Guyana Needs Merit, Not Political Favor

OPINION BY :Hem Kumar– September 2026

This U.S. settlement offers a sharp lens through which to examine a major gap in Guyana’s public administration: the absence of credible, enforceable safeguards against political, racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination in employment—particularly where the State is the employer, purchaser, regulator, and distributor of opportunity.

Accenture Federal Services, a major government contractor, has agreed to pay the United States  $25  million to resolve allegations that it falsely certified compliance with federal equal-opportunity requirements while using race and sex as factors in hiring, promotion, training, and leadership-development decisions.

The allegations are especially important because they go beyond crude or open discrimination. The U.S. government alleged that the company used internal demographic targets, color-coded workforce reports, race-conscious hiring exercises, separate promotion pipelines, and training opportunities restricted by race or sex. The Justice Department’s central position was straightforward: a company cannot receive taxpayer-funded contracts, certify that employment decisions will be made without regard to race or sex, and then make those characteristics part of the employment decision.

Whether one agrees with every aspect of the U.S. government’s policy direction is not the main lesson for Guyana. The larger lesson is that a serious State must have laws, oversight institutions, contract rules, and remedies capable of detecting and punishing employment discrimination. Guyana does not.

The Guyanese Reality

In Guyana, meritocracy is too often a slogan rather than a governing standard. Employment, promotion, dismissal, contract awards, boards, commissions, scholarships, training opportunities, and access to State-connected opportunities can be clouded by political affiliation, ethnicity, family ties, personal loyalty, and proximity to those in power.

Too many Guyanese believe—often with good reason—that competence is not enough. A person’s prospects may depend on who recommended them, which party they are perceived to support, whether they are considered politically reliable, or whether their identity makes them convenient or inconvenient to the administration of the day.

The consequences are not abstract. Workers can be sidelined, denied advancement, stripped of substantive responsibilities, transferred punitively, excluded from training, or removed from positions without transparent and fair processes. Applicants can be overlooked without receiving any explanation. Qualified citizens can watch jobs go to persons with weaker credentials but stronger political connections.

State culpability and the REO purge

The Guyanese crisis is more serious than the absence of strong anti-discrimination legislation. The State itself appears capable of becoming the principal vehicle through which cronyism, nepotism, political preference, and punitive exclusion are practised.

The sudden removal of all ten Regional Executive Officers, followed by the immediate naming of replacements, raises grave questions about whether the public service is being administered according to law, merit, transparency, and due process—or according to the political preferences of the ruling PPP-C administration.

These were not minor clerical posts. Regional Executive Officers sit at the heart of regional government. They oversee administration, spending, implementation of public projects, personnel, services, and the machinery through which citizens access the State. Such offices should never be treated as political rewards, party property, or positions to be distributed at the pleasure of any President. These are Public Service appointments that are bound by a prescribed process of appointment 

If the former REOs were removed for misconduct, incapacity, poor performance, financial irregularity, or breach of duty, then the evidence, assessments, notices, and procedures should be placed before the public. If they were not removed for those reasons, then Guyanese are entitled to know why ten senior officials were displaced simultaneously and why the replacements were apparently selected without an open, competitive, and independently verifiable process.

The central question is unavoidable: Were these appointments made through public-service rules and merit-based selection, or were they cherry-picked through executive and political discretion?

A genuine merit process would require advertised vacancies, published eligibility criteria, applications, independent assessment, documented interviews, scoring, a shortlist, conflict-of-interest safeguards, and an appointment process insulated from partisan influence. The country should be able to see why each successful candidate was more qualified than every other Guyanese who might reasonably have applied.

Where none of that is visible, the perception of political patronage becomes unavoidable.

In a small society, where government remains the dominant employer and where state-linked contracts carry enormous economic value, discrimination and patronage have an even more corrosive effect. They do not merely harm an individual worker. They can determine which families advance, which communities remain excluded, and who gains access to the country’s oil-era wealth.

Oil Wealth Requires Higher Standards

Guyana is no longer a country that can excuse weak institutions as the unavoidable condition of poverty. The country now has access to unprecedented petroleum revenues. It is building roads, hospitals, schools, energy projects, housing schemes, public agencies, and major procurement programmes.

Every one of those programs will require employees, contractors, consultants, engineers, administrators, suppliers, and managers. The question is whether those opportunities will be allocated through transparent competition and demonstrated competence—or whether they will become another machinery for entrenching political patronage.

That requires more than speeches about inclusion. It requires rules that can be enforced against those with political power.

What Guyana Should Do

Guyana needs a modern employment-equality and public-integrity framework that expressly prohibits discrimination in hiring, promotion, training, transfer, disciplinary action, dismissal, public appointments, and access to government-funded opportunities.

Such reform should include:

⇒ A clear statutory prohibition against discrimination based on race, ethnicity, sex, religion, political opinion, disability, age, social origin, and other protected characteristics.

⇒ Explicit protection against political discrimination and retaliation in public employment and State-owned or State-controlled entities.

⇒ Mandatory merit-based recruitment procedures for public-sector jobs, including published criteria, scored interviews, documented selection decisions, and independent review.

⇒ A legal requirement that public contracts include enforceable equal-opportunity and non-discrimination clauses.

⇒ Contractor certifications confirming that hiring, promotion, and workplace opportunities are administered without discrimination or political retaliation.

⇒ Strong whistleblower protections for employees who report discriminatory practices, political interference, falsified recruitment records, or retaliatory dismissals.

⇒ An independent employment-equity or public-service commission with investigative authority, access to records, power to compel evidence, and authority to recommend remedies.

⇒ Public reporting on recruitment, promotions, dismissals, acting appointments, contract awards, and training opportunities across ministries, agencies, State boards, and State-owned enterprises.

⇒ Meaningful consequences, including reinstatement, compensation, disqualification from public contracts, recovery of funds, and sanctions against officials who abuse public office.

No More “Discretion” Without Accountability

The most dangerous word in Guyanese public administration may be “discretion.” In principle, officials need discretion to manage institutions. In practice, unchecked discretion can become a cover for discrimination, cronyism, victimization, and the quiet removal of persons deemed politically undesirable.

The Accenture settlement demonstrates an important principle: discrimination involving public funds is not merely an internal human-resources issue. It can amount to fraud against taxpayers when an organization certifies compliance with equal-opportunity requirements but acts differently behind closed doors.

Guyana should adopt that principle. Any company, agency, board, contractor, or public official that receives public funds while manipulating jobs and opportunities according to race, sex, political affiliation, or personal connection should face real scrutiny and real consequences.

The country cannot build a modern oil economy on an old foundation of patronage. Guyana’s wealth belongs to all Guyanese. So must its opportunities.

–The Board

 ACCOUNTABILITY IN GEOPOLITICS · PT III  

THE GRAMMAR OF NON-ALIGNMENT

Rule-Shaper or Rule-Taker

Part One of this series read the New Delhi Declaration as a document organised around omission — a text that could gesture at grievances against Washington and Moscow without ever naming either. Part Two found the same instinct closer to home, in the quiet, unexplained handoff of the Berbice port file from Chinese to American patrons, and in a security-cooperation architecture that has never been made to answer for what it means alongside Huawei’s entrenched surveillance footprint. Both cases showed a state; or a bloc of states — protecting room to maneuver by declining to say plainly what it wants and from whom.

Prime Minister Modi offered a phrase at the summit that deserves to be taken seriously rather than filed as a rhetorical flourish: the Global South, he said, should stop being a rule-taker and start being a rule-shaper. It is worth asking what that would actually require, and then asking whether Guyana — a small state with more leverage available to it than its size would suggest, sitting on one of the largest per-capita oil discoveries in modern history — has used any of it.

THE ONE CONTRACT WHERE THE TEST IS NOT HYPOTHETICAL

Guyana does not need an abstract theory of rule-shaping. It has a live, specific, currently pending opportunity to exercise it: the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC. This newsroom’s own reporting, in the “Stabroek Surrender” series and its subsequent installments, has laid out the mechanism in detail. The contract contains no ring-fencing between projects, meaning that new developments — Uaru, Whiptail, Hammerhead, worth a combined US$32.2 billion — enter the same undivided cost-recovery pool the consortium’s exploration and development costs have drawn from since the beginning. The July 2026 milestone widely celebrated as a turning point, the moment Guyana’s profit share crossed fifty percent after Exxon confirmed full recovery of its initial US$55 billion in costs, is offset by exactly this feature: each new project resets the clock on what can be recovered before the state’s share improves further.

Christopher Ram, the Guyanese chartered accountant and attorney who has pressed this argument longest and most precisely, has pointed to Article 32.1 of the agreement, which does not require a finding of impossibility, hardship, or breach to reopen its terms. It requires only that Exxon consent. That is a materially different proposition from what President Ali has offered publicly: that the contract’s A contract clause that can be reopened by mutual agreement is not a wall. It is a door the government has chosen not to knock on.

Article 32.1 does not require impossibility or breach to reopen the contract. It requires only that Exxon consent. That is a door, not a wall — and the government has chosen not to knock on it.

SANCTITY OF CONTRACT, SELECTIVELY APPLIED

What makes “sanctity of contract” a harder position to defend on its own terms is that the government has not, in practice, treated the Stabroek agreement as untouchably sacred. Audit deadline extensions have been granted. A gas feasibility study the contract itself contemplates has never been conducted. These are not renegotiations of headline fiscal terms, but they are departures from strict enforcement — evidence that the government is capable of treating the agreement’s obligations as negotiable when the negotiation runs in the consortium’s favour, and inflexible only when the negotiation would run in the state’s.

This is the precise inversion of what rule-shaping would look like. A rule-shaper, in Modi’s own formulation from the summit floor, does not simply accept the terms an established power offers and defend that acceptance as principle. It names what it wants changed and uses whatever leverage it holds to change it. Ram’s full renegotiation proposal — a sunset on the tax waiver by 2029, royalty escalation from two to six to ten percent, ring-fenced cost centres so new projects cannot dilute the state’s position, a recovery ceiling cut from seventy-five to fifty percent of revenue, and cash-funded decommissioning backed by parent-company guarantees rather than the current, weaker liability structure — is not a radical document.

It is the kind of counter-offer any government confident in its own leverage would put on the table and let Exxon accept, modify, or walk away from. Guyana has not put it on the table. It has instead described the table itself as fixed.

WHAT ACTUAL LEVERAGE WOULD LOOK LIKE

None of this requires Guyana to become adversarial toward Exxon, any more than genuine rule-shaping requires BRICS to become adversarial toward Washington or Moscow. The distinction Part One drew about the New Delhi Declaration applies with equal force here: there is a difference between careful diplomatic language that preserves room for a negotiated outcome, and careful diplomatic language that exists to avoid the negotiation altogether. BRICS, whatever the limits of its declaration, did at least gesture toward the substance of its members’ grievances — tariffs, sanctions, restraint in an active war — even while declining to name names. Guyana’s public position on Stabroek has not gestured toward the substance of Ram’s argument at all.

It has simply asserted that the conversation is closed, using a phrase, “sanctity of contract,” that the government’s own conduct elsewhere in the same agreement does not consistently honor.

This is the throughline across all three parts of this series. BRICS proved that a bloc of eleven states, several of them at odds with one another, could produce a declaration vague enough to hold together without ever taking the harder step of assigning responsibility. Guyana has shown the same skill on a smaller stage — first in the unexplained silence over who built, or was meant to build, the Berbice port, and now in a fiscal contract whose own text offers a legal path to renegotiation that has simply gone unused. A rule-shaper opens the door provided for in its own contracts. Guyana has the door.

What has been missing is not leverage, and not even a legal argument — Ram supplied that months ago. What has been missing is the willingness to use the word “renegotiate” in public and mean it.

This concludes “The Grammar of Non-Alignment.” Part One examined the New Delhi Declaration’s engineered vagueness; Part Two traced the same pattern through Guyana’s unexplained Berbice port patron handoff and its parallel security and surveillance arrangements; Part Three has tested the resulting claim to “rule-shaping” against the one contract where Guyana holds a clear, unused legal path to renegotiate its own terms.

 ACCOUNTABILITY IN GEOPOLITICS · PART TWO OF THREE

 THE GRAMMAR OF NON-ALIGNMENT– PT II

Guyana’s Own Generalized Language 

 OPINION BY: Staff–Writer  

Part One of this series examined a declaration built almost entirely out of omissions — a document that could condemn tariffs without naming the United States and condemn sanctions without naming Russia, because naming either would have broken the consensus holding eleven governments together in one room. Guyana belongs to no such bloc and signed no such declaration. But the same instinct for language that commits to nothing while appearing to commit to something governs how this country has talked about its own most consequential piece of positioning between great powers: the deep-water port planned for the mouth of the Berbice River.

A DECADE, TWO PATRONS, NO PUBLIC RECONCILIATION

In 2015, the China State Construction Engineering Company signed a memorandum of understanding with the Guyanese government to conduct what was described as a “pre-pre-feasibility” study for a deepwater harbour at Berbice, at the company’s own expense and with no obligation attached to the state. It was a modest instrument, but it was real: a formal, signed acknowledgment that China had scoped this specific piece of infrastructure first. By 2023, American analysts tracking Chinese engagement in the hemisphere were still citing China State Construction and China Dalian as having examined the Berbice site.

Then the patron changed. By 2025 and into 2026, President Ali was confirming a feasibility study underway with Bechtel, the American engineering firm, and Hess Corporation, ExxonMobil’s former–partner in the Stabroek consortium, with costs shared between the state and Hess. The Modern Port Act followed as the legislative vehicle. Nowhere in the public record does the government explain what happened to the 2015 Chinese MoU in between. It was not formally cancelled, in any statement this newsroom has located. It was not renegotiated. It simply stopped being mentioned, and a new set of partners appeared to occupy the same physical site and the same strategic purpose.

This is Guyana’s version of the BRICS declaration’s careful vagueness. Where the bloc avoided naming Washington on tariffs to preserve consensus among its own divided membership, Georgetown has avoided naming China’s earlier position on Berbice to preserve room to maneuver between two powers whose competition in this hemisphere is no longer subtle. The silence is not an oversight. It is the position.

THE SECURITY TRACK TELLS THE SAME STORY

The pattern repeats on the security side of the ledger. On August 12, 2026, Guyana signed an enhanced memorandum of understanding with the United States committing US$2 million toward “air domain awareness and unmanned aerial systems,”signed by Foreign Minister Hugh Todd and US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, and framed publicly around organized crime and drug trafficking. It built on a March 2025 security cooperation MoU, a March 2026 drone-monitoring and EEZ surveillance announcement, and a July 2026 exchange between the Guyana Defense Force and the Florida National Guard on drone concepts. During the same Landau visit, the two governments also discussed port, road, and housing infrastructure, and the visit referenced a recent US$150 million American bauxite investment.

What the government has not said — publicly, in any statement this newsroom has found — is how this new American security architecture sits alongside Huawei’s already-established role in the country’s surveillance infrastructure across at least two regions. Analysts have flagged the data-security implications of that arrangement for years. The Guyanese state has never addressed the two tracks in the same sentence, let alone explained how they will coexist, what data each side can see, or what happens if their interests diverge. Like BRICS declining to name Washington and Moscow in the same clause, Georgetown has kept its American security patron and its Chinese surveillance vendor in entirely separate public conversations, each described as though the other does not exist.

WHAT THE SILENCE IS ACTUALLY PROTECTING

None of this means Guyana has chosen a side, or should be read as covertly favoring one power over the other. That is precisely the point, and precisely what makes the comparison to the New Delhi Declaration useful rather than merely decorative. BRICS’s vagueness on Iran, Ukraine, and tariffs was not confusion — it was a deliberate technique for extracting the appearance of unity from genuinely divergent interests without forcing any member to choose. Guyana’s silence on the Chinese-to-American handoff at Berbice, and on the Huawei-to-Pentagon handoff in its surveillance architecture, serves an equivalent function: it lets the state accept infrastructure, financing, and security cooperation from both directions without ever being pinned to a public accounting of the trade-offs involved in either relationship.

The difference is that BRICS’s vagueness was negotiated in the open, across eleven governments, in a document anyone can read. Guyana’s has developed by omission — through MoUs that quietly stop being mentioned, and press briefings that describe each new arrangement as though it is the first and only one.

A rule-shaper, to use Modi’s phrase from the New Delhi summit, names its terms in public. What Guyana has practiced instead, on the two files that matter most to its position in a contested Atlantic corridor, is the diplomacy of the unstated MoU.

Part Three of this series tests Prime Minister Modi’s claim that the Global South is becoming a “rule-shaper” against Guyana’s actual conduct — measured against the Stabroek Block PSA, the pattern documented here, and what genuine leverage would look like if Georgetown chose to exercise it.

Surprise Visits Are Not Public-Service Reform

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Fine. But why must a ministerial ambush be necessary for Government to discover that its own offices are failing the public?

That is the real question.

For years, citizens have complained about the same degrading experiences across government ministries and agencies: unanswered telephones, endless lines, missing files, staff who pass people from desk to desk, officers who appear indifferent, and citizens made to feel as if they are begging for a favor rather than seeking a public service they are entitled to receive.

None of this is new. None of it should require a surprise visit to uncover.

When a minister must personally turn up, unannounced, to confirm that an office is dysfunctional, it is not merely an indictment of frontline staff. It is a damning indictment of the Permanent Secretary, departmental heads, supervisors, internal reporting systems, and the wider machinery of public administration.

◊ Where are the performance reports?

◊  Where are the service-delivery targets?

◊ Where are the call-response records, queue-time data, complaint registers, file-tracking systems, staff evaluations, and independent audits?

◊  What exactly are senior managers monitoring every day if it takes a minister walking through the door to reveal that citizens are being ignored?

The much bragged about Digital Ecosystem

Government cannot boast about smart cities, digital transformation, modernization, and a safer, more efficient Guyana while managing public offices through a system of occasional surprise inspections. That is not modern management. It is reactionary supervision dressed up as decisive leadership.

A public service cannot be run on the assumption that employees will perform only when they fear that a minister may suddenly appear. That approach belongs to an old command-and-control culture—one too close to the “Massa Days” mentality Guyana should have left behind.

Unannounced visits have their place. They can expose problems that polished reports conceal. They can give decision-makers a direct view of how ordinary citizens are treated. They can also send a needed signal that public servants are accountable.

But they are not a substitute for institutional reform.

Guyana needs continuous, evidence-based oversight of public service delivery. Public-facing government offices should have properly governed monitoring systems, including video surveillance where appropriate, electronic queue management, recorded and audited call systems, file-tracking mechanisms, service standards, accessible complaint channels, and regular independent performance audits.

These measures must be implemented with clear privacy protections and rules against political misuse. The purpose is not to create a workplace police state. It is to protect citizens, identify recurring failures, reward competent workers, improve training, and ensure that supervisors cannot pretend that problems do not exist.

Taxpayers should not have to finance ministerial trips simply to establish whether staff are attending to the public. Ministers have policy portfolios to manage. Their time should not be consumed by discovering basic failures that competent managers ought to identify and correct daily.

If a department cannot tell its minister how many callers were answered, how long citizens waited, how many complaints were received, whether applications were processed on time, or which officers repeatedly failed the public, then that department is not being managed. It is being left to drift.

Editor’s Note: Accountability Cannot Stop at the Counter

The minister’s unannounced visit exposed more than poor customer service. It exposed the failure of a Government that has budgeted billions for ministries and agencies, financed staff training, purchased equipment, promoted digitalization, and repeatedly promised improved service delivery—yet still appears unable to ensure that ordinary citizens are treated efficiently and respectfully at the most basic point of contact.

The issue is not whether an employee was discourteous on one particular day, whether a phone rang unanswered, or whether citizens waited too long in one office. Those are the visible symptoms. The deeper disease is institutional failure.

Value for money is not a press release. It is not a budget speech, a ribbon-cutting exercise, a glossy report, or a ministerial visit arranged for public consumption. Value for money is reflected in results: calls answered, files located, applications processed, appointments kept, complaints resolved, citizens informed, and people treated with basic dignity.

If a minister can enter an office unannounced and discover dysfunction that has apparently escaped the attention of the ministry’s management, then the minister must not confine responsibility to the staff behind the counter. The Permanent Secretary must answer. Departmental heads must answer. Supervisors must answer. And the minister, as the political head with responsibility for the portfolio, must answer as well.

◊Who monitors service standards?

◊ Who receives and analyses complaints?

◊ Who checks attendance and productivity?

◊ Who reviews pending applications and delayed files?

◊ Who determines whether training has actually improved performance?

◊ Who evaluates whether money spent on technology has reduced waiting times and made services easier to access?

The same concern applies beyond a single office. Guyana has become accustomed to presidential and Cabinet outreaches where the country’s highest political officials are called upon to learn that a drain is blocked, a streetlight is broken, a road is deteriorating, or potholes have gone unattended. Citizens may welcome the intervention because it sometimes brings quick relief.

That is not a sign of strong governance. It is evidence of an administrative culture that is excessively top-down, reactive, and dependent on political intervention. A functioning State should not require the President to identify a blocked drain or a minister to discover that an office is failing to answer telephones.

The Government cannot credibly promote a “smart city,” modernization, technological transformation, or efficient public administration while relying on impromptu inspections and outreach tours as the principal tools for identifying routine failures. This is an asymmetry of governance: grand national ambitions at the top, but weak monitoring and poor execution where citizens actually encounter the State.

The minister’s visit was therefore useful—not because it revealed something extraordinary, but because it revealed what too many Guyanese already know. It also implicitly indicted the Government’s own management systems and the ministerial leadership responsible for ensuring that those systems work.

There should be consequences. Not theatrical reprimands for junior officers alone, but formal service-delivery reviews; public performance targets; audited complaint, call, and processing-time records; regular reports to Parliament; corrective deadlines for senior managers; and sanctions where negligence, incompetence, or chronic non-performance is established.

Ministers cannot take credit for budget allocations and new initiatives while disowning responsibility for the results. Permanent Secretaries cannot administer billions in public funds without being held accountable for whether their agencies deliver. Department heads cannot occupy positions of authority while routine dysfunction festers below them.

Until that happens, unannounced visits will remain what they are—brief moments of official discovery in a country where taxpayers have long been living with the consequences of Government’s failure to manage what it funds

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 The Article 51 Sleight of Hand

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar– September 2026

A Speaker’s press release, a Chief Whip’s rebuttal, and a consultation exercise that collapses the moment anyone asks what, precisely, is being consulted on

There is a particular kind of institutional evasion that does not deny the substance of a complaint so much as it changes the subject to something true but irrelevant, and hopes no one notices the swap. The Speaker of the National Assembly has just supplied a textbook specimen of it.

On Tuesday, President Irfaan Ali proceeded with a meeting billed as an engagement with the Parliamentary Foreign Relations Committee. Opposition members of that committee, and of the Economic Services Committee summoned for a separate sitting, did not attend. The We Invest in Nationhood Party said its MPs stayed away because correspondence to the Speaker had gone unanswered in any meaningful way. The Speaker, in a press release, acknowledged the correspondence, stated that a reply had in fact been dispatched, and closed with a line evidently meant to settle the matter: Article 51 of the Constitution provides that Parliament comprises the President and the National Assembly.

A civics footnote, delivered as though it were a rebuttal. It is not one. And the response from Opposition Chief Whip Tabitha Sarabo-Halley, released the same day, does the necessary work of showing why.  

WHAT WAS ACTUALLY ASKED

Sarabo-Halley’s account matters because it reframes what the dispute is actually about. Her letter to the Speaker, she says, did not simply ask whether a meeting was happening. It asked under what authority the meeting was being convened, in what capacity Members were being asked to attend, and what business was to be considered — the ordinary, minimum information any parliamentary committee needs before a Chairperson can properly summon it. The reply she received, she says, came not from the Speaker directly but from the Deputy Clerk, and it conceded the central point: these sessions do not constitute meetings of the respective Parliamentary Sectoral Committees.

“If these are not meetings of the respective Parliamentary Sectoral Committees, then Members cannot reasonably be expected to attend them as committee meetings.”

That is not a minor procedural quibble. It is the Clerk’s own office confirming that the thing opposition MPs were being asked to attend carried no defined parliamentary status at all — not a formally constituted committee sitting, not chaired by the committee’s own Chairperson, not built around a circulated agenda. What, then, was it? The Office of the President has called it consultation. APNU’s Coretta McDonald, present at a separate but related sitting, called it something blunter: “just one of those– photo op to say consultation did take place.”

THE CONSTITUTIONAL SLEIGHT OF HAND

This is where the Speaker’s invocation of Article 51 does its quiet work. The provision is accurate as far as it goes — the President is, formally, part of the institution of Parliament, alongside the National Assembly. But the Speaker deploys that fact to answer a question no one asked. Sarabo-Halley was not disputing that the President sits within Parliament in the constitutional sense. She was asking what a specific committee, operating under its own standing orders, under a specific Chairperson, with a specific mandate to scrutinize government policy and administration, was actually being convened to do — and by whom.

Those are different questions with different answers, and the difference is the entire point of having sectoral committees in the first place. A Parliamentary Sectoral Committee is not a standing invitation for the Executive to address its members whenever convenient. It is a scrutiny mechanism, with its own procedure for how it is summoned and what it does when it meets. If the President’s membership in Parliament under Article 51 were sufficient, on its own, to require committee attendance without an agenda, without the Chairperson convening it, and without any defined business — as Sarabo-Halley put it — then Article 51 appears to have been given a rather remarkable interpretation.

Her formulation is the more precise one, and worth stating plainly: the President being part of Parliament does not make parliamentary committees departments of the Executive. Collapsing that distinction is not a reading of Article 51. It is a repurposing of it.

A PATTERN WITH A NAME

This newsroom has tracked a recurring structure in how consultation gets performed in Guyana’s current political arrangement: an invitation is extended, attendance or non-attendance is then treated as the entire story, and the substantive question — consultation over what, on what terms, with what actual input into the outcome — goes unaddressed. The pattern recurred, in different registers, in the selective initiation of consultation on Judicial Service Commission, Local Government Commission, and Public Service Commission appointments earlier last month, where some appointments moved forward through formal consultation and the substantive Chancellor and Chief Justice vacancy; arguably the most consequential of the lot — did not.

The mechanism is the same here. Meet the form of consultation; contest the framing the moment anyone asks whether the form had any substance.

Rupnarain’s warning, in the account carried alongside McDonald’s, names the risk directly: that attendance at such a meeting would later be cited as proof the opposition was consulted, or had signed off on decisions already made — on, in this instance, live matters including Guyana’s ICJ case against Venezuela and the Third Country National Agreement with the United States. An opposition MP who walks into a room with no agenda has no way of knowing, in advance, whether their presence will be recorded as scrutiny or as endorsement.

That is precisely the ambiguity a properly constituted committee meeting, with a circulated agenda and a Chairperson in the chair, exists to foreclose.

WHAT THE SPEAKER’S OFFICE OWES THE RECORD

None of this requires assuming bad faith on the part of the Office of the President in scheduling the sessions, or accepting every particular of the opposition’s account without scrutiny of its own. It requires only taking seriously what the Deputy Clerk’s letter itself appears to have conceded, and asking the Speaker’s office the question its press release did not answer: if these were not sectoral committee meetings, what were they, under what parliamentary authority were members summoned to them, and why was a circulated agenda — the baseline precondition Sarabo-Halley says she specifically requested — not provided?

A constitutional citation is not a substitute for an answer to that question. The Speaker’s office would do more for the institution it represents by supplying one than by repeating, correctly but besides the point, that the President is part of Parliament.

Everyone already knew that. What no one yet knows is what, exactly, opposition MPs were being asked to attend, and on whose terms.

— The Board