Aubrey Norton’s Unearned Throne

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦OPINION♦POLITICS                OP- ED                                                                                              BY: Hem Kumar

Aubrey Norton’s Unearned Throne

Defeated, deserted, and demoted to third place, the PNCR/APNU leader still acts as though the mandate never left him — and Guyana’s democracy is paying the price.

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board  |  June, 2026

Aubrey Compton Norton answers to several titles. He is Leader of the People’s National Congress Reform. He is Chairman, and Representative of the List of Candidates, for A Partnership for National Unity. What he is not, and has not been since the night of September 6, 2025, is Leader of the Opposition. That office now belongs to Azruddin Mohammed, whose three-month-old We Invest in Nationhood party did what six decades of PNC machinery never expected : it  pushed Norton’s coalition into third place. The titles Norton still holds describe a man running a smaller and smaller room.

The title he lost described the only one that mattered constitutionally. He has conducted himself ever since as though the distinction were beneath his notice

 The numbers are not contestable, because they are GECOM’s own. APNU went from 31 seats in the previous National Assembly to 12 in this one — the worst result in the coalition’s history, and the first time since its founding that it failed to carry a single region. Georgetown, the capital the PNC effectively owned for the better part of six decades, fell to the PPP/C for the first time, by a margin of nearly two to one. WIN’s 16 seats made it the country’s new official opposition. Norton’s APNU, with its 12, is now the third force in a parliament it once dominated.

This was not a setback. It was a dismantling, and Norton was the man at the wheel when it happened.

What followed was supposed to be a reckoning. Instead it has been a kind of stage management. Norton has not called a single General Council meeting of his own party since the defeat. The PNCR’s Congress — the one body with actual authority to replace him — has been pushed back to 2027, on his own say-so, in the name of “consolidation.” In June, with the wreckage of September still being swept up, he told a WPA-aligned broadcast that he is prepared to stand for the party leadership again, having already ruled himself out only for the presidency. A man who led his party to its historic floor has positioned himself as the only person qualified to lead its recovery. That is not humility. That is occupancy.

The exodus continued anyway, and it has not gone where a healthy opposition’s defectors should go.

In May, a fresh group of former APNU parliamentarians and sitting regional councillors — Ricky Ramsaroop, Shurwayne Holder, Dinesh Jaiprashad, Ravoldo Birbal, Sheik Yaseen, Prince Holder, and Gangadai Lloyd — sat down with PPP General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo and declared themselves part of his party’s political family. They joined a list that already included former PNC stalwarts James Bond, Jermaine Figueira, Geeta Chandan-Edmond, Richard Van West Charles, Daniel Seeram, and Samuel Sandy.

Notice the direction of travel. These were not disillusioned PNC supporters drifting toward WIN, the upstart that actually defeated Norton’s coalition at the polls. They walked directly into the government’s camp. For the party’s base, this has landed as a double shot of sobriety: a historic loss at the ballot box, compounded by a leadership that keeps quietly handing the winners more of its own people. Every PNC defector who lands at Freedom House rather than at WIN’s door is not a wandering vote. He is a transfer payment from the opposition to the government — and Norton’s coalition has been making those payments on a near-monthly basis.

Norton’s own account of all this is that nobody should be surprised, that the departing members had signaled their intentions for some time, that defection is simply what happens to parties out of power. He is, in other words, narrating his own hemorrhage as background noise. His party’s General Secretary, Sherwin Benjamin, called the May defections an act of “personal aggrandizement.” Norton called it predictable. Neither man called it a leadership failure — which is the one explanation the evidence actually supports.

He has not lacked for warning. Former Georgetown Mayor Ubraj Narine resigned from the PNCR in November, saying the party had been “hemorrhaging internally and externally.” In May, in a public letter, he went further, telling Norton plainly that he had to step aside or watch the PNCR lose the one stronghold it has held since Forbes Burnham built it — City Hall itself. Norton’s answer was silence, followed by a renewed bid for his own job.

The title he lost described the only one that mattered constitutionally. He has conducted himself ever since as though the distinction were beneath his notice.

 It is against this backdrop — third place, a bleeding caucus, a postponed Congress, a leader the public record shows clinging rather than rebuilding — that Norton has chosen to assert himself on a matter of real constitutional consequence. As this media outfit  reported this week, Azruddin Mohamed, the man who now holds the office Norton lost, has moved to replace the three long-serving opposition-nominated GECOM commissioners, arguing that their tenure traces to a parliamentary mandate that no longer exists. Norton’s reply, offered without engaging the constitutional argument Mohamed actually made, amounted to a flat denial: “no vacancy exists,” he said, unless a sitting commissioner dies or resigns.

That is not a constitutional position. It is a veto, asserted by a leader the architecture of the Constitution no longer recognizes as the opposition’s voice.

A claim made over commissioners who were never his appointees to begin with — Charles Corbin, Desmond Trotman, and Vincent Alexander were advised upon by a previous opposition leader representing a different party and a different mandate entirely. Norton wants the authority of an office he does not hold, exercised over appointments he did not make, to outlast an election he comprehensively lost. That is the kind of unchecked, informal power this board has in mind, and it is not an isolated incident. It is the pattern.

It would be one thing if Norton’s caution were a strategic choice his own coalition endorsed. It is not. Within APNU itself, voices including parliamentarians Terrence Campbell and David Hinds have called for the kind of social mobilization an opposition reduced to twelve seats might actually need to make itself heard against a government with thirty-six. Norton has offered no comparable urgency — only consolidation, only continuity, only himself.

None of this serves the PNC’s supporters, the generations of Afro-Guyanese voters whose loyalty built the party Norton now administers. It serves the government he is nominally there to check.

 

A demoralized, third-place opposition that cannot hold its own councillors, cannot convene its own Congress, and spends its remaining credibility defending GECOM appointments nobody currently mandates him to defend is not an obstacle to the PPP/C’s continued dominance. It is a convenience. Whatever Norton intends, the effect of his refusal to leave is to aid and abet the very consolidation of power his party was founded to resist.

A leader who will not yield the chair, in a moment that calls for renewal, is not protecting the opposition. He is one of the quiet guarantees of its continued weakness — and in a country where unchecked executive power is the actual and growing danger, that guarantee is itself a clear and present danger to the growth of any credible check on the state.

Someone in the PNC needs to bell this cat. The party, and the country, cannot wait much longer for that someone to arrive.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

DEMOCRACIES UNDER PRESSURE

/0 Comments/in , , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN |EDITORIAL

ANALYSIS & COMMENTARY  ♦  UNDP DEMOCRACY REPORT 2026

The Stability Illusion: Guyana in the UNDP Democracy Mirror

A landmark regional report finds Caribbean democracies resilient. Read against Guyana’s actual record of governance failure, resource capture, and institutional decay, the picture is rather more troubling.

The 592 Guardian — Editorial Board Georgetown, Guyana  ·  June 2026

The United Nations Development Program has released its Democracy and Development Report 2026, covering Latin America and the Caribbean. In its Caribbean chapter, the report extends a qualified but meaningful endorsement: electoral democracy in the region remains stable, institutionally grounded, and internationally legitimate. Haiti and Cuba are noted as the chronic outliers. Countries like Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana appear in the V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index chart as solid performers, their trend lines sitting comfortably in the upper half of the index.

The 592 Guardian reads that chart with some unease. Because what the index measures — free and fair elections, freedom of association, elected officials, inclusive suffrage, freedom of expression — is not the same thing as what Guyanese citizens actually experience when they try to hold their government to account. Electoral proceduralism and substantive democratic governance are not synonyms. And nowhere in the Caribbean region is that gap more consequential than in a country that is now, per capita, one of the largest oil producers on earth.

Electoral proceduralism and substantive democratic governance are not synonyms — and in oil-rich Guyana, the gap between them has never been more consequential.

THE REPORT’S FRAMEWORK, APPLIED HONESTLY

The UNDP report identifies five critical areas for democratic renewal across the region. We propose to apply each of them to Guyana without the diplomatic softening that a multilateral institution is, by its nature, required to deploy.

The first priority the report identifies is restraining the conversion of economic power into political influence. It calls for ‘greater transparency, oversight and fairness in political funding‘ and warns against ‘both legal and illegal resources‘ distorting democratic competition. In Guyana, this concern is not theoretical. The administration of President Irfaan Ali and Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo has overseen a procurement environment in which the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board has repeatedly awarded contracts — in energy, infrastructure, and services — under circumstances that independent observers have found difficult to reconcile with competitive, transparent tendering. The GPL-InterEnergy sole-source power contract, the Karpowership arrangement, and the Gas-to-Energy project’s ballooning budget variances all represent, in the UNDP’s own terminology, the conversion of economic adjacency into political arrangement.

The second priority is strengthening State capacity so that political participation is not subject to coercion by non-state actors. The report cites organized crime and violence as the central threat here, and the data it presents are sobering: the Caribbean now records a homicide rate of 27.9 per 100,000 — the highest of any region tracked, exceeding Central America. Guyana is embedded in that figure. Interior regions and border communities face security environments in which the state’s presence is at best intermittent, at worst captured. The Auditor General’s repeated documentation of unretired cash advances and phantom project expenditures across NDIA and regional administrations is not merely a fiscal footnote — it is evidence of a state that has chosen to be absent from the lives of the citizens who most need it.

WHAT THE UNDP REPORT ACTUALLY FOUND ON CARIBBEAN DEMOCRACY

→  Electoral Democracy Index scores remain high and stable for most Caribbean states

→  Homicide rates in the Caribbean (27.9/100k) now exceed Central America and are the highest globally tracked

→  Fiscal constraints and climate vulnerability create structural limits on State capacity

→  Political polarization is lower than Latin America — but the report notes this does not preclude governance capture

→  The report calls for limiting economic power’s conversion into political influence as a top reform priority

→  Figure 16 (V-Dem) shows Guyana’s Electoral Democracy score dipped notably in the 2010s with incomplete recovery

THE V-DEM LINE NOBODY IN GEORGETOWN IS DISCUSSING

The UNDP’s Figure 16 is perhaps the report’s most important visual artefact for Guyanese readers. The Electoral Democracy Index trend lines for Caribbean states chart forty years of democratic development. Guyana’s line is distinctive: it rises sharply in the 1990s following the end of the Forbes Burnham-era distortions, climbs through the Cheddi Jagan restoration and its aftermath, then experiences a visible and documented dip — precisely during the decade in which the PPP consolidated its administrative dominance before losing power in 2015. It recovers partially after 2020 but does not return to its earlier trajectory.

We note this not to score partisan points — the PNC/APNU-AFC’s behavior during the 2020 election recount was itself a democratic crisis of the first order, and one this publication has documented at length. We note it because the UNDP report’s optimistic framing of Caribbean electoral stability must be read alongside that specific curve. The curve tells a story of institutional fragility that formal electoral outcomes can temporarily mask.

Guyana’s V-Dem curve dipped precisely during the decade the PPP consolidated administrative dominance — and has not fully recovered. The UNDP’s optimism does not erase that line.

OIL, SOVEREIGNTY, AND THE ACCOUNTABILITY DEFICIT

The UNDP report’s deepest structural argument is one that Guyanese citizens should internalize urgently: the quality of democracy depends on the State’s ability to deliver tangible human development outcomes that reinforce democratic legitimacy. Where the State fails to do so, legitimacy erodes — and that erosion creates the conditions for authoritarian consolidation, whether it arrives in the form of electoral manipulation, institutional capture, or the simple exhaustion of civil society.

Guyana now generates, through the Stabroek Block, revenues that would transform virtually any small Caribbean economy. The Natural Resource Fund has been capitalized. The Gas-to-Energy project, whatever its procurement irregularities, is premised on a genuine infrastructure ambition. But the governance framework around these revenues has been systematically insulated from meaningful parliamentary scrutiny. The National Assembly — the institution that in Westminster systems is meant to be the democratic counterweight to executive excess — has been rendered functionally inert. Speaker Manzoor Nadir has presided over a chamber that has failed in its core accountability function: scrutinizing public expenditure, interrogating contracts, and holding ministers to account in real time.

The UNDP report warns explicitly against ‘the concentration of power’ and calls for ‘reinforcing institutional checks and balances and protecting the autonomy of oversight institutions.’ In Guyana in 2026, that warning reads as a diagnosis, not a prescription. The Auditor General’s reports document, year after year, a pattern of procurement irregularity, unretired advances, and audit evasion that would trigger executive crisis in any Westminster democracy with functional oversight. In Georgetown, they are tabled, noted, and forgotten.

THE ETHNIC POLITICS VARIABLE THE REPORT CANNOT NAME

There is one structural feature of Guyanese democracy that no multilateral institution can comfortably address in a regional report but which is essential to any honest accounting of the country’s democratic health: the role of ethnic bloc voting as both the foundation of PPP dominance and the ceiling of opposition viability.

The UNDP report speaks of ‘reconnecting citizens with politics by strengthening the capacity of political parties to structure competition and channel social demands in a sustained and programmatic manner.’ In Guyana, political parties have never primarily competed on programmatic grounds. The PPP’s electoral floor is Indo-Guyanese communal solidarity; the PNC/APNU’s is Afro-Guyanese communal solidarity. The result is a democracy in which electoral competition is formally free and fair but substantively structured by demographic arithmetic rather than policy debate. This is not a recent development — it is the original wound of colonial labour importation, never healed by the postcolonial state. But it is a wound that the current administration has shown no interest in healing, because ethnic loyalty is the administration’s most reliable governance asset.

Into this environment, the country is injecting oil revenues at a scale that has no precedent in Caribbean history. The risk the UNDP report identifies — economic power converting into political influence — is, in Guyana’s specific context, not a general concern about corporate lobbying. It is a concern about whether oil rents will be used to entrench ethnic patronage networks so deeply that competitive democracy becomes structurally impossible regardless of what the V-Dem index records.

In Guyana, oil revenues risk deepening not just corruption but ethnic patronage — converting a structural democratic weakness into a permanent electoral architecture.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM OWES THIS MOMENT

The UNDP report closes with a call for ‘broad, purposeful, and multi-stakeholder national dialogues’ to reconnect democracy, the State, and development. It is the kind of recommendation that sounds procedurally sound and is politically unenforceable. No government that benefits from the current configuration of power has an incentive to convene a dialogue designed to limit that power.

What exists — what must exist — are independent institutions willing to document the gap between the report’s framework and the country’s reality. Courts that adjudicate without deference. Auditors who report without fear of consequence. A press that publishes without calculating what the administration will accept.

The 592 Guardian does not operate under the illusion that editorial scrutiny alone is sufficient to close Guyana’s democratic deficit. But we do operate under the conviction that naming the deficit precisely — rather than allowing it to disappear behind the warm light of a V-Dem index score — is a precondition for anything that follows.

Guyana is not, by the UNDP’s reckoning, a democracy in crisis. By the reckoning of the citizens who cannot access public contracts, cannot hold their National Assembly accountable, and cannot see where their oil revenues are going, the assessment requires more work.

Guyana is not, by the UNDP’s reckoning, a democracy in crisis. By the reckoning of the citizens who cannot access public contracts, cannot hold their National Assembly accountable, and cannot see where their oil revenues are going, the assessment requires more work.

The report has given us a useful framework. The country deserves honest application of it.

 

—  The 592 Guardian  |  Independent Accountability Journalism  |  Georgetown, Guyana  —

 

Iran, Israel, Caracas -Georgetown, there’s a problem

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN| OPINIONS| GTOWN ,GUYANA |June 2026

TRUTH♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY♦

BY: GHK LALL

Iran, Israel, Caracas -Georgetown, there’s a problem

I hope that Pres Ali is absorbing.  I trust that Vice President Jagdeo is digesting the development.  The same goes for every Guyana opposition party leader.  America has made its call.  The chips fall wherever they do.  Israel is raging.  PM Netanyahu is reeling.  His competitors are positioning.  America is moving.  Proving once again that its own interests take precedence, are due the highest priority.

Which country could boast like Israel of a special friendship with the U.S?  A friendship so special that it is sacred; that it makes White House occupants cower (after they curse); that it pushes the vaunted U.S. Congress to tie itself into knots; that it rattles the outspoken American media, so that sections of it walk on tiptoe, as though weaving through a dangerous, treacherous, minefield.  It is and they are.  All of that faded every so slightly, lost some footing, and surrendered to the supremacy and permanency of American interests.  Iran has become a major irritation to Israel.  The deal-good or bad, well-received or well-trashed-showed in the clearest light where U.S. priorities are.  Even when a best friend, the best of the best, has to be pulled away from, given a wakeup call.

It couldn’t have been an easy call for President Trump.  Reports are that in the heated discussion, a choice word or two (not the kindergarten classroom kind) came from the American side of the red line.  Say what has to be said about Donald John Trump, but the New Yorker in him is still alive and just as brawling and inflaming.  It takes a leader like President Trump to deal (not the business kind) with a leader like PM Netanyahu.  Trump may be ready to move onto the next chapter.  Israel may have other ideas; was sure to have seen some sort of agreement in the making between Washington and Teheran, and have its contingencies in hand.

Provocation that could unravel a shaky bargain.  I dare not say sabotage, but little else is left.  Blood enemies, when forced to bury their hatchets, usually respond one way.  They bury them in each other’s head.  Too much bad blood.  Too many bad vibes: Gaza, Lebanon.  And, if there is one attribute that is prized in the sunny Middle East, it is the death-dealing heat of revenge.  Politics, geopolitics, geography, holy territory all get lost in the call of, cry for, gore.  All it takes is one slight, intended or misread, and the table is cleared.  Time to throw down.  It’s time to get back to Guyana.

I warned (humbly) Pres Ali, VP Jagdeo.  Ally with America.  But don’t lock eggs in one safe.  Keep a spare key.  Keep something in reserve.  Ali laffed.  Jagdeo mocked.  I do my duty.  American soldiers fighting by the side of Venezuelan soldiers.  In January, American soldiers were killing Venezuelans while extracting that remarkable gentleman, Nicholas Maduro, (remember him?). Meanwhile, in June American soldiers are waging war alongside Venezuelans soldiers.  Who will fight for Guyana, but poor, ole slobs, like me?  Flyover or no flyover at the last presidential inauguration.  I said once that it is good to be American.  Still stands.  But is Pres Ali still laughing?  Is VP Jagdeo still smirking?  I reintroduce Benjamin Netanyahu as a timely, haunting, reminder.

The Venezuelans were uncanny, unambiguous, and mighty unsavory, too.  No ICJ!  I ask Excellency Richard Van West Charles to convey my apologies to the Bolivarian plenipotentiary here and the powers in Caracas.  No to the ICJ means that there will be a land-for-peace deal sometime or the other.  Remember Netanyahu.  Remember my words.  For by that time, I will be gone, Trump gone, Routledge gone.  Only Drs. Ali and Jagdeo left.  Doctor’s diet and good ole fashioned oil living.  But what of Guyana and its special relationship with America?  Oh, that!  A pyrrhic victory is still a victory.  What choice left?  What’s left with leaders like Ali, Jagdeo, and the whole kaboodle?

Israel has assets, will go on battling.  Guyana has Excellency Ali, who went from Captain America to Captain Bligh.  On a boat, with neither partner nor paddle.  I pray for this country.  Pray for me, somebody.  One last thing: God bless America.  Guyana also.

The Architecture of Sycophancy

/0 Comments/in /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN   |   Accountability Journalism

EDITORIAL RESPONSE

The Architecture of Sycophancy

Khemraj and Pasha have dressed in academic clothing for a defense brief. Economics — properly understood — is the study of incentives and structures. By that standard, their case for the Guyana Development Bank Bill fails on first principles.

Professor Tarron Khemraj and Mr. Sukrishnalall Pasha have offered what presents itself as scholarly analysis of the Guyana Development Bank Bill. It is, in substance, a defence brief dressed in academic clothing — and a troubling one at that.

Their central claim — that the Bill’s mention of board independence constitutes actual institutional independence — confuses legislative language with institutional reality. This is not an error a student of economics should make, let alone a professor of it. Economics, properly understood, is the study of incentives and structures. It asks not what a document says, but what behaviour the underlying architecture produces. By that standard, the Bill fails on first principles.

“A Board member who owes their appointment, their tenure, and their professional standing to ministerial favour does not exercise independent judgment — they exercise calibrated compliance.”

When a Minister appoints every director, selects the Chairperson, and retains the power of removal on terms broad enough to swallow any inconvenient dissent, there is no independence to speak of. There is only the performance of it. A Board member who owes their appointment, their tenure, and their professional standing to ministerial favour does not exercise independent judgment — they exercise calibrated compliance. No clause in any bill can override that arithmetic.

Guyana is not a one-party state. It should not be governed as though it were. The entire premise of institutional design — central banks, development finance institutions, regulatory bodies — is that democratic states require structures insulated from the appetites of the party in power at any given moment. The Bill does not provide that insulation. Khemraj and Pasha do not demonstrate that it does. They assert it, repeatedly, and call the assertion scholarship.

One must hope that what Professor Khemraj signs his name to in public does not reflect what he teaches in the classroom. Because what he has defended here is not economic analysis.

It is an alibi — and an unconvincing one.

The 592 Guardian

Independent Accountability Journalism — Guyana

The Cost of Silence in the Caribbean: CUBA?

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN|ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM|GTOWN ,GUYANA

The Cost of Silence in the Caribbean: CUBA?               

As Cuba deepens its diplomatic engagement across CARICOM, one response has been as loud as it is troubling: silence.

Timing, in geopolitics, is rarely accidental.

Cuba’s re-engagement with CARICOM comes at a moment when the region itself is rethinking energy sovereignty. From Trinidad and Guyana’s hydrocarbons to Barbados and Dominica’s renewable ambitions, the Caribbean is searching—urgently—for pathways out of dependence and vulnerability. Havana’s outreach fits squarely within that conversation: technical cooperation, medical diplomacy, energy collaboration.

Washington’s response, however, suggests discomfort with that alignment.

The Caribbean has seen this pattern before: pressure applied incrementally, justified rhetorically, and absorbed quietly—until it becomes precedent.

And precedent, once set, is rarely confined.

The question confronting CARICOM is not whether to align with Cuba politically. It is whether to defend a principle that underpins its own survival: that small states cannot be coerced into submission through economic strangulation without consequence.

Because if that principle erodes, then sovereignty itself becomes conditional.

 Cuba’s diplomacy across the region is not merely outreach—it is a test. Not of alliances, but of resolve.                                                                                         And in that test, silence will not be read as neutrality. It will be read as permission.

Let us dispense with the diplomatic euphemisms. When a policy is designed to deprive a population of electricity, cooking gas, and basic energy stability, it crosses from strategy into coercion. When its stated or foreseeable outcome is widespread civilian hardship—heat without relief, food without preservation, hospitals under strain—it edges dangerously close to collective punishment.

The timing is telling. Just as Cuba signals incremental technological progress—developing methods to refine its own difficult crude and cautiously expanding production partnerships—the sanctions arrive, not as coincidence, but as interruption.

Progress, however modest, is treated as provocation. Self-sufficiency becomes a threat.

This is not about democracy. It has not been for decades.

Nowhere is that silence more pronounced—and more consequential—than in Guyana

 At a moment when Washington escalates economic pressure against Cuba by targeting CUPET, the backbone of its energy survival, Georgetown has chosen not caution, but quiet alignment. There has been no meaningful expression of concern, no reaffirmation of principle, no recognition of the broader implications for small states navigating power asymmetries. Instead, what emerges is a posture of intransigence—one that places geopolitical convenience above historical memory and regional responsibility.

This is not a neutral stance. It is complicity by omission.

Guyana, of all nations, does not have the luxury of historical amnesia. Cuba was not a distant observer during Guyana’s formative struggles. It was a partner—offering medical support, education, technical training, and solidarity at a time when such gestures were neither fashionable nor strategically convenient. That relationship was not transactional; it was foundational.

To now stand inert as Cuba faces intensified economic strangulation is not pragmatism. It is abandonment dressed as diplomacy.

President Irfaan Ali’s government has, in recent years, cultivated an increasingly close alignment with Washington—one driven in part by Guyana’s rising profile as an oil-producing state. Strategic partnerships are neither unusual nor inherently problematic. But when alignment hardens into reflex, and reflex overrides principle, foreign policy begins to lose its independence.

What is unfolding is precisely that erosion.

The absence of a clear, principled stance on measures that target Cuba’s civilian energy infrastructure suggests a leadership more attuned to external approval than to the values Guyana has historically claimed as its own: sovereignty, non-interference, and regional solidarity.

These are not abstract ideals; they are the very safeguards small states rely on in a world defined by unequal power. To disregard them now is to weaken the very framework that protects Guyana itself.

There is also an uncomfortable truth that cannot be ignored. The current posture of Guyana’s leadership reflects not strategic balance, but strategic deference. The optics—and increasingly, the substance—suggest a government captivated by proximity to power, particularly in a U.S. political climate where hardline positions on Cuba are rewarded, not questioned.

This is not diplomacy anchored in confidence. It is diplomacy shaped by accommodation.

And while Washington’s political winds may shift—from administration to administration, from tone to tone—the consequences of these positions within the Caribbean endure. Relationships fray. Trust erodes. And the region’s ability to act collectively weakens.

Guyana’s silence does not occur in isolation; it resonates.

It signals to CARICOM that principles can be selectively applied. It signals to external powers that pressure tactics carry little regional cost. And it signals to Cuba that even those who once benefited from its solidarity may no longer find it politically convenient to speak.

That is a dangerous precedent.

Because the logic underpinning the sanctions against CUPET—the use of economic pressure to force political outcomes—does not end with Cuba. It establishes a model. And models, once normalized, expand.

Today, Cuba’s energy lifeline is the target. Tomorrow, any state pursuing policies outside the accepted orbit may find itself similarly exposed

Guyana, now flush with oil wealth and geopolitical attention, should understand this better than most. The question, then, is not whether Guyana must agree with Cuba on governance or ideology. That is beside the point. The question is whether it is prepared to defend a principle that once defined its own place in the world: that small nations deserve the space to determine their path without being economically suffocated into submission.

At present, the answer appears uncertain.

And in that uncertainty lies the deeper concern—not just for Cuba, but for the integrity of Caribbean diplomacy itself.

Because when silence replaces principle, it is not neutrality that prevails.It is surrender

 

 

THE GLITTER OF AMBITION

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN

GOVERNANCE & ACCOUNTABILITY

THE GLITTER OF AMBITION

When foreign appointments can’t mask domestic failures

The Ali administration has perfected the art of international optics. But a closer look at the legislative record at home — including a sexual offenders registry sealed from public view — raises questions that no UN nomination can answer.

There is a species of political theatre that confuses visibility with virtue. The Ali administration has become expert at staging it.

The nomination of Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett for the position of UN Secretary-General and the election of Human Services Minister Dr. Vindhya Persaud to the executive body of the OAS Inter-American Commission of Women have been received in certain quarters as proof of Guyana’s ascending global stature. Commentators speak of a “quiet but unmistakable internationalism,” of Guyana earning a seat at the tables where the rules of food, energy, climate and finance are written. It makes for elegant copy.

But elegance is not analysis.

Everyone in the diplomatic community wants proximity to petro-wealth. The offshore fields do not confer wisdom on their beneficiaries — they confer access.

Let us be direct: the international bodies offering appointments to Guyanese politicians are not doing so as recognition of governance excellence. They are doing so on the premise of Guyana’s economic standing. Everyone in the diplomatic community wants proximity to petro-wealth. The offshore oil fields do not confer wisdom on their beneficiaries — they confer access. These are two very different things, and the distinction matters enormously when we are asked to evaluate whether our government’s reach abroad reflects genuine diplomatic capital or merely the gravitational pull of a resource windfall that any administration, competent or otherwise, would have inherited.

The Rodrigues-Birkett nomination for UN Secretary-General is a case study in ambition mistaken for vision. The Secretary-Generalship is among the most demanding executive roles on the planet — part moral arbiter, part crisis manager, part institutional statesman. It demands a record of multilateral leadership that commands consensus across adversarial blocs. We wish Ambassador Rodrigues-Birkett no personal ill; she is a capable diplomat. But the nomination, originating from President Ali’s desk, tells us far more about his appetite for symbolic gestures than about a sober assessment of what the position requires and what any Guyanese candidate can currently offer in this crowded field.

— ◆ —

The more troubling case, however, is that of Minister Persaud.

Her appointment to the OAS Inter-American Commission of Women has been celebrated as placing “Guyana at the centre of regional decision-making on gender policy for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century.” What has gone conspicuously unremarked is what Minister Persaud brought to Parliament in her domestic portfolio: a Sexual Offenders Registry that would be closed to the public.

A closed registry serves, above all else, the registered — which is to say, it protects predators from the social consequences of their crimes.

Let that register fully. A registry of sexual offenders — a tool whose entire logic rests on community awareness and the protection of vulnerable people, particularly children — was proposed as a document to be sealed from the very public it is designed to protect.

One must ask, with full seriousness: for whose benefit is a secret sexual offenders registry? It does not serve survivors. It does not serve parents. It does not serve communities.

A closed registry serves, above all else, the registered — which is to say, it protects predators from the social consequences of their crimes.

Had the OAS Inter-American Commission of Women been fully briefed on this legislative proposal when it was weighing its appointment, the outcome may well have been different. International bodies operate on representations and reputations.

They see the press release, not the bill. They see the nomination, not the fine print. And the Ali administration is extraordinarily skilled at managing what international bodies see.

This is the core deception at work. When a government’s domestic record on gender protection is a closed sexual offenders registry while its international profile features an appointment to a hemispheric gender commission, we are not witnessing statesmanship. We are witnessing brand management.

The 592 Guardian has consistently argued that resource wealth tests the character of governments more severely than poverty does, because it supplies the means to perform competence without ever having to demonstrate it. You can host summits. You can fund alliances. You can nominate your diplomats to prestigious offices. And you can do all of this while failing the woman in Berbice who cannot access justice, while failing the child in a Region Seven community who deserves to know where registered offenders live, while continuing the pattern of legislation drafted for the protection of the powerful rather than the governed.

Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful” has been invoked in defense of the Ali administration’s vision. But Schumacher’s argument was precisely that scale divorced from human welfare is not development — it is displacement.

A humane economy is not measured by where your nominees sit at the UN. It is measured by whether your laws protect the most vulnerable people in your society.

By that measure, the glitter dims considerably.

The 592 Guardian calls on the OAS Inter-American Commission of Women to request a full briefing on the Sexual Offenders Registry Bill and its provisions before Minister Persaud assumes her executive responsibilities. We further call on civil society organisations to elevate this legislative contradiction to every regional and international gender body that was presented with Guyana’s nomination materials.

Ambition dressed as vision is still ambition. And a secret sexual offenders registry is not a footnote. It is a verdict.

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet focused on Guyanese governance, public finance, and regional geopolitics.

The Contractor List Is A Voter List

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL — PROCUREMENT & GOVERNANCE

The Contractor List Is A Voter List

How Bharrat Jagdeo’s $180 billion small works guarantee launders electoral patronage through procurement clothing — in broad daylight

The 592 Guardian♦ Editorial Board Georgetown, Guyana  ♦ June 2026

Let us be precise about what happened at Fort Wellington last week. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo did not announce a procurement initiative. He announced a political transaction — one structured to look like governance while functioning as a voter-dependency engine — and he did it out loud, on the public record, with the Department of Public Information faithfully amplifying every word.

More than 12,000 contractors. Each guaranteed at least one contract. Each capped just below $15 million. Each falling neatly beneath the threshold that triggers mandatory National Procurement and Tender Administration Board review.

The arithmetic is not ambiguous. Twelve thousand contracts at the stated ceiling produces an aggregate disbursement of approximately $180 billion Guyanese dollars — deployed outside competitive bidding, outside tender board evaluation, outside any published award rationale. One announcement. One Public Day.

One crowd of beneficiaries told, in terms they could not misread: we are the source, and we want you to know it.

“The paper trail that does not exist is the feature, not the bug.”

THE $15 MILLION ARCHITECTURE

The NPTAB threshold is not a secret. It is published, debated, and well understood by every procurement practitioner in this country. Contracts valued below it proceed without the formal competitive process that larger awards require — no public advertisement of terms, no evaluation committee scoring, no gazette of award.

“Your turn will come”Bharrat Jagdeo response to supporters.

The $15 million ceiling cited by the Vice President at Fort Wellington is not a coincidence. It is a design parameter. By guaranteeing that each of the 12,000 contracts will sit below the trigger point, the government has engineered a disbursement mechanism that is immune, by architecture, to the oversight apparatus theoretically governing public procurement.

This is not a grey area. The Procurement Act exists precisely to prevent the fragmentation of public expenditure into sub-threshold tranches that aggregate into enormous unaccountable sums. What Jagdeo announced is a textbook threshold circumvention scheme — executed not covertly, but from a podium, before cameras, with a DPI press release attached.

THE FISCAL EXPOSURE AT A GLANCE
Pre-qualified contractors

 12,000+
Region Five contractors

 530 confirmed
Contract ceiling (each)

 Below GYD $15 million
NPTAB trigger threshold

 GYD $15 million
Aggregate maximum exposure

 ~GYD $180 billion
Competitive bids required

 None
Published award criteria

 None disclosed
Audit paper trail

 Structurally absent
Announcement venue

 Public Day outreach, Fort Wellington RDC

LEGIBILITY AS INSTRUMENT

What makes this episode distinctive — and more alarming than ordinary procurement malfeasance — is that secrecy is not part of the design. The Vice President did not bury this in a supplementary budget line or disperse it across silent Cabinet minutes. He said it from a stage. He said it to beneficiaries. He had it reported nationally.

That is not a mistake. That is the mechanism.

When a government announces publicly that it controls the economic futures of 12,000 households, the announcement itself is the instrument of capture. The message delivered to every contractor on that list is not merely ‘you will receive work.’ It is: ‘we are the origin of your livelihood, and you are watching us confirm it.’ Dependency, made visible, is dependency reinforced.

Political scientists have a term for this architecture. In patronage democracies, the delivery of material benefits is often deliberately public precisely because visibility is what converts a transaction into a loyalty bond. The recipient is not simply paid. The recipient is made to understand who paid them, and why. The cycle then becomes self-sustaining: the patron needs the client’s vote; the client needs the patron’s contract; each requires the other to survive.

Jagdeo linked the guarantee explicitly to the 2025 elections manifesto — framing $180 billion in untendered disbursements as promise-keeping. That framing is not incidental. It is immunization. Patronage dressed as mandate fulfilment is patronage that cannot be criticized without appearing to oppose the democratic will. It is a rhetorical trap as elegant as it is corrupt.

“Patronage dressed as mandate fulfilment is patronage that cannot be criticized without appearing to oppose the democratic will.”

THE DOUBLE LEVER: CENTRAL AND LOCAL POWER

The location of this announcement was not accidental. Fort Wellington sits in Region Five — Mahaica-Berbice — one of Guyana’s contested regional political corridors. The 530 pre-qualified contractors in that region were told, at their Regional Democratic Council offices, that their contracts were secured.

The governing party is contesting local government influence. Regional Democratic Councils are the delivery infrastructure through which central government largesse reaches constituencies. By conducting this announcement at an RDC, with a VP present, the government collapsed the distinction between central procurement policy and local political mobilization into a single choreographed event.

The double lever is now both visible and operational: central government controls contract allocation; local government structures provide the physical and symbolic venue for the distribution announcement. If the ruling party captures both tiers in the coming cycle — which this contractor network is explicitly designed to facilitate — the patronage loop becomes institutionally locked. Not corrupt alongside governance, but corrupt as governance. The machinery of the state and the machinery of the party become indistinguishable.

This is state capture. Not the slow, hidden variety that scholars document after the fact. The fast, open, announced variety — executed with the confidence of a government that has concluded the rules no longer apply to it.

WHAT THE SILENCE OF INSTITUTIONS MEANS

The NPTAB has said nothing. The Public Procurement Commission has said nothing. The Auditor General has said nothing. Parliament — which controls the national budget that funds these contracts — has not convened to scrutinize an aggregate commitment of $180 billion made at a public outreach event.

This silence is not neutral. Institutions that do not respond to visible violations of their mandate are institutions that have either been captured, intimidated, or rendered irrelevant by a political culture that has learned to act without consequence. Each silent cycle teaches the executive that the architecture of accountability is decorative.

The contractors who ‘missed the cycle’ — Jagdeo’s phrase for those who failed to register during the three-month window — were told plainly: “If you missed it, you missed the cycle for this year.” That is not procurement language. That is the language of a closed patronage queue. You are either on the list or you are not. The list is the gate. The VP controls the gate.

Guyana has an oil fund, a sovereign wealth framework, and a procurement statute. It has none of the institutional culture necessary to make those instruments function. What Fort Wellington demonstrated is that the government has internalized this gap — and is exploiting it systematically, at scale, in public, without pause.

“This is state capture — not the slow, hidden variety. The fast, open, announced variety.”

ACCOUNTABILITY DEMANDS

THE 592 GUARDIAN DEMANDS
1

 The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board must issue a public statement within fourteen days on whether the fragmentation of this disbursement into sub-threshold tranches is compliant with the Procurement Act — and if not, what remedial action it will take.
2

 The Public Procurement Commission must initiate an independent audit of all contracts awarded under the small works pre-qualification scheme to date, covering award methodology, beneficiary identities, and completion verification.
3

 The Ministry of Finance must publish a consolidated fiscal note quantifying the total budgetary commitment made by the Vice President at Fort Wellington — including which budget line authorizes it and whether parliamentary approval was obtained.
4

 The Auditor General must flag the small works scheme in the next annual report as a procurement structure requiring enhanced scrutiny, given the structural absence of competitive bidding and NPTAB oversight.
5

 The Opposition and civil society must move immediately to test the legality of sub-threshold fragmentation under Section 43 of the Procurement Act — and publish their legal opinion regardless of political cost.

THE RECORD

We note for the record that this editorial has not alleged illegality that is unprovable. We have described, in precise terms, what a senior government official announced at a public event, what the fiscal arithmetic of that announcement produces, what procurement threshold it structurally avoids, and what political purpose its timing and venue serve.

If that description is wrong, the government is invited to correct it — with figures, legal citations, and a published procurement methodology. We will print the correction.

Until then, the contractor list is a voter list. The public outreach is a patronage queue. The $180 billion is an undisclosed campaign commitment disguised as infrastructure policy. And every institution in this country that has remained silent about it is complicit in the disguise

The 592 Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Guyanese governance, procurement transparency, and regional geopolitics. Corrections and responses may be submitted to the editorial board.

Justice Arif Bulkan: Guyana devours its own

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ TRUTH ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY

Justice Arif Bulkan: Guyana devours its own

Dr. Arif Bulkan.  I thought that all Guyanese-from First Citizen Ali to the last citizen-would have been proud.  By the distinction of a Guyanese finally making it to the CCJ.  Not as a petitioner or advocate.  But as one of its respected justices.  Like so many things about this country, restarting and restudying it are now mandatory.

There is a problem with Justice Bulkan.  Please, pray tell, what offends so much?  Then, help with what basis for such determined resistance, such a call, that there be recusal?  To acknowledge what failing, what imagined flaw, that has contributed to his falling from the gracious considerations of those who fear?  Out of a cohort of nine, one is feared?  Is fairness, what is right and just, feared that much in Guyana?  And not by ordinary citizens, but by those who have amassed so much power in their hands?  “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown….” (Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 2, Act III, Scene 1).  Every leaf that stirs disturbs the peace of those who live with dreads, many largely earned, a few imagined.  Justice Bulkan belongs to the latter category.

It is to the credit of the Hon Attorney General, Anil Nandlall, SC, that he hasn’t lodge any objection (Motion to Recuse) before the Caribbean Court of Justice.  Mr. Nandlall, acting in his capacities as attorney general and a legal practitioner, would earn eternal encomia for coming out publicly and denouncing sharply, with all that he is capable of, any efforts to tarnish Justice Bulkan’s honor.  As a man, as a man of the law, as a man of considerable standing in this country, he can clothe himself with honor, if he doesn’t shrink from taking that mandatory step.  If he hasn’t wrapped his arms and his mind around the implications of the attack on Justice Bulkan, then I lend a hand.

An attack on Guyanese-born, Justice Arif Bulkan is an attack on all Guyanese.  By misguided attempts to scorch one of its stellar sons.  Pres Ali is made to look like a man of unwarranted vehemence, of destructive venom, when he is not.  As Guyana’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Ali has to be troubled, when what was unleashed against a Guyanese at the heights of regional jurisprudence questions his intellectual and legal honesty, through scurrilous efforts to taint him. 

The court that stands at the peak of the regional pyramid loses some luster, if only because of vile, brutish, endeavors. 

  

If there were grounds, one millimeter, I could pause, reflect, and admit that a closer look is mandatory.  But where is that one pebble (one only) where Justice Bulkan has stumbled, dropped to his knees, due to the weight of relationships that are contrast sharply with standing norms?  Or any other weight, for that matter.

This country does devour its young, its free of mind, its men and women who hold to that indefinable construct called conscience. Guyana has expelled its most promising, still sends its best and brightest hurrying to wipe the dust from their feet, and out of a place now irretrievably lost.

 It is no wonder that so few seek to return to their homeland, a land now so universally attractive.  Others want to return, but it’s for what they can get out of Guyana and its newfound riches.  It is damnation for those whose who still think and wish to live: ‘ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’

It is a fitting note in which to close due to the proven notorious family ties of the famous utterer of those inspiring words.  For who was John F. Kennedy’s father, if not Joseph P. Kennedy.  Rumrunner.  Stock manipulator.  Lawbreaker.  The list is longer still.  Yet his son made it all the way to the White House and the presidency of the United States.  The sins of the father turned upside down. 

In Guyana, made up sins, fabricated crimes, are what remains in efforts to weaken Justice Arif Bulkan, attach a dark cast to him.  I offer Justice Bulkan and his family what works for me.  Adversity is an opportunity to learn humility, grow in integrity.

EXXON’S BOUNTY: FIVE YEARS, US$214 MILLION, AND COUNTING

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦TRUTH♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY

EXXON’S BOUNTY: FIVE YEARS, US$214 MILLION, AND COUNTING— June 2026

The numbers are not in dispute. ExxonMobil submitted them.

Let us be precise about what is happening here.

Independent auditors examined costs that ExxonMobil itself declared and submitted for recovery under Guyana’s Production Sharing Agreement. They reviewed the numbers. They did the arithmetic. And they concluded that US$214 million in expenses charged to Guyana between 1999 and 2017 should never have been charged at all.

That audit was completed. The report was delivered to government in March 2021. Five years have since elapsed.

ExxonMobil is still fighting.

This is not a dispute over interpretation. This is not a clash of competing methodologies or a good-faith disagreement between technical experts. The figures under challenge are figures that ExxonMobil itself put forward. The company submitted those numbers. Independent auditors examined them and said: these do not hold up. And now, rather than account for what it claimed, ExxonMobil has spent half a decade doing what bounty hunters do — holding the prize and running out the clock.

That is the only honest description of what this conduct represents. Not partnership. Not good faith engagement. A calculated campaign of attrition against a sovereign nation’s right to recover money that independent scrutiny says was never legitimately taken.

The arithmetic of delay is not neutral. Every month this dispute continues unresolved is another month that US$214 million is not building a hospital in Region Six, not repairing drainage infrastructure in Berbice, not funding the school that a child in Linden is still waiting to attend. The government has a word for this posture when citizens practice it. It is called contempt.

The Production Sharing Agreement is not ambiguous on the question of timeline. Dispute resolution procedures exist. The prescribed window for appointing a sole expert has lapsed. Government officials themselves publicly acknowledged more than a year ago that direct discussions had concluded and the process should advance to its next formal stage. Yet Guyanese are told, again, that talks are continuing.

What, precisely, are they still discussing?

Accountability journalism requires the uncomfortable question be asked plainly: is the government negotiating in the interest of the Guyanese people, or is it managing the optics of a dispute it lacks the political will to press to conclusion? Because those are not the same thing. And the difference between them is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.

The US$214 million figure is, moreover, only the first act of a much larger drama. A second audit has reportedly flagged a further US$65 million in questionable charges. A third audit — covering a staggering US$19.6 billion in expenditures — is said to be complete, but its findings remain concealed from the Guyanese public. Concealed. On expenditures nearly equivalent to the country’s entire GDP.

This government has spoken endlessly about transparency as a governance value. It should be asked to demonstrate it.      

 The Petroleum Agreement under which ExxonMobil operates was already, in the assessment of economists and resource governance specialists across the hemisphere, among the most concessionary contracts ever signed by an oil-producing nation. Guyana accepted terms that tilted the table. In exchange, Guyanese were told, came investment, expertise, and a trustworthy long-term partner.

A trustworthy partner does not contest audit findings for five years.

A trustworthy partner does not force a developing nation to threaten international arbitration to recover money that independent reviewers concluded was improperly charged.

A trustworthy partner does not treat the sovereign rights of a small Caribbean nation as a negotiating inconvenience to be slowly exhausted.      

A trustworthy partner does not treat the sovereign rights of a small Caribbean nation as a negotiating inconvenience to be slowly exhausted.

What ExxonMobil has demonstrated, through five years of procedural resistance, is that it intends to maximize extraction in every dimension available to it — from the reservoir and from the dispute resolution process alike. The Production Sharing Agreement is being deployed not merely to govern production, but to govern how long a legitimate grievance can be held at bay.

Guyana’s oil belongs to the people of Guyana. Not to the companies that extract it. Not to the officials who negotiate the terms. Not to the public relations narrative of “partnership” that has substituted for genuine accountability in too many press conferences.

The government’s obligation is singular and non-negotiable: recover every dollar that independent auditors say this country is owed. Not when ExxonMobil is ready. Not after another year of “ongoing discussions.” Now.

Because the longer this drags on, the more a different and more damaging conclusion becomes unavoidable — that the bounty hunter does not merely hunt. It has learned, from experience, that patience in Guyana is reliably rewarded.

 

The 592 Guardian holds that accountability is not a courtesy extended to power. It is the price power pays for legitimacy.

 

Carolyn Rodrigues for UN Sec Gen -I endorse

/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN -OPINION

Carolyn Rodrigues -Birkett for UN Sec Gen -I endorse

BY:GHK LALL

Way to go, Excellency Ali.  Excellency Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett is Guyana’s nominee for the prestigious and demanding role of United Nations Secretary General.  Why not?  Since everybody globally have their eyes on a wedge of Guyana’s riches, here’s an opportunity to do some horse-trading.  A vote for Excellency Suzy is a favorable ballot cast for a portion of Guyana’s patrimony.  There is plenty to share around. 

The Ali government can be depended upon to be generous.  Recall that politics, whether at the bottom-house level or the rooftops of the world is about quid pro quos (something for something). 

A fair bargain, I say.  Depending on what is gotten for what is given away.

The Guyana Government (PPP) may not like Guyanese born Dr. Arif Bulkan in the role of CCJ jurist. 

It is reported to have stood in the way of his ascending to another role in Europe that was a tribute to his perspicacity and sagacity. 

Indeed, his mind and the manner in which he employs it will always be two perennial bestsellers.  The hope is that I am getting through to Excellency, Dr. Ali, Guyana’s president.  Call of the curs, sir.  Vehemence in politics is pardonable.  Up to a point only. 

But the PPP’s thirst for vengeance and the vindictiveness and viciousness that must accompany it to reinforce should have no place in Guyana’s politics.  Let that be monopolized by Donald Trump.  Let him have exclusive rights to those depraved standards.

If Guyana is ever going to come within 100 miles of One Guyana, then PPP savagery against Dr. Arif Bulkan should not be. 

Who are the haters now, if not the PPP?  But there is Excellency Rodrigues-Birkett whose name is now entered in the UN Sec Gen race.  I support her nomination for several reasons.  Notwithstanding her former flair for table-climbing, political gyrating, and other such entertaining antics.  What is past is past. 

There is her nomination to which I lend my voice.

First, she is Guyanese.  Two, she is female -would make a groundbreaking Secretary General. 

There is a female CARICOM Secretary General, Excellency Carla Barnett.  There was a woman Commonwealth Secretary General, Baroness Patricia Janet Scotland.  Excellency Rodrigues-Birkett is Guyanese, a woman, and third she is also of indigenous heritage.  She is also fairly astute.  Politically.  Recall how she praised former U.S. Ambassador Brendt Hardt (another devout Roman Catholic), days before her sister ministers in the PPP scorched him with a so-called feral blast, and in his castle of all places.  An unbeatable combination; a winner for whom I would vote eight days in every week.  It’s the way that the PPP has practiced voting, isn’t it?  After all the horrors that the Spaniards, Dutch, French, British (and now Americans) inflicted upon the Incas, Aztecs, Caribs, Arawaks, and other indigenous peoples native to this hemisphere, it is time for some leveling of the scales, an executive and administrative repatriation of sorts.

The U.S. has a big say, holds a significant amount of sway in things of this nature (like it does with the ICJ), and it is a special friend of Guyana. 

So, I am counting for the U.S. to favor Sister Suzie.  China is a partner, ally, and fellow traveler alongside Guyana.  Thus, nothing prevents that superpower from the Orient to throwdown with thumbs up for Guyana’s choice for UN SG.  It should be a lock.  Naturally, it depends on what Guyana is offering in return.  Get real, Guyanese.  Welcome to the real world.  Pres Ali has made his name (such as it is) as a willing soldier when it comes to deal making.  This is his big opportunity to give a big hand up to Susan Rodrigues-Birkett.  She can depend on him.  I am.

In the spirit of One Guyana, I urge all Guyanese to rally behind Excellency Rodrigues-Birkett’s nomination. 

Let us all show Pres Ali, and the PPP, how it’s done.  Politics is cast out.  Bygone begone.  If only Guyana worked like this, Guyanese thought like this.  What could be a better manifestation of Essequibo belongs to Guyana, Essequibo is OURS!  Where is Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett from if not the storied shores of Essequibo.  She is ours.  Therefore, the UN SG job should be hers.  Whoever seeks to do business here better get that right.