Two Ceremonies, One River

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ATHE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

 Two Ceremonies, One River

On praise, pillars, and a country still counting its dead

EDITORIAL— August, 2026

Two weeks ago, thirty-eight Guyanese families were still waiting for a body to bury. Two weeks ago, a ferry built in 1939 — a vessel older than Guyanese independence itself — lay capsized off the Essequibo Coast with an unknown number of the missing still inside it.

This week, the President of the Republic marked Emancipation Day by invoking the Village Movement, by speaking of ancestors who “fixed their gaze steadily upon the future,” and by declaring that the pillars our forebears built are the pillars upon which modern Guyana now stands.

The same week, the state-owned Guyana Chronicle ran the International Monetary Fund’s Article IV assessment as vindication: prudent fiscal policy, the lowest debt-distress risk in the hemisphere, a Natural Resource Fund swelling with oil wealth. Other government-aligned outlets went further, framing the consultation as confirmation that Guyana is, full stop, the fastest-growing economy on Earth.

Both stories are true. That is precisely the problem.

WHAT THE FUND ACTUALLY SAID

The IMF’s concluding statement is not a fabrication, and this publication has no interest in pretending otherwise.

Guyana’s fiscal deficit is expected to widen in 2026 on account of social transfers and electricity subsidies, with an improvement projected for 2027 as the Natural Resource Fund’s built-in withdrawal lag moderates spending. The Fund did credit the country with a rapid accumulation of NRF balances and one of the lowest debt-to-GDP ratios in the hemisphere. It did note progress on digital procurement, cost-oil audit resolution through arbitration, and a comprehensive approach to anti-money-laundering compliance tied to the 2024 Caribbean Financial Action Task Force evaluation.

None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute — what this Board insists on stating plainly — is the use to which that assessment has been put by state and state-aligned media.

An Article IV consultation is a technical exercise in macro-fiscal surveillance. It is not, and was never intended to be, a verdict on whether oil wealth is reaching the people the Constitution says it belongs to.

Reporting it as the latter is not journalism. It is laundering a narrow finding into a broad absolution.

THE FASTEST-GROWING ECONOMY, MEASURED FROM WHERE

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Juan Pablo Spinetto spent time on the ground in Georgetown around Guyana’s independence anniversary — including, by his own account, standing before the Golden Arrowhead at midnight at a ceremony he later described in blunt terms as an embarrassment rather than a triumph.

His subsequent column measured Guyana against the Natural Resource Charter, a set of governance benchmarks developed in 2010 for exactly this situation: a small state suddenly rich, and at risk of squandering it the way so many petro-states have before.                                              Guyana meets four of those benchmarks outright, including accountable public decision-making and revenue smoothing. It only partially meets others — public spending efficiency, economic diversification, an inclusive national strategy.

Spinetto’s most damning finding was not a number. It was an absence of one.

He wrote plainly that positive economic indicators abound — vehicle sales, a booming mortgage market — while poverty data remains unreliable and difficult to access. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a structural description of how a government chooses what to measure and what to leave dark.

This Board has tried to fill that dark space honestly, because the alternative — letting a single contested figure become a talking point in either direction — serves no one. The World Bank’s most recent published estimate puts Guyana’s poverty rate at 48.4 percent, but that number rests on a 2019 baseline; seven years and a full oil boom later, no comprehensive updated household survey has been published.

The Inter-American Development Bank’s cross-country documentation cites a considerably higher 58 percent, split between 32 percent in extreme poverty and 26 percent in moderate poverty — a figure that has itself become a subject of domestic argument precisely because no current government household survey exists to settle it.

We do not resolve that dispute here. We note it, because the eleven-point gap between two credible multilateral estimates is not a footnote. It is the story. A government cannot claim to be managing oil wealth transparently while the most basic measure of who that wealth has and has not reached is seven years stale.

 THE VESSEL BENEATH THE NUMBERS

It is against that backdrop that this news-media  places the Emancipation Day address beside the ferry. The President spoke of ancestors who built villages as “crucibles of culture” and “seedbeds of nationhood,” who farmed and mined and built enterprises so that later generations might “stand taller, reach further, and dream broader.”

These are not empty words, and this Board will not pretend the history behind them is anything other than real. The Village Movement was a genuine act of collective self-determination by a formerly enslaved people with almost nothing, and it deserves the honor the President gave it.

But the MV Barima sailed under the same government being praised this week for prudent fiscal stewardship. It sailed in 2026 as a 1939-built vessel, older than the nation’s independence, carrying by the government’s own revised count some 179 people against a manifest that listed 133 — a discrepancy that has never been adequately explained. Seventy-seven people are confirmed dead. More than two dozen remain unaccounted for, weeks later. Families in Charity waited by the shore for news of children who were never found.

A Commission of Inquiry now sits, appointed unilaterally, with its own unresolved questions about commissioner conflicts that this Board has documented at length in prior editions. A government audit team convened to review maritime safety was staffed by officials with years-long institutional ties to the very regulator whose failures the disaster exposed.

This is not a story about incompetence in isolation. It is a story about sequencing and priority inside a state managing, by its own telling, one of the best-run oil windfalls in the hemisphere.

A nation capable of the digital procurement platforms and detailed medium-term fiscal projections the IMF praised is a nation capable of maintaining a passenger ferry manifest. The failure was not a lack of capacity.

It was a lack of will to apply that capacity where poor and rural Guyanese — disproportionately Indigenous, disproportionately far from Georgetown — actually live and travel.

THE QUESTION WORTH ASKING

Do the people who write these state-aligned pieces — the ones hailing the IMF report as proof of a nation transformed, in the same week the country buried ferry victims and marked Emancipation Day with talk of pillars — actually believe what they are writing?

This Board does not know, and will not pretend to divine motive where evidence is unavailable. What we can state is this: a free press exists precisely to hold the space between an IMF technical statement and a lived reality of stale poverty data and a sunken 87-year-old ferry.  

When state media collapses that space — when it reports the former as though it resolves the latter — it is not covering the country. It is covering for it.

Guyana’s ancestors, the President said correctly, did not greet freedom with bitterness. They built. This Board asks only that the government being praised this week for its stewardship of a $40-billion sovereign fund show the same resolve their ancestors showed with far less: an honest accounting, published and current, of who in this country is still waiting for the pillars to reach them.

— The Board

By Hem Kumar, Editor

Phillips’s Non-Answers Are the Story

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM GUYANA

 ANALYSIS ♦ MV BARIMA COMMISSION OF INQUIRY

Phillips’s Non-Answers Are the Story

The 592 Guardian  Board   |   Georgetown, Guyana   |   August 2026

Prime Minister Mark Phillips stood before the press on Tuesday and, in the space of one news conference, managed to confirm nearly every fear survivors and the public have had about how this government intends to handle the MV Barima wreck.

He did not need to admit a cover-up. He performed one.

A CONSULTATION BUILT BACKWARD

Start with the sequence, because sequence is where evasions hide. Before families were formally polled on salvage versus memorial, a “Declaration of Agreement” document was already circulating — pre-drafted, asking relatives to consent to the vessel remaining on the seabed. That document did not materialize in a vacuum. It followed Mr. Phillips’s own proclamation in the House that conditions were “not favourable” for salvage. The government reached its preferred outcome first and built the consultation process to arrive there. Calling that “yielding to the wishes of families” inverts the actual order of events.

The government reached its preferred outcome first and built the consultation process to arrive there.

TESTIMONY IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR EVIDENCE

Then there is the engine question, which Mr. Phillips was asked directly and answered by not answering.

Pressed on whether avoiding salvage conveniently avoids incontrovertible physical evidence of engine failure, he pivoted to survivor testimony — arguing witnesses “could say” whether the engine stopped and repairs were needed, so “either way, it can be done.”

That is not a rebuttal. It is a substitution. Eyewitness recollection of a mechanical event and a forensic engine inspection are not interchangeable forms of evidence, and Mr. Phillips — a former army officer who understands the difference between testimony and material evidence — knows this.

A Commission of Inquiry that settles for the former when the latter is retrievable is a COI built to reach a predetermined, defensible-on-paper conclusion.

THE ADMISSION INSIDE THE DEFLECTION

The “several discrepancies” admission is the tell inside the deflection. Mr. Phillips conceded that identifying one discrepancy — apparently the loading figures — means others likely exist.

That is precisely the kind of admission that makes physical inspection of the vessel indispensable, not optional.

You do not tell the public there may be undiscovered discrepancies and then structure the recovery decision around whether grieving families feel emotionally prepared to relive the loss.

Those are two different questions being deliberately fused into one.

A DENIAL NO ONE HAD FINISHED ASKING FOR

And then the flat denial — “Government has nothing to hide” — offered without being asked, before the accusation of cover-up was formally news to circle back to.

When a Prime Minister volunteers a denial to a charge that has not yet fully calcified in the public record, it usually means he has already seen the writing on the wall.

THE OFFER THAT WENT UNANSWERED

Mr. Mohamed’s funded international salvage offer, still unanswered by government as of this week, sits there as the counter-proof: the “we have engaged with several companies” line evaporates the moment an alternative recovery path — fully resourced, requiring no state funds — is placed on the table and simply ignored.

If the barrier to salvage were genuinely logistical or financial, that offer resolves it. It has not been touched.

None of this requires speculation about motive. The public record — his own words, the timeline of the memorial declaration, the unaddressed Mohamed offer — does the indicting on its own.

— The Board       

The Elite Capture Story: Long Creek, the Development Bank, and the Money Nobody Can Trace

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

SMOKE AND FIRE — PART I OF III

The Elite Capture Story: Long Creek, the Development Bank, and the Money Nobody Can Trace

By Hem Kumar, Editor

Georgetown — August, 2026

This is the first of a three-part series examining Guyana’s oil-era governance through the lens of Bloomberg Opinion’s July 29, 2026 feature “Oil’s Resource Curse Hangs Heavy Over Guyana” by Juan Pablo Spinetto, read against The 592 Guardian’s own investigative record. Where Bloomberg’s reporting from Georgetown captured the outline of a pattern, this newsroom’s sourcing over the past several weeks fills it in. Attributed excerpts below are drawn from Spinetto’s published column; all further findings are the Guardian’s own unless otherwise sourced

Juan Pablo Spinetto spent a week in Georgetown and came away, in his words, “less optimistic” than when he arrived.

He interviewed the President. He toured the shanty dwellings of South Cummingsburg, blocks from the presidential palace. He watched dump trucks and excavators multiply against a skyline that still tops out at a dozen storeys. And he arrived, from the outside, at a question this newsroom has been answering from the inside for weeks: whether Guyana’s oil windfall is enriching a nation or a class.

The lingering question for many is how members of the political elite managed to amass such vast wealth in such a short time.

— JP Spinetto, Bloomberg Opinion, July 29, 2026

Spinetto’s column names the Long Creek matter directly, citing Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed’s allegation that President Irfaan Ali’s ownership of a 150-acre ranch south of Georgetown represents a conflict of interest, and recording the President’s defense — that the property was purchased before he took office and properly disclosed. Bloomberg reports the allegation and the denial and, constrained by the format of a single reporting trip, leaves it there.

WHAT THE RECORD ACTUALLY SHOWS

The Guardian’s own satellite polygon trace of the Long Creek property — conducted independently of any party’s public claims — measures approximately 155 acres under active use, against the sub-75-acre figure implied in the President’s own public accounting.

That is not a rounding error. It is more than double.

More significant is the paper trail. This news- media  has obtained and reviewed a duplicate 2011 State Lands lease — File No. 411123/688, Lease No. A 23480 — naming then-Finance-Minister-turned-Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo as Lessor and a “Mohamed Ali,” holder of Guyanese passport number R028239, as Lessee, covering Lots 33 and 35 at Long Creek, a combined 20.338 acres per GL&SC Plan No. 50318. This new-media’s published findings, in “The Lease, the Name, and the Silence,” treat the existence and contents of that lease as verified fact. The identity question — whether “Mohamed Ali” on that 2011 instrument is the same individual now occupying the Office of the President — and the prior SARU investigation cited by APNU remain, and are treated by this publication as, unproven allegations pending further documentary corroboration.

That distinction matters, and it is the distinction Bloomberg’s column — writing at the level of political atmosphere rather than instrument-level record — was not positioned to draw. Spinetto’s piece captures the public argument. It does not, and could not from a week’s reporting trip, reach the lease.

THE SECOND FRONT: A BANK WITH NO GUARDRAILS

Bloomberg’s column mentions the new Guyana Development Bank in passing — “more than $200 million in initial funding to finance venture projects, including start-ups that require no collateral” — folded into President Ali’s account of a diversifying, “future-proofed” economy.

It is presented, in the column, as evidence of ambition.

It is broad. It is highly integrated, and it’s what I would say progressive.

— President Irfaan Ali to Bloomberg Opinion, on his economic diversification strategy

The Guyana Development Bank Bill, tabled by Finance Minister Ashni Singh on June 5, 2026, passed its second reading and received full passage on July 27 — the same sitting, this publication notes, in which Parliament passed a $54.9 billion appropriations bill and the Joint Opposition staged its walk-in protest over the MV Barima disaster.

The Development Bank Bill passed without debate.

This news-media’s review of the Bill’s text finds that the “interest-free, no collateral” pitch offered to the public sits alongside Section 5(2), which grants the Finance Minister discretionary authority over collateral and interest terms — a provision nowhere mentioned in the public framing Bloomberg’s column reproduces.

Section 23 imposes no Guyanese-citizenship eligibility requirement on borrowers.

The board appointment structure gives the Finance Minister sole discretion over the naming of all directors, with no reserved seats for opposition, civil society, or independent transparency nominees. The Bill’s offence provisions are written entirely toward borrower misconduct; there is no specific offence contemplated for insider self-dealing within a fund with an aggregate ceiling of up to $40 billion.

Bloomberg’s $200 million figure describes the Bank’s initial funding tranche. It is not in conflict with this newsroom’s reporting on the $40 billion structural ceiling — the two numbers describe different things, the seed capital versus the statutory maximum — but read together they illustrate exactly the gap this series exists to close: the modest, reassuring number offered abroad, and the uncapped discretionary architecture legislated at home.

A PATTERN, NOT AN INCIDENT

Michael L. Ross, the UCLA political scientist Spinetto quotes at length, offers the theoretical scaffolding for what this outlet has been reporting as a specific, documented case:

“These countries start with weak institutions and often oil turns them worse. Wealth is getting concentrated. Investment in infrastructure or education gets behind. There is a lot of corruption. This is something that happens periodically.”

Ross was speaking in general terms, citing Venezuela, Nigeria, and Chad.

Guyana’s trajectory is probably neither the best-case nor the worst-case outcome.

— Michael L. Ross, UCLA, to Bloomberg Opinion

This publication takes no position on where Guyana ultimately lands on that spectrum. What can be stated as fact, on the documentary record assembled here, is this: a sitting president’s family land holding measures more than double what has been publicly implied, tied to a 2011 lease instrument bearing a name and passport number this news-media has independently verified; and a piece of legislation capable of channeling up to $40 billion passed the same day as a $54.9 billion appropriations bill and a walkout over a ferry disaster that has killed an estimated 100 people — without a single hour of parliamentary debate.

Christopher Ram’s call for a Commission of Inquiry into the Long Creek matter remains, as of this writing, unanswered by government. Freddie Kissoon and Nazim Baksh, writing in the state-aligned press, have characterized this news-media’s coverage as noise and distraction. 

The lease, the acreage, and the statute do not move because a columnist calls them noise.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Bloomberg saw the smoke. It flew in, interviewed the principals, and flew out with an accurate sense that something in Guyana’s institutional architecture is under strain.

The 592 Guardian has been standing in the fire.

Part II of this series turns to the MV Barima disaster — the clearest test yet of whether Guyana’s institutions can absorb a genuine crisis without reaching first for control of the narrative, and second for the people asking questions about it.

This is Part I of a three-part series. Part II: “The Barima Test Case” and Part III: “Democracy on Paper” will follow.

— The Board

You Can Fool Some of Us Sometime: A 592 Guardian Reply to Go-Invest

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA & DIASPORA

FACT CHECK · FISCAL GOVERNANCE

You Can Fool Some of Us Sometime: A 592 Guardian Reply to Go-Invest

Peter Ramsaroop’s essay on escaping the resource curse reads well on a podium. It does not survive contact with the Auditor General’s numbers, the IMF’s own tables, FIFA’s Golden Handshake Is a Governance Emergency, Not an Investment Strategy or the bill Parliament passed without debate three days before he published it.

The 592 Guardian Board 

There is an old vernacular truth that predates every consultancy deck and every Go-Invest slideshow: you can fool some of us sometime, but not all of us all the time. Peter Ramsaroop, Chief Investment Officer at Go-Invest, has published an essay this week insisting Guyana is “writing a different story” than the resource-cursed petrostates of history.

He cites the Natural Resource Fund. He cites parliamentary oversight. He cites diversification, institution-building, and a people-centred development model.

We took him at his word and went to the primary sources — the Auditor General’s findings, the IMF Article IV reports, the Bank of Guyana’s own fund disclosures, and the Hansard record of what Parliament actually did this week.

What we found is not a different story. It is the same story, told with better production values.

CLAIM ONE: “PARLIAMENTARY OVERSIGHT AND TRANSPARENT REPORTING”

It is true that the Natural Resource Fund Act requires parliamentary approval before withdrawal, and that the Bank of Guyana publishes quarterly disclosures. Mr. Ramsaroop is not lying about the statute. He is simply not telling readers what independent analysts say happens after the statute is satisfied.

Stabroek News’s own Budget Focus 2026 analysis is blunt on this point: oversight mechanisms remain weak, parliamentary committees are ineffective or dormant, and the Public Accounts Committee is years behind in examining the public accounts it exists to examine.

Accountability architecture that cannot keep pace with the money flowing past it is not oversight. It is a building with the lights on and nobody inside.

More damaging to Mr. Ramsaroop’s framing: opposition parliamentarian Dr. Terrence Campbell has filed legal proceedings arguing the government’s headline NRF balance figures conceal roughly US$2.61 billion in withdrawals over three years that he says were routinely used to fund ordinary government operations rather than the national-development and emergency purposes the Act specifies.

That dispute is now before the courts. You do not litigate transparency you already have.

“Oversight that produces a lawsuit over what the numbers mean is not the safeguard the essay describes.”

CLAIM TWO: “OIL IS NOT OUR DESTINATION; IT IS OUR CATALYST”

The 2026 approved NRF withdrawal — US$2.37 billion — will finance roughly one-third of the entire national budget. Stabroek News’s fiscal analysts go further, and we agree with them: they dispute the very accounting convention of booking NRF withdrawals as current revenue at all, calling it a classification that masks how dependent the Budget already is on oil-financed transfers.

A country financing a third of its national budget from an oil fund is not treating oil as a catalyst. It is treating oil as the operating account.

CLAIM THREE: THE DIVERSIFICATION NUMBERS, READ IN FULL

Here Mr. Ramsaroop is on his firmest ground, and fairness requires us to say so plainly. The IMF’s most recent Article IV consultation found real non-oil GDP expanded over 13 percent in 2024, and projects non-oil growth averaging roughly 6.75 percent annually over the medium term — genuinely above Guyana’s pre-oil decade average.

Construction, manufacturing, and agriculture are all posting real gains.

But context is not the same as contradiction. In the same years the non-oil economy grew by low double digits, oil-sector GDP grew by 17 to 58 percent. Diversification is occurring at the margins of an economy whose center of gravity is moving further toward petroleum, not away from it.

An essay that leads with diversification and never mentions the growth differential between oil and non-oil sectors has chosen its numbers, not reported them.

THE “NEW GROWTH PILLARS”, SECTOR BY SECTOR

Mr. Ramsaroop’s essay names business process outsourcing, agriculture, and tourism as three of Guyana’s emerging growth pillars alongside oil. Each deserves its own scrutiny, because each is doing very different work than the essay claims.

Business process outsourcing is not a growth pillar. It is a retreating sector dressed as one. More than 2,000 BPO jobs were shed in Guyana within a matter of months, against a government target of 15,000 contact-centre jobs that remains nowhere in sight.

Itel — a company that had only recently announced ambitious expansion plans — shut down entirely, laying off over 400 workers and citing client losses and rising costs in Guyana. French BPO giant Teleperformance closed a facility as well. Asked directly about the sector’s health, Mr. Ramsaroop himself dismissed concerns that oil-sector poaching was driving the exodus, telling one industry outlet that call-centre workers “wouldn’t necessarily be looking to join an oil company.” That may be true, but it does not explain where the workers — or the companies — actually went.

An industry that is losing its anchor tenants is not a pillar. It is a hole in the floor with a press release taped over it.

Agriculture’s growth has nothing to do with Go-Invest. The sector is real and it is expanding — the Ministry of Agriculture reported a $106.6 billion budget allocation for 2026 and cites $7.4 billion invested in hinterland agriculture over five years. But that money moves entirely through Minister Zulfikar Mustapha’s ministry — drainage and irrigation, livestock, fisheries, rice-farmer relief grants — not through Go-Invest’s investment-attraction apparatus.

When Mr. Ramsaroop lists agriculture as evidence of his office’s diversification strategy, he is claiming credit for a ministry’s budget line his own agency does not administer.

Guyanese farmers know exactly whose office they walk into for support, and it is not the one that wrote this essay.

Tourism’s growth is real, and still tiny. Guyana closed 2025 with 453,489 visitor arrivals, a genuine 22 percent year-on-year increase, and the Guyana Tourism Authority projects 550,000 by the end of 2026. Those are honest numbers and we report them as such.

But independent tourism trackers place Guyana as the least-visited country in South America even as that growth continues — a 22 percent increase off a small base is still a small number. Presenting a percentage without its denominator is a favourite trick of every government relations office in the world, and it is the same trick at work here.

THE OMISSION THAT MATTERS MOST: DEBT

Nowhere in Mr. Ramsaroop’s essay does the word debt appear. Here is what he left out. Domestic public debt rose from G$80.0 billion in 2019 to G$1,004.3 billion in 2025 — an increase of 1,155 percent — and is projected to reach G$1,245.1 billion in 2026. External debt rose from US$1.305 billion to US$2.920 billion over the same stretch, a 124 percent increase, projected to hit US$4.355 billion in 2026, a further 49.1 percent jump in a single year.

An essay invoking “disciplined management” and “responsible leadership” while debt compounds at quadruple-digit percentage growth is not describing fiscal discipline. It is describing its absence, in the register of a press release.

CLAIM FOUR: “INSTITUTION BUILDING IS EQUALLY CENTRAL”

This is the claim that collapses fastest against our own reporting.        In the same week Mr. Ramsaroop published his essay, Parliament passed the Guyana Development Bank Bill — without debate — concentrating discretion over roughly $40 billion in lending authority in the Finance Minister’s office alone.

The Bill’s Section 5(2) quietly permits collateral and interest terms at ministerial discretion, contradicting the public pitch of “interest-free, no collateral” financing. Section 23 sets no Guyanese-citizenship eligibility requirement.

The board is appointed entirely at the Finance Minister’s discretion, with no reserved seats for opposition or civil society. And the Bill’s offence provisions criminalize borrower misconduct while specifying no offence at all for insider self-dealing among the funds it controls.

You cannot cite institution-building as evidence against the resource curse in the same week your own Parliament builds an institution with none of the institutional safeguards the resource-curse literature actually calls for.

WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SAY

2026 NRF withdrawal

 US$2.37B — approx. 32% of the national budget
Domestic public debt, 2019→2026(p)

 G$80.0B → G$1,245.1B (+1,155%)
External debt, 2019→2026(p)

 US$1.305B → US$4.355B (+124%, +49.1% in 2026 alone)
Non-oil GDP growth, 2024

 13%+ (IMF) — vs. oil-sector growth of 58%
Disputed withdrawals under legal challenge

 ~US$2.61B, 2022–2024 (Campbell v. Government)
Development Bank Bill

 $40B in Finance Minister discretion, passed without debate, July 27 2026
BPO sector jobs lost

 2,000+ in months; Itel and Teleperformance both exited; 15,000-job target unmet
Tourism, in context

 453,489 arrivals in 2025 (+22%) — still least-visited country in South America

OUR ASSESSMENT

Mr. Ramsaroop is not wrong that Guyana has written more safeguards into law than most first-generation petrostates managed. The Natural Resource Fund Act is a real statute with real mechanics. Non-oil growth is real. None of that is fiction.

What is fiction is the picture assembled from only the safeguards that flatter the government and none of the numbers that don’t. A resource-curse defense that omits the debt trajectory, omits the pending litigation over fund transparency, omits a $40 billion bill passed without debate in the same news cycle, and lists a collapsing BPO sector and a ministry budget it does not administer as evidence of its own strategy is not analysis.

It is advocacy wearing analysis’s clothes — and Go-Invest’s Chief Investment Officer is not a neutral narrator of Guyana’s fiscal health. He is paid to sell it.

Our readers are academics, professionals, and an informed diaspora who do not need the pitch. They need the numbers Mr. Ramsaroop left out of his own essay. We have supplied them here, sourced and citable, so that the next time this argument is made — and it will be made again — it can be made honestly, or not made at all.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

Walk with kings…never lose touch with the common people

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA 

Walk with kings…never lose touch with the common people

OPINION BY: GHK LALL

And, I promise one and all – those who supported me and those who didn’t – that I will be the President for all the people of Guyana, and I will serve each of you with affection, without discrimination and with every attention to fairness and equity—President Ali August 2020

 

As President, I will have to walk with kings, in our country’s interest, but I assure you that I will never lose the common touch. My first and last responsibility will be to the people of Guyana – all of them.— President Ali August 2020

 

As I first declared on the 2nd of August 2020: I am not the President of some Guyanese; I am the President of all Guyana. That principle has guided me these past five years, and it shall remain my compass in the years ahead.” —President Ali September 2025

No one could justifiably think that Pres Ali is struggling with myopia. I think, though, that he struggles with a touch of amnesia in August 2020; the last from 2025. The quotes are his words.

Now fast forward almost six years later, and there is the tragedy of the MV Barima. Pres Ali committed to the Guyanese people that he is going to be there for them. Every single one of them. How about that today, sir? Just a little. In a time of national tragedy is the best situation to make good on those words.

A Commission of Inquiry and no consultation with the leader of the opposition? Where is “of all Guyana” in this current national conversation?

In a time of national hurting, this is when national leaders rise to the moment and reach with arms outstretched for national healing. Not one person left behind. Not one boat allowed to stay at the bottom. Not one Guyanese left out, cast adrift. Not one media house left. Not when the national house is in distress.

Mr. President: this is not about who has got it right and who has got it wrong. This is about what is done well, there is confidence that all have done their best. To honor the dead. To regard the living. To keep the flames of hope shining brightly.

Mine is not the right to condemn, Pres Ali. History will commend or criticize him accordingly.

On reading his first inaugural address to the nation in August 2020, I stated publicly. Let’s try him. Let’s give him the space. I am sorry, Mr. President, but disappointment comes in waves that crest and will not let me rest. Nor the dead in the MV Barima who now lie in the uneasy embrace of death at the end of the sea. Their time was cut short. Abruptly. Frighteningly. Enduringly.

Mr. President, please let the work of the commission proceed publicly. Guyanese have had COI’s of extraordinary luminosity. They shed darkness, when light was all that would suffice. Why not cut Guyanese some slack? Why heap Guyanese on the rack? Why inspire me, Mr. President, to rise above all the noise that is vexatious to the spirit of the dead? Why add to the torments of the Guyanese people that are still waiting to make good on his words? So lusciously tendered. So grandly delivered.

“I will walk with kings” and “I will never lose the common touch.”

Mr. President, the indigenous of Guyana are waiting for their leader to not lose touch with them. They are pleading, but not begging. They are crying, but not cursing. If there ever was a time for Excellency Mohamed Irfaan Ali to “never lose the common touch” that time is now.

And, if ever there was a moment that called for Guyana’s national leader to stand up and say that I will be different (and truly mean what he says) that time is now.

When words are hollow, they have a habit of coming back to haunt. And, after that they hollow out even the best amongst us. Mr. President, I close with the words of that immortal Athenian tragedian:

“And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.”

A Line Kissoon Invented, Then Accused Others of Crossing

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY ◊GOVERNANCE ◊ THE PUBLIC RECORD

EDITORIAL RESPONSE

A Line Kissoon Invented, Then Accused Others of Crossing

Freddie Kissoon’s July 30 column builds its entire moral case on a rule that does not exist. What follows is worse than a factual lapse.

By The Board  ·  July, 2026

Freddie Kissoon’s July 30 column opens with a premise stated as settled fact: that children do not belong in Guyana’s Parliament, that their presence on July 27 was “unheard of in the world,” and that Azruddin Mohamed therefore crossed a line that is, in Kissoon’s word, “unforgivable.”

The premise is false, and not in a way that requires specialist knowledge to correct.

School civics tours through the National Assembly are a routine feature of parliamentary systems, including Guyana’s own — a fact available to anyone who attended secondary school within walking distance of the Public Buildings.

Stakeholder and special-interest hearings that bring affected families before a legislature to address the matter that concerns them are likewise unremarkable practice, not a Guyanese or global anomaly.

Kissoon’s rhetorical question — “in which country has that happened?” — has an answer, and it is: most of them, regularly.

This matters because the column’s entire architecture depends on the premise holding. Strip out “children are categorically barred from Parliament” and what remains is not a violated rule but a policy dispute over optics — whether it was wise or exploitative for the Opposition Leader to bring grieving family members, including children, into the House in connection with a disaster that killed their parents and siblings.

That is a legitimate question. It is not the question Kissoon asked. He asked it as though the answer were already written into the Standing Orders, and built a column’s worth of moral certainty on top of an assertion he never verified.

TWO DIFFERENT THINGS, COLLAPSED INTO ONE

The column treats “children in the public gallery” as interchangeable with “victims’ family members, including children, present in connection with a matter that killed their relatives.”

These are not the same category. A school tour and a stakeholder appearance by bereaved families are both examples of children in a legislature; neither is “the public wandering in to watch a sitting for entertainment,” which is the image Kissoon’s column works to conjure.

Collapsing the distinction is either careless or convenient. Given the rest of the column, convenient seems the likelier reading.

THE UNASKED QUESTION

Kissoon asks “for what purpose?” four times in various forms, treating it as rhetorical — a question with no honest answer, only a cynical one. He does not engage with the stated purpose: that these were relatives of MV Barima victims, present to make their concerns known to a government whose response to the disaster — from the handling of funeral arrangements to the timeline on salvage to the circulation of a memorial-site “Declaration of Agreement” ahead of any genuine consultation — has itself drawn sustained and specific scrutiny.

A columnist confident in his own premise does not need to ignore the competing one.

Kissoon ignores it entirely, then fills the vacuum with motive he has not demonstrated: ego, bandwagon politics, “crass mentality.”

THE PRESUMPTION OF BAD FAITH, APPLIED SELECTIVELY

The column’s roll call — Kaieteur News, Kiskadee Watch, Demerara Waves, the Guyana Human Rights Association, Transparency International Guyana, Red Thread — is presented as a list of organizations that will stay silent because they “need” Mohamed.

This is asserted, not shown. It is also asserted before any of those organizations had published anything on the matter, which means the column is not describing a silence that occurred but predicting one, and then treating the prediction as evidence of the bad faith it has not yet observed.

That is not analysis. It is a script written in advance of the facts it claims to interpret.

WHAT THE COLUMN NEVER ASKS

A column genuinely concerned with the welfare of grieving children might have asked whether the government’s own conduct in the days after July 18 — the disputed account of remarks about burial costs, the reported instruction not to photograph or film, the pre-drafted memorial declaration circulated to families ahead of a stated “consultation” process — contributed to families feeling they had no avenue but a public one. Kissoon’s column asks none of this.

It reserves its outrage entirely for the opposition’s optics and none for the government conduct that gave families cause to seek an audience in the first place.

None of this requires taking a position on whether bringing children to Parliament was, on balance, wise. Reasonable people can disagree on that. What they cannot do honestly is invent a rule that does not exist, use it to declare a line “unforgivably crossed,” and then spend a column’s remaining length assigning motive to everyone who might question the premise.

WHOSE POSITION, EXACTLY

One further point deserves the record. The column runs in the Guyana Chronicle, a state-owned newspaper, under a standard disclaimer identifying Kissoon as a paid columnist whose views are his own and not the outlet’s official position.

That disclaimer exists precisely because Chronicle is state property, and it is boilerplate practice for compensated contributors at any paper. It does not by itself prove alignment with government messaging.

But it is a fact worth placing beside the column’s own accusation — that the opposition and civil society are motivated by what they “need,” never principle — because that accusation arrives from a paid platform of the state, aimed at people writing for free.

Readers can weigh that asymmetry for themselves.

— The Board

A $40 BILLION BLANK CHEQUE

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦GUYANA

A $40 BILLION BLANK CHEQUE

How the Guyana Development Bank Bill Was Passed Without Debate

Parliament used the Barima crisis as cover to wave through a bill built to concentrate control

OPINION♦July, 2026

On July 27, while the Joint Opposition was inside the National Assembly demanding the resignations of Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill and Minister within Public Works Deodat Indar over the MV Barima disaster, the government moved the Guyana Development Bank Bill to a second reading and passed it — 52 days after it was tabled, and without a single substantive contribution from the Opposition benches.

The same sitting passed a $54.9 billion bill and observed one minute of silence for the 73 confirmed dead. The Development Bank Bill received considerably less scrutiny than the moment of silence.

This is not incidental. A chamber consumed by grief and protest is a chamber that cannot read a bill clause by clause.

The government’s own contributions to the “debate” — from Minister of Culture Youth and Sport Charles Ramson, Minister Zulfikar Ally, and MPs Lenox Shuman and Alister Charlies — proceeded while Opposition MPs stood near ministers mid-presentation and the Speaker suspended the sitting twice to restore order. Whatever this was, it was not deliberation.

THE SALES PITCH VERSUS THE STATUTE

The Guyana Development Bank was publicly marketed as a facility offering interest-free loans of up to $3 million to Guyanese entrepreneurs, with no collateral required. The legislation says something narrower. Section 5(2) permits the Bank to provide loans “with or without collateral and with or without charging interest” — discretionary language that leaves the government free to impose collateral and interest on some or most applicants, with no criteria in the Bill specifying which projects qualify for the interest-free, collateral-free terms that were used to sell this to the public.

The eligibility gap runs deeper. Part V does not restrict financing to Guyanese nationals. Section 23 requires only that an applicant “provide such information, documents and statutory declarations as may be prescribed” — language vague enough that a foreign-owned enterprise could plausibly qualify under the same terms as a Guyanese small business the fund was announced to serve.

ONE MINISTER, TOTAL DISCRETION

The structural core of this Bill is Section 5 and the governance provisions that follow it.

Up to $40 billion — roughly US$200 million, a figure that can be revised upward by Parliament — will be administered by a board of five to nine directors appointed entirely by the Minister of Finance. The Minister appoints the chairperson, the deputy chairperson, sets director remuneration, and the board in turn appoints the CEO. Directors serve three-year terms and may be reappointed at the Minister’s discretion.

“No seat is reserved for the Opposition. No seat is reserved for civil society. No seat is reserved for a transparency body. This is not an oversight — it is the single most consequential design choice in the Bill.”

A development bank distributing this scale of public capital without a single independently-nominated director is a bank answerable to one office and one office alone.

PENALTIES THAT MISS THE ACTUAL RISK

The Bill enumerates five offences:

⇒providing false information to the Bank

⇒obstructing the Bank’s functions

⇒falsifying records

⇒improperly disclosing confidential information 

⇒willfully misapplying Bank funds or assets.

Every one of these is oriented toward the borrower — the person seeking or holding a loan.

Nowhere does the Bill create a specific offence for unauthorised withdrawal or self-dealing by the officials entrusted with managing the $40 billion pool itself.

The “connivance” clause — imposing fines of $5 million to $10 million on a director, manager, or officer who consents to or connives in one of the five listed offences — is derivative. It requires an underlying offence to attach to. It does not independently criminalise a Finance Minister appointee steering approvals toward political allies, because favouritism in loan approval is not on the list of offences at all.

Combine this with the appointment structure above: a board selected without external check, operating under a penalty regime that does not contemplate insider misconduct as its own offence. The Auditor General will audit annually, and the Annual Report will be tabled in the National Assembly — but after-the-fact reporting is not a substitute for structural safeguards at the point of decision.

THE PATTERN

This joins a growing list of instruments — the GECOM Article 161(3)(b) dispute, the Former Presidents Benefits Bill — that share a common architecture: broad ministerial or executive discretion, minimal independent check, and passage timed to avoid the scrutiny the moment would otherwise attract. On July 27, that moment was Barima. The country was watching a grieving Opposition Leader’s sister confronted in the halls of Parliament and a Prime Minister proclaiming salvage conditions “not favourable” for recovering a vessel with the dead still aboard.

Forty billion dollars changed hands, procedurally, in the same sitting.

The Guyana Development Bank may yet do real good for small business owners who cannot access commercial credit.

That possibility does not answer the structural question this Bill leaves open: who decides who gets the money, on what terms, and who answers for it if the decision is made badly. As written, the answer to all three is the same person.

— The Board

Thirty-One Toshaos, Nine Hundred Thirty Million Dollars, and No Bids: The Threshold That Vanished in a Week

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

Thirty-One Toshaos, Nine Hundred Thirty Million Dollars, and No Bids: The Threshold That Vanished in a Week

Gtown, Guyana — July, 2026

On Saturday, thirty-one village leaders from Regions Eight and Nine stood in the boardroom of the Ministry of Public Works and signed their names to Community Participation Contracts worth roughly $30 million apiece — a combined $930 million in public money, delivered without a single open bid.

Permanent Secretary Vladim Persaud called it capacity-building. It is also, on the public record, the single largest expansion of uncompeted procurement discretion this administration has exercised in the hinterland in recent memory, and it happened in under a week.

The mechanism is not new. Community Participation Contracts have existed for years as a deliberate, defensible exception to open tendering — a way to let villages execute their own road and bridge maintenance with local labour rather than importing an outside contractor. Nobody at this newspaper disputes that the underlying idea has merit.

What changed, abruptly and by ministerial announcement rather than by any visible legislative or regulatory process this newspaper can locate, is the ceiling on what that exception now covers.

A THRESHOLD RAISED AT A PODIUM

At the National Toshaos Council Conference, Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo told delegates the government would raise the CPC threshold from $5 million to $30 million — a sixfold increase — and instructed, in terms that left no room for bureaucratic delay, that it be done “before you leave.” It was. Within days, thirty-one contracts at or near the new ceiling were signed in a Georgetown boardroom.

A threshold that took years to sit at $5 million was multiplied sixfold at a podium and operationalized into $930 million of signed contracts before the conference delegates had returned home.

This news-media has covered enough hinterland procurement to recognize the shape of what is being described here. The prior $5 million ceiling was not an oversight; it was a guardrail sized to what village councils — most of which are not incorporated companies with standard contracting capacity — could plausibly execute and account for without a formal open-tender evaluation. As recently as May 2025, villages were being urged by the Ministry of Public Works to consider incorporating precisely so they could handle larger sums. That advice was still being given a little over a year before the ceiling was raised sixfold and $930 million moved.

WHAT CRITERIA? WHAT QUALIFICATIONS?

Minister of Local Government and Regional Development Priya Manickchand has said contracts will only be awarded where villages have “demonstrated capacity to complete the work successfully.”

This publication takes no position on the sincerity of that statement. What it observes is that “demonstrated capacity” is not a criterion; it is a conclusion. No published scoring rubric, no engineering pre-qualification standard, no capacity audit methodology, and no evaluation committee composition has been made public for the thirty-one contracts signed on Saturday.

The 592 Guardian was unable to identify, in any government statement, DPI release, or ministry publication, a single objective standard against which a Toshao’s village was measured before receiving an award of up to $30 million.

That absence is not a technicality. It is the entire question. When $930 million moves through a channel exempt by design from the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board’s open-tender rules, the exemption is only defensible if something else — publicly stated, consistently applied criteria — stands in for the market discipline that competitive bidding would otherwise provide. As of this writing, nothing has.

ON THE OPEN-BID QUESTION, PRECISELY

Readers have asked directly whether these contracts were advertised for open bids. They were not, and under the CPC framework as constituted, they were never going to be — that is the defined character of a Community Participation Contract, not a deviation from it. The relevant failure is therefore not procedural evasion but design: a mechanism built for modest, locally-executed maintenance work has just had its ceiling raised sixfold with no accompanying publication of the safeguards that would ordinarily substitute for competition at that scale. NPTAB’s own procurement guidance draws an explicit line between what falls below threshold, subject only to internal record-keeping, and what rises above it, subject to Board-level scrutiny and public notice. This administration has, in a single week, moved $930 million from one side of that line’s practical effect to the other without moving it formally at all.

IS THIS PATRONAGE?

We are conscious that some in the hinterland will read any scrutiny of this initiative as an attack on Indigenous communities’ right to development finance, and we reject that framing in advance. Toshao Russian Dorrick’s own appeal at the NTC conference — asking the ministry directly, “why not give us the contract, we will do it” — is on the public record and deserves to be taken at face value as a legitimate demand for self-determination in how hinterland infrastructure money is spent. That demand is not the problem.

The problem is a government that answered it by removing competitive and evaluative safeguards rather than building new ones suited to the larger sums now in play.

This news media will will not accuse the administration, on the present record, of purchasing political loyalty in Regions Eight and Nine. That is a serious charge and we have not seen the evidence to sustain it.

What we will say, plainly, is that a $930 million disbursement, announced and executed within a single conference cycle, timed precisely to a gathering of the political constituency it benefits, with no published evaluation criteria and no NPTAB oversight role disclosed, is patronage-shaped whether or not it is patronage-intentioned.

Guyanese taxpayers, and the Indigenous communities this initiative claims to serve, are entitled to know which of the two it is — and the only way to know is for the government to publish what it has so far kept to itself.

WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN NOW

The equipment and training components of this initiative — $1 billion across seven Region Eight clusters, $50 million in technical training, a funded road-safety and signage programme — are, on their face, sound public investment.

None of what follows is a call to unwind them. It is a demand that they be made auditable.

  1. The Ministry of Public Works should publish the evaluation criteria and scoring methodology used to select the thirty-one awardee villages, including whether any village that applied was declined and why.
  2. The Ministry should publish the individual contract value, scope of works, and completion timeline for each of the thirty-one CPCs, not merely the aggregate $930 million figure.
  3. The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board should state, on the record, what oversight role — if any — it retained over CPC awards following the threshold increase from $5 million to $30 million, and whether that increase was formalized in regulation or remains a ministerial instruction.
  4. The Public Procurement Commission, established under Article 212W of the Constitution specifically to guard against exactly this category of risk, should confirm whether it reviewed the threshold change before or after it was announced at the NTC conference.
  5. Village councils that registered as companies to access these contracts should have that corporate and financial structure disclosed, so that beneficial ownership and any contractor relationships are transparent to the communities the money is meant to serve.

None of these five demands require the government to slow down hinterland development. They require it to show its work. An administration confident that thirty-one Toshaos were selected on merit and capacity, rather than proximity to the podium at Arthur Chung, should have no objection to publishing the record that proves it.

— The Board

WHAT IS GOVERNMENT AFRAID A FLOATED MV BARIMA WILL SHOW?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA 

WHAT IS GOVERNMENT AFRAID A FLOATED MV BARIMA WILL SHOW?

The Paper Trail Behind the “Family Choice” on Recovery

THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL

By Hem Kumar, Editor

The government wants the nation to believe that whether the MV Barima is raised from the seabed remains an open question — one to be decided by the families of the dead, gently and patiently, through consultation.

It has gone so far as to float the idea of retaining, at public expense, a conflict resolution expert should those families disagree among themselves. All very reasonable-sounding. All very procedurally correct.

It is also, on the documentary record now before this news-media, a fiction.

I. Before a single questionnaire was drafted. Before any “consultation process” was announced to the public. Before, as far as this news-media  can establish, most families had been formally approached at all — a document titled “Declaration of Agreement — MV Barima as Memorial Site” was already circulating for signature.

Read that title again. Not a survey. Not a canvass of sentiment. A declaration of agreement. The document does not ask the relative of the deceased what outcome they would prefer. It states, as an accomplished fact, that the vessel will remain a memorial where it sank — and it invites the signature of the grieving to ratify that fact. 

Name of the deceased. Name of the relative. Relationship. Address. Telephone number. Signature line.

That is not the architecture of an inquiry. That is the architecture of a release form — the kind an institution circulates when it needs the record to show consent it has not actually earned.

II. The sequence damns the government more than the document alone. This news outlet timeline shows the Declaration following directly on the heels of Prime Minister Mark Phillips’s own pronouncement in the House — delivered before the families’ “consultation” had even formally begun — that recovery “conditions are not favourable.” The conclusion preceded the process. The verdict came before the hearing.

What followed was not fact-finding. It was the construction of a paper record to justify a decision the Cabinet had already reached in private. The questionnaire, when it did arrive, did not exist to discover what families wanted. It existed to produce signatures consistent with what the government had already decided they should want.

A government that had genuinely left this question open does not tell the nation the vessel is staying down and then go asking families to sign a form agreeing that it should.

III. This casts the “conflict resolution expert” proposal — offered to the public as evidence of the state’s sensitivity to divided family opinion — in a considerably less flattering light. If the outcome was fixed before the canvassing began, there is no live dispute for such an expert to mediate. 

There is only the management of dissent: the handling of those families who decline to sign a script already written for them. Guyanese taxpayers would not be funding conflict resolution. They would be funding compliance management, dressed up as grief counselling.

IV. None of this changes the underlying moral arithmetic, which this news-media  has already set out plainly: it defies belief that any family, absent influence or inducement, would choose to leave a loved one’s remains at the bottom of the Essequibo rather than retrieve them for burial. It defies belief further still that a memorial marker — which is all any family will ever see or touch, whether the vessel is raised or not — cannot achieve every commemorative purpose the government claims only a sunken hull can provide. And it should not need saying, though apparently it does, that surfacing the vessel, recovering the remains and any evidence of value, and returning it to the water afterward serves every party’s stated interest at once — unless one interest was never about grief at all.

The government has already conceded that the manifest cannot reliably establish who was aboard when the Barima went down. Somewhere between that admission and the pre-drafted Declaration sits an uncomfortable question this publication  intends to keep asking: what, precisely, does government fear a floated MV Barima would disclose — and to whom does it owe an answer first, the families, or itself?

The families deserve a genuine choice, honestly presented, before any decision — not a signature drive dressed up as one.

— The Board

The Street Corner Was in the Prime Minister’s Mouth

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 592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL

The Street Corner Was in the Prime Minister’s Mouth

On the Office of the Prime Minister’s statement, Kwame McCoy’s condemnation of Hadiyyah Mohamed, and the video that says otherwise

There is a particular species of political statement that survives only in the dark — issued in the confident hope that no one troubled themselves to record what actually happened. The Office of the Prime Minister’s Monday release on the confrontation between Prime Minister Mark Phillips and Hadiyyah Mohamed does not have that luxury. Guyana has the video. It has had it since the moment the exchange occurred inside the precincts of Parliament, in full public view, during a sitting convened in the shadow of the MV Barima tragedy. 

The Office’s statement asks the country to disbelieve its own eyes.

Let us be exact about what is being alleged and by whom. The Prime Minister’s office says Ms. Mohamed “forced herself into the precincts of Parliament” and directed “offensive and distasteful remarks” at the Prime Minister. It says the precincts “must not be reduced to a stage for intimidation, disorder and Opposition theatrics.” It commends Mr. Phillips for a “composure” it says reflected “discipline, dignity and restraint.” Each of these claims is checkable against a public record that shows something close to the reverse.

WHAT THE PUBLIC BUILDING ACTUALLY CONTAINS

Hadiyyah Mohamed did not force her way anywhere. Family members of MV Barima victims — a tragedy that has already claimed lives the government has yet to fully account for — came to Parliament to see the Leader of the Opposition, Azruddin Mohamed, whose party had spent the sitting wearing placards bearing photographs of the dead. It was the Prime Minister who inserted himself into that meeting, approaching grieving relatives to offer condolences the Opposition contends were overdue and unearned given the ministerial record on the disaster. When Ms. Mohamed pressed him on when the government intended to correct what she and others regard as its failures, it was Mr. Phillips who told her to “get from here” and demanded to know why she was in the building — a public building, funded by the public, that she has every right to enter. It was his personal security detail that made physical contact with her. And it was Mr. Phillips himself who called it off: “leave her, don’t touch her.”

Throughout, by every account and every frame of footage that has circulated, Ms. Mohamed remained composed. She addressed the Prime Minister of Guyana as “sir.”

That is not the vocabulary of a street thug. It is the vocabulary of a citizen who understood, even as she was being physically handled by state security inside a legislative building, that she was the one behaving correctly.

THE OFFICE’S STATEMENT INVERTS THE RECORD

Which makes the Prime Minister’s office’s chosen framing worth sitting with. Parliament, the statement says, “is not a political street corner.” Correct. And on the available video, it was not Ms. Mohamed who turned it into one. A Prime Minister who tells a grieving citizen to “get from here” while his security lays hands on her has not modeled discipline; he has demonstrated exactly the disorder his own office now attributes, backwards, to the person on the receiving end of it.

Composure is not what a camera recorded. What a camera recorded was a public official losing control of an encounter he initiated, and a young woman keeping hers.

The statement goes further, invoking Ms. Mohamed’s

That is not an accountability argument. It is guilt assigned by bloodline, dressed up in the language of institutional standards. The 592 Guardian has covered Azruddin Mohamed’s legal jeopardy on its merits and will continue to; it is a different matter entirely, and beneath the dignity the Office claims to be defending, to use a brother’s indictment as a cudgel against his sister’s conduct in an encounter the video shows she did not instigate.

A FAMILIAR VOICE, A FAMILIAR PATTERN

This is not the first time the Mohamed’s  has been cast as the aggressor by officials whose own conduct invited scrutiny. Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister Kwame McCoy has built something of a specialty out of it, previously accusing her of running a “deliberate misinformation campaign” during last year’s election recount — an accusation issued, as this one was, in a statement rather than in any forum where the claims could be tested against contrary evidence. The pattern is consistent: an official statement asserts a narrative; the available video contradicts it; no correction follows. Guyanese are entitled to notice the pattern, and to weigh a government’s fondness for it against its professed devotion to institutional standards.

None of this excuses genuine disorder in the National Assembly, wherever it originates, or license for any citizen — related to an indicted figure or not — to disrupt the proceedings of Parliament.

That is a real standard, and this publication  holds all sides to it. But the Office of the Prime Minister’s own statement is not a defense of that standard. It is an attempt to relocate blame from the official whose security touched a citizen to the citizen who was touched, and to do so using her brother’s legal troubles as aggravating evidence against her.

The nation has the footage. It does not need a taxpayer-funded press release to tell it what it watched.

WHAT ACTUALLY WARRANTS REJECTION

The Prime Minister’s office is right about one thing: Guyana must firmly reject this level of political hostility and disrespect. It should start by rejecting it from whichever side of an encounter it actually originated — and on the record so far available to the public, that is not the side the statement names. If the Office of the Prime Minister believes otherwise, the remedy is simple and available to it: release the full, unedited footage in its possession, alongside a transcript, and let the public standard the statement invokes be applied evenly.

Short of that, this cannot and must not become the new normal either — a government official manhandling a grieving citizen in a public building, and then authoring the official record that says she did it to him. —The Board