Freddie Kissoon’s Farm Alibi: When “PR” Becomes a Euphemism for Evasion

/0 Comments/in , /by

 THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦EDITORIAL RESPONSE

Freddie Kissoon’s Farm Alibi: When “PR” Becomes a Euphemism for Evasion

By the Editor  |  The 592 Guardian  |  July , 2026

Freddie Kissoon has produced, in “The president adequately farmed out his farm explanation,” not analysis but absolution.                                            It is worth reading closely, because it reveals more about the columnist’s method than about the controversy he claims to settle.

The tell is in his own headline. Kissoon does not argue that Ali answered the substantive questions raised about the Long Creek estate. He argues that Ali “got his PR right.” That is not a defense of the President’s conduct — it is a review of his messaging. Kissoon has, in effect, graded a performance and called it a verdict.

What Ali actually said — and didn’t.

By Kissoon’s own admission, the President’s account came without hard particulars. Ali claimed Mohamed had “exaggerated the size of the farm” by more than double its actual acreage, but did not state the actual acreage or name the financial institutions holding the loans he referenced. Ali had previously said, through a statement, that he was “willing to make” the alleged blackmail communications “public” for independent scrutiny — a commitment his Thursday address did not honor. Instead of the full texts, videos, or recordings, he offered only a paraphrased, vague fragment of a single message. Opposition figures have since published a list of fourteen direct questions — among them the acreage and acquisition dates — that remain unanswered.

Kissoon calls this “context.” A more precise word is omission.

The 140-acre sleight of hand.

Kissoon anchors his entire minimization (“is that a large farm?”) on a figure — 140 acres — that he attributes to “the private press,” without specifying which outlet or its methodology. This is worth pausing on, because it is doing real argumentative work: it lets Kissoon dismiss the story as a fuss over nothing.

But independent satellite measurement of the Long Creek estate puts the figure at approximately 155 acres — corroborating, not undercutting, the opposition’s original ~150-acre claim, and considerably larger than the number Kissoon uses to make the story shrink. If Kissoon wants to adjudicate acreage, the burden is on him to say whose 140 acres he is citing and how it was derived — not to borrow an unsourced figure because it flatters his conclusion.

What the numbers say Kissoon can’t.

Independent sentiment analysis compiled by ENODO Global gives the lie to Kissoon’s implicit claim that this controversy is a manufactured storm. Across the past 7 days, public discourse on the Long Creek acquisition registers 58% Negative Friction against just 15% Positive Resilience — and the gap between the administration’s official messaging and street-level sentiment runs to 50 percentage points, with grassroots discourse registering both a sharper negative valence (-62%) and a higher intensity (92%) than anything the government’s own communications have managed to counter. If this were, as Kissoon suggests, a fringe grievance nursed by a discredited opposition, the data would not show “Conflict of Interest” as the single largest driver of negative sentiment nationally, at 45%, ahead of “Regulatory Toothlessness” at 35%. Nor would “Institutional Integrity & Accountability” register 70% negative sentiment, or “Land Tenure & Resource Allocation” — the exact acreage dispute Kissoon tries to wave away — run 55% negative. The public is not confused about what matters here. It has already rendered a verdict Kissoon has not caught up to.

The character-assassination-as-argument problem.

Much of Kissoon’s piece is not about the farm at all. It is about Azruddin Mohamed’s wealth, his sanctions, his “laughable” standing to demand accountability. All of this may be true, and none of it is in dispute. But it is also irrelevant to the question of how a sitting president financed and built a multi-billion-dollar estate on a presidential salary.

Guyanese commentary does not require a spotless messenger to have a legitimate question. TIGI’s call for an independent probe did not originate with Mohamed’s credibility — it originated with the unanswered arithmetic of the President’s own disclosed income against the scale of what is now confirmed to exist on that highway. This is precisely why the “Elite Enrichment Perceptions” vector in the ENODO data runs 75% negative even as the messenger’s credibility is contested on other grounds: the public has separated the question of who is asking from the question of what is being asked. Tellingly, the street-level narrative — “Unequal Access and Grassroots Neglect” — commands 45% dominance in the broader discourse, nearly double the official narrative’s 25%. Kissoon’s column, whatever its intent, functions as an extension of that losing 25%.

“He will emerge unscathed” is not a prediction — it is a character reference filed before a single document has been produced.

 “He will emerge unscathed.”

This is the sentence that gives away the whole column. Kissoon is not predicting an outcome; he is prescribing one, and doing so before a single document has been produced, before a single loan has been named, before a single bank has confirmed anything. That is not journalism holding power accountable. It is a character reference filed on the President’s behalf, dressed up as commentary.

The 592 Guardian’s position is not that Ali is guilty of anything beyond what the record shows. It is that “he gave a good speech” is not the same as “he gave an account” — and the public, by a two-to-one margin against him in independent sentiment analysis, appears to already know the difference.

Kissoon has confused the two, and asked the country to do the same.

Sentiment analytics cited above are drawn from ENODO Global’s Forensic Analysis of President Irfaan Ali’s Long Creek Ranch (8 July 2026). Satellite acreage measurement is the Guardian’s own.

. 

The Sovereign Trap: Why Guyana Must Choose Innovation Over Digital Imitation

/0 Comments/in , /by

 

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦Accountability Journalism 

EDITORIAL  |  JULY, 2026

The Sovereign Trap: Why Guyana Must Choose Innovation Over Digital Imitation

A senior U.S. State Department official has challenged the world to rethink what digital sovereignty actually means. Guyana — awash in oil revenues, chronically short on digital literacy, and absent any coherent national technology strategy — should be paying very close attention.

Jacob Helberg, the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs has written a pointed rebuke of what he calls “digital sovereignty evangelism” — the fashionable global movement in which governments pour billions into building national AI models, sovereign cloud infrastructure, and domestic digital champions that, in the end, merely replicate what already exists elsewhere. His argument is as elegant as it is unsettling: copying yesterday’s breakthrough while the world races toward tomorrow’s is not independence. It is expensive irrelevance.

Guyana should read this not as an American manifesto — which it partly is — but as a mirror held up to our own digital condition. Because if there is a country that has perfected the art of announcing transformations it has not yet started, it is ours.

The Oil State Without a Digital Guyana will extract over 1,000,000 barrels of oil per day by the end of this year. The sovereign wealth fund is accumulating. The Ali administration speaks, at every opportunity, of transformation, diversification, and a knowledge economy. Yet the country has no published national digital strategy, no functioning data protection framework — indeed, the sole officer of the Data Protection Commission appears to have emigrated — no publicly accountable AI policy, and a digital literacy rate that leaves the majority of Guyanese unable to participate meaningfully in the economy that their own petroleum is financing.

Helberg’s essay warns against nations that race to build “a sovereign cloud, a sovereign model, a national champion of their very own,” only to discover they have achieved “not digital sovereignty but a kind of synchronized mediocrity.” Guyana has not even reached that stage. We have not built the imitation. We have barely registered the ambition.Helberg introduces a concept worth internalizing: innovation sovereignty. Not the power to reproduce what others have built, but the capacity to create what does not yet exist. A country becomes digitally sovereign, in this framing, not by hoarding a model that will be obsolete within the year, but by developing the institutional capacity — the human capital, the research ecosystem, the regulatory intelligence — to generate original advantage.

By that measure, Guyana’s digital sovereignty is approximately zero. We are not even in the race being described. While the Government announces “smart city” pilots in a capital still struggling with persistent flooding and electricity cuts, the deeper question — whether Guyanese citizens possess the digital competence to be active agents rather than passive consumers of the technologies being rolled out around them — goes entirely unasked.

This newspaper has raised the alarm repeatedly. We are not performing journalism about technology in the abstract. We are pressing a civic case: that a citizenry that cannot navigate, interrogate, and hold accountable the digital systems governing their lives is a citizenry permanently vulnerable to capture — by foreign corporations, by patronage-driven state procurement, and by a political class that understands, very well, that an informationally dependent population is an electorally compliant one.

When the Government selected India’s UPI digital payments architecture over Brazil’s PIX — a decision this publication examined in depth — the technical and economic justification offered to the public was essentially nil. A decision with decade-long consequences for how millions of Guyanese will transact, save, and borrow was taken without parliamentary scrutiny, without published procurement criteria, and without any public consultation about digital infrastructure sovereignty. That is not the behavior of a government building innovation capacity. It is the behavior of a government treating its citizens as spectators to decisions made elsewhere and handed down here.

Helberg is correct that the prize is not a model but an ecosystem — one in which value flows outward to every firm, institution, and citizen it touches. Guyana’s current trajectory builds no such ecosystem. It imports finished products, signs long-term contracts that lock in dependency, and congratulates itself on the modernity of the acquisition.

What Guyana needs is not a sovereign large language model. What it needs, urgently, is a generation of citizens who understand data rights, can interrogate a government contract published online, know how to identify disinformation, understand the implications of facial recognition in public spaces, and can participate in democratic life in a world that has moved decisively onto digital platforms.
The 592 Guardian is, to our knowledge, the only media platform in this country that pursues digital literacy as a sustained editorial commitment — not as a technology column or a gadget review, but as an accountability imperative.Other outlets report on digital announcements. We interrogate digital structures, because the structures determine who benefits and who is excluded.This is not a boast. It is a statement of the gap. In a country of this size, with this much capital now flowing through it, there should be a chorus of voices pressing citizens to understand what is being built in their name. There is near silence.

  
Pax Silica Is Real — and Guyana Has No Seat at the Table

Helberg describes Pax Silica — the emerging American-led coalition of trusted technology partners — as a framework built on comparative advantage: one partner’s compute, another’s minerals, a third’s talent, a fourth’s capital, multiplied together. Guyana has minerals. We sit on rare earth potential, on gold, on bauxite. What we have not done is convert resource endowment into negotiating leverage in digital infrastructure partnerships.

CARICOM has no seat at the Pax Silica table. Guyana has not sought one. The G2 Goldfields merger — a US$2.2 billion transaction executed through Canadian capital markets with no visible Guyanese government role — is emblematic: our assets participate in global value chains; our citizens and our institutions do not.

Helberg writes that a country becomes digitally sovereign by owning “the loop that turns its own experience into advantage.” Every time a Guyanese oil field is assessed by a foreign algorithm, every time a Guyanese voter’s data passes through a foreign platform’s architecture, every time a state contract is negotiated by a government official who does not understand what they are signing, that loop runs elsewhere. The advantage compounds abroad.

What Must Change                                                       
 
Guyana does not need to build a national AI model. But it does need to do several things it has conspicuously refused to do.

  
→It needs a published, debated, parliamentary-approved national digital strategy.
→It needs a Data Protection Commission that is staffed, funded, and independent.
→It needs digital literacy integrated into the national curriculum from primary school through university. It needs transparent, competitive procurement for all digital infrastructure — every sole-source technology contract is a compounding liability.
→And it needs an opposition, a civil society, and a press that treats digital governance as the sovereignty question it actually is.

 The champions of performative sovereignty — those who cut ribbons on servers they do not understand, sign cloud contracts they have not read, and announce digital transformations they have not resourced — are, in Helberg’s withering phrase, “marching their nations, in perfect and well-funded formation, into the past.”

Guyana is not yet marching. We have not yet decided to move. The oil money buys time, but it does not stop the clock .Every year that passes without a digitally capable citizenry is a year in which the gap between what Guyana owns and what Guyana understands grows wider — and the terms on which others will eventually exploit that gap grow more favorable to them.

This publication will continue to close that gap, one editorial at a time. We invite our readers, our institutions, and our government to join us — before the frontier moves so far ahead that catching it requires more than courage. It requires a generation we have not yet educate — The 592 Guardian Editorial Board                  


ACCOUNTABILITY ♦INTEGRITY ♦TRUTH

 

The Guyana Chronicle Asks Guyanese to Take the State’s Word for It

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ OBJECTIVITY ♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

EDITORIAL

The Guyana Chronicle Asks Guyanese to Take the State’s Word for It

A taxpayer-funded newspaper is defending the President’s finances by asserting a paper trail it has never shown the public — while demanding, of his accuser, exactly the transparency it will not practise itself.

By The 592 Guardian Editor-July  2026

The Guyana Chronicle wants Guyanese to believe a case has been made. It has not shown us the case — it has told us the case exists. On July 6 and 7, the state-owned paper published two pieces defending President Irfaan Ali’s ownership of a sprawling agricultural estate and private ranch at Long Creek, off the Soesdyke-Linden Highway, in response to allegations from Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed that the property, and its rapid development, cannot be reconciled with a presidential salary of roughly GY$3.7 million a month.

ASSERTION IS NOT DOCUMENTATION

Read the Chronicle’s defence closely and a pattern emerges: every load-bearing claim is asserted, not demonstrated. The property “predates” the presidency — no deed is reproduced, no date of acquisition given, no title search shown. The purchase is said to be “traceable through banking records and other official documentation” — which records, held by which institution, examined by which independent party, the reader is never told. The President “has made the declarations required” to the Integrity Commission — a body whose own record of proactive public disclosure is, on any honest accounting, one of the thinnest in the hemisphere. None of this has been shown. All of it has been asserted, by a paper the state itself owns and funds through the public purse.

 That is the detail worth sitting with plainly. The defence of the President’s private finances was published in an outlet financed by the very taxpayers whose scrutiny it is now trying to foreclose. Guyanese are being asked to fund the argument that they should stop asking how public office and private wealth intersect at Long Creek.  

That is not accountability journalism. That is the state marking its own homework and mailing citizens the invoice.

A FAIR POINT, TURNED INTO COVER

None of this excuses Azruddin Mohamed of his own obligations. A man facing an eleven-count federal indictment in the Southern District of Florida — accused, alongside his father Nazar, of a gold-smuggling and mislabelling scheme that prosecutors estimate cost the Guyanese state some US$50 million — inviting scrutiny of anyone else’s income is entitled to exactly the scrutiny he applies to others. If Mohamed wants the moral standing to demand the President’s books, opening his own is the fastest way to earn it.

But the Chronicle takes that fair point and turns it into cover for its own evidentiary emptiness. Two people can owe the public documentation at the same time. Pointing at one man’s indictment does not discharge the other’s obligation to show his work — least of all when the other is the sitting head of state, and the outlet demanding proof from his accuser is the government’s own newspaper.

WHAT EVEN THE FRIENDLY COVERAGE CONCEDES

It is worth noting what has already surfaced in reporting sympathetic to the President, because it undercuts the Chronicle’s own case for taking his word alone. The PNCR/APNU has pointed out that one of nineteen fraud-related charges brought against Ali before he assumed office concerned lands along this same Linden-Soesdyke corridor — charges later discontinued after he took office. Other outlets have reported the Long Creek arrangement involves a lease running to roughly GY$25 million annually, a figure that itself invites reconciliation against the scale of development described: poultry infrastructure for tens of thousands of birds, an electrical network with two transformers and roughly 6,600 metres of distribution line, a private road. None of these figures are drawn from Mohamed’s video. They are already in the public record, sitting unreconciled beside the Chronicle’s insistence that nothing here merits a second look.

THE REMEDY IS SIMPLE

If the paper trail is really there, the Chronicle does not need another editorial. It needs to publish the trail. Publish the deed. Publish the purchase or loan documentation. Publish the Integrity Commission filing, or press the Commission — which has for years resisted proactive disclosure to the public it serves — to release it. Reconcile the reported lease terms with the scale of the estate..

Anything short of that is not a rebuttal to Mohamed’s allegations. It is state media asking citizens to trust the government’s account of the government, written on the government’s dime.

Guyanese do not owe deference to assertions dressed as documentation — from either side of this fight. They are entitled to the actual papers, not a columnist’s word that the papers exist. Until the Chronicle produces them, its editorial proves only one thing: that state media can write “the record shows” in a taxpayer-funded font.                                   That is not accountability. It is a talking point wearing the costume of one.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

“Water Contamination 630× Above Safety Threshold; GWI Statement Draws Outrage”

/0 Comments/in , , /by

“Water Contamination 630× Above Safety Threshold; GWI Statement Draws Outrage”

OP-ED BY DR.VINCENT ADAMS

Laboratory analysis confirms contaminant concentrations in local water supplies at 630 times the safe regulatory limit, a finding that public health experts say makes Guyana Water Inc.’s recent statement appear irresponsible and dangerously dismissive.

Upon reading the July 5, 2026 edition of THE 592 GUARDIAN summarizing the Public Utilities Commission’s (PUC) 2025 findings on drinking water quality in Regions 4, 7 and 10, I was embarrassed and astounded by the Guyana Water Inc’s (GWI) statement reported in the July 3, 2026 Kaieteur News article that “Water quality issues flagged by PUC affect only taste, colour and appearance, not safety”.

True to the Govt’s code of conduct, GWI attempts to deceive the people, not only by leaving out the actual measurements that would make it impossible to back up their ludicrous claim, but also insultingly tells the people not to believe the coffee coloured water they see with their own eyes. This GWI statement is nothing but irresponsible, callous and dangerous to the people’s health.

This issue is close to home for yours truly, since I happen to be one of the 11 Engineers specially trained by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to establish and run the GWI (originally GUYWA) initiated in 1972; so, knows first-hand of the world class Water Authority handed over to the PPPC Govt in 1992, only to see it descend to this abbys of incompetence and neglect of its sacred mandate to provide reliable, clean and safe water to the public. Instead, the people are heartlessly advised that it is no big deal for them to drink water that is perilous to their health, while certainly not the same water consumed by Govt officials and their families.

In a normal country, it would have been an oxymoron for a country to be dubbed “the land of many waters” with “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink” (Poet Samuel Coleridge).

The data analyses and facts – Human beings can survive without oil, electricity, etc., but never without water! A safe water supply is guided by scientifically developed safe standards and undoubtedly the most essential substance for the sustenance of human life. Consequently, let’s address the three contaminants highlighted by the PUC that falls out of the range of safe standards. They are: pH, turbidity and iron.

pH – The pH scale ranges from 0 to 14 with lower pH values corresponding to higher acidity. However, it is most important to note that the pH scale is logarithmic and not linear, meaning each unit change represents a 10-fold change in acidity. For example, a pH of 4 is 10 times more acidic than a pH of 5, and 100 times more acidic than a pH of 6. This means that the 3.7 pH measured at Linden is 630 times more acidic than the World Health Organization (WHO) safe pH limit of 6.5.

Highly acidic water at 630 times the safe limit is corrosive and can dissolve toxic heavy metals such the copper and lead from the plumbing lines, which wind up in your drinking water. Ingesting these metals can cause serious health problems such as cancer, stroke, kidney disease, memory loss, high blood pressure, reduced bone density, etc. It is more toxic for children, as their growing bodies absorb these metals much quicker. Further, water with a high acidity has likely not gone through proper filtration and may still contain pollutants like pesticides and chemicals making the water unsafe to drink.

Turbidity – As clearly defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “Turbidity is a measure of the cloudiness of water, and the higher the levels the more particles (which carry the pollutants) are present. It is used to indicate water quality and filtration effectiveness (such as whether disease-causing organisms are present) and higher levels are associated with higher levels of disease-causing microorganisms such as viruses, parasites and some bacteria.”

Notwithstanding that one doesn’t need a measurement to verify the obvious that coffee coloured water at Grove means extremely high turbidity, the actual measurement of 29 times the US EPA and WHO limits plainly points out the grave health risk of consuming such water that may indicate presence of disease-causing microorganisms such as viruses, parasites and some bacteria. Substantively, owing to constant flooding, flood water with disease-causing microorganisms from latrines, septic tanks, manholes and pipes transporting raw city sewage, will most likely leak into the drinking water pipe network; thus, testing for the presence of these microorganisms must be conducted, especially during and after floods.

Iron – Though at a high level of 3.35 mg/l, or 11 times the WHO guideline, high iron content is not a major health concern, and high levels are expected from the upper of the two major aquifers supplying Georgetown and the East Coast of Demerara. However, high iron levels may create operational and cosmetic problems, staining plumbing fixtures, sinks, dishes, and laundry with a rust color; and can build up inside pipes, reducing water flow and clogging appliances like dishwashers and water heaters.

Considering the above, is the nation led to believe that the Guyana EPA and GWI has become devoid of technically qualified professionals to advise against such statements that put the public at serious health risk?

Considering the above, is the nation led to believe that the Guyana EPA and GWI has become devoid of technically qualified professionals to advise against such statements that put the public at serious health risk?

I hope this missive will implore the GWI to immediately do the right and responsible thing to apologetically retract their advice to consume such unsafe water, and to follow-up with urgent actions to satisfy its only mandate to provide the nation with mankind’s most precious substance and basic need for a safe water supply, especially in a nation with the highest GDP.

In the meantime, I humbly wish to dissuade the public from following GWI’s inexplicably advice that the water is safe, despite its irrefutable scientific indications of being hazardous to human health.

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

The Ali Farm -From Bankroller to Blackmailer

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ Independent Accountability Journalism For Guyana

The Ali Farm -From Bankroller to Blackmailer

Almost without exception, Guyanese across the board, are familiar about the kind of upstanding citizen and leader that Pres Ali is.  They have a good idea about the quality of his character, the beauties of his activities.  Their leader is a winner.  He touches mud and magic happens: many minerals massed on his table.  I need some of that to rub off on me.  Thus, I stay close to the president.  As he goes, I go.

The man, main voice, from WIN, Mr. Mohamed dropped his aerial bombardment flush on the head of Mohamed Irfaan Ali.  It’s the president and none other.  Sparks have since flew.  Shards of expensive plate glass whizzing dangerously close.  The record shows that Pres Ali has not taken what WIN Mohamed shared publicly sitting down.  He went on an offensive of his own.  The land is ole story.  There are loans.  Documents to burst the archives.  Pres Ali saved his secret weapon for last.  It is one dipped in deadly curare: blackmail.  Azruddin Mohamed delivered his message express mail.  A U.S. carrier, I think.  Pres Ali fired back even quicker.  There’s his verbal delivery.  Blackmail.  Well, blow me down!

Wasn’t it the PPP of Ali, Jagdeo, and Nandlall, who once treasured the Mohamed Family above all else?  Yes or no, folks?  Was it not the PPP Govt that turned against the Mohamed family that was so good to its members (bank rolled, remember?) And turned the father and son over to the tender ministrations of Uncle Sam.  It would be helpful if any of the superstars in the Office of the President, including old Burnham ones, could say what kind of mail is that one?  Drink a man rum.  Feast at his table.  Dance to his music.  Tek out selfees wid he.  Collect he bankroll.  Then, tun pun he.  Wha is dah, white mail, greenmail, or blackmail?  My interest is not in who blackmail who first.  But how is it that blackmail enters the political frame?  Pres Ali is reported to be a very clever fellow.  Therefore, he ought to know (or be advised) that the claim of blackmail doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.  Not when it’s open-air.  Not when everyone is watching, listening, and following the sequence of actions.  Because Pres Ali enjoys such a special relationship with the U.S., he should reach out to Excellency Theriot and have her check with the FBI on the validity of what I assert.

Further, blackmail caan wuk, Mistah President.  Not when there are documents.  Like transport(s) for the Long Creek lands.  Like the loan applications.  Like the loan approvals with rubberstamps, revenues stamps, raised seals, authorized commercial bank personnel, and in the originals.  I would hope that the loan officers and land officers have not all left Guyana to take up permanent residence in the U.S. in the last few days.  Mohamed could tri wah evah blackmail he want.  But a man of the resourcefulness and adaptability of Dr. Irfaan Ali has his own mail.  They don’t give doctorates to dummies.  It is not snail mail.  It is not mail with a different kind of gender identifier.  What Pres Ali has is a mailed fist.  Waan fuh mess wid mee?  Ah readee!

The point I go to great lengths to make is that Pres Ali doesn’t have to bluff.  Or engage in any boisterous bacchanalian bravado.  He has the best mail available.  His standing with personal honesty.  Incumbency advantage.  The numerous tools and vast resources of the state (an oil rich state).  Plus, the Guyanese people believe in him.  Well, sort of, and only some.  How many for him this week versus last week, that’s the question?  Guyanese catching hell, and there’s no question about their condition.  Pres Ali has to ride beyond the blackmail he claims and put out the cleanest slate.

If there are hiccups, he might as well cleanout his desk.  Grace and peace, Mr. President.

The Stability Trap: How Guyana Signed Away the Right to Govern Its Own Oil Sector

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦Independent Accountability Journalism  ·  Guyana

EDITORIAL

THE STABROEK SURRENDER

Part II of IV  ·  The Stability Trap

The Stability Trap: How Guyana Signed Away the Right to Govern Its Own Oil Sector

Article 32 of the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement did not just fix a fiscal formula. It froze the State’s sovereign authority in place, and handed a private arbitral tribunal in Washington the final word on whether Guyana may ever legislate, regulate, or tax its own resource sector again.

In Part I of this series, The 592 Guardian examined the arithmetic of the 2016 Stabroek Block Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) — the 2% royalty, the Article 15.4 tax-payment mechanism under which the Government of Guyana, not the companies, discharges the Contractor’s income tax liability, and a cost-recovery ceiling that has allowed ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC to post combined profits several multiples of Guyana’s own profit-oil share. Chartered Accountant Christopher Ram’s analysis, cited in Part I, established that on the Agreement’s own terms, the arithmetic of the deal was never close to a genuine 50-50 split.

Part II turns from arithmetic to architecture. However bad the money is, it can in principle be renegotiated — new governments, new parliaments, new public pressure can in theory revisit a bad bargain. Article 32 exists precisely to foreclose that possibility. It is titled, without euphemism, “Stability of Agreement,” and it is the mechanism by which the 2016 PSA converts a one-time fiscal concession into a permanent constitutional constraint.

What Article 32 Actually Does

The clause’s operative logic, confirmed across multiple public accounts of the Agreement’s text, is straightforward and severe. It prohibits the Government from unilaterally renegotiating, or in any manner seeking to “avoid, alter, or limit,” the conditions of the Agreement without the written consent of the Contractor — ExxonMobil Guyana Limited and its partners, Hess and CNOOC.

Article 32 — Stability of Agreement (as publicly described)

 Any alteration of the Agreement, or the imposition of new petroleum-related fiscal obligations, requires the written consent of the Contractor. The Government may not unilaterally renegotiate, avoid, alter, or limit the conditions of the Agreement.

The current PPP/C administration has treated this clause not as a source of shame but as a shield. Government officials have repeatedly cited Article 32 as the reason the 2016 terms cannot be revisited, arguing that contract sanctity must be honoured regardless of how the terms were arrived at. ExxonMobil Guyana’s own president has publicly confirmed the company’s unwillingness to consent to renegotiation, which is, of course, exactly the point of the clause: it was drafted so that the party who benefits from the status quo would never have to agree to change it.

This is the trap. A stability clause does not merely protect an investment from expropriation, which is a legitimate and common feature of resource contracts worldwide. This one goes further: it protects the entire fiscal architecture — the royalty rate, the tax-shifting mechanism, the cost-recovery ceiling, the absence of ring-fencing — from any future government action, indefinitely, unless Exxon and its partners agree otherwise. A government that signs such a clause is not protecting its investment climate. It is pre-emptively disarming its own legislature.

A government does not need to be corrupt to sign away its sovereignty. It only needs to be outmatched at the table — and to fail to tell the country what it gave up.

The Compensation Mechanism: Taxation Without Representation, in Reverse

Where Article 32 is silent on renegotiation, it is explicit on consequence. Public summaries of the Agreement’s fiscal-stability provisions confirm that if the Government does introduce a new law, regulation, or fiscal measure that adversely affects the Contractor’s economic position under the Agreement — a new environmental levy, a windfall tax, a change to the exchange-control regime — the Government is contractually obligated to compensate the Contractor for the adverse effect, restoring it to the same economic position it would have occupied had the change never been made.

In practice, this means the National Assembly retains the formal power to legislate, but not the practical power to legislate at Exxon’s expense. Any parliamentary act that touches the economics of the Stabroek Block becomes, under the PSA’s own terms, a compensable event — a bill the Guyanese taxpayer must eventually pay, on top of whatever tax or regulatory change was intended to raise revenue or correct an abuse in the first instance. The State is free to govern, provided it is willing to indemnify the party it is attempting to govern.

Whose Court Decides? ICSID, Washington, and the End of Guyanese Jurisdiction

The stability clause’s teeth are supplied by the Agreement’s arbitration provisions. Disputes arising under the PSA — including, per the logic above, a dispute over whether a new Guyanese law has triggered the compensation obligation — are not resolved in the High Court of Guyana or the Caribbean Court of Justice. They go to international arbitration, most likely under the auspices of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the World Bank-affiliated tribunal system headquartered in Washington, D.C.

This detail should not be glossed over as ordinary commercial boilerplate. ICSID arbitration is, by design, insulated from domestic judicial review. Contracting states cannot have ICSID awards second-guessed by their own courts on jurisdictional, procedural, or merits-based grounds; the Convention establishes what specialists in the field describe as a self-contained system in which the tribunal’s ruling is close to final. A Guyanese law passed by a democratically elected National Assembly, if challenged by the Contractor as a violation of Article 32, would ultimately be judged not by a Guyanese judge applying Guyanese constitutional principles, but by an arbitral panel applying the terms of a contract signed by an outgoing government in 2016.

This is the second half of the stability trap. The first half freezes the law. The second half removes the forum in which any dispute over that freeze would be argued from Georgetown to Washington.

Sovereign Immunity, Waived in Advance

The final component completes the structure. By entering into an arbitration agreement of this kind, the Government of Guyana is understood to have waived its sovereign immunity from the jurisdiction of the arbitral process — the same doctrine that would ordinarily allow a state to resist being hauled before a foreign or international tribunal without its case-by-case consent. Courts around the world, including the UK Supreme Court in its 2026 ruling on ICSID enforcement in the conjoined Spain and Zimbabwe cases, have continued to affirm that a state’s accession to arbitration under the ICSID framework functions as a clear and binding submission to that jurisdiction, whatever domestic political objections might later arise. The immunity is not lost through some future act of the Guyanese state; it was surrendered the day the PSA was signed, for every year the Agreement remains in force.

Guyana did not merely agree to arbitrate a dispute. It agreed, in 2016, on behalf of every subsequent Parliament and every subsequent generation of Guyanese voters, that it would not resist being ordered to pay.

What This Means for Guyana’s Democratic Governance

Strip away the legal terminology and the picture is unambiguous. A future Government of Guyana — responding to a spill, a labor abuse, a public health finding, a shift in global tax norms, or simply a mandate from voters to capture more value from the country’s own resource — cannot act without first calculating what it will owe ExxonMobil, Hess, and CNOOC for the privilege of governing. And if a dispute arises over that calculation, it is not a Guyanese court, nor the CCJ, nor the National Assembly, that has the final say. It is an arbitral tribunal sitting under ICSID rules, applying a contract that a public increasingly regards as having surrendered more than it secured.

This is not a hypothetical erosion of sovereignty. It is a structural one, written into the founding contract of Guyana’s oil era, and defended today by the very government that says it has no choice but to honour it.

What The 592 Guardian Is Asking

In keeping with this outlet’s accountability mandate, we are putting the following questions on the public record, to the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Attorney General’s Chambers, and the Department of Energy:

  1. Has the Government of Guyana, at any point since 2020, sought or received legal advice quantifying the compensation exposure created by Article 32 for any proposed environmental, fiscal, or labour legislation? If so, will that advice be№”# published?
  2. Has ExxonMobil Guyana Limited, Hess, or CNOOC ever been asked for written consent to amend any term of the 2016 PSA, and if so, on what date, and with what result?
  3. What is the Government’s position on whether a dispute over Article 32 compensation would proceed to ICSID arbitration, and has any such claim, formal or informal, ever been raised by the Contractor?
  4. Given the Vice President’s public statements on the limits of Guyana’s ownership rights under the Agreement, does the Government consider Article 32 compatible with the sovereignty protections of the Constitution of Guyana?

We extend the Government and the Contractor an open invitation to respond in full; any response received will be published without alteration alongside this editorial

Part III of The Stabroek Surrender will examine the decommissioning liability structure embedded in the Agreement — the mechanism by which cash is advanced to the oil companies decades before it is needed for decommissioning, with no enforceable requirement that it be set aside.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

The Ali Farm -Fish, Fowl, Foals

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL BOARD

The Ali Farm –Fish, Fowl, Foals -another Episode

Land ahoy!  There’s a sheepfold.  Followed by a cow palace.  A rich field for fowls.  Then, a shrimp lake.  One could get lost in a daze.  For those are only a glimpse of what grazes in Guyana’s Pres Ali’s grand garden.  A mere handful of what teems in Excellency Ali’s lush nature resort.  His Animal Farm that functions with Space Age precision.  And a budget to match.

By any count, Pres Ali’s pastoral paradise tucked behind the stone façade and bushes of the Soesdyke-Linden Highway is like a Rockefeller Trust.  A combination of hacienda and encomienda; one fitting for a maharajah.  Only the best for the best: in beauty, what billions make happen.  I congratulate Pres Ali on his prowess with remarkable success.  I plead with my national leader: a president who is more than a president.  One bigger and better than any Wall Street powerhouse.  Move over Morgan Stanley.  PPP Guyana has Mohamed Irfaan Ali.  What’s the secret, skipper, of all this success?  I won’t tell.

Pres Ali has been forthcoming, a barrel of cooperation, truckloads of transparency.  Assets accumulated before becoming president.  By golly!  Anything of this grandiosity takes some doing!  For that means the flow of funds, and the alignment of the stars: bold banks backing a big hitter of a batter. 

 Remember: back then he was only a minister.  When he was earning less than a million, maybe half, monthly.  I learn again about ‘too big to fail.’  Ah, the talent to identify a tycoon on the move, a star waiting to be born.

I recall that it was in Guyana’s sleepy, prehistoric, paleolithic age.  That is, its distressed nonoil era.  Loans were low.  Movement was slow.  But the president said it: loans.  I congratulate the now president on his superb, platinum, creditworthiness back then.   I behold a budding fairytale in the making, waiting to burst into the scene.  Taking notes.  Must scribble one of those.  Try this title: Dreams come true.

What was needed in circumstances involving big lands for a big man with a big appetite for risk was a big bank. Perhaps, a syndicate of such big banks required.  To cushion the risks of lending enormous sums for a project of that spectacular dimensions. Banks exist for risk-taking, don’t they?  On a conservative scale, naturally, since it’s other people’s money.  For the dead certain, can’t lose stuff-special livestock breeds, rare aquaculture species, a riot of seeds, and other Medellin-type arboreal touches-put into it.  Those all cost quite a bundle of millions.  Think billions.  It would take more than one bank to lend one man that many millions. 

A consortium taking big risks based on what collaterals, what assurances, what guarantors?  Those are the products of my inquiring mind.  Regarding guarantors, who would those be?  Pres Ali should find it easy to trot them out and line them up.  Former presidents could be among such helpful souls.  Ready to give a young man a break.  A good deed done.  But what about the little people of Guyana?  What strokes for such folks?

Street level, grassroots, minibus riding Guyanese have to line up, wait, and hold their breath for 10 years or more for a single plot of land.  There must be a different standard at work for other citizens.  Those who are not political leaders, not business leaders, not government ministers, and not members of parliament.  Because it seems that for every square inch of house lot space that a teacher, soldier, or pensioner is awarded, fat cats and bigshots snare an acre.  And what takes 10 years for the small people require 10 hours, maybe 10 minutes, to get approved by the relevant authorities for Guyanese big people.  If all this is off the reservation, then I plead to the kind in Guyana for enlightenment.  Where am I going wrong?

Truly World-class

Land ahoy!  Compass bearings: Long Creek, Linden Highway.  Pres Ali is in for many a long day.  There’s a silver lining.  Excellency Ali says he has the goods.  They had better be good.

Fifty-Three Years On, a Union Measured in Two Holidays

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN
ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA AND THE CARIBBEAN
EDITORIAL

Fifty-Three Years On, a Union Measured in Two Holidays

The Treaty of Chaguaramas promised a people forged in common no cause. Fifty-three anniversaries later, thirteen of fifteen full member states cannot bring themselves to close their offices for a day to mark it.

On 4th July 1973, four men signed a treaty in Chaguaramas, Trinidad, and told their peoples something momentous had happened. Errol Barrow of Barbados, Forbes Burnham of Guyana, Michael Manley of Jamaica, and Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago did not present the Caribbean Community as a customs union or a trade bloc dressed up in ceremonial language.

The four signatories -53year ago.

They presented it, explicitly, as an act of nation-building beyond the nation — a deliberate attempt to forge, out of scattered post-colonial territories with different colonial masters and different tongues, a people bound by common cause. That was the promise. It was not modest.

 Fifty-three years is long enough to judge a promise by what it has actually built, rather than by what it once intended to build. And on the narrow but telling measure of whether the Community’s own governments treat its founding day as worth a day’s lost productivity — the cheapest, most symbolic form of institutional commitment there is — the verdict is not encouraging. Of fifteen full CARICOM member states, only Antigua and Barbuda and Guyana have made CARICOM Day a standing public holiday in law. Thirteen have not.

AN ADMISSION, NOT AN OVERSIGHT
It would be easier to treat this as bureaucratic inertia — the kind of thing that simply never reaches the top of a legislative agenda —ime were it not for the fact that CARICOM’s own Heads of Government made this a collective decision and watched it collapse in real time .Ahead of the 50th anniversary in 2023, the Conference meeting in the Bahamas agreed that 4th July would be marked as a public holiday across all member states.

It was not a suggestion left to drift. It was a Community-level declaration.
Grenada and St Kitts and Nevis complied — for one year. Grenada’s Cabinet approved a National Bank Holiday under its Bank Holiday Act specifically to mark the golden jubilee; the proclamation was explicit that this was a jubilee-year gesture, not a permanent addition to the calendar. Antigua and Barbuda, one of the two states that already observes the holiday annually, came closest to stating the quiet part aloud. Prime Minister Gaston Browne told a flag-raising ceremony that his Cabinet still had not decided, adding: “Truth be told, we have had so many public holidays… that it is always difficult to add additional holidays, and this is no disrespect or lack of commitment to Caricom if we decide not to.”

A head of government did not fail to notice the anniversary. He weighed it against the cost of a working day and explained, on the record, why the day lost.
That sentence deserves to be read twice. It is not a denial that CARICOM matters. It is a candid acknowledgment that when the symbolic cost of the Community is placed on one side of the ledger and the fiscal cost of a public holiday is placed on the other, the ledger does not balance in the Community’s favour — even in a jubilee year, even after the Conference itself had asked for it. If the day is not worth defending against a productivity argument in its fiftieth year, when precisely was it ever going to be?

WHERE INTEGRATION SURVIVES, AND WHERE IT DOESN’T
This is not a case for despair about CARICOM as such. The Community has built real, durable things: the Caribbean Court of Justice sits as an appellate court for the states that have acceded to it; CARPHA coordinates public health response across borders that used to mean very little cooperation in a crisis; CXC examinations give the region a shared educational currency; CDEMA moves disaster response faster than any single small state could manage alone. These are not nothing. They represent the parts of the CARICOM project that survive contact with national self-interest — because they are technocratic, low-cost to the state, and diffuse enough in benefit that no single government bears a visible price for participating.

The pattern breaks down precisely where the original promise was boldest. The CARICOM Single Market and Economy, twenty years after the Revised Treaty entered into force, still delivers free movement in name more than in practice for most categories of worker. A common external tariff exists mostly as a starting position from which exceptions are negotiated. Intra-regional transport — the physical infrastructure a genuine single market would require — remains, by the admission of sitting heads of government, an unsolved problem discussed at conference after conference without resolution. And now the calendar itself, the cheapest and least consequential of all possible commitments, has produced the same result: broad agreement in principle, thirteen governments declining in practice.

The throughline is not that Caribbean governments are hostile to integration. It is that integration survives exactly as far as it is costless, and stalls at the first point where it requires a government to spend something real — fiscal space, sovereignty, political capital — for a benefit that is diffuse, long-term, and hard to claim credit for at the next election. A public holiday is perhaps the smallest possible test of that willingness. It is a single day, already scheduled by the Community’s own Conference, requiring no treaty renegotiation and no surrender of sovereignty whatsoever. That even this modest test returns a 2-of-15 pass rate should function as a diagnostic, not a footnote.

WHAT BURNHAM, MANLEY, WILLIAMS, AND BARROW ACTUALLY ASKED FOR
It is worth returning to what was actually promised in 1973, because the founding language was never merely economic. The four signatories spoke of common cause among peoples who had won or were winning independence within a few years of one another, who shared a colonial inheritance of extraction and neglect, and who calculated — correctly — that no single one of their small territories could bargain effectively alone in a world of larger blocs.

The Community was conceived as protection against exactly the kind of fragmentation that had characterised the region for centuries: divide-and-administer under colonial rule, replaced, they hoped, by a deliberate and sustained unity under self-rule

 Measured against that ambition, a fractured calendar is a small thing and a large thing simultaneously. Small, because no one seriously argues that a shared public holiday would itself rescue CSME implementation or resolve intra-regional transport. Large, because the holiday was never really about the day off. It was proposed, by the Community’s own leadership, as exactly the kind of low-cost, symbolic act that ought to have been the easiest possible demonstration of shared identity — a single day set aside, as the Conference itself intended, for schools to teach the region’s own history and citizens to recognise themselves as participants in something larger than their own territory. That thirteen governments could not sustain even this, once the anniversary year passed, says less about the holiday than about how thinly the founding promise of common cause is actually held once the cameras and the jubilee theme songs are put away.

Fifty-three years on, the accountability question the region’s editorial and academic community should be asking is not whether CARICOM Day deserves a public holiday everywhere — it self-evidently does, on the Community’s own stated logic. The question is what a fractured response to that low a bar reveals about the higher bars: the customs union, the single market, the common foreign policy that CARICOM has struggled to project with one voice even during the Essequibo crisis on its own doorstep.

A people forged in common cause do not need a statute to remind them what day their community was born. Thirteen governments’ silence on the calendar is itself the finding.
— The Board
The 592 Guardian

When Stipends and Garbage Trucks Aren’t Enough

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦TRANSPARENCY♦ OBJECTIVITY

When Stipends and Garbage Trucks Aren’t Enough— A Case of Political Patronage Masquerading as Capacity Building

Minister Priya Manickchand is right to flag the technical weaknesses of Neighbourhood Democratic Councils (NDCs). But her confession — that councillors “just don’t know what next to do” — should not be treated as a neutral administrative diagnosis. It is an admission of a far deeper political failure: decades of patronage politics that trade competence for loyalty and then attempt to paper over the consequences with money and equipment.

Let’s be clear about the sequence.

For years, political actors have selected local officials not for experience, integrity, or civic competence, but for their usefulness at election time and their willingness to follow orders.

Those actors then celebrate every donated garbage truck or salary increase as evidence of progress. But handing out trucks and stipends without insisting on merit, accountability, and clear institutional norms only deepens a cycle of dependency and dysfunction.

Training is necessary — no one disputes that. Standard operating procedures, clear written protocols, and refresher courses would undoubtedly help many councillors navigate by-laws, notice procedures, and statutory steps But training is a short-term, technocratic fix for what is fundamentally a political and cultural problem.

The minister’s proposal for SoPs will help those willing to learn; it will not replace the incentive structures that produced underqualified appointees in the first place.

Three uncomfortable truths follow.

– Material inputs don’t change incentives. A $50,000 stipend or a new truck increases resources but does nothing to alter why people were chosen. If selection remains driven by patronage, some councillors will view these resources as perks, not responsibilities.
– Knowledge without enforcement yields little. Teaching councillors how to issue notices or secure court orders is pointless if there are no consequences for chronic nonperformance, nor transparent performance metrics the public can review. Training that doesn’t link to sanctions or rewards will be treated as optional.
– Communication masks accountability gaps. Explaining statutory timeframes to frustrated residents is useful, but it can also function as an excuse. Saying “we followed the law” while failing to pursue cases, monitor contractors, or follow up on enforcement is not transparency — it’s a smokescreen.

If the Government genuinely wants functional local governance, it should combine capacity-building with structural reforms that change incentives and increase oversight:

◊ Merit-based recruitment and clear qualification standards for council candidates; require evidence of basic administrative training or community service before appointment or electio
◊ Transparent performance metrics: publish annual reports from each NDC with targets (garbage collection frequency, drainage maintenance timetables, resolution rates for complaints) and publicize audits.
◊ Conditional funding: tie a portion of subventions to demonstrated performance and compliance with SoPs; withhold or reduce funds for chronic noncompliance until remedial measures are verified.
◊ Independent local ombuds offices or hotlines that investigate complaints and refer gross negligence to higher authorities.
◊ Community participation mechanisms: empower citizen oversight committees with defined roles in monitoring projects and spending, and with a direct channel to escalate issues
◊ Political parties must be pressured to stop treating local posts as patronage spoils; civil-society campaigns and media accountability can spotlight abuses and force change

 Finally, a word to residents: don’t accept platitudes. Demand visible progress, insist on published timelines, and use the new stipends as leverage — these are public funds, not gifts to be squandered. If councillors receive better pay and equipment, they must also receive clearer obligations and public scrutiny.

Minister Manickchand’s outreach to 65 of 70 NDCs is a start, but acknowledgement without action becomes complicity. Training manuals and SOPs are useful tools, but they must be embedded in a broader strategy that roots out patronage, enforces standards, and rewards competence. Otherwise, we will keep recycling the same problem: more money, more trucks, and the same structural failures dressed up as reform.

Pres Ali: Be wise, Go beyond the Norm -Pt III

/0 Comments/in , /by

THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊OBJECTIVITY◊JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

Pres Ali: Be wise, Go beyond the Norm -Pt III

The disclosures pinpointed monumental asset accumulations with Pres Ali’s name immovably affixed.  He has acknowledged that the farm property is his.  A great start.  So also, all the inanimate structures, and all the thriving, exotic, life forms, that form part of a physical animal farm.  He admits they have been in his portfolio for years.  Years prior to his ascendancy to the number one office in Guyana.  It’s not an office to be trifled with: many citizens revere the very title.  Even seen by some as sacred.  Due to the developments now moving like an out-of-control avalanche around this much-talked about farm, and not in a good way, Pres Ali has his work cut out for him.  He must go all out to protect the presidency.  He must leave no stone unturned in his efforts to help the presidency emerge from a grim condition to a clean light.                                                                                       

One that’s better than when this deluge of revelations shocked Guyanese silly, and left them stunned.  My kind counsel to the president is that he proves he has nothing to hide.  And because he has nothing to fear, there will only be the straightest, cleanest, and most persuasive of outcomes about this farm. 

Neither subterfuge nor complexity will intervene in the days ahead.

In the aftermath of Mr. Azruddin Mohamed’s disclosures, it’s vital that Pres Ali discerns that he has a matter before him that calls for the best that’s in him.                                     He defends himself strongly, while manifesting new levels of wisdom.  The wisdom that goes beyond himself.  Place this whole matter, Mr. President, in the hands of others.  Others outside of Guyana.  He is the sitting head-of-state.  Hence, it is not in the best interests of himself and Guyana for this matter to be reviewed and pronounced upon by Guyanese.  Wrong move. 

A local study/inquiry of what’s now public would invite contentiousness.  Over what appears artificial.  About what looks like a whitewash.  Past appointed local bodies have attracted endless criticisms re their terms of reference, procedures, actual probes. 

 They have raised more questions and controversy than provided answers and closure.  Recommendation: place this locally insoluble matter in foreign hands.  For full disclosure of the facts, as tracked and treated.  From how they came into existence, to identification of all involved parties.

It would help immensely if the Integrity Commission Act is amended to allow disclosure of submissions in situations such as these.  Frankly,, I do not support any arrangement where the assets of politicians are kept secret.  This would cover from their earnings to their acquisitions to their liquidations.  Further, any amended Integrity Commission Act must provide for a majority of its members to be drawn from civil society, as nominated by civil society.  From that majority a chair is chosen.  Of what strength, what utility is a chair, chosen by a government, when a member of that same government, has to be scrutinized?

President Ali, any politician, any public servant, has a right to mount the most vigorous defense when claims are made about their conduct in office.  I endorse that to the fullest. 

Using the same standard, the public, the taxpayer, the electorate, is entitled to an inquiry that is hoped to be authentic, appears to be authentic, and is authentic.  In its probity.  In the quality of its work and output.  In the confidence that it inspires.  There is a system.  It is working and it delivers.

I wish Pres Ali well.  I wish also that he would be most seriously engaged in allowing full ventilation of what is encircled and embedded in his farm cum estate.  Through those wishes, I think that much could be achieved.  The air must be cleared.  So that this matter is put to rest., once and for all.