Archive for category: Opinions

THE 592GUARDIAN ♦Independent Accountability Journalism
EDITORIAL

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Not Analysis, But an Announcement:
The Nandlall Column Dressed as Political Science
July 2026
A recent column by ‘political analyst” Freddie Kisson purports to offer a comparative study of Keir Starmer and Irfaan Ali — two leaders, we are told, whose diverging fortunes turn on “the art of communication” and “the common touch.” Strip away the framing device, however, and the piece is not a comparison at all. It opens by naming its real subject in its very first line: a prediction that Anil Nandlall will be the PPP’s next presidential candidate, and that he will win by default — carried by oil revenue and a hollowed-out opposition rather than by any test of his own record.               

Starmer an Ali are furniture. The column is a campaign launch wearing the costume of a political science essay.

That alone would be unremarkable — endorsements are not new to Guyanese commentary.

What is worth examining is what the endorsement had to leave out to make Nandlall look like a natural successor, and what a comparative analysis would have found had it actually been undertaken honestly.

 Start with the flawed comparison itself. Starmer did not fall because British voters found him stiff. He fell because a Parliament, a press, and an electorate that could still hold a governing party to account did exactly that — job done, however uncomfortable the outcome. That is not national dysfunction; it is the system performing as designed.                                                                     

Ali’s survival of criticism from the local press and civil society is offered as evidence of superior personality, but survival of scrutiny and vindication by scrutiny are not the same thing, and the column never asks which one actually occurred. To praise a leader for outlasting his critics while ignoring what those critics found is to mistake endurance for exoneration.

Having built its foundation on that inversion, the column then hands the reader its actual candidate — untested, unexamined, and, on the record of the last several months alone, carrying considerably more baggage than “campaign launch” prose allows for.

 A single-issue résumé might be forgivable. What follows is not a single issue but a pattern spanning two separate encounters with the region’s apex court, the treasury, and the government’s own relationship with a foreign social media platform — each instance independently documented, none of it addressed in the column that positions this man as president-in-waiting.

A Repeat Offender Before the CCJ
The April rebuke was not Nandlall’s first brush with CCJ discipline. In October 2022, an advance and strictly embargoed copy of a CCJ ruling on an APNU+AFC election petition appeal was posted to Nandlall’s own Facebook page before the court had delivered it.

Justice Jacob Wit, speaking for the bench, called the breach “unacceptable” and capable of bringing the court’s integrity into disrepute, and personally ordered Nandlall to issue a public apology on the same platform where the leak occurred

Nandlall’s own Solicitor General had to appear in his place to beg the court’s “forgiveness and mercy,” while Nandlall, travelling abroad at the time, offered his apology only after the court’s directive. Two encounters with the same regional court, four years apart, both ending in a sitting Attorney General being formally instructed by CCJ judges to correct his own conduct — this is not misfortune. It is a record.

The CCJ’s Verdict on the AG’s Conduct
In April, Guyana’s Attorney General faced not a friendly domestic bench but the Caribbean Court of Justice — a court, unlike some at home, genuinely insulated from executive reach.                           The five-hour hearing in the Mohameds’ extradition appeal produced a sustained and pointed rebuke from three separate judges:

•CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson raised what he called the “elephant in the room”: the Attorney General’s repeated public commentary on a case still before the courts, and whether it represented, in the President’s words, the best way for government to express its position.                                                 •Justice Arif Bulkan directly confronted Nandlall’s submission that fair-trial protections under Article 144 do not apply to extradition committal proceedings, warning that such a position would be “extraordinary” — a challenge sharp enough that the Attorney General retreated on the spot.                                                 •Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji pressed further, questioning whether the AG’s “running commentary” on an active matter was compatible with encouraging public respect for the judicial process he is meant to steward.

The Court did not stop at questioning. It issued what amounted to a formal caution to counsel on both sides against public commentary capable of undermining the fairness of the proceedings — an unusual step for a regional apex court to take against a sitting Attorney General. Nandlall himself subsequently announced, on his own television programme, that he would “exercise restraint” going forward. That is not the language of a leader whose command of persuasion overawes his critics. It is the language of a senior law officer who was told, plainly, by his own region’s highest court, to stop talking.

A Treasury Bleeding on Two Fronts
The financial picture compounds the legal one. In November 2025, Justice Gino Persaud quashed the GRA’s imposition of over $421 million in taxes against Azruddin Mohamed relating to a Lamborghini and two Land Cruisers, ruling that the Revenue Authority’s own application to the court was “an abuse of process.” Nandlall’s response was to call the judge’s reasoning an “aberration” that “cripples the state’s power to recover taxes” — remarkable language for the state’s chief legal officer to use against a sitting High Court judge’s ruling.

Then, on July 2 of this year, Justice Persaud quashed a second, even larger assessment: nearly $800 million in taxes and attempted vehicle seizures against Hana and Bibi Mohamed, with the court finding the GRA’s long-standing remigrant concession conditions themselves unlawful and beyond its statutory power. Two rulings, over a billion dollars in disputed assessments, both going against the state within eight months of each other. That is not an isolated misstep. It is a pattern of the state’s own legal position collapsing under judicial scrutiny — the opposite of the “world-class legal system” the country has been promised.

The government’s own fiscal choices around the extradition matter raise a further, related question of institutional confidence. Guyana, as the requested state, bears responsibility for the legal costs of prosecuting the American extradition request — that much reflects international treaty practice and precedent under governments of both major parties, and is not seriously in dispute.

What is in dispute is the government’s decision to bypass its own Director of Public Prosecutions — an office with decades of institutional experience in extradition matters — in favour of high-priced foreign counsel, including Terrence Williams KC and, since, Douglas Mendes SC.                                                                    As one letter writer to Stabroek News put it directly to the Attorney General in November, the State “already employs a corps of highly qualified, salaried lawyers” in the DPP’s Chambers who could have handled the matter “at zero additional cost to our nation’s coffers” — a rebuttal the AG’s public response, by the writer’s own account, never actually answered.

The optics compound the substance: taxpayers are underwriting an arrangement whose necessity has been publicly and specifically disputed, with no guarantee of recovering a cent of the sums the extradition is meant to vindicate.

The Meta Letter
Add to this the government’s own disclosure, offered by the Attorney General on his weekly programme, that it has written to Meta seeking a “formal institutional relationship” as part of a push toward social media regulation. The AG frames this exclusively as child protection, and the stated aim is not in question here. But a government that has just spent months being told by its own regional apex court to rein in its public commentary is not obviously the government whose assurances on the limits of a new relationship with the world’s largest social platform should go unexamined.       

The public’s unease was foreseeable enough that Nandlall felt compelled to pre-empt it publicly — itself a signal of how thin the trust has worn.

What an Honest Comparison Would Have Required
None of this is to say Ali lacks political skill, or that Starmer’s failures were purely institutional rather than personal. Leaders matter, and communication matters. But a column that sets out to explain political durability and then omits its subject’s most consequential year in public office is not making an argument — it is clearing a path.                                   

Had the column been the comparative analysis it claimed to be, it would have had to weigh Starmer’s accountability to functioning institutions against the specific, documented record of the man it proposes as Guyana’s next president: two separate CCJ rebukes four years apart, the second involving a rebuke from the region’s own apex court over conduct in the country’s highest-profile prosecution, two separate rulings quashing the state’s tax claims at a combined cost approaching a billion dollars, a public dispute over bypassing the state’s own prosecutorial service in favour of costly foreign counsel, and a disclosed approach to a global social media company for a “formal institutional relationship” that the AG felt compelled to publicly justify before it was even challenged.

None of this settles whether Nandlall would make a good or bad president — that is a judgment for an electorate, not an editorial. What it does settle is that the column in question is not the vehicle for making that judgment. A genuine comparative analysis invites scrutiny of all its subjects equally.

A campaign announcement invites scrutiny of none. Guyanese readers are entitled to know which one they were given.
— Staff Writer

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦PUBLIC INTEREST JOURNALISM         

When “Aesthetic” Means Acidic:GWI’s Semantic

There is a particular species of institutional dishonesty that doesn’t bother lying about the facts — it simply renames them. GWI’s response to the Public Utilities Commission’s 2025 Annual Report is a textbook specimen. The utility does not dispute a single reading in the PUC’s findings. It disputes what those readings should be called.

Let’s be precise about what the PUC actually found, because GWI’s statement is engineered to make you forget. At Amelia’s Ward, Linden Power Company, McKenzie, West Watooka and Wisroc, pH levels registered between 3.7 and 5.4 — this against a WHO safe range of 6.5 to 8.5. That is not a shade off-colour. That is water sitting in the acidity neighbourhood of black coffee and tomato juice, corrosive enough, in the PUC’s own language, to pose direct health risks. In Sparendaam, iron concentrations reached 3.35 mg/L — more than eleven times the WHO guideline. In Grove, turbidity spiked to 29 NTU against a ceiling of 5.

GWI’s statement never mentions these numbers. It never mentions Region 10’s acidic readings at all. Instead it retreats to a carefully bounded claim: that the parameters cited “primarily affect appearance, taste, colour and operational efficiency” and that no parameter “directly linked to public health” was flagged non-compliant. This is the sentence a communications team writes when it has decided the technical distinction between “aesthetic” and “health” parameters is more defensible than the plain English meaning of water corrosive enough to eat through a distribution system.

The category itself is doing the deceiving

pH, turbidity and iron are indeed classified by the WHO as aesthetic or operational parameters in isolation — a mild deviation causes complaints about taste, not tumours. GWI is exploiting the gap between the textbook definition and the field reality. Water at pH 3.7 is not a cosmetic inconvenience. Extreme acidity of that magnitude corrodes pipes, leaches heavy metals from ageing infrastructure into the water supply, and creates exactly the conditions under which secondary contamination becomes a public health event rather than a public health footnote. The PUC said as much — “corrosive enough to pose direct health risks” — and GWI’s statement simply does not engage with that sentence. It cannot rebut it, so it omits it.

This is the manoeuvre: cite the general classification, ignore the magnitude, and let the classification do all the rhetorical work. A body of water that fails on pH, turbidity, and iron simultaneously, across nine facilities, in three regions, for an entire reporting year, is not a controlled aesthetic variance. It is a systemic treatment failure that happens to be measured using indicators the WHO also uses for milder cosmetic issues elsewhere. GWI is borrowing the WHO’s terminology while discarding the WHO’s context.

Visible failure, verbal management                                       Raising the deeper point: residents did not need a PUC report to know something was wrong. The discoloured water pouring from taps in Shelter Belt and Grove was visible evidence, not a statistical abstraction. When a utility’s own customers can see, smell and taste the failure daily, and the regulator’s technical report confirms what was already visibly true, the appropriate response is not to reclassify the finding — it is to acknowledge what people already know and explain the remediation timeline honestly.

Instead, GWI’s statement inverts the burden of persuasion. It does not need to convince Region 10 that the water flowing acidic through their pipes is safe; the residents already have their evidence.

What GWI is actually doing is pre-empting the national conversation — trying to inoculate public opinion and, more pointedly, its own regulatory standing, against a report that arrived at a politically inconvenient moment.

The statement is addressed less to the people drinking the water than to the PUC, to Parliament, and to whoever will read the annual report line by line.

The meter deflection follows the same pattern

The same document pivots to water meter installation and performs an identical trick with numbers: cite a favourable three-year average (2022–2024) to bury a single damning year

GWI’s own figures, set against the PUC’s, tell the sharper story: installations collapsed to 8,608 units in 2025 with almost no activity in the final two quarters, against a mandate under PUC Order No. 2 of 2018. Blaming a Brazilian supplier’s relocation to China is a real supply-chain fact, but it does not explain a near-total stoppage across two consecutive quarters, nor does it explain why 47,875 customers — roughly one in four — remain unmetered seven years into a mandated rollout now pushed back to 2028. A single external shock does not produce that scale of institutional drift. Something closer to home stalled, and the statement’s supplier narrative is doing for the metering failure what “aesthetic” is doing for the water quality failure: supplying an externally-caused, blame-diffusing frame for what looks, on the numbers, like an internally-caused shortfall.

What accountability journalism owes here

GWI is entitled to context. It is entitled to point out, correctly, that the PUC report did not find bacteriological or microbial contamination, and that is a real and relevant fact the public should have. But there is a difference between adding context and substituting a narrower technical category for the honest characterisation of a systemic failure. The company’s own statement confirms the treatment plants were already flagged for upgrades before the story ran — meaning GWI’s own internal assessment agreed something was materially wrong, well before the semantics campaign began.

The public does not need GWI to tell them whether their water looks safe. They need GWI to tell them, honestly and without linguistic cover, when it will be.

Until Amelia’s Ward, McKenzie, Grove and Sparendaam post pH, turbidity and iron readings inside WHO ranges — not reclassified readings, actual compliant ones — this publication will treat “aesthetic, not safety” as what it is: a defence built for a regulator’s filing cabinet, not for a family filling a glass from the tap.

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦TRUTH♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦OBJECTIVITY

The Office, Not the Man: Ali’s “Continuity” Fiction and the Article 127 Breach

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There is a particular species of executive overreach that does not announce itself with a raised fist. It arrives instead in a lawyer’s phrase, offered almost as an aside, and it is more dangerous for the modesty of its delivery. This week it arrived as “a grey area that we have to navigate carefully.”

That is how President Irfaan Ali characterised the question of whether he is constitutionally obliged to consult Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed on the substantive appointments of the Chancellor of the Judiciary and the Chief Justice. There is no grey area. Article 127(1) of the Constitution is not ambiguous, and it does not run to the President’s convenience. It states, without qualification:

The Chancellor and the Chief Justice shall each be appointed by the President, acting after obtaining the agreement of the Leader of the Opposition.” Not notice. Not courtesy. Agreement — from the Leader of the Opposition, a constitutional office presently held by Mr Mohamed, not by a letter Dr Ali wrote to his predecessor

The theory, in the President’s own words

Pressed on why he had not engaged Mr Mohamed directly, Dr Ali offered a “continuity of government” theory: that because his administration continued after the September 1 elections, the recommendation he had put to then-Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton in October 2025 “remains the position of the government” and requires no fresh engagement with the man who has held the office since January 26. Asked again, directly, whether that position had been communicated to Mr Mohamed, the President repeated only that the recommendation “has not changed” — an answer to a question that was not asked, and a studied evasion of the one that was.

This is worth sitting with, because it is not a slip. It is a legal theory, articulated by a head of state, in defence of a decision not to perform a constitutional duty.

Reduced to its essence, the theory holds that “consultation” under Article 127 is satisfied once, in perpetuity, regardless of who subsequently occupies the office of Leader of the Opposition — that the President’s obligation attaches not to the constitutional office and the person Guyanese voters and parliamentarians have placed in it, but to whichever individual happened to be convenient to consult at the moment the President first formed a view.

Mr Mohamed’s rebuttal was plain and correct: “Mr Norton is not the Opposition Leader. He needs to write me or call me and mention that he wants to meet on whatever issue. We can’t go with that letter.” Put another way — the Office survives the transition of the person occupying it, and so does the President’s duty to it. That is not a novel constitutional proposition. It is the ordinary operation of Westminster-derived office.

The courts have already answered this question

The President is not improvising in a vacuum. Guyana’s High Court has already ruled — directly and specifically — on the character of the Article 127 obligation, in litigation arising from Dr Ali’s own decade-long refusal to make these very appointments. In April 2023, Justice Damone Younge held that “for as long as there are no substantive appointments to the offices of Chancellor and Chief Justice under Article 127(1) of the Constitution, the President and the Leader of the Opposition are under the continuous mandatory constitutional duty and obligation to engage in a process which results in compliance with Article 127(1) of the Constitution.”

Continuous. Mandatory.                Those are the court’s words, not the Opposition’s rhetoric. A continuous duty cannot, by definition, be discharged by a single static communication frozen at a moment in time and preserved thereafter as if the office to which it was addressed had not changed hands. If the duty is continuous, it necessarily runs to whoever currently holds the office being consulted — otherwise the word “continuous” means nothing at all. Dr Ali’s own government has never challenged this characterisation of the duty; it has only ever argued about timing, never about to whom the duty is owed.

Indeed, it is the government’s own former courtroom position that now undercuts the President’s “continuity” theory. In the same 2023 proceedings, Attorney General Anil Nandlall argued on the State’s behalf that the President retained discretion over when to initiate the Article 127 process — “as soon as is reasonably practicable” — while never once disputing that the party owed consultation was the sitting Leader of the Opposition. The government’s litigated position, then, conceded implicitly what Dr Ali now wishes to avoid conceding explicitly: that the obligation tracks the office as currently occupied. He cannot rely on a letter to Mr Norton to satisfy a duty his own Attorney General has already told a judge is continuous and mandatory.

Anticipating the deflection

There is a precedent the government may reach for, and it should be dealt with before it is deployed. Mr Nandlall has separately noted, in relation to the appointment of the Commissioner of Police, that the constitutional consultation requirement did not apply at a moment when there was, in fact, no Opposition Leader in office to consult — a genuine vacancy, not a change of occupant. That is not the present case. Mr Mohamed is the duly elected Leader of the Opposition.                                                 

There is no vacancy for Dr Ali to invoke, no absence of an interlocutor, only his own reluctance to pick up the telephone.

Any attempt to graft the Police Commissioner precedent onto this dispute should be recognised for what it would be: a false equivalence between an empty office and an occupied one the President would simply prefer not to deal with.

A demand grounded in the Office, not the man

Some will note, correctly, that Mr Mohamed and his father are presently the subject of United States sanctions and an extradition fight tied to allegations of gold export tax evasion, wire fraud, and money laundering. That is a serious matter, and it is entirely beside the point. The Constitution does not condition the President’s Article 127 duty on the Opposition Leader’s personal legal standing, his popularity, his business history, or Dr Ali’s evident discomfort with him. It conditions the duty on the office. This publication has never hesitated to hold power to account regardless of who wields it or who opposes it, and we extend the same standard here: the demand that Dr Ali consult with Mr Mohamed is a demand that he respect the Office of Opposition Leader, exactly as we would make of any president confronting any opposition leader, popular or reviled. To excuse the President from a constitutional duty because the current occupant of a co-equal office is personally unpalatable to him is to hand him a permanent veto over which opposition leaders he must respect the Constitution for — a veto no president should have and none was given.

The pattern this fits

This is not an isolated lapse. It is the latest instance of a governing style this publication has documented repeatedly: a President who treats the constitutional bodies and processes designed to check him as optional formalities to be honoured only when convenient, and who prefers his own unilateral pronouncement to the deliberative process the Constitution actually requires.

We have seen it in his preemption of the Integrity Commission’s findings before the Commission itself could act. We have seen it in the GECOM commissioner impasse, where the Leader of the Opposition’s Article 161(3)(b) nomination rights have met similar resistance.

 We now see it in the judiciary’s top two offices — offices that have sat without substantive appointments for more than two decades, a fact the Caribbean Court of Justice’s own President, Adrian Saunders, has publicly and pointedly lamented.

Seventeen years without a substantive Chancellor. Seventeen years without a substantive Chief Justice. A High Court ruling, sought by his own government’s political opponents, that already tells him the duty is continuous and mandatory. And still, in July 2026, the President’s answer is a “grey area” and a letter written to a man no longer in office.

A 36-seat mandate is a mandate to govern. It is not a dispensation from the Constitution’s plain text, and it is not, whatever the President may have convinced himself of, a title deed to a kingdom.

  . Mr Mohamed says he is prepared to test court, as the opposition did successfully in 2023. He should. The Constitution, and the ruling already on the books, are on his side.