When Popularity Begins to Challenge the Guardrails

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592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM GUYANA

When Popularity Begins to Challenge the Guardrails

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

There was something politically revealing about the September 24 diaspora gathering for President Irfaan Ali and the PPP/C in New York.

The event attracting  a major outpouring of Guyanese from NY, other states in the USA ,Canada and as far as Florida, began late. Attendees waited outside the venue in chilly conditions as organizers managed entry under security protocols, explaining that a large crowd could not be allowed to accumulate indoors before the President arrived. Some were understandably frustrated. But many stayed. The crowd built. The anticipation held.

That alone does not make a political argument. Crowds gather for many reasons: party loyalty, curiosity, access, networking, national pride, opposition, spectacle, or a genuine desire to hear from a head of government.

But what became clear in conversations with those waiting was that President Ali has something more than ordinary support among sections of the diaspora. He has a constituent that is alive, emotional, invested, and increasingly personal in its devotion.

Several people interviewed offered exceptionally generous praise. Some described him as Guyana’s best president. Others argued that he deserves a third term. When reminded that the Constitution imposes a two-term presidential limit, the response from some was immediate: “change the Constitution.”

Unfortunately, these same individuals along with everyone else who attended to either  express their support or voice their concerns were not afforded an opportunity as the format of the forum was uniquely structured around  any such mechanism.

 What the format tells us

There was no town hall. No microphone passed through the crowd for questions. No moment, structured or improvised, where an attendee — supporter or otherwise — could press the President on policy, on term limits, on anything at all. What existed instead was a social occasion: music, drinks, food, photographs.

That is a fact about the event’s structure, not a claim about anyone’s intentions. But it is a fact worth stating plainly, because of what it means in combination with everything else: a gathering large enough to draw travelers from two countries, animated enough to produce spontaneous talk of constitutional change, and structured in a way that built in no mechanism for the President to be questioned by the very people expressing that sentiment in front of him.

Whether that absence was by design is a fair question — one this publication cannot answer on the basis of one event. It is, at minimum, a pattern worth watching against future gatherings of this kind.

That is where this discussion must begin.

There is nothing wrong with citizens admiring a president. There is nothing undemocratic about believing that a government has performed well, that a leader has represented the country effectively, or that a president has brought a new energy to the office. Citizens are entitled to praise leaders, defend them, campaign for them, and reward them at the ballot box.

But democracy must become concerned when admiration for a leader evolves into the belief that constitutional safeguards should be removed to accommodate that leader.

Guyana’s presidential term limit exists for a reason. A person elected President after the year 2000 may be re-elected only once. The two-term limit is not a restraint designed for failed, unpopular, or ineffective presidents. Elections themselves can deal with those leaders. Term limits exist for leaders who are popular, powerful, resource-rich, deeply connected, and capable of building a political structure around themselves.

They exist precisely because popularity can become intoxicating—not only for the leader, but for the followers who begin to see one man as irreplaceable.

That is the point Guyana must confront honestly.

President Ali’s political stock is clearly rising. He has returned to office with an expanded parliamentary mandate. The PPP-C now holds 36 seats in the National Assembly, while WIN has 16 seats, APNU has 12, and Forward Guyana Movement holds one. The governing party’s victory, combined with the weakness and fragmentation of the opposition, gives the administration considerable room to set the political agenda.

But Ali’s strength is not confined to Parliament.

He has become the most visible face of Guyana’s oil-era ambitions. He is the President who travels, speaks internationally, meets investors, courts the diaspora, promotes infrastructure, presents Guyana as a country on the rise, and projects a modern image of national confidence. Whether one agrees with every policy of his administration or not, it is impossible to deny that Ali has become a major political asset to the PPP-C.

The diaspora gathering demonstrated that this asset is no longer merely institutional. It is personal.

That carries consequences.

A President who commands genuine public enthusiasm can become more powerful than the party machinery that elevated him. He can build a direct relationship with citizens at home and abroad. He can develop personal political capital that does not always depend on the approval of party executives, Central Committees, Cabinet colleagues, or traditional gatekeepers.

This is where the Ali–Jagdeo question becomes unavoidable.

Guyana’s Constitution makes the President the supreme executive authority. The President chairs  Cabinet, appoints ministers, represents the state, and holds the constitutional authority to direct the executive arm of government. Yet the PPP-C is not merely a collection of officeholders. It is a disciplined party with a long organizational history, a Central Committee, an Executive Committee, deep political networks, and a General Secretary in Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo who remains one of the most consequential political actors in the country.

This produces an unusual governing arrangement.

Ali possesses the constitutional authority of the presidency. Jagdeo possesses long-standing organizational authority within the party. One commands the office of state. The other commands deep experience, political networks, party machinery, and a strategic role as the central figure head  of the ruling establishment.

For a time, such an arrangement can work efficiently. A president and party leader can operate as partners. One can provide public stature and executive authority; the other can provide political organization, electoral discipline, strategy, and institutional continuity.

But every dual-power arrangement contains the possibility of tension.

The more President Ali develops an independent public constituency, the more he becomes politically significant beyond the structure that produced him. The more his name, image, international profile, diaspora support, and executive authority grow, the more the political equation inside the PPP-C may change.

That does not mean a rupture has occurred. It does not prove that a clash is underway. It does not establish that every policy disagreement, procurement question, appointment, or Cabinet debate reflects a personal conflict between the President and the Vice President.

Such assertions require evidence, not gossip.

But political analysis must be allowed to identify structural realities before they become public crises. And the structural reality is clear: a second-term president with growing popularity, control of the constitutional executive, and a personal support base can eventually become too politically substantial to remain merely the political product of another figure’s party machinery.

This is not only an Ali question. It is a Guyana question.

Guyana has lived through the dangers of party supremacy and maximum leader syndrome before. The Burnham era taught this country the grave consequences of allowing party and leader  dominance to eclipse the state, weaken institutions, and reduce public governance to the will of a narrow political center.

The present moment is not a copy of that era. Guyana still holds competitive elections. Opposition parties remain represented in Parliament, whenever the doors are opened .The courts function. The Constitution remains in force. The media remains contested, diverse, and active. The country is not under a formal doctrine of party paramountcy.

But we should not make the opposite mistake and assume that democracy is secure merely because elections are held.

Democratic erosion rarely announces itself with a single decree. It grows through habits: the normalization of unchecked executive authority; the blurring of state business and party interest; the elevation of loyalty over scrutiny; the treatment of criticism as disloyalty; the use of resources to consolidate political advantage; and the growing public belief that one leader is so essential that the rules must be changed for him.

The issue is not whether President Ali is popular. He plainly is among important sections of the Guyanese public and diaspora. The issue is whether Guyana is cultivating a political culture in which popularity becomes a license for permanence. I would call  it “ a competitive electoral democracy with a dominant-party governing culture.”

That is the danger of populism when it is left unexamined.

Populism tells the public that the leader alone understands them, that institutions are obstacles, that critics are enemies of progress, and that constitutional limits are technical inconveniences standing in the way of national advancement. It thrives on the seductive argument that if a leader is delivering development, attracting investment, building roads, speaking confidently for the country, and commanding loyalty, then why should anyone object to keeping him in office for as long as the public desires?

The answer is simple: because no democracy should depend on the virtue, popularity, or goodwill of one individual.

A country that changes its constitutional rules whenever a leader becomes beloved is no longer defending institutions. It is building a system around personalities.

Guyana’s oil wealth makes this question more urgent, not less. Oil has given the Government unprecedented fiscal power. It has expanded the scale of public projects, contracts, infrastructure, state spending, international engagement, and political expectations. In such an environment, incumbency is not an abstract advantage. It can become a formidable machine.

The leader at the center of that machine can appear larger than the party, larger than Parliament, and larger than the constitutional restraints meant to preserve balance. That is why citizens who admire President Ali should be the first to defend the two-term limit, not the first to demand its removal.

If Ali’s record is as strong as his admirers believe, then let that record become the foundation for institutional continuity, better governance, stronger public systems, an improved PPP-C, and a new generation of capable leadership. Let his legacy be the strengthening of Guyana’s democracy—not the weakening of its guardrails.

A great president does not need the Constitution bent around him. A great president leaves office having proven that the institutions of the Republic are stronger than any one man.

The same standard must apply to every party.

WIN cannot survive as a serious national alternative merely by exploiting public anger or presenting itself as the answer to PPP-C dominance. Its 16 parliamentary seats represent an important disruption of the old political order, but a movement is not yet a governing institution. It must build structure, transparency, internal democracy, policy competence, and a leadership culture that does not simply replace one form of political worship with another.

APNU, reduced to 12 seats, must also confront its crisis honestly. It cannot recover by behaving as though the political landscape has not. Its decline opened the space that WIN filled. If it cannot reform, reconnect, and offer credible leadership, it will continue to surrender the role of principal opposition to newer and less tested forces.

The PPP-C, meanwhile, faces its own test: whether it will use its mandate to strengthen democratic institutions or to deepen a political culture where party, government, leadership, and state resources increasingly appear inseparable.

Guyana does not need weaker leaders. It needs stronger institutions.It does not need less ambition from its President. It needs more accountability from every center of power.

It does not need a politics built around the question of who can remain in office longest. It needs a politics built around whether the Constitution, Parliament, Cabinet, courts, procurement systems, regulators, media, civil society, and citizens can remain strong enough to question anyone.

The diaspora gathering in New York was, in that sense, more than a meet-and-greet. The largest I have witnessed in over four decades in New York. And it was a clear political signal.

It showed that President Ali has an active and passionate following. It showed that he can generate anticipation and loyalty beyond Guyana’s shores. It showed that supporters are prepared to speak of him not simply as a President, but as an indispensable national figure.

That should not be ignored. Neither should it be feared irrationally. But it must be understood.

Guyana’s future cannot rest on whether one leader remains popular enough to stay. It must rest on whether the country is mature enough to ensure that no leader—however gifted, admired, connected, or successful—ever becomes larger than the constitutional democracy he was elected to serve.

Grief comes too easily to some, opening for new rehearsals

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Grief comes too easily to some, opening for new rehearsals

OPINION BY : GHK LALL September 2026

Ever encounter a professional mourner?  Guyana has some highly-placed ones.  They don’t have to be paid to mourn (sometimes).  They will weep for free.  To get in the practice, to keep in championship form.  The MV Barima catastrophe is a monument to Guyanese grieving.  Expected from impacted families and communities.  Intolerable for those that have endured multiple casualties.  There’s a lifetime of trauma waiting.  I take for granted, because that’s the essence of families, neighborhoods.  Expected also is the cabal of professional mourners, those who claim being overloaded with grief. 

Stricken with pain that will not go away.  How they live night and day with the horror of the last moments, the torments, of those who left home, never to come back again.

When I hear these professional mourners in action, on public display, a bad state overtakes.  So disgusted that there’s need for a grief counsellor.  To lessen the stench and weight of these masqueraders.  Those who claim how troubled they are by grief.  Confederate General, Robert E. Lee, said it well: “It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it.”  I borrow: it’s helpful that grief is such a grave development, lest we get too comfortable around it.  Hence, when I hear professional mourners attesting to how much they are impacted by the loss of life (under the contradiction of avoidable, unforgivable circumstances), disgust arrives first, with dismissal following soon afterwards.

For what is a professional mourner if not a cunning, duplicitous, user of the pain of others, the tears of the genuinely grief wracked, for his or her benefit from those conditions?  In other words, a callous pretender who is low enough to sink to the gutter to enrich self at the expense of those tearing their hair out of their heads, and beating their breasts.  When grief is real, when wrenching trauma is felt, then every effort is expended to offer relief to those who need it, those who could be comforted by an authentic gesture.  Developments that speak for themselves because they have that distinctive human quality about them.  Heartfelt sincerity.  Humility that doesn’t have to be faked.  The absence of these are the chief hallmarks of the professional mourner, no matter the color of the clothing he or she wears.  The genuine mourner is more than a comforter; he or she will go the extra mile, remove obstacles, so that suffering is cushioned, given merciful closure. 

A professional mourner erects hurdles, talks from both sides of the mouth, while still selling himself or herself as the proverbial friend who is of deeds.  What deeds, but ruses and ploys?

In thinking of the MV Barima family, those now riveted together eternally by avoidable tragedy, my first consideration would be, what can I do to ease the grief of this national family fused by circumstances?  A roadblock wouldn’t be ordered; nothing that dilutes their expectations.  A shell game wouldn’t be played; where syrupy promises are made, only for those to be laced with nails that rip at commonsense, then shred it.  When there is honest-to-god intent to get to the bottom (literally) of the MV Barima tragedy, then the farces that have been seen and felt have no place in the pursuit of the facts.  By sheer effort of will, and accompanying impeccable honesty, mountains that stand in the way are leveled.  They would never be built. 

When one is a professional mourner, a sham operator, a Job’s comforter, then the barriers that Guyanese have seen and run into, are already neatly laid out in place.

Last, when morality and honesty fled from Guyana, then old cons and new cons came into their own.  A prime exhibit of them is the professional mourner; that ubiquitous presence that flits from one tragedy to the next.  Their grief fills their sleeves.  Grief that weighs.  Getting from under it is the problem.

The Container and the Communiqué

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

 The Container and the Communiqué

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

A hemisphere is reorganzing itself around security communiqués while the people it displaces are received in shipping containers with no running water

There is a structure in Cap-Haïtien, built from converted shipping containers, with seating for about sixty people and two toilets outside. One of the toilets works. Neither has running water. This is where the United States government delivers Haitians it no longer wishes to have within its borders — at a rate, as of last month, of one planeload roughly every week, each carrying somewhere near two hundred people, into a city whose population has tripled in two years under the weight of exactly this kind of arrival.

Human Rights Watch’s account of what is happening in Cap-Haïtien is not an allegation. It is the product of researchers physically present at the airport, watching a flight land, watching people register their names against manifests that do not record why they are being removed, watching them receive a meal, a drink, and the equivalent of seventy-seven US dollars, and then watching them walk out of a shipping container into a country that the United States’ own State Department will not permit its citizens to enter. 

A government cannot simultaneously tell its own citizens a place is too dangerous to visit and tell a deported family it is safe enough to live in.

That is the contradiction sitting at the center of this policy, and it is not a subtle one. Haiti carries a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory — the highest classification the State Department issues, reserved for conditions judged to place American travellers at grave and immediate risk. The same government maintaining that advisory terminated Temporary Protected Status for Haitians on the stated basis that conditions had “improved sufficiently.” Both cannot be true. Either Haiti is dangerous enough to warn Americans away from, or it is safe enough to send families back to. The United States government has chosen, for administrative convenience, to hold both positions at once — and the people paying for that contradiction are not policymakers in Washington. They are a Miami hotel worker who trained new employees for seven years, deported without being permitted to say goodbye to a five-year-old son who still asks whether his father will be home from school. They are a woman detained at an interview for the very immigration status she had lawfully applied for, whose only crime was believing the process she had been told to follow would be honored.

What is most damning in Human Rights Watch’s account is not any single atrocity — it is the completeness of the abandonment. Nine Haitian government institutions were asked, separately, what capacity they had to receive, shelter, feed, protect, or reintegrate the people arriving on these flights. Nine gave, in substance, the same answer: none. No dedicated shelter. No sustained food assistance. No expedited path to the identity documents a person needs simply to exist administratively in their own country — a process that can otherwise take up to three months. No plan to enrol deported children who were educated in English, and who may not read or write in French or Creole. No mechanism for reuniting unaccompanied minors beyond ad hoc arrangements with private shelters, and no way to monitor those children once reunification happens.

This is not a gap in the system. It is confirmation that no system exists.

Washington’s own paperwork betrays the same carelessness. The manifests handed to Haitian migration officials; with roughly two days’ notice — list a name, a date of birth, a gender, a nationality, an A-number. Nothing about medical needs. Nothing about whether a person arrives with a disability, a chronic illness, or a documented fear for their safety in a specific neighbourhood. And even that thin manifest has proven unreliable: on both flights Human Rights Watch examined, more people arrived than the paperwork said would.

A government capable of tracking a person through a decade of tax filings, employment records, and immigration check-ins is, evidently, incapable of accurately counting how many of them it is putting on a single aircraft.

Nor can this be waved away as an unfortunate but lawful exercise of sovereign immigration authority. The people interviewed were not, in the main, individuals with exhausted legal options and clear removal orders they had simply ignored. They were people mid-process — asylum claims pending, permanent residence applications pending, court dates scheduled years into the future — swept up during scheduled check-ins, denied contact with counsel, and in some documented cases deported without ever being shown the removal order that supposedly authorised their return. One family, the Guardian notes from the Human Rights Watch record, fled to Canada rather than risk detention, was turned back to US custody within three days, separated on arrival, and told by an ICE officer that their US-citizen son could “stay” — but only into state custody, severed from his parents. This is not the incidental cruelty of an overburdened bureaucracy. It is a system that has stopped pretending due process is the point.

Fifteen of a hundred and sixty-one is not a rebuttal. It is an admission that the other hundred and forty-six had done nothing wrong.

When confronted, the US Department of Homeland Security’s defense was that fifteen of the 161 people on the August 20 flight had criminal convictions. Set aside, for a moment, that none of the people Human Rights Watch spoke to were among those fifteen. Notice instead what the statistic concedes: that the overwhelming majority — roughly ninety-one percent of that single flight — carried no criminal conviction at all. If public safety were the governing logic of this program, that number would be the scandal. Instead, it was offered as vindication.

It would be convenient, and it would be wrong, to treat this as a story that ends at the United States’ border and belongs entirely to its domestic politics. It does not. The Trump administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, told CNN in August that he did not know the conditions in Haiti and had never set foot there — and in the same breath said the administration was simply “enforcing the law.” That is the voice of a hemisphere’s most powerful government treating the return of desperate people to a collapsing state as a matter of paperwork rather than consequence.

It is worth asking what obligations, if any, attach to nations that sit at the same table as that government on questions of regional security, narco-terrorism, and “hemispheric resilience” — tables at which sovereignty is invoked constantly and accountability, rather less so.

A communiqué that commits a hemisphere to shared security cooperation says nothing, by itself, about whether that same hemisphere is prepared to ask hard questions when one of its members empties planeloads of people into a shipping container with no running water. Silence on that question is itself a position.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has already said, in plain terms, what international law requires here: individualized assessment, due process, an effective remedy, and — where a credible risk to life or safety exists — no return at all. Haiti’s own government has said, through nine separate institutions, that it cannot absorb what is being sent to it. The United States’ own diplomats say, through an unchanged Level 4 advisory, that the country remains too dangerous for their own citizens to enter. Only the deportation flights continue as though none of this were true.

This editorial board does not pretend to adjudicate the domestic politics of US immigration enforcement.

But accountability journalism does not stop at a border, and neither should the plain observation that a policy built on a factual contradiction — declaring a country simultaneously too dangerous to visit and safe enough to deport into — deserves to be named as what it is.

Congress has a bill in front of it that would extend protected status through 2029. Until it passes, or until the flights stop, the container in Cap-Haïtien will keep filling.

— The Board

 

THE ARCHITECT’S ALIBI

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

THE ARCHITECT’S ALIBI

On Kojo Parris, the Hard Rock Presidency, and the Cover That Makes It Work

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September  2026

Kojo Parris has done this newsroom the courtesy it least often receives: he has read a piece of ours closely enough to disagree with it precisely. In “From Manufacturing Consent to Manufacturing Discontent,” published in the pages of Kiskadee Watch  on September 25, and Parris builds a four-part test for whether any political party’s leadership can discipline itself — electoral recall, obligation to the enriched, portability of hostility, and the willingness of an architect to dismantle his own building; and applies it with real rigor to Bharrat Jagdeo’s standing at the center of the PPP-C. He cites our earlier argument that Guyana’s governance is better read in tandem, Ali and Jagdeo together, and he credits it as the strongest objection his framework has to answer. We take that seriously, and we owe him a considered reply rather than a defensive one.

Parris is correct on the point he presses hardest. President Ali holds a mandate the electorate can withdraw. Jagdeo’s authority runs through a party list he himself controls, and no ballot reaches him directly. That asymmetry is real, and no amount of tandem-governance framing dissolves it. We concede it plainly, because a newsroom  that only concedes what costs it nothing is not making an argument; it is performing one.

WHAT THE TEST MISSES

But the concession does not carry as far as Parris needs it to, because his four-part test measures where authority originates. It does not measure how authority is exercised once it leaves the room. And the pattern this newsroom has documented across a year of institutional coverage — the May 2026 REO and Permanent Secretary reshuffle, the September re-warning delivered nearly verbatim four months later, the National Toshaos Council meeting and the $930 million in village contracts that followed it, the procession of ministers, accounting officers and constitutional-commission consultations convened under Jagdeo’s chairmanship — is not the record of a man running a rival engine.

It is the record of a man running the President’s engine, on the President’s instruction, with the President’s immunity standing behind every warning he issues and every consequence he declines to enforce.

That is the structural detail Parris’s architecture leaves out, and it matters because it changes what kind of building the PPP-C actually is. Parris writes as though a single man occupies the center and the party radiates outward from him. We would put it differently: this is not a one-man show. It is a one-party show, engineered so that its senior figures can act on their own initiative while the Presidency stands ready to absorb whatever fallout follows. We have watched Ali extend precisely this cover to his ministers, repeatedly and without exception, whenever their conduct drew fire. Jagdeo’s convening power is not evidence that he has escaped accountability. It is evidence that accountability in this system was never designed to reach the convener — it was designed to stop at whoever gave the instruction, and the instruction, formally, always traces back to Ali.

“The architect who has to demolish the building is not necessarily the one whose name is on the cornerstone.”

A NOTE ON THE ARITHMETIC

Parris reads the 2025 register growth against falling turnout as evidence of a PPP-C base going quiet — seething, in his word, beneath a result that still delivered the party more votes and more seats. It is a compelling image, but the seat arithmetic does not by itself support it. The PPP-C’s net gain of three seats is consistent with a transfer running APNU to WIN, not PPP-C to WIN. A party ninety days old outpolling APNU in Regions Three and Six tells us APNU bled; it does not tell us to whom. If WIN drew disproportionately from APNU’s coalition rather than the PPP-C’s, then the “smoldering frustration” Parris locates inside the PPP-C’s own base is better described as a hypothesis than a finding — the turnout decline and register growth are real, but the seething is, at present, a reasonable guess dressed as a diagnosis. We would not discard Parris’s instinct here; the twelve-point turnout drop deserves an explanation, and demobilization and defection are not mutually exclusive.

But the piece is entitled to no more than what the numbers can bear, and right now they cannot distinguish a quiet PPP-C base from a definitively absent one.

A SECOND EDIFICE, RISING

This bears directly on the fourth and, as Parris rightly says, the hardest of his four tests — that the structure must come down by the hand of someone who did not build it. We agree that Jagdeo, as chief architect of the machinery Parris describes, is constitutionally unsuited to dismantle it.

Where we would push further is in asking whether Jagdeo remains the only architect standing. Ali is not merely occupying a mandate Jagdeo cannot claim; he is actively constructing a second edifice beside it — a larger public purse than any predecessor has commanded, visible domestic development to campaign on, and a run of international partnerships that looked past Guyana for decades before oil made the country impossible to ignore. Measured in leverage, both domestic and abroad, Ali is on a trajectory to surpass the man Parris identifies as his mentor, not remain permanently in his shadow.

A leader building an edifice of his own has reasons — reputational, historical, dynastic — to eventually distinguish his legacy from the structure he inherited. That is a different kind of pressure than the one Parris’s test anticipates, and it does not require Ali to be virtuous. It only requires him to be ambitious on his own account, which the record suggests he is.

We would also caution against assuming this structure resolves itself when Ali eventually demits office. Parris’s essay treats Jagdeo’s removal as the fulcrum on which PPP/C renewal turns. Our reporting suggests the more durable problem is the structure itself — the reshuffle-without-enforcement pattern, the accountability mandates re-delivered nearly word for word months apart with no accounting for the warnings that went nowhere the first time. Ali’s relative youth gives that structure room to outlast this presidency in whatever form suits whoever inherits it next. Changing the face at Freedom House, as Parris himself notes by way of Nyerere and the CCM, is necessary but not sufficient. We would add: it is not even guaranteed to be attempted, because the man with the clearest incentive to preserve the cover-and-instruction architecture is whoever currently benefits from standing inside it — and that list is not limited to one name.

WHERE WE AGREE, AND WHERE THE DEBATE SHOULD GO

None of this diminishes what Parris has accomplished. His reading of Democratic Centralism as the PPP-C’s only operative leadership rule, his arithmetic on the 2025 register growth against falling turnout, and his account of WIN as an unclaimed container for rural discontent are contributions this debate badly needed and had not, until his piece, received in such disciplined form. We differ on where the load-bearing wall sits inside the house he has so carefully mapped. He locates it in one man’s refusal to demolish what he built.

We locate it in a structure engineered so that no single demolition, of one man or one office, is sufficient — because the cover travels with the instruction, and the instruction can issue from more than one desk

We do not offer that as the last word. This is, as Parris’s own essay insists, a national conversation and not a private exchange of ideas  between two patriotic citizens. The 592 Guardian will continue to test the tandem-governance thesis against the institutional record as it develops — the next reshuffle, the next re-warning, the next contract award issued under whichever name signs it. We invite Parris, and anyone else willing to read the record as closely as he has, to keep testing it with us.

— The Board

THE SIX MONTHS HE DIDN’T MENTION

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 THE SIX MONTHS HE DIDN’T MENTION

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

President Ali spent a lengthy interview cataloguing every weakness in Guyana’s electricity system — except the US$759 million one bearing his own name

PRESIDENT DR. IRFAAN ALI wants Guyanese to understand that the next six months are critical. In a recent sit-down with News Room, he walked through nearly every strand of the country’s electricity crisis: units coming offline for overhaul, an estimated US$800 million required over five years just for transmission and distribution, 25 to 27 megawatts of stranded capacity in Essequibo, engagement with Qatar on financing, and recommendations from InterEnergy on how to fix what he called gaps in GPL’s “technical expertise.” He said he was “frustrated.” He said the government was “not satisfied.” 

What he did not say — in an interview built entirely around the question of why the lights keep failing — is Wales. Or Gas-to-Energy. Or Lindsayca. The single largest infrastructure undertaking in Guyana’s history — the project his own government promised would cut electricity costs in half by 2024; does not appear in his account of why electricity costs have not been cut in half.

A Pattern, Not an Omission

This publication has tracked the Wales Gas-to-Energy project’s slide from a 2024 completion promise through four successive revised timelines, a confidential arbitration award the Prime Minister denied existed before admitting it did, and a two-year delay now estimated to cost the country roughly US$884 million above the plants’ original cost. None of that is in dispute inside government. What is notable is who says it. The reassurances; no extra payment under discussion, some communities already receiving phased reductions — carry the President’s name. The numbers; the revised timelines, the contractor’s request for another US$170 million, the shift from fixed-price to cost-plus — are delivered by Prime Minister Phillips, Minister Indar, or task force head Winston Brassington. It is opposition MP Sherod Duncan, not the government, who has had to point out publicly that 57 megawatts of turbine testing is not delivery of the 300 megawatts promised.

That division of labor is not accidental. It is the same architecture this publication has documented elsewhere: a government that announces reviews it does not enforce, appoints reshuffles it later re-announces as new, and stages consultations in place of consequence. GTE fits the mould precisely; the President is present for the vision and the reassurance, and absent for the reckoning.

Who Pays For This

The people who cannot afford this arrangement are the ones reading electricity bills that were supposed to have fallen by half two years ago. Every month GTE slips is a month GPL keeps burning Heavy Fuel Oil and renting powerships at a premium the state has quietly absorbed into an import bill nobody campaigns on. The US$800 million transmission-and-distribution ask the President raised in this interview is real, and it is separate from — and additional to — the money already sunk into Wales. Guyanese are being asked to accept both bills without ever being told, by the man who signed the original promise, why the first one has not yet paid off.

A president who can itemize Essequibo’s stranded megawatts down to the decimal, and describe in detail his engagement with Qatari financiers, has the capacity to explain Wales. That he consistently chooses not to is itself the finding.

 Sidebar — Claim vs. Record

What the President said, set against the government’s own public record.

The Claim (Ali) The Record Source
“The next six months is critical” for the existing electricity system. True but incomplete: the 300MW Wales plant — meant to be operational by 2024 and to cut costs in half — is not mentioned as part of why the next six months are critical. News Room interview, Sept 2026
“No extra payment [to the Wales contractor] was under discussion,” Ali said mid-Sept 2026 Lindsayca has requested ~US$170M above the original US$759M contract (22% increase), with a proposal to shift from fixed-price to cost-plus, per Kaieteur News, Sept 6, 2026. Kaieteur News, Sept 6, 2026
PM Phillips, April 7, 2026: “There are no secret payments… there is no arbitration ruling… incorrect to suggest GoG has lost the arbitration.” Five weeks later, Phillips admitted DAAB had ruled in Jan 2025 on two matters, and GoG settled with Lindsayca for a ~12.8% increase (~US$97M) over the original contract sum. Kaieteur News editorial, May 18, 2026
GTE “will cut electricity costs in half,” government said, “firmly on track,” May 14, 2026 (OPM/PM Phillips statement). First turbine testing (57MW) now targeted for December 2026 — only 19% of the promised 300MW, and APNU’s Sherod Duncan says even that is not delivery. Full commissioning pushed to Q1 2027; Combined Cycle to June 2027 OPM/DPI (May 14); Kaieteur News (Sept 15, 2026)
Original 2022 government commitment: construction begins Q3 2022, GTE complete by 2024 Timeline revised at least four times — 2024 → April 2025 → end of 2025 → May 2026 → end of 2026 (partial). Delay estimated to cost Guyana ~US$884M above base plant cost.

 OP.gov.gy (Nov 2022); Kaieteur News, June 12, 2026

— THE BOARD

Sources: News Room (Ali interview); Office of the Prime Minister / DPI press statements (May 2026); Kaieteur News (June 12, Sept 6, Sept 15, 2026); Demerara Waves (Sept 8, 2026); Rio Times (Sept 2026); Guyana Chronicle (Sept 11, 2026).

Slingah -what a singer, what a character!

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Slingah -what a singer, what a character!

OPINION BY : GHK LALL September 2026

Ninety-one and gone.  A rapturous inning, one worthy of Lords, and the Royal Albert Hall.  With the London Philharmonic accompanying.  The Mighty Sparrow lasted long, seemed to have been around forever.  What a singer and performer!  What a contributor to West Indian musical culture and life.  What a character!  Thought the best way to pay tribute to a regional immortal-indeed, a global one-is to reflect on some of his contributions, and how they came to mean so much to me and my generation, and others before and after.

My first encounter with the Mighty Sparrow was as a child, with “Maria.”  Three decades later, Whoah-wah-whoah-ohhh Maria, and those soaring and cascading reeds can still cause a tingle, the pores to grow.  Then came that classic “Dan is the man in the van.”  The King of Calypso (and Emperor of Many Musical Genres) went to town on English nursery rhymes, through parody, kaiso poetry, and sheer musical wizardry.  Some extracts may explain my excitement.  Twirly and twisty were two screws.  They are in the Government in Guyana, and not in minor roles.  Plus, who mek a cow jump over the moon.  Due to being ahead of his time, and a politically correct practitioner (sez who?), Sparrow was kind enough to leave out the farm in Guyana from which that super cow came.  Must be one of those moons that dogs howl at, and which set lunatics to roam free at all levels in a scared country.  When a lullaby was needed, a little romantic mood and interlude, there was that timeless evergreen “Only a fool (breaks his own heart), ”  Jeez when the Sparrow met the Dragon the sparks didn’t just fly, they crooned, and made many swoon.

Alongside those hits were Drunk and Disorderly which captures the local rum culture, and the need for insultation of the music rooms of bars.  Financing to be provided by a loan from the Guyana Development Bank.  This man thought of everything.  Question for Guyanese: was the Mighty Sparrow more of a superb calypsonian, or was he a slick politician in disguise?  What about Melda: oh you making wedding plan carrying me name to obeah man….”  Maybe that’s why Guyanese politicians were turning up so often in so many churches and other religious houses around the middle of last year.  They weren’t taking any chances, covering all the bases.  From consulting about election prospects with obeah men in secret to pretending at worshipping God in his Holy Temple.  Gosh!  I am ordering a copy of Slinger Franciso’s birth certificate.  I think that he was more of a Guyanese than a Grenadian.  Something got mixed up somewhere.  It is uncanny for one man-and a singer at that-to come so close to Guyanese political and cultural reality so frequently.

He was a man for all musical seasons.  A romantic in on era (Maria, Mr. Walker, and Only a Fool) and raunchy in the next: Benwood Dick, Congo Man, Village Ram, and Witch Doctor (I understand they have started giving out free PhDs for that practice).  Over the decades, the Mighty Sparrow has enthralled endless numbers, excited from aspiring singers to novice composers to anyone who ever felt daring enough to dabble in Karaoke and dancing.  He was up there and out there in a space by himself.  Miles apart from the competition.  Now after 91 years on the rich green soil of this region, he has gone on an unending singing tour. To that part of heaven specially reserved for men and women who sang their hearts out, and gave of their all to make life a little easier, a tad better, for their fellow journeyers in this earthly pale.  In this vale of tears, the Mighty Sparrow did make Guyanese and others in these parts forget their tears and be of good cheer.  If only for a moment, it was enough to last a lifetime. 

Thanks for the good times, Slinger Franciso.  Sing one for me up there, Sparrow.  I may throw one down the hatch in honor of a magician in action, a majestic passing.  Yeah, it’s true: Sparrow dead.

The Selective State

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

The Selective State

What a Collapsing Cuba Reveals About the Anatomy of a Functioning State — and Why Abundance Is No Guarantee Against the Same Disease

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar–September,2026

There is a phrase making the rounds among diplomats in Havana that deserves a longer life than a single dispatch: “authoritarian anarchy.” It describes a state that has retained, almost undiminished, its capacity to repress political expression, while every other function of government: health, education, public order, basic service delivery — quietly comes apart.

The security apparatus gets fuel when nothing else does. The prisons are staffed when the hospitals are not. The state, in other words, has not disappeared. It has simply chosen, function by function, what to keep and what to let go.

Cuba’s collapse is its own story, produced by seven decades of one-party rule, a foreign oil cutoff, and a sanctions regime with no real precedent. Guyana’s condition is not that. This editorial board has no interest in flattening the distance between a country running out of everything and a country awash in more capital than it has ever had to govern. The comparison being drawn here is not of circumstance. It is of method — a diagnostic test that travels well precisely because it does not depend on scarcity to work. Ask of any state: which functions is it keeping sharp, and which is it letting atrophy? The answer tends to say more about a government’s actual priorities than anything in its own communications.

WHAT GETS MAINTAINED

Apply that test here and an uncomfortable pattern comes into view — not of collapse, Guyana is nowhere near collapse, but of a state whose functioning capacity does not map onto its own stated urgencies.

Consider the Ministry of Health’s contract nurse payroll, which this board has tracked as it left nurses unpaid for months at a stretch — not for lack of money, but for lack of a functioning administrative pipeline to move it. Set that against Guyana Water Inc.’s entry into commercial bottled water production, a function the state stood up with evident speed and no apparent difficulty, even as its regulatory mandate over household sanitation infrastructure remains legally unresolved.

One function; paying the people who deliver frontline care — sits idle. Another; a state enterprise entering a profit-generating consumer market it also regulates — moves without friction. The capacity clearly exists. It is a question of where it gets pointed.

The same asymmetry shows up in the constitutional architecture itself. Commissions with standing constitutional mandates — the Judicial Service Commission, the Police Service Commission, the Public Service Commission, the all important Public Procurement Commission — sit in states of appointment limbo or contested composition for years at a time, GECOM’s own commissioner dispute under Article 161(3)(b) being only the most visible instance.

Meanwhile the executive finds the institutional bandwidth to launch task forces, consultations, and initiatives — a noise-nuisance task force, a Model Village roadshow, a review of AI-misinformation penalties — with considerable speed, and then lets most of them expire quietly without the follow-through their announcements promised.

This board has already named that pattern elsewhere: a bite with no teeth. Cuba’s diplomats would recognize the shape of it, even if they would not recognize the country.

A third instance is more pointed still. The MV Barima disaster produced, in its aftermath, an extraordinary mobilization of state capacity — a Commission of Inquiry, a salvage tender, ministerial resignations under pressure, a formal wreck-status process. What it has not produced, months on, is a resolved answer to the far more basic question the disaster raised: whether the vessel’s own defect and repair paper trail was ever acted upon before the sailing– that killed its passengers. The state moved fast and visibly on containment and process. It has moved far more slowly on the underlying function those processes exist to serve.

A state’s real priorities are not what it announces. They are what it keeps able to function without being asked.

THE REPARTO PROBLEM, APPLIED WITH CAUTION

The Foreign Affairs piece that prompts this editorial describes something Cubans call reparto — a divvying up. As the state opened limited space for private enterprise, the gains flowed disproportionately to those with proximity to power, while the majority absorbed the costs of an economy in retreat. Regime insiders positioned themselves at the front of a very narrow door.

The result was not broad prosperity but a widening gap between a small class of winners and everyone else — inequality manufactured in real time, alongside institutional hollowing, not despite it.

This board has been building, in a separate and more extensively sourced piece, the case that Guyana is watching its own version of that mechanism take shape — not from scarcity, as in Cuba, but from abundance. A new domestic wealthy class, without precedent in this country’s history, forming in the oil era through proximity to the ruling party rather than through the broad-based lift oil revenue was supposed to provide. We will not rehearse that argument’s evidence here; it deserves its own reckoning, on its own terms, and is forthcoming.

What is worth naming now is the structural kinship: whether a state is retreating under pressure or expanding under windfall, the same mechanism — concentrated capture through access, thin distribution to everyone else; can operate underneath very different weather.

The direction of the economy does not determine who captures its gains. Proximity to power does.

THE PRICE OF DELAY

The strongest argument in the Foreign Affairs analysis is not really about Cuba’s politics at all. It is about time. Institutional decay left unaddressed does not stay a temporary condition — it calcifies into the baseline any future government has to build on. A hospital system allowed to hollow out for long enough stops being a hospital system in need of repair and becomes, instead, the new normal a country has quietly accepted. The same logic applies to a state that lets its constitutional commissions sit vacant, or that responds to a fatal ferry disaster with process rather than accountability, or that permits a new class of insiders to consolidate gains while the mechanisms meant to check that consolidation remain unfunded, understaffed, or unconsulted.

Guyana has an advantage Cuba does not: resources, and time that has not yet run out. But advantages of that kind are not self-executing.

Capacity not spent on the functions that matter now does not sit in reserve, waiting to be spent later. It is capacity a country has simply chosen not to build.

Cuba’s ruins are the argument for urgency in a country running out of everything. Guyana’s oil wealth should be the argument for urgency in a country that has, for once, no excuse.

— The Board

Your Teenager Was Never Going to Comply — And the Data Proves It

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 Your Teenager Was Never Going to Comply — And the Data Proves It

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Why the world’s first under-16 social media ban collapsed in six months, and what it means before Guyana writes a law of its own

Imagine passing a law, watching it fail within four months, and having the exact mechanism of its failure documented by seven researchers before the ink on the policy was even dry. That is, more or less, what happened in Australia.

In December 2025, Australia became the first country in the world to bar anyone under 16 from holding an account on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Threads, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, or Kick. It was the most aggressive piece of adolescent social media regulation any government had attempted, and more than a dozen countries — along with numerous U.S. states — are reportedly watching to see if it works before writing similar laws of their own.

A team of economists and psychologists from the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Bocconi University, the University of Cologne, and Harvard Law School decided not to wait for the verdict. They surveyed hundreds of Australian teenagers four months after the ban took effect, then went back two months later to see what had changed. What they found should matter to every parent, teacher, and lawmaker anywhere a similar ban is being discussed — Guyana included.

The numbers, plainly

Four months in, only about 27% of banned 14- and 15-year-olds were actually complying. The rest had found a way around it, or had simply never been stopped in the first place. Two months after that, compliance had fallen to 6% — roughly one teenager in twenty.

This did not happen because enforcement got weaker. It happened while enforcement got stronger: platform penalties doubled over the same window, and regulators stepped up monitoring. The ban unwound anyway.

Why a ban with real teeth still failed

The researchers found that breaking the law carried almost no personal risk in a teenager’s mind — only 22% believed there were any consequences for being caught, even though 98% knew the ban existed. And getting around it required almost no effort: three in four teens called it easy or very easy. Some just lied about their birthdate. Some borrowed a parent’s or older sibling’s account. In one in five cases, an adult in the household actively helped a teenager get back online after their account was shut down.

But the single strongest predictor of whether a teenager kept using banned platforms wasn’t the law, and it wasn’t how hard the workaround was. It was how many of their five closest friends were still online. Teens whose friend groups had mostly quit were far more likely to comply themselves. Teens whose friend groups hadn’t quit almost never did — even when they knew, accurately, that quitting was what the law asked of them.

This is the part worth sitting with: teenagers were not confused about what their peers were doing. Their estimates of how many classmates were still on social media were accurate throughout the study. They understood the situation correctly, and they still went back — because being the only one offline, when your friends aren’t, has a real social cost, and no law was cancelling that cost out.

The math behind the collapse

The researchers asked teenagers a more pointed question: how many of your peers would need to quit before you’d be willing to quit too? The average answer was two out of three. But actual compliance never got past one in four. The gap between what teenagers said they needed to see, and what was actually happening around them, was never close to closing — which is why, when the researchers built a mathematical model of the tipping point Australia would need to reach for the ban to hold, the only stable number it produced was around 17%, below the rate already observed in April. The model predicted the collapse before the June data confirmed it.

There’s one more detail that explains why the pressure ran the wrong way. Teenagers who kept using social media were seen by their peers as more popular, not less — only 4% of respondents thought compliers were the more popular group. The teenagers with the most social influence were the ones least likely to log off, which meant the platforms never stopped being the place where the socially important conversations were happening.

What actually seemed to help

The researchers weren’t just interested in tallying a failure. They point to five things that might do better than a blanket ban on its own: tying restrictions to school grade rather than birth date,since classmates a year older are the most immediate source of pressure; favoring limits on use over outright prohibition — 72% of teens said they’d actually prefer a self-limiting app to a ban; pairing any restriction with campaigns that make not using social media something to be proud of, not something to hide; giving teenagers something real to do with the hours a ban would free up; and being honest that social media is one piece of the adolescent mental health picture, not the whole of it.

Why this matters here

Guyana does not yet have a law like Australia’s. But the conversation about one is already underway, and the evidence above is the most rigorous account anywhere of what happens when a country tries it.

There’s a reason to think the lesson could land even harder here than it did in Australia. Australia’s ban leaned entirely on large multinational platforms policing themselves, backed by a fine those companies could absorb — and even that arrangement only produced 6% compliance within six months. A smaller country, with a smaller and more tightly connected teenage population, would likely see the same peer dynamics resolve faster, not slower — because in a small enough social network, it takes fewer holdouts to keep everyone else online.

None of this means the underlying concern is wrong. It isn’t. It means the tool matters as much as the intention behind it. A ban that looks strong on paper and dissolves within two school terms protects no one — it only teaches a generation of teenagers, correctly, that this particular law wasn’t real.

 

Prem Narine: murders covered up -Sgt Bascom exonerated (Pt III)

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Prem Narine: murders covered up -Sgt Bascom exonerated (Pt III)

OPINION BY: GHK LALL September 2026

Was former Guyana Police Force Sergeant Dion Bascom, a victim of government foul play?  Was he made into the sacrificial lamb so that another could be protected, saved?  So that seniors in the Police could carry on with their side businesses?  So that the PPP Govt could maintain its lucrative criminal relationships?  I don’t know.  Nor do I claim to know.  But this is what I know, as sifted from the facts that recently made their way into public space.

Fact One: there were six execution-style murders.  Fact Two: one party has been fingered as the perp alleged in all six of those capital felonies.  Fact Three: the discloser of those facts is, ironically, high up in the Guyana Police Major Crimes Dept.  Fact Four: Sgt Bascom had alleged coverup in murder, which may or may not include the six execution-style murders.  Those mentioned by one who I have no choice but to identify as an approved Guyana Police and PPP Govt whistleblower.  Fact Five: Sgt Bascom had feared for his life, as he stated.  Fact Six: Sgt Bascom has claimed he was being setup, part of a frameup and coverup, by the Guyana Police.

Considering the jolting revelations about six execution-style murders from one of the Guyana Police Dept’s Finest, Snr Supt, Prem Narine, I submit that former Sgt Dion Bascom now stands exonerated.  This man is owed an apology from the Police Top Cop, and the top-ranking leaders in the PPP Govt.  The first apologies should come from the Police Commissioner and the Hon Minister of Home Affairs, though new to the job.  In mentioning the Minister of Home Affairs, I look deeper, and go further.

Whoever was the minister(s) holding that sensitive portfolio during that execution-style murder season, it is pushing reason to the brink to think that he would not have known.  Nor would not have had an interest in bodies falling, and murder numbers rising.  Suspended for the moment is the traditional political management of the Guyana Police by different governments in different years, without a single year excluded.  As a matter of sheer routine, administrative curiosity, management updates, and the minister’s own regard for the murder record on his watch, I tender that he had to have some knowledge.  It would be a gross evasion of duty, if the Top Cop didn’t so engage and inform the honorable minister.  In identical fashion, it would rise to the level of gross negligence if that now armed Minister of Home Affairs kept what he knew to himself, and decided (on his own) that that’s neither the PPP Cabinet’s, or the PPP Govt leadership’s, business.

It’s time for Fact Seven in this conversation.  The remarkable fact that the sole suspect, with evidence to match (the super said so, not I) was almost like an unappointed PPP Prime Minister, had to drive the then Minister of Home Affairs to share around that hottest of scorching potatoes.  Perhaps, a better reference is an unpinned grenade. 

No one man-not even a powerful minister, no matter how much of a demolisher or inheritor of the role he may have been-wants to be remembered as the sole owner of that situation.

Having said all of that, it shocks that there were no capital charges.  Yeah, money talks, bull walks.  Friendship counts, the law is counted out.  Are Guyana’s top lawmen listening, feeling the heat generated by this sordid situation?  Is the president, whoever that was at the time, and those since?  Six families were mocked with the unclosed loss of loved ones via violent crimes.  The Guyana family was scorned though murder evidence managed away from it.  Sgt Dion Bascom was putout and put away with extra energy and ferocious determination.  All the while, six execution-style murders stayed unsolved because the PPP Govt had an asset to protect, a dog in its crime detection dog-and-pony show.

I recommend a medal and proper reward for Sgt Bascom.  Cybercrime charges were blown up to blow him away.  He dodged a bullet.  Snr Supt Prem Narine should get a special medal.  The Order of Silence.

Guyana’s Great Growth Paradox: The Numbers Are Soaring. Are the People?

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Guyana’s Great Growth Paradox: The Numbers Are Soaring. Are the People?

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Part I of “Guyana 2025: Growth, Gold, Oil—and the Questions Behind the Numbers”

Guyana is again being celebrated as one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. The Government points to an estimated 19.3 percent expansion in real GDP in 2025; the IMF reports growth above 19 percent, following average annual growth near 40 percent over 2023 and 2024. Those are extraordinary numbers. They should not be denied, minimized, or spun away  

But neither should Guyanese be asked to confuse a statistical explosion with a national transformation.

The real question is not whether Guyana is growing. It plainly is. The real question is what is growing, who controls it, who benefits from it, and what will remain when the easy oil money has been spent.

The headline hides the story

The Government’s own 2026 Budget Speech reported total real GDP growth of 19.3 percent in 2025, oil-and-gas growth of 21 percent, and non-oil growth of 14.3 percent. It also reported production of 261.1 million barrels of crude during the year. The IMF similarly reported that oil output exceeded 900,000 barrels per day by the end of 2025—35 percent higher than one year earlier—and identified construction, agriculture, mining and manufacturing as the sources of non-oil expansion.

That is the official celebration: oil is booming, non-oil activity is rising, unemployment has declined, and Guyana is moving forward.

But growth percentages can be deceptive when one sector has become so overwhelmingly large that it dwarfs the rest of the economy. A small sector can grow quickly and still add comparatively little to national output. A giant sector can grow at a slower rate and still determine the national result.

That is the difference between a headline and an explanation.

 Oil remains the engine

By the Government’s own account, oil and gas remain the main driver of Guyana’s overall economic growth.  The IMF’s description of strong non-oil growth does not change that fundamental fact; it confirms that construction and other domestic activity are rising beside an oil sector whose output has expanded at an astonishing pace.

The public deserves an honest accounting of what this means.

When oil revenue enters the Treasury, is withdrawn from the Natural Resource Fund, and is spent on roads, bridges, buildings, housing, contractors, equipment, security, transport and public services, the resulting activity is recorded as construction, services or other non-oil output.

That activity is real. Workers are paid. Contractors earn. Materials are bought. Projects are announced. Concrete is poured.

But let us be clear: oil money spent through a non-oil sector does not automatically become economic diversification.

A construction surge financed by petroleum is still dependent on petroleum. A housing boom sustained by state contracts and oil-funded liquidity is still vulnerable to the spending decisions of the state. A retail sector expanding because contractors, officials and oil-service workers have more money to spend has not necessarily become an internationally competitive industry.

It may be activity. It may even be prosperity for some. But it is not yet proof of transformation.

The country of two economies

This is where the paradox begins.

Guyana can be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world while an ordinary family still counts every dollar at the market. It can export hundreds of millions of barrels of crude while nurses, teachers, pensioners, vendors, farmers and public servants wonder why rent, groceries, transport, school supplies, medicine and utilities remain so difficult to afford. It can be rich in GDP while too many citizens remain poor in purchasing power.

It can be praised abroad for growth while people at home ask a much simpler question: if the country is doing so well, why is life still so hard?

That question is not anti-development. It is the most pro-development question a country can ask.

A government that truly believes in shared prosperity should welcome it. It should answer it with facts: poverty data, household-income data, food-price data, wage data, rental data, regional spending data and clear evidence of who has gained from the oil era. Instead, Guyanese are too often presented with a national growth rate as though it settles every argument. It does not.

Growth is not distribution

GDP tells us how much output is produced. It does not tell us how income is divided. It does not tell us whether a mother can afford milk, whether a young man can find skilled work, whether a farmer can compete, whether a pensioner can buy medication, or whether a hinterland community has reliable health care, electricity, roads, water and internet.

It does not tell us whether prosperity has reached the people who were promised that oil would change their lives.

The IMF reported that unemployment declined to 6.2 percent at the end of 2025, even as it described the economy as constrained by limited implementation capacity and stressed the importance of saving a larger share of additional oil revenue in line with absorptive capacity.  That is not a minor footnote. It is the warning inside the celebration.

A country can spend faster than it can plan. It can build faster than it can maintain. It can borrow because lenders see oil wealth, import because contractors need equipment, and announce projects faster than institutions can supervise them.

Then the boom becomes a conveyor belt: money enters, contracts multiply, imports surge, costs rise, and the public is asked to applaud the speed of the machine without being allowed to inspect where it is taking the country.

The construction question

The IMF identifies construction as the principal driver of Guyana’s non-oil expansion.  That should prompt celebration only after it prompts scrutiny.

What is being built? Who receives the contracts? How many projects are completed on time and within budget? How much equipment is being imported? How much is being leased, shared and efficiently used? How much work is done by Guyanese labor? How much value stays in Guyana after foreign machinery, materials, consultants and suppliers are paid?

Most importantly: what will these projects produce ten years from now?

A country does not become developed merely because it has construction sites. Development is built when roads lower farm costs, schools produce capable graduates, hospitals save lives, energy reduces business expenses, ports increase exports, and public investments are maintained long after the ribbon-cutting ceremony is over.

Without that discipline, a construction boom can become little more than a temporary distribution system for oil rents.

The question Government cannot avoid

Guyana’s growth is real. Its oil production is real. Its new fiscal space is real. Its opportunity is real. So is the responsibility.

The Government must stop treating every request for a deeper accounting as hostility to progress. The public is not asking Guyana to reject oil. The public is asking whether oil is being used to build a country that can stand when oil prices fall, wells decline, contracts end, and the easy years are over.

That is the test.

♦ Not whether GDP reaches another record.

♦ Not whether another foreign institution applauds the numbers.

♦ Not whether another minister can announce another project.

The test is whether oil wealth is producing a broader productive economy; whether it is lowering the cost of living rather than inflating it; whether it is building competent institutions rather than merely bigger budgets; and whether the people who endured Guyana before oil are finally receiving more than speeches about what oil might one day bring.

Guyana may be growing faster than almost any country in the world. But growth is not the same thing as transformation.

And until the benefits are broad, visible, measurable and lasting, the world’s fastest-growing economy will remain one of its most troubling paradoxes.