The Contractor List Is A Voter List

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL — PROCUREMENT & GOVERNANCE

The Contractor List Is A Voter List

How Bharrat Jagdeo’s $180 billion small works guarantee launders electoral patronage through procurement clothing — in broad daylight

The 592 Guardian♦ Editorial Board Georgetown, Guyana  ♦ June 2026

Let us be precise about what happened at Fort Wellington last week. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo did not announce a procurement initiative. He announced a political transaction — one structured to look like governance while functioning as a voter-dependency engine — and he did it out loud, on the public record, with the Department of Public Information faithfully amplifying every word.

More than 12,000 contractors. Each guaranteed at least one contract. Each capped just below $15 million. Each falling neatly beneath the threshold that triggers mandatory National Procurement and Tender Administration Board review.

The arithmetic is not ambiguous. Twelve thousand contracts at the stated ceiling produces an aggregate disbursement of approximately $180 billion Guyanese dollars — deployed outside competitive bidding, outside tender board evaluation, outside any published award rationale. One announcement. One Public Day.

One crowd of beneficiaries told, in terms they could not misread: we are the source, and we want you to know it.

“The paper trail that does not exist is the feature, not the bug.”

THE $15 MILLION ARCHITECTURE

The NPTAB threshold is not a secret. It is published, debated, and well understood by every procurement practitioner in this country. Contracts valued below it proceed without the formal competitive process that larger awards require — no public advertisement of terms, no evaluation committee scoring, no gazette of award.

“Your turn will come”Bharrat Jagdeo response to supporters.

The $15 million ceiling cited by the Vice President at Fort Wellington is not a coincidence. It is a design parameter. By guaranteeing that each of the 12,000 contracts will sit below the trigger point, the government has engineered a disbursement mechanism that is immune, by architecture, to the oversight apparatus theoretically governing public procurement.

This is not a grey area. The Procurement Act exists precisely to prevent the fragmentation of public expenditure into sub-threshold tranches that aggregate into enormous unaccountable sums. What Jagdeo announced is a textbook threshold circumvention scheme — executed not covertly, but from a podium, before cameras, with a DPI press release attached.

THE FISCAL EXPOSURE AT A GLANCE
Pre-qualified contractors

 12,000+
Region Five contractors

 530 confirmed
Contract ceiling (each)

 Below GYD $15 million
NPTAB trigger threshold

 GYD $15 million
Aggregate maximum exposure

 ~GYD $180 billion
Competitive bids required

 None
Published award criteria

 None disclosed
Audit paper trail

 Structurally absent
Announcement venue

 Public Day outreach, Fort Wellington RDC

LEGIBILITY AS INSTRUMENT

What makes this episode distinctive — and more alarming than ordinary procurement malfeasance — is that secrecy is not part of the design. The Vice President did not bury this in a supplementary budget line or disperse it across silent Cabinet minutes. He said it from a stage. He said it to beneficiaries. He had it reported nationally.

That is not a mistake. That is the mechanism.

When a government announces publicly that it controls the economic futures of 12,000 households, the announcement itself is the instrument of capture. The message delivered to every contractor on that list is not merely ‘you will receive work.’ It is: ‘we are the origin of your livelihood, and you are watching us confirm it.’ Dependency, made visible, is dependency reinforced.

Political scientists have a term for this architecture. In patronage democracies, the delivery of material benefits is often deliberately public precisely because visibility is what converts a transaction into a loyalty bond. The recipient is not simply paid. The recipient is made to understand who paid them, and why. The cycle then becomes self-sustaining: the patron needs the client’s vote; the client needs the patron’s contract; each requires the other to survive.

Jagdeo linked the guarantee explicitly to the 2025 elections manifesto — framing $180 billion in untendered disbursements as promise-keeping. That framing is not incidental. It is immunization. Patronage dressed as mandate fulfilment is patronage that cannot be criticized without appearing to oppose the democratic will. It is a rhetorical trap as elegant as it is corrupt.

“Patronage dressed as mandate fulfilment is patronage that cannot be criticized without appearing to oppose the democratic will.”

THE DOUBLE LEVER: CENTRAL AND LOCAL POWER

The location of this announcement was not accidental. Fort Wellington sits in Region Five — Mahaica-Berbice — one of Guyana’s contested regional political corridors. The 530 pre-qualified contractors in that region were told, at their Regional Democratic Council offices, that their contracts were secured.

The governing party is contesting local government influence. Regional Democratic Councils are the delivery infrastructure through which central government largesse reaches constituencies. By conducting this announcement at an RDC, with a VP present, the government collapsed the distinction between central procurement policy and local political mobilization into a single choreographed event.

The double lever is now both visible and operational: central government controls contract allocation; local government structures provide the physical and symbolic venue for the distribution announcement. If the ruling party captures both tiers in the coming cycle — which this contractor network is explicitly designed to facilitate — the patronage loop becomes institutionally locked. Not corrupt alongside governance, but corrupt as governance. The machinery of the state and the machinery of the party become indistinguishable.

This is state capture. Not the slow, hidden variety that scholars document after the fact. The fast, open, announced variety — executed with the confidence of a government that has concluded the rules no longer apply to it.

WHAT THE SILENCE OF INSTITUTIONS MEANS

The NPTAB has said nothing. The Public Procurement Commission has said nothing. The Auditor General has said nothing. Parliament — which controls the national budget that funds these contracts — has not convened to scrutinize an aggregate commitment of $180 billion made at a public outreach event.

This silence is not neutral. Institutions that do not respond to visible violations of their mandate are institutions that have either been captured, intimidated, or rendered irrelevant by a political culture that has learned to act without consequence. Each silent cycle teaches the executive that the architecture of accountability is decorative.

The contractors who ‘missed the cycle’ — Jagdeo’s phrase for those who failed to register during the three-month window — were told plainly: “If you missed it, you missed the cycle for this year.” That is not procurement language. That is the language of a closed patronage queue. You are either on the list or you are not. The list is the gate. The VP controls the gate.

Guyana has an oil fund, a sovereign wealth framework, and a procurement statute. It has none of the institutional culture necessary to make those instruments function. What Fort Wellington demonstrated is that the government has internalized this gap — and is exploiting it systematically, at scale, in public, without pause.

“This is state capture — not the slow, hidden variety. The fast, open, announced variety.”

ACCOUNTABILITY DEMANDS

THE 592 GUARDIAN DEMANDS
1

 The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board must issue a public statement within fourteen days on whether the fragmentation of this disbursement into sub-threshold tranches is compliant with the Procurement Act — and if not, what remedial action it will take.
2

 The Public Procurement Commission must initiate an independent audit of all contracts awarded under the small works pre-qualification scheme to date, covering award methodology, beneficiary identities, and completion verification.
3

 The Ministry of Finance must publish a consolidated fiscal note quantifying the total budgetary commitment made by the Vice President at Fort Wellington — including which budget line authorizes it and whether parliamentary approval was obtained.
4

 The Auditor General must flag the small works scheme in the next annual report as a procurement structure requiring enhanced scrutiny, given the structural absence of competitive bidding and NPTAB oversight.
5

 The Opposition and civil society must move immediately to test the legality of sub-threshold fragmentation under Section 43 of the Procurement Act — and publish their legal opinion regardless of political cost.

THE RECORD

We note for the record that this editorial has not alleged illegality that is unprovable. We have described, in precise terms, what a senior government official announced at a public event, what the fiscal arithmetic of that announcement produces, what procurement threshold it structurally avoids, and what political purpose its timing and venue serve.

If that description is wrong, the government is invited to correct it — with figures, legal citations, and a published procurement methodology. We will print the correction.

Until then, the contractor list is a voter list. The public outreach is a patronage queue. The $180 billion is an undisclosed campaign commitment disguised as infrastructure policy. And every institution in this country that has remained silent about it is complicit in the disguise

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, procurement transparency, and regional geopolitics. Corrections and responses may be submitted to the editorial board.

The Nation They Could Not Afford to Let Him Build

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

COMMEMORATIVE EDITORIAL ♦13 June 2026  •  46th Anniversary

The Nation They Could Not Afford to Let Him Build

              Remembering Dr. Walter Anthony Rodney — Historian,                                Revolutionary, and the Conscience Guyana Silenced                             23 March 1942 — 13 June 1980

46 years ago June 13, on a Georgetown street near the prison walls of a dictatorship, a walkie-talkie exploded on the lap of a 38-year-old man sitting in his brother’s car. The bomb was precision-built. The crime was premeditated. The state was responsible. And Guyana has never recovered.

Dr. Walter Anthony Rodney — Georgetown-born, Queen’s College-formed, London-trained, Dar es Salaam-tested, and Pan-African in soul — was not merely one of Guyana’s greatest sons.

He was, by any serious reckoning, one of the twentieth century’s most consequential political intellectuals. That a country now swimming in oil wealth cannot find the collective will to commemorate, in any meaningful public fashion, the anniversary of his murder is itself a verdict on what we have become.

“We unhesitatingly conclude that Gregory Smith was not acting alone but had the active and full support, participation and encouragement of, and/or was aided and abetted by the GPF, the GDF, agencies of the State, and the political directorate.” — Commission of Inquiry Report, 2016

The 592 Guardian marks this anniversary not with ceremony, but with the truth — which is, in the end, what Rodney always demanded.

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY MIND

Walter Rodney was born on 23 March 1942 into a working-class family in Georgetown, British Guiana — a colony still bound by the logic of plantation extraction and racial stratification that his life’s work would systematically dismantle. He attended Queen’s College, graduating first in his class in 1960, and won an open scholarship to the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, where he achieved first-class honors in History in 1963.

He then entered the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. At twenty-four, he received his doctorate in African History with honors. His thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, was published by Oxford University Press in 1970. He was not yet thirty.

What distinguished Rodney from his contemporaries in the postcolonial academy was the marriage of rigorous scholarship to political commitment. He did not write for tenure committees.

He wrote for working people — and then went to stand beside them. In Jamaica, he held groundings with Rastafari brethren in the yards of West Kingston, taking the university to the sufferers long before the rhetoric of community engagement was fashionable.

 The Manley government found him dangerous and banned him from returning to Jamaica in 1968. The ban backfired: the Rodney Riots that followed revealed how deeply he had already taken root.

HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA — AND GUYANA

In 1972, Rodney published How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. The book was a detonation.

It reframed the entire debate on African poverty — not as a product of internal deficiency or cultural inadequacy, but as the deliberate, structural consequence of centuries of extraction: slavery, colonialism, and the continuing distortion of African economies to serve metropolitan capital.

 The book remains in print, in continuous use in university syllabuses across four continents, over fifty years later. Its analytical framework — that underdevelopment is not a natural state but an actively produced condition — maps with uncomfortable precision onto Guyana’s present moment. The Gas-to-Energy project, the sole-source power contracts, the mining deals structured to maximize foreign extraction and minimize domestic transformation: Rodney would have recognized every mechanism. He had already named them.

He taught at the University of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam — then arguably the intellectual capital of African liberation thought — before returning to Guyana in 1974 to take up a professorship at the University of Guyana. The Forbes Burnham government, recognizing the threat, rescinded the appointment before he could take it up.

The man who had lectured to international scholars was to be denied a platform in his own country. He stayed anyway.

THE WPA AND THE CHALLENGE TO BURNHAM’S DICTATORSHIP

By the mid-1970s, Guyana had descended into precisely the authoritarian patronage state that Rodney’s work had theorized at a continental level. Forbes Burnham’s People’s National Congress had rigged elections since 1968, nationalized industries not to redistribute wealth but to extend PNC control, and constructed a party-paramountcy system in which the state, the military, and the ruling party were effectively indistinguishable.

Rodney joined the Working People’s Alliance — a coalition of smaller organizations—ASCRIA|IPRA|Ratoon|WPVP— that coalesced into a political party in 1974 and declared itself publicly in June 1979. The WPA was the first credible multi-racial opposition Burnham had faced. It was explicitly not ethnic in its appeal: it sought to unite African and Indian Guyanese workers around class solidarity rather than the ethnic tribalism on which both major parties had long depended. This was its power — and the reason it had to be destroyed.

“Walter Rodney stood firm, sincere, and felt he could… Against Mr. F.L.S. Burnham and his PNC’s tightening ties.” — Dmitri Allicock, “Trouble in the Sun”

 

 In July 1979, Rodney, Dr. Rupert Roopnarine, and Dr. Omawale were arrested and charged with arson following the burning of two government offices. They denied any involvement. The government, unable to produce evidence, was eventually forced to drop the charges — but not before the arrests had served their purpose: intimidation, destabilization, and the display of state power.

That same year, Father Bernard Darke — a Jesuit priest and photographer who had documented the WPA protest surrounding those very arrests — was stabbed to death in broad daylight by a member of the House of Israel, a cult that operated with the effective patronage of the PNC government. Ohene Koama, a young WPA member, was also killed. 1979 was a year of blood.

THE ASSASSINATION — A STATE CRIME, CONFIRMED

On the night of 13 June 1980, Walter Rodney sat in his brother Donald’s car on John Street near the Georgetown Prison. He held a walkie-talkie on his lap — a communications device supplied by a man named Gregory Smith, who had presented himself as an ally interested in helping the WPA build a radio network.

Gregory Smith was, in fact, an electronics expert and active sergeant in the Guyana Defense Force. The walkie-talkie contained an explosive device. Smith remotely triggered it. Walter Rodney died at 38. Donald Rodney survived, grievously injured, and was subsequently charged with unlawful possession of explosives — a charge that was not overturned until April 2021, forty-one years later, when the Guyana Court of Appeal found it had been constitutionally unsound from the outset.

The Burnham government initially denied that any Gregory Smith existed in the GDF. They maintained this position until the Catholic Standard — then one of Guyana’s few independent publications — published a photograph of Smith in full GDF uniform. The denial collapsed. Smith was quietly spirited out of Guyana to French Guiana, where he lived under the alias Cyril Milton Johnson. He is reported to have died in 2002.

For thirty-four years, the full institutional truth remained contested. Then, in 2014, President Donald Ramotar authorized a Commission of Inquiry. The three-person panel of eminent Caribbean jurists — chaired by Sir Richard Cheltenham of Barbados — worked for two years. Their report was delivered on 8 February 2016.

“Prime Minister Burnham knew of the plan and was part of the conspiracy to assassinate Dr. Walter Rodney… a State-organized assassination… an act of violence for political purposes.” — Walter Rodney Commission of Inquiry, 2016

 The findings were categorical: the GPF, the GDF, agencies of the state, and the political directorate — up to and including Forbes Burnham himself — bore collective responsibility for the murder. Gregory Smith did not act alone. He acted on orders.

The APNU+AFC government that came to power in 2015 moved to prematurely terminate the Commission’s work before the report was finalized, though the Commissioners issued it nonetheless.

When the report was tabled in the National Assembly in 2016, the APNU+AFC members amended the tabling motion to merely “acknowledge” rather than adopt the findings. It was not until August 2021 — under the PPP/C government — that the National Assembly formally adopted Resolution No. 23 of 2021, accepting the Commission’s conclusions.

Justice, on paper, had arrived. Forty-one years late. No one has been prosecuted. No institutional accountability has followed. The state that murdered Walter Rodney has been succeeded by other states. The machinery that killed him — patronage, ethnic mobilization, captured security services, and the suppression of genuine multi-racial working-class politics — persists, in updated form, to this day.

WHAT WE LOST — AND WHAT WE REFUSE TO RECKON WITH

Walter Rodney was 38 years old. He had a wife, Patricia, and three young children. He had already written works that will endure longer than any building the Burnham government erected with nationalized bauxite revenue. He was in the middle of a multi-volume history of the Guyanese working class that was never completed.

What he represented, beyond the intellectual catalogue, was the possibility of a politics that refused Guyana’s foundational curse: the instrumentalization of race. The WPA’s multi-racial project was fragile, contested, and imperfect — but it was real.


 It was the one political formation in Guyana’s history that seriously attempted to build class solidarity across the African-Indian divide. Rodney was its moral center. His death was not incidental to its eventual disintegration.

The WPA survived Rodney’s assassination but was never the same. In subsequent decades, it entered coalitions with the very political formations it had been formed to oppose. Dr. Roopnarine, Rodney’s brother in struggle, eventually served as Education Minister in the Granger administration — the APNU+AFC government that initially refused to adopt the Commission’s findings on Rodney’s murder. Dr. Roopnarine died in February 2026.

These are not simple betrayals; they are the complicated archaeology of a small country’s political survival. But they are also what happens when a movement loses the irreplaceable.

This anniversary passed — as the writer who prompted this editorial observed — without fanfare. Even the party Rodney co-founded did not publicly mark it in any notable fashion. This silence is its own political act. It tells us something about what the WPA has become, and something about what Guyana has accepted.

THE RELEVANCE HE EARNED

It is fashionable, in commemorative pieces, to invoke the dead as eternal relevance. We resist that convention here, because in Rodney’s case, no such effort is required. His relevance is structural, not rhetorical. 

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was a theory of resource extraction masquerading as development. Guyana, forty-six years after Rodney’s death, is an oil economy in which the extraction rates, fiscal architecture, and political economy of its petroleum sector replicate, almost precisely, the enclave models Rodney spent his life critiquing. The windfall is real. The transformation is elusive. The question of who benefits — and who designs the structures that determine who benefits — is the Rodney question, asked again in barrels per day.

 His insistence on multi-racial class solidarity as the only durable basis for Guyanese democracy remains the unresolved challenge. Every election cycle in which ethnic arithmetic determines outcomes, every patronage distribution calibrated by community, every public service appointment where race is the first variable, is evidence that Guyana has not yet found an answer to the problem Rodney identified and died trying to solve.

“There are many people who believe that a revolution is about blood… But the most important element in revolution is what happens in the minds of men and women.” — Dr. Walter Rodney, WPA Address, 1979

He believed, with rigorous optimism, that political consciousness could be built — that working people, regardless of ethnicity, could recognize their common interest and act on it. He was killed precisely because the regime understood that he might be right.

AN EDITORIAL VERDICT

The 592 Guardian does not traffic in uncritical hagiography. We mark Rodney’s anniversary because the record demands it — and because the silence around it is itself a story.

The Commission of Inquiry confirmed, in formal legal terms, what Rodney’s comrades, family, and supporters knew from the night of 13 June 1980: that the state murdered him. No prosecution has followed. No senior official has been held to account. The man who built and detonated the bomb is dead. The men who gave the orders are also dead. The institution — the Guyanese state in its PNC form — has been constitutionally succeeded but never truly dismantled or reformed.

The WPA, the party he helped build, marks no public commemoration. The government of President Irfaan Ali — which formally adopted the Commission’s findings in 2021 — has made no visible effort this anniversary to honor what those findings mean, or to advance any of the institutional reforms the Commission recommended, including the professionalization of the security services that participated in his murder.

Guyana is, in 2026, a country of extraordinary potential and familiar pathologies. Its oil revenues have transformed its GDP figures. Its governance has not kept pace.

The structural critique that Walter Rodney spent his life articulating — that extractive economies reproduce inequality, that ethnic politics immunizes ruling classes against accountability, that institutions serve power rather than principle — remains as applicable as it was in 1980.

He deserved better from his country. He deserved prosecution of his killers when they could still be prosecuted. He deserved a University of Guyana that would have let him teach. He deserved an election in 1980 that was not rigged. He deserved to see his children grow up with their father.

He deserved, at minimum, a commemoration on the forty-sixth anniversary of his murder. Guyana could not even manage that.

The 592 Guardian acknowledges the poem ‘Trouble in the Sun’ by Dmitri Allicock, which provided personal and historical framing for this editorial. Copyright remains with the author. We also acknowledge the Walter Rodney Foundation, the Commission of Inquiry Report (2016), and the National Security Archive’s documentation of the Rodney assassination for factual reference.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board  |  June 2026

The Heist of Precision Woodworking

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  •  INDEPENDENT  •  GUYANESE

 INVESTIGATIVE REPORT

The Heist of Precision Woodworking

How Republic Bank, a rogue receiver and a complicit auditor, stripped Guyana’s most decorated manufacturer of its life’s work — and how the judiciary and regulator let them get away with it.

Reported by The 592 Guardian  |  Investigative Desk     Georgetown, Guyana  •  June 2026

I.THE COMPANY THEY BUILT

In 1983, five Guyanese from Georgetown made a bet against the odds. Howard ,Ronald and Rustum Bulkan along with Gordon Forte and Hakim Rahaman founded Precision Woodworking Limited at the Ruimveldt Industrial Estate — a manufacturing enterprise in a country not known for manufacturing ambition — with a clear and singular vision: to prove that Guyana’s extraordinary tropical hardwoods could become the foundation of a world-class, value-added export industry.

They were right. Over the next two decades, Precision grew into one of the most admired companies in the Caribbean. It manufactured and exported high-quality furniture crafted from indigenous Guyanese hardwoods to the European market, earning a reputation for precision engineering, sustainability and design. The company became a landmark at Ruimveldt, employing scores of Guyanese workers and showcasing what disciplined, innovative entrepreneurship could look like in a post-colonial economy.

The company was awarded the Ernst & Young Caribbean Entrepreneur of the Year title in 2001 — to date, the only Guyanese company to earn that distinction. The following year, Ronald Bulkan was inducted into the World Entrepreneur of the Year Academy in Monte Carlo.

 By any measure, Precision Woodworking was a national asset — proof of concept for a manufacturing sector that Guyana’s oil-fixated policy class has never adequately nurtured. Before the first barrel of oil was pumped offshore, Precision demonstrated that Guyana could build, export and compete internationally

In Ruimveldt, they produced fully-manufactured, high value-added products made entirely from local timbers, utilizing an all-local workforce, and sold to the most discerning international markets. A feat that defied not only conventional wisdom but unconventional wisdom.

The company had, over its lending history with Republic Bank (Guyana) Limited, repaid principal in excess of $513 million and paid more than $327 million in interest. It was, in the bank’s own institutional memory, considered an excellent customer. None of that would save it from what was coming.

IITHE CRISIS, THE OFFER AND THE BROKEN PROMISE

By 2010, the global economic contraction had caught up with Precision Woodworking. Export markets softened, operational costs mounted, and the company found itself unable to service its debt to Republic Bank.  The company acknowledged the difficulty plainly — writing to the bank in May 2011 to discuss the winding up of affairs and disposal of assets. It was the kind of letter that takes courage to write, and that any reputable bank should receive with a duty of good faith.

What followed instead was a sequence of events that the Bulkans allege was not remediation but orchestrated predation.

In the weeks preceding and following that letter, the company identified not one but two viable buyers for its prime industrial real estate. Neal & Massy offered to purchase Lot 35 at Ruimveldt. A firm agreement of sale (AOS) was executed with Torginol Paints for Lots 32 and E½,21 valued at $230 million, complete with a $30 million deposit — a cheque handed directly to Republic Bank’s Managing Director, John Alves, at a meeting on June 30, 2011.

At that same meeting, according to sworn witness testimony by the Bulkans, Mr. Alves made a three-part commitment: first, to reschedule the company’s remaining debt into a term loan following application of the Torginol proceeds; second, to apply a special concessionary interest rate during a moratorium on capital repayments; and third, to recommend to the Bank’s Board a request for partial debt forgiveness, contingent on a formal business plan.

Both property sales together would have substantially liquidated Precision’s entire indebtedness to Republic Bank — and left the company with manufacturing equipment valued at nearly USD 1 million. The bank refused repayment anyway.

The company submitted its Business Plan, as requested, under cover letter dated August 2, 2011. The Bank’s reply, dated August 9, 2011, bore no relationship to what had been agreed. It claimed the injection of equity had always been a prerequisite to any favorable consideration — a condition that had never been raised at the June 30th meeting, and one that none of the Bank’s employees present that day ever appeared in court to defend or corroborate. The sole bank witness produced at trial was an employee flown in from Trinidad, who the Bulkans allege committed perjury.

III. THE $82 MILLION PHANTOM DEPOSIT

At the center of this affair is a financial transaction that has never been satisfactorily explained, and whose implications the Bank of Guyana appears to have deliberately avoided confronting.

On June 16, 2011 — two weeks before the June 30th meeting at which Republic Bank’s MD accepted the Torginol deposit and made his commitments — a sum of $82,068,617.00 was deposited into Precision Woodworking’s account at Republic Bank  without any prior knowledge of the Principals. The depositor, according to the Bulkans, was Shamnarine Narine of Guytrac, a company with no commercial relationship with Precision Woodworking.

The Bulkans allege this was not a commercial transaction but a regulatory manoeuvre. Under Bank of Guyana guidelines, delinquent loan accounts must be reported to the central bank at end-June each year. Precision’s unsecured exposure at the time — the difference between its total indebtedness and the book value of its collateral — was precisely $82,068,616.00. To the dollar, this deposit covered that exposure, preventing the account from being classified as non-performing and reported to the regulator.

The deposit was not a payment. It was a mask — designed to conceal a non-performing account from regulatory scrutiny while the bank’s principals arranged what the Bulkans believe was a pre-determined disposal of the company’s assets.

Republic Bank’s defence, when challenged, was that the deposit was an internal credit pursuant to Bank of Guyana provisioning guidelines — standard procedure for a non-performing loan. The Bulkans contest this characterization absolutely, noting that the deposit was made by a named third party (Shamnarine Narine of Guytrac), that it appeared in account records as an external deposit, and that the bank’s subsequent refusal to provide computerized account statements suggests a deliberate effort to conceal the transaction’s true nature.

In December 2019, the Bulkans filed a $90 million lawsuit against the Bank of Guyana and its Governor, Dr. Gobind Ganga, for failing to investigate what they described as an unauthorized, suspicious and unlawful deposit. The case was dismissed in September 2020 on technical procedural grounds — the action should have been brought in the company’s name rather than by the shareholders personally. The central allegation of regulatory negligence was never examined on its merits. The Bank of Guyana’s posture, expressed in a 2014 letter from Governor Ganga, was simply that the matter was before the courts and the bank would be guided accordingly. A regulator that supervises the integrity of Guyana’s banking system abdicated that duty entirely.

IV.THE RECEIVER — ABOVE THE LAW FOR FIFTEEN YEARS

On or around July 2011, Republic Bank appointed Kashir Khan — an attorney-at-law and accountant — as Receiver of Precision Woodworking Limited. The Bulkans allege this appointment was itself unlawful, made after verbal commitments to restructure the debt and after a signed agreement of sale had already been handed to the bank’s MD.

What followed Khan’s appointment is, on the documented record, a saga of institutional impunity without precedent in Guyanese commercial history.

First, Khan allegedly moved to scuttle the Torginol sale — superseding the signed agreement of sale with one of his own preparation, before ultimately allowing that transaction to collapse. Second, he reportedly refused Neal & Massy’s written offer for Lot 35 — a refusal he was examined on during trial testimony. Together, those two transactions would have liquidated Precision’s entire debt to Republic Bank. Khan blocked both.

Third, and most damning: Kashir Khan has, for more than fifteen years, refused to file accounts with the Registrar as required by law, and refused to provide the directors of Precision Woodworking with any accounts of his receivership administration — despite repeated written requests from the Bulkans’ attorneys and a personal visit to his office by the directors themselves.

A receiver who will not account for his administration is not administering a company. He is occupying it. The refusal to file accounts is not a technicality — it is a direct violation of the statutory framework governing receiverships in Guyana.

This is not a minor procedural lapse. Under Guyana’s Companies Act and the Financial Institutions Act, a receiver has mandatory obligations to file accounts and to provide accounting access to the company’s directors. Kashir Khan has defied those obligations for a decade and a half — without reprimand from the court, without action from the Bar Association, and without response from the Bank of Guyana, which continues to permit Republic Bank to maintain him in place.

Republic Bank’s defense for keeping Khan installed, even after the dismissal of the Bulkans’ primary claim in 2021, is that Precision still owes the bank money. That may be so. But the bank refuses — despite repeated, documented requests — to provide statements of account to demonstrate what that debt actually is. A bank that claims you owe it money, but will not show you the accounting, is not recovering a debt. It is sustaining a fiction.

V. NINE YEARS IN A SPECIALIST COURT — AND AN ILLEGAL RULING

In May 2012, the Bulkans filed their legal action — Action No. 298 C/D 2012 — against Kashir Khan and Republic Bank (Guyana) Limited. The case was heard before Guyana’s Commercial Court, a specialist tribunal established at the direct lobbying of commercial banks who complained the regular courts were too slow for commercial disputes.

The irony is almost too painful to record. The case that gave the commercial banking sector its specialist court became, in the hands of that same sector, a study in procedural obstruction. Khan took four years to file a witness statement after being ordered to do so by the court — without reprimand and without penalty. Interlocutory applications, Full Court appeals and procedural manoeuvres by counsel for the defendants extended the matter year after year.

A judgment was finally delivered on February 15, 2021 — nearly nine years after filing. But the Bulkans and their legal team allege the ruling was itself illegal. The decision, they argue, addressed only sub-paragraphs (B), (F) and (N) of their Statement of Claim — the very sub-paragraphs that had been struck by a prior Full Court ruling. The court ruled, in effect, on claims it had previously struck from the record, while ignoring the surviving claims entirely.

A decision that adjudicates claims already struck by a higher court is not a judgment. It is a nullity — and one that raises grave questions about the integrity of the proceedings.

In March 2022, the Bulkans filed a Motion at the Court of Appeal seeking an expedited hearing of their appeal against Justice Singh’s decision. It was uncontested by Republic Bank and Khan. As of the most recent public reporting in March 2026 — fourteen years after the original action was filed — the appeal has still not been heard on its merits. Ronald Bulkan, writing in Stabroek News in March 2026, expressed the hope that the matter would ‘sooner rather than later receive attention.’

Between January 2017 and January 2024, at least 14 articles and letters were published in the Guyanese press on this matter. Republic Bank, the judiciary, the Bank of Guyana and key public officials have remained silent throughout.

VI.RAM & MCRAE — THE AUDITOR’S SILENCE

No exposé of this affair is complete without confronting the role of Ram & McRae, Chartered Accountants — the external auditors of Republic Bank (Guyana) Limited.

Ram & McRae, the firm co-founded by Christopher Ram, has served as auditor to Republic Bank for decades. Annual reports from 2015, 2017 and 2022 — all publicly available — list Ram & McRae as the Bank’s appointed auditors, with the AGM passing resolutions at each annual meeting to reappoint and remunerate them. The relationship between the auditor and the bank is not incidental; it is structural, remunerative and ongoing.

As external auditor, Ram & McRae is required to certify the accounts of Republic Bank and provide an Independent Auditor’s Report at the end of each financial year. Those accounts, certified year after year, contain no disclosure, no qualification and no note concerning the unresolved controversy surrounding the $82 million deposit into Precision Woodworking’s account — an account held on Republic Bank’s books, under a receivership that the Bank controls, and which has never been subject to independent accounting review.

An auditor who certifies a bank’s accounts without qualifying or disclosing a material unresolved liability — a receivership that has filed no accounts in fifteen years, held by a bank that refuses to provide account statements to the company it claims to be owed by — is not auditing. They are covering.

Christopher Ram is a prominent public commentator in Guyana, with a blog and a reputation as a voice on governance and financial integrity. That public persona exists in direct tension with a professional relationship that, the Bulkans allege, has provided material cover for Republic Bank’s conduct. Ram’s public silence on this specific matter — which has been extensively documented in the press — is not a neutral absence. It is itself a statement.

Notably, in March 2026, the Caribbean Court of Justice delivered its judgment in Cara Investments Limited v Christopher Ram and Bank of Nova Scotia — a case in which Ram served as court-appointed Receiver-Manager of Hotel Tower Ltd. The CCJ, in that judgment, articulated an evolving principle that good faith is a foundational organizing principle in contract law, requiring parties to act honestly, reasonably and fairly, and not capriciously or arbitrarily. The CCJ’s language is directly applicable to the conduct alleged against Republic Bank and its receiver in the Precision Woodworking matter — conduct that, if the Bulkans’ account is accurate, represents the antithesis of good faith at every turn.

VII. THE POLITICAL DIMENSION

Ronald Bulkan is not simply an aggrieved businessman. He is a former Minister of Communities in the APNU+AFC coalition government that held office from 2015 to 2020. He was an APNU parliamentarian, an APNU candidate in the 2020 general elections, and a vocal critic of the PPP/C during the years of opposition. He entered politics not out of opportunism, but from a stated commitment — documented in a 2012 interview with Stabroek News — to the kind of institutional reform that would break Guyana’s cycles of ethnic patronage and political retribution.

It is important to note the timing. The events that precipitated Precision’s destruction — the receiver appointment, the scuttled sales, the phantom deposit — occurred in 2011, during the final years of the PPP/C’s near-uninterrupted two-decade hold on government. The Bulkans allege that bank officials at the highest level saw in the company’s financial difficulties an opportunity for personal enrichment through a pre-arranged disposal of prime industrial real estate at Ruimveldt — properties that had significant commercial value — to connected parties.

Their suspicion, stated explicitly in the dossier, is that the properties were targeted for disposal to Guytrac — the same firm whose principal allegedly made the $82 million phantom deposit. H. Sugrim, identified in trial testimony as the owner of an establishment adjacent to Precision’s Lot 35, made a purchase offer for that property that was also refused by the receiver. The identity of the eventual buyers of Precision’s properties — and the prices at which those assets were sold — remain, to this day, a matter of public record that neither the receiver nor the bank will disclose.

The Bulkans allege that no Guyanese staff of the bank would have benefitted from the scheme — and that the local staff’s refusal to testify in support of the bank’s case during trial is itself a form of institutional conscience.

Since the PPP/C’s return to power in 2020, the state’s institutional apparatus — including the Bank of Guyana, the judiciary’s Commercial Court division, and the public prosecutorial machinery — has done nothing to address what is, on the documented record, an unresolved scandal involving an unlawful receivership, an unaccounted asset disposal, a suspicious deposit, and a certified-public-accountant-turned-receiver who has defied his legal obligations for fifteen years without consequence.

Whether the failure to act reflects institutional inertia or deliberate political calculation is a question this newspaper cannot answer definitively. What we can say is this: in a country where the ruling party governs with a demonstrated appetite for using institutional levers against its political adversaries, the continued impunity of those who stripped a former APNU minister of his life’s work does not look like an accident.

VIII. THE HUMAN COST

Precision Woodworking was not just a company. It was the livelihood of scores of Guyanese workers. A Kaieteur News report from 2022 documented that former Precision workers were still owed in excess of $30 million in unpaid salaries and termination benefits — more than a year after the dismissal of the Bulkans’ primary legal action, and with the receiver still installed and still refusing to provide any accounting.

The brothers themselves, having issued personal guarantees to Republic Bank, find themselves unable to restart any commercial enterprise — because in the absence of a final accounting of what the receivership owed or discharged, they cannot establish their own financial standing. A receiver who refuses to account does not merely harm a company. He poisons the financial futures of every individual attached to it.

 

Precision Woodworking had been, in its prime, proof of what Guyana’s non-oil productive sector could achieve. It had won the region’s most prestigious entrepreneurial honor. It had attracted international investment, exported Guyanese manufacturing excellence to Europe, and demonstrated the viability of sustainable value-added processing in the timber sector. That enterprise is gone — not because it failed on its merits, but because the institutional framework that should have protected it was turned against it instead.

IX. WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW

The 592 Guardian calls for the following:

  1. The Court of Appeal must hear and determine the Bulkans’ appeal without further delay. Fourteen years is not a judicial process. It is a denial of justice dressed in procedural garb.
  2. The Bank of Guyana must exercise its supervisory authority under the Financial Institutions Act and investigate the circumstances of the June 2011 deposit, the administration of the Precision Woodworking receivership, and Kashir Khan’s failure to file accounts with the Registrar. Regulatory silence is regulatory complicity.
  3. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Guyana (ICAG) must examine the conduct of Ram & McRae as auditors to Republic Bank in the context of their statutory obligations and the unresolved controversy documented in this report.
  4. Republic Bank (Guyana) Limited must provide full account statements to the directors of Precision Woodworking from the date of the receiver’s appointment to the present. A bank that will not show its accounting to the party it claims to be owed cannot claim to be acting within the law.
  5. Kashir Khan must immediately file all outstanding receivership accounts with the Registrar and provide the directors of Precision Woodworking with a full accounting of his administration. Failure to do so should result in professional sanction, civil contempt proceedings, and referral to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

CONCLUSION

In Guyana’s current moment of oil-driven exuberance, it is easy to look past the small-scale institutional corruptions that have always characterized the relationship between capital, the state and the courts. Easy — but inexcusable.

The story of Precision Woodworking is not ancient history. It is ongoing. As Republic Bank celebrates record profits of $7.26 billion for its 2024 financial year — a 47.9 percent increase — the men who built one of the country’s finest manufacturing enterprises remain unable to account for what was taken from them, unable to restart, and without recourse in a court system that has consumed fourteen years of their lives.

Ronald Bulkan entered politics because he believed that the nature of a society is determined by its leaders. He believed Guyana could be better. The institutional apparatus that stripped him and others of Precision Woodworking, and has since refused to provide any accounting of what was done with it, is a precise measure of how much further Guyana still has to go.

The heist of Precision Woodworking is not a dispute between a bank and a defaulting borrower. It is a case study in how Guyana’s institutional infrastructure — banking, regulatory, judicial and professional — can be assembled into an instrument of dispossession when the political conditions are right.

The 592 Guardian will continue to report on this matter until there is a full accounting.

 

KEY FACTS AT A GLANCE

Company founded:  1983, by  Howard ,Ronald, Rustum Bulkan, Gordon Forte and Hakim Rahaman

Peak recognition:  Ernst & Young Caribbean Entrepreneur of the Year, 2001 — the only Guyanese company to hold this honour

World Academy induction:  Ronald Bulkan, World Entrepreneur of the Year Academy, Monaco, 2002

Total debt repaid (principal):  Over $513 million

Total interest paid:  Over $327 million

Disputed deposit:  $82,068,617 — deposited June 16, 2011 by Shamnarine Narine (Guytrac)

Receiver appointed:  Kashir Khan, attorney-at-law and accountant — July 2011

Legal action filed:  May 15, 2012 — Action No. 298 C/D 2012

Commercial Court judgment:  February 15, 2021 — alleged by plaintiffs to be illegal

Court of Appeal motion:  Filed March 7, 2022 — uncontested — still pending as of 2026

Receivership accounts filed:  None — after 15+ years

Workers’ unpaid benefits:  Over $30 million outstanding

RBGL 2024 after-tax profit:  $7.26 billion — a 47.9% increase

External auditor to RBGL:  Ram & McRae, Chartered Accountants (reappointed annually)

CCJ good faith precedent:  Cara Investments v Christopher Ram & Bank of Nova Scotia, March 2026

THE 592 GUARDIAN  ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  ♦  INDEPENDENT ♦ GUYANESE

 

EXXON’S BOUNTY: FIVE YEARS, US$214 MILLION, AND COUNTING

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦TRUTH♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY

EXXON’S BOUNTY: FIVE YEARS, US$214 MILLION, AND COUNTING— June 2026

The numbers are not in dispute. ExxonMobil submitted them.

Let us be precise about what is happening here.

Independent auditors examined costs that ExxonMobil itself declared and submitted for recovery under Guyana’s Production Sharing Agreement. They reviewed the numbers. They did the arithmetic. And they concluded that US$214 million in expenses charged to Guyana between 1999 and 2017 should never have been charged at all.

That audit was completed. The report was delivered to government in March 2021. Five years have since elapsed.

ExxonMobil is still fighting.

This is not a dispute over interpretation. This is not a clash of competing methodologies or a good-faith disagreement between technical experts. The figures under challenge are figures that ExxonMobil itself put forward. The company submitted those numbers. Independent auditors examined them and said: these do not hold up. And now, rather than account for what it claimed, ExxonMobil has spent half a decade doing what bounty hunters do — holding the prize and running out the clock.

That is the only honest description of what this conduct represents. Not partnership. Not good faith engagement. A calculated campaign of attrition against a sovereign nation’s right to recover money that independent scrutiny says was never legitimately taken.

The arithmetic of delay is not neutral. Every month this dispute continues unresolved is another month that US$214 million is not building a hospital in Region Six, not repairing drainage infrastructure in Berbice, not funding the school that a child in Linden is still waiting to attend. The government has a word for this posture when citizens practice it. It is called contempt.

The Production Sharing Agreement is not ambiguous on the question of timeline. Dispute resolution procedures exist. The prescribed window for appointing a sole expert has lapsed. Government officials themselves publicly acknowledged more than a year ago that direct discussions had concluded and the process should advance to its next formal stage. Yet Guyanese are told, again, that talks are continuing.

What, precisely, are they still discussing?

Accountability journalism requires the uncomfortable question be asked plainly: is the government negotiating in the interest of the Guyanese people, or is it managing the optics of a dispute it lacks the political will to press to conclusion? Because those are not the same thing. And the difference between them is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.

The US$214 million figure is, moreover, only the first act of a much larger drama. A second audit has reportedly flagged a further US$65 million in questionable charges. A third audit — covering a staggering US$19.6 billion in expenditures — is said to be complete, but its findings remain concealed from the Guyanese public. Concealed. On expenditures nearly equivalent to the country’s entire GDP.

This government has spoken endlessly about transparency as a governance value. It should be asked to demonstrate it.      

 The Petroleum Agreement under which ExxonMobil operates was already, in the assessment of economists and resource governance specialists across the hemisphere, among the most concessionary contracts ever signed by an oil-producing nation. Guyana accepted terms that tilted the table. In exchange, Guyanese were told, came investment, expertise, and a trustworthy long-term partner.

A trustworthy partner does not contest audit findings for five years.

A trustworthy partner does not force a developing nation to threaten international arbitration to recover money that independent reviewers concluded was improperly charged.

A trustworthy partner does not treat the sovereign rights of a small Caribbean nation as a negotiating inconvenience to be slowly exhausted.      

A trustworthy partner does not treat the sovereign rights of a small Caribbean nation as a negotiating inconvenience to be slowly exhausted.

What ExxonMobil has demonstrated, through five years of procedural resistance, is that it intends to maximize extraction in every dimension available to it — from the reservoir and from the dispute resolution process alike. The Production Sharing Agreement is being deployed not merely to govern production, but to govern how long a legitimate grievance can be held at bay.

Guyana’s oil belongs to the people of Guyana. Not to the companies that extract it. Not to the officials who negotiate the terms. Not to the public relations narrative of “partnership” that has substituted for genuine accountability in too many press conferences.

The government’s obligation is singular and non-negotiable: recover every dollar that independent auditors say this country is owed. Not when ExxonMobil is ready. Not after another year of “ongoing discussions.” Now.

Because the longer this drags on, the more a different and more damaging conclusion becomes unavoidable — that the bounty hunter does not merely hunt. It has learned, from experience, that patience in Guyana is reliably rewarded.

 

The 592 Guardian holds that accountability is not a courtesy extended to power. It is the price power pays for legitimacy.

 

Teachers in the Witness Box: When the Ministry Makes Educators the Food Inspectors

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ OPINION ♦JUNE 2026

Teachers in the Witness Box: When the Ministry Makes Educators the Food Inspectors

Minister Sonia Parag has made teachers the food inspectors of Guyana’s National School Feeding Program. But teachers are not certified food safety professionals.

A photograph cannot detect bacteria. A video cannot measure temperature. And a signature on a “letter of satisfaction” does not make a meal wholesome. 

The Minister has placed herself in the witness box—and the questions she must answer are not about political gains, but about children’s safety.

On June 11, 2026, the Ministry of Education dismissed claims that St. Theresa Primary School in Region Six received spoiled, moldy cheese sandwiches. The ministry’s statement rests on five “facts” that collapse under scrutiny. FACT 2 declares that every meal is “videoed, photographed and inspected thoroughly by teachers,” who must then “sign a letter of satisfaction confirming that the meals meet the requisite high standards fit for our children”. FACT 3 states that since September 2025, the minister made it mandatory for caterers to provide video and photo evidence of meals being prepared.

‘This policy is accountability theater dressed as reform. It shifts professional food-safety liability onto uncertified educators while offering parents no real assurance that meals meet minimum safety, temperature, or nutritional standards.’

Teachers Are Not Certified Food Inspectors 

Minister Parag, teachers are not certified food inspectors. What training have the 5,000+ Guyanese teachers received on food-safety protocols, pathogen detection, temperature validation, or HACCP standards? Food inspection requires certified knowledge of bacterial growth zones (e.g., Salmonella, E. coli,) temperature thresholds (cold chain ≤4°C, hot food ≥60°C), cross-contamination prevention, and expiration date verification. Teachers lack the legal credentials to sign a “letter of satisfaction” for food safety.

A photo cannot detect these. Teachers are being tasked with food-safety auditing—a role that requires certification they do not possess. This is role expansion without resources, training, or legal indemnity.’

The Scientific Impossibility of Visual Checks

How does a photograph confirm that cheese sandwiches are not spoiled? Mold may be invisible in early stages. How do you verify the meal was stored at the correct temperature from caterer to classroom? FACT 2 says meals are “photographed, videoed, and inspected thoroughly,” but photos cannot measure internal temperature of food, bacterial contamination, nutritional content (protein, vitamins, calories), or moisture levels that cause mold.

‘This is documentation theater—it looks like accountability but has zero scientific basis. The ministry offers no third-party verification. The QR code for complaints is a public relations tool, not a safety mechanism.’

 Independent audits, temperature logs, and lab tests for bacterial contamination are nowhere mentioned.

Nutritional Standards Cannot Be Verified by Photos

How do teachers verify that sandwiches meet the required nutritional standards (e.g., 400–500 kcal, 15g protein, micronutrient requirements for ages 5–12)? 

Can a photo show the cheese is low-sodium, the bread is whole-grain, or the filling has adequate protein? 

The National School Feeding Program mandate includes nutritional adequacy (per FAO Guyana), but teachers are being tasked with nutrition auditing—a role that requires dietitian certification.

 Legal Liability Without Protection

When a teacher signs a “letter of satisfaction,” are they now legally liable if a child gets food poisoning? What is the due process if a caterer is removed under FACT 4? Have teachers been given legal protection or indemnity? The ministry is creating personal liability for teachers without training, certification, or appeal mechanisms. 

This is potentially unconstitutional role expansion—teachers are being made co-defendants in food-safety failures.

Parental Assurance Is Missing

 

Parents are told to trust photos and videos. But how can they be assured these checks meet minimum food safety standards? Where is the independent audit? Where are the temperature logs? Where are the lab tests for bacterial contamination? The ministry offers no transparency. The policy assumes that documentation equals safety, but it does not.

Political Deflection vs. Real Accountability

The minister claims complaints are “cheap political gains” and that meals are “forgotten in book bags for days” (FACT 5). But St. Theresa Primary reported spoiled cheese on June 11—how do you explain the discrepancy between your verification (FACT 1) and the parents’ report? (FACT 1) says cheese was served since June 9 and verified fresh by the headteacher. (FACT 5) blames parents for forgetting meals. This is contradictory deflection. The ministry is gaslighting parents while avoiding accountability for caterer breaches.

 The Time Burden on Teachers

This policy also adds significant time to teachers’ daily schedules. Inspecting 50 meals thoroughly (10–15 seconds each), photographing them (3–5 seconds each), and videoing them (5–10 seconds each) takes 16–27 minutes per lunch period. With two lunch rotations, that’s 32–54 minutes/day—roughly 2.5–5 hours per week.

For teachers already stretched thin, this is a substantial burden that directly competes with their primary mandate: delivering the school learning curriculum.

The Witness Box Is Yours

Minister Parag’s policy is not accountability—it is accountability alchemy. She is trying to turn photos into food safety, videos into nutrition audits, and teachers into certified inspectors. Children’s wellbeing cannot be secured through documentation theater.

The hard questions are clear:
What food-safety training have teachers received?
How do photos verify temperature, bacterial contamination, or nutrition?
What legal indemnity protects teachers from liability?
Where are the independent audits and temperature logs?
How do you explain the discrepancy between FACT 1 and parents’ reports of spoiled cheese?

 The witness box is yours, Minister. Answer these questions with data, not deflection.

Until you do, parents cannot be assured that their children’s meals are safe, wholesome, or nutritionally adequate. And teachers remain unfairly burdened with a role they were never trained to perform.

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

Who Controls the Room?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY · TRANSPARENCY · THE PUBLIC INTEREST

EDITORIAL

Who Controls the Room?

How the Ali administration sought to manage Guyana’s second EITI validation — and what it tells us about the state of transparency in the oil boom era

 

June, 2026

When the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative’s independent validation team arrived in Guyana this week, it came with a clear mandate: assess whether the Guyana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative — GYEITI — is meeting the international standard for disclosure and inclusive multi-stakeholder governance in the management of extractive wealth. What it encountered instead was a masterclass in managed access.

Opposition Members of Parliament Tabitha Sarabo-Halley and Amanza Walton-Desir attended their scheduled parliamentary engagement on Thursday, June 12, not because the system worked — but because it failed and then someone in civil society picked up the phone.

The EITI Secretariat had written to the Clerk of the National Assembly on June 5, 2026, formally requesting that an invitation be extended to all Members of Parliament. The schedule was explicit: Opposition MPs were to meet the validation team at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre on Thursday at 4:30 p.m. Government MPs would follow Friday morning. The letter existed. The agenda existed. The dates existed. What apparently did not exist was the will within the parliamentary administration to ensure the opposition received its invitation.

The MPs showed up not because the system worked — but because it failed, and a citizen caught it.

Instead, Opposition MPs learned of the engagement informally — a matter of hours before it was scheduled to begin — through what Walton-Desir described as the vigilance of a public-spirited citizen. That citizen was this writer, who received the invitation in their capacity as an independent investigative journalist. In the course of verifying the engagement’s details, it became apparent that parliamentary opposition had received nothing. The information was shared immediately.

The result: Opposition MPs showed up. The engagement proceeded. But the question of why they almost did not — and what would have occurred had no outside party intervened — is one that the EITI validation team ought to pursue with some urgency.

THE PATTERN BEHIND THE OMISSION

To treat the failure to notify opposition parliamentarians as administrative error is to be deliberately naïve. This is Guyana in 2026. The Ali administration has demonstrated, with consistency, that transparency institutions are to be managed rather than empowered. The record is not ambiguous.

The original GYEITI Multi-Stakeholder Group — the citizens’ watchdog at the heart of EITI’s governance architecture — has been effectively disbanded and reconstituted with government-aligned nominees. The MSG, which EITI requires to include independent civil society voices with genuine capacity to scrutinize extractive sector governance, now more closely resembles a consultative advisory panel curated for compliance optics than a genuine accountability mechanism.

That structural capture is the context within which the parliamentary notification failure must be read. The government had every incentive to ensure that the voices most likely to disclose the gap between GYEITI’s reported outputs and the lived reality of extractive governance in Guyana — sole-sourced power contracts, opaque oil revenues, procurement irregularities, audit failures at agencies like NDIA — did not reach the EITI team’s ears in any structured or formal capacity.

Whether the failure to transmit the invitation was the act of a single officer or the expression of a systemic culture of managed access, the effect was identical: opposition stakeholders were nearly excluded from a process specifically designed to solicit their perspectives.

WHAT THE VALIDATION TEAM SHOULD KNOW
  • The original GYEITI MSG has been restructured; civil society co-chairs Curtis Bernard and Vanda Radzik facilitated this week’s civil society session as former co-chairs
  • GPL’s InterEnergy contract was sole-sourced; no public competitive tender
  • Karpowership/Karadeniz arrangements lack full public disclosure of contractual terms
  • NDIA audits have identified procurement irregularities without consequence
  • Parliamentary opposition was nearly excluded from this validation exercise entirely

A NOTE TO THE OPPOSITION: INTROSPECTION IS ALSO REQUIRED

This editorial does not intend to let the Opposition off cleanly. The concerns Sarabo-Halley and Walton-Desir raised during the engagement — about governance opacity, marginalization of independent voices, and the credibility of GYEITI’s architecture — are legitimate and important. Their attendance, despite the obstacles, reflects genuine commitment to accountability.

But Parliament’s opposition benches cannot be in the business of relying on investigative journalists to alert them to international validation exercises taking place in their own backyard. The EITI Secretariat maintains a mailing list. The Guyana EITI website publishes its calendar of engagements. The validation schedule — June 8 through 12, 2026 — was not a state secret. A parliamentary office with functioning civic intelligence would have known.

The Secretariat maintains a mailing list. The calendar was public. A parliamentary office with functioning civic intelligence would have known.

That this writer — operating as an independent journalist, not a parliamentary researcher — was on the EITI notification list before the Chief Whip of the Opposition is a quiet indictment of how parliamentary opposition engages with the accountability ecosystem in Guyana. Being marginalized by the government is a different problem from failing to actively position yourself within the information flows of institutions you are supposed to be scrutinizing.

Subscribing to the mailing lists of EITI, the Extractive Industries Department, DPI, TIGI, the Bank of Guyana, and the relevant international bodies is not a supplementary function of legislative oversight. It is the baseline. Opposition MPs who are serious about extractive governance accountability ought to be embedded in these networks as a matter of professional practice — not waiting for formal invitations through a parliamentary office whose neutrality they themselves now question.

The institutional failure and the parliamentary failure are not mutually exclusive. Both are real. Both require remedy.

WHAT THE EITI MUST RECKON WITH

For the international validation team led by Francisco Paris, the events of this week are not peripheral. They are evidentiary. EITI’s standard requires that the multi-stakeholder group be genuinely representative, that civil society participants be free from government domination, and that the validation process itself be accessible to all relevant stakeholders. When opposition parliamentarians nearly miss their scheduled session due to what appears to be a failure of institutional transmission within a government-administered parliamentary secretariat, the validation process has a duty to investigate.

The question is not whether the omission was intentional. The question is whether the architecture of GYEITI — its MSG composition, its secretariat placement, its communication channels — is structured in a way that makes such omissions possible, predictable, and, for some, convenient.

A validation process that accepts managed access without interrogating the management is not a validation process. It is a performance of one.

Guyana is managing one of the most significant per-capita resource windfalls in the hemisphere. The institutions designed to ensure that wealth is disclosed, audited, and equitably governed are not functioning as designed. The EITI exists precisely for this moment — but only if its validation reflects reality rather than the version of reality that a government is prepared to present.

The auditors were invited to assess Guyana’s transparency. This week, Guyana showed them what transparency looks like when it is inconvenient: a letter in the Clerk’s drawer and a journalist making phone  calls.

THE 592 GUARDIAN

Independent accountability journalism for Guyana’s oil era

The Speaker’s Lecture Is the Problem

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

Accountability Journalism | Independent | Guyanese

EDITORIAL — PARLIAMENTARY ACCOUNTABILITY

The Speaker’s Lecture Is the Problem

Manzoor Nadir’s semantic defense of a dormant Assembly does not clarify the record—it confirms why the record needs defending–The 592 Guardian Editorial Board | June 2026

Parliament has not been “closed.” The Speaker is technically correct. Clerks are at their desks. Questions circulate in administrative limbo. The institution breathes, in the way that a building breathes when its lights are on and its doors are locked.

But a parliament that does not sit is not a parliament at work. It is a parliament in abeyance—and when the Speaker of a democratic assembly takes to state media to deliver a lecture on why that distinction should comfort the public, something has gone seriously wrong.

The 592 Guardian is not interested in scoring semantic victories. We are interested in the democratic vitality of the National Assembly. And on that question—the only question that matters—Speaker Nadir has no credible answer.

A Parliament that does not meet is not a Parliament at work. It is a Parliament on pause—no matter what the Speaker chooses to call it.

I.THE ANATOMY OF AN EVASION

Nadir’s defense rests on a single structural move: disaggregate “Parliament” from “sittings of the National Assembly,” then argue that the former continues while the latter merely pauses. This is a distinction that functions only in the abstract.

In every Westminster democracy worth naming—the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica—parliamentary accountability is measured not by administrative throughput but by the frequency, substance, and adversarial character of sittings. A Parliament that does not convene cannot question ministers in real time. It cannot compel testimony. It cannot debate the supplementary budgets that quietly expand executive spending authority. It cannot challenge the procurement decisions that are, in this administration’s case, systematically bypassing competitive tender.

The Speaker knows this. He is not uninformed; he is evasive. And evasion at this level of institutional responsibility is not a minor rhetorical failing—it is a democratic dereliction.

 

When the National Assembly went nearly four months without a sitting, the executive did not pause. Cabinet continued meeting. Contracts continued being awarded. The GPL-InterEnergy arrangement continued. The Karpowership renegotiations continued. The NDIA continued operating without audit resolution. None of it waited for Parliament. Only Parliament waited—for itself.

II.WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SAY

The Speaker cited over 400 questions submitted and processed as evidence of parliamentary vitality. We will take him at his word on the count. But numbers require context.

Over 150 of those questions were rejected outright. The Speaker does not dwell on this. He does not explain the grounds for rejection, the pattern of subject matter filtered out, or whether the rejections correlate with the most sensitive areas of executive conduct. He simply presents the figure as part of a bureaucratic accounting exercise designed to look like accountability.

It does not look like accountability. It looks like a gatekeeping system that processes scrutiny before it reaches the floor—and in doing so, insulates the executive from precisely the kind of dynamic, public, adversarial questioning that Westminster procedure was designed to enable.

Questions submitted to a clerk are not the same as questions put directly to a minister under parliamentary rules. The latter carries consequence. The former carries the illusion of process.

Procedural paperwork is not democratic oversight. It is the simulation of oversight—and the simulation has become the alibi.

III. THE INVERSION THAT INDICTS

The most revealing element of Nadir’s remarks was not his statistics. It was his accusation.

The Speaker accused members of the opposition and public commentators of “misleading” the public about Parliament’s status. Let us sit with this for a moment.

The National Assembly had not convened for the better part of a year at points within this term. The public record—sitting schedules, Hansard, parliamentary calendars—documents this. And yet the Speaker chose to characterize those who noted this reality as the misleaders.

This is not a defense. It is a prosecution of the witnesses. It is a rhetorical tactic deployed when the substantive record cannot be defended: discredit the observers rather than answer the observation. The Ali administration has used this tactic repeatedly—on procurement critics, on labor rights advocates, on journalists who report what the government auditors themselves have found. The Speaker, in deploying it, aligns himself with the evasion culture he is constitutionally obligated to check.

The Speaker of the National Assembly is not a member of the Cabinet. He is not a spokesperson for the government’s record. His institutional function is to guarantee the integrity of parliamentary process—including its frequency, its openness, and its independence from executive preference. When he instead uses press access to rebut parliamentary critics on behalf of a government narrative, he has crossed a line that compromises his office.

IV.STATE MEDIA AS DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT

This editorial would be incomplete without addressing how the Speaker’s remarks reached the public: through taxpayer-funded state media platforms, broadcast without challenge, rebuttal, or editorial counterweight.

Guyana’s state broadcasting apparatus—NCN and its affiliates—operates on a remit of public service. That remit includes fair, balanced, and editorially independent coverage of governance. What it does not include—or should not include—is the uncritical amplification of institutional self-justification from the office of one of the country’s senior constitutional officers.

When state resources are used to broadcast a one-sided defense of parliamentary inactivity, the public is not being informed. It is being managed. The distinction matters enormously in a democracy that still struggles with the legacy of state media as propaganda infrastructure.

This is not an abstract concern. When the same platforms that broadcast the Speaker’s defense of procedural normalcy do not equally broadcast the opposition’s counter-arguments, or the civil society analyses, or the comparative democratic benchmarks that expose the inadequacy of his position, the public discourse is being curated—not served.

The Speaker’s lecture confirms the very impunity it denies. Institutions that cannot be questioned do not defend themselves with evidence—they defend themselves with authority.

V.WHAT A FUNCTIONING PARLIAMENT LOOKS LIKE

We will not be accused of offering only critique without standard. Here is what functioning parliamentary democracy looks like in comparable Westminster systems.

In the United Kingdom, the House of Commons sits for approximately 150 days per year under normal conditions. Prime Minister’s Questions occurs every Wednesday when Parliament is in session. Select committees meet continuously, publishing inquiries on government spending, policy failures, and institutional conduct. Ministers appear before these committees and are questioned under oath. The record is public, searchable, and binding on the government’s credibility.

In Trinidad and Tobago, Parliament’s Standing Orders require that the Assembly meet at least once every two months. In Jamaica, budget oversight committees sit independently of the parliamentary calendar to ensure continuity of fiscal scrutiny. In Barbados, the parliamentary question system is supplemented by Ministerial Statements that require immediate debate.

None of these systems are perfect. All of them sit more regularly than Guyana’s National Assembly has in the period under review. All of them provide mechanisms for real-time executive accountability that do not depend on clerks processing questions in administrative corridors.

Guyana is not a small territory with limited institutional capacity. It is an oil-producing state with a GDP that has more than doubled in five years, a procurement budget that runs to billions of dollars annually, and an executive branch that has demonstrated—repeatedly, across this publication’s investigative record—a preference for opacity over transparency. That state needs more parliamentary oversight, not less. It needs more sittings, not administrative equivalents of sittings. It needs a Speaker who guards the institution’s independence rather than manages the institution’s public relations.

VI.THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEMANDS

The 592 Guardian puts the following on the record—directed at the Speaker of the National Assembly, at the government benches, and at the constitutional oversight bodies that have remained silent:

1.  The National Assembly must publish a firm sitting schedule for the remainder of the parliamentary year, with a minimum frequency of once per month, publicly available and legally enforceable by opposition motion.
2.  The Speaker must provide a full accounting—broken down by subject matter—of the 150-plus questions rejected during the period in question. The public is entitled to know what categories of executive conduct were filtered before reaching the floor.
3.  State media must provide equal broadcast time and editorial weight to parliamentary critics, opposition spokespersons, and civil society analysts as it provides to institutional self-justifications from constitutional officers.
4.  The Parliamentary Management Committee must convene an independent review of question processing procedures, with terms of reference that include examining whether rejection patterns correlate with politically sensitive subject areas.
5.  The Speaker must publicly clarify whether any sitting was deferred, delayed, or cancelled at the request of the executive branch, and on what authority such a request was made or accommodated.
6.  The Guyana Elections Commission and the Ombudsman’s Office must independently assess whether the prolonged gaps between sittings in the pre-election period constituted a structural suppression of parliamentary accountability for electoral advantage.
THE VERDICT

Manzoor Nadir has served the National Assembly for many years. His institutional knowledge is not in question. His judgment in this episode is.

A Speaker who uses state media to rebut critics, cites administrative statistics as substitutes for democratic vitality, and accuses observers of misleading a public that can read a sitting calendar has made a choice. He has chosen institutional defensiveness over institutional integrity.

That choice has consequences—not merely for his office, but for the credibility of the Assembly he presides over. Every time a Speaker defends procedural adequacy rather than demanding procedural excellence, the bar for parliamentary accountability drops. Every time state media amplifies that defense without challenge, the public learns that the institution serves itself before it serves them.

Guyana is at an inflection point. Oil revenues are transforming the fiscal and political landscape at a pace that outstrips the institutional capacity to oversee them. The National Assembly is either a check on that transformation, or it is not. It cannot be both a functioning parliament and a parliament that meets at administrative convenience.

The Speaker has had his say. The record will have the final word.

THE 592 GUARDIAN

Independent accountability journalism for Guyana.

Correspondence and submissions: editor@592guardian.com

When State Data Becomes a Political Weapon

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ EDITORIAL♦ PRIVACY♦ JUNE 2026

When State Data Becomes a Political Weapon

There is something deeply rotten: in a political culture that celebrates “digital transformation” while leaving ordinary citizens exposed to digital exploitation. If a man can be plucked from a photograph, identified, and dragged into a political crossfire through information that may have been accessible from a state system, then the real scandal is no longer the headline. The scandal is the state itself.

This is not governance. This is surveillance politics with a smiling face.

The public is being asked to accept a dangerous normal: that once your name, image, location, housing history, or beneficiary status enters a government system, your privacy can be treated as expendable whenever political convenience demands a target. That is not a technical slip. That is a democratic disgrace.

Let us be plain. If any ministry, agency, contractor, insider, or political operative had access to personal records and used them to identify, expose, or weaponize a citizen for partisan purposes, then that is a grave abuse of power. Full stop. It does not matter how loudly anyone wraps themselves in the language of development, housing, or public service. If state-held information is being turned into a tool of intimidation or character attack, the government has crossed a line that should alarm every citizen.

The issue here is not whether: a citizen once benefited from a public program. The issue is whether public assistance has now become a chain to drag people back into political obedience. A house built at the state’s expense is not a license for humiliation. A beneficiary is not property of the ruling party. A recipient of public support does not surrender the right to privacy, dignity, or political independence.

That is the toxic logic this country must reject.

What makes this matter even more serious: is the chilling implication that a digital database, supposedly designed to improve service delivery, may instead be functioning as a political vulnerability. If records can be searched, matched, shared, or leaked to identify people in public life, then every citizen is at risk. Today it is a housing beneficiary. Tomorrow it could be a pensioner, a single mother, a public servant, a farmer, or any ordinary person whose details have been quietly absorbed into the machinery of the state.

And this is where accountability must begin. Who accessed the information? Under what authority? Were logs kept? Was there consent? Was the data shared internally, leaked externally, or used through some informal network of political loyalty? If the government believes its systems are secure, it should welcome scrutiny. If it resists scrutiny, it confirms the fear that the database is not a shield for citizens but a weapon pointed at them.

The prosecutors’ question is simple: who touched the data, who used it, and who benefits from the abuse?

Because this is bigger than one person in one photograph. It is about whether Guyana is building a modern state or a digital labyrinth where citizens can be tracked, identified, and publicly punished whenever they step out of line. It is about whether public records belong to the people or to the political class that temporarily occupies office.

Reshie Rampersaud targeted for speaking up

 A government serious about transparency :would immediately call for an independent audit, publish the rules governing access to personal data, and explain exactly how beneficiary information is protected from abuse. It would treat privacy as a constitutional duty, not a public relations nuisance. It would acknowledge that digital systems without strong safeguards do not modernize democracy; they degrade it.

What the public should not accept: is the lazy excuse that this is simply politics as usual. It is not. Politics as usual does not require the possible misuse of state data. Politics as usual does not require the exposure of ordinary citizens to partisan retaliation. Politics as usual does not require a culture in which the state knows everything about the people while the people are left to guess who is watching them.

If the digital state can be bent into a political instrument, then every promise of modernization becomes suspect. If personal information can be harvested and weaponized, then the government owes the country far more than denials and distractions. It owes answers. It owes safeguards. It owes accountability.

And until those answers come, the red flag should stay up.

The real crime is not that citizens are speaking out. The real crime would be a state architecture that quietly turns citizen data into political ammunition. That is the abuse the public must resist, expose, and punish.

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

 

Memo for Messrs. Woods, Routledge -UGGI Survey -Pt III

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Memo for Messrs. Woods, Routledge -UGGI Survey -Pt III

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ OPINION

BY: GHK LALL

I’m the bearer of bad news for Mr. Darren Woods and Mr. Alistair Routledge, Exxon’s CEO and Guyana Country Head, respectively.

Wished it were different.  No such luck.  Must disappoint.  I humbly refer them to the University of Guyana Green Institute Survey (UGGI) titled: Trust, Oil, and Building a Better Society.”  The news is the worst that could be expected for foreign oil companies in Guyana.  Due to its oversized height, its muscular presence in Guyana, Exxon stands foremost.  I think “foreign oil companies” is a careful euphemism for Exxon.

Messrs. Woods, Routledge: Guyanese are not inspired by charity.  Bats, hats, apparel, sponsorships, community enhancements, UG monies all qualify as charity.  Cheap charity compared to real richness in a real 50:50 partner.  I believe that Guyanese think, sense, they are being tricked and cheated.  When foreign oil companies rank the lowest (2.50 out of 10) on the UGGI trust barometer in the minds of Guyanese, Exxon is savaged, has close to no standing, must rehabilitate itself.

For Mr. Routledge’s information, the only Guyanese impressed by his billboards are those feeding at Exxon’s trough.  Those swayed by handouts.  Those who live with an inferiority complex.  And those who are comfortable under the yoke of colonizers.

The mistake that Exxon and Mr. Routledge made was to dismiss Guyanese as pushovers.  Indeed, they are some at high elevations who are, and others who would do anything, from selling country to their souls, to be Exxon pushovers.

There are other Guyanese who are insulted by cheap clothing to keep them quiet, and big billboards intended to control their minds.

Mr. Woods, Mr. Routledge: it is my obligation, sirs, to convey that sparkling rhetoric doesn’t sizzle Guyanese hearts.  A first example: ‘partnership with the Guyanese people.’  It falls flat when audit obstinacy, renegotiation resistance, and complete transparency (new oil reserves, access to all areas of Exxon’s offshore ops, accounting records, and 50:50 profit calculation) incite more distrust than comfort.  Where is this partnership spoken about so smoothly?  What does it look like?  Who in Exxon harbors expectations that Guyanese are convinced that their country, their government, shares in a bona fide partnership, one of equals?  The UGGI report on foreign oil companies exposed how poorly they shape up relative to trust.

A second example: it is degrading, infuriating, for Guyanese to hear, Messrs. Woods and Routledge, about benefits for the Guyanese people, thanks to Exxon world-class management of their wealth.

Exxon harvests spectacular profits, season after season, from its “crown jewel” in Guyana, but the Guyanese owners of that same wealth, same crown jewel, live a meager existence.

  Exxon’s profit numbers and Guyana’s Oil Fund inflows do not begin to compare.  Which practical partner, one committed to a fair, straight, partnership, would not agree to ringfencing new projects?  Skirts around genuine 50:50 profit sharing when investments have been paid off, and Guyanese leaders are happy to be tethered to a merry-go-round?  Benefits are not on an equal footing, not fair.  One reason why so many locals are so distrustful of foreign oil companies.  To put brutally, many see caricatures: Ugly American, predator colonizer, ruthless exploiter.  This isn’t to disparage Guyana’s oil partner.  It’s to sound an alarm.

Mr. Woods and Mr. Routledge, when Guyanese observe their leaders slobber about sanctity of contract, grind themselves into putty, and render themselves silly, the source of their impotency traces straight to Exxon.  Their political power, their national leadership strength, hinges on the drivel of sanctity of contract.  It’s why national government ranks almost to the bottom on the UGGI’s trust scale.  Just above foreign oil companies.  The closeness in both earning such low marks from Guyanese on crucial trust could be linked to suspicions of collusion between the two.  Two peas in the same pod.  The incumbent government to retain power, the oil company to prosper to the detriment of Guyanese.  This not only reeks, but it also enrages.

Which citizen of any country is pleased to see national leaders reduced to quivering, bluffing, and bouncing from empty rhetorical stuffing?  The supine character of Guyana’s national government renders it contemptible, coats Exxon with disrepute.  Oil patrimony, democracy and liberty should never be gutted from this state.

Mr. Woods, Mr. Routledge: the game’s up.  The story is out.  Trust in Exxon is tantamount to a dead man walking.  I wish this bitter cup wasn’t mine to drink.

Whose Guyana Is It? The Hard Questions a Compliant Press Won’t Ask

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592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣♦ 𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝♦ 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮♦𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮

592 Guardian Editorial

Whose Guyana Is It? The Hard Questions a Compliant Press Won’t Ask

A 592 Guardian  Editorial

There is a story being told about Guyana’s rise — one of diplomatic maturity, strategic partnerships, and South-South cooperation. It is a story of trade doubling, tripling, and now touching the billion-dollar mark with Brazil. It is a story of a small nation punching above its weight on the world stage.

But behind that story, there is another one. And it demands to be told.

The Numbers That Indict the Narrative

Let us start with cold, uncontested facts. Trade between Guyana and Brazil has grown from US$58 million in 2020 to US$1 billion in 2026. Brazil is Guyana’s fifth-largest import source and seventh-largest export market. The two countries share a land border. Infrastructure connecting them — the Linden-Lethem Road, the Lethem airport upgrade, a proposed deep-water port — is actively being developed by both governments.

By every rational economic metric, Brazil is Guyana’s most consequential continental partner.

So when Guyana’s government decided to model and build its national digital payments architecture, which neighbor did it turn to?

It turned to India. In November 2024, during Prime Minister Modi’s state visit to Georgetown, Guyana signed an MoU with India’s NPCI International Payments Ltd specifically for deploying a UPI-like real-time payments system.

Ten MoUs in a single day. A diplomatic bonanza. Photo opportunities. Pageantry.

And Brazil — the country moving a billion dollars of goods and services with Guyana — was not in that room.

What Brazil Actually Built

This is not a case where both systems are equivalent and the choice is academic. Brazil’s Pix now reaches over 178 million users — approximately 91% of that country’s adult population — processing over 6 to 7 billion transactions monthly and moving more than USD $316 billion every single week. In 2024 alone, Pix processed 64 billion transactions — a 53% jump year over year — surpassing debit and credit card volumes by 80%.  Between 2020 and 2024, Pix brought approximately 71 million previously unbanked Brazilians into the formal digital economy, representing one of the largest financial inclusion events in modern history. 

And it is already moving regionally. Brazil’s central bank has been authorized to expand Pix internationally, and Brazilian tourists in Uruguay and Paraguay are already using their Pix digital wallets across the border. The system is currently active in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and the United States, with Colombia and Panama next in line. 

Guyana — Brazil’s direct neighbor and billion-dollar trade partner — does not appear on that list. That is not an accident of geography. That is a policy choice. And it demands an explanation.

India’s Trade With Guyana: The Real Figures

India’s total exports to Guyana in 2024 amounted to US$101 million.  One hundred and one million dollars. Against Brazil’s one billion. The ratio is roughly ten to one in Brazil’s favor.

Yet it is India that gets the digital payments partnership. India that gets the MoUs — ten of them. India whose companies are proliferating across Guyana’s economic landscape, from pharmaceuticals to mining to financial infrastructure. India is already the dominant supplier of pharmaceuticals to Guyana, accounting for approximately 39% of all pharmaceutical imports — over $13 million in 2024 — making it the leading country of origin for medicines entering this country. 

On what economic basis was India selected as the digital payments model for a country whose trade ecosystem is overwhelmingly South American? The government owes citizens a direct answer to that question — not diplomatic talking points, not press releases about historic bonds and shared values, but a concrete, evidence-based rationale.

Because if the rationale is not economic, we are entitled to ask what it actually is.

The Ekaa HRIM Question: A Window Into a Broken System

The Ekaa HRIM Earth Resources Management scandal is not merely a labor dispute. It is a window into something far more troubling about how Indian commercial interests have been permitted to operate in Guyana with insufficient scrutiny.

A mounting paper trail of regulatory complaints details systemic exploitation, forced confinement, and passport withholding against Indian laborers at the company’s Region 7 quarry — with complaints dating back as far as 2024.  Workers allege unfair contracts, confiscation of passports, denial of wages, arbitrary salary cuts, and unsafe working conditions that caused severe injury to one worker and the death of another.  The Ministry of Labor has confirmed it is examining the death of Indian national Sekhar Chhetri at the Batavia site on May 12, 2026, as well as an incident in which a worker lost four fingers.

The workers describe a calculated financial trap orchestrated between Ekaa HRIM and its preferred recruitment agency, Global Dynamic Talent Solutions, based in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu.

 Now ask the harder question: how did this company obtain the licensing, the permits, and the operational footprint to run a US$10 million quarrying operation in Guyana’s interior? Who approved it? Under what procurement and licensing framework? And were those approvals subjected to the same scrutiny that would be applied to, say, a Brazilian, Venezuelan, or American company seeking equivalent access?

The US State Department’s 2025 Investment Climate Statement on Guyana notes widespread concerns about procurement irregularities, disregard for rules governing public procurement, and reports of contract overpayments and breaches — all flagged in Guyana’s own Auditor General’s most recent report. 

These are not unrelated threads. They are part of the same fabric.

The Diaspora Variable — And Why It Cannot Be a Policy Framework

Guyana is a multi-ethnic nation. That is its strength, its complexity, and its permanent political reality. The Indo-Guyanese community constitutes over 40% of the population, and India has explicitly framed its deepening engagement with Guyana around this diaspora connection. 

There is nothing wrong with cultural ties. There is nothing wrong with trade relationships that leverage shared heritage and history. India has done this systematically and strategically across the Caribbean and South America, and one can acknowledge it as effective diplomacy.

But there is something profoundly wrong when a government of a plural, multi-ethnic nation allows diaspora affinity to distort sovereign economic decision-making. When the country with ten times your trade volume gets bypassed in favor of one that shares an ethnic connection with the ruling political base, that is not diplomacy. That is ethnic patronage operating through the mechanisms of state.

It is precisely the kind of politics that has stunted Guyana’s development for generations.

The Regional Integration Contradiction

The government speaks eloquently about South American integration. Foreign Secretary Robert Persaud invokes Guyana as a “gateway between South America and the Caribbean.” Infrastructure corridors to Brazil are hailed as transformative. The Linden-Lethem Road is a priority.

But you cannot build a road to Brazil and then refuse to build a payments rail to Brazil. You cannot describe Brazil as a “fundamental” partner for regional integration while simultaneously constructing your national financial infrastructure facing east toward Asia. These positions are in direct contradiction.

Integration is not rhetoric. It is architecture — physical, institutional, and financial. The digital payments choice was an architectural decision, and it pointed in exactly the wrong direction.

The Questions That Demand Answers

This editorial will be specific. The following questions should be put — formally, publicly, and with expectation of a written response — to the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Guyana, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Office of the President:

One. What independent feasibility analysis was conducted before Guyana signed the UPI MoU with India? Was there a comparative study of Pix versus UPI in the context of Guyana’s actual trade architecture? If so, publish it.

Two. Was Pix formally considered and rejected? On what grounds?

Three. What is the total value of government contracts, licenses, and approvals awarded to Indian-origin companies in Guyana since 2020? In which sectors? Through what procurement mechanisms?

Four. How did Ekaa HRIM Earth Resources Management obtain its operational licenses for Region 7 quarrying? What due diligence was conducted on its labor practices prior to the current scandal?

Five. Is there a deliberate government policy of preferencing Indian commercial partnerships — in digital infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, energy, education, and mining — above partnerships with geographically proximate nations? If so, what is the stated rationale?

Six. At what point does the facilitation of Indian state and commercial interests in Guyana become a conflict with Guyana’s national interest?

A Final Word

Guyana is at an extraordinary juncture. The oil revenue, the infrastructure build-out, the growing regional profile — these represent a genuine, generational opportunity. But opportunity squandered through ethnic politics, opaque procurement, and misaligned partnerships is not development. It is the old Guyana wearing new clothes.

The citizens of this country — of every ethnicity, every region, every economic station — deserve a government that makes decisions based on data, geography, economic logic, and national interest. Not on who shares a cultural heritage with the party in power. Not on which foreign government sends the most flattering diplomatic delegations.

Brazil is on our border. Brazil moves a billion dollars of trade with us. Brazil built one of the most successful digital payments systems in human history — and is expanding it across the continent. The logical, the rational, the nationally responsible choice was obvious.

That they chose otherwise demands an explanation.And Guyanese citizens — all of them — deserve one.

This editorial reflects the views of the editorial board. The questions posed herein are submitted in the public interest and in the spirit of democratic accountability.