Opinions – Page 23 – 592guardian.com

Born Leaders? The Data Manning Cited Says Otherwise

August 28, 2026/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinions, Accountability/by Editor

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Born Leaders? The Data Manning Cited Says Otherwise

OPNION BY: Hem Kumar August 2026

A regional examining body’s own chief operating officer built a claim of male biological entitlement on statistics that disprove it.

At the August 18 launch of the 2026 CXC results in Anguilla, Dr. Nicole Manning, the Caribbean Examinations Council’s Chief Operations Officer, told the region something she framed as self-evident: that men are born leaders. She said it while standing in front of the numbers that refute it.

Dr. Nicole Manning COO – CXC

Manning was addressing a real and worthwhile subject — the growing gender gap in regional exam participation. Females made up 62 per cent of CAPE entries this year against 38 per cent for males; at CSEC level the split was 59-41. That gap deserves the “deeper assessment” she called for. What it does not support is the conclusion she drew from it.

AN ARGUMENT THAT DEFEATS ITSELF

Follow Manning’s own logic for a moment. Girls are outperforming boys in participation and, by extension, in the pipeline toward tertiary education and professional life, across two major regional examination levels. Manning’s response to that female outperformance was to declare that leadership is a male birthright which society has a duty to protect.

That is not an assessment of the data. It is a conclusion that arrived before the data did, and then bent the data to fit it.

If anything, the numbers Manning cited make the opposite case: whatever “natural” leadership capacity is supposed to look like, it is not tracking with the sex she says was born to hold it.

This is also, notably, an argument made by a woman who has herself risen to the chief operating officer’s chair of the region’s principal examining authority — a position that, on her own stated theory, she should not by nature occupy.

THE COALITION’S RESPONSE

The Caribbean Family Planning Affiliation, IGNITE, Youth Advocacy Movement Grenada, and Caribbean Religious Voices for Justice issued a joint statement the following day, and it is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as reflexive offense. Their central distinction is the correct one: children are born with potential, not with rank. What later gets described as innate male leadership is, on their account, privilege exercised long enough and consistently enough that it comes to look like nature.

“Men are not born leaders any more than women are born followers.”

The coalition’s sharpest question is not rhetorical. Who built the structures that hand boys authority and teach girls accommodation? Who benefits from calling that arrangement natural rather than constructed?

A claim that something is innate is, among other things, a claim that it cannot be changed and should not be interrogated. That is precisely why the claim needs interrogating.

The groups also reached for a Caribbean-specific counter-history, and it holds up: across the region, women have run households, churches, schools, ministries, and movements, frequently absorbing the labor that men’s absence left behind, with little institutional credit for having done so. A regional examining body’s own COO erasing that record in a single sentence, at an official results launch, is not a minor rhetorical slip. It is a senior education official using her platform to naturalize the very hierarchy the participation data is busy dismantling.

WHY THIS IS NOT A PRIVATE OPINION

Manning did not offer this as a personal reflection over dinner. She said it at the formal launch of CXC’s 2026 results, in her capacity as the Council’s Chief Operations Officer, addressing the exam performance of the region’s children. CXC sets and certifies the qualifications that determine university admission and employment prospects across the Caribbean. Its senior officers are not incidental voices in the region’s education conversation; they are among its most consequential ones.

That is what makes the coalition’s demand for “serious and constructive engagement” the right one, and the minimum one. An institution entrusted with certifying the academic futures of Caribbean boys and girls alike cannot have a chief operating officer telling the region, on the record, that one sex was born to lead and the other was not — especially not while her own slide showed the opposite trend.

The gender gap in exam participation is real and deserves the region’s full attention: why boys are falling away from CAPE and CSEC entry, what support structures are missing, what a coordinated response looks like. None of that requires, or is helped by, a theory of male biological destiny.

It requires the same thing every other education policy problem requires: evidence, structural analysis, and officials willing to follow the data rather than narrate over it.

— The Board

The Border Is Not a Constitutional Vacuum nor Federal Fiefdom

August 27, 2026/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinions, Accountability/by Editor

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The Border Is Not a Constitutional Vacuum nor Federal Fiefdom

OP-ED BY: Hem Kumar–August 2026

At America’s Borders, CBP Has Claimed the Power to Make Rights Disappear

“It’s not indefinite,” the Customs and Border Protection officer said after an American citizen, held for hours at an airport, asked how long the government intended to keep him. “We’ll let you know.”

That is not an answer. It is a declaration of power.

It is the sound of a federal agency informing a citizen that time, information, counsel, explanation, and even the basic dignity of knowing why he has been seized by the state are now privileges to be dispensed with—or withheld—at the government’s pleasure.

Customs and Border Protection calls this “secondary inspection.” It calls the process “administrative.” It says lawyers are not permitted during secondary examinations because an international-arrivals inspection is not a criminal proceeding.

But the label is a legal convenience, not a moral defense.

If a person is ordered into a controlled area, separated from family, unable to leave, denied access to a telephone, interrogated about private associations and work, and given no explanation of the accusation or timeline for release, he is experiencing state coercion. Calling that coercion “administrative” does not make it less coercive. It merely reveals how easily government lawyers can use technical language to conceal a profoundly unequal exercise of power.

The reporter at the center of this account was an American citizen returning home with his wife. His passport was taken, locked in a container, and he was directed to secondary screening. His wife was admitted. He was held for approximately four hours. He asked to call a lawyer. He was refused. He was not told why he had been detained. And when he was finally cleared to enter his own country, the officer who processed him reportedly did not know why he had been held either.

Think about that.

The government confined a citizen without telling him why. The government denied him official means to speak with counsel. And the government employee who finally released him could offer no explanation because, apparently, the decision may have been made somewhere else—in a database, a hidden list, an automated targeting system, or an opaque bureaucratic chain that no individual officer could or would explain.

This is not accountable law enforcement. It is algorithmic bureaucracy armed with badges, detention rooms, and the presumption that the public has no right to ask questions.

CBP has substantial authority at the border. Nobody serious disputes that the government can inspect baggage, enforce customs law, identify fraud, intercept contraband, and investigate real threats. The issue is not whether a border exists. The issue is whether the Constitution, democratic accountability, and basic human decency cease to exist at that border.

For CBP, the answer increasingly appears to be yes.

A citizen’s right to return to the United States is fundamental. The government may demand proof of citizenship and may carry out lawful border inspections. But it cannot turn the right to come home into a conditional favor, dependent upon whether a traveler submits quietly to limitless uncertainty, invasive questioning, data extraction, and unexplained suspicion.

The danger is especially acute in the age of hidden databases and automated risk scoring. DHS acknowledges that it maintains extensive systems containing traveler data, including the Automated Targeting System and Secure Flight-related screening records. Yet Americans have no practical way to know whether they have been flagged, why they have been flagged, which agency entered the information, whether the data are wrong, or how to correct it before the next humiliating encounter at an airport.

That is the architecture of unaccountable power: the government knows, the citizen does not; the government records, the citizen cannot inspect; the government accuses by implication, the citizen is denied a meaningful chance to respond.

And those most vulnerable to this system are often those least able to fight it.

The American citizen delayed for four hours ultimately entered his country. A lawful permanent resident may instead be pressured to surrender a green card. A visitor may be placed on the next flight out. An asylum seeker may face a life-altering decision in a sterile interview room, far from a lawyer, family member, or any realistic opportunity to understand the consequences of what an officer places before them.

The account of an older Jordanian woman reportedly being pressured to sign away her permanent-resident status while her husband struggled to reach counsel illustrates the human cost. A decision that may separate families and alter the course of a life should never be treated as airport paperwork to be signed under distress, isolation, and official intimidation.

Nor should journalists, lawyers, advocates, academics, or diaspora communities be expected to accept special scrutiny because of their work, religion, ethnicity, travel history, foreign relationships, or political associations. Questions about journalism and media work may be presented as casual curiosity. But when those questions come from an armed federal authority holding a traveler incommunicado, “curiosity” carries the force of compulsion.

The First Amendment does not become a decorative suggestion at the arrivals gate.

CBP’s position is effectively this: the agency can compel waiting, demand answers, deny clarity, restrict access to counsel, and invoke sealed systems and undisclosed intelligence rationales—all while dismissing the matter as merely administrative. That proposition should alarm every American who believes government power must be explainable before it is excusable.

The response cannot be limited to sympathy after the fact. Congress must impose enforceable safeguards.

CBP should be required to provide travelers with a written record of their referral to secondary inspection, including the start and end time, the responsible office, and a meaningful explanation when disclosure would not compromise a legitimate investigation. Travelers should have prompt access to a telephone, family contact, medication, restroom facilities, disability accommodations, and legal advice. No lawful permanent resident should be pressured to abandon status without a genuine opportunity to consult counsel and understand the consequences.

DHS must also disclose how frequently U.S. citizens are sent to secondary inspection, how long they are held, how many are subjected to device searches, and how automated systems, watch lists, and database matches influence those decisions. An independent watchdog—not CBP itself—must audit the agency’s systems for error, bias, political retaliation, and unconstitutional targeting.

Finally, citizens must have a clear, rapid, and enforceable process to learn whether they have been placed on a government list, challenge false information, and obtain correction. A Freedom of Information Act request is important, but it is not enough. FOIA is slow, heavily redacted, and too often defeated by the very secrecy that enables abuse. Rights that can be exercised only after months or years of bureaucratic delay are rights already diminished.

The airport border is not a constitutional vacuum. It is not a federal fiefdom. It is not a place where the government may reduce citizens to data points, suspected names, travel patterns, and silent entries in a database.

A democracy is tested not by how it treats the powerful, well-connected, or politically favored. It is tested by whether an ordinary person can ask, “Why am I being held?” and receive an answer; whether he can call someone for help; whether he can challenge a government error before it becomes a punishment.

“We’ll let you know” is not due process. It is the language of unaccountable power

The Elephant Professor Khemraj Walked Past

August 27, 2026/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinions, Accountability/by Editor

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The Elephant Professor Khemraj Walked Past

A Reply on Cost of Living, the Cantillon Effect, and the Politics of Explaining Away

OPINION BY– HEM KUMAR– August , 2026

Professor Tarron Khemraj’s letter this week (“President Ali, food choices, and the elephant in the room”) does something worth taking seriously before it is taken apart: it distinguishes, correctly and usefully, between inflation as a rate and cost of living as a level. It traces, correctly, how the war-driven disruption of Strait of Hormuz shipping has pushed up global fertiliser and urea prices in a way no Guyanese policy could have prevented. It restates, as the professor has for over a decade, a genuine structural argument about why Guyana’s coastal ecology constrains the supply of non-tradable goods — housing, local transport, construction — relative to demand. None of that is in dispute here, and none of it should be dismissed simply because of where the professor eventually takes it.

The trouble is where he takes it. A learned, 1,500-word tour through monetary theory, comparative political history, and international commodity markets is marshalled, in the end, to defend a single presidential remark: that citizens should cook at home instead of buying restaurant food, offered as a response to public anger over the cost of living. The economics is largely sound. The use to which it is put is not.

AN ELEPHANT NAMED, THEN LEFT ALONE

The professor titles his own key section “The Elephant in the Room” and, to his credit, identifies it precisely: cost-of-living pressure that goes beyond what oil-financed spending alone would produce comes from monetising the fiscal deficit — expanding the domestic money supply faster than non-oil GDP and import capacity can absorb it.

He states plainly that this monetary channel, not spending oil revenue as such, is what worsens inflation and strains the exchange rate.

Having named the mechanism, the professor does not ask the one question a Guyanese reader most needs answered: is that mechanism operating now, under this government’s actual financing choices? A letter that diagnoses the disease with precision and then declines to check whether the patient has it is not restraint. It is the exact point at which analysis stops and cover begins.

THE CANTILLON EFFECT THE FRAMEWORK ALREADY CONTAINS

This is where a reader’s instinct — that stagnant wages sit at the center of this story — deserves to be taken more seriously than Professor Khemraj takes it. Oil- and deficit-financed spending does not arrive in every household’s pocket simultaneously or proportionally. It reaches state contractors, importers, and asset-holders first, bidding up the price of rent, services, and non-tradables well before wage income has any chance to catch up.

That sequencing — the Cantillon effect — is not a fringe theory. It is a standard implication of exactly the monetary-financing channel the professor’s own letter identifies as the elephant.

Framed correctly, then, the cost-of-living squeeze is not merely “the price of success,” borne evenly as the unavoidable byproduct of a growing economy. It is a distributional outcome, with winners who receive the new spending early and losers — wage earners — who absorb the price effects last, after their earning power has already been diluted. Government financing decisions, not household lifestyle choices, determine who ends up on which side of that line. The professor’s own framework has room for this. The letter does not go there.

A letter that diagnoses the disease with precision and then declines to check whether the patient has it is not restraint. It is where analysis stops and cover begins.

AN ANALOGY THAT DOES NOT HOLD

Professor Khemraj places President Ali’s remark alongside Forbes Burnham’s buy-local ethic, Narendra Modi’s Vocal for Local campaign, Jimmy Carter’s sweater speech, and Gerald Ford’s Whip Inflation Now button, concluding that a president urging thrift is neither unusual nor illegitimate. But each of those examples was a proactive national campaign — announced as policy, backed by government programming, sustained over time.

President Ali’s remark was none of those things. It was an aside that went viral precisely because, to a public already anxious about prices, it read as a head of state locating the problem in citizens’ kitchen habits rather than in his own government’s fiscal choices.

Placing a viral gaffe inside a lineage of deliberate national campaigns does rhetorical work. It does not do descriptive work.

“NOT PASSIVE” CUTS BOTH WAYS

To his credit, the professor credits the Ali administration with a real record of relief measures since 2021: zero-rated VAT on key food items, VAT removed on fertiliser and farm machinery, excise duty removed on fuel, freight benchmarked to pre-pandemic levels. Fair enough — these are verifiable and worth stating plainly rather than waving away.

But if the deficit-monetization channel the professor identifies as the real driver of excess inflation and currency strain is itself a financing choice made across these same years, then the same government that earns credit on one ledger owes an answer on the other. A letter willing to list five years of relief measures in the government’s favour but unwilling to ask a single question about the government’s own financing conduct is not applying one standard. It is applying two, and choosing which one to use by which direction it points.

WHAT THIS PUBLICATION IS NOT ARGUING

This is not a claim that Professor Khemraj is wrong about inflation, about the Hormuz shock, or about the constraints of a small open economy. He is not. Nor is it a claim that a food buffer stock, which the professor proposes and which has real merit, would fail to help. It is a narrower and sharper complaint: a professor capable of distinguishing a rate from a level, capable of tracing fertiliser prices through a war eight thousand miles away, chose not to spend a single paragraph asking whether his own government’s deficit financing is the mechanism turning an oil boom into a wage earner’s squeeze.

That is the elephant. The professor named it, in his own words, in his own headline — and then wrote around it for fourteen paragraphs. This newsroom asks him, and asks the government whose account he was carrying, to walk back and actually look at it.

— The Board

A MINISTER WHO SHOULD HAVE LEARNED TO ZIP IT.

August 26, 2026/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinions, Accountability/by Editor

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A MINISTER WHO SHOULD HAVE LEARNED TO ZIP IT.

Edghill’s Canawaima Claim Is Not a Jurisdictional Dispute. It Is the Same Pattern That Failed Barima’s Victims.

OPINION BY :— Staff Writer ♦ August 2026

NOT A CONTRADICTION. A PATTERN.

When the MV Canawaima was pulled from service for the second time in ten days on 22 August, Public Works Minister Bishop Juan Edghill offered the public an explanation: two technical inspections by Guyanese and Surinamese experts had concluded, in writing, that the vessel could safely remain in operation until dry-docking within three months. The Maritime Authority Suriname (MAS), he said, had simply insisted on fixing immediately what could have waited. It read, on its face, like an ordinary dispute between two regulators over timing.

We do not think that is the right way to read it, and we do not think the public should either. This is not a contradiction. It is a pattern — the same pattern this news media has already documented in exhaustive detail on the M.V. Barima, playing out again on a different vessel, in front of the same minister, who by now had every reason to have learned restraint.

THE BARIMA PRECEDENT, IN THE MINISTER’S OWN WORDS

On 19 July, less than 24 hours after the Barima capsized with dozens still missing, Edghill told grieving families at the Umana Yana that the vessel “was not overloaded by passengers or by cargo” and that there was “no engine problem or any mechanical problem.” On 20 July, at a formal press briefing, he went further: “There was no report of any kind that suggested the vessel was unseaworthy. It was in line for dry docking in keeping with the schedule.”

Those were not hedged, provisional remarks. They were confident, specific, technical assertions, delivered to a public in shock, by a minister with no maritime engineering background, about a vessel whose wreck had not yet been examined by anyone. On 13 August, Kaieteur News published a paper trail of internal maintenance logs, stamped requisitions, and urgent technical reports — the same defect record this news outlet has independently corroborated — spanning nearly a year before the disaster, including repeated “urgent” flags on generator, heat-exchanger, and exhaust failures. The minister’s 20 July claim did not survive that record. It was not a matter of interpretation. It was simply false, and it took weeks and an outside document trail to establish that.

A minister who was wrong about Barima’s seaworthiness in July had no standing to be confident about Canawaima’s in August.

SAME MINISTER, SAME VOICE, SAME VESSEL TYPE

Now compare that to Edghill’s Canawaima statement. He again spoke with certainty about a technical seaworthiness determination — “the experts concluded the vessel can remain in operation” — on a matter that was, by his own account, contested by the actual regulator with jurisdiction over the vessel’s maintenance. And once again, a document surfaced almost immediately that complicated the minister’s reassurance: Marine Consulting and Surveyor Waldo Liauw Kwie Fong’s own 21 August report — the report Edghill’s statement appears to rest on — found the Canawaima’s hull in “poor” condition with heavy corrosion, stated plainly that the 30-year-old vessel’s “economic and service life has expired,” and listed the vessel as lacking a valid safety construction certificate, tonnage certificate, registry certificate, and load line certificate, with the Surinamese crew missing STCW certification and the vessel missing its ISM certificate despite running an international route. The same document Edghill cites for reassurance is, on a plain reading, a document that catalogues serious non-compliance.

We want to be precise about what we are and are not saying. We are not saying Edghill fabricated anything, and we are not saying the surveyor’s three-month operability window was wrong on its own terms — that is a technical judgment for qualified surveyors, not for this publication or for a Minister of Public Works. What we are saying is narrower and, we think, harder to dispute: a minister who has already been publicly and documentarily proven wrong once this year about a vessel’s seaworthiness has no business speaking with the same unqualified confidence a second time, about a second vessel, while the government’s own cited document lists exactly the kind of certification gaps that turned out to matter on the Barima.

THE DISCIPLINE A MINISTER OF PUBLIC WORKS REQUIRES

A Minister of Public Works is not expected to be a marine surveyor. No one demands that of him. What is reasonably demanded — of any minister, in any government, anywhere — is the discipline to say “I am relaying what the surveyor’s report states” rather than personally vouching for a technical conclusion in his own voice, particularly on a subject where he has already gotten it wrong once, publicly, with fatal consequences attached.

That distinction is not pedantic. It is the entire difference between a minister who communicates and a minister who improvises, and it is precisely the discipline Edghill has now failed to exercise twice in five weeks.

This matters beyond Edghill’s own standing, though that standing is fair game — the call for his removal from office has stood, unresolved, since the week of the Barima disaster, and this publication does not consider it settled. It matters because every time the minister overspeaks and is later proven wrong, the credibility cost is not paid by him personally. It is paid by the next set of passengers who are told a vessel is fine, and by the CoI, the audit team, and every other accountability mechanism this government has stood up since 18 July — each one a little less trusted, because the minister whose ministry oversees all of them keeps needing correction by outside document trails rather than by his own candor.

THE PATTERN, SET OUT PLAINLY

19 Jul 2026 Edghill: Barima “was not overloaded… no engine problem or any mechanical problem.”

20 Jul 2026 Edghill: “There was no report of any kind that suggested the vessel was unseaworthy.”

13 Aug 2026 Kaieteur News publishes a documented paper trail of nearly a year of urgent, unresolved defect reports on the Barima, directly contradicting the 20 July claim.

21 Aug 2026 The surveyor’s report underlying Edghill’s reassurance documents hull corrosion, an expired service life, and multiple missing statutory certificates.

22 Aug 2026 Canawaima suspended again; Edghill states Guyanese/Surinamese experts concluded the vessel can safely operate for three more months pending dry-docking — the same report cited above.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR

That Minister Edghill cease personally characterizing technical seaworthiness findings in his own voice, and instead publish the underlying surveyor and inspection reports in full, in real time, so the public can read the primary document rather than the minister’s summary of it.
That the Ministry of Public Works issue a public accounting of every instance since 18 July in which a ministerial statement on vessel condition was later contradicted by a primary document, so the pattern can be assessed on the full record rather than piecemeal.
That the standing calls for Edghill’s resignation or removal — unresolved since late July — be answered by government on the merits, rather than left to lapse through the passage of time and the arrival of the next news cycle.

Suriname’s regulator did its job on the Canawaima. Whether Guyana’s minister did his is now, for the second time this year, a fair and documented question — and this time, the public should not have to wait for another paper trail to surface before getting the answer.

— The Board

The 592 Guardian

THE NUMBERS GUYANA DIDN’T GIVE YOU

August 25, 2026/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinions, Accountability/by Editor

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THE NUMBERS GUYANA DIDN’T GIVE YOU

A Region Published Its Exam Results. Georgetown Held a Ceremony Instead.

Accountability Desk | August,2026

Every other education ministry in the Caribbean Examinations Council’s catchment let the numbers speak. Guyana’s Ministry of Education gave a ceremony, three headline figures, and a table of seventeen vocational trades — and called it a results release.

On August 18, 2026, the Caribbean Examinations Council convened its annual results ceremony in Anguilla, hosted for the first time in a decade outside the region’s larger capitals. CXC’s Registrar and CEO, Dr. Wayne Wesley, and its Director of Operations, Dr. Nicole Manning, presented the 2026 May-June cycle’s performance to the full region at once: candidate counts, subject entries, grade distributions, absenteeism, examination irregularities, and the regional pass rate for every major certification CXC administers.

The presentation was public, it was itemized, and it was the same for every territory sitting in that room.

Guyana’s Ministry of Education held its own event that same day, at the Pegasus Suites and Corporate Centre in Georgetown. Minister of Education Sonia Parag and Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain delivered remarks. What Guyana’s students, parents and press received from that event was not a report. It was a set of talking points — a national pass rate, a Mathematics improvement figure, a candidate count, and an unverified projection of vocational certifications still awaiting confirmation from the very council that had, that same day, published a complete regional accounting.

This is not a story about a failing grade. It is a story about a government that had access to the same comparative data as every other CARICOM ministry and chose not to publish it — and about what that choice, examined against the numbers CXC did release, looks like it was built to avoid.

WHAT CXC PUBLISHED, ON THE RECORD

CXC’s regional release on August 18 gave every territory a full comparative baseline. The figures below are CXC’s own, delivered from its own podium, to the full region simultaneously:

Regional CSEC overall performance: 72.18 percent, a slight increase over 2025.
Regional CSEC Mathematics acceptable-grade rate: 42 percent, a 4-point improvement.
Regional CAPE acceptable grades (Grades I–V): 93.52 percent.
Regional CVQ candidates: 4,977, across 37 occupational areas.
Region-wide CSEC absenteeism: more than 32,000 candidates did not sit their exams — a trend CXC officials themselves called “worrying.”
Region-wide examination irregularities: 128 recorded, up from 80 the prior cycle, including the first-ever official categorization of AI misuse as a form of exam malpractice.

Every one of those figures came from CXC’s own ceremony, delivered the same day, in the same format, to every member state. Guyana’s delegation was in a position to hear all of it. None of it appeared in what Guyana’s Ministry told its own public.

WHAT GUYANA PUBLISHED, ON THE RECORD

Compare that to the complete inventory of what Georgetown’s ceremony produced, as reported:

A national CSEC pass rate of 67 percent — with no stated methodology for what counts as a “pass” in that figure, and no breakdown by subject, school, region, or gender.
A Mathematics pass rate of 34.5 percent, framed only against Guyana’s own 2025 figure of 32 percent — never against the region CXC had just placed it inside.
A CAPE claim of broad “stability and growth,“ specified only as “seven examined units” recording declines of 1 to 3 percent — with no regional CAPE figure offered for comparison, and no full subject table released.
A CVQ projection of 2,813 certifications — a number the Ministry’s own Chief Education Officer acknowledged was not yet official, pending CXC confirmation, at the moment he announced it.
No absenteeism figure. No SBA non-submission figure. No irregularity count. No mention of AI misuse, despite CXC formally introducing the category this cycle.

Nothing in Guyana’s release was false, so far as this desk has been able to verify. That is precisely the point. Every figure Georgetown chose to publish was accurate, favorable, and incomplete — and every category CXC flagged as a regional concern was a category Guyana’s ceremony did not mention at all.

CXC gave the region a report. Guyana gave its public a ceremony.— The 592 Guardian

METRIC	REGION AUG .18 TH	MIN. OF ED.	GAP
CSEC overall pass rate	72.18%	67%	-5.18 pts
CSEC Mathematics	42%	34.5%	-7.5 pts
CAPE acceptable grades	93.52%	NOT DISCLOSED	UNKOWN
Absenteeism disclosed	4,977 (confirmed)	2,813 (projected)	UNVERIFIABLE
Absenteeism disclosed	32,000+ region-wide	not disclosed	UNKOWN
Irregularities disclosed	128 region-wide	not disclosed	UNKOWN

SIDE BY SIDE: THE COMPARISON GUYANA DID NOT MAKE

Where a figure is marked “not disclosed,” that is not this desk failing to find it. It is the complete record of what was and was not said at a nationally covered government press event. Where a comparable regional figure exists and Guyana’s does not, the silence is not neutral — it is a choice made available by CXC’s transparency and declined by Guyana’s Ministry.

THE QUESTION THIS DESK IS PUTTING ON THE RECORD

The Ministry of Education has both the data and the obligation to publish it. CXC hands every territory the identical breakdown Guyana’s delegation heard in Anguilla. Nothing prevented the Ministry from releasing a comparable document — a subject-by-subject table, a regional benchmark, an absenteeism figure, an irregularity count — the same day, in the same format CXC itself used.

It did not. It held a ceremony, named its top performers, and moved on to seventeen vocational trades before a single comparative figure could be asked about.

This desk is not asserting why. We are asserting what happened, on the record, and putting the question to the Ministry directly: if the underlying results support the celebratory framing offered at Pegasus, what is the rationale for withholding the very comparative data CXC placed in the public domain that same day? A Ministry with nothing to qualify has no reason to publish less than the region it answers to.

The 592 Guardian has written to the Ministry of Education and to Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain requesting the complete, subject-by-subject 2026 results — regional comparison included — and will publish any response in full.

A NOTE ON WHAT THIS PIECE DOES NOT CLAIM

This desk sought a regional teacher-salary comparison to test whether compensation helps explain the performance gap identified above. It does not exist in usable form. Crowdsourced salary aggregators return sample sizes too small to be meaningful — eleven data points for Barbados, thirty-seven for Jamaica, a single submission at one point for Guyana — and in at least one case returned a figure for Barbados equivalent to roughly five US dollars a day, which is not a real wage and was discarded.

A comparative review of what regional governments publish on public-sector pay found that most, including Guyana and Jamaica, disclose only aggregate ministry compensation spending, not post-level salary scales — meaning no like-for-like regional comparison currently exists in the public record.

What is verifiable is that Guyana’s own teacher salaries rose substantially over the 2024–2026 cycle under the negotiated agreement with the Guyana Teachers’ Union — a graduate teacher on the 2026 scale earns GYD 277,882 monthly, part of a phased increase the government has described as a 57 percent cumulative rise since 2021. That spending is real, it is documented, and it is fair to ask what it purchased. This desk declines to assert a wage-to-outcome causal link the data cannot currently support — and will pursue the regional salary comparison as its own investigation, sourced to government pay scales rather than crowdsourced estimates, rather than force an unverified number into this piece.

SOURCING

CXC regional figures: Caribbean Examinations Council, Official Release of Results Ceremony, Anguilla, August 18, 2026, as reported. Guyana figures: Ministry of Education press briefing, Pegasus Suites and Corporate Centre, Georgetown, August 18, 2026, as reported by Guyana Chronicle, Guyana Times, News Room Guyana, and HGPTV. Teacher salary figures: Ministry of Education–Guyana Teachers’ Union agreement, as reported by the Department of Public Information; 2026 salary scale as compiled by 592Hub from GRA and Ministry of Finance notices.

The Rate They Won’t Say Out Loud: How a President’s Grocery-Cart Economics Collides With Guyana’s Currency Reality

August 24, 2026/0 Comments/in Opinions, Accountability, Featured/by Editor

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The Rate They Won’t Say Out Loud: How a President’s Grocery-Cart Economics Collides With Guyana’s Currency Reality

BOARD EDITORIAL–August,2026

President Irfaan Ali has, in the span of a single public conversation, offered Guyanese two explanations for why their money buys less than it used to. First, that the problem is where they shop — that a shift toward supermarkets and restaurants, rather than traditional markets, is itself inflating the cost of living. Second, and relatedly, that the habit of eating out is part of what is driving households into difficulty.

Both explanations share a structure: they locate the cause of a national affordability crisis inside the consumer’s own choices, rather than inside the policy environment that shapes what those choices cost.

This editorial does not dispute that some Guyanese, like consumers everywhere, spend imperfectly. What it disputes is the substitution of a behavioural narrative for a currency and supply-chain reality that is measurable, documented, and largely outside any household’s control.

THE NUMBER THE PRESIDENT IS NOT CITING

Guyana’s official, Bank of Guyana-referenced exchange rate has held in a narrow band around G$207 to G$209 to the US dollar through the first half of 2026 — a rate that has been remarkably stable for over a decade. That is the number that appears in Customs Act notifications, commercial bank forex boards, and the mental arithmetic most Guyanese still use: divide by two hundred, add a little, and you have the dollar value.

It is not, however, the rate importers are actually paying when they go looking for US currency to bring in the goods that stock a supermarket shelf or a market stall. When the commercial banking system is short of forex — as it has been for stretches of this year — importers are pushed toward parallel channels where the price of a US dollar runs meaningfully higher, into the G$230–240 range by trader account. That gap between the published rate and the street rate is not a rounding error. It is a second, informal exchange rate that Guyana’s importers absorb silently and pass forward, and that the public conversation about “consumer behaviour” never mentions.

The dollar is already beaten up before the item reaches the shelf — and the country is still doing the math at a rate that hasn’t applied for months.

This is the mechanism the President’s framing skips entirely. A trader who cannot access US dollars at the official window through a commercial bank, and who must instead source them on the parallel market, is not paying an inflated price because Guyanese suddenly prefer supermarkets to markets. He is paying it because the forex is not there at the rate the country believes is still in effect. That cost does not stay with the importer. It travels through the wholesale margin, through the retail margin, and lands — fully loaded — on the price tag a consumer blames on the cashier.

WHERE THE REGIONAL COMPARISON ACTUALLY POINTS

The government has reached for a regional comparison of its own on the inflation question, and on paper it is a favourable one: the IMF’s April 2026 outlook placed Guyana’s projected 2026 inflation at 5.7 percent, against a projected Caribbean regional average of 6.6 percent. Read in isolation, that comparison suggests Guyana is managing price growth better than most of its neighbours, and a government spokesperson would not be wrong to cite it.

But a headline CPI figure measures the average change in a broad consumer basket against a prior year. It does not measure whether a specific, forex-exposed food and household-goods basket — the one working households actually buy weekly — is moving in line with that average, or well ahead of it. Guyana’s exceptional case is precisely what makes the regional comparison misleading rather than reassuring: this is an economy where GDP grew by more than 40 percent in 2024 and close to 20 percent in 2025, driven by oil revenue that has not required the exchange rate, the forex supply chain, or the import market to modernise at anywhere near the same pace. A country can post a favourable CPI average and still have a currency-access problem that hammers importers and, through them, ordinary households, month over month.

The two facts are not in tension. They are describing different layers of the same economy.

Put plainly: citing a 5.7 percent inflation figure against a 6.6 percent regional average answers a question nobody struggling to fill a grocery cart is asking. The question is not how Guyana’s basket compares to Barbados’s or Jamaica’s on paper. It is why a basket bought with oil-boom prosperity still requires importers to hunt for scarce dollars at a rate 15 to 20 percent above the one the country is still mentally using.

WHAT THE FRAMING OBSCURES

None of this is to say every household budget in Guyana is being managed flawlessly, or that personal overspending never happens. It happens everywhere, in every economy. But a national cost-of-living conversation is not well served by collapsing a structural, currency-driven, supply-chain problem into a story about where people choose to shop or whether they occasionally eat out.

That framing is not just imprecise. It is convenient — for a government that has yet to publish retailer mark-up data, has yet to lay out a public timeline for expanding market infrastructure at the pace demand requires, and has yet to explain what, if anything, is being done to close the gap between the official exchange rate and the one importers are actually paying.

If prosperity from Guyana’s oil wealth is reaching ordinary citizens, it should be visible first at the exchange rate they depend on to buy the ordinary things they need. Until the government is prepared to speak as plainly about that rate as it is about consumer behaviour, this newsroom will keep insisting on the distinction: the problem was never the restaurant table, or the shopping cart, or the cashier. It is whether prosperity is reaching the people — and at what rate they are being made to pay for the wait.

— The Board

A Decibel Meter Is Not a Deterrent: The Kingston Seawall Pilot and the Enforcement Guyana Keeps Skipping

August 24, 2026/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinions, Accountability/by Editor

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A Decibel Meter Is Not a Deterrent: The Kingston Seawall Pilot and the Enforcement Guyana Keeps Skipping

OPINION BY : Staff Writer –August 2026

The Kingston Seawall now has decibel-meter signs, blinking out real-time noise readings as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s latest effort to confront the nuisance that has long tormented nearby residents, disturbed public spaces, and tested the patience of citizens who simply want peace after dark.

On its face, the initiative is sensible. Noise is not imaginary. It is measurable. And it is entirely reasonable for operators, patrons and the public to know when the sound they are producing has crossed from entertainment into intrusion.

But Guyana has reached the stage where the public must ask a harder question: is the Government building an enforcement system—or merely installing another public display of official concern?

A decibel sign cannot issue a warning. It cannot stop a reckless operator from turning a public space into a private nightclub. It cannot seize equipment, suspend an authorization, prosecute a repeat offender, or comfort a family whose children cannot sleep because someone has decided that their profits outrank the public’s right to peace.

A meter can measure the problem. It cannot solve it.

The law already exists

This is what makes the latest announcement so troubling. The country is not suffering because nobody has ever heard of noise regulation. Guyana already has noise-management rules. There are permissible limits. There are Environmental Authorization requirements. There are penalties. There is an Environmental Protection Agency. There is a Guyana Police Force.

So why is excessive noise still treated in far too many places as a mere inconvenience—something for citizens to endure, complain about repeatedly, and ultimately surrender to?

The answer lies not in the absence of laws, but in the absence of dependable enforcement.

Too often, the public is told to report noise. Then the report is made. The music continues. The police may or may not arrive. The operator may lower the volume for ten minutes, then turn it back up once the patrol vehicle disappears around the corner. The residents are left with the same disturbance, the same exhaustion, and the same sinking realization that the law seems firm only on paper.

That is not regulation. That is a ritual of complaint without remedy.

EPA and police: Who does what?

The EPA’s role should be clear: establish the lawful standard, monitor and document breaches, regulate environmentally authorized operations, impose compliance conditions, and take administrative or legal action against repeat offenders.

The police role should be equally clear: respond quickly where public peace is being disturbed, require the offending activity to be reduced or stopped, identify those responsible, preserve the peace, and support prosecution where an offence has been committed.

Neither agency can perform the other’s role alone. The EPA may have the technical capacity to measure noise, but it does not have the everyday street-level presence required to stop an escalating nuisance at midnight. The police may have the power to intervene on the ground, but they need reliable standards, certified readings, and a clear regulatory basis for action.

That is why the partnership matters. But collaboration must mean more than both agencies appearing in the same press release.

It must mean one functioning chain of accountability:

Alert. Response. Measurement. Warning. Order. Follow-up. Sanction.

If that chain breaks after the meter records the noise, then the entire exercise becomes little more than a taxpayer-funded electronic witness—watching the breach occur, displaying the breach in public, and doing nothing meaningful to stop it.

The missing public answers

The EPA and the National Data Management Authority must now provide the public with more than polished language about “education,” “awareness,” and “voluntary compliance.”

Those are admirable words. But they become empty words when they are used to soften the consequences for persistent offenders while residents continue to suffer.

The public deserves direct answers:

⇒ What is the precise noise limit at the Kingston Seawall during the day and at night?

⇒ Is that limit displayed beside the real-time reading so that people can understand whether the noise is lawful or excessive?

⇒ How long must a sound level remain above the threshold before the EPA and police are alerted?

⇒ Who receives that alert, and what response time is expected?

⇒ What happens when an operator refuses to comply?

⇒ How many warnings will be issued before enforcement begins?

⇒ Will repeat offenders face permit conditions, suspension, closure, charges, or prosecution?

⇒ Will the agencies publish monthly data showing alerts, inspections, complaints, warnings, repeat offenders, and cases brought before the courts?

⇒ What did the system cost to buy, install, maintain, calibrate, connect, monitor, and staff?

These are not hostile questions. They are the ordinary questions taxpayers are entitled to ask whenever public money is spent and public authority is exercised.

Voluntary compliance has limits

There is room for education. A first-time operator may not understand the applicable standard. A public display can encourage prompt adjustment. A reasonable warning can correct conduct without turning every nuisance into a confrontation.

But voluntary compliance is a beginning, not an enforcement policy.

The man who has already ignored residents, ignored warnings, ignored the law, and ignored repeated complaints does not need another educational opportunity. He needs consequences.

The business that profits from disturbing an entire neighborhood should not be allowed to treat a modest warning as a cost-free operating expense. The promoter who advertises a night of noise, congestion and disorder should not be permitted to hide behind the excuse that nobody told him the music was too loud while a decibel meter glows in plain sight.

The right of one operator to make money ends where the public’s right to sleep, study, work, recover, worship and live in peace begins.

Value for money, not technology theatre

No sensible person should oppose the use of technology to improve regulation. Real-time monitoring can be useful. Data can expose patterns. Sensors can identify repeat hotspots. Public signs can make operators more accountable. A properly designed system could make enforcement faster, fairer and less dependent on who knows whom.

But technology is only value for money when it produces measurable public benefit.

The EPA must therefore show whether the investment leads to fewer sustained breaches, fewer complaints, faster responses, stronger compliance and meaningful action against repeat offenders. If the Government cannot demonstrate those results, then the question will be unavoidable: what exactly did the taxpayer purchase—noise control, or another shiny symbol of concern?

Guyana has had enough of governance by announcement. Enough of initiatives that are launched with fanfare, photographed for publicity, and then quietly left to gather dust while the underlying problem remains untouched.

The seawall does not need a decorative scoreboard for disorder. It needs a system that works.

The public must not be the enforcement arm

Residents should not be forced to become nocturnal evidence-gatherers—recording videos from their homes, begging for intervention, making repeated calls, confronting operators at personal risk, and then being told to “report the matter” again next weekend.

That is an abdication of state responsibility.

Citizens pay taxes for agencies to regulate. They pay taxes for police to enforce the law. They should not be required to beg for the peace and quiet that the law already promises them. Let the decibel signs remain. Let the sensors collect the data. Let operators see, in real time, the point at which their activity becomes unlawful or unreasonable.

But let there be no confusion: the real test is what happens after the number turns red.

If the alert brings a rapid response; if the response produces compliance; if repeat offenders are identified and punished; if the data are published and the costs are justified—then the EPA and the police would have built something useful.

If not, the public will be left staring at another digital monument to a familiar Guyanese failure: a Government capable of measuring the nuisance, but unwilling to enforce against it.

—The Board

A House in Scarborough, a Regulator’s Own Rulebook, and the $1.49 Billion Question GWI Won’t Answer

August 24, 2026/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinions, Accountability/by Editor

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A House in Scarborough, a Regulator’s Own Rulebook, and the $1.49 Billion Question GWI Won’t Answer

How NPTAB’s published joint-venture standards square with a Toronto residential address, a chairman’s spouse, and a public utility’s defense that never mentions its own contracting partner

OPINION BY: — Investigations Desk –August 2026

When Guyana Water Incorporated moved to publicly defend itself last week against corruption allegations levelled by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed, it offered a specific, sourced account of how one of its most scrutinized contracts was won. “Under the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) Water Supply Improvement Programme,” GWI stated, “international competitive bidding guidelines resulted in Sigma Engineers receiving Lot 2 to construct treatment plants at Leguan and Wakenaam.”

It is a clean, confident sentence. It is also incomplete in a way that matters.

The contract GWI is describing — Contract Agreement dated October 28, 2024, for GYD $1,486,448,800 — was not awarded to “Sigma Engineers.” It was awarded to a joint venture: “Sigma Engineers Ltd & Hebei Wansheng Environmental Protection Engineering Co. Ltd. JV.” The contract document itself describes this JV as “a company under the Laws of Canada,” with its principal place of business listed at 6 Poplar Road, Toronto, Ontario.

This publication visited that address, virtually. It is a single-family detached house in Scarborough — a driveway, a garage, personal vehicles parked outside. There is no signage, no visible office, nothing to distinguish it from any other home on the street.

WHAT THE TITLE RECORDS SHOW

A parcel register search through Ontario’s ONLAND system traces the property’s ownership. In 2005, Tom and Helen Zoubaniotis purchased the parent lot for $405,000. The lot was subdivided in 2015. On March 1, 2017, the Zoubaniotis family sold the subdivided parcel — what is now 6 Poplar Road — to a woman named Maleka Azim, for $1,465,000, financed through a mortgage with the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.

The registered mortgage instrument, filed the same day, contains a routine disclosure required under Ontario law when a property owner is married: the name of the consenting spouse. That name is Syed Arshed Reza.

Syed Arshed Reza is not an unfamiliar name to anyone who has followed Sigma Engineers’ history. He is one of three men who founded Sigma Engineers Ltd in Bangladesh in 1985, and he currently serves as the company’s chairman. He is also one of three Sigma executives — alongside managing director Syed Md Kamal — named in a 2020 Bangladesh Anti-Corruption Commission case alleging the embezzlement of Tk 34.42 crore ( approx.$4m USD) through an inflated water-pump procurement under the Manu River Irrigation Project. Public reporting has not identified a resolution to that case in the six years since it was filed.

To be precise about what the documents do and do not establish: they confirm that the chairman of Sigma Engineers’ Bangladesh parent company is married to the woman who owns the house listed as the principal place of business of the Guyana-contracted joint venture. They do not establish that Maleka Azim holds any formal role in Sigma Engineers, in the JV, or in the GWI contract. A marital consent signature is a legal formality, not evidence of corporate involvement. This newsroom is not asserting a connection the documents do not support — we are reporting what the public record shows, and what it does not yet show, so readers can weigh it for themselves.

“The lead partner of the JV clearly identified and properly authorized… all partners in the JV legally liable, jointly and severally, during bidding and execution of the contract.”

— NPTA Standard Evaluation Criteria Handbook, 2009

WHAT NPTA’S OWN RULES REQUIRE

Whatever the answer to that question turns out to be, a separate and more immediately answerable question sits underneath it: did anyone at the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board verify any of this before awarding a Guyanese public utility contract worth nearly $1.5 billion?

NPTA’s own published standards say they were supposed to. The agency’s Standard Evaluation Criteria Handbook for Prequalification and Bidding, in force since May 2009 and still linked from NPTA’s official website today, devotes an entire section to joint-venture bidders. It requires that each partner in a JV submit the complete documentation a company would submit if bidding alone. It requires a signed Joint Venture Agreement, or at minimum a Letter of Intent to execute one, establishing that all partners are “legally liable, jointly and severally.” It requires a description of each partner’s proposed responsibilities and financial contribution. And it requires the JV to designate a lead partner, “clearly identified and properly authorized.”

The handbook’s own evaluator checklist — the literal form NPTA’s evaluation committees are meant to complete — asks these questions in writing: “Is the lead partner of the JV clearly identified and properly authorized? Are the JV’s sharing provisions in compliance with the minimum participation specified? Are all partners in the JV legally liable, jointly and severally, during bidding and execution of the contract?” A companion instruction to evaluators could not be more direct: “Particular attention should be given to issues related to eligibility and JV requirements.”

NPTA’s companion Guide to the Public Procurement Procedures adds a second layer. Whatever was verified at the prequalification stage, the Guide states, “shall be confirmed at the time of award of contract, and award may be denied to a bidder that is judged to no longer have the capability or resources to successfully perform the contract.”

Verification, in other words, is not a box ticked once and forgotten. It is meant to hold at the moment the government’s signature goes on the page.

Both documents are dated 2009 and show no recorded amendments in their own version-control pages — but they remain the standing manuals NPTA publishes today, and there is no indication any newer version has superseded them.

A PUBLIC DEFENSE THAT SKIPS THE QUESTION

GWI’s statement rejecting Mohamed’s allegations was, on its own terms, thorough. It walked through five separate contracts — the Region 4 plants, the Hope Surface Water Treatment Plant, the Shelter Belt rehabilitation, well-drilling packages, and Leguan/Wakenaam — citing bidder counts and competing prices for each. It is a document written to project procedural rigor.

But at no point does it engage with the fact that one of those five contracts was not awarded to a Guyana-registered company at all. It was awarded to a Canadian joint venture whose declared headquarters is a house in Scarborough, and whose only public link to Sigma’s ownership runs through a chairman’s wife’s name on a mortgage document.

If GWI’s own account of its due diligence has no room for that fact, it raises the question of whether NPTAB’s evaluation process had room for it either — or whether, as this newsroom’s review of the record to date suggests, Sigma Engineers’ Guyana registration was treated as sufficient proof of the whole joint venture’s standing.

This newsroom has not yet obtained NPTA’s Board Approval letter for the CDB Lot 2 award specifically — the document that would show, in NPTA’s own words, how the awardee was named and what was verified. Comparable approval letters obtained for two other Sigma contracts (the Hope plant and the Shelter Belt rehabilitation) name only “Sigma Engineers Ltd” as awardee, with no reference to any joint-venture partner. Whether the Leguan/Wakenaam approval letter follows the same pattern is, for now, an open question. NPTA’s own rules require such awards to be published on its website within two days of contract signing; this newsroom is continuing to seek that record and will publish it in full once obtained.

Ongoing works at one of the sites.-(2024)

Construction on the Leguan and Wakenaam plants is, by all accounts, proceeding. That is not in dispute, and this publication does not suggest otherwise. But an ongoing project is evidence that a contract was signed and is being executed — it is not evidence of what due diligence occurred before the signing, and it is not a substitute for the documentation NPTA’s own rules require. The two questions are separate, and the public is entitled to an answer on both.

WHAT REMAINS OPEN

This publication is not alleging that Maleka Azim, or Syed Arshed Reza, or the Sigma/Hebei Wansheng joint venture, engaged in any wrongdoing in connection with this contract. Nor are we alleging that GWI or NPTAB acted with corrupt intent. What the documentary record shows, and what we are reporting, is narrower and more precise: a public utility awarded a Guyanese taxpayer- and CDB-funded contract worth $1.49 billion to a joint venture whose declared corporate address is an ordinary house; a regulator with published, specific, decades-old rules for verifying exactly this kind of arrangement; and a public defense of that award, issued by the utility itself, that does not mention the joint venture existed.

This publication has sought comment from Guyana Water Incorporated and the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board on the specific matters raised in this report and will publish any response received in full.

— The 592 Guardian will continue reporting on this contract as records become available.

GECOM’s Non-Answer: How a “Conclusive Statement” Ducked the One Question It Was Asked

August 24, 2026/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinions, Accountability/by Editor

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GECOM’s Non-Answer: How a “Conclusive Statement” Ducked the One Question It Was Asked

ANALYSISY BY : Editor– AUGUST,2026

The Elections Commission Secretariat says it has no authority to rule on the Article 161(3)(b) impasse. But its own abstention is not neutral — it is a default ruling for indefinite tenure, and neither camp in the underlying constitutional debate has supplied a mechanism to fill the gap it leaves open.

The Guyana Elections Commission’s Secretariat yesterday issued what it plainly intended as a closing word on two festering disputes — the standoff over opposition-nominated Commissioners under Article 161(3)(b), and the parallel fight over opposition scrutineers. On the Commissioner question, GECOM said it has no legal authority to determine the validity of nominations made by the Leader of the Opposition, and that it cannot intervene in, adjudicate upon, or resolve any impasse involving persons he has nominated.

That is not a conclusion. It is a recusal — and recusal, in a standoff where one side already holds the seats, is not a neutral act. It is a ruling for the status quo, issued without GECOM having to own it as one.

THE THEORY GECOM DECLINED TO TOUCH

The constitutional debate GECOM stepped around has a name and a leading proponent: University of Guyana law lecturer Neville Bissember, whose position is that “the Leader of the Opposition” in Article 161(3)(b) denotes an office, not a person. Wherever the phrase appears in the Constitution, it refers to whoever presently holds that office — which means the advice power the clause vests is a live, current power, not one frozen in the hands of whoever exercised it last. On this reading, three Commissioners nominated by a predecessor Opposition Leader, for a parliamentary opposition configuration that no longer exists, cannot be taken to represent a bloc that never nominated them.

Bissember’s rebuttal to the “life tenure” argument is careful, and worth stating precisely. Article 161(6) imports the removal protections of Article 225 — a Commissioner “shall not be removed therefrom or suspended from the functions thereof” absent cause such as infirmity or misconduct. Defenders of the sitting Commissioners — Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin, and Desmond Trotman, all APNU-nominated — cite this as an ironclad shield. Bissember’s answer is that the question is not removal at all. It is expiry. The appointments were made within, and for, a specific opposition configuration; when that configuration was reconfigured by the 2025 election and produced a new Leader of the Opposition, the basis on which the appointments rested came to an end on its own terms. Article 225 governs cause-based removal. It was never built to answer whether a mandate has simply run its course.

Bissember offers a test to sharpen the point: reverse the 2025 result. Had the WIN-led coalition instead formed the government, with Bharrat Jagdeo or President Ali holding the office of Leader of the Opposition, few would seriously argue that Commissioners nominated by a PPP predecessor should remain in their seats once the office had passed to another party entirely.

If permanence is the rule, it has to hold in both directions — not just the direction that happens to keep the current occupants in place.

THE QUESTION BISSEMBER’S OWN LOGIC DOES NOT ANSWER

Push that reversed scenario one step further than Bissember does, and it stops being a rhetorical device and starts exposing a real structural hole.

If the 2025 outcome had gone the other way — Mohamed elected President, Jagdeo or Ali installed as Leader of the Opposition — what, on Bissember’s own reasoning, happens to Alexander, Corbin, and Trotman?

Would Norton still be saying “no vacancy ” exists here ?

They could not remain opposition Commissioners. Their mandate, by Bissember’s own account, would have expired the moment the office passed to a Leader who never nominated them and owes their appointment nothing. But they could not become government Commissioners either. Article 161(3)(a) vests the three government-side seats in the President’s own deliberate judgment — a wholly separate appointment power, textually and procedurally distinct from the advice mechanism in 161(3)(b). Nothing in the Constitution allows a sitting opposition-nominated Commissioner to migrate seats when the political wind changes. There is no clause that converts an opposition nominee into a presidential appointee by operation of law.

So in the reversed scenario, on the very logic that says their mandate expired, Alexander, Corbin and Trotman would hold no seat on the Commission at all — not the one they were nominated to, which has expired, and not the other one, which they were never appointed to and have no constitutional path into.

That is the right answer as a matter of principle. It is also the answer nobody currently arguing this dispute — not Bissember, not GECOM’s own Chairperson, not the Secretariat’s statement issued this past week — has actually operationalized. Expiry-in-principle is not the same as a mechanism that empties the seat.

Attorney Ralph Ramkarran has come closest to naming the gap honestly: he argues Commissioners in this position ought, as a moral imperative and a matter of standard political practice, to resign when the nominating office changes hands. That is candidly not a constitutional compulsion. It is an appeal to conscience, offered precisely because no one has found a provision that does the job automatically.

Into that gap steps the argument actually being run today by the sitting Commissioners and their defenders: there is no vacancy, and without a vacancy, there is nothing for the President to appoint anyone to — regardless of whose theory of Article 161(3)(b) is correct. It does not matter, on this account, whether Alexander’s mandate expired in principle in September 2025. He has not resigned. No court has ordered his removal. No constitutional amendment has intervened. The seat, mechanically, is occupied, and occupied seats do not create vacancies by force of academic argument.

This is the trap Bissember’s framework — for all its textual discipline — has not yet escaped, and the trap the reversed-election hypothetical makes undeniable: a theory of expiry without an accompanying mechanism of vacation is not a resolution. It is a description of a problem, dressed as an answer to it.

GECOM’S ABSTENTION IS NOT NEUTRAL

This is precisely the terrain GECOM’s Secretariat chose to avoid entirely, framing its non-answer as a jurisdictional limit rather than a substantive position. The Commission says it cannot adjudicate the impasse. It does not say why an “impasse” exists in the first place, or acknowledge that its own inaction is what allows one side of that impasse — the incumbent, APNU-nominated Commissioners — to remain in place indefinitely, by default, without GECOM ever having to defend that outcome as correct.

This is not a hypothetical asymmetry. It is the operating reality right now. The Commission’s own Chairperson, Justice (ret’d) Claudette Singh, has previously taken a position closer to Bissember’s — that the Commission could not properly reconstitute itself on the opposition side until a new Leader of the Opposition was named and had submitted fresh nominees. The Secretariat’s statement yesterday does not engage that position, endorse it, or explain why it no longer governs. It simply declares the entire question outside GECOM’s remit.

A constitutional commission that will not say who is validly seated on it, while continuing to pay and convene those already seated, has not stayed neutral. It has chosen an outcome and called it an absence of one.,

THE SAME PATTERN, PLAYING OUT AGAIN ON SCRUTINEERS

The Secretariat’s statement did something similar, in miniature, on the scrutineer question. GECOM confirmed it is currently remunerating 69 scrutineers appointed by APNU+AFC, while WIN has separately submitted its own list of nominees for opposition scrutineer positions. The Secretariat was careful to say the existing arrangement should not be read as a determination that WIN is not entitled to representation — while simultaneously conceding that the Commission will, at some point, have to make a determination on the matter. It has not made one. In the meantime, the arrangement inherited from the prior opposition configuration continues to be funded and operated, exactly as with the Commissioners.

The Secretariat did rule on one narrower point: the Chief Election Officer has no independent authority to alter the existing scrutineer arrangement or implement WIN’s list unilaterally, because the CEO is, notwithstanding anything in any written law, subject to the direction and control of the Commission itself. That is a correct statement of the chain of authority. But it does not resolve anything — it simply relocates the unanswered question from the CEO’s desk to the Commission’s, where it has now sat, unresolved, through two separate public disputes on two separate questions, both governed by the same underlying constitutional logic about who a change in the Opposition Leader’s office actually displaces.

WHAT A CONCLUSIVE STATEMENT WOULD ACTUALLY REQUIRE

GECOM did not conclude the Article 161(3)(b) impasse yesterday. It described its own unwillingness to conclude it, and it did so in language crafted to sound procedural rather than consequential. But the consequence is real: every day the Secretariat treats this as a matter for the Opposition Leader and the President alone to sort out between themselves, Alexander, Corbin, and Trotman continue to sit as Commissioners on nominations from an opposition configuration that, on a serious and carefully argued constitutional reading, ceased to exist in September 2025.

Resolving this properly requires more than GECOM restating its own limits. It requires either the courts to settle whether Article 161(3)(b) contains an implied mechanism of expiry, Parliament to legislate one where the Constitution is silent, or the Commission itself — not merely its Secretariat — to take up the question it insists it cannot touch.

Until one of those things happens, GECOM’s Wednesday statement will stand not as a resolution, but as a record of the moment the Commission chose institutional convenience over the constitutional question actually before it.

— The Board

SIGMA’S IMPOSSIBLE TIMELINE:

August 23, 2026/0 Comments/in Featured, Opinions, Accountability/by Editor

592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

SIGMA’S IMPOSSIBLE TIMELINE:

How GWI’s Own Contracts Contradict Sigma Engineers’ Sworn Public Denial

OPINION BY: Staff Writer –August 2026

Guyana Water Incorporated and Sigma Engineers Ltd Inc cannot both be telling the truth. That is not editorializing — it is arithmetic. GWI’s own public statement, its own signed contracts, and its own Facebook page place Sigma Engineers on the receiving end of government water infrastructure contracts beginning October 13, 2022 — seven days after the company was incorporated. Sigma’s public rebuttal, delivered through counsel and threatening legal action against Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed, insists the company’s first Guyanese contract was not awarded until 2026.

Both statements cannot stand. The documentary record, obtained and cross-verified by The 592 Guardian, resolves the contradiction — and it does not resolve in Sigma’s favor.

THE CLAIM SIGMA MADE

Responding to Mohamed’s allegations, Sigma Engineers issued a statement rejecting what it called “serious misrepresentations of the facts” and confirming it had retained legal counsel to pursue action. On the specific question of timing, Sigma’s statement was unambiguous: the company denied Mohamed’s claim that it was established just five working days before receiving a government contract, and stated instead that its Guyana-registered entity — properly incorporated on October 6, 2022 — did not receive its first Guyanese contract until 2026, following competitive bidding through the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB).

Sigma further confirmed that Mohamed Aqtar Ali, brother of President Irfaan Ali, is engaged by its Guyana operation as a “senior technical consultant,” while denying he holds any affiliation with the company’s Bangladesh parent.

WHAT THE PAPER TRAIL ACTUALLY SHOWS

The 592 Guardian has obtained the Certificate of Incorporation for Sigma Engineers L.T.D. Inc — Company No. 13572, incorporated under Guyana’s Companies Act on October 6, 2022, with M. Tamjeed Rahmaan listed as sole incorporator, director and secretary. We have also obtained the underlying GWI contract, its governing addendum, and the NPTA Board Approval letters covering every major water-sector award Sigma has received since.

Contract No. GWI 2022/43430 — the procurement of plant design, supply and installation of water treatment facilities for Lot 3 (Caledonia, Cummings Lodge and Bachelor’s Adventure, Region 4) — is dated October 13, 2022. That is seven days after Sigma’s incorporation, not four years, and the contract explicitly states it was entered into via international competitive bidding under NPTAB, the very process Sigma’s statement credits for its supposed first award.

The contract was subsequently amended by Addendum 2, dated February 29, 2024, raising the total contract sum from GYD $3,697,274,857 to GYD $3,951,992,986 under Variation Order No. 1 — a document bearing the signature of M. Tamjeed Rahmaan himself, accepting the change order on behalf of the contractor.

The same individual named as Sigma’s sole director personally signed contract paperwork in 2024 — two years before the company’s public claim that no such contract existed.

THE FULL CONTRACT RECORD

GWI’s public statement, issued in response to Mohamed’s allegations, credited Sigma with a run of contracts across the water sector: Lot 3, the Hope Surface Water Treatment Plant, the Shelter Belt rehabilitation, a well-drilling programme, and the CDB-financed Leguan and Wakenaam facilities. The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board’s own award letters confirm each of these in turn.

Contract	Awarded	Value (GYD)	Source Document
Lot 3 — Caledonia, Cummings Lodge, Bachelor’s Adventure	Oct 13, 2022	$3,951,992,986*	GWI 2022/43430 + Addendum 2
Hope Surface Water Treatment Plant (Lot 1)	Nov 29, 2024	$3,569,315,208	NPTA Ref 133/2024/45 Ret
CDB Lot 2 — Leguan & Wakenaam	Oct 28, 2024	$1,486,448,800	CDB Contract Agreement
Wells — Friendship, Westminster, Shelter Belt, Melanie Damishana	n/a (bid comparison	$411,600,000	GWI statement, Aug 2026
Shelter Belt Rehabilitation & Expansion	Dec 31, 2025	$2,439,894,525	NPTA Ref 154/2025/45

*Amended sum reflecting Variation Order No. 1 (Feb 2024); original contract sum was GYD $3,697,274,857.

Summed together, these five contracts total approximately GYD $11.86 billion — closely approaching the figure of more than $12 billion that Mohamed cited in his original allegations, a figure Sigma’s statement did not directly address.

GWI’S OWN OFFICIALS, ON THE RECORD

GWI Chief Executive Officer Shaik Baksh has publicly defended the award process itself, stating that Sigma secured its contracts through international tenders and was the lowest responsive bidder on several projects. Asked about Aqtar Ali’s involvement, Baksh was direct: “So far as GWI is concerned, he was never a figure.”

That statement addresses procurement influence. It does not address — and GWI’s own institutional Facebook page undercuts — the question of who has actually been photographed standing beside Sigma’s crews at completed GWI facilities. GWI’s official account posted images of Baksh posing with Sigma’s on-site staff at the newly constructed Cummings Lodge plant, captioned: “The New Cummings Lodge Water Treatment Plant was constructed by Sigma Engineering Ltd at a cost of GYD $1.3 billion, with a team comprising of several Guyanese staff.” The cost figure in that caption — $1.3 billion — closely matches the $1,304,444,724 final contract price for Cummings Lodge confirmed in the signed change-order documents obtained by this publication. The claim of “several Guyanese staff,” however, is not visually supported by the photograph GWI itself chose to publish alongside it.

GWI CEO with Sigma staff

SIGMA’S NARROWING DEFENSE

Sigma’s position, as relayed through its attorneys, has narrowed since its initial public statement. Rather than continuing to deny the existence of earlier contracts outright, Sigma’s lawyer has maintained — per reporting citing the correspondence — that the locally incorporated Sigma Engineers Ltd Inc has received only one contract since its 2022 registration: a contract for rehabilitation of GWI’s Shelter Belt facility, which Sigma places in 2026.

The NPTAB’s own award letter for that project is dated December 31, 2025 — not 2026 — narrowing, though not eliminating, the discrepancy in Sigma’s timeline. That letter names the awardee “Sigma Engineers Ltd Inc.” By contrast, NPTA’s November 2024 award letter for the Hope plant names the awardee simply “Sigma Engineers Ltd” — no “Inc.” Whether this inconsistency in NPTA’s own paperwork reflects two distinct corporate entities, or simply administrative imprecision, has not been established.

What can be established is that NPTA treats both awards as going to the same contractor: identical CEO addressee, identical board chairman, identical procurement process.

If Sigma intends to argue that a technical corporate distinction — Ltd versus Ltd Inc — separates the entity that signed the 2022 Lot 3 contract from the entity now facing public scrutiny, that argument has not yet been made explicitly, and it does not appear to account for M. Tamjeed Rahmaan’s personal signature on 2024 contract paperwork under the Sigma Engineers name.

WHAT REMAINS UNRESOLVED

Aqtar Ali has separately denied, through his attorney, being a director or shareholder in any company named by Mohamed, and has threatened defamation proceedings over public statements made about him. Sigma has confirmed Aqtar Ali’s role as a senior technical consultant to its Guyana operation without detailing when he was engaged or on what terms. None of the documents obtained by this publication place Aqtar Ali’s name on Sigma’s corporate filings, which list Rahmaan alone as incorporator, director and secretary.

What the documentary record does establish, without need for inference, is this: Sigma Engineers held a signed, NPTAB-tendered government water contract within seven days of its Guyana incorporation in October 2022 — not, as the company’s public statement claimed, four years later in 2026. GWI’s own contracts, GWI’s own change orders, GWI’s own NPTA award letters, and GWI’s own Facebook page all place that timeline beyond dispute. Sigma Engineers’ public statement to the contrary is not merely mistaken.

Measured against the documents its own director signed, it is not true.

— The Board

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SIGMA’S IMPOSSIBLE TIMELINE:

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