Archive for category: Local News

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITYIN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

When Dissent Becomes “Riot”: Nandlall’s Dangerous Double Standard

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OPINION BY: Staff Writer–August 2026 

Government Cannot Criminalise Dissent by Rebranding It as Disorder

Attorney General Anil Nandlall, SC, is correct on one narrow but important proposition: the constitutional right to protest is not a licence for violence, intimidation, property damage, or the deliberate prevention of others from exercising their lawful rights. But that is not the real controversy.

The controversy is the Attorney General’s apparent attempt to transform legitimate public dissent, political confrontation, and inconvenient questions into evidence of “riotous” conduct and unfitness for leadership.

It is the unmistakable instinct to attack the messenger when the Government cannot, or will not, confront the message.

The recent protests surrounding Government outreach meetings, including those connected to public outrage and unanswered questions over the MV Barima tragedy, did not emerge from thin air. Citizens who assemble, chant, carry placards, demand accountability, and confront political leaders with uncomfortable questions are not automatically criminals, anarchists, or enemies of democracy. They are citizens exercising constitutional freedoms in a country whose political history has repeatedly demonstrated the necessity of public resistance when institutions fail to inspire confidence.

A government that governs democratically must distinguish carefully between a peaceful protest that causes discomfort and a riot that causes unlawful harm. The former must be protected; the latter may properly be addressed under the law. But political office holders must not lazily collapse the two categories simply because they dislike the people protesting or the cause for which they assemble.                      Mr. Nandlall should know that constitutional rights do not become conditional upon the Government’s convenience.

The Insult Is Not a Legal Argument

The most disturbing element of the Attorney General’s intervention was not his citation of the law. It was his resort to personal insult—reportedly questioning whether Opposition parliamentary leader Terrence Campbell has “all his faculties intact.”

That statement is beneath the office of Attorney General.

The country’s chief legal officer is not merely another partisan commentator speaking in the heat of a political meeting. He holds a constitutional office. He is expected to advise the State with sobriety, defend the rule of law, and demonstrate the temperance that the Government claims its opponents lack.

If Mr. Campbell acted unlawfully, identify the conduct. Produce the video. State the statutory provision said to have been breached. Permit the police and the courts to address the matter fairly and independently. That is how a legal system works. But questioning a political opponent’s mental capacity, while offering no legal finding and no judicial determination, is not constitutional analysis. It is an ad hominem attack. It is political contempt dressed in legal language.

The Attorney General says Opposition leaders behave more “unruly” and “riotous” than their followers. The public is therefore entitled to ask: is this the standard of restraint, civility, and constitutional responsibility by which the Government wishes its own senior officials to be judged?

A Government cannot demand maturity from its critics while its highest legal spokesman descends into public ridicule.

The PPP/C’s Record Cannot Be Erased

There is a glaring inconsistency in the Attorney General’s lecture on proper protest. During the prolonged electoral crisis of 2020, the PPP/C—then in opposition—mobilised its members and supporters across Guyana and in the diaspora. Its leaders publicly condemned what they regarded as electoral wrongdoing, demanded the protection of the vote, protested outside public institutions, and confronted those whom they believed were undermining democracy.

Those demonstrations were politically consequential. They were loud, tense, emotional, and confrontational because the stakes were enormous. The PPP/C and its supporters did not sit quietly in their homes and wait for events to unfold. They took to the streets because they believed democracy was in danger.

Dr. Irfaan Ali, before his elevation to the Presidency, was himself visibly involved in those protests. Public footage from that period showed him in confrontational circumstances around police barriers. The Government cannot now pretend that forceful physical symbolism, angry crowds, obstructed movements, and heated exchanges are uniquely Opposition inventions—or proof that a person is incapable of national leadership. Nor can the country forget the history of disorderly and confrontational conduct in and around Parliament involving PPP/C parliamentarians and supporters over the years. Parliament, under successive administrations, has seen heated confrontations, disruptions, threats, invective, and conduct that no serious observer would hold up as a model of calm democratic debate.

That history does not excuse unlawful conduct by anyone today. It does, however, expose the rank hypocrisy of a Government that now speaks as though it has always represented quiet, restrained, police-approved dissent while every Opposition protest is a descent toward anarchy. The PPP/C did not become the governing party by remaining silent when it felt unheard.

It became Government in part because it understood the power of mass mobilization, public pressure, political protest, and the people’s collective refusal to accept what they regarded as injustice.

It cannot now deny those same democratic tools to others.

Rights Cannot Be Reserved for the Governing Party

The Attorney General invokes the principle that one person’s rights end where another person’s rights begin. That is a sound principle. But it must be applied equally. The right of Government supporters to attend a meeting is real. The right of political officials to speak is real. The right of citizens to gather nearby, protest peacefully, display placards, chant, question leaders, and express anger at the Government is equally real.

The task of the police is not to create a sterilised political environment in which Government meetings occur without criticism. Their task is to preserve public order while facilitating the lawful rights of all sides.

A protest need not be silent to be peaceful. It need not be polite to be lawful. It need not be convenient to those in office to be constitutionally protected

Citizens should not be told that they must protest only at a place approved by the State, at a time convenient to the Government, in a manner that cannot be heard, and under conditions that ensure no official is ever made uncomfortable. That is not meaningful freedom of assembly. It is managed dissent.

The Constitution does not protect only applause. It protects criticism. It protects opposition. It protects the citizen who refuses to smile while asking hard questions of those who wield public power.

The MV Barima Demands Answers, Not Diversions

The deeper issue is that the Attorney General’s remarks risk diverting national attention from the concerns that fueled the protest in the first place. The MV Barima tragedy is not a matter to be brushed aside through accusations of political mischief, unruliness, or opposition orchestration.

Whenever lives are lost, families are left grieving, and citizens believe the State has failed in its duty of care, there must be transparent, credible, and timely answers.

◊ What caused the tragedy?                                                                              ◊  What safety systems were in place?                                                            ◊  Were warnings disregarded?                                                                      ◊  Were regulations enforced?                                                                        ◊  Was there an adequate emergency response?                                          ◊ Who bears responsibility for any failures?                                                ◊  What changes will be made to prevent another disaster?

These are not partisan questions. They are questions of human life, public safety, ministerial accountability, and the State’s fundamental duty to protect its citizens. Calling protesters “riotous” does not answer them. Questioning an Opposition leader’s faculties does not answer them. Threatening charges against unnamed citizens does not answer them.

The more the Government evades the substance of public concern, the more it strengthens the perception that it is interested in controlling the narrative rather than confronting the truth.

Law Must Not Become a Political Weapon

Mr. Nandlall cited the warning in Frank Hope v New Guyana Company Limited that uncontrolled freedom can lead to anarchy or totalitarianism. The warning is valid, but it has two sides.

Freedom without responsibility can become disorder. But State power without restraint can become repression.

The law must never be used as an instrument to punish people merely because their protests embarrass the Government, expose administrative failures, or create politically damaging images. Charges such as unlawful assembly, disorderly behaviour, obstruction, and riotous conduct carry serious consequences. They cannot be invoked casually, selectively, or as rhetorical weapons on a political programme.

If a crime occurred, investigate it impartially. Gather evidence. Charge those against whom there is a proper evidential basis. Respect due process. Let the courts decide guilt or innocence.

But do not first publicly pronounce an entire group unruly, criminal, or unfit for leadership and then seek to retrofit legal justification afterward. That approach reverses the constitutional order. It replaces evidence with political accusation and law with partisan convenience.

A society governed by law does not criminalise dissent. It prosecutes proven offences.

Leadership Requires Tolerance of Scrutiny 

The true test of leadership is not how one behaves among supporters. It is how one responds when citizens are angry, opposition voices are loud, and questions are hard.

The PPP/C Government now possesses the instruments of executive power: the Presidency, Cabinet, a parliamentary majority, the resources of the State, and the ability to communicate with the public every day. It should not be frightened by a small group of protesters or irritated into abandoning basic standards of democratic tolerance.

Those who hold power must develop a thicker skin than those who seek it.

The Attorney General should therefore reconsider the message he has sent. If he wants political leaders to act responsibly, he must set that example. If he wants respect for the Constitution, he must defend its protections even when they benefit persons he dislikes. If he wants public order, he must insist that the law is applied consistently—not harshly against opponents and generously toward governing-party activists.

Guyana has travelled too far, and suffered too much political division, to accept a future in which protest is treated as legitimate only when it serves the party in power ,

Vox populi, vox Dei.

The people have a right to speak. They have a right to demand answers. They have a right to assemble peacefully in the face of authority. And they have a right to expect that the Attorney General of Guyana will answer constitutional criticism with law, evidence, and reason—not insults.

 

The voice of the people is not riotous merely because it refuses to be silent.

 

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

The Hundred-Dollar Benchmark: How a State Bottle of Water Became a Pricing Instrument

ANALYSIS · PUBLIC UTILITIES & AVIATION

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board· August 2026

Banks DIH has set a suggested retail price of $100 for its 500ml Rainforest Waters. On its face this is a routine SRP announcement from the country’s largest beverage manufacturer. Set beside the timeline of the last five months, it reads differently: as the point at which a state-funded market entrant and a government-brokered pricing negotiation converged on a single number, in the same week, involving the same producers.

The question this newsroom has been asked, and the question worth answering carefully, is whether Guyana just watched government “expose” private-sector pricing manipulation in bottled water, and whether that opens a road toward price control by other means. The honest answer is narrower and, in some ways, more consequential: the evidence available does not support a manipulation-exposure story. It supports something more structural — a government that now holds two levers over the same handful of producers at once, and is using them together without ever having to legislate a price.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED, IN SEQUENCE

The timeline matters more than any single announcement.

Date	Event
16–19 March 2026	Minister Indar briefs the Georgetown Chamber and meets GMSA and water manufacturers on “100% local production” for bottled water. GMSA publicly welcomes the target.
27 July 2026	National Assembly approves GY$496.3 million, under GWI’s coastal water-supply budget, for a state-owned bottling plant.
Early August 2026	Opposition MP Ganesh Mahipaul publishes figures disputing the plant’s stated rationale.
Week of 10 August 2026	Banks DIH sets a $100 SRP for 500ml Rainforest Waters.
13 August 2026	PSC, GMSA, GWI and named producers — Blue Spring Waters, Clear Waters, Pure Waters, Aquafina and Banks DIH — reach agreement on a two-phase private-sector plan: PET preform standardisation and tax relief, to be submitted to Cabinet.

Two things follow from laying the dates out. First, the cost-reduction negotiation between the PSC and government predates GWI’s funded market entry by more than four months — it did not begin because a state competitor forced private producers to the table. Second, the producers named in the 13 August agreement are, by their own account, addressing price through cost inputs they control — PET preform costs, distribution margins, environmental tax and VAT — not through an admission that prior pricing was inflated. Reading the $100 SRP as proof of “manipulation exposed” requires attributing to GWI’s entry a causal force the public record does not establish, and skips past a negotiation that was already running on its own track.

THE NUMBERS GOVERNMENT’S OWN CASE DOES NOT SURVIVE

The stated rationale for the state plant is import substitution and national self-sufficiency. Opposition figures have put government’s own trade data against that claim: local producers — led by Blue Spring Waters and Clear Waters, with Banks DIH and Demerara Distillers Limited behind them — already supply an estimated 200,000 cases of bottled water a month. Estimated imports run at roughly 6,000 to 10,000 cases a month, a fraction of domestic supply. If the stated problem is import dependence, the scale of a GY$496.3 million state plant is difficult to justify against an import gap that small.

Set against that gap, the sums involved are lopsided in the other direction too. Banks DIH alone commissioned a GY$13.7 billion bottling and canning expansion at Thirst Park in January 2026 — roughly twenty-seven times the state’s allocation for its own plant. The state is not entering this market at a scale that competes on production capacity. It is entering at a scale that competes on price signal.

The state did not need to out-produce the private sector. It needed to out-price it for one SKU, once, in public.

A LEVER GOVERNMENT DOES NOT HAVE TO LEGISLATE

This is the sharper version of the concern worth taking seriously. Guyana has no price-control statute in play here, no GNBS or CCAC order, no ministerial price directive that could be challenged, appealed, or reviewed. What it has is a state utility — GWI — funded to sell water in direct retail competition with the firms it also depends on for the negotiated cost-reduction plan now headed to Cabinet. Minister Indar has told the private sector directly that “we are not producing water to compete with you.” The GY$496.3 million allocation, and a $100 SRP appearing in the same window as a Cabinet-bound tax-relief negotiation, sit uneasily beside that assurance.

Call this what it structurally is: price-setting by market presence rather than by regulation. It achieves a public-facing outcome — a benchmark price the private sector visibly moves toward — without triggering any of the accountability mechanisms a formal price order would require. There is no statute to litigate, no regulator whose reasoning must be published, no appeal route for a producer who believes the benchmark is unsustainable relative to their actual costs. It is also, notably, harder to reverse than a regulation would be — a bad price control can be repealed; a state competitor with a sunk plant is a standing feature of the market.

This newspaper has previously documented that GNBS and CCAC, Guyana’s two nominal standards and consumer-protection bodies, have no statutory firewall separating them from ministerial direction, and no distinct protocol for auditing a state-owned competitor’s pricing the way they would audit a private one. That gap is precisely what makes this lever available. A government that wanted to set an informal price floor or ceiling in a sector with no independent regulator capable of contesting it would do more or less what has happened here: fund a state entrant, price it publicly, and let the market — and the news cycle — do the rest.

WHAT WOULD CONFIRM OR COMPLICATE THIS READING

Fairness to government’s stated position requires naming what is not yet established. Whether Banks DIH’s reduction is a durable repricing or a promotional SRP tied to the PET-preform and tax-relief negotiation remains to be seen once the Cabinet-bound proposal becomes public — it commits government to specific, checkable items: PET preform standardisation, and “recommendations on the lowering or removal of environmental tax and VAT.” If that VAT and levy relief materialises and private producers sustain lower prices independent of GWI’s benchmark, the more benign reading strengthens: this was supply-side cost reduction that happened to coincide with a state entrant, not price-setting by presence. If instead GWI’s plant becomes a standing reference price that private producers track without corresponding cost relief, the structural concern in this piece is confirmed by conduct, not just by sequence.

Whether GWI’s own $100 price is sustainable without the GY$496.3 million subsidy behind it is a separate and unresolved question. A subsidised state price that private producers cannot profitably match is not evidence that private pricing was inflated — it may simply be evidence that the state price is not real, in the sense that no unsubsidised producer could sustain it. Guyana has been here before, in the oil sector, where the state has both marketed its own resource and regulated the industry extracting it. Whether that precedent transfers cleanly to bottled water, or to other consumer sectors, is speculation this newspaper is not yet prepared to assert as established fact. It is, however, a precedent worth naming plainly: this is not the first time this government has occupied both sides of a market it also governs.

RECONCILING THIS WITH A FREE MARKET

The honest framing is not “does state entry violate free-market principles,” asked in the abstract. Guyana’s bottled water sector was never a textbook open market — a small number of producers, import-dependent packaging inputs, and now a state entrant funded outside any competitive process. The live question is narrower: is government entering as an ordinary market participant, or as a policy instrument wearing a market participant’s clothing, in a sector with no regulator equipped to tell the difference. On the record available now, the second reading has more support than the first — not because pricing manipulation was proven, but because the structural conditions that would make informal price-setting attractive, and undetectable, are already in place.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

THE 592 GUARDIAN•ACCOUNTABILITY&INTEGRITY JOURNALISM • GUYANA

Procurement in the Shadows: When Tragedy Becomes Pretext

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OPINION BY : Staff Writer -August 2026

What is unfolding in the aftermath of the MV Barima disaster is not merely administrative misjudgment—it bears the hallmarks of a procurement process that may have been fundamentally compromised from the outset.

At the center of the controversy is a simple but critical distinction: urgency does not justify opacity. In fact, under Guyana’s procurement framework, urgency demands the opposite—heightened accountability, strict documentation, and clear justification for any departure from open competitive tendering.

If, as the leaked documents suggest, the government had already solicited and received a detailed proposal from a specific foreign firm prior to issuing a public Request for Proposals (RFP), then the process begins to resemble what procurement law would characterize as a de facto single-source engagement—regardless of the later attempt to formalize it through an open invitation.

This is where the problem crystallizes.

Single-source procurement is not inherently unlawful, but it is tightly circumscribed. It must be justified on explicit grounds: extreme urgency, sole supplier capability, or national emergency conditions that make competitive tendering impractical. Even then, the law requires transparency—written justification, approval by the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB), and a clear audit trail.

None of that has been publicly demonstrated.

Instead, what appears to have occurred is a hybrid maneuver: a preferred contractor is quietly engaged and positioned, followed by the issuance of an RFP to create the appearance of competition.                  This is not compliance. It is procedural theatre.

The Expression of Interest (EOI) or RFP, in such a context, risks being reduced to a cosmetic exercise—a post hoc device designed to legitimize a decision that may have already been made.

If other firms are being invited to bid against a proposal that is already known, detailed, and internally assessed, then the playing field is not merely uneven; it is structurally tilted.

This raises serious legal and ethical concerns.

First, it undermines the principle of equal opportunity in public contracting. Firms that were not given early access are immediately disadvantaged, particularly in a highly technical operation requiring mobilization planning, cost modeling, and environmental safeguards.

Second, it exposes the State to potential bid protests and legal challenges, especially from international salvage operators who may view the process as predetermined.

Third, and most critically, it erodes public confidence in the integrity of the response to a national tragedy.

The government may argue that time was of the essence—and it was. A submerged vessel in 13–15 meters of water, in poor visibility and strong currents, presents both environmental and forensic risks. But urgency is not a loophole for selective engagement.

If anything, it strengthens the obligation to act within clearly defined emergency procurement protocols.

There is also a deeper contradiction at play. The administration initially signaled that the wreck site might be preserved as a memorial. That position has now shifted to full recovery—an operationally complex and sensitive undertaking. Such a reversal should have triggered even greater procedural rigor, not less.

What is required now is not defensiveness, but disclosure.

The government must state plainly whether this was treated as an emergency procurement; whether approvals were sought from NPTAB; whether multiple firms were invited prior to the RFP; and whether the Dutch firm was given any informational or timing advantage over potential competitors.

Absent those answers, the conclusion becomes difficult to avoid: that the procurement process was not designed to discover the best solution, but to validate a pre-selected one.

And that, in the context of lost lives, missing persons, and a nation demanding accountability, is not just a procedural failure—it is a moral one.

 

Editor’s Note:

Under Guyana’s Procurement Act, Cap. 73:05, public procurement is governed by core principles of transparency, competition, fairness, and accountability. The Act establishes open tendering as the default method of procurement, with alternative methods—such as restricted tendering or single-source procurement—permitted only under clearly defined and strictly justified circumstances.

Section 25 of the Act outlines the conditions under which restricted or sole-source procurement may be used, including situations of extreme urgency, national emergency, or where only one supplier is capable of performing the contract. However, even in such cases, the procuring entity is required to document the justification, ensure that the process remains as competitive as practicable, and secure the necessary approvals, typically through the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB).

Critically, the law does not permit a procuring entity to engage a preferred supplier in advance and subsequently issue a public tender merely to regularize or legitimize that prior engagement. Such conduct, if established, would undermine the integrity of the procurement process and may constitute a breach of both the letter and spirit of the Act.

Additionally, the Act and accompanying regulations impose obligations for equal access to information among bidders, proper record-keeping, and the avoidance of any practice that could give rise to an unfair competitive advantage. Any deviation—particularly in high-value, high-sensitivity contracts involving public safety or national emergencies—demands heightened scrutiny and full public disclosure.

In this context, the sequence of events surrounding the MV Barima salvage operation raises serious questions as to whether the procedural safeguards required under the Procurement Act were observed, or whether the appearance of competition was substituted for its lawful execution.

—The Board

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦Independent Accountability Journalism

GRACE AND GRASPING: THE ACCOUNTABILITY DIVIDE

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Starmer Exits with Honor; Norton Clings On Despite Ruin  The Editorial Board — The 592 Guardian

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Two Leaders, One Standard

Politics is a brutal business. In mature democracies, leaders are held accountable — by their parties, by parliament, and ultimately by the voters. Sir Keir Starmer understood that. On 22 June 2026, just under two years after leading Labor from fourteen years in the wilderness to a historic landslide, Starmer announced his resignation as both Prime Minister and Labor Party leader.

He did not wait to be defenestrated. He left with his dignity intact.

The circumstances that drove him out were unsparing. His net approval rating had collapsed to negative sixty-six percent. His government lost Wales to Plaid Cymru for the first time in a century of Labor dominance. Cabinet ministers — including Health Secretary Wes Streeting — resigned before he did. When it became clear that Andy Burnham’s emphatic by-election victory had crystallized the parliamentary arithmetic against him, Starmer read the room and stepped aside. He did not require a formal vote of no confidence, a constitutional crisis, or an indignant press release from his own Central Executive Committee. He simply went.

Contrast that with Aubrey Norton. After presiding over APNU’s worst electoral result since 1957 — reduced to approximately eighteen percent of the national vote, supplanted as the main opposition by a newcomer party, WIN, that did not exist at the last election — Norton refuses to go. He has not merely clung to his position; he has announced his intention to contest the PNCR leadership again at the next Congress, while simultaneously ruling out the presidency. The logic, apparently, is that he will remain atop the apparatus of a collapsing party without having to face voters again. This is not statecraft. It is entrenchment.

The Anatomy of Norton’s Tenure

The record of Aubrey Norton’s leadership of the PNCR is not a matter of interpretation. It is documented devastation. Since he assumed the party leadership in December 2021, the PNCR has hemorrhaged senior figures at a rate that suggests not merely a personality clash at the top but a structural collapse of organizational confidence. Former parliamentarians, regional chairmen, and long-standing constituency executives have publicly abandoned Congress Place, with several crossing to the PPP/C ahead of the September 2025 elections — a political humiliation without recent precedent.

Amna Ally, the late former General Secretary who gave more than half a century to the PNCR, resigned with a letter urging Norton and his entire executive to “hang their heads in shame.” That is not the language of factional grievance. That is the verdict of institutional memory.

In the 2025 general and regional elections, APNU lost Region Ten — Linden, Norton’s own stronghold — to WIN. It lost majority control in Georgetown. It lost its historic position as the official opposition in the National Assembly. A party built over six decades of organizational discipline, forged in the era of Forbes Burnham, now commands less than one fifth of the national vote. And at the helm of this wreckage: a leader who insists he is needed to guide the “rebuilding process.”

The Central Executive Committee, to its considerable discredit, has provided cover. Its post-election statement reaffirmed “complete confidence” in Norton’s leadership while declining to address the electoral collapse or offer any diagnosis of failure. Its constitutional argument — that only a duly convened Congress can remove the leader — is technically accurate and morally evasive. Constitutionalism deployed as a shield against accountability is not principle. It is proceduralism in the service of power.

What Accountability Looks Like

Starmer did not lose a single election. He won one of the most commanding majorities in Labor’s history. Yet when his government’s failures became undeniable and his party’s confidence was withdrawn, he left. There was no hostage-taking, no constitutional manuevre, no announcement that he alone possessed the institutional knowledge required to steady a turbulent ship. He gave a speech, set a timetable, and stood aside.

That is what accountability looks like. It does not require the subject to celebrate his own departure. It requires only that he recognize that leadership is conditional on the confidence of those being led — and that when that confidence is gone, so is the mandate.

Norton appears to have arrived at the opposite conclusion: that the worse things get, the more indispensable he becomes. That the party’s crisis is not evidence of his failure but rather the proof of the chaos that would engulf it without his steadying hand. This is the psychology of incumbency untethered from results. It is the logic of every leader who has mistaken the apparatus of power for a personal inheritance.

Power, Patronage, and the Third-Term Manuevre

Norton’s persistence is troubling in isolation. It becomes more troubling when considered alongside what is now being discussed, with increasing urgency, in Guyanese political circles.

Reports reaching this Editorial Board — not yet independently verified and attributed here as credible political intelligence rather than confirmed fact — suggest that elements within the governing coalition are actively exploring whether opposition parliamentarians can be induced to support a constitutional amendment that would permit a third presidential term. If true, this would implicate the offices of President Irfaan Ali and Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo in what amounts to the targeted corruption of the legislature.

This is not without historical parallel. Jagdeo himself sought, through judicial channels, to clear the path for a third term during his own presidency — and was turned back by the courts. That attempt failed. The question now being raised is whether, with a fragmentary opposition, a weakened PNCR, and a National Assembly already made pliable by the erosion of meaningful check, a second attempt — this time through parliamentary means and financial persuasion — might succeed where litigation did not.

We are not in a position to name names or cite on-record sources at this stage. We are in a position to say this:

The allegation is specific, is circulating at senior levels, and deserves urgent and transparent denial from the Office of the President and the Vice President. The silence of the powerful is not innocence. It is a provocation to ask harder questions

 Lord Acton’s axiom has never required revision: power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. A government that has already accumulated substantial control over Guyana’s regulatory architecture, media environment, and patronage networks does not need a third term to become a threat to democratic governance. It is already one. A third term would simply formalize what is already structural.

The Broader Lesson for Guyana

The Starmer-Norton juxtaposition is not offered here as an exercise in comparative politics for its own sake. It is offered because Guyana’s political culture has normalized a relationship between leaders and power that most functional democracies would find unrecognizable. In Britain, a Prime Minister who won a landslide eighteen months ago resigned when his party lost confidence.

In Guyana, a party leader who oversaw the worst electoral collapse in his party’s modern history is positioning himself for another term at the helm — and the governing party is allegedly shopping for votes to extend presidential tenure beyond constitutional limits.

 

These are not unrelated pathologies. They are symptoms of the same disease:

A political class that has internalized the assumption that accountability is something that happens to other people. That electoral defeat is a condition to be managed rather than a verdict to be respected. That the constitution is an instrument to be navigated rather than a constraint to be honored.

 Guyana’s citizens — those who voted for APNU and those who did not, those who support the PPP/C and those who do not — deserve leaders who understand, as Keir Starmer apparently understood on the morning of 22 June 2026, that the people’s verdict is final.

Aubrey Norton has not learned this. If the third-term reports carry any truth, neither has the governing Party.

The Editorial Board

The 592 Guardian ♦June 2026