Archive for category: Opinions

 Politics Grows Up When Someone Actually Does the Reading

A Response to “Guyana Deserves Better Politics: Beyond the Noise, the Likes and the Political Circus”

By The Board♦ August, 2026

A Guyana Chronicle  commentary is circulating this week under the Crossfire column — instructing Guyana’s political opposition to stop chasing likes, start reading the Budget documents, dissect the supplementary financial papers, and study the Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima disaster instead of holding placards.

The advice is not wrong. It is simply describing, almost word for word, the work that has already been done — not by WIN, not by APNU, and not by the author of that piece.

It has been done by this newsroom.

The column asks for exactly the kind of scrutiny it never once demonstrates.

WHAT “STUDYING THE COI” ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

The piece urges the opposition to “study the COI, the MARAD findings and processes, the regulatory framework… the procurement and maintenance history of the maritime fleet.”

Fair enough. Here is what that study has already surfaced, on the public record, weeks before this editorial’s publication date.

♦ The Commission’s own attorney-commissioner, Nyree Dawn Alfonso, has a documented prior professional association — through her own firm’s case record — with a lawyer who is now a sitting Cabinet minister.

♦ The CoI’s Secretary is the nephew of a former senior PPP official.

♦ The government’s own “Safety and Compliance Audit Team,” announced days after the tragedy, includes an official who has spent years as a paid MARAD consultant reviewing the very agency he was appointed to audit.

♦ MARAD itself disclosed back in 2022 — after an earlier fatal incident — that it had six certified marine surveyors for more than two thousand vessels, and was still advertising an unfilled surveyor vacancy months before the Barima went down.

♦ A retired U.S. Navy officer’s legal analysis of the Shipping Act has identified a regulatory loophole — the “24-Metre Gap” — that left a vessel the size of the Barima with fewer statutory safety obligations than a small wooden boat.

None of that came from a press release. It came from reading the documents — case records, CVs, gazette notices, procurement histories — the same documents the commentary insists nobody in Guyana’s political class is willing to open.

THE CONTRACTOR NOBODY ASKED ABOUT

Then there is the salvage contractor. The government quietly invited a Dutch firm to recover the wreck before any public bidding process opened — the same wreck that is itself physical evidence in an active inquiry into 73 deaths.                                                                                    That firm’s owner has a 2019 Interpol arrest record out of Nigeria, a Dutch Supreme Court finding of deliberate tax abuse tied to his corporate group, and an unrelated trademark dispute with BMW over salvaged vehicles. A commentary genuinely concerned with “procurement, expenditure, and national priorities” might have found that detail more useful than a paragraph about Facebook likes.

READINESS IS NOT AN OCCASION

The column singles out the Barima tragedy as proof the opposition should trade placards for policy substance — while ignoring that the same government it defends mobilized the GDF Coast Guard, the Police Marine Unit, and joint services within minutes to secure a Vice President facing a political protest at Watooka House, on a day and location the government itself had scheduled.

The Barima’s distress call, by the documented and still-uncorrected public timeline, went unanswered by a rescue vessel for roughly seven hours.

That is not a question of noise versus substance. It is a question of where the state’s readiness goes when the emergency isn’t the Vice President’s afternoon.

WHOSE POLITICS IS ACTUALLY IMMATURE

The piece frames its critique as concern for Guyana’s democratic maturity at 60 — disagreement without destruction, policy over personality, parliament over performance. Those are reasonable standards. They would be more persuasive from a byline willing to attach a name to them, and from an outlet willing to apply the same standard of documentary rigor to the government it consistently declines to scrutinize as it applies, in the abstract, to an opposition it has already decided is unserious.

Demanding a minister’s recusal on a documented conflict of interest is not “political thuggery.” It is the plain application of the same accountability standard the commentary claims to want.

♦ Asking why a legally compromised contractor was handed a no-bid mandate over evidence in a fatal-disaster inquiry is not chasing likes.       ♦ Asking why a rapid-response apparatus exists for a Vice President’s protest but not for seventy-three passengers taking on water is not political theatre.

It is the Budget-document, contract-reading, institution-strengthening work the column claims to be pleading for — already published, already on the record, and conspicuously absent from the piece’s own account of what “serious politics” requires of the government it does not name.

Guyana does not need a lecture on political maturity from a piece that cannot bring itself to look at the ministry it is defending as closely as it looks at the opposition it is scolding.

If growing up means reading the documents, strengthening the institutions, and following the money — this newsroom will keep doing exactly that. The invitation to join us remains open.

— The Board

ACCOUNTABILITY WATCH · REGIONAL JUDICIARY

A Court

Five of six CCJ judges accuse President Justice Winston Anderson of “dictatorial” rule and interference in case outcomes — and Guyana has more riding on this court than almost any other member state

THE 592 GUARDIAN  |  EDITORIAL BOARD  |  AUGUST,2026

THE Caribbean Court of Justice was built to be the region’s answer to a colonial anxiety: that Caribbean people should no longer have to sail their final appeals to London to receive justice. It was, in its founding promise, a court by the region, for the region — accountable to no imperial crown, answerable instead to the collective integrity of its own bench. That promise is now the subject of an internal reckoning its architects surely never anticipated.

Internal correspondence obtained and published by the Trinidad Express’s Sunday edition shows that five of the CCJ’s six sitting judges have formally challenged the leadership of its president, Justice Winston Anderson, accusing him of governing in a manner one judge bluntly called “dictatorial.”

The allegations are not about robes or bench jackets, whatever the paper trail’s origin point. They go to the marrow of judicial independence: panel composition, pressure on colleagues to align with predetermined outcomes, and a president who, by his own reported admission, told his colleagues early in his tenure that he did not see himself as “running a democracy.”

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS

The dispute surfaced publicly through a dispute over a proposed judicial dress code — an administrative matter that, under ordinary governance, would merit little more than a committee memo. Instead, it became the occasion for judges to air grievances that had evidently been accumulating for months.

I have never seen before the level of dictatorship in the administration of a judiciary that I have witnessed at the CCJ in recent months.— Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji, in correspondence to fellow CCJ judges

Justice Peter Jamadar of Trinidad and Tobago went further, alleging in a detailed e-mail that he had experienced “an attempt to influence the opinions of colleagues that differed from yours in an authoritative manner” in relation to the Mohamed vs. MOHA, AG, and Magistrate extradition matter — a case with direct Guyanese relevance, given that the applicants in the underlying dispute are Guyanese nationals. Jamadar also cited concerns about “unreasonable timelines” imposed on judges reviewing a consolidated draft decision in the Jeremy Enriquez and Anand Ramlogan matter.

Justice Eboe-Osuji’s account of Barrow v. Caricom is, if anything, more serious still: he alleges that Anderson attempted, without prior consultation, to “single-handedly override judicial independence and long-standing CCJ conventions that guided how decisions are rendered when judges disagreed” — and that in the Mohamed matter, Anderson informed colleagues he intended to announce the court’s decision at a time and in a manner a “clear majority” had told him was inappropriate.

Justice Arif Bulkan — the CCJ’s Guyana-born judge — was among those who pressed for proper internal consultation before any policy went to the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission, and separately raised concerns about how a rigid dress code might disadvantage religious minorities on the bench. Justice Maureen Rajnauth-Lee invoked the lengthy, consultative process used under Anderson’s predecessor, Justice Adrian Saunders, as the standard against which the current president’s conduct should be measured — and found it wanting.

WHY THIS IS GUYANA’S FIGHT TOO

It would be a mistake for Guyanese readers to treat this as a Trinidad-datelined curiosity, distant from home. Guyana is not a peripheral member of the CCJ system — it is one of the court’s most exposed constituents.

Guyana accesses the CCJ in both of its jurisdictions. As a signatory to the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, Guyana falls under the court’s Original Jurisdiction as a matter of treaty obligation — non-optional, structural. And Guyana is one of only five CARICOM states (alongside Barbados, Belize, Dominica, and Saint Lucia) that has gone further, replacing the London-based Privy Council with the CCJ as its final court of Appellate Jurisdiction.

When Guyanese litigants exhaust their domestic appeals — in constitutional matters, in criminal appeals, in commercial disputes — the CCJ is the last word. There is no jurisdiction above it to correct an error, and no further right of appeal if the court’s internal processes have been compromised.

That is precisely why Justice Jamadar’s warning deserves to be read in full by every Guyanese lawyer, judge, and civil society actor who has ever placed faith in this court: he described the risk as extending to “both our OJ and AJ jurisdictions, with implications for the jurisdictions that access this court for the delivery of justice services.”

That is not diplomatic language. That is a sitting judge, in writing, telling his colleagues that the confidence of an entire region’s justice-seeking public may be at stake.

The Mohamed extradition matter cited in Jamadar’s e-mail is not an abstraction for Guyana. It involves a Guyanese Leader of the Opposition and his father, contesting the validity of an Authority to Proceed — a case the CCJ dismissed on appeal on July 29, 2026.

If a judge with direct knowledge of that matter’s internal handling is on record alleging attempted interference in its outcome, Guyanese citizens are entitled to know whether the process that produced that judgment was sound, regardless of one’s view of the underlying merits.

THE ACCOUNTABILITY THE REGION IS OWED

What is notable — and to the credit of the five judges who signed their names to these concerns — is that this dissent did not stay silent for fear of institutional embarrassment.

Justice Eboe-Osuji explicitly called for the matter to be resolved internally “before things get out of hand,” before it became public.    It became public anyway, and the public is better for it.

The CCJ was conceived as a repudiation of unaccountable, distant authority. A regional court that cannot hold its own presidency accountable to the collegiate norms its judges swore to uphold does not escape that colonial anxiety — it reproduces it in a new form, homegrown and unexamined.

Guyana’s political class, its bar, and its civil society have a direct stake in demanding that the Regional Judicial and Legal Services Commission treat this matter with the seriousness it demands, transparently, and not as an internal personnel matter to be quietly managed.

This publication will continue to track this story and its implications for Guyanese litigants and for the region’s confidence in its own apex court.

The full internal correspondence, as obtained and published by the Trinidad Express (CCN Group), is available via the link accompanying this piece.— READ MORE:

https://1drv.ms/b/c/86ce3366cc1a852b/IQAHMCOQTsyfTI8Ibb6NNCliAZ_6LWfPy7WEq8WNHUkaCpo

— The Board

Soundproof Walls, Silent Ledger

 EDITORIAL BY: Staff Writer

 How a Bank That Does Not Yet Exist Found Its First Client

 August, 2026

At Rose Hall on Saturday, President Irfaan Ali told Region Six residents that the government’s answer to noise complaints from bars and nightclubs is not enforcement. It is a loan.

Establishment owners, he said, should look to the Guyana Development Bank to finance soundproof enclosures, so that patrons who “want to hear the noise hard” can go inside while the neighbourhood is spared. It was offered as a small, practical fix to the top complaint raised at community consultations.                It is worth examining what else was on offer, and what was not.

A BANK LENDING BEFORE IT OPENS

The Guyana Development Bank Act 2026 passed the National Assembly on July 27 without opposition participation in the debate, MPs having withdrawn from the chamber over the MV Barima matter.

President Ali assented to the Act on July 30. Two weeks from now, a delegation led by Senior Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh, Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha and Government Efficiency and Implementation Minister Zulfikar Ally is scheduled to return to Region Six to formally launch the bank.

That launch has not happened. There is no application process. No portal. No published lending criteria, no disclosed underwriting standard, no office where a Region Six business owner could walk in and ask a question.

The bank exists, at this writing, as a statute and a promise of up to $3 million in collateral-free, interest-free financing to small and medium enterprises. Yet the first specific lending purpose President Ali has attached to it, in his own words to residents, is bar and nightclub soundproofing.

Before this institution has disbursed a single dollar, its inaugural publicised use case has already been named for it by the Head of State, at a podium, ahead of its own opening.

WHAT SOUNDPROOFING DOES NOT TOUCH

Noise is the complaint residents are permitted to raise, and evidently the one the government is most comfortable answering, because it has a hardware solution. Foam panels and enclosed walls are a contractor’s job. The harder facts sitting alongside the noise are not.

Guyana’s own public health data describes a population with one of the earliest ages of first alcohol use in the Caribbean, and a share of heavy drinkers with diagnosable alcohol-use disorder. The 2019 Guyana Women’s Health and Life Experiences Survey found that 55 percent of Guyanese women have experienced some form of violence in their lifetime, and United Nations estimates place Guyana’s femicide rate as the highest per capita in the region. None of this is unique to licensed premises, but the global and regional literature linking alcohol venues to intimate partner and gender-based violence is not in dispute, and nightlife establishments are consistently identified within it as elevated-risk sites, not neutral ones.

“The first lending purpose named for this bank was not a farm, a shop, or a young entrepreneur’s idea. It was a nightclub wall.”

Then there is the matter the U.S. State Department has documented in successive Trafficking in Persons reports on Guyana. The 2024 and 2025 reports both record that traffickers have used social media to recruit workers for jobs including wait staff in bars and hotels, and that non-governmental organisations report traffickers are often middle-aged men who own or operate nightclubs.

The government’s own investigative caseload grew from 28 cases involving 25 suspects in 2022 to 77 cases involving ten named suspects in 2024. As recently as May of this year, two Cuban nationals were remanded by a Georgetown magistrate over an alleged trafficking operation in which a woman’s passport was confiscated on arrival, a debt of US$5,400 was imposed along with US$300 in monthly rent, and she was, according to the prosecution, forced into commercial sex work at a named city nightclub.

That case is active in the courts as this editorial goes to publication.

Set against that record, the government’s own posture toward bars has not always been to subsidise them. In 2018, a raid on a Georgetown strip club was framed publicly by the then Minister of Public Security as part of a deliberate campaign against trafficking and prostitution tied to such establishments, with liquor licence revocation floated as the enforcement tool of choice.

Whatever one makes of that episode, it establishes that Guyanese governments have, within recent memory, treated bars and nightclubs as sites requiring scrutiny — not sites qualifying for concessional state financing.

THE QUESTION ROSE HALL WAS NOT ASKED

None of this means every bar in Guyana is a trafficking front, and this editorial does not allege that any specific establishment named in the President’s remarks is implicated in any of the cases cited above. The point is narrower and, we think, harder to wave away: a public development bank is a finite pool of concessional capital, and every dollar of it directed at acoustic panelling is a dollar not directed at due diligence, at labour inspection capacity, at the enforcement infrastructure that the government’s own Trafficking in Persons cooperation with Washington says is still needed.

The soundproofing proposal was offered at Rose Hall as a response to a resident complaint about noise. It was not offered alongside any parallel announcement of stronger licensing checks, staff welfare verification, or trafficking screening for the same premises now being invited to apply for financing.

⇒We do not know, because it has not been disclosed, whether the Development Bank intends any due-diligence screen at all for applicants in this sector — something more than the standard SME underwriting that would apply to a farm-supply shop or a hairdressing salon.

⇒We do not know whether the ministries touring the country this month have discussed, internally, the same TIP-report findings cited here.

⇒We do know that the bank’s very first publicly named lending purpose, delivered by the President himself before the institution has opened its doors, was not a young entrepreneur’s idea, nor a woman-owned enterprise of the kind Dr Ali has repeatedly said the bank exists to support. It was a nightclub wall.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING

The 592 Guardian is submitting formal queries to the Office of the President and to the Guyana Development Bank’s transitional secretariat requesting:

(1) whether any due-diligence, licensing, or labour-welfare screening criteria specific to bars, nightclubs and entertainment venues have been developed for Development Bank applicants in this sector

(2) whether the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security or the Guyana Police Force’s anti-trafficking unit were consulted on the soundproofing proposal prior to its public announcement; and

(3) what mechanism, if any, will prevent Development Bank financing from reaching an establishment under active investigation or prosecution for trafficking-linked offences.

We will publish any response in full.

— The Board

THE BARRICADE IS THE MESSAGE

What “Consultation” Actually Means to This Government

BOARD EDITORIAL— The Board · August, 2026

Walston Martins did everything right. He is the elected Chairman of the Buxton/Foulis Neighbourhood Democratic Council. He received an invitation to the government’s Model Village Initiative consultation at Melanie Damishana. He showed up.

He was pushed behind a police barricade and told he would be arrested if he did not comply — in his own jurisdiction, for the offence of standing where he was invited to stand.

By Martins’s account, the sequence began when police ordered a group of young women waiting nearby to leave the area outside a business opposite the venue. When Martins asked why, Assistant Commissioner of Police Mahendra Siwnarine allegedly told him to move behind the barricade or be arrested.

Martins refused on principle — he said he had broken no law and was standing within the territory his own council governs. The warning was repeated. He was, by his own account, effectively forced out.

This is one man’s account, on the record, and Martins says he intends to pursue the matter further. The 592 Guardian treats it as an attributed allegation, not yet an adjudicated fact. But it does not stand alone. It is the latest entry in a pattern this news media has been documenting for two weeks, and taken together, that pattern tells you something the government has not said out loud: these “consultations” were never built to hear from the public. They were built to be seen.

A WEEK OF BARRICADES

Consider what else happened in the same seven-day span.

On August 4, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo held an outreach at Watooka House in Linden. Residents waited thirty minutes for a promised meeting that never happened. When opposition supporters and Region 10 residents pressed forward, barricades gave way. A six-hour standoff followed. The Vice President left under security escort without addressing the crowd he had promised to meet.

On the very next day August 5, in Koberimo village, Barima-Waini, Minister Juan Edghill’s own stop on the Region One outreach tour was met by a handful of mostly women holding placards — and a heavy police presence in flak jackets. Not a security detail sized to the moment. A show of force sized to deter it. Sending Edghill, one of the two ministers residents are demanding resign over the Barima disaster, into the region that lost the most people to that disaster, and greeting the women who came to meet him with body armour, is not caution.

It is a message about who the state expects trouble from — and it is not the minister.

On that same day, a Coast Guard patrol intercepted a speedboat carrying Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed near the Pomeroon Floating Base, bound for a peaceful protest in Moruca — inside the very region Edghill and Indar were touring. The government’s account calls it a routine documentation check. Mohamed’s account says the same vessel had passed the same checkpoint that same morning without incident, and that the demand for paperwork came only after a soldier took an interest in who was aboard.

He was turned back before he reached Moruca at all. On August 6, Walston Martins was barricaded out of a meeting he was invited to attend.

When the public shows up uninvited — or shows up invited but inconvenient — the state’s answer is flak jackets and a line of officers, not a conversation.

Four incidents in three days. Three different arms of the security apparatus — regular police, joint services, Coast Guard. Four different targets — a group of placard-holding women in a Region One village, an opposition leader headed to a protest, a crowd of Region 10 residents, a sitting NDC chairman.

One thread runs through all of them: when the public shows up uninvited, or shows up invited but inconvenient, the state’s answer is flak jackets and a line of officers, not a conversation.

THE ROADSHOW WAS NEVER ABOUT LISTENING

This newsroom has argued from the first day of the Model Village tour that its structure gives away its purpose. Daytime, weekday-only sessions that working people cannot attend. No online alternative, despite one being trivially available and far more inclusive than a bus tour through six regions. Local NDC governance structures that are, by the government’s own inaction, too broken in many communities to meaningfully receive village-level input in the first place.

Add now a fourth feature: security postures that treat elected local officials, protesting citizens, and even a handful of women with placards as threats to be contained rather than constituents to be heard.      Assistant Commissioner Siwnarine did not simply ask Martins to step back for crowd management. He is alleged to have threatened arrest against a sitting NDC Chairman who had done nothing unlawful, in the area his own council governs — while opposition supporters demonstrated outside.

In Koberimo, the flak jackets arrived before the trouble did, because in this government’s arithmetic, showing up with a placard is treated as the trouble.

You do not barricade the people you are consulting. You barricade the people you are performing for an audience without.

WHAT THE THEATRE IS COVERING FOR

Strip away the outreach branding and ask what these events are actually accomplishing. A predetermined infrastructure plan gets a photograph of a minister among residents. A government under sustained pressure over the MV Barima disaster — the unanswered questions about Commission of Inquiry appointees with undisclosed professional ties, the silenced witnesses, the six-month statutory clock now running against victims’ families — gets a news cycle about roads and recreation grounds instead.

An administration facing a second consecutive week of youth-led silent protest outside the Office of the President gets to point to a roadshow as evidence it is “people centered,” even as its own security forces make that phrase harder to say with a straight face by the day.

None of this requires believing in a grand unified conspiracy. It requires only noticing that every barricade this week has fallen on the same side: between the government and the people it says it is going out to meet.

WHAT WE’RE ASKING

The 592 Guardian renews, plainly, the questions this pattern demands answers to:

Why was an invited, elected local official prevented from attending a consultation in his own jurisdiction?

On whose instruction did Assistant Commissioner Siwnarine act?

Was the threat of arrest authorized, or improvised in the moment?

And if the Model Village Initiative is genuinely a listening exercise, why does listening keep requiring a barricade?

Martins says he is pursuing this further. We will be watching what “further” produces — and whether the government answers the question directly, or simply moves the roadshow to its next stop and waits for the story to move with it.

— The Board