction on the Leguan and Wakenaam plants is, by all accounts, proceeding. That is not in dispute, and this publication does not suggest otherwise. But an ongoing project is evidence that a contract was signed and is being executed — it is not evidence of what due diligence occurred before the signing, and it is not a substitute for the documentation NPTA’s own rules require. The two questions are separate, and the public is entitled to an answer on both.

WHAT REMAINS OPEN

This publication is not alleging that Maleka Azim, or Syed Arshed Reza, or the Sigma/Hebei Wansheng joint venture, engaged in any wrongdoing in connection with this contract. Nor are we alleging that GWI or NPTAB acted with corrupt intent. What the documentary record shows, and what we are reporting, is narrower and more precise: a public utility awarded a Guyanese taxpayer- and CDB-funded contract worth $1.49 billion to a joint venture whose declared corporate address is an ordinary house; a regulator with published, specific, decades-old rules for verifying exactly this kind of arrangement; and a public defense of that award, issued by the utility itself, that does not mention the joint venture existed.

This publication has sought comment from Guyana Water Incorporated and the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board on the specific matters raised in this report and will publish any response received in full.

— The 592 Guardian will continue reporting on this contract as records become available.