The Nouveau Riche of Oil: How Guyana Grew a Class It Never Had

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

The Nouveau Riche of Oil: How Guyana Grew a Class It Never Had

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar . —September 2026 

Guyana was, for most of its post-independence life, a poor country with a flat proletariat– class structure. Not equal — poor. Sugar, rice and bauxite paid wages that kept the majority in a shared, undifferentiated hardship, and the small commercial elite that existed traded in the same narrow, low-margin economy as everyone else.

There was no capital base large enough to produce a true domestic wealthy class, only a colonial one that left with the colonizers and a commercial layer that never approached the scale of what oil has now made possible.

Whatever else can be said about that era, it did not have a Guyanese class of people who could write personal checks in the hundreds of thousands of US dollars.

That class exists now. The question this piece asks is not whether wealth has grown in Guyana since 2019 — it obviously has, nationally, by any macroeconomic measure. The question is whether that wealth has produced, for the first time in the country’s history, a domestic class positioned above the law of ordinary income — a class whose wealth accumulation has outpaced anything a public salary could produce, sitting inside a state that has neither the will nor the machinery to ask how.

The mechanism, not just the outcome

Two documented cases now sit in the public record — not as opposition talking points, but as filings.

Mustapha. The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission’s own Mineral Map shows 7,614 acres of mining land allocated since 2023 to Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha’s two sons and daughter-in-law — allocations that bypassed long-standing local applicants, according to the allegation that prompted the minister’s public response. Mustapha’s rebuttal does not dispute the acreage; it disputes the characterization, insisting the allocations followed lawful procedure, and counters that the family of his chief accuser, WIN leader Azruddin Mohamed, controls more mining land still. Both things can be true.

What neither side disputes is the underlying fact:the minor children and in-laws of a sitting minister now hold a mining land portfolio that would have been unthinkable for any Guyanese family outside the old commercial elite a decade ago.

Rodrigues. The documentary trail here is this writer’s own, published across a series of Stabroek News letters beginning January 7, 2026, built entirely on public Florida and Broward County records, and unrebutted by any competing document in the nine months since. Florida Division of Corporations filings list Tourism Minister Susan Rodrigues as Manager and Authorized Person of Revelle Investments LLC, registered January 16, 2024, alongside Denisha Bobb — who, per a September 2025 shareholder resolution filed with a separate Guyana-registered company, has since legally changed her name to Denisha Rodrigues by new birth certificate.

On March 11, 2024, a Warranty Deed shows Amil Dial Homes LLC selling a property at 8601 NW 46th Ct, Lauderhill, to “Susan Margaret Rodrigues, Single,” for US$540,000, financed by a US$378,000 mortgage from A&D Mortgage. The very next day, March 12, Rodrigues executed a Quit Claim Deed transferring the same property from her own name into Revelle Investments LLC for a nominal $10 — a deed that, per my own  reporting, specifically states no title search was performed. That deed was recorded with Broward County on April 9, 2024, and the Broward County Property Appraiser’s records now list Revelle Investments LLC as owner.

A&D Mortgage’s own 2024 Form 1098 — the official tax document Rodrigues has pointed to as proof of transparency — shows the loan originating March 11, 2024 at $378,000, and an Ending Principal Balance of $0.00 as of the December 31, 2024 reporting date: a 30-year mortgage apparently extinguished within the same calendar year it began. This writer’s published reporting reads that zero balance as consistent with only two possibilities in ordinary banking practice — the loan was paid in full, or it never functioned as genuine long-term debt to begin with — and notes that Broward County’s public record does not show the Satisfaction of Mortgage that Florida Statute -SS 701.04 would ordinarily require to formally close out a paid loan. No document contradicting that reading — no recorded satisfaction, no assignment, no alternative explanation from Rodrigues or A&D Mortgage — has surfaced in public since that specific reporting was first published in January. Our own findings were formally filed with the Florida Office of Financial Regulation, and remain, as of this writing, under active review. Rodrigues separately acknowledged purchasing two lots at Peters Hall, financed by mortgage—which by AML-CFT rules, ought to have been flagged  by the issuing bank–under qualifying criteria–with title signed October 10, 2024 — while she held a ministerial portfolio overseeing the award of lands and titles.

None of this reporting has been legally challenged by Rodrigues in the months since publication. What she has done instead is emblematic of a pattern this outlet has documented more than once. The Integrity Commission was established by Act No. 20 of 1997 as an autonomous body, explicitly “not subject to the direction or control of any other person or authority.” President Ali, by his own account, personally reviewed the Revelle Investments matter and pronounced himself satisfied — accepting an explanation on the Commission’s behalf before it had so much as issued a subpoena.  This writer’s own published response to that intervention named it directly: Ali acting as Rodrigues’s “private investigator and clearance officer,” the Commission’s silence amounting to accepting its own termination “with a smile,” and the entire arrangement functioning, in this writer’s words, not as a barrier to corruption but as camouflage for it — a “ghost agency” retained chiefly to satisfy international donors with a veneer of legitimacy.

The same reflex surfaced again, days later, in an entirely different institutional setting. Following a government-vehicle crash involving the son of a sitting Home Affairs Minister — an incident that surfaced alongside unresolved public questions about a prior, fatal 2024 crash in which a woman, Salima Heeralal, lost her life — the Guyana Police Force offered no briefing, no preliminary findings, and no visible sign that routine procedure was underway. What filled that silence was not a police statement but a presidential assurance. Once again this writer’s published response to that episode asked the question directly: whether Ali’s early intervention, offered before investigators had spoken, did not so much calm the matter as signal to every level of authority what the acceptable conclusion should be — and whether presidential assurance had, in effect, replaced police investigation as the actual mechanism of accountability.

Three ministers, three entirely different institutions — a constitutional integrity body and a criminal police investigation — and in every instance– the same figure, the President, stepped in ahead of the institution’s own process to declare the matter settled.

That is not a defense mounted through the machinery the law built for the purpose, machinery explicitly designed to be independent of exactly this kind of interference. It is a verdict delivered from the Office of the President, replacing the ones those institutions were never allowed to reach.

The Benchmark: what MV Barima shows about how this administration actually works

By the time the MV Barima disaster occurred, the pattern above was not new — it was escalating. The same reflex that closed the Rodrigues and Waldron matters before their respective institutions could act is visible, at far higher stakes, in how this administration has handled the deaths of 73 people aboard that vessel.

The Commission of Inquiry into that disaster was not assembled through a visibly independent process. It was sworn in unilaterally by President Ali, behind closed doors, without press present, before commissioners’ potential conflicts of interest had been disclosed to the public. Two of those conflicts surfaced only through independent digging: commissioner Nyree Dawn Alfonso’s own law firm’s case record placed her alongside Keoma Griffith — now Ali’s Minister of Labour — as co-counsel in a prior Guyana Supreme Court matter, and Griffith’s professional bio was quietly scrubbed from that firm’s website in the days immediately before Alfonso’s swearing-in. A second appointee, Dr. Ivor English, brought to lead a “Safety and Compliance Audit Team,” turned out to still hold an active MARAD consultancy and a board seat at the Guyana National Shipping Corporation — auditing, in effect, an agency he remained institutionally embedded in. A third, the Commission’s own Secretary, was appointed from a family with a documented multi-decade proximity to the governing party.

None of these connections were volunteered by the Office of the President. All were established after the fact, by outside reporting.

Alongside the Commission sits the Attorney General, who moved within weeks of the disaster to warn grieving families against retaining independent lawyers, calling such representation potentially criminal — while the government’s own compensation channel, explicitly and repeatedly described by the state as “not compensation” and carrying no admission of liability, remained the only sanctioned route to relief. And alongside both sits a demonstrated operational capacity the state has not extended to its own citizens in crisis: when an opposition-led protest breached barricades at a vice-presidential outreach event, Coast Guard, police marine units and joint services mobilized within minutes; when the MV Barima’s captain radioed distress at roughly 10 p.m., the rescue vessel that reached the scene reportedly did not arrive until after 5 a.m. The state’s rapid-response machinery is real. It moves fastest to secure the government’s own comfort, not to save lives it has been slow to prioritize or challenges it would rather not answer.

Read together, this is not a portrait of an administration whose oversight institutions have simply atrophied. It is an administration that has learned to manage the appearance of institutional independence while retaining personal control over its outcome — swearing in inquiries whose composition it does not disclose, delivering verdicts on allegations before its own accountability bodies can rule, and closing off the avenues, legal or investigative, through which an outside party might reach a different conclusion. Once that pattern is visible at the scale of 73 deaths, it should not be read as coincidental at the scale of a minister’s mining acreage or a minister’s Florida LLC.

It is the same reflex, operating at lower volume, on a class of officials whose wealth has grown fastest since 2020, and who now sit inside a system this outlet has watched, case after case, decline to independently verify anything the Office of the President has already pronounced settled.

Why this is structural, not anecdotal

The Mustapha and Rodrigues cases, and the MV Barima Commission, sit inside a wider pattern this outlet has already documented independently:

♦ The REO/PS purge (May 2026): President Ali’s own stated justification for removing Regional Executive Officers and Permanent Secretaries nationwide was that officials and their family members had registered companies and captured public contracts — his government’s own admission that the mechanism exists at the administrative level, not just the ministerial one. Four months later, Vice President Jagdeo delivered nearly the same warning to the replacements, with no disclosed enforcement action in between.

♦ Long Creek: A 2011 State Lands lease names Bharrat Jagdeo as Lessor and “Mohamed Ali” as Lessee for land at Long Creek; independent satellite tracing puts the developed acreage near 155, against a lower figure implied by the President. Neither the lease nor the acreage gap has been resolved by any independent inquiry, despite a standing public demand for a Commission of Inquiry.

President Ali,155-acre farm at Long Creek

♦  The Development Bank Bill: passed without debate in July 2026, concentrating roughly $40 billion in discretionary allocation power in the Finance Minister’s office — a mechanism, not yet tested, for exactly the kind of capital access that could formalize and accelerate what is currently happening piecemeal through land and mining allocations.

None of these are proof of a coordinated scheme in the conspiratorial sense. They do not need to be. Taken together, they describe something more durable than a scandal:

An administration in which the president’s own pronouncements substitute for institutional verification, consistently, across ministries and across stakes as different as a mining allocation and a maritime disaster — and in which every nominally independent body positioned to check that pattern has, so far, either been appointed with undisclosed ties to it or been preempted by a presidential verdict before it could rule.

What this is not

This is not a claim that Guyana’s oil wealth is being stolen wholesale, and it should not be written as one. Mustapha and Rodrigues have both offered detailed, document-referenced rebuttals; some of what critics allege may be fully lawful. The claim is narrower, and it is not that any single official is guilty of anything a court has found.

It is that Guyana’s oil windfall has created, within six years, a visible domestic wealth tier — measured in mining acreage, US real estate, and corporate structures — with no precedent in the country’s economic history, sitting inside an administration that has repeatedly substituted the President’s own word for the independent verification its institutions exist to provide.

MV Barima shows what that substitution costs when the stakes are 73 lives and a submerged wreck nobody in authority seems in a hurry to raise. The same reflex, applied to a minister’s land holdings, a police investigation, or a minister’s LLC, costs less visibly, but it is drawn from the identical playbook: intervene early, declare the matter settled, and let the institution built to answer the question stand down before it has asked it.

 A closing note, not a verdict

None of what is documented above required this outlet to prove that any individual official broke the law. That was never the test applied here, and readers should notice that it wasn’t — because the pattern holds regardless of how any single case would resolve if it were ever actually tried.

What holds is this: three times, across three different institutions built for three different purposes — an integrity commission empowered by statute to be free of exactly this kind of interference, a police investigation into a fatal crash, a commission of inquiry into 73 deaths — the same office arrived first, spoke last, and closed the question before the institution assigned to it could open one

 

A country can survive individual corruption. Officials take what they shouldn’t, and if the institutions built to catch it are allowed to function, the wealth gets clawed back, the careers end, the system corrects

What a country cannot survive indefinitely is the quieter condition on display here:

A governing class whose fortunes grow fastest precisely where the mechanisms meant to check them have already been answered for, in advance, by the one office no mechanism was built to check. Whether that condition has a name — and what should be done about it — is left, deliberately, to the reader.

 

THE  POWER  OF  POSSIBLE -A Financal Literacy Mini- Series For Guyana’s GenZ

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

THE  POWER  OF  POSSIBLE 

A Financal Literacy Mini- Series For Guyana’s GenZ . -The 592Guardian 

SPECIAL FEATURE —Staff Writer -August 2026

The Power of Possible is a practical financial-literacy miniseries for Guyana’s Gen Z and first-time earners. It is designed to make money matters easier to understand—from finding work and opening a bank account to saving, borrowing, starting a small business and preparing for new opportunities in a rapidly changing economy. Our objective is not to lecture young people or blame them for the barriers they face. It is to provide clear, useful information that helps them ask better questions, avoid costly mistakes and make sound decisions with whatever income or opportunity is available. As Guyana expands its economy and develops new avenues for finance, training and enterprise, this series aims to help young people prepare, participate and turn opportunity into lasting progress.

Episode 1: Before the Budget — The Real Cost of Finding Work

Financial literacy is often taught as if every young person begins with a steady paycheck: make a budget, save something, avoid debt and plan ahead. Those are important skills. But for many young Guyanese, the first financial challenge comes before the first salary: finding work.

You cannot budget money you have not yet earned.

Guyana is changing rapidly. New industries, new businesses and the proposed Development Bank could create more routes into jobs, training, entrepreneurship and investment. Those opportunities can be powerful—but young people must be ready to understand the real costs, ask the right questions and make informed decisions.

That is where financial literacy begins.

The Numbers Tell Two Stories

Guyana’s official unemployment rate was a little over 6% in the second quarter of 2026, according to the Bureau of Statistics’ Quarterly Labor Force Survey. At first glance, that sounds encouraging. But the national figure does not tell the whole story for young people.

World Bank data, using International Labour Organization estimates, puts unemployment among people aged (15 to 24) at 24.9% in 2025. In plain terms, nearly one in every four young people looking for work could not find it. That means a young person entering the workforce faces a much harder reality than the national unemployment number suggests.

Behind that figure are real pressures:

⇒ Mobile data is needed to search and apply for jobs.

⇒ Transport is needed to attend interviews and get to work.

⇒ Appropriate clothes, meals and personal care all cost money.

⇒ Family members may expect support even before stable work is found.

⇒ A person may accept low-paid work because they cannot afford to keep searching.

These are not signs that young people are irresponsible. They are the real costs of trying to enter the economy.

Budgeting Starts Before the Paycheck

A budget is not magic. It cannot create a job or increase a low salary. But it can help a young person see the truth of a situation before financial pressure makes the decision for them.

Before accepting a job, ask:

⇒ How much will it cost each day to travel there and back?

⇒ Will I need lunch, mobile data, uniforms or special clothing?

⇒ What will I actually have left after those costs?

⇒ Is the job close enough and stable enough for me to keep it?

⇒ Will this job build experience, skills or connections that can lead to better opportunities?

For example, a job may offer (G$100,000) per month. That may sound like a starting point. But if transport costs (G$1,200) per workday, that can amount to about (G$26,000) in a typical month. Add lunch, data and other work-related expenses, and the usable income may be far lower than the advertised salary suggests.

Knowing this does not mean rejecting every entry-level job. It means making the decision with your eyes open.

 Opportunity Must Be Reachable

Guyana’s Constitution recognizes every citizen’s right to freely choose a trade, occupation or profession. That principle matters, especially to a new generation preparing to work, train, start businesses and build independent lives. But freedom to choose has to be matched by a fair chance to enter the marketplace.

Can a young person afford transport to training or work? Do they have reliable internet access? Can they obtain a permit, open an account, access credit or find information about available programs? Can a small business owner get startup financing without taking on unmanageable debt?

These questions will become even more important as new financing avenues emerge, including those that may come through a Development Bank. Loans, grants, business support and training can help turn potential into income—but only when people understand the costs, conditions, risks and responsibilities attached to them.

A loan can help fund equipment, stock, certification or expansion. But it must be repaid. Before borrowing, young people should understand interest, repayment periods, collateral, penalties and whether the business or job can realistically produce enough income to meet the monthly payment.

The First Money-Smart Move

For a first-time jobseeker, the first money-smart move is not necessarily saving or investing. It is pricing the route to income honestly. Calculate what it costs to apply, travel, work and stay in a job long enough to gain experience and move forward. Keep track of spending on data, transport, food and job-search costs. Compare that total with the money likely to come in.

Financial literacy should help young people make the most of opportunity. It should never be used to blame them for obstacles they did not create. The goal is not simply to teach Gen Z how to manage money once it arrives. It is to help them recognise opportunity, protect themselves from bad deals, prepare for better ones and use every new avenue wisely.

LEARN MORE: https://youtu.be/mVbcRjdpG-E 

In Episode 2, we look at the next question: who among Guyana’s first-time earners has a bank account, who is able to save, and who remains outside the formal financial system before they ever receive their first payslip?

Sources: Guyana Bureau of Statistics, Quarterly Labor Force Survey, Q2 2026; World Bank World Development Indicators, “Unemployment, youth total % of total labor force ages (15–24 yrs.) modeled ILO estimate,” sourced from ILOSTAT.

MAC MAHARAJ  and the Discipline of Revolution

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

 

 Mac Maharaj and the Discipline of Revolution

OP-ED BY : Hem Kumar August 2026

There was a time when political commitment was not measured by a Facebook post, a motorcade, a press release, or the ability to speak loudly at a public meeting. It was measured by what a person was prepared to endure—and whether, after prison, torture, isolation and exile, that person still remained committed to the cause.

Sathyandranath “Mac” Maharaj. A South African Revolutionary .

Sathyandranath “Mac” Maharaj’s life belongs to that tradition. Arrested in July 1964 during apartheid South Africa’s repression of the African National Congress and its allied underground, Maharaj was convicted in the so-called Little Rivonia Trial and sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. He spent most of that sentence on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki and other figures who would come to embody South Africa’s liberation struggle.

The record of his interrogation is not precisely documented in the sources this newsroom  could verify, but multiple independent accounts agree he was subjected to sustained torture during that period and gave his interrogators nothing that broke the underground network he had helped build.

The prison sentence was not merely imprisonment. It followed brutal state repression and torture. Yet Maharaj emerged neither politically broken nor personally detached from the struggle. That fact is central to understanding him. Many persons can speak about sacrifice after the danger has passed; Maharaj lived through the danger when apartheid still controlled the courts, the police, the prisons, the borders and the machinery of everyday life.

On Robben Island, Maharaj became part of another extraordinary act of political resistance: preserving Mandela’s prison manuscript. Mandela wrote what would later form the basis of  Long Walk to Freedom in secret. When prison officials discovered the original manuscript hidden in the garden, a transcribed copy had already been prepared. Maharaj had copied the text in tiny handwriting and concealed it within a study file among his academic materials. When he was released in December 1976, the hidden manuscript left prison with him.

That distinction — between what can be footnoted and what cannot — matters more with Maharaj than with most subjects, because his life’s work depended on exactly that kind of discipline: what to reveal, what to withhold, and when.

That episode tells us something larger than an ingenious prison escape for a set of papers. It reveals the discipline of serious political work. The men on Robben Island understood that a struggle is fought not only with speeches and demonstrations, but with memory, organization, education, trust and patience. They understood that the written record of a movement mattered. They understood that history itself could become a battlefield.

After his release, Maharaj left South Africa in 1977 and was assigned by the ANC to work in exile. But exile did not become retirement.

It was from exile that he became the authenticating link in one of the most audacious acts of sabotage of the entire anti-apartheid campaign.

A young South African contractor named Rodney Wilkinson, who had gained access to South Africa’s Koeberg nuclear power station near Cape Town, smuggled out the plant’s building plans and delivered them to the ANC. Maharaj vetted the material and the man. He then made an unusual call: rather than send a trained guerrilla into Koeberg, he judged that Wilkinson himself — already inside, already trusted by the plant’s engineers — gave the operation its best chance of reaching the reactor’s most vulnerable points. The mission was named, after him, Operation Mac.

On the night of 18–19 December 1982, Wilkinson planted four limpet mines at Koeberg — two on the reactor heads, two in cabling beneath the control rooms — timed to detonate after the plant’s reactors were shut and, according to the ANC’s own account, after independent nuclear experts had been consulted to rule out any radiation risk to civilians. The devices, aged and imperfectly engineered, went off in a staggered sequence over roughly twelve hours rather than simultaneously. No one was injured. Wilkinson had already arranged his own farewell party from the plant for the same week — sitting through the send-off, by his own account, while wondering whether the mines beneath the building would hold their timing.

This publication  has not been able to verify specific damage or delay figures sometimes attached to the Koeberg attack, and does not print unverified numbers. What is documented, corroborated on the record by both Maharaj and Wilkinson decades later, is the operation itself: a nuclear facility under construction for the apartheid state, penetrated and struck by a insider recruited and directed from exile.

Maharaj’s most sustained act of discipline came in 1988, when the ANC decided to send serving leadership back into South Africa itself — not as visitors or infiltrators passing through, but to live and command from inside the country they had been exiled from. Maharaj, by then a member of the ANC’s National Executive Committee, was chosen alongside Umkhonto we Sizwe commander Siphiwe Nyanda to go first.

The preparation took months. In Amsterdam, an operative built Maharaj a new identity from nothing — disguise specialists trained him to alter his walk, padded clothing to change his build, and the city’s opera-house wigmaker built him a wig from a foam cast of his own skull. The cover story given to his own ANC colleagues in Lusaka, who were not told the truth, was that Maharaj had gone to Moscow for a kidney operation.

“Not even his colleagues in Lusaka could be let in on what he was about to do.”

In August 1988, travelling in disguise, Maharaj and Nyanda were smuggled into Swaziland and walked across the border into South Africa on foot. A car was waiting, driven by an ANC sympathizer who had not been told what the operation was. It dropped them outside the Carlton Hotel in central Johannesburg. Maharaj later described the state he and Nyanda were in as they crossed: on a high state of alertness, ready, as he put it, to see ghosts on every street corner.

What followed was Operation Vula — Vulindlela, ‘to open the way’ — an underground project to connect the ANC’s exiled leadership directly to its structures inside South Africa, using acoustic modems and one-time-pad encryption relayed through a London flat to reach Lusaka in real time, smuggled equipment carried in by sympathetic air crew, and a growing number of returning operatives, each fitted with a disguise of their own.

The historian Stephen Ellis would later call it the most effective and impressive project the ANC ever mounted. It ran until the ANC’s unbanning in 1990, when Maharaj was detained by security police just three days before he was due to appear publicly as a relaunched South African Communist Party leader — arrested, that final time, in the open, under his own name.

He does not need the embellishment. The documented record already describes a man convicted at twenty-nine, imprisoned for twelve years, and sent back into the country that had jailed him wearing another man’s face and walk, to build, from inside, the network that helped end the system that built Robben Island in the first place.

This is where the lesson becomes uncomfortable for many contemporary politicians and activists.

Maharaj did not build a political reputation through convenience. He did not become relevant only when power was within reach. He did not enter struggle as a career path, then treat public service as a route to contracts, status, personal enrichment or permanent entitlement. His political life was marked by a sustained line: underground work, imprisonment, education in prison, exile, clandestine return, organization, democratic transition and, later, public office.

When apartheid fell and South Africa held its first democratic election in 1994, Maharaj became Minister of Transport in Nelson Mandela’s first cabinet. From prisoner to minister was not simply a personal triumph. It reflected an idea that is now too often forgotten: those who demand the right to govern must first show the capacity to serve, organize and sacrifice for something beyond themselves.

Maharaj eventually left frontline electoral politics and government office, though he later returned to public service as spokesperson to President Jacob Zuma. But whether one agrees with every political association or decision made in his later years is not the central point. The record from 1964 through the democratic transition is a record of sustained commitment under conditions that most of today’s political actors would find unimaginable.

The missing quality in Guyana

Guyana’s political culture urgently needs this kind of consistency—not the reproduction of another country’s struggle, and certainly not romantic slogans about revolution, but a return to the ethics that gave liberation politics its meaning.

Too much of what passes for activism today is episodic. A crisis appears; voices rise. A controversy trends; commentators mobilize. An election approaches; principles suddenly become fashionable. Then the moment passes, attention moves elsewhere, and the public is left with the same unaccountable systems, the same secrecy, the same political patronage and the same institutional decay.

There is a difference between protest and political work.

Protest can be necessary. Outrage can be justified. Public criticism can expose wrongdoing. But sustained political work requires more: study, institutional memory, documentation, community organization, courage under pressure, financial independence, internal democracy and a willingness to remain engaged after the headlines disappear.

That is the distinction that Maharaj’s story brings into sharp relief.

In Guyana, we have no shortage of persons prepared to condemn corruption when it is politically useful, denounce discrimination when it affects their constituency, or speak of justice when they are outside the corridors of power. What remains scarce is a culture of principled consistency: people willing to challenge wrongdoing no matter who commits it; to build organizations that outlive personalities; to maintain public records; to defend citizens who bring inconvenient information; and to resist the temptation to trade conviction for access.

The country’s oil era makes this deficiency even more dangerous.

A society receiving enormous resource revenues cannot afford a political class that thinks only in five-year electoral cycles, nor activists who mobilize only around personal ambition or partisan instruction. Guyana needs citizens and leaders who can sustain scrutiny of contracts, public procurement, environmental protection, land allocation, infrastructure spending, local-government authority and the integrity of public institutions over decades—not merely until the next appointment, contract, candidacy or coalition arrangement.

Courage without consistency is performance

The mythology of politics often celebrates the dramatic moment: the arrest, the protest, the confrontation, the speech. But Maharaj’s example suggests that the deeper test is what comes after.

What do you do after you are released?

Do you return to the work? Do you educate yourself? Do you preserve the movement’s record? Do you build networks quietly? Do you accept personal risk without converting sacrifice into a lifelong claim for privilege? Do you remain accountable when your side acquires power?

Those are harder questions than asking whether someone can denounce an opponent at a rally.

Maharaj’s life does not require us to erase complexity, overlook disputed episodes, or turn any political figure into a saint. Serious history does not work that way. But it does require honesty about a generation that understood commitment as an extended discipline, rather than a temporary performance.

That is what Guyana must recover.

Not blind loyalty. Not political violence. Not personality cults. Not imported revolutionary theatre.

What is needed is a democratic revolutionism of principle: sustained public education, organized citizens, fearless journalism, honest advocacy, transparent institutions and leaders who understand that the public good cannot be pursued only when it is safe, popular or profitable.

Mac Maharaj’s journey—from arrest and Robben Island, to exile and underground organization, to the first democratic government—reminds us that meaningful political change is rarely made by those who appear only when there is applause.

It is made by those who remain when there is a cost.

 

BOOK LAUNCH: ENTER THE POLITICAL KINGDOM BY MOSES BHAGWAN

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

JOIN US IN WASHINGTON D.C. AS:

Moses Bhagwan’s Journey Continues: Washington, D.C. Launch of Enter the Political Kingdom

Following two highly successful book launches in New York and Guyana, Moses Bhagwan’s political memoir, Enter the Political Kingdom: A Guyanese Political Memoir, now comes to Washington, D.C.

This third engagement continues an important journey of remembrance, reflection, and public conversation around a life devoted to political activism, justice, democracy, and the continuing struggle for a better Guyana. Bhagwan’s story reaches beyond the personal: it speaks to generations who have witnessed, participated in, or inherited the consequences of Guyana’s political and social struggles.

Join Moses Bhagwan, the editors, supporters, members of the Guyanese diaspora, students, scholars, activists, and friends for an evening marking the launch of this significant work at the University of the District of Columbia on Thursday, September 10, 2026  @ 5.30 pm. 

 Let us continue the journey with Moses as he shares the lessons, experiences, and life’s work that have shaped his enduring contribution to Guyana and its people.

 Available on Ian Randle Publishers : https://ianrandlepublishers.com/product/moses-bhagwan-enter-the-political-kingdom/

LEARN MORE: https://youtu.be/uXztBywol8Q 

Kaneville Must Not Become Another Land Grab by Another Name

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

 Kaneville Must Not Become Another Land Grab by Another Name

OPINION BY: Hem  Kumar • AUGUST 2026

The eviction notices served on residents of Kaneville, East Bank Demerara, are not merely notices to vacate. They are a test of whether Guyana has one land policy for all citizens—or one policy for the poor and another for the politically protected.

Residents were reportedly given (14) days to remove themselves from land they have occupied, developed and called home. That deadline is now closing in. The public expects what usually follows: State vehicles, heavy equipment, police presence, demolished homes, displaced families and official statements about illegality, order and development.

But Guyanese are entitled to ask the question the authorities would prefer to avoid: Once Kaneville is cleared, who gets the land?

Will it remain for the public purpose now being invoked? Will it be used for roads, drainage, schools, hospitals, housing or other properly disclosed development? Or will the removal of poor families create an opening for persons with the right party ties, business relationships, surnames, telephone numbers and access to decision-makers?

This is not cynicism. It is the product of experience.

For too long, land administration in Guyana has operated under a cloud of public distrust. Ordinary citizens endure long waits, unclear procedures, shifting requirements and unanswered applications. Meanwhile, people perceived to be politically connected appear to obtain access to valuable State lands with a speed and ease that ordinary Guyanese can only envy.

That perception is devastating. It tells the poor man that a formal application is not enough. It tells the young family that hard work is not enough. It tells the unemployed mother that citizenship is not enough. It tells the citizen that the real title deed is not a transport, lease or allocation letter, but a connection.

That is not land policy. That is patronage.

Bulldozers Cannot Be the Policy

Let us be clear: illegal occupation must not be encouraged. Public land is not a free-for-all. Land reserved for roads, drainage, public utilities, schools, hospitals, agriculture, environmental protection and planned housing cannot be casually occupied without consequences.

But law enforcement without justice is not governance. It is simply power.

The State cannot solve a housing crisis by waiting until poor people build homes, establish families, spend years improving a community and then arrive with machinery to erase their lives. If the occupation is unlawful, the State must act. But it must also explain why families were allowed to settle, build and remain for so long; what notice and assistance were provided; whether relocation is available; whether regularization was considered; and whether the land will truly serve the public interest after the evictions.

A family living without title may have no legal right to remain. But that does not mean the State has no duty to act humanely, transparently and consistently.

 

The question is not whether the law applies to Kaneville. It does. The question is whether it applies with equal force to those who obtain land through influence, insider information, preferential treatment or political intervention.

The Public Is Entitled to Answers

Before a single structure is demolished, the responsible agencies should publicly disclose:

◊ The exact legal status and boundaries of the land at Kaneville

◊ The statutory authority under which the evictions are being pursued

◊ The purpose for which the land is required

◊ The full development plan, including timelines and the agency responsible

◊ Whether the land is intended for public infrastructure, housing, commercial development, private leasing or allocation

◊ The names of any current or proposed beneficiaries, developers, lessees or allottees

◊ The method by which any future allocation will be made

◊ The valuation of the land and the basis upon which prices, leases or concessions will be determined

◊ Whether occupants were assessed for regularisation, relocation or alternative housing

◊ The criteria used to decide who receives assistance and who does not

◊ The safeguards against the land being transferred, allocated or occupied by politically favoured persons after residents are removed

There is no valid reason for secrecy. If the exercise is lawful, necessary and in the public interest, transparency can only strengthen it. If transparency is resisted, the public is entitled to ask what exactly is being concealed

No official should be offended by those questions. Public land is held in trust for the people of Guyana. Ministers, agencies and officials do not own it. They administer it. And administration without accountability is merely discretion waiting to be abused.

Squatting, Poverty and Privilege

Guyanese must stop allowing the word “squatter” to shut down every conversation about justice.

Being uprooted after settling for years?

There is a profound difference between an organized scheme to steal or fraudulently transfer land and a poor family occupying land because formal housing is unaffordable, inaccessible or unavailable. Both situations may require legal intervention, but they do not demand the same response, carry the same moral weight or reveal the same failure of the State.

Many informal settlements are not evidence of a people who reject the law. They are evidence of a housing system that has failed to meet human need.

A person who cannot afford a plot, cannot secure a mortgage, cannot navigate the bureaucracy and cannot wait indefinitely for a land allocation will often do what desperate people have always done: find a place to live. That does not create legal ownership. But it does expose the State’s failure to provide an accessible path to lawful ownership.

The poor must not be permitted to capture public lands. But neither should the influential be permitted to capture public lands through boardrooms, back channels, political offices and undisclosed arrangements.

Land theft does not become respectable because the thief wears a suit, owns a company, attends fundraisers or has friends in high office.

One Law Must Govern All

There must not be bulldozers for the weak and accommodation for the well-connected.

There must not be eviction notices for struggling families and quiet land deals for those who can call a Minister, a senior official, a party operative or a powerful business associate.

There must not be public condemnation of informal settlers while choice State lands are allocated, leased, rezoned, regularized or transferred under arrangements the public cannot see and cannot test.

◊ Every State-land allocation should be publicly traceable.

◊ Every beneficiary should be known.

◊ Every valuation should be independently defensible.

◊ Every waiver, concession, lease, regularisation and transfer should be subject to clear written criteria.

◊ Every conflict of interest should be disclosed.

◊ Every credible allegation of favouritizm should be independently investigated.

That is not radical. It is the minimum standard of a functioning democracy. The people of Kaneville are not above the law. But neither are those close to power.

If the State intends to remove them, it must show the public—not merely assert—that the land will be used lawfully, fairly and transparently. It must demonstrate that this is not another cycle in which the vulnerable are removed and the connected later arrive to harvest the opportunity.

Because once that occurs, the eviction is no longer simply an exercise in enforcement.                                                                                                   It becomes State-assisted dispossession.                                                 And no Government that claims to govern for all Guyanese can justify that.

 

A Generation Introduces Itself With Silence

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

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

A Generation Introduces Itself with Silence

What We Saw Outside the Office of the President — and Why It May Outlast the Ministers Who Ignore It

By Hem Kumar, Editor

I have covered Guyanese politics long enough to know the difference between a crowd that has been organized and a crowd that has organized itself.

What gathered outside the Office of the President this past week belonged unmistakably to the second category. They did not arrive under a party banner. They did not chant the slogans of any of the coalitions that have spent the last two weeks fighting over the wreckage of the MV Barima.

They arrived under a name of their own choosing — We The People — in white T-shirts they had bought with their own limited means, to stand in solidarity with the Amerindian Peoples Association’s continuing action, and then, deliberately, to stand apart from it as well.

Listening to live feeds  with representatives of the group this is what I can deduce .

They did not give us a press release  or a spokesperson’s card; what they showed us  was a banner, five feet of red, green, gold and black, printed with a demand rather than a grievance: “We The People Demand — Ministerial Accountability — Edghill Must Resign.” Their message was bold and stated plainly:  this was not a political party’s operation, and no political party paid for it.

No one incurs an expense they can barely afford to stage a performance nobody asked for.

I want to be careful here, in the way this publication  has tried to be careful with every claim it has made about the Barima disaster since July 18. My own notes from that afternoon are a corraborated  account, not a transcript — we did not take names or recorded interviews off of social media .

What I offer first is my own judgment as an editor who has watched this country’s protest movements rise and dissolve for decades: these were young people, largely surviving on stipends and family support, who chose to spend what little they have on a shirt and an afternoon in the sun outside a government building. That is not the behavior of people staging a show for an audience. It is the behavior of people who have run out of patience with the alternative — waiting.

A MOVEMENT INTRODUCES ITSELF

What We The People represents is still, by its own account, less than two weeks old. It is, on the record now, more precisely described than I could offer from memory alone. Kisskadee Watch, reporting on the same demonstration, identified the protesters as drawn largely from the University of Guyana, gathered in solemn silence outside the Office of the President, holding placards and observing moments of silence for the seventy-three confirmed dead. That reporting confirms what we saw: this was not a chanting crowd or a rally in the mode of the Joint Opposition’s July 27 walk-in. It was quiet, deliberate, and unmistakably generational in its composition.

The same reporting adds a detail this publication thinks is important to state precisely, rather than round off into a cleaner story than the facts support. Organisers maintained that the protest was independent and non-partisan — and I have no reason to doubt that framing was sincerely held.

But members of the We Invest in Nationhood party and A Partnership for National Unity were present in support, alongside members of civil society. That is not a contradiction. A movement can hold its own identity, set its own terms, and still draw solidarity from people who arrive under other banners without becoming those banners.

What matters is who called the protest, who wrote the placards, and who is committing to return — and on all three counts, the record points to the students, not the parties standing behind them.

One of the organisers, Chandradatt Jagdeo, put his own name to a public accounting of the turnout on Facebook afterward: a movement “not even 2 weeks old,” he wrote, “NOT sponsored by any Political party,” that brought “hundreds, 300+ (I did not do a head count) people out.

I record that figure as his claim, made publicly and under his own name, corraborated independently by other attendees describing the same afternoon in the same terms — not as this publication’s own verified count. That distinction matters to me more than the number does.

A movement that can produce a named organiser willing to put a figure on the record, and independent attendees willing to describe the same event unprompted, has already cleared a bar that a great many protest claims in this country’s history have not.

WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN A SINGLE PICKET

Guyana has no shortage of protest. The Joint Opposition marched into the National Assembly in black on July 27. The Amerindian Peoples Association has picketed the Office of the President twice in the same week, led by Executive Director Jean La Rose, demanding accountability for communities in Region One that absorbed the disaster’s heaviest losses. Families of the accused T&HD crew have taken to the Den Amstel and Melanie public roads. Every one of these actions has been, in its own register, legitimate.

What distinguishes We The People is that it belongs to none of them.  It is not the opposition’s protest, dressed in the opposition’s colors, chanting the opposition’s slogans of “who must go.” It is not a union action, not a party rally repackaged as civil society, not a demonstration organized by anyone who stood to gain a seat, a ministry, or a headline from it.

It is, on the evidence before me, a generation that watched its government’s handling of a mass-casualty maritime disaster — the shifting timeline on what caused the sinking, the scrubbed commissioner biographies, the pre-drafted memorial-site declarations circulated to grieving families before any consultation had genuinely occurred — and concluded that the normal channels of Guyanese political life were not going to produce the answers it was owed.

That conclusion, if it holds, is the more significant story here. Political parties in Guyana have spent sixty years organizing along lines this news -media has documented at exhausting length.

A movement that explicitly refuses that architecture — that stands beside the APA’s action without folding into it, that borrows the opposition’s demand for Edghill’s resignation without borrowing the opposition’s identity — is doing something Guyanese civil society has rarely managed to sustain: building a constituency for accountability that neither the government nor its established opposition can claim as their own.

WHAT COMES NEXT

This is not intended as a single afternoon of catharsis. Organisers have described this as the first in a planned series of weekly demonstrations, with the next gathering set for the same location — outside the Office of the President — at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, August 7.

A movement that commits to a recurring date, in public, before it knows whether anyone will show up a second time, is making a claim about itself that either holds or collapses in full view. That is a more honest test than anything this paper could construct for it.

I do not know yet which this is. I am not going to promise our readers a Guyanese Spring, because that promise is not mine to make on behalf of people I saw for an afternoon.

What I can tell them is this: a generation that the political establishment has largely assumed to be disengaged showed up, on its own initiative, under its own name, to demand that a government answer for seventy-plus deaths in the manner a Westminster democracy requires of it.

Whether the Ali administration treats that as a passing irritation or as the leading edge of something it can no longer manage through press conferences and pre-drafted declarations will do more to shape the next decade of Guyanese governance than any single resignation anyone is currently calling  for.

This publication will be eagerly awaiting for August 7. Whether the government chooses to notice is, as ever, its own decision to make — and its own consequence to bear.

When a government treats a body count as a communications problem, it should not be surprised when the young decide that protest is the only language left that it understands.

— Hem Kumar, Editor

CHANGE OF VENUE & SOLIDARITY with MV BARIMA VICTIMS and SURVIVORS

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

PRESS RELEASE

“Enter the Political Kingdom” Book Launch

Saturday August 8th at 5.00 PM at the Georgetown Club

CHANGE OF VENUE & SOLIDARITY with MV BARIMA VICTIMS and SURVIVORS

 

 

“Enter the Political Kingdom”, the panoramic autobiography of Moses Bhagwan, spanning the unified Guyanese colonial struggle, the post-colonial era and its divisive politics as well as the Civil Rebellion inspired by the Working Peoples Alliance and Walter Rodney is veined with memorable insights into community life and social activism and the core values and priorities dedicated to family life, which spans some seventy years of a life well lived. 

The book will be launched on Saturday, August 8th at 5.00 PM before an assembly of Guyanese. (Please note that the venue is now the Georgetown Club, 230 Camp Street (Between Middle and New Market). The venue has changed from the Umana Yana because it has been assigned by the Ministry of Culture as the MV Barima Information Centre for affected families.

The book launch takes place at a time of a devastated nation in mourning for the loss of lives and the trauma and suffering of survivors and the impact upon the lives of families related to the victims, of the MV Barima tragedy, a horror affecting Guyanese lives – never before experienced in the modern history of our country.

In this context, the organizers of this event have considered it fit and humane to dedicate the event to all those in mourning and in grief, in particular to the memory of the lost lives and those as yet unrecovered which magnifies the grief of the families impacted by this tragedy.

Having read the book it is our conviction that its publication now is timely as within its pages many episodes relate and confirm the genius, resourcefulness  and fortitude of the people of Guyana to battle against adversities  and to hold hands and hearts in unity in times of tragedy like  this one – as we witness joint actions, heroic rescues and unified calls for concerted action across all groups and organizations of civil society and social and political leaders.

We take this opportunity to commend all efforts to locate the sources and causes of this  catastrophe, as well as initiatives taken to sustain the families impacted. We call upon all Guyanese to continue to exercise intense vigilance as the process of unearthing the facts as they unfold so as to ensure that no stone is left unturned or effort spared in order to recover all the missing and dead, and to determine the truth of the causes of this tragedy in an honest, collective, transparent and accountable manner.

Our Book Launch program has allotted time for expressing sympathy, support and solidarity with all victims and all mourners and prayers of comfort will be offered.

The Author and Editors of “Enter the Political Kingdom” join in issuing this Press Release.

Vanda Radzik, Christopher Ram, Wazir Mohamed (Organizers of the Book Launch)

Alissa Trotz, Sasha Ann Panaram, Nigel Westmaas (Editors)

Moses Bhagwan (Author)

Georgetown August 1st 2026

 

  

 

The Elite Capture Story: Long Creek, the Development Bank, and the Money Nobody Can Trace

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

SMOKE AND FIRE — PART I OF III

The Elite Capture Story: Long Creek, the Development Bank, and the Money Nobody Can Trace

By Hem Kumar, Editor

Georgetown — August, 2026

This is the first of a three-part series examining Guyana’s oil-era governance through the lens of Bloomberg Opinion’s July 29, 2026 feature “Oil’s Resource Curse Hangs Heavy Over Guyana” by Juan Pablo Spinetto, read against The 592 Guardian’s own investigative record. Where Bloomberg’s reporting from Georgetown captured the outline of a pattern, this newsroom’s sourcing over the past several weeks fills it in. Attributed excerpts below are drawn from Spinetto’s published column; all further findings are the Guardian’s own unless otherwise sourced

Juan Pablo Spinetto spent a week in Georgetown and came away, in his words, “less optimistic” than when he arrived.

He interviewed the President. He toured the shanty dwellings of South Cummingsburg, blocks from the presidential palace. He watched dump trucks and excavators multiply against a skyline that still tops out at a dozen storeys. And he arrived, from the outside, at a question this newsroom has been answering from the inside for weeks: whether Guyana’s oil windfall is enriching a nation or a class.

The lingering question for many is how members of the political elite managed to amass such vast wealth in such a short time.

— JP Spinetto, Bloomberg Opinion, July 29, 2026

Spinetto’s column names the Long Creek matter directly, citing Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed’s allegation that President Irfaan Ali’s ownership of a 150-acre ranch south of Georgetown represents a conflict of interest, and recording the President’s defense — that the property was purchased before he took office and properly disclosed. Bloomberg reports the allegation and the denial and, constrained by the format of a single reporting trip, leaves it there.

WHAT THE RECORD ACTUALLY SHOWS

The Guardian’s own satellite polygon trace of the Long Creek property — conducted independently of any party’s public claims — measures approximately 155 acres under active use, against the sub-75-acre figure implied in the President’s own public accounting.

That is not a rounding error. It is more than double.

More significant is the paper trail. This news- media  has obtained and reviewed a duplicate 2011 State Lands lease — File No. 411123/688, Lease No. A 23480 — naming then-Finance-Minister-turned-Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo as Lessor and a “Mohamed Ali,” holder of Guyanese passport number R028239, as Lessee, covering Lots 33 and 35 at Long Creek, a combined 20.338 acres per GL&SC Plan No. 50318. This new-media’s published findings, in “The Lease, the Name, and the Silence,” treat the existence and contents of that lease as verified fact. The identity question — whether “Mohamed Ali” on that 2011 instrument is the same individual now occupying the Office of the President — and the prior SARU investigation cited by APNU remain, and are treated by this publication as, unproven allegations pending further documentary corroboration.

That distinction matters, and it is the distinction Bloomberg’s column — writing at the level of political atmosphere rather than instrument-level record — was not positioned to draw. Spinetto’s piece captures the public argument. It does not, and could not from a week’s reporting trip, reach the lease.

THE SECOND FRONT: A BANK WITH NO GUARDRAILS

Bloomberg’s column mentions the new Guyana Development Bank in passing — “more than $200 million in initial funding to finance venture projects, including start-ups that require no collateral” — folded into President Ali’s account of a diversifying, “future-proofed” economy.

It is presented, in the column, as evidence of ambition.

It is broad. It is highly integrated, and it’s what I would say progressive.

— President Irfaan Ali to Bloomberg Opinion, on his economic diversification strategy

The Guyana Development Bank Bill, tabled by Finance Minister Ashni Singh on June 5, 2026, passed its second reading and received full passage on July 27 — the same sitting, this publication notes, in which Parliament passed a $54.9 billion appropriations bill and the Joint Opposition staged its walk-in protest over the MV Barima disaster.

The Development Bank Bill passed without debate.

This news-media’s review of the Bill’s text finds that the “interest-free, no collateral” pitch offered to the public sits alongside Section 5(2), which grants the Finance Minister discretionary authority over collateral and interest terms — a provision nowhere mentioned in the public framing Bloomberg’s column reproduces.

Section 23 imposes no Guyanese-citizenship eligibility requirement on borrowers.

The board appointment structure gives the Finance Minister sole discretion over the naming of all directors, with no reserved seats for opposition, civil society, or independent transparency nominees. The Bill’s offence provisions are written entirely toward borrower misconduct; there is no specific offence contemplated for insider self-dealing within a fund with an aggregate ceiling of up to $40 billion.

Bloomberg’s $200 million figure describes the Bank’s initial funding tranche. It is not in conflict with this newsroom’s reporting on the $40 billion structural ceiling — the two numbers describe different things, the seed capital versus the statutory maximum — but read together they illustrate exactly the gap this series exists to close: the modest, reassuring number offered abroad, and the uncapped discretionary architecture legislated at home.

A PATTERN, NOT AN INCIDENT

Michael L. Ross, the UCLA political scientist Spinetto quotes at length, offers the theoretical scaffolding for what this outlet has been reporting as a specific, documented case:

“These countries start with weak institutions and often oil turns them worse. Wealth is getting concentrated. Investment in infrastructure or education gets behind. There is a lot of corruption. This is something that happens periodically.”

Ross was speaking in general terms, citing Venezuela, Nigeria, and Chad.

Guyana’s trajectory is probably neither the best-case nor the worst-case outcome.

— Michael L. Ross, UCLA, to Bloomberg Opinion

This publication takes no position on where Guyana ultimately lands on that spectrum. What can be stated as fact, on the documentary record assembled here, is this: a sitting president’s family land holding measures more than double what has been publicly implied, tied to a 2011 lease instrument bearing a name and passport number this news-media has independently verified; and a piece of legislation capable of channeling up to $40 billion passed the same day as a $54.9 billion appropriations bill and a walkout over a ferry disaster that has killed an estimated 100 people — without a single hour of parliamentary debate.

Christopher Ram’s call for a Commission of Inquiry into the Long Creek matter remains, as of this writing, unanswered by government. Freddie Kissoon and Nazim Baksh, writing in the state-aligned press, have characterized this news-media’s coverage as noise and distraction. 

The lease, the acreage, and the statute do not move because a columnist calls them noise.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Bloomberg saw the smoke. It flew in, interviewed the principals, and flew out with an accurate sense that something in Guyana’s institutional architecture is under strain.

The 592 Guardian has been standing in the fire.

Part II of this series turns to the MV Barima disaster — the clearest test yet of whether Guyana’s institutions can absorb a genuine crisis without reaching first for control of the narrative, and second for the people asking questions about it.

This is Part I of a three-part series. Part II: “The Barima Test Case” and Part III: “Democracy on Paper” will follow.

— The Board

Civil Society Withholds Confidence in the MV Barima Commission, and Sets Out Five Tests

/0 Comments/in , /by
THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦.ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL GUYANA INC.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Georgetown, Guyana — Monday, 27 July 2026

Civil Society Withholds Confidence in the MV Barima Commission, and Sets Out Five Tests

Transparency International Guyana Inc. convened a national civil society consultation on the MV Barima disaster. Following the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry without consultation, TIGI today publishes the standard against which that Commission will be measured.

Transparency International Guyana Inc. (TIGI) extends its condolences to the families of those lost in the capsizing of the MV Barima on 18 July, and to the communities of Region One who have borne this loss most heavily. Seventy-three deaths are confirmed. Thirty of our fellow citizens remain unaccounted for. We hold the bereaved and the survivors in our thoughts, and we thank those still engaged in the work of recovery.

On Saturday 25 July, TIGI convened a virtual national consultation bringing together some two dozen participants: indigenous and community organisations, faith leaders across the Hindu, Christian and Islamic communities, the trade union movement, disaster management and maritime professionals, the press, academics at home and in the diaspora, and citizens who have lost family in this disaster. This statement reflects the substance of that consultation

What we acknowledge

The rescue was real. The Coast Guard went out at night. Private boat operators with no obligation to anyone went out alongside them. Trinidadian and Brazilian teams came. Seventy-six people are alive today who would otherwise not be. That deserves the nation’s thanks, and it has ours without reservation.

The decision to appoint an international Commission responds to a central public demand, and we recognise it as such. Guyanese civil society, the parliamentary opposition, the National Toshaos Council and the Guyana Human Rights Association all called for an inquiry that could not be accused of investigating itself.

Nothing that follows retracts either acknowledgement.

Why we cannot presently give this Commission our confidence

A competent rescue does not answer the question of why the rescue was necessary. And the appointment of non-Guyanese commissioners is not the same thing as an independent process.

The Commission was constituted without consultation. Neither the parliamentary opposition, nor the National Toshaos Council, nor the affected communities of Region One, nor civil society were consulted on the composition of this body. Article 13 of the Constitution establishes inclusionary democracy as a principal objective of our political system, and provides for the increasing involvement of citizens in the decisions that affect their well-being. The Caribbean Court of Justice has held that the obligation to consult is to be understood broadly. The President’s discretion to appoint under the Commissions of Inquiry Act is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether that discretion may be exercised without the consultation our Constitution contemplates, on a matter of this gravity, affecting a State-operated service in which seventy-three citizens died.

The MV Barima was a State vessel. It was regulated by a State agency, operated by a State department, and falls under a Ministry whose leadership remains in place. This is not a government matter. It is a State matter, and the resources involved belong to the people of Guyana. A body examining the conduct of the State cannot be constituted by the State alone if it is to command public confidence.

The Terms of Reference have not been published, and no undertaking has been given that the Commission’s report will be released in full. Guyana has held Commissions of Inquiry before whose reports the Guyanese people have never seen.

TIGI therefore does not at this time have confidence in the Commission as constituted. We say this without prejudice to the individual commissioners, whose professional standing is not the subject of this statement. Our objection is to a process that excluded the people most affected from any part in constituting the body that will judge what happened to them

Five tests

TIGI and the organisations that joined our consultation will assess this Commission against five measures. Each is specific and each is verifiable.

  1. Publish the instrument of appointment and the Terms of Reference — now. Both should be published in full and laid before the National Assembly at its sitting today, before the Commission begins work. Parliament does not sit again until the autumn. If the scope of this inquiry is not opened to public and parliamentary scrutiny today, it will not be scrutinised at all before the Commission reports.
  2. Require each commissioner to publish a declaration of interests. This is ordinary practice in serious inquiries and no reputable commissioner would object to it. Each member should publish, before taking evidence, a signed declaration of any commercial, professional, institutional, familial or financial connection to the Government of Guyana, to any State agency or official, to the maritime sector in Guyana, or to any party with an interest in the outcome — together with the terms and value of their engagement. Independence that cannot be verified is not independence; it is an assurance. The public is entitled to the former.
  3. Guarantee publication of the report, in full, in advance. The undertaking should be given now, in writing, with a date. A report delivered privately to the authority that commissioned it is not an inquiry; it is a consultation.
  4. Separate the safety investigation from the criminal process. The purpose of a marine safety investigation is to prevent recurrence, not to allocate blame, and every mature maritime jurisdiction keeps the two apart. Crew, dock staff and ticketing personnel must be able to give evidence about what actually happens on that route without that evidence being used to prosecute them. Without testimonial protection, the Commission will not be told the truth. And a prosecution must not be permitted to stand in for an explanation: if this ends with a conviction and no reform, we will have held someone accountable and changed nothing.
  5. Name who owns the recommendations, and by when. This is the test Guyana has failed before. Ask who now recalls what the Mahdia inquiry recommended, or which of its recommendations were implemented. Every recommendation this Commission makes should carry a named responsible office, a published deadline, and progress reports laid before the National Assembly at six and twelve months. An inquiry whose findings have no owner is an inquiry designed to be forgotten 

What we propose

The remedy is neither complicated nor unprecedented. We call upon the President to suspend the commencement of the Commission’s work and to convene, within seven days, a consultation with the Leader of the Opposition, the National Toshaos Council, representatives of the affected communities and civil society, for the purpose of agreeing the composition of the Commission and its Terms of Reference.

On composition, we propose that the technical members be drawn from established marine casualty investigation bodies of long standing — such as the United Kingdom’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, or the Australian Transport Safety Bureau — whose investigators are career accident specialists, subject to institutional discipline, and demonstrably without connection to any party with an interest in the outcome. Technical cooperation may be sought from the International Maritime Organization in support of that work.

This costs the Government nothing but a week. It would convert a contested appointment into a national on

What must not wait for the Commission

Four matters require action now and should not be deferred pending any report.

Families must not be asked to sign away their rights. We are aware of the practice, following the Mahdia fire, of presenting bereaved families with one-time payments conditioned on documents foreclosing legal action against the State. We say plainly to every affected family: you are under no obligation to sign anything, and no payment should be conditioned on your surrender of any legal right. A compensation framework should be published, with defined amounts and timelines, that requires no waiver.

The orphaned children need a plan, not sympathy. Guardianship, schooling continuity and long-term care must be arranged now, with a named point of contact for each affected family and public reporting at six and twelve months. In the short term, those families who have lost their foodstuffs and other supplies should be helped with replacements.

Psychosocial support must reach the people it is meant to reach. Guyana has trained disaster-response personnel. Participants in our consultation with direct knowledge of that training report that those responders have not been deployed to this incident. That should be corrected this week.

The route must be made safe or suspended. A replacement vessel for this route was purchased for US$12.7 million and has not entered service because the necessary shoreside works at Port Kaituma remain incomplete. Government should publish a completion date. Until the route is demonstrably safe, subsidised alternative transport should be provided to the communities that depend on it

The standard

Region One has no road. For the people of Mabaruma, Port Kaituma and the surrounding communities, that vessel was not a convenience — it was the connection between a community and its country. The oldest vessel in the fleet was assigned to the citizens with the fewest alternatives. That is the fact this inquiry exists to confront.

TIGI does not raise these matters in a partisan spirit, and we decline the framing that treats questions as an attack. No child aboard that vessel belonged to a political party. What we are asking for is not a change of government but a standard of competence in matters where competence is the only thing between our citizens and the sea: that every passenger on every State vessel is counted before it sails, that no eighty-seven-year-old hull carries schoolchildren, and that when an inquiry tells this country what went wrong, someone is named to fix it.

We invite every Guyanese organisation and citizen willing to hold that standard — whatever their party, faith or region — to stand with us in it. Should the consultation we propose take place, TIGI will participate in good faith and will offer the Commission our full cooperation. We will report publicly on its progress against these five tests.

Media contact: Mike Singh, + 1 305 607-5587 (WhatsApp), MSIngh@TelkomCaribe.com

About Transparency International Guyana Inc. TIGI is the Guyana chapter of Transparency International, the global anti-corruption movement headquartered in Berlin and active in more than 100 countries. TIGI works for accountability, transparency and the rule of law in Guyana.

          

Moses Bhagwan and the Memory of a Nation

/0 Comments/in , /by
THE 592. GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

 BOOK LAUNCH IN GUYANA-August. 08 2026

Moses Bhagwan and the Memory of a Nation

 After a sold-out launch in New York—where Moses captivated a packed audience with stories from his life—he’s coming to Guyana to continue sharing his journey. Join us for his Guyana—ENTER THE POLITICAL KINGDOM launch.

JOIN HIM ON: AUG 08 5pm. @ The Umana Yana—Gtown.

Moses Bhagwan has lived long enough to know that history is never as neat as the textbooks make it seem. It arrives in fragments, in clashes of memory, in the stubborn persistence of people who refuse to let their stories be erased. His memoir, Enter The Political Kingdom , carries that same spirit: part witness account, part political chronicle, part personal testament to a life spent inside Guyana’s hardest struggles.

Bhagwan is not writing from the margins. He is writing from the center of the storm. The publisher describes him as a descendant of indentured labourers whose path moved from rural beginnings into the thick of political life, across the PPP, the PYO, the Indian Political Revolutionary Associates, and the WPA. That journey alone gives the book its force. It is the story of one man, yes, but it is also the story of a country trying to find itself.

The Making Of A Political Voice

What makes Bhagwan’s story compelling is not only the scope of his political involvement, but the continuity of his purpose. He was there in the years when Guyana’s political divisions hardened, when ideals collided with power, and when the promise of independence had to be defended from disappointment and distortion. He moved through those years not as a passive observer, but as an active participant with convictions that clearly outlasted the momentary applause of politics.

 

We are indebted to Moses Bhagwan for gifting us this richly detailed autobiography, a text that resonantly offers an ethical, political, and moral compass for how we story, how we practice, how, in short, we live lives of meaningful relation in the ongoing work of justice, dignity and transformation’.– (D. Alissa Trotz, University of Toronto, Caribbean Studies & Women & Gender Studies)  

I am struck by the enduring lessons Moses Bhagwan imparted. He taught us that political struggle is not just about grand ideals or sweeping movements. It is also about the everyday acts of kindness, the moments of connection, and the willingness to listen and engage with others at a human level. These lessons remain as relevant today as thy were during those turbulent times’. —(Nigel Westmaas, Dept of African Studies, Hamilton College)

Enter the Political Kingdom is a retrospective political memoir about the making of a political activist committed to fighting for his homeland, Guyana. Apart from the on-the-ground perspective, Bhagwan provides a rich narrative of his experience as part of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and working with two of Guyana’s most prominent political leaders, Cheddi Jagan and Walter Rodney among others. … Young people in the Caribbean and elsewhere, wondering how to effect meaningful change in their country and how to strategically organize will benefit from Bhagwan’s reflections on successful interventions and unrealized political dreams alike’. 

(Sasha Ann Panaram, Assoc. Professor, English, African & African-American Studies, Fordham University) 

‘This movingly written memoir offers the perspective of a freely disse nting, dissonant voice over six decades of involvement in radical politics across some of the most politically momentous events in Guyanese history’. — (Clem Seecharran, Professor Emeritus, London Metropolitan University) 

  THE 592 GUARDIAN