Iran: Two victory parades, Then both cancelled

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY♦TRUTH

Iran: Two victory parades, Both cancelled

OP-ED BY: GHK LALL

The controllers of Tehran call it a victory.  The Washington dealmaker insists he came out ahead.  Perhaps, both sides won.  Skeptics can split the difference.  My take is simple.  Somebody got out-wheeled, left with the wrong side of that peace deal.  Scratch the Persians.  Hurts to say that as an American.  But what other options are on the table?

First, there were bombs to beat the ayatollahs into submission.  Some did bite the dust.  The survivors threw more dust back at Washington and its chief bluffer.  The formula was old, battle-tested.  The friend of my enemy is my enemy.  Neighborhood airport and assets targeted.  Some screamed bloody murder behind the scenes. 

Happens to those who grow soft from sweet living.  Who needs nukes?  Why, when there are those Achilles heels right nearby?  From punishing embargoes to bunker busters, and the men in turbans still held out.  I had warned that their kind of pitched battle is not CNN material.  Nor the type that pleases Fox News and Friends.  These people know hardship.  They have weathered from Leonidas to Alexander the Great. 

They are still standing.  A little bruised and black-and-blue.  But still standing.  Fighting spirit intact.  The spirit of martyrdom itching for a showdown.

Have soldiers arrayed in a ring?  Bring ’em on!  A ring of fire is waiting.                                                                                                                     Somehow, somebody with some sense in DC finally prevailed.  This is not America’s war.  This is all Netanyahu.  A desperate gamble to get free land and lavish oil supplies.  A couple of bombs, a few dead civilians, a loss of that feeling of invincibility is a cheap price to pay.  A better Iron Dome could be built.  The U.S. Congress would see that it’s funded.  What, do otherwise, and risk losing being re-elected?

The champion warrior and master dealmaker found that his book was out of pages.  What to do?  Bring in Rawalpindi.  The Swiss had reserved a conference room. 

Iran took a battering, but got home safely.  Money.  Security.  Guarantee.  They wrote their own deal book.  So, what did Mr. Manifest Destiny take home to the American people? 

A dog with its tail between its legs.  His own people are already having a fun time, kicking it from left to right. 

 When the kicking is done, hundreds of billions are still needed.  Gone are those bad ole days of not negotiating with terrorists.  Get used to the New World Order.  In Guyanese: knack gah knack bak.  It is not easy for a man accustomed to do the smacking to get smacked around.

Hello!  What about nukes?  Well, what about them?  The Iranians bought time.                                                                                                  Washington says that’s fine.  Then concoct some strange lines.  To justify.  Pacify Netanyahu.  Smooth things over at home and abroad.  It’s smooth sailing in the Strait of Hormuz.  Never heard of something so straightforward getting so tangled up, mined up, muddied up. 

What’s next in the cauldron that’s the Middle East?  Netanyahu isn’t a fellow to take his licks lying down.  He is already plotting.  Weighing whether to rollout his own marbles.  Activating that facility buried in the desert.

Desperate men losing friends fast think the unthinkable.  Attempt the desperate, the face-saving. 

 If there could have been Dresden and Frankfurt-in-Main in Germany almost a hundred years ago, there could be Teheran.  Teach dose peeple a lesson.

Listen up, people.  Get this straight.  There’s a new bully in town.  No 80-year-old washed up has been playing at James Cagney or Russell Crowe.  If there are any people good at playing mad, there are none better than the Iranians.  They hold the cards.  They wear the smirk.  To prove.  Ceasefire shaky.  Straits of Hormuz closing.                                                                                    Still working at figuring out which side got the better deal?  Keep on figuring.                                                                                                                    Continue playing the fool.  Risk being taken for a sucker, another fall guy.

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

GECOM Seats -Laws don’t make Men, Men make Laws

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUBTABILITY♦INTEGRITY♦TRUTH

GECOM Seats -Laws don’t make Men, Men make Laws

A wise political veteran weighed in on the thickening differences over GECOM commissioners.  The pros and cons.  The issues of resignations or terminations, and replacements.  What the Constitution says, and where silence filled the place of substance.  Impressive, I say.  There were many intersections.  Constitution.  Politics.  Mathematics.  Logic.  Leadership.  Practices.  Precedents.  Then, still more.  Overpowering, even more impressive, I submit.  What I offer pales in comparison.  Anemic.  Hopefully still meaningful, in this, my last round in this ring.  A little, not much.  Yet what should convey how men function differently in testing environments.  Respond to the prompts of different stimuli.

Oil blocks.  Two went out of Guyana’s hands under a cloud.  Secrecy.  A PPP big man said no law broken.  He was right according to the law.  Because there was no literal provision in the law against how those oil blocks changed hands.  Though he was right, all Guyana knew that he had it wrong.  Wrong when two tranches of the people’s precious inheritance secretly went from one hand to another.  Strange.  If aboveboard, why go underground?  In such circumstances, no law is needed to differentiate right from wrong.  Not even schooling.  Only native intelligence.  Some basic instincts.  The PPP Big Man who said no law was broken forget something.  Men make laws.  Laws don’t make men.  But, a man without the benefit of any law, with the worst constitution (or none) knows when he just must be a man.  What it takes.  Where he must stand.  How he must be.  To grow from a small man to a big man.  Whatever the education one has, there’s none to beat that kind.  Thus, I stand.

From two oil blocks, I proceed to Oil Money.  The stewardship of it, for which the law provides.  Dr. Terrence Campbell used a sophisticated word: “rubberstamp.”  It has common utility.  Then, there’s its dark side: uncommon indecency.  What a rubberstamp smears over.  When rubberstamps are put to such use, it’s celebrated here.  All Guyana can say that Terrence Campbell has it wrong.  I will swear that he has it right.  Is right on the money.  Too close for the comfort of the people who suddenly didn’t want him around it (or in their company). 

Who could be so self-degrading, an ignoramus, to swallow “national development priorities”, and conclude that their oversight responsibilities are done?  Apologies to Dr. Terrence Campbell.  But that’s not a rubberstamp.  It’s a used condom. 

Guyanese are being taken for skunks.  For politeness, I subbed skunks for another word that spells almost like it, and sounds and rhymes with it.

From oil blocks and oil money, to an (that) oil contract.  Another PPP Big Man insisted that ‘review and renegotiate’ will be the fate of all contracts.  In his sleep he had a dream.  Exxon and retention of political power.  A safe harbor was desperately needed.  Sanctity of contract was belatedly discovered, used to rescue befogged minds.  I invite Guyanese to form a jury.  Safe harbor or the sixth sense of wily political operators prioritizing protection of their own skin.  For country or men hungry for dirty power. 

 

Last, Framers of the Constitution are dead.  Refiners are alive, but might as well be not.  Such specimens of the living, walking dead they have become.  Constitutions don’t make men.  Men make constitutions.  Wrangle ever after. 

Leaders can put their heads together to find a way out of their GECOM impasse.  To find a commonsense, workable, out-of-court settlement, as such.  There are three seats in contention.  Agree to assign one to each.  Far from Solomonic logic.  Just compromise that leads to a smoother path, higher level.  Didn’t vote for the one-seat Guyanese.  But now vote for her to get one.  To build the broken.  To shout where there’s silence.  In the Constitution. 

Let’s not muzzle our minds amidst great darkness.  We have had 60 years of liberty and not advanced one step.  Six minutes could help Guyana get somewhere.

Bhagwandin’s Word-Fog Cannot Bury the One Question He Won’t Answer: Who Holds the Pen?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY

Bhagwandin’s Word-Fog Cannot Bury the One Question He Won’t Answer: Who Holds the Pen? 

Joel Bhagwandin has written 1,800 words to avoid answering one question. That, in itself, is the story. 

His letter in the Guyana Chronicle on the Guyana Development Bank is a masterclass in a particular genre of public-relations writing: bury the politically inconvenient question under a landslide of technical vocabulary, and hope the reader mistakes density for substance.

Peer-cluster vetting. Staged disbursement. Credit-scoring architecture. Quarterly portfolio dashboards.

 It reads like a man performing competence rather than demonstrating it — and performance is precisely what is required when the actual answer is unflattering. 

Strip away the jargon and what remains is this: the Bill gives one office-holder the power to appoint the Board and the management structure of an institution that will control public lending capital, with no requirement for parliamentary consensus and no meaningful external check on that appointment power. Bhagwandin does not dispute this. He does not even really engage with it. He simply changes the subject — at length, and with great technical confidence — to talk instead about what happens after the appointments are made.

That is not an answer. That is a diversion dressed up as expertise. The architecture doesn’t operate itself 

 Bhagwandin’s entire defense rests on a quiet but load-bearing assumption: that peer review clusters, credit committees, and internal audit functions are self-executing — that once written into a manual, they enforce themselves regardless of who sits above them.

This is not how institutions work, and a financial analyst of his stated standing knows it. 

 

A credit manual is not a force of nature. It is a document that can be amended, reinterpreted, or quietly unenforced by anyone with authority over the people enforcing it. Centralised appointment power doesn’t get neutralised by decentralised paperwork. It sits above the paperwork, with its hand on the pen. 

This is why “who appoints the Board” is not, as Bhagwandin frames it, a narrow obsession of people who haven’t thought it through.

It is the load-bearing wall of the entire structure he’s describing. Every technical safeguard he cites is downstream of it. The tomfoolery of false modesty

There is something almost theatrical in Bhagwandin positioning himself as the lone adult in the room, calling for “a more mature debate” while declining to mention that he is, by public account, among those positioned for leadership inside the very institution he is publicly defending. If that is accurate, it is not a footnote — it is the single most relevant fact missing from his letter, and its absence does more to explain the tone of the piece than anything actually written in it. 

The public is entitled to a straight answer, not a paragraph about portfolio dashboards: is Joel Bhagwandin a prospective officer of the Guyana Development Bank? If so, say so on the page, in the first paragraph, before the lecture on financial maturity begins. 

And while he is disclosing, the public has a second, older question still sitting unanswered.

As a sitting member of the Public Procurement Commission, what was his role — and what was the Commission’s role — in the handling of the Tepui Construction matter, reported to involve some $167 million in public funds?,

A man who wants to be trusted with the design of a public lending institution’s accountability architecture should be willing to account, in detail, for his own record on a public accountability body. Silence on that front, while writing lecture-length essays on “institutionally costly” arbitrary lending elsewhere, is not a good look. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing his own framework would flag as an early-warning signal. 

The peer-cluster sleight of hand 

Even taken on its own terms, the peer-cluster model does no work against the actual risk. Whether a weak loan application is dressed up by a cluster of borrowers below or waved through by a minister’s appointee above, the final decision still passes through a structure controlled, top to bottom, by people, one office-holder put there. Decentralising the origination of applications while centralising control of the people who approve them is not a safeguard. It is theatre with extra paperwork. 

What the debate actually requires 

Guyana needs a development bank. No one credible disputes that. What the country cannot afford is a Bill that lets its strongest advocate write 1,800 words defending the institution’s internal mechanics while saying nothing about who controls its leadership — and possibly say nothing because he stands to be part of that leadership. 

Until Bhagwandin, and the Bill’s sponsors, answer the appointment question directly — not technically, not procedurally, but directly — no quarterly dashboard and no credit scoring matrix will mean anything at all. The architecture he is so eager to discuss is only as honest as the hand that built it.

Right now, that hand belongs to one man, and the public still doesn’t know if that man is also the bank’s prospective CEO

That is the level at which this debate should now proceed. Bhagwandin chose not to go there. We will.

“Kwakwani’s Floods: A Recurring Crisis Demanding a Permanent Solution”

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY

“Kwakwani’s Floods: A Recurring Crisis Demanding a Permanent Solution”

Another flood season, another round of assurances, and once again the people of Kwakwani find themselves navigating rising waters, damaged homes, and disrupted livelihoods. The recent statements from Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha—that water levels are expected to recede as rainfall declines—may offer temporary comfort, but they do little to address a far more troubling reality: Kwakwani’s flooding is no longer an occasional crisis. It is a predictable, recurring event.

For decades, the community has endured seasonal inundation driven by heavy rainfall, overtopping of the Berbice River, and tidal influences. What was once described as a phenomenon occurring every ten years has now evolved into a far more frequent cycle, exacerbated by climate change and environmental shifts. Yet, despite this well-documented pattern, the national response remains largely reactive—mobilizing relief supplies, conducting assessments, and waiting for waters to recede.

This cycle is not just environmentally unsustainable; it is fiscally irresponsible.

Each flood event triggers a cascade of public expenditure: emergency response deployment, infrastructure repair, drainage interventions, and social assistance. Beneath these visible costs lie deeper, less quantified burdens—lost income, disrupted education, health risks, and the psychological toll on affected families. In effect, the State is repeatedly paying to manage a problem it already understands, without committing to a permanent solution.

The question therefore arises: at what point does recurring expenditure outweigh the cost of decisive intervention?

Successive administrations have long acknowledged Kwakwani’s vulnerability. As far back as 2006, efforts were initiated to relocate residents from flood-prone waterfront areas to higher ground. Yet, nearly two decades later, that initiative remains incomplete, underutilized, and largely ineffective. The reasons are not difficult to identify—insufficient incentives, weak planning, limited infrastructure, and a failure to align relocation with the economic realities of residents whose livelihoods are tied to the river.

But these challenges do not justify inaction. They demand better policy design.

A modern, responsible approach to Kwakwani must move beyond short-term relief and toward a structured, long-term resilience strategy. This requires a holistic framework grounded in three key pillars.

First, the government must pursue a voluntary but incentivized relocation programme. This means more than allocating land—it requires fully serviced housing schemes, secure land titles, and financial support mechanisms that make relocation both viable and attractive. Residents cannot be expected to abandon their homes for uncertainty.

Second, any relocation effort must be accompanied by livelihood transition planning. Economic displacement is one of the primary barriers to resettlement. Ensuring access to transportation, markets, and alternative income opportunities is critical if relocation is to succeed. Without this, relocation efforts will continue to face resistance.

Third, there must be targeted investment in resilient infrastructure. Not all areas can or should be abandoned. Strategic flood defenses, improved drainage systems, and climate-adaptive planning are essential to protect critical assets and reduce vulnerability where relocation is not feasible.

Equally important is the enforcement of land-use policies to prevent further expansion into high-risk zones. It is counterproductive to relocate some residents while allowing others to settle in the same vulnerable areas.

 

The situation in Kwakwani is not unique. It is emblematic of a broader governance challenge in Guyana—where known risks are repeatedly managed rather than resolved. In an era of increasing climate uncertainty, this approach is no longer tenable.

If the government is serious about protecting citizens and managing public resources responsibly, it must shift from a reactive posture to a proactive strategy. The science is known. The risks are clear. The costs—both human and financial—are mounting.

Kwakwani does not need another promise that floodwaters will recede. It needs a plan to ensure that when they do, they do not return with the same devastating regularity

.Recurring floods should not mean recurring failure.

 

GECOM Seats: Why discuss, What’s to discuss?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ TRUTH♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY♦ JUNE 2026                                            OP-ED |POLITICS                              BY: GHK LALL

GECOM Seats: Why discuss, What’s to discuss?

Impressive and inspired are those writings addressing the issue of GECOM commissioners.  There’s a collision with stonewalls.  No PNC commissioner is moving.  The fact of public writings, positions taken, and actions recommended confirms the existence of those stonewalls of resistance. 

Immovable.  Apply whatever force believed necessary.  No PNC leader is flexing.  No PNC commissioner is resigning on his own.  Unbelievable.  There I stand.  Troubling in messages sent.

What message is sent to citizens?  It is okay to lose, but still lining up to claim a prize is right.  Is a right.

Taken to the extreme ends of Guyana’s electoral arithmetic, that claim, that reasoning, would still rule, if not a single seat is held in parliament. 

 Going beyond the beyond, if not a single vote was gained.  Something doesn’t add here.  Loose ends.  Like persistently irritating specks in the eye, they don’t leave.  If I tell fellow citizens to walk straight, play fair, and obey the will of the people, and am still looking to hang on to what is politically weak, what redounds to my discredit, then what the hell am I about?  Who am I?  What standards set for Guyana’s largest demographic, the young?

I have absorbed provisions in the Constitution read this way and that way.  Laws crafted.  Rules made.  And procedures to bolster. 

Whether all three are at their comprehensive best, or lacking in compelling power, there is still, there is always, what’s failsafe.  Failsafe, even tamper resistant.  Because it is of infallible and nonnegotiable standing when it confronts honorable men and women.  The constitution that is written within, deeply and inerasably.  The laws that are carved out and followed.  Because they are of my mind and my hand. 

For those come from the internal texts that form the basis for rules and the procedures that are followed.  Win, lose, or draw.  If when those tests of character come, I am found wanting, hedging, dodging, then I would not only have lost my head.  There would be no face left to lose.                                 The PNC should think carefully of sinking so low.

I hear that there is no such creature as a good loser; that a good loser is a loser.  I disagree.  Today and anytime such a statement is made. 

 What I have said repeatedly to PPP Govt leaders, I re-emphasize to PNC leaders.  A man, a woman, must have a code by which he or she operates.  It’s their personally inscribed Bible, Koran, Bhagavad Gita.  In good times.  In times that are so tough that there are no tears left.  The spirit is that decimated.  But it is on the tests of the worst times, that the best must come out.  For then is when that code must be followed.  In letter.  Most of all, in its spirit.  In other words, my personal constitution is more stringent, more demanding, more controlling than any national constitution, as robust as such may be.

The now forgotten side of this issue would be the 109,000 Guyanese who voted for WIN.  When they are seen as mere election fodder, inconsequential soft balls to be pitched around, then I submit that all they are worthy of is being kicked from pillar to post, for all the regard that they command.  So, who is representing them around GECOM’s table?  The stronger question is: representing what? 

What generated so much disillusionment?  What led to the electoral experimentation of Guyana’s desperate?  The dreams of Guyana’s scorned and left out, the other side of One Guyana.  When GECOM seats are disputed post September 2025, that’s not a fight for empowerment of poorly represented Guyanese. 

It’s fighting for self-perpetuation, self-empowerment.  Aggregate and summarize.  Neither termination nor resignation.  Therefore, talk of discussions.  Guyanese need, ask for, bread.  They are forced to contend with stones.

The Missing Agency in a Billion-Dollar Conversation

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦ JUNE 2026

The Missing Agency in a Billion-Dollar Conversation

BY: HEM KUMAR                                                                  Guyana’s rapidly expanding investment profile continues to attract international attention, but a recent meeting between Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill and a visiting U.S. delegation raises questions that go beyond routine diplomacy and into the core of governance practice.

At the center of the concern is not merely the meeting itself, but its structure—and what it reveals about the evolving approach to governance. The delegation reportedly included representatives tied to a prospective industrial-scale project in  Upper Berbice. This venture falls squarely within the realm of heavy industry, natural resource utilization, environmental regulation, and fiscal planning. Yet, the primary government interface was the Ministry of Public Works.

That is an unusual starting point.

Public Works plays a critical supporting role in national development, particularly in roads, bridges, and logistics corridors. But it is not the state’s principal gateway for negotiating or assessing industrial investments of this scale and complexity. That responsibility rests with institutions such as the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest), supported by technical agencies and sector-specific ministries. 

These bodies exist precisely to ensure that proposals are rigorously evaluated across legal, environmental, economic, and fiscal dimensions before any policy alignment is even contemplated.

 According to reports, the discussions touched on potential alumina refinery operations in Berbice—an undertaking that demanded interaction with the mandated State agency. Yet, the apparent absence of the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest) from this engagement is both conspicuous and troubling.

Guyana has invested in building out agencies like GO-Invest with technical staff, policy frameworks, and statutory responsibilities. Taxpayer resources sustain these institutions for a reason. When they are sidelined—whether deliberately or through informal parallel processes—it raises a fundamental question: are these agencies central to national development strategy, or are they being reduced to ceremonial back-end processors of decisions shaped elsewhere?

GO-Invest is not a ceremonial body. It is the state’s designated investment facilitation agency, staffed with the technical, legal, and policy expertise required to evaluate proposals, guide investors, and ensure alignment with national development priorities. Its role is foundational, particularly at the early stages of complex, capital-intensive ventures such as an alumina refinery.

This raises a simple but unavoidable question: was GO-Invest invited to participate, and if not, why not?

 

The absence—at least publicly—of technical personnel or inter-agency representation in such a meeting only sharpens the concern. This is not a minor administrative detail. It goes directly to process integrity. Standard practice in serious investment discussions, even at preliminary stages, involves technical accompaniment to ensure that conversations are grounded in feasibility, regulatory constraints, and national interest considerations. Without that, engagements risk becoming politically driven rather than technically informed.

It also opens the door to perception—and in governance, perception is often as consequential as reality.

 If the agency was excluded, it suggests a deliberate sidelining of institutional processes in favor of a more centralized, minister-led approach to investment engagement. If it was invited but absent, that raises an entirely different set of concerns about coordination and operational coherence within the state’s investment architecture. Neither scenario inspires confidence.

If this was merely an informal, exploratory courtesy call, then that should be clearly communicated. But if substantive discussions were entertained regarding a refinery and associated industrial expansion, then the process appears misaligned with established institutional roles. And that misalignment is not an isolated concern. It reflects a broader and increasingly visible pattern in which ministerial offices appear to supersede or bypass constitutionally and administratively mandated agencies.

This is where the issue moves beyond protocol into principle.

The issue is compounded by the choice of lead ministry. While Public Works is integral to infrastructure development, it is not the primary interface for negotiating or assessing industrial investments. Its role is supportive—ensuring that roads, bridges, and logistical networks can sustain economic expansion—not defining or vetting the investments themselves.

Equally significant is the reported absence of technical accompaniment. Serious investment discussions, even at exploratory stages, are typically supported by teams capable of interrogating feasibility, regulatory requirements, and long-term implications. Without that layer of expertise, such meetings risk becoming politically driven engagements untethered from the rigorous analysis that projects of this magnitude demand.

There is also an economic inversion worth noting. Investors pursuing industrial projects—particularly in extractive or processing sectors—are generally responsible for developing or financing the infrastructure necessary for their operations.

Governments facilitate and regulate; they do not ordinarily serve as the entry point for pitching industrial ventures. When that line begins to blur, it invites scrutiny.

To be fair, direct ministerial engagement is not inherently inappropriate. Governments often use high-level access to signal openness and accelerate investor interest. In a competitive global environment, that can be a strategic tool.

But strategy cannot come at the expense of structure.

When constitutionally and administratively mandated agencies like GO-Invest are absent from critical early engagements, it signals more than a procedural lapse—it suggests a governance model that is shifting away from institutional accountability toward centralized discretion. Over time, that shift can erode transparency, weaken safeguards, and create parallel decision-making channels that are difficult to track or challenge.

Guyana is operating in a high-stakes environment where investment decisions carry long-term consequences for its economy, environment, and sovereignty over resources. That reality demands stronger institutions, not their quiet displacement.

Until there is clarity on whether GO-Invest was engaged—or deliberately bypassed—the question will persist: why is the very agency designed to manage and scrutinize investment not at the table when it matters most?

 

 

 

Gold Before Guns

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦EDITORIAL♦ June  2026

Gold Before Guns: The Real Story Behind Guyana’s Arms Crisis

Thirty-three smuggled AK-47s have reignited fears of a Venezuelan invasion plot. The more uncomfortable explanation is already embedded in Guyana’s own gold economy — and in the officials who keep it running.

Former Assistant Commissioner of Police Paul Slowe was right this week to call the discovery of 33 smuggled AK-47s — ten on the Corentyne in May, twenty-three at Schoonard three weeks later, all but one stripped of their serial numbers — a national security emergency rather than an ordinary policing matter. He was right, too, that the answer runs through Interpol, the United States’ Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and an honest accounting of who inside the state may have let the shipments through. Where the public conversation has gone wrong is in the theory it has chosen to chase.

An anonymous defense and security source told Demerara Waves this week that the rifles are most plausibly the leading edge of a Venezuelan hybrid-warfare campaign: sleepers embedded among an estimated five thousand Venezuelan men already working across Guyana, positioned to “sow chaos and disorder” ahead of the International Court of Justice’s year-end ruling on the 1899 Arbitral Award. It is a dramatic theory, and not an impossible one, given that Guyana Defence Force patrols have already taken fire along the Cuyuni River and a string of unexplained bombings — the GPL substation, the Ruimveldt police station, a Regent Street gas station blast that killed a child — remain unsolved. But it asks Guyanese to believe that interim President Delcy Rodríguez, mid-negotiation with Washington over reopening Venezuela’s mining sector to foreign capital, would gamble that relationship on a covert smuggling run through Georgetown’s own wharves.

R.Evan Ellis, the U.S. Army War College’s Latin America research professor who has tracked the Essequibo dispute since well before last year’s referendum scare, offers a more disciplined read of the same facts. The guns, he argues, are more plausibly being moved by criminal networks — Venezuelan, Brazilian, Colombian — fleeing enforcement pressure now bearing down on them across the region, not by a state plotting an invasion it cannot win. Neither Rodríguez nor her brother Jorge, who chairs Venezuela’s National Assembly, has any incentive to torch a fragile opening to Washington over Essequibo right now. That distinction matters, because it points to where Guyana’s actual vulnerability lives: not in Caracas’s intentions, but in its own gold economy.

Guyana has watched this mechanism before, only from a different direction. When Brazil’s government moved against the garimpeiros occupying Yanomami land, the miners did not go home; they scattered across the Guiana Shield, into Venezuela, Suriname, French Guiana, and Guyana’s own interior. Venezuela’s troops are now running the identical operation in reverse, clearing armed groups out of the Las Claritas gold fields in Bolívar state — the same district that borders both Guyana and Brazil — as part of Caracas’s own push to reopen its mining sector to foreign investors. There is no reason to expect the men displaced from those fields will behave any differently than the garimpeiros did. The only real question is whether Guyana is a harder landing zone than it was last time, or an easier one.

The evidence says easier. Long before these rifles surfaced, Venezuelan-linked traders were already operating inside the illicit gold economy running through Guyana’s southern border regions, including Region 9, with a level of comfort that should embarrass any functioning regulator.

Gold of unverifiable origin does not cross a border and arrive at the Guyana Gold Board on its own paperwork; it requires officials and licensing bodies willing to look past the obvious questions, or willing to supply the documentation that converts smuggled ore into certified “local production.”

That is not a hypothetical for this news platform  It is the same institutional posture this media-source has spent months documenting around Mazoa Hill and Marudi. An arms pipeline riding on top of an already-tolerated gold pipeline is not a second national security failure. It is the same failure, with a body count attached.

This is what makes Slowe’s diagnosis half right and too generous by half. Guyana’s security apparatus is not simply under-resourced against a sophisticated foreign adversary. It has spent years declining to police a smuggling economy that was already running through its own ports, mining districts, and licensing offices, and is now expressing alarm that the same corridors are moving rifles as well as ore. Tracing serial numbers with Interpol’s help, as Slowe recommends, is necessary. It will not explain why the corridor existed in the first place, or who benefited from keeping it open.

The official response so far offers little reassurance that anyone intends to find out. The Home Affairs Minister’s response to the busts amounted to “still assessing,” and her predecessor offered nothing beyond a refusal to comment. President Ali has promised only that regional and international partners will be brought into the investigation, with no timeline given and no lead agency named, and no answer yet to the opposition’s basic question of how the weapons cleared a port that, by the government’s own admission, still lacks the scanners to catch them. Parliament, for its part, has not asked a single public question about how a cross-border gold-and-arms network operates inside Guyana with this much room to move.

Until it does, Guyana’s national security emergency will remain exactly what successive administrations have allowed it to become: a crisis imported through channels the state itself left open, and shows no apparent urgency to close.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

A Manufactured Shortage: ExxonMobil, Government, and the Failure to Prepare Guyana’s Workforce

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM JUNE 2026

A Manufactured Shortage: ExxonMobil, Government, and the Failure to Prepare Guyana’s Workforce

ExxonMobil’s admission that it is struggling to find sufficient skilled Guyanese workers should not be mistaken for an unfortunate surprise. It is the predictable outcome of a development model in which both the operator and the State—Guyana’s 50 percent profit partner—failed to prepare for the very scale of transformation they eagerly pursued.

After nearly a decade of oil production planning and six years since first oil, ExxonMobil is only now commissioning a baseline study to assess workforce capacity.

 

That exercise, while useful, comes far too late. The scale of Guyana’s offshore resources was never a mystery. From the early discovery phase, it was clear that multiple FPSOs, complex subsea systems, and a highly technical operational environment would demand a deep and continuously replenished pool of skilled labor.

Yet neither ExxonMobil nor the Government of Guyana treated workforce development as an urgent, front-loaded priority. Instead, both appeared content to focus on the inflow of revenues while underestimating—or outright neglecting—the foundational inputs required to sustain production at scale.

The Government’s role in this failure is particularly stark. As a direct beneficiary of oil profits and the steward of national development, it had both the incentive and the authority to align education, training, and labor policies with the demands of the emerging petroleum sector. Seven years was more than sufficient time to expand technical institutes, modernize curricula, fund specialized training programs, and establish structured pipelines into the industry.

That did not happen at the necessary pace or scale.

Instead, Guyana is now confronting a tightening labor market where demand is outstripping supply, forcing companies to compete for a limited pool of qualified workers. The consequences extend beyond the oil sector.

The very Dutch Disease dynamics now being cautiously referenced by ExxonMobil—where one industry cannibalizes talent from others—are being actively set in motion by this shortage.

Guyana now faces a convergence of pressures: an accelerating production schedule, a tightening labor market, and the risk of economic imbalance. ExxonMobil’s study may provide useful data, but data alone will not resolve a structural deficit that has been years in the making.

Healthcare, education, construction, and public administration are all vulnerable to losing skilled personnel to higher-paying oil and gas opportunities.

This is not merely a labor issue; it is a structural economic risk that threatens to distort national development.

 ExxonMobil’s data reveals the complexity of the situation. While 68 percent of the workforce is Guyanese and some 1,800 offshore workers have been trained to international standards, the company still reports increasing difficulty in sourcing qualified personnel. This highlights a critical gap between participation and proficiency. Guyanese workers are present, but the pipeline of advanced technical expertise remains too shallow for the industry’s accelerating demands.

It is also telling that this moment of reckoning coincides with stricter enforcement of local content requirements.

It is also telling that this moment of reckoning coincides with stricter enforcement of local content requirements.

The Government’s push toward a 60 percent threshold has effectively forced a confrontation with realities that should have been addressed years ago.

What is now framed as a labor shortage is, in truth, a planning deficit.

 Both ExxonMobil and the Government must now confront their shared responsibility. The company cannot credibly claim surprise at constraints it had the data to anticipate, and the Government cannot position itself as a passive regulator when it is an active partner in the venture.

The path forward requires more than retrospective analysis. It demands coordinated action between the government, the private sector, and educational institutions. Targeted scholarships, expanded technical training, apprenticeship programs, and international partnerships must be scaled rapidly and strategically. Crucially, these efforts must extend beyond oil and gas to ensure that other sectors are not hollowed out in the process.

Corrective action is still possible, but it will require urgency and coordination that have so far been lacking.. At the same time, deliberate policies are needed to protect other sectors from being stripped of talent.

Guyana’s oil wealth was always going to test the country’s institutional capacity. What is now evident is that both the operator and the State underestimated the complexity of that test.

As Guyana stands on the brink of unprecedented economic transformation, the lesson is clear. Resource wealth alone does not guarantee development. Without early investment in people—the most critical resource of all—even the most lucrative opportunities can expose the fragility of a nation’s foundation.

The result is a labor shortage that is neither accidental nor unavoidable. It is manufactured—born of delayed planning, misplaced priorities, and a collective failure to recognize that human capital is the true engine of any resource economy.

Seven years later, Guyana is paying the price for that oversight.

 

More money for Guyanese: Healing oil or Snake oil

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY ♦ INTEGRITY♦ TRUTH

OP-ED                                                  BY :GHK LALL-JUNE 2026

More money for Guyanese: Healing oil or Snake oil

I like it.  More money for Guyanese workers.  Not private sector minimum wage workers, regrettably.  If any local workers are due more money, private sector (and public service) minimum wage workers stand out.  More money is for Guyanese in the oil industry.  Well, that’s the call, with PPP Govt Minister Vickram Bharrat doing the honors. A timely push from the government.  But as Guyanese know better than me -waan haan caan klap.  How will the oil companies and other entities, all foreign, respond to this significant government call?  I foresee a few, ah, hiccups.  Some sneezing to cause watery eyes and runny noses.  I live with allergies, so I recognize the triggers.  More money for Guyanese is a trigger, pollen shower.

More money for Guyanese workers in Guyana’s oil industry means all the companies, local and foreign, have to shell out for cash. 

The bottom line gets thinner.  Nowhere near red.  But not as green.  Not as many greenbacks to export to U.S. banks.  Not as much for local companies keeping their stashes at home. 

It has been hailed rather heartily that people are a company’s best assets.  That is, until money matters surface and get in the way.  More money, especially more pay, has historically led to bad friends and bad blood.  Simply ask Guyanese luminaries Lincoln Lewis and Seepaul Narine.  Poor Seepaul!  Even he own peeple in de PPP givin he haad kyaad fuh he peeple in de fields.  More money to be paid by foreign companies to local workers, so they are at a comparable level with their expatriate neighbors, is going to cause those companies to wince.  And, once they have to pony up, that may mean that local companies with local workers could be compelled to do something.  Not necessarily the same, but something more in the envelope.

I am trying to get ahead of foreign oil companies’ reactions.  To help my fine friend, VP Jagdeo, I have some good ones for him to ponder.  Years of experience is a walkover.  I walkover specific experience (yessir!)  Guyanese have six years under their belt.  Tick that box.  But there is that animal called equivalent qualifications.  How measured?  By whom?  Leave that box for now.  Then, there are those intangibles that PPP Govt agents have used in domestic public service arenas of recruitment, promotion, compensation: team player, leadership skills, organizational asset.  Any of these can be a weight that slows down the rate of pay growth for Guyanese workers.  Then, there’s that big, bad, one that’s both tangible and intangible: Evaluation Report.  Tangible because it’s usually on paper.  Intangible because it’s the product of something in the evaluator’s head.  A fine kettle of scorpions, that is.

Which right-minded foreign company executive, manager, willingly forks out millions more for local workers? 

However, deserving, overdue, they may be?  Business is a cold-blooded reptile.  Never about the milk of human kindness.  It’s capitalism, not Christianity.  What’s the edge, the bludgeon, that expatriates calling the shots have?  Make the evaluation unconscionably, improperly, tough, and few are the local workers that measure up.  Don’t have what it takes. 

At bottom, not qualifying for the kind of lovely money of which Minister Bharrat gushed so splendidly.  From the offshore oil rigs, the S-o-S comes: Georgetown -there’s a problem.  Few Guyanese workers are up to scratch.  How many Bobby Gossais can there be in an oil yard?  Translation: few of them have earned the right to more money.  Definitely not anywhere in the vicinity of any equality with highly-skilled, highly qualified, and highly compensated (and highly-cherished) foreign imports.  Before fellow Guyanese, I plead: don’t shortchange that abbreviation in brackets.

I welcome more moolah for Guyanese oil industry workers.  Has to be an industry now, with a million daily near happening.  Meanwhile, I remember inflation.  Apparently, PPP Govt fears have been tamed.  Thanks for the corroborating stats, Dr. de la Cruz.  Nonoil Guyanese will fall farther behind, have so survive.  Somehow.

SEEDS OF DECEIT

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

INDEPENDENT♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦GTOWN  GUYANA 

EDITORIAL

SEEDS OF DECEIT:

How a $54 Billion Supplementary Bill

Exposes the Ali Administration’s Fiscal Fiction

Four months. That is all it took for Guyana’s largest-ever national budget to run dry — or so the Ali administration now asks us to believe. The President tours the Dominican Republic press circuit proclaiming Guyana the region’s anchor of fiscal responsibility, even as his government returns, hat in hand, with a $54 billion supplementary request so vague in its particulars that it raises a question far graver than incompetence: is this the oil-funded war chest for the Local Government Elections?

THE EDITORS  •  592 GUARDIAN  •   JUNE 2026

I.THE IMPLAUSIBILITY IS THE MESSAGE

On 26 January 2026, the National Assembly passed a record-breaking national budget. The Ali administration marketed it as a monument to transformational governance — the material proof that oil wealth was being translated into generational uplift. The numbers were staggering. The rhetoric was soaring. President Ali spoke of planting ‘forests of opportunity that will shelter generations to come.’ The international press was invited to witness Guyana’s arrival as a serious fiscal actor.

By May 2026 — roughly sixteen weeks later — the same administration had returned to the National Assembly with a supplementary appropriation bill seeking more than $54 billion in additional spending authority.

Let that sink in.

In the time it takes a secondary school student to complete a single term, Guyana’s government exhausted whatever buffer it had built into a historic spending plan. And not by a small margin. Fifty-four billion dollars is not a rounding error. It is not an emergency provision for a natural disaster or a regional economic shock. It is a sum that demands a full accounting — of what was miscalculated, what was deliberately omitted from the original budget, and what new priorities have emerged that are so urgent they cannot wait for the next fiscal cycle.

Instead, the nation has received vagueness. Generalities. Political boilerplate

II.THE COMPETENCE QUESTION CANNOT BE AVOIDED

There are two possible explanations for a government returning for a $54 billion supplementary appropriation within four months of passing its largest-ever budget. The first is incompetence. The second is dishonesty. Neither inspires confidence.

If the explanation is incompetence — if the Ministry of Finance and the administration’s technocrats genuinely failed to anticipate spending needs that materialized within a single quarter — then we are confronted with a profound indictment of the government’s planning capacity. Budget preparation in Guyana is not an ad hoc exercise. It involves months of ministry submissions, macroeconomic modelling, revenue projections, and Cabinet deliberation. The entire apparatus of the state is mobilized to produce the document that the government then presents to the nation as evidence of its stewardship.

If that document is wrong by $54 billion inside of sixteen weeks, one of the following must be true: the projections were wildly inaccurate; the assumptions underpinning the budget were known to be unrealistic when they were made; or the government is spending in areas it did not disclose to the National Assembly or the public. Any of these scenarios constitutes a failure of governance at the highest level.

President Ali presents himself internationally as the steward of a sophisticated oil economy, a leader who understands ‘deliberate diversification’ and ‘permanent transformation.’ His administration cannot simultaneously claim that competence while being unable to project spending needs four months into the future.

III. THE VAGUENESS IS NOT ACCIDENTAL

The opacity surrounding the supplementary bill is, this Editorial Board submits, the most damning feature of the entire exercise. In a functioning democracy, a supplementary appropriation of this scale would be accompanied by granular detail: which line items are being augmented and why; what original projections proved wrong; which projects are being accelerated; and which emergent obligations necessitate additional spending.

What Guyanese have received instead is the political equivalent of a blank cheque.

Vagueness in public finance is never neutral. It is a choice. Governments that are spending in the public interest invite scrutiny because scrutiny validates their claims. Governments that are spending for political purposes obscure details because exposure would reveal the true beneficiaries. The Ali administration’s refusal to provide itemized justifications for $54 billion in additional expenditure — in an election year — is not an administrative oversight. It is a red flag of the highest order.

The nation is owed specific answers to the following questions, and this Board demands they be answered on the floor of the National Assembly and in public written submissions to the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee:

THE QUESTIONS THIS ADMINISTRATION MUST ANSWER

1.  Which specific budget lines are being supplemented, by how much, and why did original projections fail?

2.  What procurement processes, if any, will govern the expenditure of these additional funds?

3.  Are any of these funds earmarked for infrastructure projects in constituencies targeted in the upcoming Local Government Elections?

4.  Who authorzied the spending commitments that necessitated this request, and when were those commitments made?

5.  Has the Ministry of Finance revised its full-year revenue and expenditure projections in light of this shortfall?

6.  What is the draw-down status of the Natural Resource Fund, and what disbursement approvals have been made since 1 January 2026?

IV.THE ELECTION HYPOTHESIS

The 592 Guardian does not make accusations lightly. We are, however, compelled by the available evidence to state what many Guyanese are already saying in their homes, on their minibuses, and on social media: this supplementary bill has the appearance — and the timing — of an electoral financing vehicle.

The Local Government Elections are approaching. The Ali administration is acutely aware of the legitimacy it derives from constituency-level victories. The pattern of large, vaguely justified expenditure coinciding with electoral cycles is not novel in Guyanese political history — and it has not been unique to any single party. What is novel is the scale. Fifty-four billion dollars in supplementary spending authority, sought from a compliant National Assembly majority, with minimal public itemization, in the months before a national vote, represents a qualitatively new threshold of fiscal-political risk.

The government will, predictably, deny this. It will cite development imperatives, emergent capital needs, and the accelerating pace of transformation. It will point to visible projects — roads, hospitals, solar installations — as evidence that the money is going where it should. It will accuse critics of playing politics.

But accusations do not require guilt — they require accountability. And accountability requires transparency. Show us the line items. Show us the procurement records. Show us the disbursement schedule. If the spending is legitimate, the documentation will vindicate the government. If it is not, the Guyanese people deserve to know before they cast their votes, not after.

V.THE FORTRESS AND THE FICTION

President Ali told the Dominican Republic’s energy press that the Natural Resource Fund is Guyana’s ‘fortress of fiscal responsibility.’ It is a fine phrase. It is the kind of language that sounds authoritative in a glossy magazine feature or an investor roadshow. But a fortress that requires a $54 billion emergency drawdown four months into the fiscal year is not a fortress. It is a façade.

The President speaks internationally of ‘deliberate diversification’ and ‘long-term transformation.’ He invokes future generations. He promises forests of opportunity. But one cannot credibly plan for future generations while demonstrating an inability to project spending needs over a single fiscal quarter. These two positions — visionary stewardship of intergenerational wealth and chaotic, opaque supplementary demands — are irreconcilable. The international audience hearing the inspiring version of this story deserves to know the domestic reality.

Guyana’s oil wealth is real. The developmental opportunity it represents is real. The damage that fiscal recklessness, elite capture, and political manipulation of that wealth can inflict is equally real. The resource curse that President Ali so confidently claims to be defying is not conjured by pessimists — it is documented, in granular detail, in the economic histories of Nigeria, Angola, Venezuela, and a dozen other states where the rhetoric of transformation preceded decades of squandered potential.

The antidote to that curse is not confident rhetoric. It is institutional transparency, robust parliamentary oversight, independent auditing, and a media and civil society willing to ask uncomfortable questions even when — especially when — the government’s international image is riding high.

VI.OUR DEMAND

The 592 Guardian calls on the National Assembly’s Opposition to refuse passage of this supplementary appropriation until the government tables a fully itemized breakdown of every line item, the originating ministry, the contractual basis for each expenditure, and the specific projects or programs to be funded.

We call on the Auditor General’s office to immediately flag this request for priority review and to publish a preliminary assessment of its consistency with the fiscal rules governing Natural Resource Fund disbursements.

We call on civil society organizations, the Private Sector Commission, and the academic community to add their voices to the demand for transparency. The silence of institutions in the face of fiscal opacity is itself a form of complicity.

And we call on every Guyanese citizen to remember, when they go to vote in the Local Government Elections, that a government which cannot explain where $54 billion went in sixteen weeks is not a government that has earned the right to speak of ‘forests of opportunity for generations to come.’

The seeds being planted today may indeed shelter generations — but they will be the wrong generation’s forest.

This editorial represents the independent position of The 592 Guardian Editorial Board. The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability publication committed to social justice journalism in Guyana and the wider Caribbean region.

© 2026 The 592 Guardian  •  All rights reserved