The Vetting That Never Was: How Guyana’s Housing Ministry Manufactured Trust It Never Verified

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 592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Vetting That Never Was: How Guyana’s Housing Ministry Manufactured Trust It Never Verified

OPINION BY: Editor —592 Guardian          

On May 20, 2024, President Irfaan Ali stood inside a freshly built two-bedroom home in Leonora, West Coast Demerara, and expressed his satisfaction with what he saw. Housing Minister Collin Croal, who accompanied him, posted the visit to Facebook with evident pride: stainless steel security doors, fire-resistant insulation, a first home built in seven days. The tour, Croal wrote, was led by “Modular Builds Guyana Inc.’s Director of Projects and Construction, Mr. Hardeep Singh, and Chief Financial Officer, Mr. William Grant.”

Two years later, that same company is at the centre of allegations that it defrauded four Guyanese clients of a combined $145 million. Singh is reported to have fled to the United Kingdom. Modular Build Guyana has denied the allegations as “completely false” and has threatened legal action against the outlet that reported them, but has not addressed any of the four clients’ specific claims.

It is the second such case this year. A separate contractor, Omar Malik, and his company DreamVu Homes, received a contract directly through the Housing Ministry to build dozens of units under the government’s Young Professional Homes initiative. Payments were financed through mortgages at local commercial banks — approved, the Ministry itself acknowledges, after it had approved Malik as the contractor. Malik has since fled the jurisdiction, leaving roughly two dozen young professionals servicing mortgage debt on homes that were never finished.

Confronted with mounting public anger over both cases, the Ministry’s position has been consistent: that the burden of vetting a contractor lies with the citizen, not the state that introduced them to one.

Two cases, two different failures — both traced to the Ministry

Modular Builds Guyana Inc. Four clients allege they collectively advanced $145 million to the company after encountering its representatives at the Guyana Building Expo, a state-organized event. One advanced $28 million for four two-bedroom apartments and received only columns and 100 laid blocks. Another paid $50 million for an eleven-storey building and received four truckloads of sand. A third paid $22 million for a commercial building with only minor works completed. A fourth paid $45 million for a three-storey complex that reached roughly 15 percent completion. Police told Kaieteur News that Singh has since left the country.

This is the softer form of state involvement: a presidential and ministerial photo opportunity, widely publicized, that lent Modular Builds a credibility never backed by a documented government contract. A review of the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board’s published tender-award register shows no contract ever issued to Modular Builds Guyana Inc. Central Housing and Planning Authority’s own news archive carries no procurement notice or follow-up naming the company beyond the May 2024 site-visit coverage. The endorsement, in other words, was real; the paper trail behind it was not.

Omar Malik and DreamVu Homes. This case is categorically different, and more serious. According to the Ministry’s own statement — corroborated across multiple outlets, and prompted by public criticism from Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed; Malik “received a contract through the Housing Ministry for the construction of dozens of Young Professional Homes as part of the Government’s housing push.” Payments to Malik were made, in significant part, through mortgages arranged at local commercial banks, entered into after the Ministry had approved both the contractor and the construction deals.

Mohamed’s public challenge to the Ministry captured the core problem directly: “How could a project facilitated through a government housing initiative become a nightmare for Guyanese?”

Facing that pressure, the Ministry disclosed — for the first time publicly, in a statement issued through CH&PA — that it had known about Malik’s non-performance since at least mid-2025, had issued public notices in national newspapers that August calling on him to report and resolve outstanding matters, had filed a formal criminal report with the Guyana Police Force after he failed to comply, and had since engaged INTERPOL, the FBI, and CARICOM IMPACS in an effort to locate him internationally. Independent reporting confirms this multi-agency engagement is real.

What the Ministry’s own account concedes — and what it omits

Read carefully, the Ministry’s statement is not evidence of an agency that acted proactively. It is evidence of an agency that acted only after non-compliance became undeniable, and disclosed that action only after an opposition leader forced the question into public view. Nothing in the Ministry’s account explains what due diligence, if any, was performed on Malik or DreamVu Homes before he was approved as a contractor on a government housing initiative — the point at which the harm to two dozen families became possible.

That omission matters more than the after-the-fact enforcement effort. INTERPOL and the FBI can help catch a man after he has fled with the money. Nothing the Ministry has disclosed suggests any comparable rigor was applied to stop him from being approved as a government-facilitated contractor in the first place.

The banks in the middle

The families affected by the DreamVu collapse are not simply out of pocket; they are contractually bound to mortgage lenders for houses that do not exist. Multiple outlets report that payments flowed through “local commercial banks and mortgage plans,” but not one names which bank or banks originated these loans. Neither Guyana’s Financial Intelligence Unit nor the Bank of Guyana has issued any public statement referencing this case.

That silence is itself worth scrutiny. Guyana’s Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism Act designates real estate and construction financing as a higher-risk sector precisely because large, document-heavy transactions with a weakly verifiable end-use are a recognized laundering typology internationally.

A bank originating a mortgage against a specific construction contract carries a customer due diligence obligation that reasonably extends beyond the borrower’s creditworthiness to the legitimacy and deliverability of the underlying transaction it is financing.

If a commercial bank disbursed mortgage funds against a Ministry-approved contract without independently verifying the contractor’s capacity to perform, that represents a second, distinct institutional failure sitting alongside the Ministry’s — one that neither the Ministry’s statement nor any bank has yet addressed publicly.

Until the lending institution or institutions involved are named, and asked directly what due diligence was performed, this remains an open question rather than a settled one. It should not stay that way.

The defense that doesn’t survive contact with the government’s own words

Asked by Kiskadee Watch, in the context of the Malik case, whether the Ministry had tightened expo screening to prevent a recurrence, Minister within the Ministry of Housing Vanessa Benn said the expos “feature all kinds of companies offering their services,” and that the responsibility for background checks rests with the homebuyer — comparing the choice of contractor to buying a car.

That framing does not survive contact with the government’s own public language. Ahead of the 2026 expo, Minister Croal promised the public “a safe and seamless experience for visitors and exhibitors” — the language of active curation, not a disclaimed open marketplace. Nowhere in CH&PA’s published materials, on buildingexpo.gy, or from the expo’s coordinating agency, Impressions GY, could this newsroom find any disclosed exhibitor vetting standard; no published registration requirement, no bonding requirement, no screening criteria available to the public. CH&PA’s Single Window system does require business registration and incorporation documents, but only for construction permit applications tied to specific land parcels — an entirely separate process from securing a booth at the expo, or from being approved as a contractor on a Ministry housing initiative.

Malik’s case removes any ambiguity that might have existed in the Modular Builds case about whether the state was merely an incidental host. Here, the Ministry does not dispute that it approved the contractor directly. Ms. Benn’s comparison to buying a car does not apply to a purchase the car dealership itself arranged, endorsed, and helped finance.

Where this leaves accountability

Guyanese families affected by these two cases did not lose a combined quarter of a billion dollars in an unregulated marketplace. One group encountered a contractor inside a government-branded exposition personally toured and praised by the President. The other was approved, by the Ministry’s own admission, as a direct contractor on a state housing initiative, with payments channeled through the banking system on the strength of that approval.

In neither case has the Ministry disclosed a vetting standard that was applied before the harm occurred — only enforcement measures taken, or disclosed, after it had.

That sequence — endorse first, investigate only under pressure, then instruct citizens to have vetted it themselves — is not accountability. It is liability management. Until CH&PA publishes an actual, enforced screening standard for expo exhibitors and Ministry-approved contractors alike, and until the banks that financed the DreamVu mortgages explain what due diligence they performed, the Building Expo and the Young Professional Homes initiative will remain what these two cases now demonstrate them to be: state-branded platforms carrying the appearance of official vetting, and none of the substance.

The 592 Guardian sought to verify claims independently through UK Companies House records, Guyana’s National Procurement and Tender Administration Board, Central Housing and Planning Authority’s public records, Guyana’s Financial Intelligence Unit and Bank of Guyana public statements, and independent Barbadian press coverage of Modular Builds’ prior operations in that jurisdiction. Where claims could not be independently verified — including the full corporate history of Modular Builds Guyana Inc. through Guyana’s Deeds and Commercial Registries Authority, which maintains no public online search facility, and the identity of the bank or banks that financed the DreamVu Homes mortgages — this is noted in the reporting above rather than presumed.

—The Board

 

 

 

 

 

      

 

    

            

The Number Guyana Has Already Reached Once

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Number Guyana Has Already Reached Once

PART II OF A TWO-PART SERIES  OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

The 44-Seat Threshold, the 2031 Clock, and the Defection Ledger

Part I of this series established the mechanism: in every one of the thirty-six countries, Washington-based advocates—Freedom House documented as having evaded presidential term limits, the rule change followed a legislative supermajority, not the reverse. This piece narrows that global record to a single number and a single domestic fact this Board has not seen stated plainly elsewhere: Guyana has already amended Article 90 once. Unanimously. Under the exact procedure — Article 164(2)(b), a two-thirds vote of all elected members — that would govern any future attempt to touch it again.

That is not a hypothetical parallel to Cameroon or Togo. It is Guyana’s own constitutional history, on Guyana’s own books, using Guyana’s own Article 90.

Chart of Leaders who are serving two-terms

WHAT ARTICLE 164 ACTUALLY REQUIRES

Guyana’s Constitution is not undefended against amendment — it is layered. Article 164(1) allows ordinary constitutional alterations by simple Assembly majority. Article 164(2)(a) protects a narrow set of foundational provisions; including Article 164 itself — behind a two-thirds vote plus a national referendum. But Article 164(2)(b) — the tier that governs Article 90, the presidential term-limit provision, along with roughly seventy other articles; requires only a two-thirds vote of all elected members of the National Assembly. No referendum. No public vote. Just forty-four votes, correctly counted, on a single sitting day.

Guyana has been here before. In 2000, the National Assembly passed the Constitution (Amendment) (No. 4) Act, which altered Article 90 to introduce the two-term presidential limit itself, alongside ten other articles governing presidential power. It did not pass on a bare two-thirds threshold. It passed unanimously — every member of an Assembly then split between PPP-C and PNC-led opposition, agreeing that the article should be changed. The Caribbean Court of Justice’s 2018 ruling upholding that amendment noted specifically that the Act reflected what it called compliance with a widespread community demand, and that it was passed under the Article 164(2)(b) tier of entrenchment, not the deeper referendum tier.

What made the 2000 amendment legitimate was not merely that it cleared 44 votes — it was that it cleared them unanimously.

Two things follow from this precedent, and this analyst wants both stated with equal weight. First: Article 90 is not, as it is sometimes loosely described, an immovable constitutional bedrock. It has been altered once already, lawfully, at the exact threshold now relevant to any future move. Second: what made the 2000 amendment legitimate was not merely that it cleared 44 votes — it was that it cleared them unanimously, across the aisle, in response to a public consensus. A future alteration to the same article, cleared at exactly 44 and not a vote more, secured through defection rather than cross-party agreement, would satisfy the same constitutional text while inverting everything about the process that gave the 2000 amendment its legitimacy. The Constitution does not distinguish between those two paths. Only the public record does.

THE LEDGER, COUNTED HONESTLY

This Board’s earlier piece, “The Carrot and the Count,” documented a pattern of PPP-C absorption of PNCR-APNU-aligned figures through 2026: James Bond, Shurwayne Holder, Daniel Seeram, Samuel Sandy, Wayne Maison, and, in the defection formalized on May 12, 2026, former MPs Ricky Ramsaroop and Dinesh Jaiprashad alongside regional councillors Ravoldo Birbal, Sheik Yaseen, Prince Holder, and Gangadai Lloyd. APNU General Secretary Sherwin Benjamin dismissed the move as “personal aggrandizement.” Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton called it unsurprising, attributing it to unfilled ambition rather than mass sentiment.

Precision matters here, and this Board corrects its own framing where the record demands it: as of this writing, the PPP-C government holds 36 of 65 Assembly seats — the same 36 it won in the September 2025 election. The May 2026 defections did not move that number. Guyana’s closed-list proportional representation system does not permit a sitting Assembly member to carry their seat across party lines; the defectors named above are former MPs and regional councillors, not sitting members of the current, 13th Parliament. The Assembly’s arithmetic, as of September 2026, remains 36 government, 29 opposition (WIN 16, PNCR-APNU 12, FGM 1) — eight seats short of 44.

That distinction is not a reason to relax. It is the reason to be exact about what the defection pattern actually is. It is not, today, a mechanism for moving Assembly numbers. It is a mechanism for pre-positioning ahead of the moment numbers can move — the 2031 general election, when Guyana’s closed-list system will next allocate all 65 seats fresh, and when a coalition’s list strength, not defections from a sitting Parliament, is what would put 44 seats within reach. Every figure absorbed into the PPP-C orbit between now and then is a figure who will appear on a PPP-C-aligned list, or decline to appear on an opposition one, when that list is drawn. The 2000 amendment took a unanimous Assembly to pass. The defection strategy this Board has documented since May reads, on the evidence available, as an effort to make a future amendment need no unanimity at all — only a list count that clears 44 on its own.

WHAT WOULD HAVE TO BE TRUE

The 592 Guardian is not asserting that a second alteration to Article 90 is planned, tabled, or under active discussion inside the PPP-C. No evidence supports that claim, and this publication will not manufacture urgency it cannot source. What can be stated, on the documentary record assembled across both parts of this series, is narrower and more defensible: the distance between Guyana’s current Assembly and the threshold that has, in thirty-six other countries, preceded a term-limit rewrite is eight seats; that threshold has already been used once in Guyana, on the same article, under the same procedural tier; and the defection pattern this Board has tracked since May 2026 is structurally the same activity — elite absorption ahead of a list-based seat count; that preceded Cameroon’s 2008 vote and Togo’s 2024 restructuring, each documented in Part I.

Freedom House’s report closed on a note this Board finds instructive: democracies survive this mechanism not through luck, but through institutions and citizens who name the arithmetic before it closes, not after. Senegal’s Constitutional Council stopped Macky Sall in 2024 because the threat was named and contested while it was still contestable.

Guyana’s Assembly stands at 36. The number that would end this discussion is 44. This Board intends to keep counting publicly, in the open, for as long as the gap between those two numbers continues to narrow.

— The Board

Sources: Cathryn Grothe and Grady Vaughan, “Overstaying Their Welcome: The Problem of Presidential Term Limit Evasion,” Freedom House; “A legal path to constitutional reform in Guyana,” Stabroek News (Sept. 28, 2024); “NO 3rd Term…CCJ rules upholds law that bars presidents serving more than two terms,” Guyana Chronicle (June 27, 2018); Constitution (Amendment) (No. 4) Act No. 17 of 2000; “Former APNU MPs, sitting councillors cross over to PPP,” Kaieteur News (May 13, 2026); National Assembly (Guyana), 13th Parliament composition.

Street exchange rate: $15,000 for $1.6 million

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Street exchange rate: $15,000 for $1.6 million

OPINION BY: GHK LALL— September2026

It’s unbelievable.  Try wrapping head around this: 90 feet of cable worth $1.6 million bartered for $15,000.  It’s the new street exchange rate that allows a man to eat.   I don’t know about powder or smoke, not going near those two.  After all, I have told this to Drs. Ali Mr. Food Security, Dr. Jagdeo  Mr. Food Psychology imagine being full, and not famished until blue in the face: a hungry Guyanese cannot eat concrete, cement, or sand, i.e., roads, bridges, and culverts.

People in this place are hungry.  A hungry man is a desperate man.  Grabbing ninety feet of heavy-duty copper cable weighing 30 pounds could not have been an easy feat.  With so many eyes watching.  With so many lights around.  But a hungry man somehow digs deep, finds that last ounce of superhuman strength.  Plus, the adrenaline gushing in torrents.  I would slap him around for the drugs, but give him a pass for the food.  Because that’s reality in oil rich PPP Guyana. 

A citizen so hungry, that he faces danger with aplomb, lugs 90 feet of cable that weighs dozens of pounds, so that he can get a bite to eat. 

If I were among the leaders in the PPP Govt, I would hang my head in shame, have difficulty facing the poor people of Guyana.  All these billions, and a citizen is forced to steal to sate the pangs of his hunger, so that he could survive to tomorrow.

Mothers shoplifting milk for their children.  Mothers cutting their fingers when slicing whatever they have.  To spread it around, so that all the children get something to take to school for lunch or the lessons that come later.  Meat and fish are usually off the menu, whatever the mothers are slicing.  Too expensive.  Too out of reach.

I am thinking of this national embarrassment, this governmental humiliation.  In a land of abundance-rich stats, richer leadership rhetoric, and the richest cash flow in its history-there are those who are compelled to scrounge to make it through another day.  Is the president listening?  Is he still seeing political motives in every statement, around every corner, behind every shadow?  Whatever the president sees, he should peel away the scales from his eyes, and see that man from Albouystown breaking the law, and pilfering a load of copper wire to reduce the gnawing wrenching that stretches from his esophagus to his duodenum.  Hunger is a hurting thing.  It’s not Lou Rawles, it Guyana’s cruel environment

Look at this tragic episode in the life and times of this dazzling new era in Guyana’s existence.  To lift himself out of hunger’s ferocious grip, a man has to break the law.  To the PPP Govt, I say.  Argue about true rate of poverty.  Hide that statistic.  Boast about cash grant.  Extol PPP Govt wisdom and generosity. Then face this set of unyielding facts and circumstances: how many more Guyanese are engaging in below the radar, petty theft, to make ends meet, to put a pot on the fire? 

How many citizens of this glorious Republic are rummaging in either private or public receptacles to see how lucky they could get, if they would hit the jackpot today?  Meaning, a slice of leftover bread or bake thrown out for the pickup people to haul away?

Hunger is transforming Guyanese into lawbreakers.  How many caught?  How many have the book of justice thrown at them, put away?  An injustice, from my perspective, when leaders live like lords of the manor, flitting from one banquet to another, guzzling the fat of the land.  Fat that first belongs to the Guyanese people, and not their abusers and deceivers.

The question I have is what is Guyana’s justice system to do with this copper cable thief?  Make him an example?  What is the PPP Govt going to do with him?  Probably, make him into a monster, then sell that as a Xmas toy to scare the children.

No Law, No Shame: The AG’s Wolf Is Wearing His Own Clothing

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

No Law, No Shame: The AG’s Wolf Is Wearing His Own Clothing

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar. September 2026

Attorney General Anil Nandlall wants Guyanese to believe that lawyers offering to represent MV Barima families are the threat in this story. He called them reckless. He called them foolish. He said they were “soliciting and touting” and committing criminal offences. He warned grieving families that free legal advice is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

We have read the Legal Practitioners Act. We have read the case law. And we have read the record of what the Attorney General himself did the last time Guyana buried children after a disaster involving state responsibility. On both the law and the history, Mr. Nandlall has this precisely backward.

The Law He’s Invoking Doesn’t Say What He Needs It to Say

Touting is a real offence in Guyana, and it has been since 1931. But the Legal Practitioners Act defines a tout narrowly: a person who is paid, by a lawyer or on a lawyer’s behalf, to go out and drum up clients for that lawyer. It is a runner’s offence — the person hanging around the courthouse steering business toward an attorney for a fee. It was written for that specific abuse, and it has produced exactly one prosecution in Guyana’s history. The Court of Appeal threw that conviction out in 1971, on the finding that the “legal business” being touted for wasn’t even genuine. Nothing has been successfully prosecuted under this provision in the fifty-five years since.

Separately, the Act restricts attorneys from soliciting retainers directly and forbids advertising legal services. That is a different provision, aimed at a different problem: professional-conduct standards for practicing lawyers, enforced; when it is enforced at all — by the Guyana Bar Association, not by ministerial broadcast.

Neither provision touches what Mr. Nandlall is actually condemning. A qualified attorney offering to represent a grieving family, for free or for a share of an eventual award, is not a tout. It is not solicitation in the sense the Act criminalizes. It is a lawyer doing what lawyers are licensed to do. Contingency and percentage-fee arrangements are lawful, common, and unremarkable in jurisdictions around the world, including this one. If the Attorney General has a specific statute that makes this arrangement a criminal offence, he should cite the section and subsection on air, the way any lawyer defending a legal claim is expected to. He did not. He asserted criminality and moved on, confident that no one watching “Issues in the News” would ask him to show his work.

We are asking.

He Has Done This Before, and We Have the Court Record

Guyanese should not have to reconstruct this pattern from memory. It is documented, litigated, and still before the courts.

On May 21, 2023, a fire at the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory killed twenty children. On July 3, 2023 — forty-two days later; Attorney General Nandlall flew to Mahdia with a government team to meet the families. According to sworn allegations now part of an active High Court claim, the families were pressured to sign settlement agreements on the spot, without independent legal counsel, for five million dollars per child. Parents have alleged they were told, in substance, that if they didn’t sign, they might get more later through a lawsuit — or they might get nothing at all. Some signed under that pressure. The government appointed attorney who represented the state in that room, Keoma Griffith, now sits in Cabinet as Minister of Labour.

Those families are now three years into a High Court battle to have those signatures set aside. In June 2026, Chief Justice Navindra Singh found the case could not be resolved simply by looking at the agreements themselves — it required a full hearing on whether the people who signed even had the legal capacity to settle claims that, in law, belonged to the children’s estates. The Attorney General’s own applications to strike out the case were refused. As recently as September 2, 2026, Mr. Nandlall  now defending the state directly, represented alongside senior counsel — filed a defense denying any negligence at all.

That is the precedent Mr. Nandlall is inviting Barima families to trust. Not a hypothetical. A live case, with his own name on the pleadings, in which the allegation is that his ministry substituted speed and pressure for the independent legal advice these same families are now being warned away from

Compare the Two Offers on the Table

Set the two things Mr. Nandlall is denouncing side by side.

What the opposition-aligned lawyers are offering: independent counsel, engaged by the family’s own choice, compensated only if the family recovers something — meaning the lawyer’s incentive is aligned with getting the family the most they can, not the least. Nothing about this requires anyone to sign anything under time pressure. Nothing about it forecloses a family’s right to walk away.

What produced the documented Mahdia harm: a government minister meeting grieving parents forty-two days after their children died, without independent counsel present, with an agreement already drafted, urging signature the same day.

Mr. Nandlall’s own government has been careful, in both the Mahdia and the Barima cases, to insist repeatedly that what it offers is “not compensation” and carries “no admission of liability” — language written by lawyers, for lawyers, to protect the state’s legal position.

Families are entitled to have someone in the room whose only job is to protect theirs. That is not a wolf. That is the floor of what due process requires when the party sitting across the table from a grieving family is the same party that may ultimately be found responsible for their loss.

What We’re Actually Asking

We are not endorsing any specific lawyer, arrangement, or fee structure being offered to Barima families — we have no independent basis to vouch for any of them, and families should scrutinize any arrangement, government or private, before signing it. Independent legal advice is not immune from bad actors either.

But that is precisely why the Attorney General’s intervention is the wrong one. If Mr. Nandlall’s concern is genuinely for these families’ welfare, the honest step is to name the specific statute he says is being broken, refer any suspected violation to the Bar Association or the police for investigation in the ordinary way, and let families make their own choice about representation — free of a state broadcast telling them, before they’ve spoken to anyone, that the people offering to stand between them and the government are the ones to fear.

Guyana is a free society. Self-determination is not a courtesy the state extends to grieving families — it is their right. Families choosing their own lawyers, on their own terms, including a percentage-fee arrangement freely entered into, is lawful. It is standard practice in nearly every common-law jurisdiction on earth.

Mr. Nandlall knows this. What he is running from is not a legal question. It is Mahdia, and the fact that this time, families might have someone in the room whose only client is them.

We renew a demand we have made before, on separate grounds: with the Section 23 limitation clock already running under the Transport and Harbors Act, families need clear, independent legal guidance now, not later — and it should come from counsel who answer to them, not to the ministry that may end up a defendant.

— The Board

Guyana Is Not a Prize: The U.S.–China Contest Must Not Eclipse the Public Interest

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

Guyana Is Not a Prize: The U.S.–China Contest Must Not Eclipse the Public Interest

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September 2026

The increasingly public exchange between U.S. and Chinese representatives over Guyana should concern every Guyanese—not because the country must choose Beijing or Washington, but because both powers are plainly seeking influence in a rapidly changing, oil-rich state.

Guyana is entitled to investment, development assistance, technical support and commercial partnerships from China, the United States and every other country willing to engage on fair terms.

But no foreign partner—however generous its aid, impressive its construction portfolio, or forceful its diplomatic rhetoric—should be allowed to convert that engagement into undue influence over Guyana’s national decisions.

The central duty belongs to the Government of Guyana: protect the national interest through transparency, competitive procurement, competent supervision, enforceable contracts and a foreign-policy posture that does not confuse friendship with dependency.

This Is Now a Public Spat

The latest Chinese Embassy statement did not emerge in a vacuum. It followed a series of documented American interventions concerning Chinese activity in Guyana: public remarks by U.S. Ambassador Nicole Theriot that attracted a response from Chinese Ambassador Yang Yang; Congressman Gabe Evans’s letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio; and Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Juan Pablo Segura’s X post invoking Guyana’s airport project in criticism of Chinese state-led development.

These are not disconnected events. They represent a clear pattern: Washington is increasingly raising the issue of China’s commercial, infrastructural and strategic presence in Guyana.

The Chinese Embassy has responded by rejecting what it calls false claims, political manipulation and malicious smears against normal China–Guyana economic and trade cooperation. It has cited Chinese firms’ participation in national development, including work associated with the new Demerara River Bridge, six regional hospitals and the China–Guyana Friendship Joe Vieira Park.

There is merit in one central Chinese contention: Guyana is sovereign. It has the unquestionable right to work with China, the United States, India, Brazil, Europe, CARICOM partners and any other country or company prepared to operate lawfully and constructively here.

But sovereignty cannot mean immunity from scrutiny.

The Airport Cannot Be Wished Away

Segura’s reference to the Cheddi Jagan International Airport expansion may have been politically motivated. It may also have been selectively deployed as part of the United States’ wider campaign to question Chinese state-linked companies across the region.

Yet political motive does not automatically make a factual issue disappear.

The airport expansion has long been associated in public discussion with delays, escalating costs, alterations to the original scope and continuing questions over the execution and supervision of the project. Guyanese citizens are entitled to ask whether the state received value for money, whether contractual obligations were adequately enforced, whether all defects and deficiencies were remedied, and whether officials exercised the degree of oversight expected on a project of national importance.

That is not an attack on China. It is an insistence on accountability.

The issue is not that a Chinese company participated in the work. Guyana has every right to retain Chinese contractors, just as it has every right to retain American, Indian, European, Brazilian, Caribbean or local firms. The issue is whether contracts are awarded transparently; whether the terms are publicly known; whether costs, variations and extensions are fully explained; and whether the State pursues remedies when a contractor fails to meet its obligations.

A public project cannot be defended merely by reciting its strategic importance. Airports, roads, bridges and hospitals are not diplomatic trophies. They are national assets paid for by the Guyanese people, and the public has a right to know how those assets were procured, financed, supervised and delivered.

China’s Contribution Must Be Fairly Recognized

Objectivity requires Guyana to acknowledge the contribution Chinese companies and Chinese-supported projects have made to the country’s development.

China has become a significant participant in Guyana’s modernization. Its companies have been involved in infrastructure, construction, trade, equipment supply and other areas of the economy. The country has seen Chinese engagement in major public works, while Chinese businesses have also become a visible feature of commercial life.

It would be dishonest to pretend that every Chinese undertaking is inherently suspect, or that every Chinese company is incapable of performing valuable work. Such reasoning would be prejudicial, simplistic and contrary to Guyana’s own economic interests.

Guyana is a developing country with enormous infrastructure needs. Roads, bridges, drainage, hospitals, housing, ports, energy facilities and communications systems require capital, technology, skilled labor and timely execution. No sensible government should close the door to qualified Chinese companies simply because China is a strategic competitor of the United States.

Nor should Guyana be pressured into abandoning a relationship that has produced visible projects and long-standing cooperation

But appreciation is not a waiver of oversight. Chinese firms, especially where they are involved in major state projects or strategic infrastructure, must meet the same tests imposed on every other foreign participant: quality, cost discipline, contractual compliance, local benefit, environmental responsibility and transparency.

Washington Also Wants a Seat at the Table

The United States is not an uninterested observer in this matter. It is a major development partner of Guyana, with a history of assistance in areas including health, governance, security, disaster response, education and institutional capacity-building.

That assistance has value. It should be fairly acknowledged.

President Trump                  President Ali.

The United States has also become increasingly engaged with Guyana at a time when the country’s oil production, strategic location, energy potential and wider regional importance have elevated its profile. American interest is not irrational. Guyana matters more today than it did a decade ago.

But American concern about Chinese influence should not be mistaken for pure altruism.

Washington is jostling for a larger share of the opportunities opening up in Guyana: infrastructure contracts, engineering work, energy-related logistics, technology, security cooperation, private-sector investment and influence over how a strategically important state develops. That is what powerful countries do. They pursue their interests.

The issue is whether Guyana understands that reality and manages it intelligently.

America’s aid programs do not entitle American companies to Guyanese contracts. Nor do Chinese grants, construction projects or diplomatic support entitle Chinese companies to preferential treatment, political protection or a privileged place in Guyana’s strategic future.

Every firm must earn its place.

Berbice Raises Important Questions

The proposed deep-water harbor in Berbice offers an important example of why Guyanese must examine the practical consequences of great-power competition.

Chinese-linked interests were associated with earlier examination of a possible deep-water port or logistics facility in Berbice. The strategic appeal is obvious. A properly developed deep-water facility could have implications for petroleum logistics, industrial development, exports, shipping, manufacturing, regional connectivity and Guyana’s broader economic transformation.

Subsequently, U.S. engineering firm Bechtel became involved in feasibility and technical work connected to the proposed Berbice deep-water-port initiative.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that development. Bechtel is a major international engineering company. Guyana should be prepared to work with capable American firms, just as it works with capable firms from other countries. The Government should not reject quality expertise merely because it comes from the United States.

But the public is entitled to clarity.

What became of the prior Chinese feasibility work?                              Was it completed? What did it recommend?                                          Was it paid for by the State, a private entity or a foreign partner?          Is it available for public examination?                                                    What technical, financial, environmental or strategic considerations informed the movement toward Bechtel’s involvement?                    What precisely is Bechtel being paid to do?                                            Who finances the current work? What obligations, if any, could follow from it?

These are not hostile questions. They are the minimum questions of responsible public administration.

Guyana must ensure that strategic projects do not become bargaining chips in a contest between foreign powers. A deep-water port should not be awarded, designed, financed or reconfigured because it suits a geopolitical narrative in Washington or Beijing. It must proceed because it is economically sound, environmentally defensible, commercially viable and beneficial to Guyanese people over the long term.

The Risk Is Overconcentration

The problem is not foreign investment. Guyana needs foreign investment.The problem is overconcentration.

No country should become so dependent on one external power’s contractors, finance, equipment, technology, suppliers, spare parts, software, credit or political support that it loses the ability to negotiate firmly or act independently.

That concern applies to China, but it also applies to the United States and every other major external player.

Guyana should be wary of any arrangement in which a single country becomes dominant across multiple strategic sectors at once: roads, bridges, ports, airports, telecommunications, energy infrastructure, security systems, digital networks, medical facilities, extractive industries and large-scale logistics.

Dependence does not always announce itself with a flag. It can arrive through repeated sole-source arrangements, opaque financing, bundled contracts, proprietary technology, maintenance agreements, foreign labour dependence, undisclosed subcontractors and long-term operating arrangements that leave the State unable to act without external approval or expertise.

A country rich in oil revenue but poor in institutional safeguards can still surrender enormous leverage.

That must not happen in Guyana.

Government Must Show Its Work

The Government of Guyana cannot simply invoke sovereignty when challenged by foreign governments. Sovereignty must be demonstrated through systems that protect the public.

The country needs a clear, public and enforceable framework for major infrastructure and strategic investments.

That framework should include:

♦ Publication of all major state contracts, including original values, variations, extensions, completion dates and final costs.

♦ Disclosure of financing terms, guarantees, repayment obligations and any state exposure associated with large projects.

♦ Independent technical audits of major infrastructure works before final acceptance and payment.

♦ Public reporting on defects, remedial works, performance bonds, liquidated damages and penalties imposed or waived.

♦ Transparent procurement records showing how contractors were selected and what competing bids, where applicable, were considered.

♦ Strong local-content rules requiring meaningful employment, training, procurement and skills transfer for Guyanese workers and businesses.

♦  A national assessment of foreign participation in critical infrastructure and strategic sectors.

♦ Security and resilience reviews where foreign companies participate in airports, ports, telecommunications, data systems, energy facilities, hospitals and other sensitive national assets.

♦ Clear beneficial-ownership disclosure so Guyanese know who ultimately controls the companies receiving public contracts.

If Government believes its processes are sound, publication and scrutiny should not be feared.

If contracts are properly awarded, works competently supervised and failures appropriately sanctioned, transparency will strengthen Guyana’s hand against both foreign criticism and domestic doubt.

No One Should Dictate to Guyana

The Chinese Embassy is correct on one fundamental point: Guyana and other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean should be free to determine their development partners without outside interference.

But this principle must apply in full.

China must not expect Guyana to silence legitimate scrutiny of Chinese companies. The United States must not expect Guyana to accept a “backyard” mentality, however delicately it may be expressed. Neither power should presume that Guyana’s resources, infrastructure program or diplomatic posture are available for capture.

Guyana must reject the false choice.

It does not have to become anti-China to demand transparency from Chinese contractors. It does not have to become anti-American to reject Washington’s attempts to frame Guyana primarily through the lens of strategic rivalry.

The proper position is pro-Guyana.

A pro-Guyana policy welcomes development partnerships, encourages genuine competition, rewards competence, exposes waste, punishes non-performance, protects strategic assets and insists that all foreign partners deal with this country as an equal.

The Test Ahead

Guyana is entering an era in which foreign governments, multinational companies, contractors, financiers and geopolitical strategists will compete intensely for access and influence.

The danger is not that outside powers have interests. They always will.

The danger is that Guyana’s leaders may be flattered, pressured or divided into accepting arrangements that serve external agendas more reliably than they serve the Guyanese people.

The current public spat should therefore be treated as a warning, not a spectacle.

China should be judged by the quality, cost, transparency and consequences of its engagement. The United States should be judged not only by its warnings about China, but by the seriousness, fairness and competitiveness of what it offers Guyana. And the Government of Guyana must be judged by whether it is willing to put every major partnership under the light of public scrutiny.

Guyana does not need permission from Washington to work with China. It does not need permission from Beijing to work with America. But it does need leaders with the resolve to ensure that, in the contest for Guyana’s future, Guyana itself does not lose.

 

The Architecture Before the Amendment

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA 

The Architecture Before the Amendment

PART I OF A TWO-PART SERIES

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

What Forty Years of Term-Limit Evasion Teaches Guyana About the Number 44

 A Washington advocacy group— Freedom House newest accounting of global democratic backsliding contains a finding that should unsettle anyone tracking Guyana’s National Assembly arithmetic: in at least thirty-six countries, sitting heads of state have altered term-limit law or benefited directly from someone else altering it. Not one of those thirty-six woke up an autocrat. Each became one through a sequence — and the sequence, almost without exception, begins in the legislature, not the constitution.

Presidents are increasingly circumventing term-limit restrictions. In at least 36 countries worldwide, current heads of state have altered the rules or benefited from such changes to remain in power.

That distinction is the subject of this piece. Guyana is not among Freedom House’s thirty-six. No government minister has proposed touching Article 90’s two-term presidential limit, and this Board makes no claim that one intends to. What this op-ed does claim, and will document here, is that the precondition for every rewrite Freedom House catalogued — a legislative supermajority assembled by whatever means available — is the same precondition now being assembled in Guyana’s own Assembly, seat by defected seat. Part II of this series will apply that arithmetic directly. Part I exists to prove, with named precedent, that the arithmetic matters at all.

THE SEQUENCE, NOT THE SYMPTOM

It is tempting to read term-limit evasion as a single dramatic act; a referendum, a coup, a strongman’s signature. Freedom House’s cases show the opposite.

The removal of a term limit is almost always the last step in a longer process of legislative capture, and by the time it happens, it is close to a formality.

Cameroon is the cleanest illustration. Paul Biya’s 1996 constitution gave him two terms. He did not challenge that limit directly. Instead, in 2008, his National Assembly; not Biya himself — passed the constitutional amendment that cleared his path to a third term and, eventually, a seventh. The vote came first. The presidency-for-life came after, almost as an afterthought once the votes existed to deliver it. Biya is now ninety-three and has governed Cameroon for over four decades under a system his own legislature, not the streets or the courts, made possible.

El Salvador offers a faster version of the same sequence. President Nayib Bukele did not need a referendum or a coup. He needed a legislature he controlled outright. Once his party held that supermajority, the amendment — extending terms from five to six years and abolishing limits altogether passed as legislative business, not national crisis. The Assembly vote was the event. Everything after was administration.

Togo went further still, and its case is the most structurally relevant one here. Rather than amend a presidential term limit, Togo’s National Assembly rewrote the constitution in 2024 to abolish the presidential system itself, replacing it with a parliamentary one. President Faure Gnassingbé; already twenty years in power, having inherited the office from his father — simply became “President of the Council of Ministers,” an unelected post created by the same legislative majority that had kept his family in power, carrying no term limit at all. No one voted to extend Gnassingbé’s presidency. The legislature that already answered to him voted to make the presidency, and its limits, irrelevant.

Three countries. Three different final instruments. One identical precondition: control of the chamber that writes the rules.

WHAT THE CHAMBER REQUIRES

Freedom House’s report is explicit that democratic institutions with genuine checks and balances tend to arrest this sequence before it completes — Senegal’s Constitutional Council blocking Macky Sall’s election delay in 2024, Indonesia’s coalition brokers denying Joko Widodo a third-term run, are cited as the cases where the mechanism was tried and failed. What separated those failures from Cameroon, El Salvador, and Togo’s successes was not public sentiment, which opposed the incumbent in all five cases. It was arithmetic. Sall and Widodo did not command the legislative numbers to force the question past institutions built to stop them. Biya, Bukele, and Gnassingbé did.

This is the mechanism this analyst has been tracking under a different name. In “The Carrot and the Count,” published on these pages, this publication documented a pattern of PPP-C absorption of opposition-aligned figures — James Bond, Shurwayne Holder, Daniel Seeram, Samuel Sandy, Wayne Maison, among others  and argued that the pattern functions as coordinated entrenchment strategy rather than isolated career moves. The government’s coalition currently holds 36 of the National Assembly’s 65 seats.

Guyana’s constitutional amendment threshold is a two-thirds majority: 44 seats. The distance between 36 and 44 is not abstract. It is eight defections, or some combination of defection and coalition, away from being closed.

Guyana’s president already operates under a two-term limit written into Article 90 after the 2000 constitutional reforms. That limit stands. This publication is not suggesting otherwise, and readers should treat with skepticism anyone on either side of the aisle — who claims a rule change is imminent. It is not, on present evidence.

What Freedom House’s cross-country record establishes is something more precise and, this writer would argue, more urgent to name early: nowhere in the thirty-six-country dataset did the rule change arrive before the votes to pass it existed. The votes came first, accumulated gradually, often over years, often through mechanisms — defection, patronage, coalition absorption  that looked unremarkable in isolation and were reported, where they were reported at all, as routine political horse-trading rather than as the architecture of anything. Cameroon’s amendment took twelve years of legislative consolidation to arrive at its 2008 vote. Togo’s took nearly two decades. The pattern this analyst has documented in Guyana’s Assembly did not begin this year, and the number 44 did not appear from nowhere — it is the same number every one of these cases eventually had to reach, under a different flag, in a different hemisphere, for the same structural reason.

WHY THIS IS PUBLISHED NOW, NOT LATER

There is an argument for waiting — for writing this piece only if and when a constitutional amendment is actually tabled, when the case is undeniable and the reporting uncontestable. This Board rejects that argument on the same grounds Freedom House’s own report implicitly makes: by the time the amendment is tabled in countries where this sequence completes, the votes to pass it are already secured, and the public conversation that might have mattered is already over. Cameroon’s National Assembly vote in 2008 was not a surprise to anyone counting seats in 2006. Togo’s 2024 constitution was not a surprise to anyone who had watched Gnassingbé’s coalition consolidate through the 2010s. The utility of naming a mechanism is entirely in naming it before it completes, not after.

Part II of this series will set Guyana’s arithmetic against this comparative record directly — the 2031 election timeline, the defection pattern by name and date, and what a closed eight-seat gap would actually permit under Guyana’s own constitutional amendment procedure.

This piece has been about establishing that the concern is not speculative alarmism. It is a documented global pattern, with a name, a sequence, and thirty-six governments’ worth of precedent — and Guyana’s National Assembly is currently closer to the threshold that pattern requires than it was a year ago.

— The Board

This report looks solely at presidential and semipresidential systems. While parliamentary systems generally lack term-limit requirements for the prime minister, parliamentary democracies feature many ways to hold the office to account. For example, a prime minister who is indirectly elected by a directly elected legislature is only able to stay in office as long as they maintain lawmakers’ confidence. If they lose popularity lawmakers can vote to replace them.

 

Source: Cathryn Grothe and Grady Vaughan, “Overstaying Their Welcome: The Problem of Presidential Term Limit Evasion,” Freedom House.

Democracy for Sale?

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Democracy for Sale?

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

The United States is preparing to use the Organization of American States to isolate Nicaragua after Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo pushed through constitutional changes designed to extinguish what remained of democratic competition in the country. The changes reportedly ban most political opposition, target parties with foreign funding, and extend the presidential term from 6 to 7 years—renewable, of course.

Washington’s condemnation is justified. Ortega’s regime has earned no presumption of good faith.

Since the 2018 protests, Nicaragua has endured a brutal and sustained campaign of political repression: demonstrators killed, opponents imprisoned, journalists silenced, civic groups dismantled, universities shuttered, religious institutions harassed, and hundreds of citizens forced into exile or stripped of nationality.

Elections have been hollowed out. Independent public life has been placed under siege. The state increasingly serves not the Nicaraguan people but the political survival of one ruling family

.There is no credible democratic defense of this record. Ortega and Murillo are not protecting a revolution from foreign sabotage; they are protecting their hold on power from the judgment of their own people.

But the United States cannot credibly present itself as the uncompromising guardian of democratic principle while treating democracy as a slogan in Managua and a bargaining chip in Caracas.

That is the central indictment.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Ortega and Murillo are waging a “war on democracy” that threatens the stability and prosperity of the hemisphere. True enough. But where does that standard go when Washington pursues enormous commercial arrangements with Venezuela’s ruling apparatus, represented by Delcy Rodríguez?

Rosario Murillo and Daniel Ortega

Rodríguez is not the product of a transparent, competitive, internationally credible electoral mandate. She did not rise to authority through a free contest in which Venezuelans had an unfettered ability to organize, campaign, vote, and see their votes respected. Yet the United States has demonstrated its willingness to conduct high-stakes energy and economic business with the Venezuelan state when oil markets, migration pressures, geopolitical calculations, or corporate interests dictate it.

This is not a demand that the United States refuse all contact with Caracas. Diplomacy is not a purity test. Governments sometimes must negotiate with adversaries and authoritarian governments. They do so to secure the release of prisoners, protect citizens, reduce migration pressures, prevent armed conflict, stabilize energy markets, or advance humanitarian access.

The problem is not diplomacy. The problem is hypocrisy dressed as principle.

If Washington wishes to deal with Venezuela pragmatically, it should say so plainly. It should acknowledge that national interest is influencing its choices. It should not then mount a moral crusade against Nicaragua as though the United States applies one consistent rule across the hemisphere: democratic legitimacy for all, or preferential treatment for none.

The distinction becomes even more glaring because the same tools used to justify pressure on Nicaragua—political exclusion, institutional capture, suppression of dissent, and the erosion of electoral legitimacy—are the very concerns that have long defined the Venezuelan crisis. The United States cannot insist that Ortega’s manipulation of institutions makes him untouchable while accepting arrangements with officials empowered by a political system Washington itself has repeatedly described as authoritarian and illegitimate.

That is not principled statecraft. It is selective enforcement.

And selective enforcement has consequences. It gives Ortega the propaganda he needs. It allows Managua to dismiss legitimate criticism as another exercise in US imperial preference. It reinforces the claim—frequently made by authoritarian governments—that Washington’s concern for rights and elections evaporates whenever oil, security cooperation, migration control, or commercial access is on the table.

Ortega’s arguments may be cynical, but US inconsistency makes them easier to sell.

The OAS Test

The OAS now faces its own credibility test.

Nicaragua formally withdrew from the organization, a process completed in 2023 after years of conflict over the regime’s human rights record. That means the OAS has limited direct leverage over Managua. It cannot simply compel democratic reform through a resolution or restore political rights through condemnation alone.

But it can still matter.

The organization can create a clear hemispheric record of Nicaragua’s democratic collapse. It can coordinate diplomatic pressure. It can call on member states to limit normal political engagement with the Ortega-Murillo government. It can support independent documentation of abuses, amplify the voices of exiled Nicaraguans, defend political prisoners and their families, and press for the restoration of citizenship and civil rights to those arbitrarily stripped of both.

Most importantly, it can refuse to normalize the destruction of an entire political system.

Yet the OAS must avoid becoming merely a stage on which Washington performs outrage against an adversary it has already chosen to punish. If the body is to retain authority, its members must make clear that their concern is not obedience to the United States. Their concern must be the basic democratic rights of Nicaraguans: the right to organize, speak, worship, report, protest, compete for office, and remove a government peacefully.

That standard cannot be negotiable.

 A Hemispheric Double Standard

The United States has enormous influence in the Americas. With that influence comes a choice.

It can support democracy consistently, even when doing so complicates energy deals, migration agreements, security arrangements, and corporate ambitions. Or it can continue applying democratic standards selectively—harshly against governments deemed hostile, flexibly against governments deemed useful.

The second path may yield short-term transactions. It will not create long-term credibility.

A foreign policy based exclusively on moral posturing is naïve. A foreign policy based exclusively on commercial and strategic expediency is corrosive. Responsible statecraft requires both interests and values—but it also requires honesty when the two collide.

Washington should condemn Ortega without qualification. It should press Nicaragua’s government to restore political pluralism, free political prisoners, halt persecution of journalists and civic organizations, and permit genuinely competitive elections. It should support Nicaraguan civil society, refugees, and exiles without imposing suffering on ordinary citizens already trapped under an increasingly authoritarian state.

But it should also stop pretending that democracy is an inviolable principle when confronting Ortega and an optional consideration when making billion-dollar arrangements with Venezuela’s unelected governing class.

The people of Nicaragua deserve more than rhetorical solidarity. They deserve coherent action.

And the hemisphere deserves something better than a democracy doctrine that changes according to who controls the oil, who controls the migration routes, and who is useful to Washington at a given moment.

The United States can be the leader of a principled democratic coalition—or it can be the manager of a transactional sphere of influence. It cannot convincingly be both.

Energy Is Economics — Until the Bill Comes Due in Linden

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Energy Is Economics — Until the Bill Comes Due in Linden

OPINION BY: Staff Writer— September 2026

The Chief Investment Officer’s Caribbean Energy Week pitch treats the equation as a matter of national competitiveness. Region Ten has been living the same equation as a matter of survival, and no one in government has offered it the same theory of value.

Peter Ramsaroop stood before Caribbean Energy Week and delivered a formula clean enough to fit on a slide: “Energy is economics.” The cost, reliability and availability of power, he said, determine what a nation can produce, what it can export, and how competitive it becomes. He is not wrong. It is, in fact, one of the more honest sentences to come out of a Guyanese government platform this year. The trouble is that Mr. Ramsaroop delivered it as an investment thesis for 2027, aimed at capital, LNG buyers and regional integration planners — while the government he speaks for has spent 2026 failing to apply that same formula to a town two hours down the highway.

If energy is economics for a refinery, a data centre or a manufacturing cluster courted at a Marriott ballroom, it is economics for a Linden household running a freezer off a generator during rolling blackouts. It is economics for the shop that cannot keep product cold, the clinic that cannot guarantee refrigerated medicine, the student doing homework by phone-light. The Chief Investment Officer’s framework does not stop being true at the Soesdyke-Linden Highway. It simply stops being applied there.

THE NUMBER THE SLIDE DECK SKIPS

This newsroom has already put the arithmetic on the record. At roughly 900,000 barrels a day and a government take of 39.8 percent post-cost-recovery, Guyana’s oil revenue runs near $26.9 million a day — better than $1.1 million an hour. Linden’s power shortfall, by GPL’s own numbers, is under 1 megawatt against a town of roughly 40,000 people. This is not a resource-constrained state pleading capacity limits.

This is a treasury collecting over a million dollars an hour that could not, on its own initiative, close a sub-megawatt gap; until a private mining company, Bosai, stepped in with generators the government itself is supposed to regulate.

A government does not get to lecture the region on the economics of energy while outsourcing its own energy obligations to the companies it regulates.

That is not partnership. That is abdication dressed up afterward as ceremony — and it was this newsroom’s own framing when GPL, Bosai and Guyana Manganese Inc. signed their generator donation in August. The same logic applies here with more force, because Mr. Ramsaroop’s speech makes the omission harder to excuse. He has now put the state’s own theory of energy value on paper. He has conceded, on the government’s behalf, that energy access is the precondition for competitiveness, for participation, for wealth creation.

Region Ten is entitled to ask why that precondition has been denied to it for years while GPL’s own solar pipeline for the area stretches out toward 2028.

WHOSE COMPETITIVENESS, EXACTLY?

Read closely, the Caribbean Energy Week pitch is addressed to a very specific audience: policymakers, investors, energy leaders, industry stakeholders. It promises that lower energy costs will make “industries that were previously difficult to establish or expand” commercially viable — manufacturing, agro-processing, logistics, tourism. Every one of those sectors requires ordinary citizens as workers, suppliers and consumers before it requires foreign capital. A poultry cluster, a bean storage facility, a hinterland tourism circuit; all recent government initiatives this news media  has tracked ; depend on the same reliable power the state cannot yet guarantee its own regions.

You cannot build the industries of the energy dividend on top of a population still waiting for the energy.

 

So we ask it plainly, in the prosecutorial terms this policy invites: Is “energy is economics” a governing philosophy, or is it a marketing line reserved for foreign delegations? If the formula is real, does it apply to the citizen of Linden with the same weight it applies to the LNG investor being courted for July 2027? If the government believes, as it now says it does, that energy determines competitiveness, participation and wealth — what is its account of the years Linden spent without that competitiveness, that participation, that wealth, while the state collected record hydrocarbon revenue in the interim?

Mr. Ramsaroop closed his remarks by framing the real question as” no longer how much energy Guyana can produce, but what can be built because of it, and how ordinary people participate in the wealth it creates?” This publication agrees with the question. It simply notes that Linden has been asking it for longer, and has yet to receive an answer that did not arrive by way of a mining company’s donated generators.

Energy is economics. The government has now said so itself. It owes the country an explanation for why that principle governs its pitch to investors and not its obligations to its own citizens.

— THE BOARD

A Minister Cannot Deny a By-Law and Revoke It on the Same Day

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

A Minister Cannot Deny a By-Law and Revoke It on the Same Day

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

The revocation of the Linden Town Council’s 2016 toll by-laws is not merely a dispute over a toll point at Kara Kara. It raises grave questions of ministerial consistency, statutory authority and respect for the autonomy of elected local-government institutions.

 On September 1, 2026, the Minister of Local Government and Regional Development wrote to Linden Town Clerk Lennox Gasper asserting that the Ministry had “not authorized the imposition of or collection of any toll-charges at Kara Kara Public Road or anywhere else in Linden.” More strikingly, the letter declared that “no By-law or Order was issued and published” by a Minister responsible for Local Government to authorize such collection.

Yet, on that same date, the Official Gazette carried Order No. 172 of 2026, signed by the same Minister. The Order expressly revoked the Linden Town Council (Toll) By-Laws 2016—By-Laws No. 1 of 2016—which had been published in the Official Gazette on August 20, 2016.

That contradiction demands an answer.

If no by-law existed, as the Minister’s letter represented, what precisely was she revoking? A non-existent law cannot be annulled. A Minister does not issue a formal revocation order, publish it in the Official Gazette, and invoke statutory provisions to extinguish something that never existed.

The Minister’s own Order acknowledges what her letter denied: that there was a Linden Town Council toll by-law, that it was made in 2016, and that it had been published in the Official Gazette. The 2016 instrument was not an informal arrangement or a roadside invention. It imposed tolls for road use, prescribed payment arrangements, identified the classes of vehicles liable to pay, and carried the record that it was made by the Linden Town Council and approved by the responsible Minister before gazetting.

The Schedule to those by-laws prescribed charges for 18 categories of vehicles, ranging from G$2,000 to G$7,000. This was plainly a legislative scheme—not an unauthorized collection exercise operating outside the law.

The issue is therefore not whether a by-law existed. The documentary evidence makes that question impossible to evade. The real issue is whether the Minister possessed lawful authority to revoke an approved and gazetted municipal by-law in the manner she chose.

Order No. 172 invokes sections 304 and 305 of the Municipal and District Councils Act, Cap. 28:01. Those provisions are associated with the authority of councils to make by-laws and the process by which proposed by-laws are submitted for ministerial consideration and approval.

But a power to approve, amend or reject a proposed by-law is not automatically a power to later repeal or revoke a by-law after it has received approval, been gazetted and taken effect as subsidiary legislation

That distinction lies at the heart of lawful government. Public office-holders do not possess authority merely because they desire a particular result. They must identify the legal source of their power. Where Parliament has granted the Minister a power to approve a proposed by-law, it does not necessarily follow that Parliament also granted an unrestricted power to erase an existing by-law by ministerial decree.

The Minister may believe that the Linden toll was undesirable, burdensome, improperly applied, or inconsistent with national policy. Those are matters for public debate and, where necessary, lawful intervention. But disagreement with a local council’s policy is not itself a legal power of revocation.

The Act reportedly contains mechanisms through which ministerial intervention may occur where a council is in default, exceeds its authority, neglects statutory obligations or acts improperly. Such safeguards matter because they require government to act through the procedures Parliament established, rather than by simply substituting ministerial preference for the authority of elected local organs.

This is particularly serious because the Minister is an Attorney-at-Law and an officer of the court. That professional status carries an enhanced duty to precision, candour and fidelity to the law. The public is entitled to expect that a lawyer serving as a Minister will distinguish between what is politically expedient and what is legally authorised; between a by-law whose validity is disputed and one said not to exist at all; and between a statutory power expressly granted and one simply assumed.

It is not enough to say that the Government wishes the tolls to stop. Nor is it enough to cite statutory sections without demonstrating that they confer the exact power being exercised. The Minister’s letter and her Gazette Order must be read together. One says no relevant by-law or order was issued and published. The other revokes a named by-law that it admits was published in the Official Gazette in 2016.

That is not a trivial inconsistency. It goes to the credibility of the Government’s stated legal position and to the validity of the action taken against the Linden Town Council.

Local democratic organs are not departments of a Ministry to be managed at ministerial whim. They are elected statutory bodies with defined responsibilities, including responsibilities relating to municipal administration, revenue and the welfare of their communities. Their autonomy has meaning only if their lawful acts cannot be undone without clear authority, due process and respect for the limits imposed by Parliament.

The Linden toll controversy must therefore be tested not by political convenience, but by law. The Government should identify, plainly and precisely, the statutory provision that authorised the revocation of the 2016 by-laws. Until it does, Order No. 172 will remain open to the compelling question it has created for itself:

If the 2016 by-laws did not exist, why did the Minister find it necessary to revoke them?

CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR THE 2106 GAZETTED BY-LAWS THAT THE MINISTER SAID DIDNT EXIST BUT SHE SUBSEQUENTLY REVOKED ⇒

  

 

GUYANA DOES NOT NEED TO COUNT MIGRANTS. IT NEEDS TO ASK WHAT THEY CAN BUILD.

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  592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY INJOURNALISM◊GUYANA

GUYANA DOES NOT NEED TO COUNT MIGRANTS. IT NEEDS TO ASK WHAT THEY CAN BUILD.

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

A Caribbean engineer’s “Friction Economy” theory names the question Guyana has never asked about its migrant workforce — not who authorized them, but what they could build if anyone looked

A Jamaican born engineer living in Brazil recently gave the Business Guardian an economic vocabulary Guyana badly needs and does not have. Kimroy Bailey, with his wife Sherika Trott Bailey, has spent the last six years  across South Korea, Brazil, and now a still-unrealized interest in Trinidad and Tobago, developing what they call the Trott Bailey Friction Economy Theory: the idea that a country can be sitting on capability, need, and resources simultaneously, and still generate nothing, because nothing connects them.

Kimroy and Sherika Trott Bailey

Bailey’s illustration is deliberately small. A builder needs a tool. A welder needs a workspace. Between them, both problems are solvable. But if neither has capital, the transaction defaults to a market that doesn’t exist, and both needs go unmet, not because the value isn’t there, but because nothing in the system is designed to notice it.

Guyana should sit with that example longer than a headline allows, because it describes, almost exactly, the shape of the country’s migrant labor problem — a problem this paper has been documenting piece by piece for over a year, and one Guyana has no functioning framework to answer.

THE GAP HAS A PAPER TRAIL

Start with what is not disputed. In February 2024, Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs authorized a company called Sigma Engineers Ltd. Inc. to recruit up to 500 healthcare workers from Bangladesh, at Sigma’s own request. Government later confirmed zero recruits were ever brought in under that authorization. The shortages it was meant to address were filled instead by Cuban medical personnel — an entirely separate migration channel, with its own unresolved allegations of labor exploitation that this paper has tracked independently.

Meanwhile, the same Sigma entity was executing a very different kind of contract: multi-billion-dollar water treatment infrastructure work for Guyana Water Inc., beginning just seven days after its Guyana incorporation in October 2022. Photographic evidence obtained by this paper — including GWI’s own published Facebook post — shows work crews at these plant sites that are visibly, overwhelmingly South Asian, standing beside a caption claiming the team comprised “several Guyanese staff.” No Guyanese face is identifiable in the image GWI chose to publish alongside that claim.

Guyana’s own laws require labor market testing before a foreign worker is hired: an employer must show the position could not be filled locally. The Local Content Act names engineering and technical services explicitly among the sectors covered by local-hiring obligations. Whether that testing was done for this workforce, whether it was done at all — is not publicly documented anywhere. Nobody has been made to show their work.

This is not a story about Sigma’s guilt or innocence in a separate procurement scandal, which is its own matter and still unfolding.

It is a story about a state that has built an elaborate machinery for awarding contracts and no comparable machinery for accounting for the labor those contracts pull into the country, where it comes from, what it can do beyond the single task it was imported for, or what it leaves behind when the contract ends

REGISTRATION IS NOT THE SAME QUESTION AS CAPABILITY

Bailey’s caution to Trinidad applies with equal force here: a government’s instinct, faced with a migrant population it does not understand, is to register it – for identity and security reasons that are genuinely legitimate. But registration answers only who is here. It says nothing about what they can do, and worse, when skills-mapping does happen, it is almost always aimed at slotting migrants into existing vacancies.

As Bailey put it, if a Guyanese and a migrant are both qualified for one job, mapping both of their abilities doesn’t create a second position.      Someone still loses, and the country stays locked inside the same “local versus migrant” argument, just with better paperwork.

That argument is precisely where Guyana’s migrant labor discourse has been stuck, a discourse of suspicion in one direction (are jobs being taken) and pretext in the other (is a healthcare authorization actually cover for engineering labor), with almost no public attention paid to what either group of workers, Guyanese or migrant, is actually capable of beyond the narrow occupational box a work permit or an NPTAB bid document assigns them.

WHAT THE FRICTION ECONOMY WOULD ASK INSTEAD

Bailey’s reframe is not naive about capital — he is explicit that machinery, land, and credit still matter, and that money should not be pretended out of the picture. But he insists money should not be the only mechanism a country has for connecting a need to a solution that already exists nearby.

Applied to Guyana’s Bangladeshi and Cuban migrant populations, that reframe produces sharper questions than any Ministry of Foreign Affairs authorization letter has yet asked. Cuban medical personnel brought in to cover healthcare shortages – do they carry skills beyond the specific clinical role they were slotted into, that Guyana’s own strained health system could use if anyone had asked? A South Asian workforce imported for water-treatment plant construction, once the plants are commissioned and the contract ends, does that capability simply leave the country, or could it be connected to Guyana’s next infrastructure need, the next repair, the next skills gap in a sector far from GWI? Nobody has asked, because nobody has built a system designed to notice the answer.

Guyana does not currently have Bailey’s Pacorips — the AI capability-mapping system he has piloted informally in Brazil, matching people, needs, and idle resources without reducing anyone to one official occupation. It does not need to import his software to import his discipline. What Guyana lacks is not technology. It is the prior decision to ask the question at all: not is this person authorized to be here, and not did this company follow the rules that got them here, but what can these people, together with the Guyanese working alongside or instead of them, build that does not currently exist.

THE PIE QUESTION

Bailey’s closing formulation is the one worth sitting with longest: a country cannot build lasting prosperity by endlessly relitigating who gets the remaining slice of a fixed pie. Guyana’s public conversation about migrant labour — Cuban, Bangladeshi, Venezuelan, has been almost entirely a pie-slicing conversation: who authorized this, who benefited, who was cut out, who lied about when the first contract was signed. Those questions matter, and this paper will keep asking them, because accountability for the how is not optional.

But Bailey’s theory names the question sitting underneath all of it, one Guyana has not asked even once in public: what has arrived in this country, alongside the thin paper trail of authorization letters and NPTAB awards, that nobody has yet tried to use.

— The Board