A Recognition Gap: What the Record Shows About Fisher and Mohamed

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM GUYANA

A Recognition Gap: What the Record Shows About Fisher and Mohamed

OPINION BY: Staff Writer –August 2026

Sometime in early June 2026 — within his first two months as British High Commissioner to Guyana — Joseph Fisher sat for a photograph with a delegation from A Partnership for National Unity. It has the look of a standard early courtesy call: new envoy, opposition party, flags either side, the kind of introduction most incoming high commissioners work through in their first weeks. Around the same period, Fisher was photographed separately with Amanza Walton-Desir, leader of the Forward Guyana Movement, in a one-on-one portrait rather than a group shot.

There is no equivalent photograph, and no documented meeting of any kind, between Fisher and Azruddin Mohamed — or between Fisher and We Invest in Nationhood as a party. This is despite WIN holding sixteen seats in the National Assembly, more than APNU and Forward Guyana combined, and despite Mohamed having held the constitutionally recognised office of Leader of the Opposition since January 2026.

The timing complicates the obvious explanation

The APNU meeting falls in early June — before the Caribbean Court of Justice dismissed Mohamed’s extradition appeal on July 29, and well before his legal team’s mid-August campaign accusing CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson of bias, a campaign the Guyana Chronicle described as a coordinated effort spanning multiple WIN-linked social media platforms.

Whatever explains the absence of a Fisher–Mohamed meeting, it cannot be explained by conduct that had not yet happened. If Fisher’s early courtesy rounds reached the smaller opposition parties within his first eight weeks and did not reach the largest one, that gap predates the events most likely to be cited in its defence.

This does not resolve the question. It narrows it.

The precedent Fisher inherited

Fisher’s predecessor, Jane Miller, did not treat Mohamed’s US indictment as a reason for diplomatic distance. In January 2026, as the government and the Speaker of the National Assembly delayed the swearing-in of an Opposition Leader, Miller told Stabroek News on the record that the election of a Leader of the Opposition should proceed “without delay,” explicitly naming a functioning legislature as the priority — a position she took alongside the US, Canadian and EU missions, all of whom pressed for Mohamed’s confirmation despite his legal position being, by then, already public and unresolved.

Miller went further than neutrality; she used her office’s public voice to support the institutional recognition Mohamed was seeking.

Whatever the current posture reflects, it did not begin as British diplomatic orthodoxy in Guyana. It is, at minimum, a change from the position the previous High Commissioner staked out in writing.

Two explanations, neither proven

There are two honest ways to read the gap, and the record does not yet allow a confident choice between them.

“The first is that something shifted in the UK’s posture independent of Mohamed’s conduct — a judgment call by Fisher, made early and for reasons not publicly stated, to keep the largest opposition party at arm’s length while extending ordinary courtesy to the smaller ones.”

The second is that Mohamed’s own position made him progressively harder to engage — an indicted politician contesting extradition through the courts is a different diplomatic proposition than one merely facing an unresolved case, and a politician whose legal team is publicly attacking the integrity of the region’s highest court is a different proposition again.

On this reading, the calculus may simply have hardened as 2026 went on, even if it was not yet fully formed in June.

The honest difficulty is that the documented timeline fits neither story cleanly. The absence predates the CCJ campaign, which weakens the second explanation as a complete account. But Miller’s precedent shows the indictment alone was not, on the UK’s own recent conduct, treated as disqualifying — which weakens the idea that Mohamed’s legal jeopardy in isolation explains everything either.

Something in between is more likely than either extreme, and this publication is not in a position to assert which.

What this means for the appeals now underway

What can be said without speculation is this: Mohamed has, over recent months, written directly to Fisher on the Region 10 impasse, seeking his intervention with the same posture he has brought to letters addressed to President Ali and to the CCJ Registrar — treating the recipient as a good-faith channel whose engagement can reasonably be expected. The documented record does not support that assumption in Fisher’s case. It shows a High Commissioner who found time for Mohamed’s smaller rivals and, so far as this publication has been able to establish, none for him.

That gap may be snub. It may be consequence. It may be some combination that changed over the course of the year. What it is not, on the evidence available, is a settled diplomatic relationship capable of delivering the intervention Mohamed’s letters ask for.

 

Continuing to write as though it is one is, at best, an appeal to an audience whose willingness to listen has not been demonstrated — and, at worst, another entry in a pattern this news outlet has now traced across GECOM, Region 10 and the CCJ: letters addressed with confidence to authorities whose capacity or willingness to act on them remains, on the public record, unproven.

 

A Letter Ali May Not Be Able to Answer

/0 Comments/in , , , /by
592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

ELECTORAL GOVERNANCE

A Letter Ali May Not Be Able to Answer

The Constitutional Hole at the Centre of Mohamed’s GECOM Campaign

592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL BOARD – August 2026

Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has now written President Irfaan Ali on the composition of the Guyana Elections Commission enough times that the letters have started to blur into one another. The latest, sent in the wake of The Carter Center’s statement on the GECOM impasse, asks Ali to give “urgent consideration” to appointing Mohamed’s three nominees — his own private attorneys, Roysdale Forde, Siand Dhurjon and Damien Da Silva — in place of the three sitting opposition-nominated commissioners. It is, by any reasonable count, his fourth or fifth attempt since June.

What has not changed across any of these letters is the assumption sitting underneath them: that this is a request Ali is capable of granting.

THE QUESTION THE LETTER TREATS AS SETTLED

Mohamed’s position rests on reading Article 161(3)(b) of the Constitution as attaching to an office, not a person. The Leader of the Opposition’s power to advise the President on GECOM appointments, on this view, belongs to whoever currently holds that title — so when the office changed hands from Aubrey Norton to Mohamed following the 2025 elections, the basis on which the three sitting commissioners were appointed changed with it.

University of Guyana law lecturer Neville Bissember has made this case seriously: the relevant constitutional language speaks of “the Leader of the Opposition” as a role, not a named individual, and a role that has been reconfigured cannot indefinitely bind the President to advice given by its previous occupant.

It is a real argument. It is not, however, the only one, and it is nowhere close to settled.

The competing reading draws on Article 161(6), which imports the removal protections of Article 225 into GECOM membership — the same protections that shield judges from arbitrary dismissal. On this view, a commissioner can only be removed for cause: infirmity, misbehaviour, the standard categories that apply to constitutional officeholders generally. 

A change in the opposition’s parliamentary arithmetic is not a recognised cause for removal. The sitting commissioners — Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin and Desmond Trotman — have made exactly this argument in their own defence: that appointment created a personal constitutional tenure, not a leash held by whichever party leader happened to nominate them.

Both readings have been argued in good faith by people who understand the Constitution. Neither has been resolved by a court.

Mohamed’s letters to Ali do not acknowledge this. They proceed as though the “office not person” interpretation is simply correct, and as though the only obstacle to Ali acting on it is inattention or bad faith.

THE DEEPER PROBLEM: EVEN IF MOHAMED IS RIGHT, ALI MAY NOT BE ABLE TO SAY SO

This is where the letter-writing campaign runs into its real difficulty, and it is a difficulty that survives even a charitable reading of Mohamed’s constitutional argument. Legal opinion aired publicly in July concluded that there is, at present, no vacancy on GECOM for the President to fill — because nothing in the Constitution gives the President the unilateral authority to decide, on his own initiative, which of two competing constitutional interpretations governs.

That determination belongs to the courts.

Put plainly: Mohamed is not simply asking Ali to act quickly. He is asking Ali to resolve, by executive letter, a genuine and unresolved dispute about the meaning of Article 161(3)(b) — a dispute serious enough that it has produced dueling legal opinions in the national press for months.

Even if Ali agreed entirely with Mohamed’s reading, replacing sitting constitutional officeholders on that basis alone would be an act of constitutional interpretation the Presidency does not clearly have the standing to perform unilaterally. It would almost certainly invite the very litigation Mohamed says he is prepared to bring — except brought against the President, by the displaced commissioners, rather than by Mohamed against the President.

This changes what “no response” actually means. Ali’s silence need not be read as obstruction or political convenience, though it may be that too. It can just as easily be read as the more legally cautious course available to him: declining to adjudicate a live constitutional question that properly belongs before a judge, rather than acting on one party’s account of it and creating a fresh cause of action in the process.

WHAT THAT DOES TO THE LETTERS THEMSELVES

If this reading is right, the recurring letters to Ali were, in a meaningful sense, never going to work — not because the President is unresponsive, but because the request was addressed to an office that most likely cannot grant it. That reframes the entire exercise. A letter asking for something the recipient cannot lawfully give is not really a request for action.

It is a public record being built: evidence, for a later court filing or a later international appeal, that “urgent” correspondence was sent and ignored.

Whether or not that is Mohamed’s actual strategy, it is the practical effect. And it sits inside a pattern that is now difficult to miss. The same posture — treat a contested legal question as though it is obviously resolved, address the request to an authority who may not have the power to grant it, invoke the international community rather than the courts — has now appeared in Mohamed’s approach to the Region 10 impasse and in his legal team’s demand letter to the CCJ Registrar over Justice Anderson’s participation in his own extradition proceedings.

In each case, the domestic judicial remedy that could actually settle the underlying question — judicial review, injunctive relief, a constitutional motion — remains unused, while the letters multiply.

The answer the moment requires is a judicial one, not another letter to an office that has now been asked, repeatedly, to do something it may not be constitutionally positioned to do.

The GECOM commissioners’ dispute deserves an answer. Guyana’s electoral machinery cannot indefinitely run on a commission whose composition even its own members and the Chairperson herself have publicly disputed, and the country cannot deliver credible Local Government Elections while that dispute drags on unresolved.

But the answer the moment requires is a judicial one, not another letter to an office that has now been asked, repeatedly, to do something it may not be constitutionally positioned to do.

— The Board

 

The Stopgap That Never Closed the Gap: Guyana’s Solar Billions and the Blackouts That Won’t Stop

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Stopgap That Never Closed the Gap: Guyana’s Solar Billions and the Blackouts That Won’t Stop

OPINION BY : Staff Writer  August 2026 

Solar farms were sold to the public as the fix for Guyana’s power shortfalls. Months and years after commissioning, the shortfalls are still here — and no one in government has published the numbers to explain why.

Guyana’s electricity grid failed again this month. Not in a remote hinterland outpost waiting on infrastructure that has not yet arrived, but in Linden — a town where the government has been promising a 15-megawatt solar solution for years, and where residents are now enduring rolling blackouts while they wait for it to switch on. The Linden Electricity Company confirmed the outages stem from a straightforward supply shortfall: demand has outgrown the 14.5 MW available from Bosai, the solar farms meant to close that gap remain under construction, and the government has been forced back to the negotiating table with the same bauxite company whose limits triggered the crisis in the first place.

This is not an isolated embarrassment. It is the clearest illustration yet of the question APNU parliamentarian Ganesh Mahipaul has now put to the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, the Guyana Energy Agency, and Guyana Power and Light: if hundreds of millions — and in some cases billions — of taxpayer dollars have gone into solar infrastructure explicitly framed as an urgent fix for Guyana’s power reliability problems, why does the reliability problem persist?

A STOPGAP BY DESIGN, NOT YET A FIX IN PRACTICE

The solar programme was never pitched to the public as a long-horizon decarbonisation project on a fifteen-year timeline. It was pitched, repeatedly and specifically, as an immediate answer to diesel dependency, generation shortfalls, and the reliability failures that have plagued the Guyana Power and Light network and isolated hinterland systems alike.

That framing is precisely what makes the current moment so difficult to explain away. Linden’s own case makes the point without any need for interpretation: the government’s own public messaging around the Linden solar project describes it as the intended remedy for a demand surge that has now arrived before the fix did — leaving residents on rolling blackouts while the solution sits half-built.

Guyana Power and Light’s own numbers, meanwhile, show a national system running close to its edge. As of mid-August, GPL reported available generation capacity of roughly 266 megawatts against peak demand ranging between 235 and 240 megawatts — a reserve margin of about 26 megawatts on a system that has separately been described as recording its highest-ever demand reading this year. A country that has spent years and tens of billions of dollars building solar capacity should not still be operating this close to the margin. If the installed solar capacity that Mahipaul has catalogued were reliably feeding the grid at anything close to its rated output, that reserve margin should look very different.

WHAT HAS ACTUALLY BEEN SPENT

Mahipaul’s letter assembles, for the first time in one place, the individual price tags behind Guyana’s solar buildout. The figures span both hinterland stand-alone systems and the larger grid-connected GUYSOL program:

Facility Capacity  Cost Status Claimed
Mabaruma Solar  400 kW ≈G$272 M Operational
Lethem Solar 1 MW G$472–490 M Operational
Bartica / Daag 1.5 MW G$625M -$703M Operational
Mahdia (storage) 650 kW G$362.41M Operational
Onderneeming-GUYSOL 5 MW 10.4M USD Completed  18MWp
Hampshire-GUYSOL – GUYSOL (inc) Completed  18MWp
Prospect- GUYSOL 3 MW $5.5 M USD Completed  18MWp
Trafalgar (GUYSOL)
 4MW $8M USD Completed 18MWp
Charity-GUYSOL 3MW $14M USD Completed 18MWp
GUYSOL (TOTAL) 33MWp(34 storage)  $83.3 USD 8 sites mixed status
Linden (3 phases) 15MW undisclosed 1st phase due 2026

Individually, each of these numbers might be defensible. Solar infrastructure is capital-intensive, hinterland logistics are expensive, and battery storage adds real cost. Collectively, they represent a sum large enough that the public is owed more than installed-capacity press releases — it is owed operating data.

CAPACITY IS NOT THE SAME AS DELIVERY

This is the distinction Mahipaul’s letter turns on, and it is the correct one. A solar farm’s rated capacity — its megawatts or megawatt-peak figure — describes what it could theoretically generate under ideal irradiance conditions. It says nothing about actual output over a year, nothing about downtime, nothing about how much of that output ever reaches a consumer’s meter rather than being curtailed, stored, or lost.

The government’s own projections for two of the completed GUYSOL sites illustrate why the distinction matters: Onderneeming is projected to generate approximately 7,700 megawatt-hours annually, saving an estimated G$447 million a year in avoided fossil-fuel costs; Charity is projected at roughly 4,600 megawatt-hours annually, worth an estimated G$267 million.

These are meaningful numbers — if they are being realised. The government has published the projections. It has not published a single quarter of actual generation data to show whether those projections are holding, falling short, or being exceeded.

Mahipaul’s letter also raises a technical point that deserves more attention than it has received: connection to a local distribution network is not the same as export to the national interconnected grid. GUYSOL facilities connect to 13.8-kilovolt distribution networks in their respective areas, and several hinterland installations operate on isolated systems entirely separate from the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System. A solar farm described in a press release as “connected to the grid” may in practice be feeding a small local network with no meaningful bearing on the national reliability picture that ministers invoke when defending the programme’s cost.

The public has been given capacity figures. It has not been told, facility by facility, where the electricity generated actually goes.

THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN UNANSWERED

Mahipaul’s demand is specific and, on its face, unobjectionable for a government that maintains its solar investments are performing as promised: publish, for every facility, the total expenditure and how it compares to the original contract price; the contractor and procurement record; monthly generation figures; diesel volumes actually displaced; realised financial savings against fossil-fuel-cost projections; battery storage performance; and operational status including downtime and maintenance history.

“Guyana cannot simply count solar panels and call that energy transformation.”

That is the crux of it. Guyana has, over several years now, been shown ribbon-cuttings, capacity announcements, and projected-savings press releases. It has not been shown a single consolidated account of what these facilities have actually produced, what they have actually saved, and what has happened when demand outpaced supply in the very communities the solar farms were built to serve.                    Linden is not a hypothetical test of that gap. It is the test, running in real time, right now.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE BALANCE SHEET

Guyana’s oil revenues have created the fiscal space to make investments of this scale without the immediate budgetary strain such spending would once have imposed. That is precisely why the accounting standard should rise, not fall. Money that is easy to spend is not thereby immune from scrutiny — if anything, the ease of spending is the reason scrutiny becomes more necessary, not less.

A government sitting on record oil revenue has fewer excuses, not more, for leaving a reserve margin this thin, a hinterland town on rolling blackouts, and a national solar programme’s actual output undisclosed years into its rollout.

The Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, the Guyana Energy Agency, and Guyana Power and Light have the generation data. Smart meters, inverters, and battery management systems on modern solar installations record output automatically; this is not information that would need to be reconstructed from scratch. If the political message accompanying each commissioning — that this facility would ease the shortfall, cut diesel costs, and strengthen reliability — was accurate, the underlying data will bear that out and the disclosure costs the government nothing but the paperwork.

If it will not bear that out, Guyanese taxpayers who have funded hundreds of millions and, cumulatively, billions of dollars in solar infrastructure are entitled to know why — and who signed off on projects that did not deliver what they were sold as delivering.

The stopgap was supposed to close the gap. Linden’s blackouts this month are the clearest evidence yet that, on the government’s own timeline and its own terms, it has not. The figures exist to settle the question either way. The government’s continued silence on them is itself an answer of a kind.

— The Board

FOURTEEN YEARS, TWO ADDRESSES, ONE LESSON UNLEARNED

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

FOURTEEN YEARS, TWO ADDRESSES, ONE LESSON UNLEARNED:

What Fip Motilall’s Grocery Store Should Have Taught Guyana About Vetting Foreign Contractors — and Why GWI Didn’t Learn It

In 2010, the Government of Guyana handed Makeshwar “Fip” Motilall a US$15.4 million contract to build the access road to the Amaila Falls hydro site, on the strength of a company, Synergy Holdings Inc, whose listed American headquarters turned out to be a grocery supermarket in Florida. Motilall admitted it himself, at a press conference, after the contract collapsed.

Fourteen years later, Guyana Water Incorporated signed a GYD $1.49 billion contract with a joint venture whose listed Canadian headquarters is a house on a residential street in Scarborough, Ontario.

Nobody at GWI has admitted anything, because — as far as the public record shows — nobody at GWI has asked.

THE PRECEDENT GUYANA ALREADY PAID FOR

Motilall’s Synergy Holdings Inc was awarded the Amaila access road contract in March 2010, tasked with upgrading roughly 85km of existing roadway and constructing 110km of virgin roadway through some of Guyana’s most difficult terrain, plus two river crossings. Its listed head office was 951 Sansbury’s Way, Suite 204, West Palm Beach, Florida — an address shared with a second Motilall entity, Synergy Energy Solutions Inc, according to Florida’s own corporate registry. Independent investigations at the time found no evidence Motilall had ever built a road, managed a hydroelectric project, or employed technical staff of the kind the contract required.

The government defended the award anyway. Then-Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh and Winston Brassington, head of the Privatisation Unit, both went before the press to vouch for Motilall’s qualifications. Brassington predicted the project would finish on time and “in excellent fashion.” By December 2011, only 40 percent of the works were complete. Motilall himself later conceded that of 161km of contracted road, only 9km had been finished to specification.

The contract was terminated in January 2012, days after failing to meet the deadline for submitting the new valid performance bond from an acceptable financial institution. —by the Jagdeo administration who was in his second term in  office — and Motilall, cornered by reporters, admitted the truth about his American headquarters at a press conference rather than in response to any government audit or due-diligence review that caught it first.

The government didn’t catch the grocery store. Motilall confessed to it, after the money was already spent.

THE PATTERN REPEATS

Guyana Water Incorporated’s October 2024 contract with the Sigma Engineers Ltd & Hebei Wansheng Environmental Protection Engineering Co. Ltd joint venture — GYD $1,486,448,800 for water treatment facilities at Leguan and Wakenaam — names the JV’s principal place of business as 6 Poplar Road, Toronto, Ontario, and describes it in the contract’s own text as “a company under the Laws of Canada.” This publication obtained a street-level image confirming that address is an ordinary detached house: driveway, garage, personal vehicles parked outside. Nothing about it resembles the office of an international engineering joint venture executing a nine-figure public contract.

A subsequent title search through Ontario’s land registry, detailed in our earlier reporting, found no name connected to Sigma, its Guyana director M. Tamjeed Rahmaan, or Mohamed Aqtar Ali anywhere in that property’s ownership history.

That absence does not resolve the question of why the address appears on the contract at all — it sharpens it.

Whoever drafted, reviewed, and signed this agreement on GWI’s behalf allowed a residential address to stand as the registered seat of a Canadian corporate partner in a public contract worth close to a billion and a half Guyana dollars, without — so far as the public record shows — verifying it.

SIDE BY SIDE

The two cases differ in scale and in the nationality of the address involved. They do not differ in the underlying failure: a foreign-registered address attached to a Guyanese public contract, unverified before signature, discovered only by outside scrutiny after the fact.

  Synergy Holdings Inc   Sigma/Hebei Wansheng JV 
Contract value  $15.4 M USD  $1.4 Billion GYD
Awarding body Govt of Guyana GWI/NPTAB
Foreign address  West Palm Beach FL. Scarborough Ontario
Use Type Supermarket(Grocery)  Residential
Prior Experience None -established Not independently verified
Responsible Party Ashni Singh / Winston Brassington CEO Shaik Baksh
Outcome Contract terminated after ~40% completion, 9 of 161km delivered Contract active; commissioning delays on Bachelor’s Adventure

GWI CEO Shaik Baksh has publicly defended Sigma’s contracts as the product of competitive, NPTAB-run tenders and stated he was unaware of any involvement by Aqtar Ali in the procurement process. That defense addresses bidding process. It says nothing about whether GWI verified the physical, operational reality of the Canadian entity named as co-contractor on a JV worth GYD $1.49 billion — the same category of gap that let Motilall’s grocery-store headquarters go unnoticed in 2010.

WHAT DUE DILIGENCE WOULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE

Confirming that a joint-venture partner’s listed address corresponds to an actual business premises is not a forensic undertaking. It requires a property search, a corporate registry check, and — at minimum — a phone call.

Ontario’s land registry, the same public tool this publication used to trace 6 Poplar Road’s ownership history, was available to NPTAB and GWI before either signed the CDB Lot 2 contract in October 2024.

There is no indication either institution used it, or any equivalent Bangladesh-side verification of Sigma’s own claimed “more than two decades of engineering experience” — a claim GWI’s own contracting behavior appears to have simply accepted. 

If it did , it would have discovered that Sigma Engineering Inc. was under investigation by Bangladesh Anti- Corruption Commission for contract fixing since 2019 and was subsequently charged in 2020

Guyana does not lack the institutional memory to know better. The Motilall case was extensively documented by Stabroek News, Kaieteur News, and other outlets across four years, and it cost the country a road that still, by Motilall’s own admission, was barely a sixth complete when the contract collapsed. The lesson available from that failure — verify the contractor’s stated address before, not after, signing — does not appear to have reached the officials responsible for vetting Sigma’s Canadian joint venture partner fourteen years later.

WHAT THIS IS, AND ISN’T

This is not an allegation that Sigma Engineers or the Hebei Wansheng joint venture will fail to deliver the Leguan and Wakenaam facilities, or that the arrangement mirrors Motilall’s in outcome.                  Hebei Wansheng is a real, independently operating manufacturer with its own factory in Hebei Province, China — a fact this publication confirmed and has already reported.

What this is, is a documented pattern in how Guyana’s procurement institutions treat the addresses foreign contractors supply: as details to be recorded, not verified.

Fourteen years and one failed hydro road separate the grocery store in Florida from the house in Scarborough. The distance between them, institutionally, appears to be zero.

— The Board

Pres Ali’s Procurement Rap, New Song Sung

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Pres Ali’s Procurement Rap, New Song Sung

OPINION BY: GHK LALL– August 2026

Those visits by Pres Ali into places of worship may be paying off.  He sees the light.  He may insist that he sees god (meaning himself); I settle for light.  Light is late in coming.  Its speed slowed down by GPL wires and thick political darkness.  But light has arrived in Guyana and it struck Pres Ali first. 

Opposition and civil society could participate in the national procurement process, part of the oversight mechanism.  Now lightning has struck me.  Really?  After a half decade of PPP cronies and family members ripping off billions from the treasury and reaming Guyanese taxpayers, it may be time for the Opposition and civil society to be involved.  Not in the teefin, but in the new PPP stop the stealing campaign.

Pres Ali wouldn’t be Pres Ali if he didn’t see an opportunity to showcase his cute side.  Adorable he is not.  The national procurement setup has multi-stakeholder presences with little involvement by the government.  If the president is going to crack a joke, it should be one that makes Guyanese laff. 

His multi-stakeholder plot fell flat.  Hence, I beg to differ with him. 

Take a look fellow Guyanese, almost all of those so-called multi-stakeholder presences in the national procurement system are either beholden to the PPP Govt, or proxies for it.  When they are in procurement programs, the government has many seats at the table.  There is no need for a minister, or PPP flunkies.  Such would give away the storyline.  The evaluators are largely PPP loyalists or PPP indentured and indebted. 

Which one was going to go against the tide of corruption?

Recall how quickly the PPP got rid of Geoffrey Vaughn.  There were other components to his departure.  Recall Dr. Terrence Campbell and his exposé on how Oil Fund oversight really works.  One word is adequate enough: rubberstamp.  Recall how obstinate the same PPP Govt has been whenever the idea, the push, for opposition and/or civil society presences within the procurement system came up.  If the procurement system was pure, if it was untouched by politics, then non-PPP presences would have been seated already. 

There was nothing to hide.  No prearrangements to conceal.  No bloated pricing models to stuff under a seat.  No highly favored contractors calling after hours and outside of channels and claiming the right to be the winner of a tender.

Now I hear the government is pondering.  The law could be amended.  Recall what I said earlier about the Pres Ali seeing the light.  It took him a half decade plus to reach this place.  He had a dream.  In Georgetown, not Georgia.  Or, some pressure from foreign diplomats, with the Yankees leading.  Good, ole, Uncle Sam salvaging the situation, seeking to tidy up past messes between now and 2030.  

It’s evident that corruption has become so rampant it is now out-of-control.  Bidders make their own rules.  Evaluators finalize their own numbers.  The procurement system follows through with its eye on Freedom House and Office of the President.  Waiting for a signal, maybe.

The president mentioned the cabinet.  The cabinet doesn’t know its ankle (a euphemism) from its elbow.  Its members see a bid and they see dollars.  Friends due for a partnership, or shakedown. 

Bagmen who should come in for a piece of the action. 

I am sorry, but this business of the president and the cabinet finding religion overnight neither impresses nor inspires.  A bargain, perhaps, to sidestep or go easy on questionable PPP spending in the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. 

The PPP does nothing for nothing.  There’s always a catch.  So, when I hear of the president with his latest sensationalism, two things register.  There’s a hidden trapdoor in this development of opposition and civil society presences in the procurement system. 

Certainly, the rewards are so rich that it may prove irresistible to some of the newcomers. 

By then, it’s too late.  Can’t say that the PPP using the procurement system fuh teef.  And, if there’s teefin, is nah dem alone teefin. 

Apologies, Excellency Ali.  Government tricks return to condemn.

The Tap, Not the Tax: How Guyana Inverted the Redistribution Debate

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

The Tap, Not the Tax: How Guyana Inverted the Redistribution Debate

BOARD EDITORIAL

State Wealth, Discretionary Dispersal, and the Erosion of an Independent Civil Society

Every recent American argument against redistribution begins from the same premise: wealth is born dispersed, in private hands, and the state’s task is to gather it up. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani want the state to do more of the gathering. Their critics, invoking Friedrich Hayek and pointing to fortunes that financed abolitionism and suffrage and even Karl Marx’s own writing desk, warn that the gathering itself is the danger — that authority migrates from citizens and civil society to the centre, one tax return at a time.

Guyana does not have this problem. Guyana has the opposite one.

WEALTH THAT NEVER LEFT THE STATE

In the American frame, private wealth is the baseline and the state is the intruder. In Guyana, the state is the baseline. Petroleum revenue arrives already concentrated in government hands through the Natural Resource Fund and the terms of the Stabroek Block production-sharing arrangement, before a single dollar has touched a private ledger.

There was no antecedent class of dispersed owners for the state to expropriate, because the wealth in question was never dispersed to begin with.

The moral hazard the American essayists worry about — a government that acquires what belonged to someone else — does not describe Guyana’s condition. The government here is not acquiring resources it must first take from citizens. It is sitting on resources it already holds and deciding, at its own discretion, who gets a share and on what terms.

This is not a semantic distinction. It changes where the danger sits. Redistribution, in the classic critique, is dangerous because it transfers authority from the private sphere to the state. In Guyana the authority was never in the private sphere. The live question is not whether the state should take. It is whether the state, having already taken, will ever let go — and on what terms it chooses to.

DISPERSAL WITHOUT RELINQUISHMENT

The state can hand out money without ever giving up the authority to decide who deserves it.

This is where patronage enters, and where it must be distinguished sharply from redistribution proper. A genuine dispersal of state-held wealth back into private hands would look like a rule: a published formula, a transparent eligibility test, an entitlement a citizen could claim without asking anyone’s permission.

Guyana’s Development Bank Bill, passed without debate on July 27, 2026, was pitched publicly as interest-free and collateral-free lending for ordinary Guyanese. Its actual text tells a different story: Section 5(2) preserves discretionary collateral and interest terms, Section 23 carries no citizenship-eligibility requirement, and the board of up to forty billion dollars in disbursement authority answers to no one but the Finance Minister, who alone appoints every director. There is no opposition seat, no civil-society nominee, no published criteria.

Within days of the Bill’s passage, the pattern that discretion invites was already visible. At a Model Village consultation in Rose Hall, the President instructed bar and entertainment-venue owners to draw on Development Bank financing to soundproof their premises against noise complaints — this from a bank that, at the time of the remarks, had no application process, no disbursement portal, and had not yet held its formal launch.

The lending priority existed before the lending mechanism did. That sequence only makes sense if the money was never intended to move by rule. It was always going to move by instruction.

 

This is dispersal without relinquishment. The state hands out access to its wealth, but it never hands over the authority to decide who receives it, when, or why.

A citizen with a rule-bound entitlement does not need to stay in anyone’s good graces to keep it. A citizen or business dependent on discretionary allocation does.

That dependency is the entire point, and it is the opposite of what the American redistribution debate assumes redistribution produces.

THE VILLAGE AS THE UNIT OF PATRONAGE

The Model Village Initiative supplies the clearest illustration of the mechanism at village scale. Launched August 3, 2026, as a multi-region consultation tour, it was scheduled on weekday daytimes — structurally excluding the working residents it claimed to be consulting — and delivered polished concept renders (a gateway sign, a landscaped park with splash pad and gazebos) with no attached funding, procurement process, or delivery date. Over forty individual village plans were produced within the tour’s first week, a volume of cabinet-level coordination that does not happen in three weeks and was, on the evidence, substantially pre-planned rather than assembled in response to public pressure.

The tour’s own security posture undercuts the consultation framing further. In Buxton/Foulis, the local NDC chairman — holding a personal invitation — was barricaded out of the very meeting convened to hear him, and threatened with arrest for asking why young women were being moved along near the venue. In Koberimo, placard-holding women met a flak-jacketed police presence. A boat bound for a Moruca consultation was intercepted by the Coast Guard.

A government engaged in genuine damage control de-escalates. A government staging a pre-scripted electioneering tour polices its own audience.

None of this is redistribution in the sense the American essayists mean. No wealth tax was levied; no private fortune was seized. But the effect the essayists fear — citizens taught to see their material circumstances as something dispensed from above rather than built through their own initiative — is being produced anyway, and produced more directly, because the wealth was concentrated at the source and the dispersal itself is being timed to an electoral calendar rather than a citizen’s claim of right.

WHAT THE ESSAY GETS RIGHT, READ BACKWARDS

The American case against redistribution rests on an empirical claim: that dispersed private wealth finances things governments will not — dissent, unpopular causes, independent institutions, art and scholarship hostile to the prevailing order. Friedrich Engels’ textile profits paid for the writing of Capital.

Private fortunes, in the American telling, bankrolled abolitionism and suffrage years before either enjoyed public approval.

Guyana’s civil society and independent press have no equivalent financial base to draw on. There is no class of private petroleum wealth in domestic hands sitting parallel to the state’s share, available to fund criticism the state finds inconvenient. What independent institutions exist are financed by advertisers with state-linked interests, by foreign donors, or not at all.

The essay’s own safeguard against centralised authority — a dispersed private sector wealthy enough to fund its own critics — is close to absent here. That is not an argument for redistribution in the American sense. It is an argument that Guyana’s civil society is more exposed to the concentration-of-authority risk the essay describes than the American essayists’ own country is, because it lacks the very buffer their argument assumes every modern state still has.

The essay closes by quoting Hayek: that a minimum of food, shelter, and clothing can be assured to everybody, but that it does not follow that the state should become the standing manager of incomes, opportunities, and social life. Guyana’s government has reversed the order of that sentence. It has not assured a minimum through any rule a citizen can claim.

It has made itself the standing manager first, and left the assurance of a minimum to whichever village gets a roadshow stop, whichever bar owner gets a soundproofing loan, and whichever chairman is let past the barricade.

THE ACTUAL REMEDY

If the essay’s warning has any purchase in Guyana, it points toward the opposite of what its American authors intended. The problem is not that too much wealth might be redistributed by rule. It is that too little is. A transparent, formula-bound Natural Resource Fund withdrawal schedule; a published, contestable Development Bank lending criterion; procurement records a citizen can inspect without a court order — these are the dispersal mechanisms that would actually return authority from the centre to individuals, the very outcome the American essayists claim to want and fear losing.

Guyana does not need to be warned off redistribution. It needs redistribution conducted by rule instead of by favour — the thing patronage is built to resemble without ever becoming.

— The Board

The Pool, Not the Project: What President Ali Left Out of His Cost-Oil Math

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Pool, Not the Project: What President Ali Left Out of His Cost-Oil Math

By The 592 Guardian–Staff Writer August 2026

President Irfaan Ali told a news conference this week that Guyana is about to see a sharply larger share of Stabroek Block oil, now that ExxonMobil and its co-venturers have recovered close to their outstanding costs. He simplified the arithmetic for the public: instead of 75 barrels out of every 100 produced going to cost recovery, only 20 barrels would now be needed — leaving 80 to split, 39.8 for Guyana and 39.8 among the consortium.

The formula he cited — a 75% cost-oil ceiling, with the remainder split 50/50 as profit oil — is real. It is written into Article 11 of the 2016 Petroleum Agreement between the Government of Guyana and Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, CNOOC Nexen Petroleum Guyana Limited, and Hess Guyana Exploration Limited. What Ali did not explain is that the same Article 11 he is relying on also explains why his numbers describe a moment, not a destination — and the contract text says so in language considerably more direct than his press conference did.

WHAT THE CONTRACT ACTUALLY ALLOWS

Article 11.2 of the Agreement sets the ceiling Ali referenced:

“All Recoverable Contract Costs incurred by the Contractor shall… be recovered from the value… of a volume of Crude Oil (‘Cost Oil’) and/or Natural Gas (‘Cost Gas’) produced and sold from the Contract Area and limited in any Month to an amount which equals seventy-five percent (75%) of the total production from the Contract Area for such Month.”

Two words in that clause do most of the work: “Contract Area.” Not “Field.” Not “Project.” The 75% ceiling — and by extension whatever percentage the consortium is currently drawing beneath that ceiling — is calculated against production from the entire Stabroek Block, treated as a single pool.

There is no clause anywhere in the Agreement that assigns a project’s costs to that project’s own output alone.

Article 11.6 removes any ambiguity on this point:

“The quantity of Cost Oil and/or Cost Gas actually utilized in satisfying the Recoverable Contract Costs may be allocated by the Contractor to production from any Field or Fields.”

This is the operative sentence for evaluating the President’s claim. The Agreement gives Esso — as operator — explicit discretion to recover costs from any field in the block, regardless of which field generated them. There is no ring-fencing. A dollar spent developing Uaru, Whiptail, or the incoming fifth FPSO does not sit in a separate account waiting on that project’s own production to pay it back. It is thrown into the same cost pool as Liza Phase 1 and Payara, and recovered against whatever oil the block produces that month.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR THE “20 BARRELS” CLAIM

Ali’s framing implies a new steady state: cost recovery has dropped to roughly a fifth of production, and Guyana’s larger share is now the going rate. The contract’s own pooling mechanism says otherwise.

ExxonMobil’s Q2 2026 earnings disclosures put recovered costs at approximately US$55 billion — not the roughly US$40 billion, with US$5 billion outstanding, that the President’s figures implied. That gap alone is worth scrutiny. But even taking recovery as substantially complete, the pooled cost bank does not stay empty. The consortium is actively developing Uaru and Whiptail, and the fifth FPSO — arriving this month, according to Ali’s own remarks — carries its own capital costs. Under Article 11.6, every dollar of that new spending is eligible for recovery against total block production, the same pool that just drained toward zero.

Article 11.3 adds a second mechanism working in the same direction. Where Recoverable Contract Costs in a given month exceed the value of Cost Oil and Cost Gas available under the 75% ceiling, the shortfall does not disappear — it carries forward and is recovered from subsequent months’ production. A concentrated burst of commissioning or development spending, in other words, does not just raise the cost-oil share in the month it occurs; it can create a backlog that keeps pulling the percentage upward in the months that follow.

Neither mechanism was mentioned at the President’s news conference. Both are the direct and foreseeable consequence of a pooled, block-wide cost-recovery structure that the government itself signed.

 

THE OTHER OMISSION: ROYALTY

Ali’s 39.8/39.8 figure describes only the profit-oil split under Article 11.4, which is indeed 50/50 between the Minister and the Contractor. It leaves out Guyana’s 2% royalty on gross production, which is calculated separately and paid to government before cost recovery or profit-sharing even begins. That royalty is not cost-recoverable — a point the Guyana Revenue Authority itself has previously confirmed publicly. Guyana’s actual entitlement in any month is the royalty plus its half of profit oil, not the profit-oil split alone.

Presenting 39.8 barrels as the government’s full take understates what the state is contractually owed.

THE BOTTOM LINE

None of this makes President Ali’s underlying description of the formula false. The 75% ceiling exists. The 50/50 profit-oil split exists. What is missing from his account is the mechanism — written into the same Article 11 he is citing — that determines whether “20 barrels for costs” is a new floor or a temporary trough. The Agreement pools costs across the entire Contract Area and allows the operator to recover them against any field’s production, with unrecovered costs carried forward month to month. Sanctioned capital spending already in the pipeline — Uaru, Whiptail, and the fifth FPSO — will draw against that same pool.

The government is entitled to characterize a genuine improvement in Guyana’s near-term oil entitlement as good news. It is not entitled to present a pooled, fluctuating cost-recovery mechanism as though it were a permanent structural shift, when the contract’s own text says it is neither ring-fenced nor fixed.

For more on the agreement : https://petroleum.gov.gy/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Petroleum-Agreement-Oct-7-2016_2.pdf

 Sources: 2016 Petroleum Agreement between the Government of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana and Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, CNOOC Nexen Petroleum Guyana Limited, and Hess Guyana Exploration Limited, Article 11 (Cost Recovery and Production Sharing); ExxonMobil Q2 2026 earnings call remarks of CFO Neil Hansen; Guyana Revenue Authority public statements on royalty treatment.

Charity Police Station And The Costly Myth Of “World-Class” Governance

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITYJOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Charity Police Station And The Costly Myth Of “World-Class” Governance

OPINION BY: Staff Writer —August 2026

One year ago, the government stood at Charity and declared a victory. The reconstructed Charity Police Station, commissioned at a cost of $ 62.7 million, was branded modern, “futuristic” and “world‑class” – the template, we were told, for citizen‑friendly policing infrastructure across Guyana. Twelve months later, the same facility is back on the tender board, this time with an engineer’s estimate of $ 66.8 million for “external waiting area, infrastructural works and rehab” – almost matching the original reconstruction cost.

If that does not immediately raise red flags about planning, procurement discipline, and honest governance, nothing will.

When “additional works” rival the original project

The Ministry of Home Affairs has invited bids for the new round of works at Charity, with 23 contractors responding. The engineer’s estimate: $66,810,150. Bids range from $ 47.9 million to $ 87 million. This comes after an earlier tender, for a perimeter fence alone, carried an eye‑popping government estimate of $ 74 million – more than the reconstruction of the station itself.

Guyanese taxpayers must now ask:

How did a “complete” and “futuristic” station, commissioned in July 2025, suddenly demand rehabilitation and an external waiting area barely a year later?

⇒ Why is an external waiting area, routine civil works and “infrastructural rehab” valued in the same bracket as an entire station’s reconstruction?

⇒What exactly was covered in the original $ 62.7 million scope, and what was left out – by design or by incompetence?

We are not talking about unforeseen structural damage, a natural disaster, or a radical change in policing needs. The ministry’s own description – “construction of external waiting area, infrastructural works and rehab” – reads like housekeeping that any competent project design should have anticipated and included from day one.

The culture of half‑done, over‑priced projects

At Charity, the numbers tell a familiar story in Guyana’s public sector:

⇒ Original reconstruction: $ 62.7 million.

⇒ Fence estimate: $ 74 million.

⇒Additional works one year later: $ 66.8 million.

In other words, the “extras” – a fence and now “external waiting area and rehab” – are poised to outstrip the core reconstruction. This is not modern project management; it is the old culture of fragmenting public works into multiple contracts, multiplying costs, and blurring accountability.

Some hard questions demand public answers:

⇒Was the original design incomplete, and if so, who signed off on it?

⇒ Did the engineer’s estimates fully capture the functional requirements of a modern police station – including external waiting facilities – or were key elements deliberately postponed?

⇒ Which officials within the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Guyana Police Force reviewed and endorsed the original scope of works?

⇒ Has there been any independent evaluation of whether the first    $ 62.7 million was prudently spent and delivered according to standards?

Guyana has seen this pattern in schools, health centers, roads and wharves: the fanfare of commissioning, the ribbon‑cutting, the promise of “world‑class” this and “state‑of‑the‑art” that – followed by a steady drip of add‑ons, variations and “rehab” that quietly doubles the public bill.

 “Futuristic” talk, pre‑modern practice

At the time of commissioning, Charity was held up as one of the most modern, responsive stations in Region Two: upgraded male, female and juvenile lockups; witness and ID parade room; marine and immigration offices; CID and traffic departments; officers’ accommodation; a child‑friendly area and a domestic violence unit.

That is exactly why this new tender is so troubling. You do not proclaim a facility to be “futuristic” and “world‑class” and then return within a year to fix basic infrastructure, build an external waiting area, and undertake rehab. Either the original claims were exaggerated political marketing, or the project management was fundamentally deficient.

In a world where policing infrastructure is being designed around community engagement, trauma‑informed spaces, accessibility and digital systems, Guyana’s version of “futuristic” appears to move at a break‑neck crawl. The world is racing toward integrated justice campuses and smart, flexible public buildings; we are still retrofitting waiting areas after commissioning.

This gap between the rhetoric and the reality is not a technical issue. It is a governance problem.

Procurement opacity and the engineer’s estimate

The NPTAB opening on August 4 showed bids stretching from $ 47.9 million to $ 87 million. That spread alone prompts serious scrutiny of the engineer’s estimate and the procurement process:

⇒ Why is the engineer’s estimate so close to several mid‑range bidders, but almost $ 19 million above the lowest bid?

⇒ What is the detailed bill of quantities behind the $.66.8 million estimate?

⇒ Has the Ministry published any justification for this cost to the public, or are taxpayers expected to accept the figure on faith?

The engineer’s estimate is not a private internal number; it is the benchmark against which NPTAB and the Ministry will adjudicate bids. When such estimates repeatedly hover at the higher end of the spectrum, Guyanese citizens have every right to question whether the system structurally favors more expensive outcomes.

Where is the oversight?

Key institutions ought to be asking questions today:

⇒ The Auditor General’s Office should be looking at the full Charity station portfolio – reconstruction, fence, and these new works – as a single project with cumulative cost, not as isolated tenders.

⇒ The Public Procurement Commission, still struggling to assert relevance, should insist on transparency for the scope and cost drivers of these add‑on works.

⇒ Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee should demand explanations from the Ministry of Home Affairs about planning failures and cumulative spending on a single station over a short period.

A simple, concrete example: if a rural health centre were rebuilt at   $ 60 million and, within a year, required another $ 65 million for “external works and rehab,” citizens would cry foul. Charity is no different. Policemen and women deserve decent facilities; citizens deserve safe and humane spaces.

But taxpayers also deserve evidence that their money is being spent with foresight, competence and integrity.

Citizens should not accept “business as usual”

This is not about one station in Region Two. It is about the norms we are silently accepting:

⇒ Grandiose language at commissioning, minimal transparency afterward.

⇒ Multiple tenders for a single facility, each inflating the cumulative cost.

⇒A political system that equates concrete and steel with governance, while ignoring planning rigor and financial discipline.

The government cannot continue to market every building as “world‑class” while operating with pre‑modern project control.      If Charity is truly a model station, then the public deserves a full breakdown of:

⇒ The original design and cost.

⇒ The scope and justification for the fence and new “external waiting area and rehab.”

⇒ The total projected lifetime cost of the facility to the public purse.

Until then, Guyanese should treat every “futuristic” ribbon‑cutting with skepticism. Modern governance is not what you say at the podium; it is how you plan, procure, and account for every dollar long after the cameras leave.

Charity Police Station is now a test case. Will this government confront the hard questions about over‑fragmented, over‑priced public works, or will it simply add another line item to the national budget and hope nobody connects the dots?

Woods conveyed, Ali delayed

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Woods conveyed, Ali delayed

OPINION BY: GHK LALL– August 2026

I see a study in contrasts.  Exxon’s CEO Darren Woods burst out of his executive suite and conveyed the news.  Investment in Guyana fully recovered; all US$55 billion of it.  Two years early to crown some superb work.  Guyana’s CEO of Oil, Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, barricaded himself behind steel fences and locked doors.  He hasn’t shown his face, said a word, on that Exxon investment development. 

See what I mean by the foreign CEO conveyed, the local CEO delayed?  A study in contrasts, if ever there was one.

It took Guyana’s other CEO, Pres Irfaan Ali to break away from his government’s delay and relay that Guyana is finally in the money and collecting 39.5 percent in profits.  I am still working through what made that so hard to say so.  Now checkout this other contrast: Exxon was proud to proclaim to the world that its investment came back into the house bank a full two years ahead of time. 

On the Guyana side, it took 18 days before the PPP Govt, through CEO Ali, to break its silence on what has to qualify as an extraordinary event in Guyana’s ongoing oil story.  One CEO recouped his billions two years before schedule.  The Guyanese CEO took almost two years to repeat the same grand news to his people.  The 18-day delay to cut through the profit silence equates to almost two years by my reckoning.  Each day of silence was the equivalent of a monthlong delay.  This was news that belonged with Guyanese.  More than three times the oil earnings of the first six years of oil production must be a giant leap for Guyana, a great moment for Guyanese.                          Why withhold?  How can there be silence? 

Exxon’s investment repaid and Guyana set to climb the profit ladder cannot be a national security secret.  How so?  Who is so, ah, sloppy, to say so?

Before proceeding, permit me.  Appreciate and repeat for the record that Mr. Darren Woods was also selling himself as due for a nice raise for his lovely work.  Appreciate also that it took the PPP Govt so much time to decide what to say to Guyanese.  Three times present oil collections and then some more must have set the wheels spinning in Freedom House. 

What to do with all these new US billions tumbling into the Oil Fund?  In circumstances such as these, temptations soar.  National development priorities have proven to be a dud, worn thin.  I empathize.  A cash grant only utilizes so many US millions.  For the first time, I heard Pres Ali mentioning structure.  It seems that the MV Barima disaster jarred him awake, stuck some wisdom in him.  Too late. 

A legacy that was pathetic to begin with, now in tatters.  To quote local lingo: “dem nah gah watah fuh wash am.”  Play with fire.  End up in the crematory.

Nobody can say that I didn’t warn the PPP, which is why Dr. Jagdeo is so wrapped in silence at this exciting juncture.  He is working diligently to hold the party together.  Amid a sea of blatant corruption, ongoing starvation in sections of the population, and political families enriched from left to right to stragglers, the PPP General Secretary doesn’t have time for oil.  He either gets the party faithful in line quickly and conclusively, or many of his people (and others closer to home) could be looking at jail time. 

He knows that, which is why he has been missing in action from the conversation about 39.8 percent in profits.

A strange country this Guyana of ours.  Master presenter Darren Woods was all excitement about collecting back his company’s US$55 billion.  In contrast, Guyana with more billions coming in from a greater surge in American dollars is glummer than Droopy, that sad cartoon canine, and dimmer than Cinderella after she lost her slipper when the dancing was over. 

For people who love money, it’s a strange way in which the PPP celebrates Guyana’s change in fortunes.  Woods was all bubbly.  Ali was no less than rusty.  Something tells me that Guyanese are in trouble with their 39.8 percent windfall.

Consultation À La Carte.

/0 Comments/in , , /by
592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Consultation À La Carte

OPINION BY : Staff Writer – August 2026

The President consults promptly on three vacant commissions. On the two judicial offices Guyana has waited twenty years to fill, he has yet to write at all.

P resident Irfaan Ali wants Guyanese to know he takes the Constitution seriously. “Wherever consultation is required in accordance with the Constitution,” he told reporters on Tuesday, “you can be assured that I will fulfill my mandate.” The occasion for the assurance was a genuine one: through Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance Gail Teixeira, the President has initiated consultation with Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed on three constitutional bodies whose membership had lapsed — the Judicial Service Commission, the Local Government Commission, and the Public Service Commission.

By the letter of the process, this looks like the Constitution working as designed. The JSC’s life expired July 13; nine days later, Teixeira wrote proposing the reappointment of retired Justice Carl Singh under Article 198(2). The Local Government Commission Act required three opposition nominees; Mohamed, after consulting APNU’s Aubrey Norton and Forward Guyana’s Amanza Walton, delivered them — Leola Narine and Leslyn Lowe from WIN, Nicholas Chesney from Forward Guyana. The Public Service Commission slate — Maurice Gajadhar, Meleita Bovell, Leila Ramson — was proposed and acknowledged in turn. Three letters, three responses, three commissions moving toward being properly constituted. Whatever one thinks of the individual nominees, the mechanics of consultation were followed.

Which is exactly why what’s missing from that list is so conspicuous.

Mohamed said it plainly: consultation has proceeded on the three commissions, but the President “has not initiated consultation on the substantive appointment of a Chancellor and Chief Justice.” Guyana has gone without a substantive Chancellor since 2005 and without a substantive Chief Justice since Carl Singh — the same Carl Singh now being proposed for the JSC — stepped down from acting as Chancellor in 2017 after twelve years in the role. Justice Ian Chang acted as Chief Justice for fifteen years before that. The current arrangement, with Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire and Justice Navindra Singh both acting, is simply the latest chapter in an impasse now past twenty years old.

Article 127(1) sets out exactly the same mechanism as the commissions the President just moved on: appointment by the President, “acting after obtaining the agreement of the Leader of the Opposition.”

It is not a more complicated provision than Article 198(2). It does not require different machinery, a different minister, or a different letter-writing process.

Guyana’s own courts have already confirmed there is no legal barrier to the President initiating it at will — a 2023 High Court ruling declined to find that the delay amounted to a dereliction of constitutional duty, but pointedly directed that the political actors involved act with “all convenient speed.”

Three years on, “convenient speed” has yet to arrive.

The pattern is not new, and it is not partisan in a way that lets the President off the hook. When Aubrey Norton held the LOO seat, he was invited to consult on the same two positions and, by his own account, declined — calling the exercise a “waste of time” because he did not believe genuine consultation would follow.

Norton’s reasoning deserves scrutiny of its own; refusing an invitation is not the same as never receiving one. But Mohamed has now held the office for more than six months, and the record shows no comparable invitation extended to him. Asked directly about it, the President’s position has reportedly been that a letter written to a previous Opposition Leader does not automatically carry over to his successor — a technical distinction that, notably, did not stop the administration from moving briskly on three commissions with  different opposition leaderships in the same stretch of time.

That contrast is the story. It is one thing to argue, as the Attorney General has in court, that the President is entitled to sequence his constitutional obligations — commissions with vacant seats first, offices that are “occupied and persons are functioning in them” later.

It is another thing to watch that sequencing hold, letter after letter, for every seat except the two that carry the most institutional weight and the least security of tenure for whoever holds them.

A commissioner serves a fixed term. An acting Chancellor or acting Chief Justice serves at the pleasure of whoever keeps them there — a standing incentive, structural rather than personal, for any Executive to prefer the acting arrangement over the substantive one. Twenty years of unbroken continuity in that preference, across administrations, is not proof of a single conspiracy.

It is proof of a mechanism that consistently rewards inaction, regardless of who is in office to benefit from it.

None of this requires reaching for the more explosive allegations now circulating about how the last serious attempt at these appointments actually unfolded — the claims that a sitting CCJ President personally pressed a former Opposition Leader toward a government-preferred slate, or that Justice Cummings-Edwards’s own departure from the acting Chancellorship was less a request than a push. That history is serious enough to warrant its own reckoning, and this news outlet  has been tracking it as such. It does not need to be imported into this piece to make the point that stands on Tuesday’s letters alone: a President who wants credit for constitutional fidelity should be judged by his least convenient obligations, not his easiest ones.

The Leader of the Opposition has the stronger position here, and he should use it. Mohamed does not need to wait for an invitation that has not come. Nothing in Article 127 requires the President to write first any more than nothing in Article 198 required him to write first on the JSC — except that in this case, he already did, to someone else, over a different name. The Opposition Leader should put the President on record: initiate the request himself, in writing, and force a public answer to why the seats that most need a permanent occupant have waited the longest.

Twenty years is not a queue. It’s a choice, renewed every year no one is made to explain it.

— The Board