THE 592 GUARDIAN  ♦  ACCOUNTABILITY EDITORIAL

Rum, Roads, and the Public Purse

Komal Samaroo went to Capitol Hill to condemn subsidies. He forgot to mention the ones keeping his empire afloat.

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

There is a particular brand of audacity that flourishes in the tropics. It is the audacity of the man who builds his fortune on public scaffolding, then mounts a podium to lecture the world about fair competition.

Komal Samaroo, Chairman of Demerara Distillers Limited (DDL) and the West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers Association (WIRSPA), delivered exactly that performance at a working lunch on Capitol Hill during the Caribbean Legislative Forum.

His keynote, draped in the respectable language of regional development and trade equity, was at its core a lobbying brief — a private sector executive asking the United States Congress to extend and deepen trade preferences that underpin his company’s competitive position. What the address conspicuously omitted was any accounting of the domestic public subsidies, infrastructure handouts, and state-financed inputs upon which DDL’s business model has long depended.

Before Georgetown and Washington hear any more from Mr. Samaroo about the unfairness of subsidized competition, the Guyanese public deserves a full reckoning of what he has already received from them.

He built his fortune on public scaffolding, then mounted a podium to lecture the world about fair competition.

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THE GUYSUCO LIFELINE

The foundation of DDL’s rum production is molasses — the by-product of sugar refining. That molasses comes almost entirely from the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), a state enterprise that has never, across decades of operation, been able to produce sugar at or below world market prices. GuySuCo has survived only through repeated, substantial injections of public funds. It is, by any honest measure, a permanently subsidized industry.

Yet DDL draws its primary raw material from this failing entity. Every bottle of El Dorado rum that exits the Ruimveldt bond carries within it the hidden cost of Guyanese taxpayer support for a sugar corporation that cannot stand on its own commercial feet. When Samaroo speaks of DDL’s ‘authentic provenance’ and ‘premium quality,’ he is describing a product whose cost base is artificially suppressed by state subsidy — a subsidy paid not by DDL’s shareholders, but by Guyanese citizens.

This is not a peripheral detail. It is the structural foundation of DDL’s pricing competitiveness. Without a subsidized GuySuCo supplying below-market molasses, DDL’s cost of production would look materially different. The premium narrative Samaroo markets to Washington is built, in part, on public money he has never been asked to account for.

THE MOBLISSA MODEL: INFRASTRUCTURE AS CORPORATE WELFARE

DDL’s dairy subsidiary at Moblissa offers a case study in how the Guyanese state converts public expenditure into private profit. The facility — a diversification venture by the DDL group — was accompanied by significant government infrastructure investment: roads built, a bridge constructed, tax concessions granted, and tax holidays extended.

These are not trivial inputs. Road and bridge construction in the Guyanese interior represents real capital expenditure drawn from the national budget. Tax holidays represent foregone public revenue. Together they constitute a substantial subsidy package delivered to a private enterprise whose principal shareholder is not the Guyanese public, but DDL’s ownership structure.

One searches in vain for the corporate social responsibility commitments that might justify this largesse. DDL has not distinguished itself with community investment, worker welfare programs, or environmental stewardship proportionate to the public inputs it has received. The Moblissa arrangement is the pattern made concrete: the state builds the infrastructure, a private company captures the commercial upside, and the public balance sheet absorbs the cost.

The state builds the infrastructure. The private company captures the upside. The public balance sheet absorbs the cost.

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THE CAPITOL HILL PERFORMANCE

Against this domestic backdrop, Samaroo’s Capitol Hill address requires a different reading than the one its author intended. His call for reallocation of US sugar tariff-rate quotas — specifically the unused quotas assigned to Trinidad & Tobago and St. Kitts & Nevis, countries that have ceased sugar production — is not a gesture of regional solidarity. It is a market access argument that benefits, above all, those Caribbean producers still in the sugar and rum business. DDL is foremost among them.

His advocacy for extension of the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (CBERA) is similarly self-interested. CBERA’s duty-free access provisions have provided DDL with a preferential entry point into the US market. Samaroo presents this as regional benefit; it is also, plainly, corporate benefit to his own company.

Most revealing is his denunciation of ‘tremendously subsidized products’ from the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, which benefit from the Rum Excise Tax Cover-Over and dominate roughly 80 percent of the US rum market. The complaint is legitimate as a matter of trade fairness. Its irony is total. The man objecting to US government subsidies distorting the rum market draws his molasses from a Guyanese state enterprise that has never been commercially viable without government subsidy.

FACT BOX: PUBLIC INPUTS TO DDL’S COMPETITIVE POSITION

THE ACCOUNTABILITY STANDARD

None of this is to argue that DDL has not built real commercial capability or that Caribbean rum does not deserve market access. It does. The region’s distillers produce genuine quality and the preferential trade architecture supporting them has historical justification rooted in colonial economic arrangements that the Caribbean did not choose.

The problem is not that DDL benefits from state support. The problem is that Samaroo presents himself and his company as exemplars of private enterprise virtue — authentic, quality-driven, unfairly disadvantaged by the subsidized competition of others — while remaining entirely silent about the public inputs that underpin his own position. That silence is not an oversight. It is a rhetorical strategy.

Caribbean people, and Guyanese people in particular, are entitled to a full accounting. They are entitled to know the value of the GuySuCo molasses supplied to DDL at below-market effective rates enabled by state subsidy. They are entitled to know the capital cost of the Moblissa road and bridge infrastructure. They are entitled to know the quantum of tax concessions and holidays extended to DDL entities. And they are entitled to know what DDL has given back — in taxes actually paid, in wages, in community investment, in environmental compliance — relative to what it has received.

Until that accounting is produced, Mr. Samaroo’s lectures on trade fairness should be received in Washington and Georgetown with appropriate skepticism. The rum is excellent. The audacity is something else entirely.

THE 592 GUARDIAN DEMANDS

1.The Government of Guyana must publish a full accounting of all public infrastructure expenditure, tax concessions, and tax holidays granted to DDL and its subsidiaries, including Moblissa Dairy, for the period 2000 to present.

2.GuySuCo must disclose the transfer price and volume of molasses supplied to DDL, and the government must commission an independent assessment of the effective subsidy value embedded in that arrangement.

3.DDL must publish an annual Corporate Social Responsibility report detailing community investment, environmental compliance, and worker welfare outcomes relative to the public inputs the company has received.

4.Any further government infrastructure support, tax concessions, or preferential arrangements for DDL entities must be subject to Parliamentary scrutiny and public disclosure before approval.

5.CARICOM trade advocacy positions advanced by WIRSPA and its chairman must disclose the direct commercial interests of the association’s principal members in any proposed policy change.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism publication focused on Guyana. Editorial positions represent the views of the editorial board.

Freedom Delayed:

The Unfinished Promise of Independence

OPINION

BY: JAI LALL

This country of many waters and races is observing its 60th independence anniversary since the British flag, the Union Jack, was lowered at midnight on the 25th May 1966 and the Guyana flag, the Golden Arrowhead, was raised on the 26th May 1966. Those were the days when sugar was king of the land and nicknamed “gold dust.” Today, oil is the queen of the sea, and its pet name is “liquid gold.” Uniquely, Guyanese are enjoying back-to-back holidays with Eid Al-Adha, the following day.

From the inception, “gold” cradled the foundation for Guyana’s name, built its growth for fame, and its “discovery” to develop its fortune. The searching, sighting, visiting, landing, settling, and colonizing of “Guiana” was as a quest to find the “Golden City of El Dorado,” with a famous myth that villages with houses were made of gold.

British Guiana has metamorphosed from a British colony ruled previously by the Dutch and invariably occupied by the French and Spanish, thus tainted with a European intrusion, to a sovereign state known as Guyana and then to a Republic, now referenced to as “The Co-operative Republic of Guyana.” But, from inception, it was the original home of the Indigenous inhabitants which comprised a number of different tribes but popularly and collectively referred to as the “Amerindians,” who populated the hinterland, in “The Land of Many Waters.”

After the arrival of the European pioneers, they pulverized the land to reap and rape for profits. This was followed by the infusion of African slaves, the indentured Indian laborers and a small influx of Portuguese and Chinese. The eventual co-habitation of the six races, reproduced a seventh race genesis as a result from “cross-pollination.”

From exploration to exploitation, a new community evolved from this Guyanese society to rise to a significant level from a breeding ground, to birth another race of “mixed races” and “crossbreeds” identified as “dougla.” Guyanese are still in disbelief but cannot forget Burnham’s evil intention of the real purpose behind the formation of National Service. Having set aside our diversified background, known as Guyanese, now, we are forecasting an identity of “One People.”

Mind you, most Guyanese are wary of the comparable combination of the citizens’ contrasting cultures, which cement a comfortable compatibility not to compromise the nation’s goal of gluing as “One Nation.”

But differences and indifferences with options and opinions, actions and activities and our way of life of why we live how we live, will always circumvent any given standard for commonality.

Despite any great purpose, there are those who will obviate any good intention. The ruling Government led by a roaring President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali and the popular People’s Progress Party/Civic, is perpetually pronouncing on their productive performances and the profitable achievements which will permeate a promenade to produce the aspiration of working together to mold a “One Destiny,” paving a pampered path with peace, progress and prosperity.

Notwithstanding this erudite motto with the classic slogan, “One People, One Nation, One Destiny,” these exponential factors bear an existential quest to resolve an equation for:

A vision not to look through the lens of ethnicity as a redress for liberty; a promise to forgo using violence to instigate disruption to address equality; and a challenge to work together to bridge harmony in fraternity against racism.

Having traversed the treacherous journey from forced exits to coerced exits, the wind changed direction from slavery to freedom and then, indentureship to liberation. The tide having sailed in the colonizers, changed course from independence to a Republican state. In the travesty for overnight self-governance, we trailed on a trial of conspired deception to avoid alleged

Communism. The turmoiled water provided a storm to brew dictatorship before being relieved of socialism to rely on capitalism.

Political leaders from the past have manipulated and mutilated the richness of this land via disgusting measures, deceptive means and disguising intentions, denying the people the true results from the ballot boxes with the aid of the British and American cooperation, Guyanese collation and conspirators’ collaboration controlling rigged elections.

Nationalization has seen the rude awakening of a crude, new leader imitating the image of a “white, colonial master,” ashamed of his “innate inhibitions.”

A man who professed to be a General, rode on a horse with a cigar as his horse trotted along the road in his “Hope” estate, ordering his “serfs” to obey his command or, bear the brunt of his whip as he unleashed violence, vindication and vengeance! A man who can make Satan cry and his sister weep, was one to fear and not fathom.

The man who thought he would rule for life, aligned himself with Jim Jones and the 918 mass-murders in Jonestown, Rabbi Washington’s House of Israel and the murder of Father Darke and was the intellectual architect who engineered WPA’s Dr. Walter Rodney’s murder. But those sinister events played second fiddle to the horror of the “Wismar Massacre,” the burning and looting in Georgetown on Black Friday and the harsh 135 and 80 days GAWU strikes. The “best orator” stood silent to speak against indignity, injustice and insanity!

Guyana’s independence gave us poverty, nakedness and corruption, all enwrapped, enveloped and entrapped in the name of freedom for the small man to enter the dream of being the real man while the privileged, the protected and the prioritized ones were permitted to enjoy the platter from the luxury of a golden plate!

The infancy stage of Guyana’s freedom fermented a mass exodus of migration from all races, banning of essential food items, the creation of long and lasting “Guy lines,” the freezing of wages, the ‘mistreatment’ of females workers, the use of workers and materials for personal gains, the misuse of the armed forces, the evaporation of foreign currency, the abuse of state properties, and to crown it all, the PNC Party card’s usage as a Passport to freedom, freebies and feasts for the few, fortunate figures!

“Independence did not immediately free all and sundry. The fight for real freedom continues as, hopefully, will this article”. 

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

 EDITORIAL

Staff Writer

When World- Class is no longer a “SLOGAN”

Guyana’s Independence celebration at Fort Island will be remembered not as a triumphant national observance, but as a case study in governmental disorganization, poor planning, security recklessness, and administrative arrogance. 

What should have been an occasion of pride instead descended into confusion, embarrassment, and avoidable danger. And what makes it worse is that none of it was unforeseeable. Every failure that evening was the product of choices — or the deliberate absence of them.

The most troubling aspect of the evening was not any single mistake. It was the systemic nature of the incompetence on display. When failures are isolated, they can be attributed to oversight. When they are layered, interlocking, and spread across every dimension of an event’s execution, they speak to something more fundamental: an institutional culture that does not take governance seriously enough to sweat the details — even when the occasion demands nothing less.

1.The Citizens Left Behind

Let us begin where the evening ended — with thousands of Guyanese stranded in the dark, waiting for vessels that were not coming quickly enough, on an island they had been invited to celebrate upon.

The transportation failure to and from Fort Island was not the consequence of bad weather, mechanical emergency, or some unforeseeable crisis. It was the consequence of elementary miscalculation. Planners organized a national public event on an island — a geographically enclosed venue with a single mode of mass egress — and failed to provision adequate maritime transport for the return journey. This is not a logistical nuance. It is the first question any competent event planner asks: how do we get people home?

The answer, apparently, was not asked loudly enough, or not answered honestly, or not acted upon at all.

What followed was entirely predictable. 

Exhausted citizens — many of whom had made the effort to attend out of genuine patriotic feeling — scrambled for passage back to the mainland in conditions that ranged from disorganized to dangerous. 

Unforgettable Moment

Officials who should have been coordinating were apparently unprepared for the entirely predictable reality that the ceremony would end and people would need to leave.

There is something particularly corrosive about this kind of failure. It is not the failure of ambition. It is the failure of basic care. The state invited citizens to participate in a national celebration and then abandoned the operational responsibility of ensuring they could return safely. That is not a logistical shortcoming. It is a statement about whose comfort, time, and safety the state considers worth planning for.

11.The Security Question No One Should Have to Ask

While citizens scrambled on the docks, a more quietly alarming tableau was unfolding above them.

Reports indicate that Cabinet members — senior figures of the Guyanese executive — were clustered together in the top VIP section of a single vessel during transport. In ordinary circumstances, this might be unremarkable. These are not ordinary circumstances.

Guyana is presently navigating one of the most consequential and sensitive geopolitical situations in its history. The territorial controversy with Venezuela over the Essequibo region has elevated the country’s strategic exposure in ways that carry real, not theoretical, risk. Against this backdrop, the decision to concentrate a significant portion of senior state leadership in one exposed maritime environment — without apparent security zoning, contingency separation, or layered emergency protocols — is not merely poor optics. It is a failure of basic statecraft.

Serious states, particularly those operating under conditions of heightened geopolitical tension, do not casually centralize their executive leadership in vulnerable transit settings. 

The principles of state continuity — ensuring that no single incident can decapitate a government’s command and decision-making capacity — exist precisely because history has demonstrated, repeatedly, that risk does not announce its arrival.

This is not paranoia. It is not theatrical caution. It is the fundamental obligation of those who manage state security to plan not for the probable, but for the possible. The question is not whether anything happened that night. The question is whether anything was in place if something had. The silence on that question is, itself, an answer.

III. What the World Saw

Nations are judged, in part, by the small moments — the details that reveal whether a state is genuinely capable of executing what it claims to represent. Fort Island offered the world a revealing detail.

The United States Ambassador to Guyana, one of the most senior diplomatic representatives present at the occasion, was reportedly left to navigate her way onto a vessel using unstable boards placed haphazardly between the dock and the boat — largely unassisted, in conditions of darkness and confusion. She managed. That is not the point.

Diplomacy is theatre as much as it is policy. Visiting ambassadors and foreign dignitaries are not merely guests at national events. They are, whether we acknowledge it or not, observers and reporters. What they experience becomes part of the informal record of a country’s institutional character — the stories that circulate in embassies, foreign ministries, and diplomatic cables. 

What was communicated to Guyana’s international partners that evening was not the image of a confident, capable, oil-rich emerging state asserting its place among the nations. It was the image of a country that could not organize safe boarding conditions for one of its most important diplomatic guests.

Guyana is, at this precise moment in its history, seeking to project itself as a serious and sovereign actor — a nation whose governance infrastructure is equal to its extraordinary natural wealth. Fort Island did not reinforce that projection. It undermined it, quietly but unmistakably, in front of an audience that will remember.

IV.The Flag That Faltered

None of the above failures occurred in isolation. They shared the evening with a moment that, in the context of national ceremony, carries particular symbolic weight.

The midnight flag raising — the ceremonial centerpiece of Independence observance, the act around which the entire gathering was organized — faltered. Visibly. In a manner that communicated, without ambiguity, a lack of adequate rehearsal and coordination.

This matters more than it may appear. National ceremonies are not casual social events. They are deliberately constructed expressions of sovereignty — rituals that project the discipline, precision, and institutional competence of a state to its own citizens and to the world. They derive their emotional and symbolic power from flawless execution. When they fail, even partially, they do not merely embarrass. They communicate something about the state itself — about whether its institutions are capable of commanding the details that collective identity demands.

A flag raised clumsily on Independence Night is not just an aesthetic blemish. In a country navigating the weight of its history, the complexity of its present, and the uncertainty of its geopolitical future, it is a signal. And signals, once sent, cannot be unsent.

V.A Pattern, Not an Incident

Individually, each of the failures at Fort Island might be dismissed as an aberration — a bad night, a miscommunication, an unfortunate oversight. But they did not occur individually. They occurred together, on the same evening, at the same event, organized by the same state apparatus. That simultaneity is not incidental. It is diagnostic.

What Fort Island revealed is not merely that event planners made mistakes. It revealed that the state’s approach to high-visibility public obligations is not underwritten by the rigor, accountability, and systematic preparation that such obligations require.

The citizens were an afterthought. The security calculus was casual. The diplomatic protocol was inadequate. The ceremonial execution was unrehearsed.

These are not the failures of a government that was unlucky. They are the failures of a government that was underprepared — and, more troublingly, of a government that may not have considered that preparation necessary.

Guyana is a nation at a crossroads of enormous historical consequence. Its oil revenues, its territorial disputes, its emergence onto the international stage — all of it demands a state that is not merely present, but capable. Fort Island showed us, in miniature and in real time, what an incapable state looks like when it dresses itself in the clothes of national celebration.

There are no easy answers here. There is no single official to blame, no single department to restructure, no single reform that addresses what was on display that night. What happened at Fort Island is the product of a broader institutional culture — one in which accountability is deferred, standards are negotiated downward, and the performance of governance is permitted to substitute for its substance.

The celebration is over. The stranded citizens made it home. The ambassador boarded her vessel. The flag, eventually, was raised.

But the questions that Fort Island asks of this government have no expiry date. And they have not yet been answered.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮, 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—