The Spin Has Begun — Don’t Let It Work

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

The Spin Has Begun — Don’t Let It Work

The MV Barima did not sink because a captain tested positive for marijuana. It sank because an 87-year-old vessel, reportedly known to have come close to sinking before, was still in national service.

A FAMILIAR SEQUENCE

Within hours of the MV Barima going down off Guyana’s coast, the story on offer from officialdom was that the captain and a crew member had tested positive for marijuana. It arrived fast, it arrived with specificity, and it arrived before the country had any clear count of who had survived. That timing is not incidental. It is the opening move in a pattern this newsroom has now watched play out after tragedy following tragedy: introduce a human failing early, let it dominate the headline, and let the institutional failure recede into background noise.

An impaired crew member is a serious allegation. If proven, it is a crime, and it should be prosecuted as one, fully and publicly. But intoxication does not build a hull. It does not certify a vessel seaworthy. It does not decide whether an 87-year-old ferry, reportedly known to have come close to sinking on previous occasions, should still be carrying more than a hundred passengers on the Georgetown–Port Kaituma run. Those are decisions made — or not made — by people who answer to the state, not by whoever was on watch that night.

THE QUESTION THAT MATTERS

The Barima was a national ferry. It belonged to the country, was maintained — or left unmaintained — by state administration, and was permitted to sail under the authority of the Guyanese government. That means the responsibility and the accountability for its condition rest, ultimately, with the Government. Full stop.

 The fundamental question is not what was in a crew member’s bloodstream. It is why a vessel with a documented history of trouble was still certified, still scheduled, and still loaded with families and children when it went down. Every day that question goes unanswered in favour of a drug-test headline is a day the actual accountability chain — procurement, maintenance, inspection, oversight — goes unexamined.

A drug test does not explain a vessel that had, by reputable account, already come close to sinking more than once.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ACCIDENT

This is not the first time the country has been offered a human-scale distraction in place of an institutional reckoning. Twenty children died in the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory fire. Siblings drowned in a trench at Bachelor’s Adventure. A children’s home at Enmore burned. Each of these was, in its moment, described in the language of individual tragedy — bad luck, bad judgment, isolated failure. Each time, the systemic questions that actually mattered — building codes, staffing ratios, supervision protocols, infrastructure maintenance — were raised, discussed, and then allowed to fade from the news cycle before they produced reform.

That is the cover. Not a denial that something went wrong, but a redirection of exactly what went wrong — from the systems the state is responsible for, to the individuals who were merely present when those systems failed. It lets institutions describe themselves as tragic bystanders rather than as the parties whose decisions and omissions made the tragedy possible.

It is a way of appearing infallible while the machinery of governance goes unexamined.

ACCOUNTABILITY CANNOT BE SEASONAL

This newsroom’s position does not depend on which party holds office. Regardless of which government is in power, the standard must be the same: those entrusted with public safety are accountable for the conditions they allow to persist, not only for the incidents that finally expose them. A society that only demands answers in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, and then permits the file to close quietly once the news cycle moves on, should not be surprised when the next disaster arrives wearing a familiar shape.

We have insisted before, and we insist again: transparency after a tragedy is not optional, and it is not satisfied by an arrest of the people who were on board when the failure surfaced. It requires answers from those who set maintenance schedules, those who signed certifications, and those who had prior knowledge — if prior knowledge existed — that this vessel was not fit to carry the public.

WHAT CITIZENS SHOULD DEMAND

Search and rescue must remain the immediate priority, and nothing in this argument should be read as minimizing that effort or the grief of the families waiting for answers. But alongside that effort, citizens have standing to demand a parallel and public accounting: the maintenance and inspection history of the MV Barima; the identity of every official who had authority to withdraw it from service and did not; and a transparent, independent — not internal — inquiry into how a vessel with a documented history of near-disaster remained in national passenger service.

Governing for the people means answering to the people when the state’s own assets fail them. Governing over the people means managing the story instead. The spin is already in motion. Guyana’s citizens do not have to accept it.

— The Board

The Numbers: What They Say (And Don’t)

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

Accountability Journalism · Georgetown, Guyana

The Numbers: What They Say (And Don’t)

I owe Guyana’s chief statistician.  He has enlightened.  Numbers, real crackling numbers.  What happened to that other number?  The one apparently causing so much agitation that it suffers from extended constipation.  Can’t come out, cannot pass.  Many great numbers, but a vital one missing, then another.

Over a million now living in Guyana.  Growth is good.  Population growth is good for a country so rich, one lacking capacity.  Helps to close gaps, ease stresses.  A separate stress intervenes, however.  Man to man can be so unjust, as the Jamaican songster so rightly said.  All these good people counted with such diligence, yet with a difference that’s distinctive.  What were they made of: plaster or putty?  Alabaster or asbestos?  

The numbers bureau can count.  But it can’t count the kinds of people that Guyana has.  Restrained expression or subtle omission?  There was a line item about how many foreigners in the preliminary census report.  With admission about uncertainty about quantity.  I like honesty.  But what about the levels of ethnicity of the various Guyanese groups? Those contributing heavily to that million, plus 25,000 more.

It is unlikely that all of the Bureau of Numbers field workers wore highly tinted glasses.  Or, operated solely at night.  Meaning, that they couldn’t detect black from brown, and who was not so dusky but bronze.  Instead of Guyanese being presented as a rainbow, there is a bow sending an arrow to the belly: shut up and sit down.  Be invisible.  I am trying for ways to overlook the blank space in the ethnicity column of the census disclosure(s).  It could be that when questioned about their racial composition, Guyanese composed a different story, a safe one.  They identified as “Other.”  With so many Latins from the region congregating in Guyana, it would be the safest bet for Indo and Afro and Indigenous Guyanese to identify themselves as “Hispanic.”  

Whether so or not, there is this sensitivity with declaring the ethnic makeup in Guyana’s population.  If not now, then when?  If not some other time, then will it be ever? 

Another side of me ponders if this lack of ethnic specificity is a tribute to the One Guyana movement.  No separate races.  Aal ah wee is waan.  What better representation of One Guyana!

Time for a reality check.  To face the color of the local ground.  When the Bureau of Statistics is so stubbornly resistant with sharing the ethnic proportions in Guyana’s population, what’s responsible?  Study from this angle: if the traditional base of the PPP Govt had expanded to, or maintained, a comfortable numerical (percentage) edge in the local population, that stat would already be in the public domain.  A cause for quiet celebration.  Persuasive proof of electoral strength.  To put differently, a convincing source of credible electoral power.  With lesser or negligible dependence on foreign and other votes.  Ah, the mystery, more secrecy.  

My position is that the Stats Bureau’s ongoing obfuscation of ethnic numbers in Guyana is neither accidental nor due to the regular difficulties in data gathering.  Because genuine ethnic numbers, in whatever form they are, may be indicative of a narrowing of the gap between the two major ethnicities in Guyana, I think that explains the Bureau’s dilemma.  Migration, family planning, and career priorities, individually or jointly, could have reversed the statistical history that has prevailed from the inception.  Hence, the government’s anxiety about publishing the ethnic numbers/percentages.  To repeat: if old ethnic numbers held, they would be old news.  If a sea change occurred, that explains the withholding.  Nothing to write home about.

Last, the Bureau’s hands are tied.  There’s a desire to complete that public gap in its work, and get on with some of its other work.  But orders must be followed.  Amid exciting numbers, the poverty rate is another unknown. 

Where does that stand?  What does it say?  About Guyanese existence, standards, amidst a big, oil boom

Mr. Baksh, the Tomfoolery Must Stop

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL RESPONSE

Mr. Baksh, the Tomfoolery Must Stop

A response to Nazim Baksh’s “Forget the Noise: President Ali’s land revolution is already underway,” Guyana Chronicle, July 19, 2026

Nazim Baksh wants the country to “turn the page” on President Irfaan Ali’s Long Creek farm. He wants us to forget the noise. He asks Guyanese to instead take a guided tour through Dutch plantations, Jamaican land settlement acts, Zimbabwean collapse, South African redistribution failure, and Singaporean public housing triumph — a journey spanning four centuries and five countries — all to arrive nowhere near the actual question on the table.

That question is simple. Does a sitting president hold an undisclosed landholding of roughly 155 acres at Long Creek, under a lease naming “Mohamed Ali” rather than Irfaan Ali, and if so, why has neither the fact nor the discrepancy been addressed?

Mr. Baksh does not answer that question. He does not raise it. He does not acknowledge it exists. Instead he changes the subject with such scale and confidence that the maneuver itself becomes the story.

THE TACTIC, NAMED PLAINLY

This is deflection by magnitude. Baksh’s argument, stripped of its historical scaffolding, runs: the President has a large and admirable housing programme, therefore scrutiny of his personal land-holding is a “strange obsession.” Sixty thousand house-lot titles are invoked as a kind of moral offset — proof, apparently, that the public should stop asking what the President himself holds and how he holds it.

This is not analysis. It is substitution. A government’s public housing record and a president’s private land-holding are two entirely different accountability questions, and no volume of achievement on the first settles the second. Guyanese citizens are capable of holding both thoughts at once: that a housing programme can be real and substantial, and that a president’s undisclosed assets still warrant an answer.

Baksh’s column asks readers to trade the second question for the first, as though accountability were a zero-sum ledger.

Note, too, what the column does not do. It does not dispute the satellite acreage measurements. It does not address the 2011 State Lands lease — File No. 411123/688, Lease No. A 23480 — naming Bharrat Jagdeo as Lessor and “Mohamed Ali” as Lessee for Lots 33 and 35 at Long Creek, totalling 20.338 acres per GL&SC Plan No. 50318. It does not explain the name discrepancy. It does not engage Christopher Ram’s call for a Commission of Inquiry. On every point of documented fact, the column is silent. It is 1,000 words of silence dressed as historical erudition.

WHAT THE DOCUMENTS ACTUALLY SHOW

The record, independent of Mr. Baksh’s detour through Singapore’s Housing Development Board, is this:

  • A duplicate 2011 State Lands lease exists, naming Bharrat Jagdeo as Lessor and a lessee identified as “Mohamed Ali.”
  • The leased parcels, Lots 33 and 35, total 20.338 acres by GL&SC’s own plan.
  • Satellite polygon tracing of the broader Long Creek holding measures closer to 155 acres — a figure far exceeding what has been publicly acknowledged.
  • The identity question — whether “Mohamed Ali” is the President, a relation, or an unrelated party using a similar name — has never been answered on the record, by the President or by his office.

These are not matters of colonial history or comparative land policy. They are matters of a signature on a lease, a name that does or does not match, and an acreage that does or does not add up. They are answerable this week, with documents that already exist, by people who already hold them.

TURN THE PAGE TO WHAT, EXACTLY?

Baksh closes by casting President Ali as the architect of “the most ambitious land distribution programme in this nation’s post-independence history.” Perhaps so. But architects of public land programmes are not thereby exempted from disclosing their own. If anything, the scale of the public housing ambition makes the private landholding question more urgent, not less — a government asking citizens to trust it with the survey and title of 20,000 acres of new land should have no difficulty explaining 20 of its own.

The tomfoolery is not the public’s scrutiny. It is the columnist’s insistence that scrutiny be abandoned in favour of a world tour.

Baksh had an opportunity to address the lease, the name, and the acreage. He chose Zimbabwe instead.

We will not forget the noise. We will keep asking the only questions that matter: whose name is on the lease, how many acres does it actually cover, and why, after all this time, has the President’s office still not said.

— The Board

Gouveia’s “Model Farm” Endorsement Is a Conflict the PSC Chairman Cannot Explain Away

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

Gouveia’s “Model Farm” Endorsement Is a Conflict the PSC Chairman Cannot Explain Away

Source: PSC Chairman Gerald Gouveia Jr., in an invited comment to Kiskadee Watch.

The Private Sector Commission exists to represent the interests of Guyanese business — competitive business, operating on a level field, subject to the same rules of land access, financing, and regulatory scrutiny as everyone else. That is the entire premise of its institutional legitimacy. So when its Chairman, Gerald Gouveia Jr., told Kiskadee Watch that President Ali’s Long Creek operation “seems to be quite a model farm in terms of using every aspect of agriculture in one location,” he did not offer neutral commentary. He put the Commission on record endorsing an enterprise that no other agricultural entrepreneur in Guyana could replicate — and in doing so, he exposed the PSC to a conflict it has not addressed.

An endorsement built on media reports, not inspection

Gouveia was direct about his source material: his understanding, he said, is “based largely on media reports,” and beyond the President’s own declarations to the Integrity Commission, “all I’m seeing is what you guys are posting in the news.” That is a significant admission. The Chairman of the country’s premier private-sector body assessed a sitting president’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural enterprise as a “model” — a term with real reputational weight — without a site visit, without reviewing land records, and without any financing disclosure in hand.

An industry body vouching for a business’s excellence on that basis is not doing due diligence. It is amplifying a narrative. The distinction is not cosmetic: due diligence protects the Commission’s credibility; amplification spends it.

The competition problem the Chairman cannot address

Set aside ownership and financing questions for a moment and look only at the operating conditions. Reporting on the Long Creek property has described infrastructure — a maintained access road, electricity distribution — reaching a privately held agricultural enterprise in a way that has drawn public questions from residents of neighbouring communities who lack the same services. No comparably resourced private farm in Guyana operates with that kind of guaranteed infrastructural backbone arriving alongside it, free of the years-long bureaucratic grind that ordinary agricultural investors face to get a road built or a line run.

That is not a level field. It is the textbook definition of an uncompetitive advantage — one participant in a market receiving state-adjacent inputs unavailable to rivals. When the head of the body representing private enterprise praises the output of an enterprise operating under those conditions, without naming the disparity, he is not defending competitive business. He is normalizing its absence.

The deflection to the Integrity Commission doesn’t hold

Gouveia’s answer to questions about the President’s assets was to point elsewhere: “The President has said he has declared everything to them, so they would have the evidence.” This is a non-answer dressed as an answer. The Integrity Commission’s declarations are not public. Gouveia has not seen them. He is vouching for the existence of evidence he has never examined, from a body that has never released it, in defense of an arrangement his own Commission has not investigated.

That is not accountability — it is one unverified assurance propping up another.

It is also worth noting what surrounds Gouveia’s comment. The two agencies with direct, verifiable jurisdiction over the facts he is deferring on — the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency — have gone silent.

GLSC’s CEO was unavailable; two senior land officers declined to speak on the record. The EPA’s Executive Director asked that questions be submitted in writing and did not return prior calls. These are the bodies that could actually confirm or deny the lease terms, the land classification, and the environmental approvals.

Their silence is the story. Gouveia’s “model farm” line fills that silence with praise instead of pressure.

Why this is untenable for an entrepreneur

The PSC Chairman is, by definition, a businessman first. His institutional role is to protect the conditions that let Guyanese entrepreneurs compete on merit — access to capital, land, and infrastructure without political preference determining who gets there first##

 Praising an enterprise that appears to sit outside those constraints, without demanding the same transparency he would expect any member business to produce for a bank, a regulator, or an investor, is not a defensible position for someone occupying that chair. It either means he did not apply the standard his own institution exists to enforce, or he applied a different standard because of who owns the farm. Neither is a comfortable answer, and both deserve to be put to him directly — on the record, not through a spokesperson.

What would resolve it

Gouveia does not need to retract admiration for the agricultural output. He needs to answer a narrower question: did the PSC examine — or does it have any intention of examining — whether the farm’s land access, infrastructure, and financing were obtained through processes available to any Guyanese entrepreneur, or through channels that only a sitting president could access?

Until that question is answered, the “model farm” label functions less as an assessment of agricultural merit and more as institutional cover for an arrangement ordinary competitors could never obtain — offered by the one body in the country whose job is to notice the difference.

— The Board

MV Barima: There Are Days Like These

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ Accountability Journalism ◊ Georgetown, Guyana

MV Barima: There Are Days Like These

OPINION BY: GHK LALL- July 2026

Everything comes to a pause.  Writings already sent suspended.  There is only one development to share a word about: the MV Barima.  one word, and a whole barrel of pain.  A disaster greeting long before the sun showed its face on a Sunday.  Of all days, a Sunday.  The hopes and prayers started with the first words of the 07:30 Mass at the Brickdam Cathedral.  So many found, embraced, and cheered.  So many still missing, leaving an empty space.  Amid the manmade disasters on land in Guyana, there is this kind of grim disaster on the waters.  The numbers are not looking too inspiring.  The bells toll.

I read of 116 aboard.  Then it was 133, when the crew was counted.  Approximately eight hours after the news broke, 70 were rescued and close to that number still not in hand.  A dismal consideration when only adults are involved.  Children numbered among those onboard that now capsized ferry.  A terrible new dimension added.  My hope, my wish, my prayer, is that all are saved.  Not one soul is lost.  The odds of that happening are daunting.  Ten miles from shore is almost as far as the other end of the world.  Nevertheless, rescue operations are in full motion.  The government has mobilized.  Good.  The national leadership is engaged and alert.  Better.

Now is not the time to lose a minute debating the state of new helicopters.  Nor to speculate about the number of lifejackets.  Currently, there is a search and rescue operation going on, and that is where all eyes should be fixed.  It’s where all Guyanese hearts should be committed.  Every hour that passes is an hour that cannot be recovered.  Reality that is hard and unforgiving creeps forward remorselessly.  Another hour lost could mean that one more was lost.  Too late to make it through the day for a mother, or a father, maybe a grandmother or a child.  I saw some pictures and they were of very young children, some not close to 10, as yet.

It should emphasize to every Guyanese how fragile life could be.  It does so to me.  What’s taken as routine goes overboard and sinks in a heartbeat.  Quite literally.  In a flash, life races past the eye.  Though far away and out of harm’s way, those are the images that register.  Having been near to shattering disaster more than once, there is some idea of the shock that must have jarred many out of their sleep.  A passenger boat slammed by a force of nature, a battering ram wall of water.  Men, women, and children left naked and imperiled before the elements at their rawest.

I am hoping for two things to follow beyond this prayer dripping from my pen.    They are the thoughts that rise, will not go away.  The first is that the fewest are lost; and that search and rescue do not give way to salvage and retrieve.  Indeed, like that ancient sage of a scribbler said: there is a time for laughing, and there is a time for mourning.  Even if only a handful never makes it back, it is still one handful too many.  However tiny. 

And whatever the number that is not found, there is still that tragedy to be faced by family and community: lost at sea.  Gone to the depths.  Lack of closure adds crisis to family calamity.

The second and final thought is that the people of this young country—from young leader(s) to largely younger citizenry to a place rich with young visions that still sparkle-arrive at a clear and deep appreciation of what is needed to make neighbor and others better.  There is too much bickering and cursing.  There is too much disagreeing, on the one hand, and too much demonizing and damning, on the other.  There is a storehouse of riches, but of real riches there is too much poorness.  In counting the hours,

I am keeping vigil, counting the numbers being picked up, flashing across the screens.  Let there be as many as could be.

Four Months Late: The Digital ID Rollout and the Governance of Afterthought

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ EDITORIAL

Four Late: The Digital ID Rollout and the Governance of Afterthought

JULY 2026

On March 31, 2026, Prime Minister Brigadier (Ret’d) Mark Phillips signed the Commencement Order that brought the Digital Identity Card Act 19 of 2023 into full force. The Act itself had been passed by Parliament in August 2023 — two and a half years earlier. On July 18, 2026, nearly four months after commencement, the Office of the Prime Minister’s Digital Identity Card Registry found it necessary to issue formal guidance to banks, employers, and public bodies explaining which number on the card they are legally required to use to identify a citizen.

That gap — two and a half years from passage to commencement, and a further four months from commencement to basic operational guidance — is not a footnote. It is the story.

What Should Have Been Settled Before Day One

The guidance itself is not complicated. The GUIN, for citizens, and the RIDN, for eligible non-citizen residents, are the permanent identifiers assigned for life.        The Document Number is a travel reference that changes with every renewal. The Card Access Number is a chip-level technical value that should never be used to identify anyone. This is not a discovery. It is card design 101, the kind of distinction that any institution issuing a national identity credential must resolve, communicate, and train its counterpart institutions on before a single card reaches a citizen’s hand — not four months after the fact, and not in response to confusion already circulating in bank branches and payroll departments across the country.

 

The sequencing here matters. Section 6(1) of the Act makes the card the lawful standard of identification for any business conducted with a public body and or private entity in Guyana That provision took effect on March 31. Every bank, insurance company, employer, and government office that has processed a Digital Identity Card since that date has been operating, potentially, on inconsistent internal guidance — some recording the Document Number as a permanent identifier, a number the registry itself confirms changes with every reissue. The Registry’s own rationale for the July guidance is an admission of exactly this exposure: institutions relying on the wrong number, it says, risk “losing continuity of records or misidentifying cardholders over time.”

A single-page reference card distributed to every bank compliance officer and HR department on commencement day would have cost nothing and prevented four months of exactly the confusion the Registry is now moving to correct.

A Familiar Pattern, Not an Isolated Lapse

This publication has tracked this administration’s approach to major institutional rollouts before, and the pattern recurring here is not new: legislation is passed, a commencement date is set with fanfare, and the operational architecture that ordinary citizens and private-sector compliance officers actually need — reference guides, standardized onboarding materials, coordinated communication with regulated industries — arrives later, piecemeal, and usually only once the absence of that architecture has already generated confusion, risk, or complaint.

  The Digital Identity Card project adds a further complication that deserves its own scrutiny: the 2023 Data Protection Act, which legal commentary has already flagged as intrinsically linked to DICA’s own legality, remains uncommenced. A national identity system built to eventually govern financial, medical, and biometric data has been placed into full legal force for identification purposes while the statute meant to govern the protection of that same data sits idle.

None of this is to say the Digital Identity Card project lacks merit. A single, life-long identifier that survives card renewal is a genuine improvement over the fragmented identification landscape it replaces. The concept is sound. What is absent is foresight in the execution — the discipline of anticipating, before commencement, what the regulated institutions of this country would need to know on day one, rather than assembling that guidance reactively once gaps in practice have already taken root.

The Question the Registry’s Notice Does Not Answer

The Registry’s guidance does not say how many institutions have, over the past four months, recorded the wrong number as a permanent identifier, nor what remediation — if any — is planned for records already corrupted by that error. It does not address whether the Data Protection Act’s continued dormancy affects the legal footing of the data now being collected under DICA. And it does not explain why a Commencement Order signed in March could not have been paired, on the same day, with the identical guidance now issued in July.

Guyana’s citizens and the private institutions that serve them deserve a government that anticipates the operational consequences of its own legislation before those consequences become public confusion requiring public correction

“We will cross that bridge when we get there” is not a policy posture befitting a national identity system that Section 6(1) now makes mandatory for daily life. It is an admission that the bridge was never built in the first place.

— The Board

INVESTIGATION · THE RESOURCE CURSE HAS ARRIVED,OF ALL PLACES ,ON A FARM

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  ·  GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

INVESTIGATION · THE RESOURCE CURSE HAS ARRIVED,OF ALL PLACES ,ON A FARM

20.338 Acres: What the Lease Document Actually Shows

A single instrument of state, issued eight years in the name Mohamed Ali,before Irfaan Ali became president, is now the only verified fact anchoring a controversy his own government says cannot be independently checked.

By Editor, The 592 Guardian  ·  Part I of a Series

The document at the centre of the Long Creek farm controversy is, on its face, unremarkable. It is a lease. It bears a file number, a plan number, a surveyor’s signature, and two names: the Lessor and the Lessee. It says nothing about a ranch, a poultry operation, or a $5 billion valuation. It says nothing about who paid for what came after. What it says, precisely, is this: on terms issued under the State Lands Act, the State of Guyana leased 20.338 acres at Long Creek to a private citizen named Mohamed Ali. That citizen is now the President of the Republic. Everything else in this controversy — the size of the operation today, the financing behind it, whether public resources were used to build it out — sits outside what this document can tell us. This is where the reporting starts: with what is actually on paper, and with the considerable distance between that and what is publicly visible on the ground at Long Creek.

THE INSTRUMENT

The lease is filed under File No. 411123/688 and carries Lease No. A 23480, issued pursuant to Section 3(b) of the State Lands Act, Chapter 62:01. The Lessor is recorded as then-President Bharrat Jagdeo, acting on behalf of the State of Guyana. The Lessee is recorded as Mohamed Ali, holder of Passport No. R028239. The land comprises two lots on the western side of the Soesdyke-Linden Highway, on the left bank of the Haimaruni River — the area known locally as Long Creek, in the County of Demerara.

File No.

 411123/688
Lease No.cc#

 A 23480
Statutory basis

 Section 3(b), State Lands Act, Cap. 62:01
Lessor

 The State of Guyana (then-President Bharrat Jagdeo)
Lessee

 Mohamed Ali (Passport No. R028239)
Location

 West side, Soesdyke-Linden Highway; Left Bank Haimaruni River (Long Creek), Demerara
Lot 33

 9.733 acres
Lot 35

 10.605 acres
Total leased area

 20.338 acres
Survey reference

 GL&SC Plan No. 50318, R. Looknauth, Sworn Land Surveyor, 2 September 2011

Two things follow directly from the document and require no further interpretation. First, the leasehold predates the Ali presidency by close to a decade — the survey plan underlying it is dated 2011, and the lease was issued under the Jagdeo administration, years before Irfaan Ali held national office. Second, the area leased under this instrument is 20.338 acres. Neither of these facts is in dispute. Both are worth stating plainly before the more contested figures enter the record.

THE GAP: TWENTY ACRES, OR A HUNDRED AND FIFTY

Set against the lease figure, the scale of what the public has been shown at Long Creek today is difficult to reconcile. Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has publicly described the operation as a roughly 150-acre private ranch, valuing the development at more than $5 billion. This publication’s own satellite polygon trace of the current footprint returns a broadly similar figure — in the neighbourhood of 155 acres. Both estimates sit far outside the 20.338 acres described in the 2011 survey and the lease issued from it.

This is the central arithmetic problem of the Long Creek story, and it is a documentary problem before it is a political one. Somewhere between a State lease for just over 20 acres and a visible operation covering roughly seven times that area, there is a paper trail — further leases, a purchase, a transfer, an allocation under a different instrument, or some combination. That trail has not been made public. This is not an allegation that anything unlawful occurred; it is a statement of what remains undocumented. The 592 Guardian is not in a position, on the evidence presently available, to say how the acreage grew. We are in a position to say that it did, and that the instrument establishing the first 20.338 acres is, at this writing, the only piece of that trail on the public record.

WHAT THE PRESIDENT HAS SAID, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT RESOLVE 

President Ali’s public position, offered in a video statement and in subsequent remarks, is that he acquired the property before assuming the presidency, that its development has been funded through loans, and that reported figures on the farm’s size and value are incorrect. Each of these is a claim capable, in principle, of documentary support: a loan is a matter of record between a borrower and a lender; a disputed acreage figure is a matter of survey. Neither has been supported publicly with the underlying instrument. The President has not named the lending institution or institutions, disclosed the date or terms of the loans, indicated what collateral, if any, was pledged, or produced a survey contradicting the figures now in wide circulation. Until one or more of these is produced, the President’s account and the publicly visible facts remain in the same posture: asserted, not demonstrated.

THE VERIFICATION THE PRESIDENT CITES — AND WHY IT CANNOT HAPPEN

The most consequential sentence in President Ali’s public defence is also the one that undercuts itself on a plain reading of the law. Responding to the allegations, the President said that his asset acquisitions and the source of the funds used for them “are capable of verification through the relevant financial and regulatory records,” and that he has, as required by law, made the appropriate declarations to the Integrity Commission.

The body he is pointing to as proof is, by statute, the one body in Guyana legally forbidden from telling the public what it knows.

Under the Integrity Commission Act, Chapter 26:01, the Commission operates under a strict statutory duty of confidentiality. It is prohibited from disclosing the contents of any declaration or assessment it holds. This is not a discretionary practice or an institutional habit; it is the law under which the Commission is constituted. The consequence is direct: the “verification” the President has invited the public to seek is, by his own government’s statute, unavailable to that public. A journalist, an opposition MP, or an ordinary citizen cannot obtain the Commission’s file on the President’s declared assets, however filed and complete that file may be. The President’s statement is true and beside the point in the same breath — the records may well exist and say everything he claims. No one outside the Commission is permitted to know.

ON THE RECORD: TWO INSTITUTIONAL VOICES, ONE DIAGNOSIS

This is not solely The 592 Guardian’s reading of the statute. Senior Counsel Ralph Ramkarran, former Speaker of the National Assembly, has renewed a call for reform he has been making since at least 2012 — a call that was, by his own account, a factor in his departure from the People’s Progressive Party after more than five decades of membership. Ramkarran has pointed to jurisdictions where senior officials’ financial declarations are public by law, and to the United States’ Ethics in Government Act as a model requiring presidential financial disclosure, arguing that Guyana’s growing oil-financed budgets have expanded the opportunities for the very conflicts its disclosure regime is unable to surface.

APNU Member of Parliament Dr. Terrence Campbell has gone further, stating that he has drafted an amendment to the Integrity Commission Act that would make certain aspects of high officials’ declarations public, and calling on parliamentary party leaders, the President, and Cabinet to voluntarily release summary declarations for 2025 in the interim, ahead of any legislative change. Separately, Transparency International Guyana has taken the unusual step of ceding control of any inquiry into the Long Creek matter to international TI chapters and independent outside experts — an implicit acknowledgment that the local chapter does not consider itself positioned to investigate credibly on its own.

Taken together, a former Speaker of the governing party’s own political lineage, an opposition parliamentarian with a drafted bill in hand, and the country’s leading anti-corruption watchdog are converging on the same diagnosis from different directions: the law as written cannot produce the verification the President says is available.

WHAT THIS REPORT ESTABLISHES, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT

In the interest of the legal defensibility this news-media holds itself to, we state plainly what this first instalment does and does not claim.

Established, from the primary document: a 20.338-acre lease over Lots 33 and 35 at Long Creek was issued to Mohamed Ali under the Jagdeo administration, under Section 3(b) of the State Lands Act, years before he became President. The statutory confidentiality provision of the Integrity Commission Act, Cap. 26:01, means the Commission cannot legally confirm or disclose the contents of any declaration the President has filed.

Not yet established: how the operative footprint at Long Creek grew from 20.338 leased acres to the roughly 150-to-155 acres now visible; the identity of the lender or lenders behind the President’s stated “bank loans,” their terms, dates, or collateral; and whether any public infrastructure was extended to the property outside the terms available to other applicants. These are the subjects of Part II of this series.

The 592 Guardian is requesting, on the record, that the Office of the President, the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, and the Integrity Commission each provide the underlying instruments — the further lease or transfer documents accounting for the acreage beyond the original 20.338, and the loan instruments referenced in the President’s public statement — or state on the record why they will not. We will publish any response in full.

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— The Board, The 592 Guardian

The Rotor Wing Question

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EDITORIAL · AVIATION & REGULATORY ACCOUNTABILITY

The Rotor Wing Question

What ASL’s closure actually exposes about the state of regulatory capacity in Guyana’s aviation sector

The 592 Guardian  |  July, 2026

Air Services Limited says it is closing its rotor wing division after seven years spent chasing a helicopter Air Operator Certificate it says the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority never delivered in good faith. The company that opened Guyana’s interior to commercial aviation is walking away from the aircraft type that, more than any other, keeps that interior connected.

That claim deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. It also deserves to be tested against the record, because the record complicates it considerably. This is not, as some public commentary has already framed it, a clean story of an entrenched pioneer strangled by an opaque regulator to clear room for a favoured rival. There is no evidence in the public record of a competitor benefiting from ASL’s exit, and none of a personal or financial relationship steering GCAA’s decisions. What the record does show is two institutions, each with a documented problem, colliding in public — and a genuine transparency gap sitting underneath both.

WHAT ASL SAYS

In its Tuesday statement, ASL described the seven-year AOC process as “a cycle of bureaucratic obstruction” rather than a collaborative path to compliance. The company, which has operated in Guyana for over fifty years and holds AOC No. 1 as the country’s first certificated operator, framed the closure as a loss to hinterland communities for whom air transport is not a convenience but a lifeline. It argued that certification and personnel-licensing procedures remain unnecessarily cumbersome at a moment of rapid national economic expansion, and it thanked GCAA for its role in the industry’s safety record even as it criticised the process.

When regulatory frameworks become so rigid that they stifle long-standing, reputable operators rather than guiding them toward compliance, it is the Guyanese people who suffer.— Air Services Limited, closure statement

That is a serious allegation from a serious operator, and it should not be dismissed. But it also does not arrive in a vacuum. It lands amid a months-long, increasingly public dispute between ASL and GCAA that the closure statement does not mention directly.

THE RECORD GCAA POINTS TO

In February, an ASL Cessna 208 Caravan overran onto an unprepared section of the Matthews Ridge airstrip. GCAA subsequently suspended flights to Matthews Ridge and restricted ASL’s pilots, citing its statutory mandate under the Civil Aviation Act 2018, which authorises the Director General to take immediate action, including suspending licences, when safety may be compromised, subject to due process. ASL’s chairman, Captain Ahamad Mazahar Ally, has accused Director General Egbert Field of unfairly targeting the company, and the company’s attorney has argued the restrictions rested on unsubstantiated reports rather than a formal investigation, with legal action reportedly under consideration.

This is not the first documented friction between the two. In December 2022, GCAA grounded an ASL Bell 206 helicopter after inspectors found the aircraft was fitted with rotor blades that were not approved parts — and, more troubling, found maintenance being prepared on the aircraft using the same unapproved blades after ASL had already been notified to correct the defect. Whether that history is directly relevant to the AOC delay is not established in the public record. But it is part of the factual backdrop against which “seven years of pure bureaucracy” has to be weighed, and a responsible accounting of this dispute cannot leave it out.

THE INSTITUTIONAL WEAKNESS THAT IS ACTUALLY DOCUMENTED

The strongest evidence of systemic regulatory weakness in Guyana’s aviation sector right now does not come from the ASL dispute at all. It comes from the investigation into the December 2023 crash of a Guyana Defence Force Bell 412 EPi helicopter, which found that GCAA lacked a flight operations inspector current on that aircraft type — a direct gap in regulatory surveillance capacity for a major helicopter type in national service. That finding points toward under-resourcing and thin technical bench strength at the regulator, not toward favouritism. It is also far more concretely damning than anything yet substantiated in the ASL matter, and it has received comparatively little sustained scrutiny.

Read together, the two threads suggest a regulator stretched by the same aviation boom that Tuesday’s GCAA panel at the World Trade Centre spent an afternoon celebrating. Cargo volumes have roughly doubled since 2020. New routes and operators are entering the market. If GCAA does not have enough current inspectors to keep pace with the fleet it already oversees, an AOC backlog stretching into years is a plausible institutional symptom — not proof of a scheme, but not proof of a clean process either.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY ACTUALLY REQUIRES HERE

The 592 Guardian does not have evidence to support claims of nepotism or a deliberately rigged process, and we are not going to manufacture a conspiracy where the record shows something more mundane and, in its own way, more serious: an operator with a documented compliance history disputing a regulator with a documented capacity gap, in the absence of any visible, published standard either side can be held to.

That absence is the actual story, and it is a legitimate one. Guyana has no published AOC processing timeline or service-level benchmark that a carrier or the public can point to. There is no visible appeal or independent review mechanism for licensing disputes short of litigation — which is precisely where this one may now be headed. And there is no public accounting of GCAA’s inspector staffing relative to the fleet types it is required to certify and surveil, despite one such gap already being confirmed in a fatal-crash investigation.

Three things would resolve more than a public statement war ever will. First, GCAA should publish the AOC processing history for ASL’s rotorcraft application — dates, deficiencies cited, and ASL’s responses — so the seven-year timeline can be assessed against fact rather than characterisation. Second, the Ministry of Public Works, which holds sectoral oversight, should commission an independent review of GCAA’s inspector staffing against its current certification and surveillance obligations, given the gap already identified in the GDF crash report. Third, GCAA should adopt and publish a standard AOC processing timeline with defined escalation and appeal steps, so that no future operator — and no future regulator — is left relitigating a licensing dispute in the press.

Guyana’s aviation sector is expanding faster than almost any other part of its economy. That growth will not be secured by picking a side in a dispute the public record does not yet allow anyone to settle. It will be secured by making the rules the same, visible, and enforced consistently for everyone flying in Guyanese skies — the fifty-year pioneer and the newest entrant alike.

The 592 Guardian sought comment from GCAA on the specifics raised in this editorial. This article will be updated with any response received

A Farm, a Felony -Guyana’s Relativity Theory

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA JULY 2026

A Farm, a Felony -Guyana’s Relativity Theory

OPINION BY: GHK LALL 

Five years are an eternity.  Cold-blooded murder.  A trail quickly gone cold.  Cold trail or calculated coverup?  A family left with the chill of their tears.  There was the uneasy feeling that missing links ought not to be.  What linkages, missing or not, and why?  One thing was certain: the whole story, the true story, of the Fagundes (Paper Shorts) execution was not forthcoming.  Then another: it shouldn’t be that unsolvable.  And still another: operation of law, application of law, enforcement grittiness and energy, and blindfolded justice were shadows of themselves.  Now, I follow this trail of untimely death, the passage of time, and another untimely development: the discovery of a farm.

What does a farm have to do with a heinous felony?  One that spilled its blood all over Guyanese consciousness. 

Neither a body nor any telltale splatter of blood was found on the farm.  Both savaged the peace and curdled on the pavement of the aptly named Main Street.  Yet, when I think of this, the question is why is a farm and many felonies coming up close to one another?  In other words, no mention of a farm, no mention of any felony.  Strange country, this Guyana is.  For five years, silence reigned. 

But like Banquo’s ghost in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, so also the ghost of Mr. Paper Shorts wouldn’t remain still.  The timing is immaculate.  Follow me.  If pain is added to the Fagundes family, apologies.  But no eggs cracked, no scrambled eggs.  Perhaps, unscrambled fits better.

Murder occurred, stayed underground for five long, punishing years.  Murder took less than five short days to be exhumed.  Maybe, with wheels spinning furiously, it was five hours, if not five minutes.  For a murder to be retrieved from the deepfreeze and paraded before the Guyanese public.  When developments are too pat, that’s when I rock back, reel in any slack, and work to crack the code.  From American football, I share sporting folklore: the best offense is an aggressive defense.  Attempting to takedown inspires greater efforts at returning the favor -twofold, threefold, manifold.  The development in the shadow of America’s Fourth of July ecstasies was of a placid farm, babbling brooks, clandestine nooks and crannies, and then Gotterdammerung.  A blitzkrieg: murder, Maimi Vice equivalents, more mystery.

In a jiffy, there’s a fluent, compelling story for citizens.  A suspect resurrected.  A circle of suspected involved cornered and corralled.  Before the farm, there was nobody.  Immediately after the farm discovery, there are more warm bodies than a submerged submarine surfacing.  This has all the precision timing of a well-made Swiss watch.  Swiss or Guyanese, that’s my thrust.  What I think, where I stand.  The clock ticks.  It also stinks.  Uncanny how after the first leaf and stone of that farm were arrayed in public display, that a murder was dug up and similarly displayed.  Where suspects only existed under the radar in earlier times, in these stormy times, those same suspects now participate in primetime presentations.

In all this, the PPP Govt’s well-refined art form is exhibited.  What works for it, but what also reveals.  When the PPP Govt has no defense, deflection becomes its flaming sword.  Deflection follows denial and precedes damnation.  Are all those not unfolding in tight formation?  In efforts at locating some elusive credibility.  What are the final objectives: to nail an opponent and be done with an inconvenience, an irrepressible, insoluble nuisance?  When the law takes forever to find its feet in Guyana, then lawlessness is a marathon runner.  For when there is in inversion of justice, what law?  When the timeline of a murder is seemingly tampered with, then whither honesty?  I behold the PPP Govt’s abandonment of all interests in, all claims to, all pretensions at, morality.  Cocooned in the pile of obscenity is a travesty.  Of justice.  Of conscience.  In toto, Guyanese are dealing with more than a crisis of circumstances combining.  They are living with a crisis in governance.  Why was this murder allowed to fester restlessly for five years?  And only now given oxygen?  

I wish I could hold a brief, stand in defense, for all parties in this deformity.  I cannot.  I hear and read.  I see, think, and speak.

Guests, Not Gods: The Pulpit’s Duty When Power Walks In

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THE 592 GUARDIAN

EDITORIAL

Guests, Not Gods: The Pulpit’s Duty When Power Walks In

On the moral cowardice of houses of worship that trade the altar for access — and go silent when the powerful owe the nation an answer

Every sacred place in Guyana must welcome every soul that enters it — dharmic, Islamic, ecclesiastic, Christian, atheist, agnostic, and yes, politician. No one is irredeemable, and no threshold of a temple, mandir, mosque, or church should ever be barred to the vilest trickster who walks through it seeking grace. That is not in dispute, and this news outlet does not dispute it. But there is a canyon of difference between welcoming a politician and crowning him. Between offering a seat and surrendering the pulpit. Between letting a man pray, and letting him perform.

Politicians who enter a sacred space come as guests. They take their place as guests. They pray as guests, if they are up to it. That is the entirety of their entitlement, and it is a generous one. No honest man or woman of faith needs a political operator co-opting his most public moment with God — needs him processed to the front, handed the microphone, permitted to turn worship into stagecraft. 

When a man of manufactured piety proselytises from the altar, that is not communion. That is perversion of the sanctuary, dressed in the borrowed vestments of the sacred.

And yet, across Guyana’s houses of worship, we have watched a different arrangement take hold: preachers who jump and gyrate for whichever politician has grinding, gyrating power over the poor. Ministers who bow before manmade gods dressed as public servants. Men and women who preen behind the cloth while a self-made deity preens beside them at the pulpit rail. 

Which preacher of true moral substance consents to such a display? Which one is so low as to stoop lower still, for a reward, a recognition, an elevation? None who deserve the collar.

That, this publication has already said, immovably and non-negotiably. But there is a second corruption, quieter than the first and just as grave: the silence of the sanctuary when the politician it just finished garlanding owes the country an answer he has not given. We are not accusing the President of misleading the nation. 

We are asking, as any citizen of a republic is entitled to ask, to see the documents. That is the whole of the demand — production, not presumption of guilt. It is the most modest request accountability journalism can make of executive power, and it is the one so many of Guyana’s well-endowed houses of moral instruction have found no cause to echo. Not one word. Not from the pulpits that had a president in their midst weeks earlier, hands raised, blessed and blessing. The same institutions that would summon righteous fury over a private citizen’s minor indiscretion have found, in the face of an unresolved public question involving the nation’s highest office, nothing to say at all.

That silence is not neutrality. Neutrality does not require gyrating to a politician’s music one Sunday and forgetting his name the next, when accountability comes calling. 

This is something else — a free pass extended in advance, purchased with proximity, paid for in access to the microphone, the front pew, the photograph shaking hands beside the altar. 

An insane proliferation of politics and religion has entrenched itself in Guyana, and the morally righteous have proven only too accommodating with the accolades.                            

They have overlooked, conveniently and at length, the untenable position a sitting president has put himself into.

Guyana is a land now blessed with wealth it did not have a decade ago, and still crippled, perpetually, by the burdens of poverty for so many who live in it. That contradiction is precisely the terrain on which the prophetic voice of religion is supposed to stand — grinding gyrating politicians who grind the poor to dust are exactly who the pulpit exists to confront, not court. 

A preacher who will not ask a basic question of the powerful because the powerful filled his stadium last month has already answered, in practice, whose gospel he actually preaches.

Politicians have their place. They must either know it, or be put to it. Welcome, brother — take a seat. Listen and learn about humility, about sincerity, about banishing hypocrisy, about the plight of the poor and how much they hurt in a land so rich. But do not hand him the pulpit. And when he leaves the sanctuary and re-enters public life owing the public an answer, do not pretend the two are unconnected.

Ask for the documents. That is not persecution. That is the last honest thing left for a house of God to do.

— The Board