THE LOTTERY NOBODY AUDITS

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    THE 592 GUARDIAN

Accountability Journalism for Guyana

 INVESTIGATION | FISCAL GOVERNANCE

The Lottery Nobody Audits

For nearly three decades, a Canadian company has held a monopoly over Guyana’s national lottery. The state gets a slice. The public gets a story. The contract stays hidden.

By the Editorial Board — The 592 Guardian

Georgetown, Guyana | June 2026

Every week, tens of thousands of Guyanese buy a lottery ticket. They part with their money in the hope of a windfall, sustained by the implicit promise that the national lottery is a regulated, publicly accountable system — one that channels some portion of its proceeds back into Guyanese society. What they are not told is that the institution presiding over that transaction is a privately held foreign company operating under a license whose terms have never been made public, audited by no institution the public can see, and accountable chiefly to its Canadian parent company.

Guyana Lottery Company Limited (GLCL), established in Guyana in 1996, has run the national lottery without interruption for nearly thirty years. That is not a record of continuity. It is a record of insulation. The company has survived three administrations, an oil boom, and a period of profound institutional reform — and emerged from all of it with its monopoly intact, its contract undisturbed, and its financials outside the reach of ordinary public scrutiny.

“The company’s social narrative is easy to publicize. The contractual economics remain the real public-interest test.”

This editorial does not allege criminality. It raises something more uncomfortable: the structural possibility that Guyana has been systematically undervaluing a captive revenue stream for a generation, while accepting CSR donations and charity optics in place of genuine fiscal accountability.

I.THE ARCHITECTURE OF A PRIVATE MONOPOLY

GLCL is owned by Canadian Bank Note Company — a Canadian corporation. That fact alone repositions the lottery not as a quasi-public service but as a foreign-controlled commercial operation licensed by the state. The distinction matters enormously. When public reporting describes the government’s take as “up to 24 percent on every ticket sold,” the framing is deliberately asymmetric: it sounds generous until you ask what the other 76 percent funds, where it goes, and under what conditions it may leave Guyana.

In any serious fiscal analysis, a revenue-share arrangement of this kind demands scrutiny across several dimensions: the gross revenue base against which the share is calculated; the treatment of operating costs deducted before the share is applied; the tax regime governing profits; the rules — if any — on profit repatriation to Canada; and whether the exclusivity clause that gives GLCL its monopoly is time-limited, renewable as of right, or negotiated at arm’s length. None of these questions has been answered in the public record.

What we have instead is a headline figure — 24 percent per ticket — offered without the denominator that would make it meaningful. This is not transparency. It is the appearance of transparency.

II.CSR IS NOT A DEVELOPMENT POLICY

GLCL’s public communications lean heavily on corporate social responsibility: donations to breast cancer awareness, contributions to schools, libraries, orphanages, sports development, and elderly care. These contributions are real. They are also, in every meaningful sense, beside the point.

The distinction between CSR and development policy is not semantic. CSR is discretionary. The company decides what to fund, when to fund it, and how to publicize it. Development policy is mandatory, measurable, and enforceable. A hospital built because a contract requires reinvestment is a public asset. A donation to a hospital announced at a press conference is a marketing expense. Guyana appears to have accepted the latter in lieu of the former for the better part of three decades.

“Philanthropy chosen by the company is not equivalent to enforceable public-interest obligations.”

The new board appointments announced recently — profiles built around corporate oversight, legal control, and lottery-sector expertise — confirm the model. This is a company organizing itself around commercial management and legal protection. There is no indication of a public accountability function, a citizens’ board, or an independent oversight mechanism. The governance improvements appear designed to serve the company’s interests, not the public’s.

III. THE EXTRACTION ARITHMETIC

The economics of lottery systems deserve direct examination. Lotteries are, by design, regressive revenue instruments. The people who spend the highest proportion of their income on lottery tickets are disproportionately lower income. In Guyana, a country where income inequality remains structurally entrenched even as oil revenues surge, this means that GLCL’s revenue base is substantially funded by the working poor and lower middle class.

The question is therefore not merely whether the government receives a fair share of revenue. The question is whether the entire arrangement — a foreign monopoly extracting consumer spending from a captive lower-income market, returning a capped percentage to the state and deploying charitable optics to manage its public image — is consistent with Guyana’s developmental obligations to its own people.

Put plainly: if GLCL collects, for argument’s sake, ten billion dollars in annual gross ticket sales, and pays out 50 percent in prizes, 24 percent to the government, and operates at, say, 10 percent administrative cost, Canadian Bank Note retains something in the order of 16 percent in profit — a figure that, compounded over 29 years of operation, represents a substantial and entirely private accumulation. The public has never seen the numbers that would confirm or refute this estimate. That is not an accident.

IV.THE DOCUMENTS THAT WOULD ANSWER THE QUESTION

Investigative journalism can only go as far as the documentary record allows. The 592 Guardian acknowledges that the full picture of GLCL’s fiscal relationship with the state remains hidden behind documents that have not been made public. But that opacity is itself the story. The following records, if released, would allow the public to determine whether the national lottery has served the national interest:

The original license agreement and all subsequent amendments; any audit reports commissioned by the Ministry of Finance, the Guyana Revenue Authority, or the gaming regulatory authority; annual audited financial statements covering all years of operation; records of transfers to the Consolidated Fund or any special-purpose lottery fund; documentation of any profit repatriation to Canadian Bank Note; and the terms of any exclusivity clause, including renewal conditions and expiry dates.

If any of these documents have been reviewed by Parliament, we have not seen the record of that review. If the Public Accounts Committee has examined the lottery arrangement, its findings are not in circulation. If the Auditor General has ever reported on GLCL’s compliance with its license, that report is not publicly accessible.

EDITORIAL NOTE: The 592 Guardian formally requests that the Ministry of Finance, the Guyana Revenue Authority, and the relevant gaming authority release the GLCL licence agreement and all associated audit and compliance records under applicable freedom of information provisions. We invite GLCL and Canadian Bank Note to respond to the questions raised in this editorial.

V. A FAMILIAR PATTERN

Readers of The 592 Guardian will recognize the architecture. We have reported on the GPL-InterEnergy sole-sourced power contract, in which a foreign operator secured captive market access under terms the public was not shown. We have reported on the Karpowership arrangement, in which emergency procurement framing was used to bypass competitive tendering for a long-duration infrastructure commitment. We have reported on G-Mining’s asset flip and Guyana’s failure to capture windfall value through transfer taxes or equity mechanisms.

In each of these cases, the structure is recognizably the same: a foreign operator receives exclusive or preferential access to a Guyanese revenue stream; the fiscal terms are presented to the public in summary form, never in full; and the operator ’s legitimacy is maintained through a combination of regulatory endorsement, selective disclosure, and reputational management through charity and social investment.

GLCL is the oldest iteration of this pattern. It has been running since 1996. It has survived the PPP, the APNU-AFC, and the PPP’s return to office. Its durability across administrations of different political philosophies suggests that the arrangement serves interests that transcend electoral cycles. That should trouble anyone who believes that natural and commercial resources held in Guyana ought to benefit Guyanese people on transparent terms.

VI.THE CENTRAL LINE

This is not a story about a lottery company doing bad things. It may be a story about a lottery company doing entirely legal things, inside a contract it negotiated in 1996 and has never had serious cause to renegotiate. The question The 592 Guardian is asking is simpler and more fundamental: does the public have the right to know the terms of the deal?

The answer, in a functioning democracy, is yes. The national lottery is not a private commercial matter between two companies. It is a licensed monopoly over a consumer market, operated by a foreign corporation, generating revenue partly claimed by the state. The public, as both the source of that revenue and the beneficiary class the state is supposed to serve, has an unambiguous right to see the contract.

“The public has been asked to accept ‘CSR’ and ‘development’ language without being shown the underlying bargain.”

Until those documents are released and subjected to independent audit, the lottery will remain what it has always been: a comfortable arrangement for everyone involved in its management, and an unexamined assumption for everyone else. Guyana, in 2026, with oil revenues transforming its fiscal landscape and governance reform on every politician’s lips, can afford to do better than that. It should start by publishing the contract.

The 592 Guardian  —  Accountability Journalism for Guyana  —  592guardian.com

France Arrives in Guyana After Africa Showed It the Door

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THE 592GUARDIAN ♦ EDITORIAL

INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL | FOREIGN INVESTMENT | JUNE 2026

THE LAST FRONTIER:

France Arrives in Guyana After Africa Showed It the Door

Expelled from the Sahel. Humiliated in Francophone Africa. Now, twenty French companies descend on a government that salivates for every foreign dollar on offer — and a population that has seen this story before.

THE 592-GUARDIAN EDITORIAL BOARD | JUNE  2026

1.UNINVITED HISTORY

Let us be precise about what the French Ambassador’s recent announcement at the Private Sector Commission’s Annual General Meeting actually represents. It is not, as the PPP/C Government would have us believe, a triumphant validation of Guyana’s oil-era magnetism. It is a geographic redirect — a colonial reflex in modern diplomatic clothing. The hunting grounds have changed. The prey remains the same.

Across Francophone West Africa — in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire — France has been shown the door with the full-throated support of populations who have had enough. French troops were expelled. Defense agreements were terminated. The currency architecture of Fran Afrique — sixty years of monetary and political subordination dressed up as cooperation — is collapsing. By 2024, France had gone from 10,000 soldiers on the African continent to fewer than 2,000. The Sahel did not ask France to leave politely. It ordered it out.

France did not discover Guyana. It was rejected by Africa — and landed here next.

Now, Ambassador Olivier Plançon appears at our Private Sector Commission not as a stranger to investment diplomacy, but as a representative of a power in active retreat, scouting its next chapter. Currently around ten French companies operate in Guyana across aerospace, transportation, logistics, and engineering — with twenty more expressing strong interest, and a full business mission planned for 2026. The embassy, one of only two France opened globally in 2025, opened its doors here in September of last year. The sequencing is not incidental. It is strategic.

ll.THE ANATOMY OF ARRIVAL

The French diplomatic playbook in Guyana follows a now-familiar script, practiced with minor variations from Dakar to Kinshasa to Abidjan. First: establish diplomatic infrastructure. France upgraded from a diplomatic office to a full embassy — the first EU member state to do so — in September 2025. Second: military access, packaged as security cooperation. In March 2024, the joint communiqué announcing the embassy also disclosed Guyana’s acquisition of maritime patrol assets from France. A warship made its call. Defense ties were formalized. A working group on defense, climate, food security, and infrastructure was constituted. Third: the business missions follow. MEDEF International — France’s leading private business federation — led a delegation here in July 2024. Another is being organized for 2026.

 

This is not spontaneous commercial enthusiasm. This is sequenced statecraft. Defense before dollars; embassy before extraction.

Paris has been here before, many times, in many countries, and it knows the choreography by heart.

FACT BOX: FRANCE’S AFRICAN RETREAT — THE RECORD

• Mali: French troops expelled, 2022. Replaced by Russian Wagner Group.

• Burkina Faso: Anti-French mass protests; troops expelled following 2022 coup.

• Niger: Tens of thousands rallied outside French military bases demanding withdrawal, 2023.

• Chad & Senegal: Defense agreements terminated, late 2024–2025.

• Côte d’Ivoire: Once France’s ‘watchdog’; has now also exited French defense arrangements.

• Mali, Burkina Faso & Niger: Withdrew from the Organization Internationale de la Francophonie, March 2025.

The three Sahel juntas described France’s actions as driven by ‘neocolonial inclinations’ and characterized French military presence as an act of destabilization, not partnership.

III. THE GUYANA PROPOSITION: OPEN FOR BUSINESS, CLOSED TO SCRUTINY

The PPP/C Government has made its posture unmistakable: Guyana is open, eager, and grateful. Every foreign ambassador who rings a bell gets a standing ovation from the podium. Every business delegation generates a press release about jobs, local content, and transformational investment. Citizens have been here before. They have heard about the American jobs, the Canadian infrastructure, the Chinese construction workforce, the British and Canadian investments fastened in between — and they have watched as the contracts that underpin all of it remain, in critical respects, opaque.

The US State Department’s own Investment Climate Statement on Guyana — hardly a hostile source — noted ‘widespread concerns about inefficiencies and corruption regarding the awarding of contracts,’ and recorded that the Auditor General found ‘disregard for the procedures, rules, and laws that govern public procurement,’ including overpayments and procurement breaches. Transparency International ranked Guyana 87th out of 180 countries on its Corruption Perceptions Index. This is the landscape into which twenty French companies are being invited: a procurement environment where the rule is that the rules are optional.

Transparency International ranked Guyana 87th globally for corruption. That is not an investment climate. That is an investor’s paradise.

The flagship illustration of what Guyana receives from these ‘investment relationships’ remains the Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC — a contract now condemned by the World Bank, the IDB, the IMF, Global Witness, the IEEFA, Chatham House, and the BBC as structurally disadvantageous to Guyana. A 2% royalty rate. A 75% cost recovery ceiling. The government paying the corporate taxes of the oil consortium. Some analysts have estimated Guyana forfeited upward of US$55 billion in potential revenues through the terms of that agreement. President Ali has refused to renegotiate it.

In this context, French arrivals are not exceptional. They are logical. Cheap deals are the standing order of business. The alphabet of nations that have come to Guyana — from A to Z, as the editors of this publication note — is long precisely because the terms on offer are accommodating to the investor and not to the Guyanese people.

lV WHY FRANCE, AND WHY NOW

Ambassador Plançon was candid, to his credit, about the delay: ‘Some countries are much more advanced; we have had some delay but we want to be there.’ The delay was not accidental. France was occupied in Africa — militarily, politically, commercially — and assumed its Francophone sphere would hold. It did not. The populations of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger did not rise against France because of abstract anti-imperialism. They rose because sixty years of Fran Afrique had delivered precisely nothing: Francophone Africa remains, as the academic literature consistently notes, among the most underdeveloped regions on the planet.

When that model collapsed — dramatically, publicly, and with the full backing of the streets — France needed new terrain. Guyana fits the profile: a small, strategically located nation with vast natural resources; a government responsive to foreign capital and less responsive to citizen scrutiny; a diaspora largely outside the country and therefore less able to organize domestic pressure; and a geography that, with French Guiana as a literal neighbor, makes Paris a logistically natural partner. The deep-water port under development, the weakness of air connectivity that Ambassador Plançon himself acknowledged, and the growing infrastructure pipeline all present commercial entry points.

One does not begrudge France its commercial interests.

What one begrudges is the predictability of what follows: the boasting from the podium, the vague commitments to local content and community benefits, the contracts that are never fully published, and the discovery, years later, that the benefits did not quite materialize in the manner advertised.

V. THE COLONIAL PATTERN IN POST-COLONIAL CLOTHES

Fran Afrique operated through what scholars call ‘elite capture’: not occupation by force, but the cultivation of ruling classes whose interests aligned with the metropole’s extraction agenda.

The French did not need to run African states directly. They needed African presidents who would sign the right contracts, maintain the right currency pegs, and ensure the right companies had the right concessions. When those presidents fell or were ousted, the system became untenable.

The dynamic in Guyana is not identical, but the structural logic rhymes. A government that is ‘only too happy to put up for sale the many rich patrimonies of Guyanese for pittances’ — to use the plain language this editorial endorses — does not need to be formally colonized.

It needs only to be commercially cultivated. The French investment mission, coordinated through MEDEF International and backstopped by the full machinery of a newly opened embassy, is exactly that cultivation.

You do not need a colony if you have a compliant government. Fran Afrique proved that. Guyana is being offered the same arrangement — without the French language requirement.

There is a reason, after all, that Ambassador Plançon chose the Private Sector Commission’s AGM as his platform, and not a civil society forum. The Private Sector Commission is the constituency that matters for this announcement.

Not workers. Not communities in the regions where extractive operations will be sited. Not the fishing communities that will be displaced by logistics corridors.

The constituency is capital — and the Government, as intermediary, is only too pleased to facilitate the introduction.

Vl .WHAT LEVERAGE REQUIRES

This editorial is not a counsel of paranoia, and it is not an argument for autarky. Foreign investment, competitively structured and transparently contracted, can serve Guyanese development. The question is not whether French companies should be permitted to operate here. The question is on whose terms, scrutinized by whom, and with what accountability mechanisms in place.

France arrives in Guyana at a moment of unusual leverage for the host nation. Guyana has something France wants — access to a booming resource economy in a strategically important hemisphere. France is simultaneously in retreat globally, which reduces its bargaining power. A government with a spine would recognize this asymmetry and use it. The conditions for French investment should be explicit, published, and non-negotiable: full local content compliance, independently verified; transparent contract publication as a condition of investment approval; mandatory technology transfer with measurable benchmarks; and community benefit agreements that go beyond infrastructure cosmetics to deliver genuine equity stakes for affected populations.

The French warship that made its call here was not a cultural gesture. Defense access and commercial access travel together in French foreign policy — they always have. Guyana’s leaders should understand precisely what they are entering when they welcome both simultaneously, and they should structure the relationship accordingly.

THE 592 GUARDIAN DEMANDS — FRENCH INVESTMENT ACCOUNTABILITY

1.  Full publication of all investment agreements signed with French entities — within 30 days of execution.

2.  Parliamentary review of any defense and dual-use arrangements embedded in the bilateral cooperation framework.

3.  Independent local content audits on all French companies — with results published quarterly and any breaches resulting in contract suspension.

4.  Mandatory environmental and social impact assessments — independently conducted, publicly released — before any French extractive or logistics concession is granted.

5.  A formal government briefing to the National Assembly on the scope and terms of the MEDEF-coordinated investment mission — before the 2026 business delegation arrives.

6.  A public inquiry into whether Guyana’s pattern of foreign investment contracting — from Stabroek to the present — has delivered measurable, independently verified benefit to Guyanese citizens.

Africa learned its lesson about France the hard way — through generations of underdevelopment disguised as partnership, enforced through currency control, military presence, and the cultivation of client elites. It took sixty years, coups, mass protests, and the expulsion of armies to begin the correction. Guyana does not have that kind of time, and it should not need that kind of rupture. The French are not coming here as friends of Guyanese sovereignty. They are coming here because sovereignty, in Guyana, has been cheap. That can change. But only if those entrusted with guarding it decide it is worth the price.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board, Georgetown, June 2026

The Anatomy of a Rubber Stamp: Joel Bhagwandin’s Defense of Unaccountable Power

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The Anatomy of a Rubber Stamp: 

Joel Bhagwandin’s Defense of Unaccountable Power

Joel Bhagwandin would like us to believe that the Guyana Development Bank Bill is a technocratic marvel unfairly maligned by critics who simply don’t understand development finance.

His letter of June 8th is a masterclass in the art of dressing up institutional capture in the language of professional competence.

We are not impressed.

Let us begin with the central argument: that a development finance institution should be governed exclusively by professionals in banking, finance, economics, law, and agriculture — and that including Opposition or civil society representatives would “politicize” operations.

This reasoning sounds sophisticated until you hold it against any credible international standard, at which point it collapses entirely.

The African Development Bank seats independent directors drawn from civil society and regional member states. The Inter-American Development Bank operates under governance structures that explicitly insulate lending decisions from executive capture through multi-stakeholder board composition. The European Investment Bank — the world’s largest multilateral lender — maintains oversight mechanisms that deliberately include voices beyond the executive branch’s orbit.

Even the World Bank Group, which Bhagwandin presumably regards as a model of development finance orthodoxy, demands governance frameworks that include independent oversight precisely because public capital is involved.

Show us, Mr. Bhagwandin, a single credible development finance institution in the contemporary global order that deploys public funds at scale while concentrating board appointment authority exclusively in the hands of a sitting government. We will wait.

The answer, of course, is that none exist — because every serious institution-builder in the post-Washington Consensus era understands that public money demands public accountability structures, not promises of future transparency laundered through ministerial discretion.

His second line of defense — that “existing laws” adequately address bribery and corruption — is perhaps the most brazen passage in an already audacious letter. Guyana’s existing laws have not prevented the sole-sourcing of the GPL-InterEnergy contract. They did not stop the Karpowership debacle. They have not produced a single prosecution arising from the NDIA’s audit failures while communities flooded. The existence of anti-corruption statutes means nothing without the institutional independence to enforce them. A Development Bank board appointed by and answerable to the very government whose projects it finances is not a check on power — it is an instrument of power wearing a tie.

Then there is the matter of “flexibility.” Bhagwandin celebrates the Bill’s deliberate vagueness — its absence of hard eligibility criteria, its delegation of lending rules to internal manuals — as an innovative feature rather than a structural vulnerability. This is precisely the architecture of a slush fund.

Discretionary lending criteria, board members who serve at the pleasure of the executive, and oversight reduced to the annual tabling of documents in a National Assembly where the government holds a parliamentary majority — this is not a development bank. It is a political financing vehicle with developmental branding.

The National Assembly oversight mechanism Bhagwandin invokes as sufficient accountability deserves particular scrutiny. Tabling an annual report before a legislature your party controls is not oversight. It is theatre. Parliamentary scrutiny has teeth only where committees have investigative independence, where the opposition has meaningful procedural power, and where documents tabled are subject to adversarial examination — none of which characterizes the current configuration of Guyana’s National Assembly on matters the government wishes to insulate from challenge.

What Bhagwandin is really arguing, stripped of its technocratic veneer, is this: trust the government. Trust that the professionals it appoints will act with integrity. Trust that existing laws will be enforced against powerful interests. Trust that annual reports tabled before a captive legislature will produce genuine accountability.

Guyana’s recent institutional history — from procurement irregularities to audit evasions to infrastructure scandals — provides no rational basis for that trust.

The Guyana Development Bank, as currently structured, is not designed to serve the people whose tax revenues and oil patrimony will capitalize it. It is designed to serve the political interests of those who will control it. Joel Bhagwandin’s letter does not refute that charge. It confirms it — by defending, with remarkable candor, every structural feature that makes independent oversight impossible.

A development bank should indeed be judged by the integrity of its governance. That is precisely our objection.

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

INTERENERGY SOLE-SOURCE CONTRACT

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—THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  ·  GUYANA  June 2026

US$15.6 Million, Eight Months, and the Lights Are Still On a Rented Ship

The GPL-InterEnergy contract was sole-sourced, apparently in breach of the Procurement Act, displaced a cheaper, competitive winner, and has consumed eight months of public money. The only things shown to the public so far are a PowerPoint and an office ribbon-cutting. The figure for what has actually been paid remains a state secret.

Guyana’s government likes to speak in superlatives. The largest budget in history. The fastest-growing economy on earth. The most ambitious energy transition the Caribbean has ever seen. What it does not speak about and has not spoken about despite four direct parliamentary requests from the opposition, is how much public money has been disbursed to a Dominican Republic power company for a job that, eight months in, the country cannot yet feel.

On October 8, 2025, the Guyana Power and Light Incorporated signed a US$15.6 million contract with InterEnergy Group for what was officially described as Supervisory, Engineering and Project Management Consultancy Services.

At US$650,000 per month across two years, the contract would make InterEnergy the most expensive supervisor in GPL’s history — paid not to build anything, not to own anything, not to operate anything, but to watch other companies build and operate things that Guyanese taxpayers are funding separately.

Eight months on, the grid is still running on Karpowership’s rented Turkish powerships, still subject to cascading load-shedding, and still months away from the Gas-to-Energy plant whose readiness InterEnergy was ostensibly hired to ensure. What InterEnergy has delivered to the public record is a roadmap — presented to President Ali and select private sector figures in early June 2026 — and a Georgetown office inauguration. Neither is what the Procurement Act’s public interest provisions were designed to purchase.

The contract was sole-sourced. The winning bidder was never told it had won. The government has not disclosed how much has been paid. This is not a procurement irregularity — it is a procurement system in active collapse.

HOW A COMPETITIVE TENDER BECAME A NO-BID CONTRACT

The story begins, as so many of this administration’s embarrassments do, with an item buried in official routine. In December 2024, GPL issued an invitation for proposals for project supervisory services related to the Gas-to-Energy initiative. Bids were opened in January 2025. The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board evaluated the submissions and recommended the lowest-qualifying bidder: Method4 Engineering Inc., a Canadian firm.

Method4 was never told. GPL, having received NPTAB’s recommendation in January, said nothing to the winning company. The contract was not awarded, the file was not closed, and Method4 learned it had won only when Stabroek News reported the matter months later. This silence was not negligence — it was preparation. On June 2, 2025, GPL wrote to NPTAB requesting the annulment of the Method4 award. Three weeks later, on July 17, sole-source procurement of InterEnergy went before Cabinet under the Office of the Prime Minister, which gave its no-objection.

Former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran — one of the few technocrats in Guyana willing to call procurement violations by their statutory names — was unambiguous: GPL’s failure to notify Method4 of its award was a violation of Section 39 of the Procurement Act. More fundamentally, Goolsarran noted that sole-source procurement cannot legally be used when the services are demonstrably available from other suppliers, as evidenced by the very fact that GPL had already received competitive proposals

. There is no legal corridor between the rejection of Method4 and the engagement of InterEnergy. The government created one anyway.

When Minister Indar was subsequently pressed in Parliament by APNU’s Sherod Duncan, he argued the move was fully justified under the Act due to a critical and urgent need to stabilize the GPL grid. This was the government’s chosen justification for a procurement decision that had been months in preparation, predicated on a Memorandum of Understanding signed with InterEnergy in January 2024 — before the tender was even issued.

GPL issued the tender in December 2024. InterEnergy had an MoU with GPL since January 2024. The competitive process was, in retrospect, a procedural formality that the outcome had already been decided.

THE ARITHMETIC OF THE DEAL

President Ali, in defending the contract prior to signing, argued that comparable services could have cost as much as US$40 million. This framing — that US$15.6 million is a bargain relative to a hypothetical ceiling the government itself invented — is not a procurement justification. It is rhetorical misdirection.

What the government did not say is that Method4’s lowest bid, which NPTAB evaluated and recommended, came in at a figure millions cheaper than InterEnergy’s US$15.6 million. The public has not been given the precise figures for either bid. No tender board minutes have been published. No evaluation criteria have been released. No justification for why InterEnergy’s qualifications outweighed Method4’s has been formally provided. What Vice President Jagdeo called the most cost-effective choice is, by definition, not the cheapest option the competitive process produced.

At US$650,000 per month, InterEnergy is being paid to supervise work that Power China and Indian firm Kalpataru are executing under separate contracts totaling over US$400 million.

The supervisor costs more per month than many of the infrastructure subcomponents being supervised. The taxpayer funds the infrastructure, funds the supervision, funds the power ships keeping the lights on in the interim, and receives no itemized accounting for any of it.

CONTRACT VALUE

 US$15.6 million (US$650,000/month over 24 months)
PROCURED BY

 Single-source / sole-source — Cabinet no-objection July 17, 2025
CONTRACT SIGNED

 October 8, 2025
CONTRACTOR

 InterEnergy Group, Dominican Republic
MoU DATE

 January 16, 2024 — predates any tender process
DISPLACED BID

 Method4 Engineering — NPTAB’s recommended lowest bidder, January 2025
METHOD4 NOTIFIED?

 No. Method4 learned of its own selection via media, months later.
ANNULMENT LETTER

 GPL to NPTAB dated June 2, 2025 — requesting annulment of Method4 award
STATUTORY VIOLATION

 Section 39 Procurement Act (failure to notify), and single-source without legal grounds per former Auditor General Goolsarran
MONTHS ELAPSED

 ~8 months (Oct 2025 – Jun 2026)
PUBLIC DELIVERABLES

 One roadmap presentation + Georgetown office inauguration (June 2026)
AMOUNT PAID TO DATE

 Undisclosed. Opposition has asked four times. No answer.

THE WALL OF SILENCE

APNU has now asked four times, through parliamentary channels, for the full procurement records of the InterEnergy contract: tender board minutes, evaluation criteria, and the justification for sole-source selection. The government has not provided them. Minister Indar has offered parliamentary answers that defend the outcome without disclosing the process. GPL, NPTAB, and the Office of the Prime Minister have collectively maintained what Goolsarran described as a blackout on information.

When Stabroek News put the procurement legality question directly to InterEnergy Chairman Rolando González Bunster in October 2025, his response was instructive. He recounted that President Ali had visited InterEnergy’s operations in the Dominican Republic, was impressed by what he saw, and that a partnership followed.

Asked specifically whether he was concerned that the contract appeared to violate Guyana’s procurement law, González Bunster said it was none of his business. He later approached the reporter who had asked and suggested the line of questioning indicated a desire to exclude InterEnergy from future Guyanese business.

This is the posture of a company that has been given every reason to believe the rules do not apply to it: a head of state personally enchanted by its facilities, a Cabinet that produced no-objection without competitive evaluation, and a government that treats parliamentary scrutiny as an inconvenience rather than a constitutional requirement.

When the Chairman of a foreign contractor calls procurement law enforcement ‘none of my business,’ the question is not about his conduct — it is about the government that has made him so comfortable in that view.

EIGHT MONTHS: WHAT HAS BEEN DELIVERED

The contract was signed October 8, 2025. By the time InterEnergy presented its roadmap to President Ali in early June 2026 and inaugurated its Georgetown office, eight months of the two-year contract had elapsed — representing, at the contracted rate, approximately US$5.2 million in payments assuming disbursement on schedule. The government has confirmed none of this. No payment schedule has been published. No milestone report has been tabled in Parliament. No progress audit has been commissioned or released.

What InterEnergy has publicly cited as evidence of its work includes supervision of over 350 kilometers of transmission lines, 16 new or expanded substations, and the deployment of 20,000 smart meters — all projects that were already underway or contracted before InterEnergy’s engagement, built by other companies, financed by public capital, and which would have proceeded regardless of whether a Dominican Republic management consultancy was watching. The claim of supervision over work that was already in motion is not a deliverable. It is a description of proximity.

The grid, meanwhile, remains dependent on Karpowership’s Turkish power ships. Load-shedding continues. The Gas-to-Energy plant, whose supervisory readiness InterEnergy was hired to ensure, is still not operational. APNU this week filed a parliamentary question about the status of power ship contract renewals and whether Guyana’s grid would survive the transition if either vessel ceased operations before Wales comes online. The government broke its silence only after the question was filed. The power ship dependency that InterEnergy was engaged to help end has not ended.

WHAT MUST BE ANSWERED

This editorial makes no allegation of corruption in the criminal sense. It makes a simpler and more verifiable demand: that a government which spends public money on sole-sourced contracts, displaces competitive bidders without notification, and refuses to disclose payment records to elected representatives is not governing in the public interest. It is governing against it.

The following are not opposition talking points. They are the minimum requirements of statutory accountability under the Procurement Act, the Financial Administration and Audit Act, and the basic obligations of a Parliament whose members were elected to exercise oversight:

  1. GPL and the Ministry of Public Utilities must immediately publish the full NPTAB evaluation records for the December 2024 tender, including Method4’s bid amount, InterEnergy’s proposal, and the evaluation scores for each.
  2. Cabinet must release the sole-source justification document submitted on July 17, 2025, including the legal opinion — if one was obtained — on whether InterEnergy’s engagement satisfied the Procurement Act’s criteria for single-source award.
  3. GPL must table a full payment schedule and disbursement record showing every sum paid to InterEnergy from contract inception through the current date, certified by the Auditor General.
  4. InterEnergy must submit to Parliament a formal progress report against agreed contractual milestones, separating its own deliverables from infrastructure work performed by other contractors under separate agreements.
  5. The Audit Committee of Parliament must initiate a formal inquiry into the procurement process, with terms wide enough to examine the relationship between the January 2024 MoU, the December 2024 tender, the June 2025 annulment request, and the July 2025 Cabinet no-objection.

This is a public utility that Guyanese depend on for their homes, their businesses, and their futures. Its US$15.6 million consultancy contract is not an abstraction. It is money drawn from an oil-era fiscal ledger that was supposed to close the gap between what this country has been promised and what it actually receives. Until the government opens its books, that gap — like the lights in too many Guyanese homes — remains dark.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

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

A Government That Cannot Learn

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THE 592 GUARDIAN · 

INTEGRITY♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ TRUTH♦

INVESTIGATIVE EDITORIAL | GOVERNANCE & ACCOUNTABILITY

A Government That Cannot Learn

From EMBRAPA to UPI: How the Ali Administration’s pattern of politically convenient decisions over nationally optimal ones has become the defining feature of Guyanese governance — and why the cost is compounding.

By The 592 Guardian Editorial Board   |   June 2026   |   The 592 Guardian 

On a Tuesday morning in Georgetown, officials from Guyana, Brazil, and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture gathered in the Ministry of Agriculture’s boardroom to sign a Letter of Intent establishing the EMBRAPA Science, Technologies and Innovation Hub. On its face, it was one of the more prudent decisions this government has made. Brazil’s EMBRAPA is, by any credible metric, among the world’s foremost agricultural research institutions — a body that transformed a country once dependent on food imports into a global agricultural superpower within a single generation. Bringing its expertise to bear on Guyana’s tropical agriculture challenges, and anchoring a regional food security framework through it, is exactly the kind of strategic thinking that development economists would endorse.

Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha called it a game changer. He was not wrong.

But here is what the press conference did not address, and what the celebratory photographs obscured: at the very moment the Ali administration was publicly recognizing Brazil as an indispensable partner — close enough to anchor Guyana’s agricultural future, trusted enough to house a regional center of excellence on our soil — that same administration had already chosen to bypass Brazil entirely on a decision of equal or greater economic consequence.

When Guyana was ready to modernize its digital payments infrastructure, it did not look south to Brazil, whose PIX instant payment system had been live since November 2020 and had become one of the most successfully adopted financial technology platforms on earth. It looked east — all the way to India — and adopted the Unified Payments Interface instead.

One bad decision is an error. The same structural logic repeated across energy, infrastructure, procurement, and now digital finance is a governance philosophy.

That pivot, sitting directly alongside the EMBRAPA signing in the same news cycle, is not merely ironic. It is diagnostic. It tells us something precise and damning about how decisions are made in this administration — not through rigorous comparative analysis, not through a framework that consistently privileges national interest, but through a filter that sometimes, inexplicably, subordinates the obvious choice to something else entirely.

And once you see that filter at work, you cannot unsee it. Because the UPI-over-PIX decision is not an anomaly. It is the latest entry in a ledger that has been accumulating for years.

THE CASE THAT WAS NEVER MADE

Let us be precise about what was at stake in the digital payments’ decision, because the magnitude of the missed opportunity demands specificity.

Guyana and Brazil conduct over one billion dollars in bilateral trade annually. That relationship is not theoretical — it is embedded in the movement of goods, vehicles, building materials, agricultural products, and energy inputs across a shared land border. It is the economic lifeblood of Region Nine and has significant downstream effects across the country’s logistics and supply chain infrastructure.

A Guyanese digital payments system integrated with Brazil’s PIX architecture would have done something that UPI structurally cannot: it would have created the conditions for GYD-BRL convertibility at scale, reducing dollar dependency in cross-border trade, lowering friction costs for businesses and farmers operating in the bilateral corridor, and potentially seeding a broader CARICOM-anchored South American payments framework. The economic logic writes itself. More than a billion dollars in annual trade provides the liquidity base that makes currency integration viable. PIX had the infrastructure. The relationship had the volume. The geography made it obvious.

India’s UPI is an impressive platform. But Guyana does not share a land border with India. Guyana does not conduct a billion dollars in annual trade with India. The rupee has no meaningful role in Guyanese commerce, which means the dollar displacement argument — the most compelling case for any payments modernization effort — simply does not apply. What Guyana adopted was prestige technology untethered from the economic relationships that would have given it transformative value.

THE PIX CASE IN THREE LINES

Brazil: shared land border, $1B+ annual trade, PIX live since 2020, GYD-BRL corridor viable, CARICOM integration possible. India: no shared border, negligible bilateral trade, rupee irrelevant to Guyanese commerce. The comparative analysis was never published. We suspect it was never conducted.

The question that has not been answered — that no minister has been asked to answer in any public forum — is simple: was a comparative feasibility assessment conducted? Was PIX evaluated against UPI on criteria of trade volume, currency utility, geographic logic, and integration potential? If it was, where is the document? If it was not, on what basis was the decision made?

The silence is its own answer. And it rhymes with silences we have heard before.

THE LEDGER: WHEN PATTERN BECOMES POLICY

The PIX-UPI decision did not emerge from a vacuum. It emerged from an administrative culture in which consequential choices are made without published criteria, without independent review, and — critically — without consequences when the outcomes prove damaging. That culture has a documented history.

Consider the GPL-InterEnergy sole-sourced power contract. The Guyana Power and Light entered into a major energy supply arrangement through a process that bypassed competitive procurement entirely. No public tender. No comparative bid evaluation. No independent assessment of whether the terms secured reflected market value. The contract was presented as a solution; the process that produced it was presented as irrelevant. When the 592 Guardian and others pressed for justification, the administration retreated behind the language of urgency and operational necessity — the universal solvent that this government applies to dissolve procurement obligations whenever they become inconvenient.

The Karpowership episode compounded the pattern. Guyana’s engagement with the Turkish power ship company, Karadeniz, became a masterclass in contractual opacity. A country navigating an unprecedented oil windfall, with the resources to make long-term, asset-owning energy infrastructure investments, was instead negotiating short-term floating power arrangements whose terms were shielded from public scrutiny. The national interest calculus — what Guyana would own, what it would pay per kilowatt over the contract life, what exit provisions existed — was never transparently presented. The administration announced; it did not justify.

A country with Guyana’s resource windfall should not be making energy decisions in the dark. But darkness has become this government’s preferred procurement environment.

The National Drainage and Irrigation Authority audits told a different story of the same failure mode. Year after year, Guyana’s chronic flooding crisis — which displaces families, destroys crops, and disproportionately punishes the country’s most economically vulnerable communities — was attributed in part to infrastructure deficiencies within NDIA’s mandate. Year after year, audit findings documented financial irregularities, project delivery failures, and procurement anomalies within the agency. And year after year, those findings produced no meaningful accountability. No senior official faced consequence. No systemic reform was announced. The flooding returned. The audits continued. The ledger grew.

The G-Mining and Reunion Gold asset transaction exposed yet another dimension of the governance failure: not merely the absence of accountability after the fact, but the absence of protective mechanisms before it. When significant mining assets changed hands in a transaction that should have triggered scrutiny of transfer pricing, capital gains capture, and equity participation rights for the Guyanese state, the administration watched it happen without deploying the fiscal tools that resource nationalism — a doctrine this government invokes enthusiastically in its rhetoric — would demand in practice. Guyana captured none of the windfall. The foreign principals captured all of it. The government called it investment.

The Puruni River Bridge project illustrated how the failure mode extends to public infrastructure investment itself. A bridge project whose routing and specifications appeared to serve the operational interests of a foreign mining concern over the connectivity needs of the communities it ostensibly served raised fundamental questions about who public capital is actually working for in this administration. The questions were raised. They were not answered.

And then there is the Cabinet outreach program — a touring, government-funded engagement exercise conducted in the electoral calendar’s shadow, using state resources, ministerial presence, and public funds to perform constituency work that the boundaries between government and party should prohibit. It was campaigning dressed in the language of service delivery. When pressed, the administration insisted on the distinction between the two. The calendars told a different story.

THE ANATOMY OF IMPUNITY

What connects these cases is not complexity. Each individual decision, examined in isolation, can be given a narrative — urgency here, development imperative there, bilateral relationship management somewhere else. The administration is practiced at the individual justification. What it cannot justify is the aggregate.

Because when you lay the GPL contract alongside the NDIA audits alongside the Karpowership opacity alongside the G-Mining windfall failure alongside the Puruni routing alongside the UPI pivot, a structural portrait emerges that no individual explanation can account for. The portrait is of an administration that has identified, correctly, that Guyana’s oversight architecture lacks the teeth to impose real costs on consequential decisions made badly.

The Auditor General reports. Parliament debates. Civil society criticizes. The press — what remains of independent press in this country — investigates. And then nothing happens. No minister resigns. No contract is voided. No procurement officer faces sanction. No policy framework is revised. The administration absorbs the criticism, waits for the news cycle to move, and proceeds to the next decision with its risk calculus entirely unchanged.

This is not incompetence in the ordinary sense. Incompetence implies the absence of capacity. What Guyana has is the presence of a system — informal, durable, and rational from the perspective of those who benefit from it — in which the cost of a bad decision is borne by the public and the benefit of the same decision accrues to the network of relationships that the decision was designed to serve.

The administration has not failed to learn from its mistakes. It has learned precisely the right lesson: that in the absence of real consequences, the optimal strategy is to keep deciding.

That is why the UPI-over-PIX decision is not a puzzle. Once you understand the operating logic, it resolves completely. PIX would have been the correct technical choice. But the UPI decision served different imperatives — cultural alignment, diaspora politics, a preference for relationships that track ethnicity rather than economic geography. Whether those imperatives were explicit or atmospheric, conscious or reflexive, the outcome is the same: national interest, measured in trade corridor utility and currency integration potential, was subordinated to something smaller.

And no one will be asked to explain why.

BACK TO THE BOARDROOM

Let us return, then, to that signing ceremony. To the photographs of ministers and officials gathered in the Ministry of Agriculture’s boardroom, to the celebratory language about game changers and regional powerhouses, to the genuine value of the EMBRAPA partnership and what it could mean for Caribbean food security if executed with the seriousness the occasion demands.

We do not dispute the value of the initiative. We note, rather, what the initiative inadvertently demonstrates:that this administration is perfectly capable of recognizing Brazil as a partner of consequence. It knows what EMBRAPA is. It understands what the bilateral relationship represents. It can, when it chooses to, make the obvious call.

Which is precisely why the UPI decision is unforgivable. Because it was not made in ignorance of Brazil. It was made in full awareness of a relationship that this government publicly celebrates — and then, when a different sector required an analogous decision, chose to ignore.

The EMBRAPA signing is not evidence of a government finding its footing. It is evidence of a government that knows what good decisions look like, makes them selectively, and faces no pressure to explain why the selection criterion is something other than the national interest.

The 592 Guardian will continue to name the decisions that do not survive comparative scrutiny. We will continue to place them beside one another until the pattern is too legible to dismiss. And we will continue to ask the questions that the administration’s preferred interlocutors do not ask: not what was decided, but how, by whom, for whose benefit, and — most damningly of all — why no one has yet been required to answer for what was left on the table.

Guyana is not a poor country anymore. It does not have the luxury of excusing governance failure as the product of limited capacity.

It has the resources to do better. What it lacks, still, is a government that believes it must.

 

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet focused on Guyanese governance, transparency, and public interest reporting.

The Return of Sarah Ann Lynch

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THE 592-GUARDIAN OPINION

TRUTH ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY♦

The Return of Sarah Ann Lynch

OPINION BY : GHK LALL

My position was always clear.  Excellency Sarah Ann Lynch, U.S. Ambassador to Guyana during 2019-2024, was more than a Foreign Service professional, more than a political appointment.  What the CIA did to the PPP’s Cheddi Jagan in the 1960s through the combined efforts of the media, trade unions, and nefarious political operators, the agency did with Sarah Ann Lynch in the face of the PNC’s David Granger in 2019-2020.  Now, Excellency Lynch is back.  Political success means economic rewards.  A little scripture may also help to nudge Guyanese in a thoughtful, national direction: what is hidden has a way of coming to light.  Democracy for Guyana, or the paramountcy of U.S. interests, is the choice. 

Excellency Lynch was the one-woman army that was on the move, always moving skillfully, even over to the Office of the then Leader of the Opposition, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo.  It was too much, too rich, too unlike the more studied, restrained efforts of diplomats.  Whose orders from the world capital are let local processes stand supreme.  Said differently, be a peacemaker not a warrior envoy.  I recall the late Jimmy Carter in Panama during the reign of Manuel Noreiga. In sum, when the Americans want to be rid of real or imagined threats, the jobs get done.  Sarah Ann Lynch filled that role superbly.  So well, that some Guyanese wanted to make her their new Queen Victoria, i.e., erect a statue in her honor.

Now Sarah the Great is back.  More subdued.  More on the sweet, smiling, side.  But still in the mold of a general on the move, but with new objectives in mind.   That is, very much involved in moving what is in U.S interests along. 

What’s a better vehicle than a trade delegation to manifest such interest, with her as the lead player?  She knows Dr. Jagdeo well.  Dr. Jagdeo knows both Excellency Lynch and how much he and the PPP owe her.  It’s an inspired choice by Washington to send down its diplomat cum best kept secret agent now wearing her new hat of trade envoy.  Both trade leader Lynch and Guyana’s leader Jagdeo know that it’s collection time: the piper has to be paid.  In a word -opportunities.  In two stages: open the door and let in a flood of Americans.  The downside is getting ready to see the Chinese relegated to second chair, a much smaller one that reduces them to a shadow.  Ms. Lynch’s presence is part of a pattern.  Check it out.

 Americans in influential positions have been saying it more often, more openly, now: the U.S. must be closer positioned, enjoy a bigger drag, on the Guyana milking cow.  Recall two Guyanese political patriots, Messrs. Todd and Persaud.  Whether here or in DC, the language is the same.  Security, aviation, technology and, naturally, that codeword for business, investment.  American businesses must get more, and there are no two ways about it.  I don’t have a problem (yet).  The PPP Govt’s problem is how will Dr. Jagdeo serve two masters who each have their own interests, demand priority treatment simultaneously?  The Chinese must be monitoring these incoming U.S. delegations and outgoing Guyanese ones, with alarm.  They didn’t too much for democracy back in 2019-20.  But they have been good for PPP style of business for decades.  How the Guyana’s milking cow is going to be milked by these two elephants remains to be seen.  Recall that the French are also lining up, making their objectives clear (more business here), and the British are singing the same song. 

When all this is aggregated, Pres Ali and Vice President Jagdeo see themselves as investor darlings.  Reality can be a vicious animal.  The foreign legion-Americans, Brits, Chinese, and French (Canada’s gold cup already overflows)-stalk, come to grab.  The PPP Govt has no choice, but to give.  Freely.  Cheaply.  Smilingly.  There was Dr. Jagdeo grinning from ear-to-ear.  His 2019-2020 bargaining partner, Excellency Sarah Lynch, is back in town.  Thus, the world turns.  Remember: Americans only have permanent interests, merely convenient friends.  Marco Rubio could talk cheese.

Calls for Justice Bulkan to Recuse himself is Politically Charged , Not Grounded in Law 

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Mr. Quincy Anderson’s letter in the Chronicle  is not a serious contribution to jurisprudential debate; it is a politically loaded broadside dressed up as concern for judicial ethics—and it collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

At its core, the argument is both legally illiterate and strategically convenient.

The standard for judicial recusal is not built on guilt by association, nor on the political activities of a judge’s relatives. If that were the case, no judge in Guyana—or anywhere in the Commonwealth—could safely adjudicate politically sensitive matters without being subjected to endless, opportunistic disqualification campaigns.

Mr. Anderson leans heavily on “perception,” but weaponizes it in its most dangerous form: partisan suspicion masquerading as public concern. The law is clear. The test is whether a fair-minded and properly informed observer would conclude there is a real possibility of bias—not whether politically interested actors can manufacture doubt by invoking family connections.

By that standard, his argument fails completely.

Justice Arif Bulkan’s judicial record is unblemished. There has been no finding, no credible allegation, and no pattern of conduct suggesting bias. What Mr. Anderson offers instead is conjecture rooted in the independent political engagement of Justice Bulkan’s siblings—individuals over whom he has neither control nor legal responsibility. 

That is not an ethical breach; it is a reality of life in any democratic society.

More troubling, however, is the broader implication of this line of attack. If accepted, it would establish a corrosive precedent in which judges are assessed not by their rulings or conduct, but by the political identities of those around them. In a small, politically active society like Guyana, that standard would paralyze the judiciary and invite calculated efforts to disqualify judges for strategic gain.

Mr. Anderson also exposes a fundamental misunderstanding—or deliberate misrepresentation—of governance. The Government of Guyana is not synonymous with the PPP/C as a political party. Legal matters before the courts involve the State as a constitutional entity, not a partisan apparatus. 

Collapsing that distinction is not only inaccurate, it is dangerous, as suggests a view of governance in which party and state are indistinguishable.

Equally conspicuous is the timing. Justice Bulkan has served on the bench for years, including in matters of political sensitivity, without calls for recusal based on his family. Why now? 

Ethical concerns that emerge—only when politically convenient—invite skepticism about their true motivation.

Finally, there is the question of editorial judgment. Publishing such a thin, speculative attack on a sitting CCJ judge—without evidentiary grounding—does not elevate public discourse. It risks doing the opposite: normalizing the erosion of judicial credibility through insinuation rather than fact.

The integrity of the Caribbean Court of Justice is not safeguarded by entertaining arguments of this nature. It is preserved by adherence to established legal standards and by resisting attempts—however packaged—to undermine confidence in its judges without cause.

Justice Bulkan’s reputation has been built on decades of disciplined, ethical service. It cannot be undone by assertions that would not withstand even the most basic legal test.

A Bank Built To Serve Power.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL♦ACCONTABILITY♦ TRANSPARENCY

A Bank Built To Serve Power.

The proposed Guyana Development Bank is not a transparent institution. It is a patronage architecture dressed in development language — and its contempt for established governance frameworks is, by itself, a scandal.

There is a well-worn playbook in Guyanese governance. You announce an initiative with genuine popular appeal — flood relief, housing, scholarships, now small business financing — and you structure the delivery mechanism so that access flows through political loyalty rather than merit. The Guyana Development Bank Bill, in its current form, is that playbook with a prospectus attached.

Let us be precise about what this legislation proposes. It does not merely create a bank. It creates a financial instrument — potentially managing tens of billions in public resources — whose entire governance structure is constituted by a single minister. The Finance Minister appoints the board. The Finance minister appoints the chair. The Finance Minister determines what directors are paid. There is no parliamentary confirmation, no civil society seat, no private sector voice, no Opposition input. The institution exists at the pleasure of the Executive, accountable upward to the Cabinet and downward to no one.

This is not an oversight. It is a design.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this legislation is not what it contains but what it deliberately omits: any meaningful relationship with the Bank of Guyana.

The Bank of Guyana exists precisely for this purpose. Under the Financial Institutions Act, the BOG is the statutory regulator for deposit-taking and lending institutions operating in Guyana. It sets prudential standards. It conducts examinations. It demands capital adequacy compliance. It investigates governance failures. It licenses institutions that handle public money. When Guyana’s financial architecture was rebuilt after the catastrophic banking collapses of the 1990s — collapses that wiped out the savings of ordinary Guyanese — the entire remediation framework rested on a single principle: no institution handling the public’s money operates outside independent central bank oversight.

The Development Bank Bill, as currently drafted, creates precisely such an institution.

There is no provision for BOG licensing. No mandatory BOG examination schedule. No capital adequacy framework referenced. No prudential reporting requirement to the central bank. No trigger for BOG intervention if the institution becomes insolvent or if lending decisions expose it to systemic risk. The institution that will manage what the government itself is advertising as a transformative public financing vehicle sits entirely outside the regulatory architecture that governs every other financial institution in this country.

Ask the question plainly: why? Why would a government drafting legislation for a public bank — an institution that will hold public deposits and disburse public funds — deliberately structure it to avoid central bank supervision? There is no development finance rationale for this exclusion. Regional development banks across CARICOM operate under some form of central bank oversight or independent statutory regulation. Guyana’s National Development Strategy, the IDB’s own technical assistance frameworks, and the Caribbean Development Bank’s governance standards all contemplate central bank supervisory roles in national development finance. The exclusion of the BOG from this architecture is not a regional norm. It is a local choice. And it is a choice that produces a single outcome: an institution whose financial conduct cannot be independently examined by anyone outside the government that controls it.

This is the structural foundation upon which every other governance failure in this bill rests.

The Patronage Architecture, Named

Consider what Guyana has spent the better part of a decade building, unevenly and imperfectly, in the domain of public financial governance. The Public Procurement Commission. The Audit Office. Parliamentary oversight committees. The SARA framework. Whatever their operational failures, these institutions rest on a conceptual foundation: that public resources require independent scrutiny and that no single political actor should control both the allocation of those resources and the evaluation of that allocation.

The Development Bank Bill, as drafted, seats a ministerially appointed board making lending decisions without clear criteria, without independent audit triggers, and — most strikingly — without any explicit anti-corruption provisions governing the conduct of loan officers and directors themselves.

But this is not merely a legal deficiency. It is a political economy. To understand what this bank will actually do, you do not read the eligibility clauses. You read the appointment clause.

The Finance Minister selects every director. The Finance Minister sets every director’s pay. Directors serve at the Finance Minister’s pleasure. What follows from this is not complicated: the directors will make decisions consistent with the preferences of the Finance Minister. Not because they are necessarily corrupt individuals, but because no rational appointee, in the absence of independent tenure protection, makes decisions that displease their appointing authority. The institution’s governance structure guarantees alignment between lending decisions and executive preference before a single application is reviewed.

Now overlay the operational reality. This bank is being positioned as the primary financing vehicle for small and medium enterprise in a country approaching a LG election. The government has publicly advertised loan access — collateral-free, interest-free by its own account — to constituencies that have historically struggled to access formal credit. Rural communities. Hinterland entrepreneurs. Young professionals without property to pledge. These are also, not coincidentally, the swing constituencies whose mobilisation determines electoral outcomes in Guyana’s tight political arithmetic.

The combination of discretionary lending criteria, politically appointed gatekeepers, no BOG oversight, and an election cycle is not a governance risk. It is a governance blueprint.

Guyana has lived this pattern before. The National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited contracts. The Housing and Water Inc. allocations. The COVID-19 relief disbursements. The various grant and voucher programmes administered through regional democratic councils in election years. In each case the combination of political appointment, discretionary criteria, and weak anti-corruption architecture produced outcomes that bore a suspicious resemblance to electoral maps. The Development Bank Bill creates the same conditions at larger scale and with the additional moral authority of a mandate that is supposed to serve the economically marginalised.

The more genuine the need, the more powerful the patronage instrument becomes. When people are genuinely desperate for financing, they will tolerate conditions they would otherwise refuse. They will vote for access. They will not complain about the terms. Political patrons have always understood this. A development bank, structurally captured before it opens, does not reduce that vulnerability. It monetises it.

The Corruption Architecture, Clause by Clause

The bill prohibits false information and records destruction. It does not prohibit a director soliciting a kickback in exchange for approving a loan. Read that sentence again. An institution disbursing concessionary public financing, with no independent regulator, a politically appointed board, and discretionary lending criteria, contains no explicit statutory prohibition on its own officials demanding payment for access.

This is not a drafting oversight. Anti-corruption provisions are standard in development finance legislation globally precisely because development banks are understood to be structurally vulnerable to rent-seeking. They control access to a scarce and valuable resource — concessionary credit — that the market does not otherwise provide. Every applicant who cannot get a commercial loan has an incentive to pay for access. Every official who controls that access has an opportunity to extract value from it. The legislative response to this structural vulnerability, in every credible jurisdiction, is explicit: name the conduct, criminalise it, specify the penalties, create independent reporting channels.

The Development Bank Bill names none of this. It creates a corruption-permissive environment not through malice in any individual clause but through systematic architectural omission. There is no fit-and-proper test for directors referenced to any independent standard. There is no conflict-of-interest register requirement. There is no whistle-blower protection for loan officers pressured to approve politically connected applications. There is no independent complaints mechanism for rejected applicants. There is no publication requirement for approved loans above threshold values. There is no mandatory referral to SARA or the DPP for suspected corruption in the lending process.

Each omission is individually explicable. Together they describe an institution in which corruption, if it occurs, will be nearly impossible to detect, document, or prosecute. That is not an accident of drafting. It is an environment that has been carefully cleared.

An Insult Inscribed in Legislation

There is a final dimension to this bill that deserves to be stated plainly, because it has not been stated plainly enough: the manner in which this legislation was presented to Parliament is itself a form of institutional disrespect that should offend every member of the National Assembly, regardless of party.

Guyana has a constitutional framework. It has a financial management and audit act. It has a Bank of Guyana Act. It has procurement legislation. It has anti-money-laundering obligations under FATF review. It has commitments to the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force. It has loan covenants with the IDB, the World Bank, and the Caribbean Development Bank that contain governance conditionalities. Every one of these frameworks exists because Guyana, at various points, made formal commitments — some under duress, some voluntarily — to govern its public finances according to standards that could withstand independent scrutiny.

The Development Bank Bill was brought to Parliament in apparent disregard of the coherence demands of every one of these frameworks. It creates a financial institution outside BOG supervision, without FATF-compliant beneficial ownership requirements clearly specified, without procurement-consistent tender obligations for institutional contracts, and without the audit architecture that Guyana’s own Fiscal Management and Accountability Act contemplates for public entities. This legislation does not merely have gaps. It sits in active tension with the governance architecture Guyana has spent years — and significant donor and creditor resources — constructing.

To have brought this bill in this form to the National Assembly is not bold governance. It is crass disregard for the nation’s own laws. It signals that the Executive views Parliament not as the institution through which public financial frameworks are legitimately constructed, but as a ratification chamber for decisions already made elsewhere, on terms already fixed in favour of those who made them.

The National Assembly has not merely a right but an obligation to refuse that role.

What A Real Development Bank Looks Like

The underlying need is genuine. Guyana’s credit market fails small farmers, coastal fisherfolk, hinterland entrepreneurs, and young professionals with viable ideas and no collateral. That failure is real and it has real consequences for economic diversification and for the people who bear the cost of an oil boom that has not reached them. A properly structured development finance institution could address a gap that the private market has not filled and will not fill at accessible rates.

But credibility is the precondition for effectiveness.

The IDB, the Caribbean Development Bank, the IFC — every institution Guyana aspires to partner with built its legitimacy on precisely the independence and transparency this bill refuses. Independent governance. Published lending criteria. Central bank or equivalent prudential oversight. Explicit anti-corruption frameworks. Publicly disclosed loan portfolios. These are not bureaucratic impositions. They are what separates a development bank from a slush fund.

What is being proposed here is not a development bank. It is a disbursement mechanism under executive control, surrounded by development language and pointed at an election.

If it passes unchanged, it will not serve Guyanese small business owners. It will serve whoever controls the appointment power — and through them, it will serve the project of making those people impossible to vote out.

The question before the National Assembly is not whether Guyana needs a development bank. It does. The question is whether the Assembly will allow this government to build one that works for the country, or ratify one that works for the party. That question must be answered in the legislation itself. It will not answer itself on the floor of a board meeting chaired by a political appointee, supervised by no one, accountable to nothing but the next election.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering governance, transparency, and the political economy of Guyana.

WHEN THE RECORD SPEAKS: A RESPONSE TO AUBREY NORTON’S WISMAR REVISIONISM

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WHEN THE RECORD SPEAKS: A RESPONSE TO AUBREY NORTON’S WISMAR REVISIONISM

Editorial | The 592 Guardian June 2026

Aubrey Norton has written a letter. He has given it a title — End This Nonsense About a Wismar “Massacre” — and signed it with his full complement of titles: Leader of the PNCR, Chairman of APNU, and, pointedly, a Proud Lindener. He wants the public to understand this is not merely a private opinion. It is a political position, staked on a date that carries its own weight.

We take him at his word. And we respond accordingly.

Norton’s central argument is this: the Wismar Commission of Inquiry does not support the characterization of what occurred in May 1964 as a massacre. He cites the commission’s finding that violence was greater elsewhere in the country. He counts five deaths among Indo-Guyanese in the post-Sun Chapman period. He invokes comparative suffering — the Abraham family, the Sun Chapman victims — as though the mathematics of atrocity, carefully arranged, can dissolve the testimony of thousands.

It is a masterclass in selective citation. And it fails on its own terms.

What Norton cited — and what he left out

Norton reaches repeatedly for the Wismar Commission Report as his authority. What he does not tell his readers is what else that same report contains.

The commissioners — whose composition Norton himself notes included no African Guyanese — did not merely count bodies. They examined 86 witnesses over 19 days and produced findings that no honest reading can reduce to a body count. The commission concluded, in its own language, that the destruction of Indo-Guyanese property was not spontaneous. It was, the commissioners wrote, “organized, and well organized.” More than 200 homes and business premises were systematically looted and burned to the ground.

Over 3,000 Indo-Guyanese residents were forcibly evacuated from the region by river to Georgetown — an entire community, expelled.

The commission also documented what Norton’s letter does not acknowledge: harrowing accounts of physical assault and mass sexual violence, deployed deliberately as instruments of terror to drive the minority population out.

These are not the findings of Indian rights activists. These are the findings of the commission Norton himself holds up as definitive.

The resignation Norton does not mention

There is one fact conspicuously absent from Norton’s lengthy letter. When the evidence of security force conduct during the Wismar attacks became undeniable — when it was clear that local law enforcement had stood aside as arsonists burned 200 homes and failed to apprehend a single perpetrator — the then Minister of Home Affairs resigned from Cabinet in protest.

That minister was Janet Jagan.

A sitting Cabinet minister, wife of the Prime Minister, walked out of government because the evidence of institutional collusion with or indifference to the atrocities could not be squared with her conscience or her office. The violence only subsided when British soldiers arrived to establish order — not the local forces whose mandate was to protect all residents equally.

Norton is a senior political figure with decades of experience in Guyanese governance and history. He is not unaware of Janet Jagan’s resignation. Its absence from his letter is not an oversight. It is a choice. And choices of omission, in matters of historical record, are their own form of testimony.

On the question of method

Norton accuses those who use the term “massacre” of race baiting. He frames accountability as divisiveness. This inversion deserves naming plainly.

It is not divisive to document what happened. It is not race baiting to insist that the forced expulsion of 3,000 people, the systematic destruction of their homes and livelihoods, the documented use of sexual violence as a weapon, and the institutional failure to protect them — constitutes an event of historical gravity that demands accurate language and honest reckoning.

What is divisive is the deliberate suppression of that record. What corrodes national fabric is not the naming of wounds but the insistence that the wounded are lying.

The record is being assembled

Norton writes as though the historical ledger on Wismar is closed. It is not.

Dr. Baytoram Ramharack’s recently released work THE WISMAR MASSACRE  details — the culmination of more than two decades of archival research, hundreds of oral history interviews, and examination of documents from the Guyana and British Archives — has now placed in the public domain a 825-page account of what occurred in May and July of 1964. It draws on eyewitness testimony, including survivors who have carried this history in silence for sixty years. It examines the geopolitical machinery — American and British cold war maneuvering against Cheddi Jagan — that created the conditions in which Wismar became possible. It uses the framework of ethnic cleansing, not casually, but with the evidentiary weight that two decades of scholarship can bring.

Cheddi Jagan called it a massacre. Janet Jagan called it genocide. The commissioners themselves, in an unguarded moment of their own report, reached for the word “holocaust” to describe the collective acts.

Norton wants the public to believe these are the hysterics of partisans. What he cannot explain away is that the commission he cites used that language too.

A note to Mr. Norton

The 592 Guardian does not adjudicate historical debates for sport. We engage them because the public record matters, because survivors deserve accuracy, and because those who hold positions of political leadership bear a particular responsibility for the claims they make in public about contested history.

Norton ends his letter by declaring it is “time to end this nonsense.”

We respectfully disagree. It is time, rather, to tell the truth — fully, without omission, and without the arithmetic of comparative suffering that transforms a community’s expulsion into a footnote.

The record exists. It is being uncovered and un-silenced. And this publication will continue to ensure that those who attempt to bury it know that fact checkers are paying close attention.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet committed to the full and accurate documentation of Guyana’s public record.

SEEDS OF DECEIT

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

INDEPENDENT ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM • GUYANA

EDITORIAL

SEEDS OF DECEIT:

How a $54 Billion Supplementary Bill

Exposes the Ali Administration’s Fiscal Fiction

Four months. That is all it took for Guyana’s largest-ever national budget to run dry — or so the Ali administration now asks us to believe. The President tours the Dominican Republic press circuit, proclaiming Guyana the region’s anchor of fiscal responsibility, even as his government returns, hat in hand, with a $54 billion supplementary request so vague in its particulars that it raises a question far graver than incompetence: is this the oil-funded war chest for the Local Government Elections?

                           THE EDITORS • 592 GUARDIAN • JUNE 2026                             

1. THE IMPLAUSIBILITY IS THE MESSAGE

On 26 January 2026, the National Assembly passed a record-breaking national budget. The Ali administration marketed it as a monument to transformational governance — the material proof that oil wealth was being translated into generational uplift. The numbers were staggering. The rhetoric was soaring. President Ali spoke of planting ‘forests of opportunity that will shelter generations to come.’ The international press was invited to witness Guyana’s arrival as a serious fiscal actor.

By June 2026 — roughly sixteen weeks later — the same administration had returned to the National Assembly with a supplementary appropriation bill seeking more than $54 billion in additional spending authority.

Let that sink in.

In the time it takes a secondary school student to complete a single term, Guyana’s government exhausted whatever buffer it had built into a historic spending plan. And not by a small margin. Fifty-four billion dollars is not a rounding error. It is not an emergency provision for a natural disaster or a regional economic shock. It is a sum that demands a full accounting — of what was miscalculated, what was deliberately omitted from the original budget, and what new priorities have emerged that are so urgent they cannot wait for the next fiscal cycle.

Instead, the nation has received vagueness. Generalities. Political boilerplate.                                                                         

11.THE COMPETENCE QUESTION CANNOT BE AVOIDED

There are two possible explanations for a government returning for a $54 billion supplementary appropriation within four months of passing its largest-ever budget. The first is incompetence. The second is dishonesty. Neither inspires confidence.

If the explanation is incompetence — if the Ministry of Finance and the administration’s technocrats genuinely failed to anticipate spending needs that materialized within a single quarter — then we are confronted with a profound indictment of the government’s planning capacity. Budget preparation in Guyana is not an ad hoc exercise. It involves months of ministry submissions, macroeconomic modelling, revenue projections, and Cabinet deliberation. The entire apparatus of the state is mobilized to produce the document that the government then presents to the nation as evidence of its stewardship.

If that document is wrong by $54 billion inside of sixteen weeks, one of the following must be true: the projections were wildly inaccurate; the assumptions underpinning the budget were known to be unrealistic when they were made; or the government is spending in areas it did not disclose to the National Assembly or the public. Any of these scenarios constitutes a failure of governance at the highest level.

President Ali presents himself internationally as the steward of a sophisticated oil economy, a leader who understands ‘deliberate diversification’ and ‘permanent transformation.’ His administration cannot simultaneously claim that competence while being unable to project spending needs four months into the future.

III. THE VAGUENESS IS NOT ACCIDENTAL

The opacity surrounding the supplementary bill is, this Editorial Board submits, the most damning feature of the entire exercise. In a functioning democracy, a supplementary appropriation of this scale would be accompanied by granular detail: which line items are being augmented and why; what original projections proved wrong; which projects are being accelerated; and which emergent obligations necessitate additional spending.

What Guyanese have received instead is the political equivalent of a blank cheque.

Vagueness in public finance is never neutral. It is a choice. Governments that are spending in the public interest invite scrutiny because scrutiny validates their claims. Governments that are spending for political purposes obscure details because exposure would reveal the true beneficiaries. The Ali administration’s refusal to provide itemized justifications for $54 billion in additional expenditure — in an election year — is not an administrative oversight. It is a red flag of the highest order.

The nation is owed specific answers to the following questions, and this Board demands they be answered on the floor of the National Assembly and in public written submissions to the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee:

THE QUESTIONS THIS ADMINISTRATION MUST ANSWER
1.  Which specific budget lines are being supplemented, by how much, and why did original projections fail?
2.  What procurement processes, if any, will govern the expenditure of these additional funds?
3.  Are any of these funds earmarked for infrastructure projects in constituencies targeted in the upcoming Local Government Elections?
4.  Who authorized the spending commitments that necessitated this request, and when were those commitments made?
5.  Has the Ministry of Finance revised its full-year revenue and expenditure projections in light of this shortfall?
6.  What is the draw-down status of the Natural Resource Fund, and what disbursement approvals have been made since 1 January 2026?

IV.THE ELECTION HYPOTHESIS

The 592 Guardian does not make accusations lightly. We are, however, compelled by the available evidence to state what many Guyanese are already saying in their homes, on their minibuses, and on social media: this supplementary bill has the appearance — and the timing — of an electoral financing vehicle.

The Local Government Elections are approaching. The Ali administration is acutely aware of the legitimacy it derives from constituency-level victories. The pattern of large, vaguely justified expenditure coinciding with electoral cycles is not novel in Guyanese political history — and it has not been unique to any single party. What is novel is the scale. Fifty-four billion dollars in supplementary spending authority, sought from a compliant National Assembly majority, with minimal public itemization, in the months before a national vote, represents a qualitatively new threshold of fiscal-political risk.

The government will, predictably, deny this. It will cite development imperatives, emergent capital needs, and the accelerating pace of transformation. It will point to visible projects — roads, hospitals, solar installations — as evidence that the money is going where it should. It will accuse critics of playing politics.

But accusations do not require guilt — they require accountability. And accountability requires transparency. Show us the line items. Show us the procurement records. Show us the disbursement schedule. If the spending is legitimate, the documentation will vindicate the government. If it is not, the Guyanese people deserve to know before they cast their votes, not after.

V.THE FORTRESS AND THE FICTION

President Ali told the Dominican Republic’s energy press that the Natural Resource Fund is Guyana’s ‘fortress of fiscal responsibility.’ It is a fine phrase. It is the kind of language that sounds authoritative in a glossy magazine feature or an investor roadshow. But a fortress that requires a $54 billion emergency drawdown four months into the fiscal year is not a fortress. It is a façade.

The President speaks internationally of ‘deliberate diversification’ and ‘long-term transformation.’ He invokes future generations. He promises forests of opportunity. But one cannot credibly plan for future generations while demonstrating an inability to project spending needs over a single fiscal quarter. These two positions — visionary stewardship of intergenerational wealth and chaotic, opaque supplementary demands — are irreconcilable. The international audience hearing the inspiring version of this story deserves to know the domestic reality.

Guyana’s oil wealth is real. The developmental opportunity it represents is real. The damage that fiscal recklessness, elite capture, and political manipulation of that wealth can inflict is equally real. The resource curse that President Ali so confidently claims to be defying is not conjured by pessimists — it is documented, in granular detail, in the economic histories of Nigeria, Angola, Venezuela, and a dozen other states where the rhetoric of transformation preceded decades of squandered potential.

The antidote to that curse is not confident rhetoric. It is institutional transparency, robust parliamentary oversight, independent auditing, and a media and civil society willing to ask uncomfortable questions even when — especially when — the government’s international image is riding high.

VI.OUR DEMAND

The 592 Guardian calls on the National Assembly’s Opposition to refuse passage of this supplementary appropriation until the government tables a fully itemized breakdown of every line item, the originating ministry, the contractual basis for each expenditure, and the specific projects or programs to be funded.

We call on the Auditor General’s office to immediately flag this request for priority review and to publish a preliminary assessment of its consistency with the fiscal rules governing Natural Resource Fund disbursements.

We call on civil society organizations, the Private Sector Commission, and the academic community to add their voices to the demand for transparency. The silence of institutions in the face of fiscal opacity is itself a form of complicity.

And we call on every Guyanese citizen to remember, when they go to vote in the Local Government Elections, that a government which cannot explain where $54 billion went in sixteen weeks is not a government that has earned the right to speak of ‘forests of opportunity for generations to come.’

The seeds being planted today may indeed shelter generations — but they will be the wrong generation’s forest.

This editorial represents the independent position of The 592 Guardian Editorial Board. The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability publication committed to social justice journalism in Guyana and the wider Caribbean region.

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