THE AUDACITY OF THE UNACCOUNTABLE-Response to Freddie Kisson.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN
Independent Accountability Journalism | Georgetown, Guyana
EDITORIAL | June, 2026

The Audacity of the Unaccountable
On Freddie Kissoon’s review of Moses Bhagwan’s memoir, and the question of who has earned the right to judge
FREDDIE KISSOON has spent decades styling himself as Guyana’s foremost public conscience — the lone scribe willing to hold power to account.

 That self-portrait demands examination. Because when a man who was targeted with a chemical substance in an attack widely attributed to operatives loyal to the People’s Progressive Party — reportedly orchestrated by Kwame McCoy — chooses,  a decade later, to align his editorial voice with that same political formation’s dismissal of Moses Bhagwan, something more than literary criticism is taking place. What we witness is capitulation dressed as authority.

Let us be plain about what Kissoon’s review of Bhagwan’s memoir, Enter The Political Kingdom, actually is: a settling of old scores wrapped in the language of intellectual disappointment. It is the work of a man who once shared Bhagwan’s terrain of opposition and who has, by degrees, vacated it — not for reasons of principle, but of proximity to power.

Kissoon reserves his most withering contempt for a man who spent his life building what Kissoon only ever wrote about

Moses Bhagwan is not a polemicist. He is a statesman of the civic tradition — the rarer and more demanding vocation

His two published works, Enter The Political Kingdom and Ancestors of the River, represent something Kissoon has never produced: a sustained, documented contribution to the archive of Guyanese national memory.

These are not columns dashed off between grievances. They are the considered testimony of a man who signed marriage certificates in 1979 while others were being killed for their politics, who built and sustained the Working People’s Alliance through state terror, and who committed decades of his life to the liberation of Guyanese from poverty, racial tribalism, and authoritarian governance.

Kissoon accuses Bhagwan of political dishonesty and an anti-Jagan obsession. These are serious charges, rendered unserious by their source. The Kissoon who now writes these words is not the Kissoon of the 1980s. This is a Kissoon who, by his own published admission, went silent in April 2020 — the precise moment when silence carried the highest political cost.               He demanded Bhagwan speak on the elections rigging of that year. But what, precisely, was Kissoon’s own record of clarity on the systematic subversion of democratic process that preceded, accompanied, and followed those elections? The record is incomplete. The silence, when it mattered, was mutual.

The substantive criticisms Kissoon raises — Bhagwan’s omissions on the WPA in government from 2015 to 2020, the absence of reckoning with what Clive Thomas, Rupert Roopnaraine, and others became — are not without merit as questions.

Any serious accountability journalism would press them. This publication has pressed them. But Kissoon does not press them as a journalist. He deploys them as instruments of personal settlement, selectively, against a man he once called his political comrade, at the close of that man’s ninety-first year.

There is a name for that practice. It is not criticism. It is score-settling on a deathbed timeline.

A man who was chemically attacked by agents of the PPP now performs their preferred verdict on Bhagwan’s legacy. The substance worked.

Kissoon writes — with a register of wounded intimacy — that Bhagwan signed his marriage certificate in 1979.

He describes Moses as a kind, gentle soul. He tells us he was deflated when the memoir was announced because he anticipated what it would contain. And then he delivers the most devastating phrase of all, one that reveals more about Kissoon than about Bhagwan “Go to hell  Moses.”
That is not the language of a man doing journalism. That is the language of a man who feels abandoned. And perhaps Bhagwan did abandon Kissoon — by refusing, in April 2020, to become a weapon in Kissoon’s preferred narrative. Perhaps that refusal was itself a kind of political judgment that Kissoon has never forgiven.

We do not adjudicate every interpretive dispute Kissoon raises about Bhagwan’s memoir. Reasonable readers will disagree on questions of omission, emphasis, and the obligations of memoir as a form. But we do adjudicate the following: no columnist who aligned himself — whether through silence, selective outrage, or direct editorial companionship — with those who brought miasmic violence against him, and who then deploys that borrowed credibility to diminish one of Guyana’s genuine nation-builders, is operating in good faith.

Moses Bhagwan’s contribution to this nation is not carried in a column. It is carried in the bodies of men and women who were organised, protected, and politically educated under conditions that would have broken Kissoon before he reached the first paragraph. Ancestors of the River is a document of historical memory. Enter The Political Kingdom is a testimony of civic courage. Together, they constitute a body of work that will outlast every column Kissoon has published, including this one.
We challenge Freddie Kissoon to produce his own comparable record of nation-building — not his columns, which are the record of his opinions, but his record of sacrifice, organisation, sustained civic construction, and documented historical contribution to the Guyanese people.

Let him lay that record beside Bhagwan’s two books, beside the WPA’s years of unarmed resistance against Burnhamite state terror, beside the quiet, dignified labour of a man who chose not to be a weapon for any faction.

When that accounting is made, the question of who has earned the authority to pronounce on Moses Bhagwan’s legacy will answer itself.

Available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0dM2Bkcd
The 592 Guardian holds that legacy in the tradition we were founded to defend: evidence-led, prosecutorial, and unwilling to flatter power — including the power of the self-appointed.
— The Board of Editors, The 592 Guardian

ILLNESS AND DEATH,THEN MORE SICKNESS, DEATH-LIKE STATES

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦JUNE 2026                                                                                  ILLNESS AND DEATH, THEN MORE SICKNESS, DEATHLIKE STATE

I met Mr. Don Singh just once. Stopped and shared a few minutes in pleasant conversation. Whatever his politics, my impression was of a decent fellow. When the news of his sudden illness came, it was a surprise. Now that he has left these shores, may his soul rest in peace. To his biological family, my condolences on what has to be a hard loss. To his political family, regrets at losing a formidable worker. And, to my regret, whenever I make the mistake of thinking that things can’t get worse in this country, sink to more depraved depths, they do.

I struggle to understand how some can find joy in a man’s illness. A political man, a prince of a man, poor man, or a man who may have made himself, or be seen as, an enemy, it does not matter. There is ugly and there is ugly. To chortle privately on receiving the news of sickness is bad enough. To celebrate sickness in the vast public space of social media is degrading to an unfathomably dreadful level. It’s a sickness of a terrible kind by itself. Guyanese have really sunk to the bottom of a bottomless pit. When the savaging politics of this land of barbarians takes precedence over basic humanity, and day-to-day decency. I don’t care who is involved, so I say it now, and will say it forever. Whoever finds laughter, a time to engage in mockery, and an opportunity to kick a man, during a time of serious illness, that is one sick puppy. Sick in the head. Sick to the soul. And so sick and so callously indifferent that may have already died.

It is at times like these that I am glad to hold what is for me a prized outsider status.

Not trapped and warped by the prejudices that power local politics. Not condemned to the garbage dumpsite where ancient political grudges fester and flourish. There is so much hating, the call to forgiving may now be forever lost.

Guyanese are ghosts inside a skeleton that is overloaded and overflowing with a stream of poisons that find escape and the worst expressions when there is a human tragedy. Who is so base they see an enemy during those painful moments of loss and human catastrophe? I cast my eyes across to Venezuela and devastating earthquakes of this and that magnitude, and a full body shiver runs amok. Guyanese are so fortunate when the licks and kicks of providence were allocated. Perhaps that explains why the people of this country are so cursed. By the irresistible pull of their politics hurling them towards all that they have come to know: gutter reactions. Such was what stalked the news of Mr. Don Singh’s illness.

Now that he is gone to his creator, there was a moment for many of the social media warriors to regroup and recollect themselves. Having had a good laugh at sickness, the news of the man’s death was a line not to be crossed. Except that it was. The unbreachable breached. Treating self with profanity and vulgarity amid threnodies of grieving. Guyanese do wear their disgrace on their sleeves. All self-respect hollowed out and proudly displayed on the altar of political frenzies that burn at higher and higher pitches.

Seeing that sickness and death are causes for ostentatious displays of ignorance, it is no wonder that living has become such a corrosive burden in this divided, raucous, self-defeating society.

I behold Guyanese, who are committed to tearing apart and bringing down each other. It is all in the name of the wrenching and divisive politics that have haunted this land, in times of peace and relative quiet. Thus, I cringe in thinking of how citizens may be to fellow citizens in times that are hostile and more hateful. Often, I am glad that, though many a thought is shared in public spaces, there is still rebuffing getting any closer. The armor that protects. The safety net that upholds sanity.

May the soul of this brother, Don Singh, find eternal rest.

THE GUIANA SHIELD IS BEING REORGANIZED

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 The 592 GUARDIAN♦EDITORIAL♦ENVIORMENTAL ACCOUNTABILITY

The Guiana Shield Is Being Reorganised — And Guyana Is Watching From the Sidelines    What is happening in Venezuela’s mining belt is not Venezuela’s problem alone– JUNE 2026

The arrest of Nicolás Maduro by American special forces in January 2026 was treated in Guyana largely as a geopolitical curiosity — the end of a neighbourhood nuisance, perhaps even a quiet relief given the years of Essequibo belligerence his government sponsored. That reading was dangerously shallow. What has unfolded since in Venezuela’s Bolívar state is not the tidying up of a failed state. It is the reorganisation of the Guiana Shield — the same ancient geological formation that underlies Guyana’s gold and uranium frontier — under American strategic and commercial direction. Guyana is not a spectator to this process. It is a participant whether it chooses to be or not.

 On June 8th, army helicopters swept into Las Claritas, Venezuela’s ground zero for illegal gold mining in Bolívar state. Thousands of freelance prospectors fled. Days later, the United States launched an air strike killing Héctor “Niño” Guerrero Flores, the boss of the Tren de Aragua crime group. President Trump announced the operation was “co-ordinated closely with our friends in Venezuela.” Within weeks, Western mining executives were on the ground at El Callao, one of Venezuela’s most famous gold complexes. In April, Venezuela’s National Assembly had already passed a mining-reform bill cutting royalties, prolonging concessions and allowing international arbitration of disputes. 

The message was unambiguous: the Orinoco Mining Arc, a Portugal-sized stretch of rainforest and mineral wealth that Chávez nationalised and Maduro surrendered to criminal syndicates, is now open for Western business under American military cover.

 This should command the full attention of every Guyanese citizen who has followed this news—outlet coverage of the GGMC’s nine-year audit backlog, the U92 Energy Corp. uranium play at Kurupung, the G2 Goldfields/GMIN merger and Guyana’s failure to enforce change-of-control provisions, and the gold laundering vectors through the Guiana Shield into Brazil and beyond. 

 What The Economist describes from the Venezuelan side of the Shield is the mirror image of what we have been documenting from the Guyanese side: the same unregulated extractive frontier, the same absent regulatory infrastructure, the same criminal networks, the same geological wealth being approached without the governance architecture to manage it responsibly.

 The Shield Does Not Recognise Our Border

 The Guiana Shield is one of the oldest geological formations on Earth, stretching across Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana and northern Brazil. It holds some of the world’s most significant deposits of gold, diamonds, bauxite and — as the Kurupung case makes plain — uranium. The criminal networks that have exploited it do not organise themselves around the borders drawn by colonial cartographers. Tren de Aragua, whose leadership the Americans just eliminated in Las Claritas, has been documented operating across the Shield. The FARC dissidents and the National Liberation Army, whom The Economist identifies as still active in Venezuela’s mining belt despite the American air strikes, are not going to demobilise. They are, as one Venezuelan mining industry source told the magazine plainly, going to move. “If you clean up one area, they are going to move somewhere else. It’s that simple.”

 Where do they move? Deeper into national parks, says The Economist. Venezuela’s Imataca and Canaima national parks border Guyana. The Pakaraima mountains straddle the frontier. The same jungle that conceals illegal mining operations at Mazoa Hill and along the Cuyuni river system on the Guyanese side connects without interruption to the zone the Americans are now attempting to clear on the Venezuelan side. The displacement of criminal mining networks from Bolívar state is not a solution to the problem of unregulated extraction on the Guiana Shield. 

It is a pressure valve that will push those networks toward the path of least resistance. Guyana needs to be asking right now whether it is that path.

 The Regulatory Vacuum Is the Real Security Risk

 The government of Guyana will point to the Guyana Gold Board, the GGMC, the Environmental Protection Agency and the various bilateral security arrangements with the United States as evidence that the country is not defenceless. These institutions exist. The question this newspaper has been asking for months — and which events in Venezuela now make urgent — is whether they function adequately for the moment we are in.

The GGMC has not produced audited financial statements in nine years. That is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. In a context where criminal networks are being actively displaced from one part of the Guiana Shield toward another, it means that Guyana’s primary regulatory body for gold and mineral extraction cannot account for what has been extracted, by whom, under what conditions, and where it went. The Mazoa Hill controversy and the Cataratas vector we have previously documented are not isolated incidents. They are evidence of a structural gap between the extractive activity occurring on 

 Guyana’s territory and the state’s capacity to govern it.

 The G2 Goldfields/GMIN merger is a related symptom. When the ownership of a major mining concession changes hands through a corporate restructuring and the state’s change-of-control provisions are not enforced, the message sent to the extractive industry — legitimate and otherwise — is that Guyana’s regulatory framework is a formality, not a constraint. That message travels. It is heard in Caracas, in São Paulo, in the offices of commodity traders in Geneva and Singapore who are now making decisions about the post-Maduro Guiana Shield.

And then there is uranium. The U92 Energy Corp. Kurupung project sits in a jurisdiction with

→no domestic regulatory framework for uranium extraction.

→no specialised inspectorate.

→no established environmental liability regime 

→no parliamentary oversight mechanism with the technical capacity to evaluate what is being proposed.

 We have made this argument before on purely governance grounds.                                                                                                    We make it again now on security grounds: a uranium frontier on the Pakaraima border, adjacent to a zone from which armed criminal networks are being displaced by American military operations, is not a situation that a functioning state should approach with a nine-year audit backlog and an unstaffed Data Protection Commission.

 Washington’s New Architecture and Guyana’s Position

 The broader regional picture demands clear-eyed assessment. The Economist documents what it calls the “Trumpification” of Latin America — seven consecutive right-wing presidential victories since January 2025, an ideological convergence around Washington’s priorities on crime, migration and extractive industry, and a network of direct American military co-operation from Ecuador to Venezuela. The PPP government has historically cultivated a careful non-alignment, maintaining relations with Washington, Beijing and Caracas simultaneously. That triangulation is now under structural pressure.

The US-Venezuela arrangement is revealing in its terms. Venezuela under Rodríguez is supplying mineral access, security co-operation and political compliance in exchange for American recognition, sanctions relief, oil export waivers and military protection. Maduro’s Essequibo aggression — the December 2023 referendum, the military mobilisation, the maps redrawn in Caracas — was a product of that previous regime’s political economy. The Rodríguez government, operating under American supervision, has different incentive structures. The Essequibo claim has not been formally withdrawn. But the regime that was prepared to mobilise it militarily has been replaced by one whose survival depends on American goodwill.

This creates a narrow diplomatic window that Guyana should be exploiting with urgency and precision.

 The International Court of Justice case proceeds on its own timeline. But the political conditions that made Venezuelan adventurism possible have shifted significantly. “A Guyanese government with the strategic literacy and institutional capacity to engage this moment could consolidate real security gains. A government that treats it as background noise while managing oil revenues and managing elections is leaving an opening”.

The question of how Georgetown engages Washington in this new regional architecture is not separable from the question of whether Guyana’s extractive governance is adequate to the moment. 

American capital is rushing into the Guiana Shield. American military presence is reorganizing its security environment. American strategic interest in the region’s mineral wealth — gold, uranium, rare earths — is not abstract. 

If Guyana cannot demonstrate that it governs its portion of the Shield with the transparency and accountability that Western investors and institutions nominally require, it will find itself not as a partner in this new architecture but as the next ungoverned frontier to be reorganised by someone else.

What Needs to Happen

This new outlet does not traffic in alarm for its own sake. We state what the evidence requires:                                                                                               
→The GGMC audit backlog must be cleared as a matter of national security, not administrative housekeeping. The government should be asked in Parliament, specifically and on the record, when audited financial statements for 2017 through 2025 will be tabled. No answer is itself an answer.

→The U92 Kurupung uranium project must be paused pending the establishment of a fit-for-purpose regulatory framework. This is not anti-investment. It is the condition for investment that does not create liabilities the Guyanese state cannot manage.

The Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services, reduced from monthly to quarterly meetings in the same period that these extractive governance questions have intensified, must be restored to regular function and given the technical support to conduct meaningful oversight of the mining sector.

 The Guyana government must make a formal public assessment of the security implications of the displacement of criminal mining networks from Venezuela’s Bolívar state toward the Pakaraima border region. If that assessment has been made internally, it should be shared with Parliament and the public.

And the PPP government must decide, clearly and on the record, what Guyana’s strategic posture is in the new regional architecture that:                                                                            American policy is constructing. Non-alignment was a coherent position when the region was genuinely multipolar. It becomes incoherence when the Shield on which your economy depends is being reorganised under the military and commercial direction of one power, on your border, right now.

The Guiana Shield does not belong to Washington.

 It does not belong to Caracas. 

A significant portion of it belongs to the people of Guyana.

It is time to govern it like it does.

 The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet. We accept no government advertising and carry no political affiliations.

Beyond Polite Suggestions

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

EDITORIAL  |  JUNE, 2026

Beyond Polite Suggestions: Guyana Needs Open Data by Law, Not by Goodwill

A recent commentary on inter-agency coordination identifies the right problem — and then systematically avoids the solution. We will not be so cautious.

A letter published recently in Stabroek News by Emille Giddings offers a thoughtful — and carefully circumscribed — meditation on Guyana’s crisis of institutional information-sharing. The author frames his concern in the language of administrative philosophy: silos, coordination culture, the tension between information as a public good and information as a political instrument. He asks the right questions. He arrives at no demands. We understand why. We do not share his constraints.

Let us state plainly what the letter gestures toward but does not reach: Guyana has no enforceable legal framework requiring its public agencies to produce, validate, and share data with the public. None.

The coordination failures the author describes are not accidents of organisational culture. They are the predictable output of a system in which agencies are rewarded for secrecy and penalised for nothing when they withhold. Until we fix that structural reality, no amount of appeals to cooperation will change anything.

The Problem Is Not Culture. It Is Architecture.

Giddings writes that the failure to share data is “sometimes out of pride, sometimes rivalry, sometimes caution.” That observation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The more precise explanation is that Guyana has never legislated open data as a civic right. There is no Freedom of Information Act with teeth. There is no statutory mandate for machine-readable datasets from public agencies on a regular publication schedule. There is no enforcement mechanism, no independent oversight body, no penalty structure for non-disclosure.

In the absence of those structures, the default condition is opacity, and opacity serves those in power. That is not an accident; it is a design. When ministers can choose which figures to release and when, when procurement data is not public by default, when audit findings take years to surface — that is not a coordination problem. That is a governance problem, and it will not be resolved by encouraging agencies to be more collegial with one another.

The author’s example of an energy planner needing data from housing, customs, transport and income agencies to forecast demand is entirely correct. What he stops short of saying is that in a properly governed democracy, most of that data would already be publicly available on a government data portal, downloadable, structured and regularly updated. The planner would not need to make requests across institutional boundaries. The data would be there, because the law would require it to be.

Open Data Is Not a Technical Project. It Is a Transparency Obligation.

The 592 Guardian has long argued for a national open data architecture — not because it will make planners more efficient, though it will — but because public data produced by public agencies using public money belongs to the public. Full stop. The government of Guyana spends billions of dollars every year. The Guyanese citizenry, the academic community, independent journalists, civil society organisations, and ordinary residents have an unconditional right to the data that describes how that money moves and what it produces.

What would this look like in practice? It means a statutory Open Data Act, with a clear schedule of datasets that every public agency must publish in machine-readable formats on a public-facing portal — procurement records, budget execution reports, environmental compliance filings, infrastructure project progress data, land titling, licensing approvals, revenue collection figures and more. It means regular, automated publication — not annual tabling in a Parliament that rarely sits. It means an independent regulator with the authority to compel disclosure and impose sanctions for non-compliance.

None of this is radical. It is standard democratic governance in 2026. What is radical — what should be treated as a scandal — is that Guyana is awash in oil revenues and still does not have a functioning open government data infrastructure.

The Data Protection Commission: An Irony Worth Naming

The letter’s author is himself the brother of Aneal Giddings, who is — or until recently was — the sole staff member of Guyana’s Data Protection Commission. We raise this not to impugn the letter writer, whose observations stand or fall on their merits, but because it illustrates precisely the institutional dysfunction his letter describes.

Guyana’s Data Protection Commission, established under legislation, has operated for its entire existence as a one-person office. One officer. One person charged with overseeing data protection across the entire public and private sectors of a country undergoing one of the most rapid economic transformations in the hemisphere. The Commission has not been resourced. It has not been empowered. It has been, in effect, a statutory obligation fulfilled on paper and ignored in practice.

Aneal Giddings is now, by all available evidence, no longer in Guyana. He appears to have emigrated — while simultaneously serving as the only staff member of a statutory body and as a witness in the elections fraud trial. The Commission’s mandate sits in legislative limbo. No one has been appointed to replace him. No statement has been issued by the Minister responsible. Parliament has asked no questions. The press has largely moved on.

This is the ecosystem Emille Giddings is asking to coordinate more effectively. It is a reasonable ask. It is also, given the above, a somewhat optimistic one.

What Needs to Happen

The 592 Guardian calls for the following, specifically and without qualification:

→First, the immediate tabling of an Open Data Bill in the National Assembly, establishing a legal right of public access to government datasets, a mandatory publication schedule for covered agencies, and an independent enforcement mechanism with real powers of sanction.

→Second, the immediate reconstitution of the Data Protection Commission with adequate staffing, a published budget, and a board that includes civil society representation — not as a patronage exercise, but as a governance requirement.

→Third, the immediate launch of a public-facing national data portal, centrally maintained, with structured machine-readable datasets from the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Guyana Revenue Authority, the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board, and the major state-owned enterprises. This portal should be updated on a rolling basis, not annually.

→Fourth, a statutory requirement that all future contracts for infrastructure and extractive industry projects above a defined threshold include data transparency clauses — requiring contractors and the relevant agencies to report progress metrics and financial disbursements to the public portal on a quarterly basis.

None of these proposals require new technology. They require political will. They require a government that genuinely believes the public has a right to know what is being done in its name, with its resources, on its land.

The Silence That Costs Us

Giddings ends his letter with a series of rhetorical questions — do we want planning systems that depend on improvisation, do we believe Guyana can build institutions that think across boundaries, do enough of us believe in a Guyana that can become more coherent and serious? These are good questions. They deserve an honest answer.

The answer is that we will not get there through appeals to better coordination culture. We will get there when the law requires transparency, when institutions are penalised for secrecy, when citizens can access the data that is rightfully theirs without submitting requests that go unanswered, without relying on leaks, without needing to know someone who knows someone inside the agency.

The author was careful. He had reasons to be. We have no such reasons.

Guyana’s information architecture is broken. It is broken by design and sustained by convenience. The answer is not better collegial habits among agencies. The answer is open data by law, transparently administered, publicly accessible, and enforceable. Anything less is a conversation about the symptoms while the disease continues to spread.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

THE PHANTOM BOND

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THE PHANTOM BOND:                 How Guyana’s President Announced a Financial Product That Does Not Legally Exist

The 592 Guardian | Accountability Desk

On May 26, 2026 — Guyana’s Diamond Jubilee — President Irfaan Ali stood before a joint press conference at the National Stadium in Providence and made a declaration that would have moved financial regulators in any serious jurisdiction to immediate attention.

“I want to announce that the Government of Guyana will launch a special bond, a diaspora bond, to raise funds from the diaspora for investment in public infrastructure projects in Guyana,” the President said. “Within one week, we’ll be launching the diaspora bond.”

 That was twenty-seven days ago.

The bond has not launched. No prospectus has been filed. No issuing authority has been named. No interest rate, tenor, denomination, subscription cap or targeted project has been disclosed to the public.

The Guyana Securities Council — the statutory body mandated under the Securities Industry Act 1998 to register securities, require prospectuses, and protect investors — has not announced any registration process for this instrument. The Bank of Guyana has not issued a corresponding regulatory notice. The Ministry of Finance has not tabled enabling legislation, published a bond framework, or identified the legal vehicle through which this debt would be contracted.

What exists, after nearly a month, is a presidential declaration made before a crowd on a national holiday. Nothing more

 This is not a minor administrative lag. It is a structural problem with serious legal and investor-protection dimensions that deserves examination on its own terms — before a single diaspora dollar is solicited.

What the Law Requires

The Guyana Securities Council is a statutory body created by the Securities Industry Act 1998, with a principal mandate to register, authorize and regulate issuers of securities, and to protect the integrity of the securities market.  The Act explicitly requires a prospectus for any offer to sell a security to the public, and mandates the contents of that prospectus, the delivery requirements, and supplementary disclosure obligations.

A government diaspora bond — an instrument designed to solicit investment from identifiable members of the public in exchange for a fixed return — is a security within the meaning of that Act. It is debt.

Under Guyana’s legal framework, where beneficial ownership of securities exceeds fifty persons, the issuer is classified as a public company and falls squarely within the purview of the Guyana Securities Council and the reporting obligations of the Securities Industry Act. A diaspora bond targeting thousands of overseas Guyanese would vastly exceed that threshold on day one.

No prospectus has been filed. No issuer has registered. The legal architecture for this product, as publicly announced, does not currently exist.

The Public Debt Management Gap

The problem extends beyond securities regulation. Guyana’s own Public Debt Annual Report of 2020 acknowledged that a comprehensive Public Debt Management Bill was earmarked for enactment by 2022— legislation that would, in the government’s own framing, “bolster transparency, accountability and sustainability” in how debt is issued and administered. Six years later, that Bill remains unenacted.

There is no consolidated statutory framework governing how this bond would be structured, who bears fiduciary responsibility for its proceeds, how those proceeds would be ring-fenced from general consolidated fund expenditure, or what remedies investors would hold if projects were cancelled or funds redirected.

The president announced a financial product into a legal vacuum that his own government’s debt management agenda had already identified as needing to be filled — and failed to fill.

A Pattern Worth Naming

This is not Guyana’s first experience with bond arrangements that lacked transparent architecture at the point of announcement. The Peeping Tom column in Kaieteur News recalled this week the episode of a prior bond issuance in which approximately $1 billion in bonds at a reported 20 percent interest rate was reportedly acquired entirely by a single corporate entity, generating some $400 million in returns over two years. Whether that account is precisely accurate in every detail is less important than the structural lesson it illustrates: when bond issuances are designed without mandatory prospectus requirements, public subscription caps, or independent oversight at the point of launch, they tend to resolve in favor of those with prior access to decision-makers.

The absence of disclosed details at announcement is not neutral. Although the government has not yet disclosed details regarding the size of the bond, expected returns, eligibility requirements or targeted projects,  the President nonetheless extended a public invitation to invest. That sequencing — invitation before framework — is the hallmark of pre-marketing, not regulated public offering.

The Structural Question No One Has Asked

A Diaspora Bond offering fixed rates of return is described as being designed to raise investment capital for large-scale infrastructure projects — but Guyana is not a country without capital for infrastructure. Finance Minister Ashni Singh told the Local Content Summit that Guyana currently produces over 900,000 barrels of oil per day across major offshore developments, with the upcoming Uaru project expected to push production beyond one million barrels. Hundreds of billions of dollars in Natural Resource Fund withdrawals are already financing roads, hospitals, housing and energy infrastructure through the annual budget. The government is not capital-constrained in any conventional sense.

If there is a financing rationale — a cash-flow gap, an acceleration of expenditure beyond NRF withdrawal limits under the amended Act, a desire to create a distinct financing pool for specific projects — that rationale should be stated in public, in writing, before any member of the diaspora is asked to commit their savings.

What Must Be Answered

The 592 Guardian puts the following questions on record to the Minister of Finance and the Office of the President:
→Under which legal instrument does the government propose to issue this bond — and has it been tabled before, or authorized by, the National Assembly?

→Has a prospectus or information memorandum been filed with the Guyana Securities Council, and if not, on what statutory basis is a public securities offering exempt from that requirement?

→What is the proposed interest rate, tenor, denomination and individual subscription cap for this instrument?

→Which specific infrastructure projects will the proceeds finance, and what ring-fencing mechanism will ensure proceeds are not redirected to general consolidated fund expenditure?

→What independent trustee or bondholder representative structure will be established to protect investor rights?

→Will resident Guyanese have equal, concurrent access to this instrument — or will the diaspora tranche be closed before domestic subscription opens?

  The Flag Stays Up

President Ali announced a bond “within one week” on Guyana’s independence anniversary. Nearly four weeks later, there is no bond, no framework and no legislative authority in the public domain. What there is, however, is an open solicitation — the President’s own words extended to the diaspora on a national stage, replayed in international Caribbean media — with no corresponding investor protection structure.

That is not a delay. That is an announcement in search of architecture.

 

And in a petrostate with Guyana’s procurement history and capital concentration patterns, the absence of that architecture at the point of public announcement is precisely the kind of red flag that accountability journalism exists to name.

This flag is flying. It will remain flying until the framework is public, the prospectus is filed, and the questions above are answered on the record.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, extractive industry and civil rights. Questions and documents may be directed to the editorial desk.

 

Seven Years and No Pipeline

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THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL June, 2026

            EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRY ♦HUMAN CAPITAL ♦                                        GOVERNANCE FAILURE 

Seven Years and No Pipeline

ExxonMobil is commissioning a study to 3nd out who will run Guyana’s oil economy. A university handed Government a blueprint years ago. Someone, in a ministry, in a boardroom, in a Cabinet, chose to do nothing. We want to know who. 

THE 592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL BOARD ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

 Seven years into active oil production — seven years of billion-dollar revenues, supplementary budgets, mega-projects, and presidential tours of international investor conferences — ExxonMobil has now announced that it must commission a study to determine what workforce Guyana’s petroleum economy requires. Read that sentence again slowly. A study. In 2026. After first oil in 2019. 

This is not a planning challenge. This is a governance autopsy. 

The University of Guyana’s Vice-Chancellor has confirmed publicly that a detailed blueprint — identifying precisely the skills, disciplines, and institutional capacity required to service a mature oil economy — was prepared and formally handed to the Government of Guyana. That document did not disappear into a vacuum. It was received. It was presumably read, filed, noted, and actioned — or rather, not actioned. It was, in the language of Caribbean governance, “taken under advisement” and then quietly buried under the weight of inertia and misplaced priority. 

The question before this editorial board is not whether a skills gap exists in Guyana’s petroleum sector. That is now confirmed beyond dispute by the operator of the Stabroek Block itself. The questions that demand answers are structural, specific, and urgent. 

THE          QUESTIONS         GOVERNMENT          MUST            ANSWER 

 →When was the University of Guyana’s workforce blueprint received by the 

→ Ministry of Education and/or the Ministry of Labor? Who signed for it? 

→Was the blueprint reviewed by Cabinet, the Department of Energy, or the Local Content Secretariat? If so, what was the formal response? 

→ What budget allocations — across the 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 national budgets — were made specifically for petroleum-sector workforce development and credentialing? 

→ How much of the Natural Resource Fund has been earmarked for human capital development in the extractive sector, and what has been disbursed? 

→ What is the scope, cost, and timeline of ExxonMobil’s announced workforce study — and is that study being conducted with or without Government co financing? 

→Why is the national operator of the sector’s largest producing block performing a function that should have been executed by the State? 

    

The World Already Knows What Guyana Refuses to Do 

The World Bank Group — whose International Finance Corporation partners with governments and industry globally — published guidance this month making a point so elemental it should embarrass every minister who has cycled through the relevant portfolios since 2016: skills systems fail when industry is not a co-architect. Curriculum must be dynamic.

Partnerships between post-secondary institutions and extractive operators must be structured, funded, and time-bound. In Argentina, a university-company partnership model in the mining sector — supported by development finance — is projected to generate more than 10,000 direct jobs and 50,000 indirect ones by 2033.

The architecture was in place before the revenue arrived. Guyana inverted that sequence entirely. The revenue arrived. The institutional architecture did not follow. The University of Guyana built the blueprint anyway — and was met with the silence that passes for governance in this republic. 

 “The skills gap is acute and growing — but so is the evidence that when industry leads the way in designing skills curricula, it can help close this gap.” WORLD BANK GROUP — GLOBAL EDUCATION CONFERENCE, MADRID, JUNE 2026 

The irony is almost surgical. The very development institution that finances Guyana’s budget support and structural adjustment conversations is publishing frameworks about industry-government co-design in skills development — while Guyana’s government, flush with oil revenue, ceded that function entirely to the operator and leI a university’s work product gathering dust.

Local Content as Political Theatre 

The Local Content Act of 2021 was presented by the PPP/C administration as the legislative cornerstone of Guyanese participation in the oil economy. It mandated thresholds. It created a Secretariat. It generated public relations. What it has manifestly failed to do is generate a credentialed, competitive Guyanese workforce capable of Jlling the technical roles the sector demands. 

Local content without local competence is a political performance. You cannot legislate your way to a petroleum engineer if you have not funded the program that produces one. You cannot enforce supplier thresholds on Guyanese firms that do not exist because you never trained the people who would have founded them. The Local Content Act, separated from a structured national workforce development programme, is a compliance document without a delivery mechanism — a statute in search of a sector that was never built. 

This is the Government’s core failure: the conflation of legislation with governance. Passing a law is not the same as building a system. Announcing a Secretariat is not the same as training a generation. Holding a ribbon cutting at a new UG faculty building is not the same as ensuring its graduates meet the certification standards that Exxon, Hess, and CNOOC require at the wellhead. 

 The Cost Is No Longer Theoretical 

Every year that Guyana’s oil sector operates without a domestically trained technical workforce is a year in which the economic rents of extraction flow

disproportionately outward. Foreign technicians, expatriate specialists, and imported expertise consume wages, housing allowances, and per diems that should be anchoring a Guyanese middle class. The macroeconomic argument for workforce localization is not ideological — it is arithmetic. It is the differnce between an enclave economy and a developmental one. 

The Government has had seven years of production revenue, a university blueprint, a Local Content Act, a Natural Resource Fund, a Department of Energy, and a Ministry of Labor. ExxonMobil is now doing the study. That inversion of institutional responsibility tells you everything about where accountability for this failure sits. 

WHAT         ACCOUNTABILITY         REQUIRES 

→The Ministry of Education must publicly release the UG workforce blueprint and document its official handling since receipt. 

→The Local Content Secretariat must publish a disaggregated accounting of Guyanese versus expatriate employment in the Stabroek Block, by skill category and salary band. 

→The Natural Resource Fund oversight committee must disclose what, if any, allocations have been made for tertiary and vocational skills development in the petroleum sector. 

→Parliament’s sector committee must summon the responsible ministers — past and present — to account for the seven-year gap between blueprint and action. 

→ExxonMobil must make its forthcoming workforce study a public document, subject to independent civil society review, not a proprietary operator filing. 

 A Final Observation 

There is something revealing in the fact that it took the operator — not the State — to publicly identify that a workforce study was needed.

In a properly functioning developmental state, that announcement would have come from a ministry, backed by a budget line and a parliamentary timeline. Instead, it came from a Texas-headquartered multinational as a practical operational necessity. The government’s silence before that announcement, and its likely silence aIer it, is the story. 

Someone received the University of Guyana’s blueprint. Someone decided it was not urgent. Someone sat in a Cabinet room, year after year, and approved budgets without a serious workforce development line for the sector generating the nation’s historic windfall.

We do not yet know those names. But the record exists. The documents exist. The budget lines — and the blank spaces where budget lines should have been — exist. 

This editorial board will be pursuing them. 

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ INDEPENDENT ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

HELD TO RANSOM

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Held to Ransom: How Political Failure Handed Guyana’s Energy Security to Private Power

When Leadership Fails: How Guyana Lost Control of Its Energy Sector

Guyana now finds itself in the untenable position of being effectively held hostage by two corporate entities, forced to choose between paying millions more each day or subjecting the nation to blackouts. This is not an accident. It is not a misfortune. It is the direct and foreseeable result of political decisions made at the highest levels of government.

Responsibility for this crisis rests squarely with the current administration and, in particular, with those entrusted with oversight of the energy sector and the execution of the Gas-to-Energy project. The President, who has taken personal ownership of this initiative, and the Minister responsible for energy and public utilities cannot now retreat into silence while the consequences unfold.

The Wales Gas-to-Energy project was presented to the nation as a transformational undertaking—one that would deliver reliable, affordable power and reduce dependence on costly stopgap measures. Instead, it has been plagued by delays, escalating costs, and a troubling lack of transparency. Years after its promised timelines, the project remains incomplete, with no credible, fixed delivery date.

This failure is not merely technical. It is managerial and political.

Critical national infrastructure was placed under the supervision of individuals whose primary qualification appears to have been political proximity rather than proven expertise in energy planning, project execution, or contract management. Competence was subordinated to loyalty. Oversight was weakened. And predictable risks were ignored.

The result is what Guyana is now experiencing: a government negotiating under duress, stripped of leverage, and exposed to demands it cannot reasonably refuse. When a country cannot allow a supplier to walk away without triggering a national crisis, it has already surrendered its bargaining power.

Karpowership’s demand for increased payments is therefore not the root problem—it is the symptom. The real issue is that the Government of Guyana created the conditions under which such a demand could be made with confidence.

The financial implications are severe. Millions of US dollars in additional annual costs for a single power vessel. Billions of Guyana dollars diverted from the treasury. And all of this occurring in a country now earning unprecedented revenues from its oil sector.

This is not development. It is waste.

It is also, unmistakably, a misuse of public funds. Taxpayer resources are being deployed not to expand capacity or improve efficiency, but to compensate for delays, miscalculations, and poor governance. Citizens are effectively paying a premium for the government’s failure to deliver on its own promises.

Equally concerning is the continued lack of transparency. Key officials, including the President and the responsible minister, have offered no clear public accounting of the situation. No detailed explanation of the contractual breakdown. No roadmap for resolution. In any functioning democracy, such silence in the face of a national vulnerability would be unacceptable.

This is not simply about one contract or one project. It is about a pattern of governance in which political control overrides institutional strength, and where accountability is treated as optional rather than essential.

Guyana’s growing oil wealth was meant to insulate the nation from precisely this kind of vulnerability. Instead, it has coincided with a governance approach that has weakened planning, diluted expertise, and concentrated decision-making without adequate scrutiny.

The country is now paying the price.

If there is to be any meaningful course correction, it must begin with acknowledgment. Not deflection, not silence, but clear acceptance of responsibility at the highest levels. It must be followed by transparency, professionalization of key sectors, and a firm commitment to ensuring that national projects are managed by those with the competence to deliver.

Anything less will guarantee that this episode is not the last of its kind.

Guyana cannot afford to be a nation rich in resources but poor in governance.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 ,𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—

Guyana Dev Bank: Players likely already in Place

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THE 592 GUARDIAN|ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

JUNE 2026 —BY: GHK LALL

Guyana Dev Bank: Players likely already in Place

The Guyana Development Bank (GDB) has generated much excitement.  Not yet fully airborne, but still stirring considerable interest.  Guyanese sit, wait, smile.  They are ready.  One set anticipates what’s in it for them.  To get them off the bottom. 

Other Guyanese (guess who?) have their plans ready on how to milk this bank till it geh sickly and paglee.  For those who need clarity, rest easy.  Coming up shortly.

 The key players have already been handpicked.  Ready to rumble.  The PPP had a handful of names to choose from to move the GDB up the ladder, along the way.  There’s the way, truth, and life of Jesus.  Not the PPP way, regrettably.         

The PPP Govt has its own way.   Radically different.  In substance, results.  To condition Guyanese hopefuls, I conclude that senior positions-GDB chair, deputy chair, and CEO are as good as filled.  Done deals.  Before that GDB bill becomes law.  What’s there to debate?  There’s a seven-seat majority.  Who cares what the other sides, any Guyanese, think?  Including those who think less of the PPP’s standards of staffing?  Overseers and officers, for example.  Seven seats provide that electricity-sparking confidence [and disdain].

Qualifications for the jobs of chair, deputy chair, and CEO earn top marks for the following.  They don’t have to be thieves, but it helps

Known thieves are prized by the PPP Govt.  The logic is majestic.  Whoever teef caan taak.  The best are party loyalists who prosper when matters are upside down, shrouded in secrecy. 

Try this example.  The PPP loves overseers, commissioners, bank watchmen, senior bank officers who see a dog, hear a dog, know it’s a dog, but sell it as a duck or a donkey.

  Whoever heard a dog that sounds or looks like one of those creatures?  Best of all, are those who know how to keep their mouths shut, whatever the crimes committed.  It’s better when they’re part of the white-collar crimewave waiting inside that new bank.  With such trusted personnel seated, secrets stay secret.  Trouble is contained.  What happened in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.  Substitute GDB for local color.

With $40 billion around, there’s plenty for PPP boys and girls to play around with, have fun.  There’s a guarantee, two to be accurate.  Freedom House has their back.  And Office of the President has its own magistracy and rubberstamp ready

Nah maan! Nat dese peeple.  Dem is good PPP people.  Look how much ting deh duh fuh de paaty.  Can’t abandon them.  Cannot, will not, throw them under the bus.  Not with all those sharks waiting to rip them to pieces.  It’s basic democracy: taking care of one’s own is taking care of business.  They are due first bites at the fruits of victory and policy.  So, what if they mess up, make their hands fast?  Stuff happens.  Nobody is perfect.

Qualifications for the jobs of chair, deputy chair, and CEO earn top marks for the following.  They don’t have to be thieves, but it helps.

 The government is quick thinking: help to fix the loan documents.  Fix is preferred.  For other people: wrong color, wrong hairstyle, and wrong relationships, the GDB is just as warm and hospitable.  Welcome, sir, madam.  Take a number.  Have a seat.  Just a little wait.  The staff is out to lunch, in a meeting, gone golfing, or off to Congress.  Free seats.  Free updates.  Few could be so classless or tasteless to want more.  Wait until they hear ‘this loan application is receiving the highest consideration.  The bull just began.  No money, no love.  No $3 million loan.  Those kinds of Guyanese are on their own.  Stage is set.  Law ready. 

The games begin.  The chair’s in place.  I think that the whole kit and kaboodle (PPP kin)-chiefs and cooks are like corruption Oreos. 

Devilishly pious on the outside, wickedly devious inside.  A bank with a shank.

THE CURRENCY OF A COUNTRY’S SOUL

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The Currency of a Country’s Soul

The Story of a Currency and Its  People

When Guyana gained its independence in 1966, it did so with a currency and a dream. The one-dollar bill was never just paper. It was a modest symbol of a people stepping out of colonial shadows and into the bright, uncertain language of self-rule. It bore, silently but surely, the hopes of a generation that believed independence would mean more than a flag and an anthem — that it would mean bread on the table, dignity in work, and a future measured not by survival, but by progress.

Sixty years later, that same bill feels like a relic from another moral universe.

The story of the Guyana dollar is the story of a nation learning, painfully, that sovereignty alone does not guarantee strength. At independence, the exchange rate stood at about G$1.71 to US$1. Today it hovers around G$209 to US$1. What began as a respectable national symbol has been worn down by decades of inflation, mismanagement, policy drift, and economic vulnerability. But to speak only of exchange rates is to tell only half the story.

A currency falls because a country’s foundations have been weakened; and when money loses value, the people who live by wages, savings, and fixed incomes are the first to feel the wound.

This is where the history becomes less technical and more tragic.

For ordinary Guyanese, devaluation was never an abstract chart in an office. It was the rising price of rice, flour, medicine, fuel, rent. It was a salary that arrived on time but bought less than it did last month. It was the slow humiliation of watching effort lose its reward. Over time, the money in the pocket stopped reflecting the dignity of the labor behind it. The national promise narrowed. The horizon shrank. Families adapted not by thriving, but by enduring.

And that endurance, though admirable, should not be mistaken for justice.

A people can be made hardy by hardship, but they should not be forced to mistake hardship for destiny. Much of Guyana’s decline in value was not inevitable. It was shaped by leadership choices — by the absence of foresight, the failure of discipline, the habit of postponing difficult reforms, and the too-familiar tendency to place political survival above national stewardship.

When leadership is selfless, it builds institutions that protect the citizen from economic ruin. When leadership is timid, extractive, or vain, it leaves the citizen to absorb the cost of failure in silence.

 

So, the decline of the Guyana dollar is also the decline of a social contract.

That may be the hardest truth of all. Because when a currency is devalued over decades, it is not only the state that loses credibility. The people begin to lose confidence too — in systems, in promises, in the idea that tomorrow might be better than today.

The national mood darkens. Social status erodes. Hope grows cautious. Aspiration becomes expensive. And a country once birthed in optimism begins to resemble, in unsettling ways, the very vulnerability from which it sought escape.

Today, Guyana stands in a strange contradiction: a country with extraordinary resource wealth, yet one still haunted by the habits and inequalities of its past. Oil has changed the macroeconomic story, but it has not automatically healed the social one. The danger now is that the nation mistakes rising headline wealth for genuine national renewal, while inequality, mistrust, and uneven development continue beneath the surface. Without accountable and selfless leadership, even prosperity can become another chapter in the same old story.

Yet there is still meaning in the old one-dollar bill. Indeed, there is warning in it.

It reminds us that nations are not measured only by what they produce, but by how they protect the worth of their people’s labor. It reminds us that economic decline always becomes social decline when the burden is left to fall on the poor, the ordinary, and the unprotected. And it reminds us that independence is not a completed act, but a continuing obligation — one that demands honesty, courage, and sacrifice from those entrusted with power.

The old bill, then, is not merely a collector’s item. It is a witness. It stands as a paper archive of promise, loss, and the unfinished work of nationhood. It asks a difficult question of the present: what is a country worth if its money dwindles, its people struggle, and its leaders mistake motion for progress?

The old one-dollar bill therefore speaks with unusual force. It tells us that currencies do not collapse in isolation, and societies do not decay by accident. When the national economy is mishandled, the people pay first, longest, and hardest. And when a country loses sight of the public good, even its symbols — its money, its institutions, its promise — begin to look like relics of a future it never fully realized.

A nation can be born in hope and still age in neglect. Guyana’s one-dollar bill tells us that plainly.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

Mutual Respect, One-Sided Ledger: What Beijing’s Global Governance White Paper Leaves Out of Guyana

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY ♦TRUTH

Mutual Respect, One-Sided Ledger: What Beijing’s Global Governance White Paper Leaves Out of Guyana

 THE 592 GUARDIAN | EDITORIAL 

On Wednesday, Beijing’s State Council Information Office released a new white paper on global governance, the latest articulation of Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative—a framework built on the language of extensive consultation, joint contribution, shared benefits, and a “community with a shared future for humanity.” The document claims the backing of nearly 160 countries and more than 60 in a formal “Group of Friends.”

It positions China as a defender of UN-centered multilateralism against a turbulent, unequal world order. 

Guyana is not named in the white paper. It does not need to be. Guyana is where the doctrine gets tested against contract law, customs waivers, and a riverbed. 

 A live laboratory, not a footnote 

Guyana was the first English-speaking Caribbean nation to recognize the People’s Republic of China, in 1972. Half a century later it is China’s largest trading partner in the Caribbean. Chinese investment into Guyana in 2024 alone totaled US$10.6 billion; bilateral trade has quadrupled since 2019. When Foreign Minister Hugh Todd travelled to Beijing last year and met his counterpart Wang Yi, the language on both sides was the same language now repeated in the white paper — shared future, mutual respect, multilateralism, support for the UN Charter. Guyana’s government has, on the record, endorsed China’s global governance vocabulary almost word for word. 

The question this editorial puts plainly: does the conduct of Chinese state-linked capital inside Guyana’s borders bear any resemblance to the principles Beijing has just spent a five-part white paper describing? 

The contractors writing their own terms 

Start with China Harbor Engineering Company. CHEC’s contract for work on Guyanese infrastructure — reported by the Caribbean Investigative Journalism Network — secured full payment of the contract price while being released from paying taxes, duties, royalties, and fees ordinarily owed to central or local government. The same contract reportedly stipulated that sixty percent of non-technical labor be Chinese nationals,with specialized positions reserved exclusively for Chinese citizens.

This is not a contractor adapting to local content law. This is a contractor writing around it — in a country whose own Local Content Act requires Guyanese nationals to fill the overwhelming majority of positions in comparable sectors. 

Then there is China Railway Construction Corporation, the joint-venture partner awarded the US$260 million contract to build the new Demerara River crossing. CRCC was expelled by the World Bank in 2019 — alongside its subsidiaries and 730 controlled affiliates — for submitting manipulated information in the award of a highway contract in the country of Georgia.

Guyana awarded it the largest transport infrastructure contract in the country’s history regardless.

Construction began without a completed environmental and social impact assessment. Guyanese environmentalist Simone Mangal-Joly has warned that the absence of basic design information makes it impossible to assess the bridge’s effect on a river already carrying heavy sedimentation.

None of this required Beijing’s intervention. Georgetown signed it. 

CNOOC holds a twenty-five percent stake in the ExxonMobil-led Stabroek consortium, with $5.25 billion of its own capital committed — making the government’s repeated insistence that ExxonMobil’s audit disputes are a bilateral matter between Guyana and one American operator increasingly difficult to sustain. Bai Shan Lin’s logging record, Bosai Minerals’ manganese operations in Region Ten, and the slow transformation of Lethem into a Chinese-financed trading and transit hub round out a picture of saturation across timber, mining, hospitality, energy, and now cross-border logistics toward Brazil. 

The quarry fight nobody wanted to have on the record 

In May, truckers protesting a loss of income over sand and stone access forced Vice President Jagdeo onto the record. He insisted that none of the sixteen active quarries was Chinese-owned, that Chinese firms were merely contracted to operate them, and that none of the major housing programs on the East Coast used Chinese contractors. The public record does not support the ownership denial. Golden Rock Investment and Construction Co. — described in its own promotional materials and in NCN Guyana’s coverage as a Chinese company, with Managing Director Mike Wu unveiling the project at Guyana’s Building Expo — owns the quarry at Lanabali, Essequibo Islands-West Demerara, advertised as the country’s largest with a projected capacity of two to five million tons a year. And the Arisaru Mountain quarry in Region Ten, the actual site at the centre of the original trucker protests, has been identified in Kaieteur News’s reporting on Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill’s own response to those protests as a Chinese-owned quarry — the same report in which Edghill was defending the duty-free status of equipment operating inside it.

A Vice President cannot credibly deny Chinese ownership of the quarry sector while his own Minister of Public Works is on record managing the fallout from a quarry that reporting consistently identifies as Chinese-owned.

Jagdeo’s more honest line came earlier in the same remarks, where he volunteered the actual justification for why Chinese firms keep winning these awards: in his words, the Chinese may be able to do it faster and, in some cases, cheaper. That is a coherent economic argument.

It is not the argument in the white paper. The white paper sells partnership and shared benefit

 The Vice President, under pressure from his own truckers, sold speed and price — while denying an ownership pattern his own ministry had already been forced to manage in public.

 Self-certification, again 

This publication has spent the past several months documenting how Guyana’s extractive governance — gold, carbon credits, the EITI framework itself — collapses under the weight of self-certification without independent external verification. The same structural flaw governs the China file.

There is no independent registry of Chinese state-linked contracts in Guyana, no published evaluation criteria for the fourteen bidders who competed for the Demerara Bridge award, no public accounting of which contracts carry tax and royalty waivers, and no legislative mechanism requiring parliamentary ratification of contracts above a defined threshold. What exists instead is a closed loop: Beijing’s white paper affirms its own good conduct, and Georgetown’s diplomatic statements affirm Beijing’s affirmation. Nobody outside that loop is asked to verify anything. 

 What accountability requires 

A government that has publicly embraced the vocabulary of mutual respect and shared benefit owes the public the documents that would let citizens judge whether that vocabulary describes reality. The National Assembly should require disclosure of the full CHEC and CRCC contract terms, including labor quotas and fiscal waivers, currently known to the public only through investigative reporting rather than government publication. The Local Content Secretariat should be asked, on the record, whether the sixty percent non-technical labor provision attributed to CHEC was ever reviewed against the Local Content Act, and if not, why not. The Environmental Protection Agency should explain how a $260 million bridge across a sediment-heavy river proceeded without a completed impact assessment, and whether that omission would have been tolerated from any contractor not carrying the weight of a head-of-state relationship behind it.

And given CRCC’s documented blacklisting by the World Bank, the Public Procurement Commission owes the country a public explanation of how that history factored, or failed to factor, into the award. 

 None of this requires hostility toward China, toward Chinese workers, or toward the genuine economic opportunity that Chinese capital has brought to a country starved of infrastructure financing for decades. It requires the same thing this outlet has demanded of every other concentration of unaccountable power in Guyana: documents, named officials, and answers that don’t arrive pre-laundered through the language of friendship.