Gouveia’s “Model Farm” Endorsement Is a Conflict the PSC Chairman Cannot Explain Away

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

Gouveia’s “Model Farm” Endorsement Is a Conflict the PSC Chairman Cannot Explain Away

Source: PSC Chairman Gerald Gouveia Jr., in an invited comment to Kiskadee Watch.

The Private Sector Commission exists to represent the interests of Guyanese business — competitive business, operating on a level field, subject to the same rules of land access, financing, and regulatory scrutiny as everyone else. That is the entire premise of its institutional legitimacy. So when its Chairman, Gerald Gouveia Jr., told Kiskadee Watch that President Ali’s Long Creek operation “seems to be quite a model farm in terms of using every aspect of agriculture in one location,” he did not offer neutral commentary. He put the Commission on record endorsing an enterprise that no other agricultural entrepreneur in Guyana could replicate — and in doing so, he exposed the PSC to a conflict it has not addressed.

An endorsement built on media reports, not inspection

Gouveia was direct about his source material: his understanding, he said, is “based largely on media reports,” and beyond the President’s own declarations to the Integrity Commission, “all I’m seeing is what you guys are posting in the news.” That is a significant admission. The Chairman of the country’s premier private-sector body assessed a sitting president’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural enterprise as a “model” — a term with real reputational weight — without a site visit, without reviewing land records, and without any financing disclosure in hand.

An industry body vouching for a business’s excellence on that basis is not doing due diligence. It is amplifying a narrative. The distinction is not cosmetic: due diligence protects the Commission’s credibility; amplification spends it.

The competition problem the Chairman cannot address

Set aside ownership and financing questions for a moment and look only at the operating conditions. Reporting on the Long Creek property has described infrastructure — a maintained access road, electricity distribution — reaching a privately held agricultural enterprise in a way that has drawn public questions from residents of neighbouring communities who lack the same services. No comparably resourced private farm in Guyana operates with that kind of guaranteed infrastructural backbone arriving alongside it, free of the years-long bureaucratic grind that ordinary agricultural investors face to get a road built or a line run.

That is not a level field. It is the textbook definition of an uncompetitive advantage — one participant in a market receiving state-adjacent inputs unavailable to rivals. When the head of the body representing private enterprise praises the output of an enterprise operating under those conditions, without naming the disparity, he is not defending competitive business. He is normalizing its absence.

The deflection to the Integrity Commission doesn’t hold

Gouveia’s answer to questions about the President’s assets was to point elsewhere: “The President has said he has declared everything to them, so they would have the evidence.” This is a non-answer dressed as an answer. The Integrity Commission’s declarations are not public. Gouveia has not seen them. He is vouching for the existence of evidence he has never examined, from a body that has never released it, in defense of an arrangement his own Commission has not investigated.

That is not accountability — it is one unverified assurance propping up another.

It is also worth noting what surrounds Gouveia’s comment. The two agencies with direct, verifiable jurisdiction over the facts he is deferring on — the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency — have gone silent.

GLSC’s CEO was unavailable; two senior land officers declined to speak on the record. The EPA’s Executive Director asked that questions be submitted in writing and did not return prior calls. These are the bodies that could actually confirm or deny the lease terms, the land classification, and the environmental approvals.

Their silence is the story. Gouveia’s “model farm” line fills that silence with praise instead of pressure.

Why this is untenable for an entrepreneur

The PSC Chairman is, by definition, a businessman first. His institutional role is to protect the conditions that let Guyanese entrepreneurs compete on merit — access to capital, land, and infrastructure without political preference determining who gets there first##

 Praising an enterprise that appears to sit outside those constraints, without demanding the same transparency he would expect any member business to produce for a bank, a regulator, or an investor, is not a defensible position for someone occupying that chair. It either means he did not apply the standard his own institution exists to enforce, or he applied a different standard because of who owns the farm. Neither is a comfortable answer, and both deserve to be put to him directly — on the record, not through a spokesperson.

What would resolve it

Gouveia does not need to retract admiration for the agricultural output. He needs to answer a narrower question: did the PSC examine — or does it have any intention of examining — whether the farm’s land access, infrastructure, and financing were obtained through processes available to any Guyanese entrepreneur, or through channels that only a sitting president could access?

Until that question is answered, the “model farm” label functions less as an assessment of agricultural merit and more as institutional cover for an arrangement ordinary competitors could never obtain — offered by the one body in the country whose job is to notice the difference.

— The Board

MV Barima: There Are Days Like These

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ Accountability Journalism ◊ Georgetown, Guyana

MV Barima: There Are Days Like These

OPINION BY: GHK LALL- July 2026

Everything comes to a pause.  Writings already sent suspended.  There is only one development to share a word about: the MV Barima.  one word, and a whole barrel of pain.  A disaster greeting long before the sun showed its face on a Sunday.  Of all days, a Sunday.  The hopes and prayers started with the first words of the 07:30 Mass at the Brickdam Cathedral.  So many found, embraced, and cheered.  So many still missing, leaving an empty space.  Amid the manmade disasters on land in Guyana, there is this kind of grim disaster on the waters.  The numbers are not looking too inspiring.  The bells toll.

I read of 116 aboard.  Then it was 133, when the crew was counted.  Approximately eight hours after the news broke, 70 were rescued and close to that number still not in hand.  A dismal consideration when only adults are involved.  Children numbered among those onboard that now capsized ferry.  A terrible new dimension added.  My hope, my wish, my prayer, is that all are saved.  Not one soul is lost.  The odds of that happening are daunting.  Ten miles from shore is almost as far as the other end of the world.  Nevertheless, rescue operations are in full motion.  The government has mobilized.  Good.  The national leadership is engaged and alert.  Better.

Now is not the time to lose a minute debating the state of new helicopters.  Nor to speculate about the number of lifejackets.  Currently, there is a search and rescue operation going on, and that is where all eyes should be fixed.  It’s where all Guyanese hearts should be committed.  Every hour that passes is an hour that cannot be recovered.  Reality that is hard and unforgiving creeps forward remorselessly.  Another hour lost could mean that one more was lost.  Too late to make it through the day for a mother, or a father, maybe a grandmother or a child.  I saw some pictures and they were of very young children, some not close to 10, as yet.

It should emphasize to every Guyanese how fragile life could be.  It does so to me.  What’s taken as routine goes overboard and sinks in a heartbeat.  Quite literally.  In a flash, life races past the eye.  Though far away and out of harm’s way, those are the images that register.  Having been near to shattering disaster more than once, there is some idea of the shock that must have jarred many out of their sleep.  A passenger boat slammed by a force of nature, a battering ram wall of water.  Men, women, and children left naked and imperiled before the elements at their rawest.

I am hoping for two things to follow beyond this prayer dripping from my pen.    They are the thoughts that rise, will not go away.  The first is that the fewest are lost; and that search and rescue do not give way to salvage and retrieve.  Indeed, like that ancient sage of a scribbler said: there is a time for laughing, and there is a time for mourning.  Even if only a handful never makes it back, it is still one handful too many.  However tiny. 

And whatever the number that is not found, there is still that tragedy to be faced by family and community: lost at sea.  Gone to the depths.  Lack of closure adds crisis to family calamity.

The second and final thought is that the people of this young country—from young leader(s) to largely younger citizenry to a place rich with young visions that still sparkle-arrive at a clear and deep appreciation of what is needed to make neighbor and others better.  There is too much bickering and cursing.  There is too much disagreeing, on the one hand, and too much demonizing and damning, on the other.  There is a storehouse of riches, but of real riches there is too much poorness.  In counting the hours,

I am keeping vigil, counting the numbers being picked up, flashing across the screens.  Let there be as many as could be.

Four Months Late: The Digital ID Rollout and the Governance of Afterthought

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ EDITORIAL

Four Late: The Digital ID Rollout and the Governance of Afterthought

JULY 2026

On March 31, 2026, Prime Minister Brigadier (Ret’d) Mark Phillips signed the Commencement Order that brought the Digital Identity Card Act 19 of 2023 into full force. The Act itself had been passed by Parliament in August 2023 — two and a half years earlier. On July 18, 2026, nearly four months after commencement, the Office of the Prime Minister’s Digital Identity Card Registry found it necessary to issue formal guidance to banks, employers, and public bodies explaining which number on the card they are legally required to use to identify a citizen.

That gap — two and a half years from passage to commencement, and a further four months from commencement to basic operational guidance — is not a footnote. It is the story.

What Should Have Been Settled Before Day One

The guidance itself is not complicated. The GUIN, for citizens, and the RIDN, for eligible non-citizen residents, are the permanent identifiers assigned for life.        The Document Number is a travel reference that changes with every renewal. The Card Access Number is a chip-level technical value that should never be used to identify anyone. This is not a discovery. It is card design 101, the kind of distinction that any institution issuing a national identity credential must resolve, communicate, and train its counterpart institutions on before a single card reaches a citizen’s hand — not four months after the fact, and not in response to confusion already circulating in bank branches and payroll departments across the country.

 

The sequencing here matters. Section 6(1) of the Act makes the card the lawful standard of identification for any business conducted with a public body and or private entity in Guyana That provision took effect on March 31. Every bank, insurance company, employer, and government office that has processed a Digital Identity Card since that date has been operating, potentially, on inconsistent internal guidance — some recording the Document Number as a permanent identifier, a number the registry itself confirms changes with every reissue. The Registry’s own rationale for the July guidance is an admission of exactly this exposure: institutions relying on the wrong number, it says, risk “losing continuity of records or misidentifying cardholders over time.”

A single-page reference card distributed to every bank compliance officer and HR department on commencement day would have cost nothing and prevented four months of exactly the confusion the Registry is now moving to correct.

A Familiar Pattern, Not an Isolated Lapse

This publication has tracked this administration’s approach to major institutional rollouts before, and the pattern recurring here is not new: legislation is passed, a commencement date is set with fanfare, and the operational architecture that ordinary citizens and private-sector compliance officers actually need — reference guides, standardized onboarding materials, coordinated communication with regulated industries — arrives later, piecemeal, and usually only once the absence of that architecture has already generated confusion, risk, or complaint.

  The Digital Identity Card project adds a further complication that deserves its own scrutiny: the 2023 Data Protection Act, which legal commentary has already flagged as intrinsically linked to DICA’s own legality, remains uncommenced. A national identity system built to eventually govern financial, medical, and biometric data has been placed into full legal force for identification purposes while the statute meant to govern the protection of that same data sits idle.

None of this is to say the Digital Identity Card project lacks merit. A single, life-long identifier that survives card renewal is a genuine improvement over the fragmented identification landscape it replaces. The concept is sound. What is absent is foresight in the execution — the discipline of anticipating, before commencement, what the regulated institutions of this country would need to know on day one, rather than assembling that guidance reactively once gaps in practice have already taken root.

The Question the Registry’s Notice Does Not Answer

The Registry’s guidance does not say how many institutions have, over the past four months, recorded the wrong number as a permanent identifier, nor what remediation — if any — is planned for records already corrupted by that error. It does not address whether the Data Protection Act’s continued dormancy affects the legal footing of the data now being collected under DICA. And it does not explain why a Commencement Order signed in March could not have been paired, on the same day, with the identical guidance now issued in July.

Guyana’s citizens and the private institutions that serve them deserve a government that anticipates the operational consequences of its own legislation before those consequences become public confusion requiring public correction

“We will cross that bridge when we get there” is not a policy posture befitting a national identity system that Section 6(1) now makes mandatory for daily life. It is an admission that the bridge was never built in the first place.

— The Board

INVESTIGATION · THE RESOURCE CURSE HAS ARRIVED,OF ALL PLACES ,ON A FARM

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  ·  GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

INVESTIGATION · THE RESOURCE CURSE HAS ARRIVED,OF ALL PLACES ,ON A FARM

20.338 Acres: What the Lease Document Actually Shows

A single instrument of state, issued eight years in the name Mohamed Ali,before Irfaan Ali became president, is now the only verified fact anchoring a controversy his own government says cannot be independently checked.

By Editor, The 592 Guardian  ·  Part I of a Series

The document at the centre of the Long Creek farm controversy is, on its face, unremarkable. It is a lease. It bears a file number, a plan number, a surveyor’s signature, and two names: the Lessor and the Lessee. It says nothing about a ranch, a poultry operation, or a $5 billion valuation. It says nothing about who paid for what came after. What it says, precisely, is this: on terms issued under the State Lands Act, the State of Guyana leased 20.338 acres at Long Creek to a private citizen named Mohamed Ali. That citizen is now the President of the Republic. Everything else in this controversy — the size of the operation today, the financing behind it, whether public resources were used to build it out — sits outside what this document can tell us. This is where the reporting starts: with what is actually on paper, and with the considerable distance between that and what is publicly visible on the ground at Long Creek.

THE INSTRUMENT

The lease is filed under File No. 411123/688 and carries Lease No. A 23480, issued pursuant to Section 3(b) of the State Lands Act, Chapter 62:01. The Lessor is recorded as then-President Bharrat Jagdeo, acting on behalf of the State of Guyana. The Lessee is recorded as Mohamed Ali, holder of Passport No. R028239. The land comprises two lots on the western side of the Soesdyke-Linden Highway, on the left bank of the Haimaruni River — the area known locally as Long Creek, in the County of Demerara.

File No.

 411123/688
Lease No.cc#

 A 23480
Statutory basis

 Section 3(b), State Lands Act, Cap. 62:01
Lessor

 The State of Guyana (then-President Bharrat Jagdeo)
Lessee

 Mohamed Ali (Passport No. R028239)
Location

 West side, Soesdyke-Linden Highway; Left Bank Haimaruni River (Long Creek), Demerara
Lot 33

 9.733 acres
Lot 35

 10.605 acres
Total leased area

 20.338 acres
Survey reference

 GL&SC Plan No. 50318, R. Looknauth, Sworn Land Surveyor, 2 September 2011

Two things follow directly from the document and require no further interpretation. First, the leasehold predates the Ali presidency by close to a decade — the survey plan underlying it is dated 2011, and the lease was issued under the Jagdeo administration, years before Irfaan Ali held national office. Second, the area leased under this instrument is 20.338 acres. Neither of these facts is in dispute. Both are worth stating plainly before the more contested figures enter the record.

THE GAP: TWENTY ACRES, OR A HUNDRED AND FIFTY

Set against the lease figure, the scale of what the public has been shown at Long Creek today is difficult to reconcile. Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has publicly described the operation as a roughly 150-acre private ranch, valuing the development at more than $5 billion. This publication’s own satellite polygon trace of the current footprint returns a broadly similar figure — in the neighbourhood of 155 acres. Both estimates sit far outside the 20.338 acres described in the 2011 survey and the lease issued from it.

This is the central arithmetic problem of the Long Creek story, and it is a documentary problem before it is a political one. Somewhere between a State lease for just over 20 acres and a visible operation covering roughly seven times that area, there is a paper trail — further leases, a purchase, a transfer, an allocation under a different instrument, or some combination. That trail has not been made public. This is not an allegation that anything unlawful occurred; it is a statement of what remains undocumented. The 592 Guardian is not in a position, on the evidence presently available, to say how the acreage grew. We are in a position to say that it did, and that the instrument establishing the first 20.338 acres is, at this writing, the only piece of that trail on the public record.

WHAT THE PRESIDENT HAS SAID, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT RESOLVE 

President Ali’s public position, offered in a video statement and in subsequent remarks, is that he acquired the property before assuming the presidency, that its development has been funded through loans, and that reported figures on the farm’s size and value are incorrect. Each of these is a claim capable, in principle, of documentary support: a loan is a matter of record between a borrower and a lender; a disputed acreage figure is a matter of survey. Neither has been supported publicly with the underlying instrument. The President has not named the lending institution or institutions, disclosed the date or terms of the loans, indicated what collateral, if any, was pledged, or produced a survey contradicting the figures now in wide circulation. Until one or more of these is produced, the President’s account and the publicly visible facts remain in the same posture: asserted, not demonstrated.

THE VERIFICATION THE PRESIDENT CITES — AND WHY IT CANNOT HAPPEN

The most consequential sentence in President Ali’s public defence is also the one that undercuts itself on a plain reading of the law. Responding to the allegations, the President said that his asset acquisitions and the source of the funds used for them “are capable of verification through the relevant financial and regulatory records,” and that he has, as required by law, made the appropriate declarations to the Integrity Commission.

The body he is pointing to as proof is, by statute, the one body in Guyana legally forbidden from telling the public what it knows.

Under the Integrity Commission Act, Chapter 26:01, the Commission operates under a strict statutory duty of confidentiality. It is prohibited from disclosing the contents of any declaration or assessment it holds. This is not a discretionary practice or an institutional habit; it is the law under which the Commission is constituted. The consequence is direct: the “verification” the President has invited the public to seek is, by his own government’s statute, unavailable to that public. A journalist, an opposition MP, or an ordinary citizen cannot obtain the Commission’s file on the President’s declared assets, however filed and complete that file may be. The President’s statement is true and beside the point in the same breath — the records may well exist and say everything he claims. No one outside the Commission is permitted to know.

ON THE RECORD: TWO INSTITUTIONAL VOICES, ONE DIAGNOSIS

This is not solely The 592 Guardian’s reading of the statute. Senior Counsel Ralph Ramkarran, former Speaker of the National Assembly, has renewed a call for reform he has been making since at least 2012 — a call that was, by his own account, a factor in his departure from the People’s Progressive Party after more than five decades of membership. Ramkarran has pointed to jurisdictions where senior officials’ financial declarations are public by law, and to the United States’ Ethics in Government Act as a model requiring presidential financial disclosure, arguing that Guyana’s growing oil-financed budgets have expanded the opportunities for the very conflicts its disclosure regime is unable to surface.

APNU Member of Parliament Dr. Terrence Campbell has gone further, stating that he has drafted an amendment to the Integrity Commission Act that would make certain aspects of high officials’ declarations public, and calling on parliamentary party leaders, the President, and Cabinet to voluntarily release summary declarations for 2025 in the interim, ahead of any legislative change. Separately, Transparency International Guyana has taken the unusual step of ceding control of any inquiry into the Long Creek matter to international TI chapters and independent outside experts — an implicit acknowledgment that the local chapter does not consider itself positioned to investigate credibly on its own.

Taken together, a former Speaker of the governing party’s own political lineage, an opposition parliamentarian with a drafted bill in hand, and the country’s leading anti-corruption watchdog are converging on the same diagnosis from different directions: the law as written cannot produce the verification the President says is available.

WHAT THIS REPORT ESTABLISHES, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT

In the interest of the legal defensibility this news-media holds itself to, we state plainly what this first instalment does and does not claim.

Established, from the primary document: a 20.338-acre lease over Lots 33 and 35 at Long Creek was issued to Mohamed Ali under the Jagdeo administration, under Section 3(b) of the State Lands Act, years before he became President. The statutory confidentiality provision of the Integrity Commission Act, Cap. 26:01, means the Commission cannot legally confirm or disclose the contents of any declaration the President has filed.

Not yet established: how the operative footprint at Long Creek grew from 20.338 leased acres to the roughly 150-to-155 acres now visible; the identity of the lender or lenders behind the President’s stated “bank loans,” their terms, dates, or collateral; and whether any public infrastructure was extended to the property outside the terms available to other applicants. These are the subjects of Part II of this series.

The 592 Guardian is requesting, on the record, that the Office of the President, the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, and the Integrity Commission each provide the underlying instruments — the further lease or transfer documents accounting for the acreage beyond the original 20.338, and the loan instruments referenced in the President’s public statement — or state on the record why they will not. We will publish any response in full.

◆ ◆ ◆

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

The Rotor Wing Question

/0 Comments/in , /by

EDITORIAL · AVIATION & REGULATORY ACCOUNTABILITY

The Rotor Wing Question

What ASL’s closure actually exposes about the state of regulatory capacity in Guyana’s aviation sector

The 592 Guardian  |  July, 2026

Air Services Limited says it is closing its rotor wing division after seven years spent chasing a helicopter Air Operator Certificate it says the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority never delivered in good faith. The company that opened Guyana’s interior to commercial aviation is walking away from the aircraft type that, more than any other, keeps that interior connected.

That claim deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. It also deserves to be tested against the record, because the record complicates it considerably. This is not, as some public commentary has already framed it, a clean story of an entrenched pioneer strangled by an opaque regulator to clear room for a favoured rival. There is no evidence in the public record of a competitor benefiting from ASL’s exit, and none of a personal or financial relationship steering GCAA’s decisions. What the record does show is two institutions, each with a documented problem, colliding in public — and a genuine transparency gap sitting underneath both.

WHAT ASL SAYS

In its Tuesday statement, ASL described the seven-year AOC process as “a cycle of bureaucratic obstruction” rather than a collaborative path to compliance. The company, which has operated in Guyana for over fifty years and holds AOC No. 1 as the country’s first certificated operator, framed the closure as a loss to hinterland communities for whom air transport is not a convenience but a lifeline. It argued that certification and personnel-licensing procedures remain unnecessarily cumbersome at a moment of rapid national economic expansion, and it thanked GCAA for its role in the industry’s safety record even as it criticised the process.

When regulatory frameworks become so rigid that they stifle long-standing, reputable operators rather than guiding them toward compliance, it is the Guyanese people who suffer.— Air Services Limited, closure statement

That is a serious allegation from a serious operator, and it should not be dismissed. But it also does not arrive in a vacuum. It lands amid a months-long, increasingly public dispute between ASL and GCAA that the closure statement does not mention directly.

THE RECORD GCAA POINTS TO

In February, an ASL Cessna 208 Caravan overran onto an unprepared section of the Matthews Ridge airstrip. GCAA subsequently suspended flights to Matthews Ridge and restricted ASL’s pilots, citing its statutory mandate under the Civil Aviation Act 2018, which authorises the Director General to take immediate action, including suspending licences, when safety may be compromised, subject to due process. ASL’s chairman, Captain Ahamad Mazahar Ally, has accused Director General Egbert Field of unfairly targeting the company, and the company’s attorney has argued the restrictions rested on unsubstantiated reports rather than a formal investigation, with legal action reportedly under consideration.

This is not the first documented friction between the two. In December 2022, GCAA grounded an ASL Bell 206 helicopter after inspectors found the aircraft was fitted with rotor blades that were not approved parts — and, more troubling, found maintenance being prepared on the aircraft using the same unapproved blades after ASL had already been notified to correct the defect. Whether that history is directly relevant to the AOC delay is not established in the public record. But it is part of the factual backdrop against which “seven years of pure bureaucracy” has to be weighed, and a responsible accounting of this dispute cannot leave it out.

THE INSTITUTIONAL WEAKNESS THAT IS ACTUALLY DOCUMENTED

The strongest evidence of systemic regulatory weakness in Guyana’s aviation sector right now does not come from the ASL dispute at all. It comes from the investigation into the December 2023 crash of a Guyana Defence Force Bell 412 EPi helicopter, which found that GCAA lacked a flight operations inspector current on that aircraft type — a direct gap in regulatory surveillance capacity for a major helicopter type in national service. That finding points toward under-resourcing and thin technical bench strength at the regulator, not toward favouritism. It is also far more concretely damning than anything yet substantiated in the ASL matter, and it has received comparatively little sustained scrutiny.

Read together, the two threads suggest a regulator stretched by the same aviation boom that Tuesday’s GCAA panel at the World Trade Centre spent an afternoon celebrating. Cargo volumes have roughly doubled since 2020. New routes and operators are entering the market. If GCAA does not have enough current inspectors to keep pace with the fleet it already oversees, an AOC backlog stretching into years is a plausible institutional symptom — not proof of a scheme, but not proof of a clean process either.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY ACTUALLY REQUIRES HERE

The 592 Guardian does not have evidence to support claims of nepotism or a deliberately rigged process, and we are not going to manufacture a conspiracy where the record shows something more mundane and, in its own way, more serious: an operator with a documented compliance history disputing a regulator with a documented capacity gap, in the absence of any visible, published standard either side can be held to.

That absence is the actual story, and it is a legitimate one. Guyana has no published AOC processing timeline or service-level benchmark that a carrier or the public can point to. There is no visible appeal or independent review mechanism for licensing disputes short of litigation — which is precisely where this one may now be headed. And there is no public accounting of GCAA’s inspector staffing relative to the fleet types it is required to certify and surveil, despite one such gap already being confirmed in a fatal-crash investigation.

Three things would resolve more than a public statement war ever will. First, GCAA should publish the AOC processing history for ASL’s rotorcraft application — dates, deficiencies cited, and ASL’s responses — so the seven-year timeline can be assessed against fact rather than characterisation. Second, the Ministry of Public Works, which holds sectoral oversight, should commission an independent review of GCAA’s inspector staffing against its current certification and surveillance obligations, given the gap already identified in the GDF crash report. Third, GCAA should adopt and publish a standard AOC processing timeline with defined escalation and appeal steps, so that no future operator — and no future regulator — is left relitigating a licensing dispute in the press.

Guyana’s aviation sector is expanding faster than almost any other part of its economy. That growth will not be secured by picking a side in a dispute the public record does not yet allow anyone to settle. It will be secured by making the rules the same, visible, and enforced consistently for everyone flying in Guyanese skies — the fifty-year pioneer and the newest entrant alike.

The 592 Guardian sought comment from GCAA on the specifics raised in this editorial. This article will be updated with any response received

A Farm, a Felony -Guyana’s Relativity Theory

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA JULY 2026

A Farm, a Felony -Guyana’s Relativity Theory

OPINION BY: GHK LALL 

Five years are an eternity.  Cold-blooded murder.  A trail quickly gone cold.  Cold trail or calculated coverup?  A family left with the chill of their tears.  There was the uneasy feeling that missing links ought not to be.  What linkages, missing or not, and why?  One thing was certain: the whole story, the true story, of the Fagundes (Paper Shorts) execution was not forthcoming.  Then another: it shouldn’t be that unsolvable.  And still another: operation of law, application of law, enforcement grittiness and energy, and blindfolded justice were shadows of themselves.  Now, I follow this trail of untimely death, the passage of time, and another untimely development: the discovery of a farm.

What does a farm have to do with a heinous felony?  One that spilled its blood all over Guyanese consciousness. 

Neither a body nor any telltale splatter of blood was found on the farm.  Both savaged the peace and curdled on the pavement of the aptly named Main Street.  Yet, when I think of this, the question is why is a farm and many felonies coming up close to one another?  In other words, no mention of a farm, no mention of any felony.  Strange country, this Guyana is.  For five years, silence reigned. 

But like Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, so also the ghost of Mr. Paper Shorts wouldn’t remain still.  The timing is immaculate.  Follow me.  If pain is added to the Fagundes family, apologies.  But no eggs cracked, no scrambled eggs.  Perhaps, unscrambled fits better.

Murder occurred, stayed underground for five long, punishing years.  Murder took less than five short days to be exhumed.  Maybe, with wheels spinning furiously, it was five hours, if not five minutes.  For a murder to be retrieved from the deepfreeze and paraded before the Guyanese public.  When developments are too pat, that’s when I rock back, reel in any slack, and work to crack the code.  From American football, I share sporting folklore: the best offense is an aggressive defense.  Attempting to takedown inspires greater efforts at returning the favor -twofold, threefold, manifold.  The development in the shadow of America’s Fourth of July ecstasies was of a placid farm, babbling brooks, clandestine nooks and crannies, and then Gotterdammerung.  A blitzkrieg: murder, Maimi Vice equivalents, more mystery.

In a jiffy, there’s a fluent, compelling story for citizens.  A suspect resurrected.  A circle of suspected involved cornered and corralled.  Before the farm, there was nobody.  Immediately after the farm discovery, there are more warm bodies than a submerged submarine surfacing.  This has all the precision timing of a well-made Swiss watch.  Swiss or Guyanese, that’s my thrust.  What I think, where I stand.  The clock ticks.  It also stinks.  Uncanny how after the first leaf and stone of that farm were arrayed in public display, that a murder was dug up and similarly displayed.  Where suspects only existed under the radar in earlier times, in these stormy times, those same suspects now participate in primetime presentations.

In all this, the PPP Govt’s well-refined art form is exhibited.  What works for it, but what also reveals.  When the PPP Govt has no defense, deflection becomes its flaming sword.  Deflection follows denial and precedes damnation.  Are all those not unfolding in tight formation?  In efforts at locating some elusive credibility.  What are the final objectives: to nail an opponent and be done with an inconvenience, an irrepressible, insoluble nuisance?  When the law takes forever to find its feet in Guyana, then lawlessness is a marathon runner.  For when there is in inversion of justice, what law?  When the timeline of a murder is seemingly tampered with, then whither honesty?  I behold the PPP Govt’s abandonment of all interests in, all claims to, all pretensions at, morality.  Cocooned in the pile of obscenity is a travesty.  Of justice.  Of conscience.  In toto, Guyanese are dealing with more than a crisis of circumstances combining.  They are living with a crisis in governance.  Why was this murder allowed to fester restlessly for five years?  And only now given oxygen?  

I wish I could hold a brief, stand in defense, for all parties in this deformity.  I cannot.  I hear and read.  I see, think, and speak.

Guests, Not Gods: The Pulpit’s Duty When Power Walks In

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN

EDITORIAL

Guests, Not Gods: The Pulpit’s Duty When Power Walks In

On the moral cowardice of houses of worship that trade the altar for access — and go silent when the powerful owe the nation an answer

Every sacred place in Guyana must welcome every soul that enters it — dharmic, Islamic, ecclesiastic, Christian, atheist, agnostic, and yes, politician. No one is irredeemable, and no threshold of a temple, mandir, mosque, or church should ever be barred to the vilest trickster who walks through it seeking grace. That is not in dispute, and this news outlet does not dispute it. But there is a canyon of difference between welcoming a politician and crowning him. Between offering a seat and surrendering the pulpit. Between letting a man pray, and letting him perform.

Politicians who enter a sacred space come as guests. They take their place as guests. They pray as guests, if they are up to it. That is the entirety of their entitlement, and it is a generous one. No honest man or woman of faith needs a political operator co-opting his most public moment with God — needs him processed to the front, handed the microphone, permitted to turn worship into stagecraft. 

When a man of manufactured piety proselytises from the altar, that is not communion. That is perversion of the sanctuary, dressed in the borrowed vestments of the sacred.

And yet, across Guyana’s houses of worship, we have watched a different arrangement take hold: preachers who jump and gyrate for whichever politician has grinding, gyrating power over the poor. Ministers who bow before manmade gods dressed as public servants. Men and women who preen behind the cloth while a self-made deity preens beside them at the pulpit rail. 

Which preacher of true moral substance consents to such a display? Which one is so low as to stoop lower still, for a reward, a recognition, an elevation? None who deserve the collar.

That, this publication has already said, immovably and non-negotiably. But there is a second corruption, quieter than the first and just as grave: the silence of the sanctuary when the politician it just finished garlanding owes the country an answer he has not given. We are not accusing the President of misleading the nation. 

We are asking, as any citizen of a republic is entitled to ask, to see the documents. That is the whole of the demand — production, not presumption of guilt. It is the most modest request accountability journalism can make of executive power, and it is the one so many of Guyana’s well-endowed houses of moral instruction have found no cause to echo. Not one word. Not from the pulpits that had a president in their midst weeks earlier, hands raised, blessed and blessing. The same institutions that would summon righteous fury over a private citizen’s minor indiscretion have found, in the face of an unresolved public question involving the nation’s highest office, nothing to say at all.

That silence is not neutrality. Neutrality does not require gyrating to a politician’s music one Sunday and forgetting his name the next, when accountability comes calling. 

This is something else — a free pass extended in advance, purchased with proximity, paid for in access to the microphone, the front pew, the photograph shaking hands beside the altar. 

An insane proliferation of politics and religion has entrenched itself in Guyana, and the morally righteous have proven only too accommodating with the accolades.                            

They have overlooked, conveniently and at length, the untenable position a sitting president has put himself into.

Guyana is a land now blessed with wealth it did not have a decade ago, and still crippled, perpetually, by the burdens of poverty for so many who live in it. That contradiction is precisely the terrain on which the prophetic voice of religion is supposed to stand — grinding gyrating politicians who grind the poor to dust are exactly who the pulpit exists to confront, not court. 

A preacher who will not ask a basic question of the powerful because the powerful filled his stadium last month has already answered, in practice, whose gospel he actually preaches.

Politicians have their place. They must either know it, or be put to it. Welcome, brother — take a seat. Listen and learn about humility, about sincerity, about banishing hypocrisy, about the plight of the poor and how much they hurt in a land so rich. But do not hand him the pulpit. And when he leaves the sanctuary and re-enters public life owing the public an answer, do not pretend the two are unconnected.

Ask for the documents. That is not persecution. That is the last honest thing left for a house of God to do.

— The Board

Half Share for Guyana (Get Real) -Pt II- JULY 2026

/0 Comments/in , /by

 

THE 592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

Half Share for Guyana (Get Real) -Pt II- JULY 2026

Guyanese are dreaming.  Green not white.  Not mistletoe green of Xmas.  Think the green of this country finally getting its full half share of oil profits from Exxon.  A full share that’s fair.  Accounting pure.  Arithmetic clean.  No tricks.  No gimmicks.  I wish fellow Guyanese the best, though December is distant.  They can dream.  It’s free.  Sometimes, dreams come true.  Bad ones, good ones.

I draw a line in the sand.  Make it stone.  A full half share of oil profits isn’t happening.  Dreaming, or slamming hand hard on the table, it’s not happening.  Sorry, but that’s the hard life of a messenger: delivery of more bad news than good news.  The bad news is that there will be no bona fide half share for Guyana.  For good reason.  Exxon will see to it.  The PPP Govt of A, Jay, and N will endorse, when it comes out.  Get ready, Guyanese dreamers!  Here it comes!  A sneak preview, not a leak.

Whoever never heard of more oil projects, just did.  More wells, 35 planned.  Those amphibians cost money.  Millions of American; billions in Guyanese dollars.  Whoever thought that those came compliments of the kindness of Messrs. Darren Woods and Alistair Routledge has much to learn about life.  And, American capitalism.  It was why Dr. Cheddi Jagan was made to eat dust.  With each new oil project, new hole drilled, massive amounts of nuts and bolts, hoses and wires, boats and seismic blasting (aka mapping), among the endless attachments and tools used in the oil trade will be needed.  Plus, expert expats.  Plus, fandango kinds of auditing.  The cost bank that just ran dry will be replenished.  New oil schemes, new oil activities.

C’mon, folks: dreaming Guyanese or hard-headed realists.  Production is currently at 900k a day.  Gearing up to go to 1.3 million, then 1.7 million, a day, in a year or few.  More groundworks installed; more oil extracted.  It’s the physics of oil, the biology of commerce.  So, Guyanese must get real: what real half share of profits when there’s that beehive in feverish motion?  To roll back the cost bank a billion or 20 more.

For once, Exxon showed its hand.  Sometime ago.  More projects assembled.  Stationed under Dr. Jagdeo’s nose.  Backing Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency against a wall.  Poor chaps, they have an offer they can’t refuse.  Capitalism 101 for dummies.  Whoever thought that 2019-2020 election help was charity, get something straight.  America is not the Red Cross.  Nor were Excellencies Sarah Ann Lynch and Michael ‘the Archangel’ Pompeo reincarnations of Florence Nightingale.  All white hat and pilgrims among peasants in Guyana.  It was for Exxon, American Airlines, and Schlumberger, among other Yankee grandees.

From now, I can hear Exxon’s Routledge and the new guy, Mr. Colling, setting the table.  More projects needed to keep the oil flowing.  The oil drums floating to the surface.  The oil tankers sailing away.  The partnership prospering.  For whom in the Exxon-Guyana partnership specifically, that’s my question?  Hence, it’s a blast from the past: cost bank.  Rebuilt to bursting.  Cost recovery -necessary, so that the good times roll.  Anybody in Exxon or the PPP hierarchy interested in IHS Markit for a real audit of the new billions?  Ha-ha! Didn’t think so.

I can anticipate Drs. Ali and Jagdeo with their noble, patriotic contributions to a full, free, and fair half share for Guyana.  Not it isn’t about elections.  Only oil.  Listen to dese bruddahs: it’s for continuity, stupid!  Get with the program!  Spend money to make money.  Same question: for whom?  Yeah, after all the billions invested by Exxon and repaid by Guyana, this is the closest I come to Sisyphus, that great tragic figure of Grecian mythology.  He rolls a boulder uphill.  Overnight it tumbling back down on him.  Thus, he restarts from scratch daily.

Still dreaming of half share profits, Guyanese?  Keep dreaming.  When Exxon and the PPP finish with Guyana, this country will be a bigger, rowdier, poverty-infested lunatic asylum.  A world-class one.

Awakening A Nation Held In Fear

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN
ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM · GEORGETOWN, GUYANA
Awakening A Nation Held In Fear

There are mornings when the news feels like a personal wound. A follower’s message reached me recently — a short, honest outcry about fear for the future, for children, for a country that promised so much and now seems adrift. “We are living in a time that feels downright scary,” she wrote. “Every day there is a new lie told with a straight face… prices rising, services collapsing, opportunities drying up, and the future slipping further out of reach.” That tremor of panic is not private. It is the collective shiver of a nation watching its institutions fray while those in charge insist nothing is wrong.—- Concerned Guyanese

Guyana today sits in an oil-rich moment, yet ranks poorly on global corruption indices, with perceptions of corruption worsening over recent years even as wealth expands. This is not an abstract indicator; it is a reflection of how people experience governance: contracts awarded without trust, procurement systems gamed, and oversight bodies present on paper but weak in practice.

When the United Nations Human Rights Committee has to urge Guyana to address the “root causes of corruption” in law enforcement, public procurement, and the oil sector, it is a sign that the rot is visible far beyond our borders, even if we are told to pretend otherwise at home.

To be afraid under such leadership is not weakness; it is clarity.

Fear names what empty slogans cannot hide: the erosion of trust, the hollowing out of accountability, the slow theft of public purpose.

 We have integrity laws, like the Integrity Commission Act and the Audit Act, and we had a State Assets Recovery framework, yet the very body meant to recover stolen wealth was dismantled rather than strengthened. We have a Protected Disclosures and Witness Protection Act, but years later it has still not been brought fully into force, leaving whistleblowers exposed and ordinary citizens unprotected when they dare to speak. When laws exist only as decoration, people reasonably conclude that power, not principle, decides who is safe and who is sacrificed.

Meanwhile, the oil and gas sector — our supposed golden ticket — operates under a cloud of secrecy and doubt. International bodies have cited corruption risks in petroleum licensing and contracting, and even the UN has raised concerns about the transparency and accountability of permits and licenses for natural resource exploitation. When high-stakes decisions about our national patrimony are made without robust, independent oversight, the “spoils of office” feel very real to those who see contracts and privileges clustered around a small circle.

The promise of development becomes another reason for despair, because people see wealth flowing but do not see fairness growing.

 The institutions that should anchor public trust are either underused or undermined. The Auditor General’s Office, the Integrity Commission, the Commissioner of Information, the Public Procurement Commission — all have been flagged by international observers as needing greater independence, effectiveness, and transparency. Even basic access to information is uneven, with reports that the Commissioner of Information does not address all public requests. Every unanswered query, every stalled investigation, every unexplained contract is another tiny fracture in the bond between citizen and state.

In this climate, the follower’s fear that “the moment you speak up… you are targeted” is not paranoia; it is rooted in a landscape where whistleblower protections are delayed and where criticism of corruption reports, rather than action on them, has become the response of those at the top. Hostility towards independent media and attempts to delegitimize scrutiny only deepen the sense that dissent is dangerous and that ordinary people who “just want better” are made to feel unsafe in their own country.

Yet despair is a dangerous surrender. It is the quiet partner of those who would hold power by intimidation and distraction. The message that “dissent is a threat” is precisely what enables wrongdoing to flourish. That is why silence is not neutral. It is a choice — and in our time, too many have accepted that choice because speaking out has been made costly and institutions that should protect courage have been left weak.

We must insist, instead, that courage be ordinary. Courage is the civil servant who insists on following procurement rules when shortcuts are demanded. It is the citizen who files information requests and refuses to be brushed aside. It is the journalist who keeps reporting, even when independent media is treated as an enemy rather than a partner in democracy. Courage is parents teaching their children that truth is not negotiable, even when leaders treat it like a campaign tool.

The path back to trust is practical as well as moral. We must demand the full activation of the Protected Disclosures and Witness Protection Act so that whistleblowers and witnesses can come forward without fear. We must insist that anti-corruption bodies — the Auditor General, the Integrity Commission, the Public Procurement Commission, the Commissioner of Information — be given real independence, resources, and teeth, not just titles. We must require that oil and gas licenses and natural resource permits undergo proper environmental and social impact assessments, in a transparent process where affected communities meaningfully participate. These are not radical demands; they are the minimum for a country that claims to be serious about its future.

To those who feel silence is safer: feel the cost of staying quiet. Hope withers when people who care decide it is less painful to look away. To those who benefit from the current arrangements: understand that a system built on opaque contracts, sidelined oversight, and intimidated critics is ultimately unstable — it erodes the very society that sustains wealth and security.

This is not a call to chaos. It is a call to steadfastness. We do not need an Arab Spring that burns everything. down; we need a Guyanese awakening that rebuilds the very institutions now hollowed out. We need a civic revival where accountability is prized as fiercely as profit, where public service is honored, and where the next generation can trust institutions because those institutions have earned that trust through transparent, lawful action.

If you love this country, act like it. Speak the truth, even when it is risky. Join others who demand better laws, better enforcement, and better behavior from those in office. Support independent media. Protect whistleblowers. Demand that our oil wealth be governed in daylight, not in shadows. Vote, organize, and refuse to accept fear as the final answer.

We are not helpless. We are a people with memory, with community, and with the tools — legal, institutional, and moral — to rebuild trust. If we choose to use them, the promise that once inspired this nation can be renewed, not by a single leader, but by many ordinary, brave hands determined to awaken the soul of Guyana

The Ledger Guyana Refuses to Keep

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

ACCOUNTABILITY EDITORIAL

Sovereignty at the Edges — Part I. : The Register Gap

The Ledger Guyana Refuses to Keep: Why the Absence of a Public Extractives Register Is Itself the Story

There is a question the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, and the Guyana Revenue Authority have never had to answer, because no institution in this country has been built with the authority to ask it: who currently holds what, and how did they come to hold it?                                                                                        Not what was signed in 2016. Not what was signed with GMIN, or with U92 Energy Corp., or with whichever shell reorganises itself out of Singapore next quarter. What is true today, on the record, checked against a register that a citizen, a parliamentarian, or a journalist can open without a Freedom of Information request that dies quietly in a ministry drawer.

Guyana has no such register. Not for petroleum. Not for mining. Not for the pipeline of Gas-to-Energy reimbursement arrangements that Trinidadian energy strategist Anthony Paul has now, in a third consecutive Kaieteur News column, all but begged this country to build before it is too late. This editorial board has spent extensive energy documenting the individual wounds — the Section 18 gap in the Mining Act that let G2 Goldfields slide GMIN’s ownership sideways without triggering statutory review; the reverse-takeover architecture that delivered U92’s Kurupung uranium project through a Singapore holding chain nobody at GGMC was resourced to interrogate; the sole-source procurement that displaced Method4 Engineering in favour of InterEnergy while Anand Goolsarran’s statutory objections sat unanswered. Each of these was treated, in turn, as a scandal of the week. None of them is. They are symptoms of one untreated condition: Guyana has never built the institutional plumbing to track what happens to extractive rights after the contract is signed.

Public Contracts Were Never the Whole Promise

Government has taken credit, repeatedly and not entirely without justification, for publishing petroleum agreements that Trinidad and Tobago kept behind closed doors for a century. That step was real. It was also, as Paul’s series has now made explicit in language this Board has been circling for two years, the easy half of transparency.

A contract is a photograph. It tells you what existed at the moment of signing. It tells you nothing about what happens next — the farm-ins, the farm-outs, the changes of control, the beneficial ownership that mutates behind a parent company merger in a jurisdiction with no disclosure obligations to Guyana at all.

Petroleum rights, mining licences, and uranium concessions are not static instruments. They move. They are assigned, relinquished, pledged, and quietly restructured through corporate layers designed for exactly that purpose. When GMIN’s change of control moved through indirect transfer rather than a direct, reviewable transaction, it did not break the letter of the Mining Act — it exploited a gap in it that Section 18 has left untouched since long before this administration or the last one. That is not an accident of drafting. It is the kind of gap that persists because no one with the power to close it has ever been made to answer publicly for its cost.

What a Register Would Have Forced Into the Light

Consider what a statutory, searchable extractives register — covering petroleum and mining and the licences GGMC and the Ministry currently treat as administrative ephemera — would have required this country’s regulators to answer, in real time, rather than in a Kaieteur News column three years after the fact:

  • Who is the current beneficial owner of GMIN, and through what chain of holding companies did that ownership travel before and after the G2 Goldfields transaction — and did GGMC ever formally assess whether that chain constituted a change of control under Section 18?
  • What premium, if any, changed hands in the U92 Energy Corp. reverse takeover of the Kurupung uranium concession, and does the Guyana Revenue Authority have any record of assessing tax liability on that transfer of value?
  • On what statutory basis did InterEnergy displace Method4 Engineering in a sole-source procurement that Anand Goolsarran formally objected to, and why does no public record exist showing that objection was ever substantively answered?
  • What are the complete terms of the Gas-to-Energy pipeline, cost-recovery, and reimbursement arrangements — including the financing role of Banco San Juan Internacional — and why are these not published with the same posture of openness Government claims for the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement?

These are not abstract questions. Each has already surfaced, piecemeal, through the investigative labour of this outlet and others, because no institution was doing the work of surfacing them systematically. A register does not replace journalism. It replaces leaks, rumour, and scattered company announcements — Paul’s own words — as the primary mechanism by which citizens learn what has happened to resources that belong to them.

The GGMC Audit Backlog Is Not a Coincidence

It should trouble every reader of this news outlet that the Auditor General’s qualified opinion on GGMC’s accounts covers only 2013 to 2016 — a full decade behind the present moment — at precisely the time GGMC is being asked to police the ownership structures of gold, uranium, and rare earth concessions moving through Singapore holding companies and Mauritius jurisdiction fragments. An agency that cannot close its own books within a decade has no plausible capacity to police beneficial ownership in real time. The absence of a public register is not merely a transparency failure. It is the visible edge of a regulatory body operating years behind the transactions it exists to supervise.

Oko West Gold Project

This is precisely the trajectory Paul has warned Guyana against by pointing to Trinidad and Tobago’s history: a country with functioning law on the books — a petroleum register and Gazette notice requirement that existed in statute — where practice quietly diverged from law until citizens could no longer track the country’s own petroleum rights.       Guyana is not importing Trinidad’s outcome by accident. It is importing it by omission, one unregistered transfer and one unaudited institution at a time.

What This Board Demands

The 592 Guardian calls on the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission, and the Guyana Revenue Authority to state, on the public record and within thirty days of this editorial’s publication, whether any of the following exist in any form accessible to the public:

⇒a consolidated register of extractive licences and their beneficial owners;

⇒a documented review of the GMIN change of control under Section 18 of the Mining Act; a published tax assessment, if any was conducted, of the U92 Energy Corp. transaction;

⇒and a substantive, written response to Anand Goolsarran’s objections in the GPL-InterEnergy procurement. Silence in response to this editorial will be treated, and reported, as an answer.

Guyana still has the option Trinidad and Tobago no longer has: the chance to build this architecture before the volume of transactions makes retrofitting it politically and administratively impossible. A public, statutory extractives register — covering petroleum, mining, and the gas infrastructure now rising at Wales — would not embarrass this Government.

It would be the single strongest evidence that Government has nothing left to hide. The refusal to build one is, in itself, the clearest evidence that it does.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian