592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Relocation Cannot Become Displacement

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OPINION BY : Hem Kumar —August 2026

Government is right to protect reserves, drainage corridors and other restricted lands. But for the more than 1000 people marked for relocation, the critical question is whether serviced, accessible alternatives have been prepared—close enough to jobs, schools, transport and the lives families have spent years building.

The Minister of Housing acknowledgement that more than 1000 occupants of restricted areas have been identified for relocation is an important first step. A government cannot responsibly plan relocations without first knowing who is affected, where they live, and why their present occupation cannot be regularized. Likewise, the record of more than 2000 regularization exercises over the past five years shows that regularization, where lawful and safe, remains a necessary tool rather than an act of indulgence.

The Government’s stated distinction between areas capable of regularization and those that cannot be retained—such as drainage and irrigation reserves, riverbanks, dams, coastal zones and other environmentally or infrastructurally sensitive lands—is reasonable in principle. No responsible administration can legitimize settlements that block drainage, threaten flood protection, compromise public reserves, or place families in danger.

But the test of a humane housing policy does not end with declaring that people must move.

It begins with answering a far more consequential question: Where, exactly, are they expected to go?

If the Ministry of Housing and the Central Housing and Planning Authority have already logged more than 1000 people who will have to be relocated, the public should be told whether suitable parcels have already been identified and developed for them. Have the lands been surveyed? Are roads, drainage, water, electricity, schools, transportation, health facilities and security available? Will families be moved to communities within reasonable reach of their jobs and the schools their children attend?

These questions are not an attempt to defend illegal occupation of State land. They go to the heart of whether relocation is being handled as a planned social intervention or merely as an eviction exercise.

 

A family that has lived for years in Kaneville, Lusignan, Annandale, Good Hope, Sophia, Ogle or another established area has built more than a structure. People have built routines and livelihoods. They have found work nearby, established small businesses, enrolled children in school, arranged transportation, developed support networks and, in many cases, created the practical conditions by which they survive.

Uprooting them and placing them far away in an undeveloped location may technically remove them from a reserve or a riverbank. But it can also deepen hardship. A household may face longer and more expensive travel, lost employment, disruption to children’s education, reduced access to health services, and the uncertainty of moving into an area without basic infrastructure.

That is why the language of “zero tolerance” must be accompanied by a policy of zero indifference.

Lessons From Kaneville

The concerns raised previously in relation to Kaneville remain relevant. The issue was never that the State should permit unsafe or unauthorised occupation indefinitely. The issue is whether the State, having allowed communities to develop over time, has a duty to ensure that any eventual intervention is orderly, transparent, humane and grounded in practical alternatives.

Government is correct that there are tens of thousands of formal housing applicants waiting patiently within the system. Their rights and expectations must be respected. It would be unfair to reward opportunistic land grabbing at the expense of citizens who applied, paid and waited through the lawful process.

However, fairness does not require Government to choose between formal applicants and vulnerable squatters. A mature housing policy must protect both: preserve the integrity of the allocation system while ensuring that families who must move are not pushed into deeper poverty, remoteness or instability.

The relevant distinction should not simply be between “law-abiding applicants” and “illegal occupants.” There must also be recognition of differing circumstances. Some people may have exploited public land knowingly. Others may have occupied land because of poverty, overcrowding, lack of affordable rental options, delayed housing allocations, family breakdown, or the absence of realistic alternatives. A fair process must assess those differences rather than treat every case as identical.

A Public Relocation Plan Is Needed

Before enforcement is contemplated, the Ministry should publish a clear relocation framework covering the affected communities. At a minimum, it should state:

⇒ The number of households—not merely structures or occupants—identified for relocation in each area.

⇒ The precise basis for determining that an area cannot be regularised.

⇒ The locations proposed for relocation and the distance from residents’ present communities.

⇒ Whether relocation sites have roads, drainage, potable water, electricity, internet access, public transport, schools, health services and policing.

⇒ The criteria for eligibility, including the treatment of low-income families, elderly residents, persons with disabilities, women-headed households and families with school-age children.

⇒ Whether families will receive serviced house lots, completed homes, rental support, moving assistance or other transitional help.

⇒ The timeline for relocation, consultation and the provision of infrastructure.

⇒ A transparent appeal or review mechanism for persons who believe they were wrongly classified or inadequately accommodated.

It is not enough to tell residents to “put your house in order” and apply like everyone else if the relocation process itself may leave them without a viable place to live. A pending application alone does not solve the immediate consequences of displacement.

Nor should relocation become a route to sending low-income families to distant, poorly serviced lands simply because those areas are available. Relocation must be to developed or demonstrably developing communities, not to bush lots, flood-prone tracts or places where residents are effectively cut off from work, schools and essential services.

Compassion Must Be Practical

The Minister is right that Government has an obligation to enforce the law and protect reserves, drainage corridors, riverbanks and coastal infrastructure. But enforcement without a credible, adequately serviced alternative risks creating a cycle in which displaced families simply seek another unauthorised place to live.

That outcome would serve no one—not the families, not formal housing applicants, not nearby communities and not the State.

The Government deserves credit for acknowledging the scale of the issue, conducting regularisation exercises where appropriate, and recording those who will need to move. The next measure of success, however, will be whether every relocation is supported by land, infrastructure, accessibility and genuine consultation.

People should not be left to choose between living illegally in an unsafe place and accepting a distant plot that dismantles the lives they have painstakingly built. If relocation is necessary, it must be planned as a transition to dignity—not administered as a punishment for poverty.

 

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Presentation Without Execution: Selling Region 10 as a Manufacturing Hub While Linden Sits in the Dark

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On Wednesday, Chief Investment Officer Peter Ramsaroop stood in Linden and told Region 10 it was moving into “its next level of investment, production and export growth.” He spoke of a manufacturing, transport and logistics hub linking Guyana’s coast, interior and northern Brazil. He cited G$8 billion in approved investment agreements since 2020, hundreds of jobs, new dairy and agro-processing activity.

None of it mentioned the obvious thing sitting in the room.

Region 10 is in the middle of a power crisis. Linden’s electricity supplier has been running rolling blackouts since mid-August, after peak demand tore past the system’s 14.5-megawatt ceiling. Generation has been tripping at Bosai. The Mayor and Town Council convened an emergency town hall over it. An MP has called the situation the result of years of neglect and poor planning. Sawmillers have been asked, by government request, to shift their operations to the hours between 10 p.m. and 11 a.m. because the grid cannot carry them in daylight.

That is the backdrop against which a senior government investment official chose to pitch Linden as the next manufacturing and logistics hub of Guyana.

A bold, brash and unthoughtful pitch

There is a word for going into a region that cannot currently keep its lights on during peak hours and presenting it as ready for manufacturing expansion: disconnected. Manufacturing runs on continuous, reliable power. Cold storage, processing lines, BPO operations — every activity Ramsaroop listed as part of Region 10’s “diversified productive base” depends on exactly the resource Linden does not currently have enough of.

This is not a hypothetical concern raised by critics. It is the government’s own admitted position. Linden’s electricity company has said publicly that it is managing a “critical generation shortfall.” The Public Utilities Minister has said the region’s demand peaks have outstripped supply. Sawmillers — existing industry, not hypothetical future investors — have already been told to work around the shortage rather than through it.

Against that backdrop, telling the region it is entering a new phase of production and export growth is not optimism. It is a failure to read the room, or a deliberate decision not to.

 

Investment agreements are not the same as electricity

Ramsaroop’s release leans on a specific number: G$8 billion in GO-Invest-approved investment agreements for Region 10 between 2020 and 2026, with local investors accounting for most of it. That figure describes paper commitments accumulated over six years. It says nothing about which of those agreements have actually become operating production, and nothing about how any of it is meant to run on a grid that cannot currently support the industrial demand already in place.

An investment agreement is not a kilowatt. A press release announcing a “next level” is not a solved generation shortfall. If GO-Invest’s own aftercare mandate is to work with investors on “implementation challenges,” the single largest implementation challenge in Region 10 right now is the one nobody at Wednesday’s engagement apparently raised out loud: there is not enough power to run what is already there, let alone what is being promised.

Another crass electioneering ploy

This fits a pattern this outlet has tracked repeatedly: rhetorical presentation substituting for delivery. 

Announce the hub. Announce the next phase. Announce the transformation. Let the cameras record the visit. Leave the underlying infrastructure problem — the one residents are living with in the dark, on a rolling schedule, right now — for another day, another minister, another press release.

Region 10 does not need to be told it is on the verge of a manufacturing renaissance. It needs the government department responsible for its electricity supply to fix the generation shortfall that is currently disrupting daily life and existing industry. Everything else is theater.

Power survives on presentation. Accountability requires execution.

592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

The Carrot and the Count

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OPINION BY: Hem Kumar— August 2026

How the PPP’s Defection Strategy Points Toward 2031

Guyana’s next general election is not four years away. Under the current constitutional timeline, the PPP/C’s term runs to September 2030, with elections due within 90 days of parliament’s dissolution (Article 61) — pushing the actual vote into early 2031. That distinction matters, because what is unfolding in Guyana’s political landscape between now and then is not simply the run-up to a contest.

It is a slower, more consequential process: the deliberate erosion of the opposition’s base through an elite-defection strategy the PPP/C has run openly, effectively, and — so far — with only a partial answer from the other side.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ANECDOTE

The pattern is well documented and still ongoing. James Bond, a prominent former PNC-R executive with real standing among younger and mixed-race Afro-Guyanese voters, crossed to the PPP/C and has said publicly that no one criticized Bharrat Jagdeo and Irfaan Ali more than he once did. Shurwayne Holder — PNC-R’s own sitting Chairman — made the same move, alongside a wider group of former MPs and regional officials: Jermaine Figuiera, Daniel Seeram, Samuel Sandy, Dr. Richard Van-West Charles, Geeta Chandan-Edmond, Ricky Ramsaroop, Dinesh Jaiprashad,  Lennpx Shuman. Josh Kanhai, Asha Kission and several sitting regional councillors. In May 2026 alone, a group of former APNU MPs and councillors crossed together in a single coordinated meeting with Vice President Jagdeo.

Most recently, Wayne Maison, another PNC-R figure, signaled his support after meeting with the Vice President directly.

The PPP/C is not hiding any of this. Jagdeo has repeatedly cited each crossover publicly as validation of the party’s governance record, describing the wave as evidence of “disillusionment and fragmentation” within PNC/R and APNU, and positioning the PPP/C as a “party of inclusion” open to defectors from anywhere on the political spectrum

The opposition has offered its own explanation, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than ignored. Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton has dismissed the defections as unsurprising, attributing them to personal resentment — “a lot of them were dissatisfied they didn’t become MPs.” APNU General Secretary Sherwin Benjamin went further, calling the pattern “personal aggrandizement” rather than genuine conviction.

If true, this would reduce the entire trend to a handful of disappointed careerists chasing individual opportunity, with no larger signal for ordinary voters to read into it.

But that explanation grows harder to sustain as the list lengthens and diversifies — MPs, a sitting party Chairman, regional chairmen and vice chairmen, councillors, professionals, moving both individually and in organized groups, over a sustained period rather than a single disgruntled cluster. A pattern this size and this durable is not simply a story about individual career frustration. It is beginning to look like a strategy, and a working one.

THE MECHANISM

The mechanism is straightforward, and it does not require any voter to be fooled. This is not a series of disconnected personal decisions; it is coordinated messaging. Bring over a recognizable figure, publicize his improved standing, let his visible success stand in for an implicit promise to everyone still watching.

The message to any opposition supporter observing from the outside requires no direct persuasion at all: come over, and your life improves too.

Whether that promise is honored in every individual case matters less, politically, than whether it is believed. And there is a reasonable case that it increasingly is. As oil revenue reshapes the state’s capacity to reward loyalty, and as APNU/PNC’s own bench continues to thin, the comparison between the life available on one side and the life available on the other becomes starker — not necessarily because opposition voters are being deceived, but because a growing number of them may be making a rational bet on which party can actually deliver.

THE ARITHMETIC

This is where the long-term arithmetic becomes relevant. The PPP/C currently holds 36 of 65 seats. A two-thirds majority — 44 seats — would open the door to constitutional amendment, including provisions governing presidential term limits.

That is not a prediction; it is a description of what the current trajectory makes possible if the defection pattern continues uninterrupted and translates into proportional vote share by 2031.

Guyanese should understand the stakes of that scenario now, while there is still runway to respond to it — not in the final weeks of a campaign five years from now.

GUYANA IS NOT IMMUNE TO THE PATTERN OIL STATES FOLLOW

None of this unfolds in a vacuum, and Guyana is not the first country to test whether new oil wealth and democratic restraint can coexist.

The academic literature on so-called petrostates is not encouraging. Political scientists who study the “resource curse” have found, across dozens of oil-producing countries, that resource windfalls tend to entrench incumbents rather than unseat them — extending the tenure of ruling parties, weakening the ties between government and citizen that ordinarily come from taxation, and giving incumbents financial advantages that challengers, armed or electoral, struggle to match.

The pattern is not universal or automatic, and the same research shows that peaceful, negotiated transitions remain possible even in oil-rich states — but the base rate runs toward entrenchment, not away from it.

This is not a hypothetical warning imported from elsewhere. UCLA political scientist Michael Ross delivered a lecture directly addressed to this country — titled, without ambiguity, “The Resource Curse and Democracy: Lessons for Guyana” — in which he cautioned that oil wealth threatens free and fair elections by letting incumbents outlast their rivals and consolidate authority while civil society becomes progressively more dependent on the state, and therefore more reluctant to challenge it. The talk was delivered via a June 2020 webinar hosted by the University of Guyana’s GREEN Institute — before first oil turned into the scale of revenue Guyana now manages.                                              It reads, today, less like caution and more like description.

ENTRENCHMENT WITHOUT A STRONGMAN

It would be a mistake, though, to import the standard petrostate narrative wholesale and expect it to play out here exactly as it has elsewhere. The usual caricature of oil-fueled entrenchment is personalist: a single dominant leader, a cult of personality, power concentrated in one man until he dies or is deposed. That is not the shape this is likely to take in Guyana, and understanding why matters for how the country should respond.

The PPP has multiple senior figures with their own standing, their own bases, and their own ambitions for the presidency. That internal reality is precisely what makes collective entrenchment more durable than one-man rule, not less.

Where a single strongman creates a single point of failure — one health crisis, one succession fight, one loss of personal popularity — a party with several leadership aspirants has every incentive to cooperate in defending the system that lets each of them eventually take a turn at the top.

Removing term limits or engineering a durable legislative supermajority does not just benefit whoever is president today ; it preserves the mechanism for whoever leads the party tomorrow.     That gives every ambitious figure inside the party a personal stake in defending and expanding the same structure, and it means the effort to entrench is likely to be pursued through multiple avenues at once — legislative, judicial, administrative, and electoral — rather than through the will of a single man.

A coalition of ambitious leaders defending a shared system can be harder to dislodge than a single ruler defending only himself, because there is no single figure whose fall brings the whole structure down with him.

This is what makes the defection strategy more than a footnote to the entrenchment question. Every recognizable figure absorbed from the opposition is not just a public-relations win. It is a reduction in the number of credible alternatives standing outside the system, and an enlargement of the coalition with a direct personal stake in keeping the system exactly as it is.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY AT STAKE

To be clear about what is being argued here, and what is not: this is not a claim that Guyana is already a one-party state, or that the 2031 election is predetermined. The opposition’s account — that some of these defections reflect personal disappointment rather than mass sentiment — may be true in individual cases even as the aggregate pattern points somewhere more significant.

Both things can be true at once, and a serious accounting of what is happening has to hold them together rather than choosing the more convenient one.

What can be said with confidence is this: a recognizable, escalating strategy is underway; it is being executed by a party with more than one leader who benefits from its success; and if it continues on its current trajectory, it points toward the constitutional threshold that would let a governing coalition rewrite the rules under which it holds power.  Naming that trajectory now, five years before the votes are cast, is not alarmism. It is the minimum work required of anyone who wants Guyana to reach 2031 as a functioning multi-party democracy rather than a one-party state that got there by accumulation rather than by any single dramatic act.

The question the opposition — and the electorate it claims to represent — has not yet answered is what it intends to do about it, beyond hoping the pattern reverses itself.

— The Board

WATCH THE VIDEO: ⇓

Source: Michael Ross, “The Resource Curse and Democracy: Lessons for Guyana,” GREEN Institute, University of Guyana (June 2020)

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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.

 

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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