Donald Trump, Irfaan Ali: what differentiates, who imitates?

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592 GUARDIAN♥ACCOUNTABILITY♥INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♥GUYANA

Donald Trump, Irfaan Ali: what differentiates, who imitates?

OPINION BY: GHK LALL September 2026

I have long observed Presidents Donald Trump and Irfaan Ali.  Who’s the leader, who the imitator?  Which one is the pretender, or are they both?  Because of the grand and glorious natures of both Pres Trump and Pres Ali, the great pretender is more appropriate.  The competition between the two is for the crown of who is the greater pretender.  It’s a close call, almost a photo finish.   Consider.

Pres Trump just finalized a secret deal with Venezuela, with a hapless and helpless President Delcy Rodriguez dragged along, while trying to keep her slip from showing.  He instantly proclaimed it as the best oil deal ever.  Mosey on over to Guyana, and there is Pres Ali’s PPP Govt.  According to Guyana’s Ali, his PPP Govt is the most transparent in Guyana’s history. 

The pressures of his high, demanding, office made him forget access to information; Exxon audits; and cost-of-living stats distorted. . 

An American and a Guyanese, both leaders who discredit themselves appallingly without any help from others, claiming to be the best in class, the best ever.

Pres Trump has visions of Making America Great Again.  He succeeded.  In reimaging the KKK and reselling it as MAGA.  Though no cone hats and white sheets for their uniform, there’s still white heat generated by a storm of white supremacy.  I wonder how many of those characters are resident in Duke Street and Ogle.  So that all Guyanese get my point, the U.S. Embassy and that projection of American imperial power, Exxon, respectively.  Exxon’s red, white, and blue colors are not accidental.  I should be proud.

In Guyana, Pres Ali very much likes the idea that he is the greatest.  He isn’t named Mohamed I. Ali for nothing.  Whereas, Mr. Trump has MAGA, Mr. Ali has One Guyana.  Renegade Indians, tribal traitors, and parasites and naysayers from Guyana’s other tribes are not welcome inside the One Guyana tent.  Though separated by 2500 miles of ocean and islands, the American Donald Trump and Guyanese Irfaan Ali are the closest reproduction of those Siamese marvels that’s been my joy to encounter. 

 To this point, the thrust has been that when Trump and Ali are lined up side-by-side, what differentiates?  What separates?

Candidate Trump campaigned on a pledge to end wars.  On assuming office, he promptly discarded that pledge and runs with one of the biggest moneymakers for the Republican base Wall Street and America’s sprawling military-industrial complex.  When there are no grounds for war, he manufactures one.  Perhaps, he meant the thought of war, and not the practice of it. 

Candidate Ali campaigned on a pledge to review and renegotiate all contracts.  On assuming Guyana’s presidency, he declared war on Guyanese interests, by settling for newfound solace in sanctity of contract.  Identical to how Trump pays his debts to America’s war machine and business interests, so also Ali’s halter wrapped around his neck compels him to pay PPP indebtedness to America; those commitments made to Pompeo, Lynch, and others of that cabal.

Pres Trump has issued pardons left and right to insurrectionists and subversives.  Those who laid waste to the Capitol in Washington, in the manner of Atilla the Hun and Alaric the Visigoth.  Vandalism doesn’t come near to covering that wreckage.  Yet, presidential pardons and Republican no objections have since led to those being doled out like donuts and free coffee. 

Pres Ali and his PPP have a cabinet, a Congress, a consulate or two, and a cohort, where there’s no need to look too long, or research too hard, to find terrorists, stalkers, predators, assassins, financial felons, and corrupters.  Like America, so Guyana.  Somehow those outstanding Guyanese emerge with untarnished hands and sanitized characters, compliments of some mysterious PPP pardoning process.  Purest Guyanese patriots.

Both Presidents Trump and Ali see the free and independent sections of the media as an enemy to be vanquished.  Both Trump and Ali see the judiciary in a certain light, have their uses for it.  Both leaders boast a compulsion to the outlandish and outrageous.  Both seem to think nothing of immersing themselves in the injurious and infantile.

Summation time.  In considering all this, the two earlier questions return reinforced.  Donald Trump and Irfaan Ali: who is the leader, who the imitator?  What differentiates, what separates?  One more: who came first, who owns first place?  A progressive, everyone.

ONE LAW, TWO STANDARDS: GGMC WARNS SMALL MINERS ON TENURE TRANSFERS

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ONE LAW, TWO STANDARDS: GGMC WARNS SMALL MINERS ON TENURE TRANSFERS — WHILE A $2.2 BILLION FOREIGN CHANGE OF CONTROL GOES UNEXPLAINED

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar- September 2026

The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) issued a public advisory this week warning tenure holders against selling, assigning, or transferring mining lands outside the law — naming Irrevocable Powers of Attorney specifically as an instrument the Commission will not recognize as proof of ownership. The advisory is framed as a defense of “the integrity of the mining tenure system.” The 592 Guardian agrees the concern is legitimate. But the same statute GGMC invokes against small holders — Section 18 of the Mining Act — applies with equal force, and considerably higher stakes, to the largest corporate concession holders in the country. The record shows no evidence it has been applied to them at all.

THE LAW, AS WRITTEN

Section 18 of the Mining Act (Cap. 65:01) is unambiguous. A body corporate holding a mining license “shall not, without the prior consent in writing of the Minister” register a share transfer, or enter any arrangement, that has the effect of giving a person “control” of that body corporate. Control is defined precisely: twenty percent or more of issued equity shares, the power to appoint or block half the board, or command of two-fifths or more of voting rights. On an application for consent, the Minister must be satisfied that “the public interest would not be prejudiced by the change of control” before granting it and the Minister “may call for and obtain such information as he considers necessary” to make that decision.

This is not an obscure or discretionary courtesy. It is the statute’s central mechanism for ensuring that when control of a Guyana mining license changes hands, the State has been asked, has looked at the transaction, and has said yes.

THE TRANSACTION THAT SHOULD HAVE TRIGGERED IT

In April 2026, Canadian miner G Mining Ventures Corp. (GMIN) announced a definitive agreement to acquire all issued and outstanding shares of G2 Goldfields Inc. — not a fraction, not a stake, but total ownership; in a deal valued at approximately US$2.2 billion. The acquisition combined G2’s Oko-Ghanie project with GMIN’s Oko West project into what the companies themselves describe as a Tier-1, district-scale gold mining hub spanning over 362 square kilometres in Region Seven. G2 shareholders approved the arrangement in June 2026 with 99.99 percent of votes in favor; the Ontario Superior Court of Justice granted final approval later that month; the transaction closed in July.

Oko West mining claim.

At every stage of that process — the shareholder vote, the court hearing, the closing — the approving authority was Canadian: the Ontario Superior Court and G2’s own shareholders, voting under Ontario corporate law. Nowhere in the extensive public record of this transaction; the joint press releases, the investor filings, the trade press coverage — does the Ministry of Natural Resources or the GGMC appear as a party whose written consent was sought or obtained under Section 18, despite this transaction constituting control many multiples over every threshold the section defines.

If a small miner needs the Commission’s approval to arrange a joint venture on a single claim, a foreign public company does not get to acquire total control of a license many times the scale of that claim by simply filing paperwork in Toronto.

THE QUESTION GGMC’S ADVISORY DOES NOT ANSWER

GGMC’s advisory this week is addressed to “tenure holders” in general terms, but its practical target is unmistakable: individual and small-scale operators using private agreements, receipts, and IPOAs to move claims informally. The Commission is right that these instruments are not lawful proof of tenure transfer, and right to insist that Joint Venture arrangements be “properly structured, documented, and submitted to the GGMC for consideration and approval.”

But the advisory is silent on the one class of transaction where Section 18 was written specifically to apply — corporate change-of-control among mining license holders  and where the value at stake is not a single claim but a national gold district. If the Commission expects a small operator to submit a JV agreement for approval before any beneficial occupation occurs, it owes the public an equivalent account of how it satisfied itself, under Section 18(2), that “the public interest would not be prejudiced” by GMIN’s acquisition of G2 — a transaction of a scale the drafters of the Mining Act plainly had in mind when they wrote the twenty percent and two-fifths thresholds into law.

President Irfaan Ali was asked directly, at a recent press conference, whether the pattern of foreign firms “flipping” large-scale mining assets concerns his administration, and whether stronger policy is needed to ensure Guyana benefits directly from such transactions. He defended the practice, characterizing the transfer and sale of mineral properties among foreign mining companies as ordinary global mining industry activity, not unique to Guyana.

That answer addresses the economics of the deal. It does not address whether Section 18 consent was sought, reviewed, or granted

WHAT THIS PUBLICATION IS ASKING

The 592 Guardian is not asserting that Section 18 consent was withheld or ignored. We are asserting that no public record shows it was obtained; and that the absence of that record, set against an advisory publicly disciplining small holders under the same Act, creates the appearance of a two-tiered enforcement regime: one standard, rigorously stated, for Guyanese operating at the level of a single claim; a second, unstated and unevidenced, for foreign public companies restructuring national mineral assets worth billions. If that appearance is wrong, the remedy is simple — publish the proof.

FORMAL REQUESTS FOR THE RECORD

1, Confirm whether an application for Ministerial consent under Section 18 of the Mining Act was submitted in connection with G Mining Ventures Corp.’s acquisition of all issued and outstanding shares of G2 Goldfields Inc., and if so, the date of that application.
2.If consent was granted, produce the written instrument of consent, the date it was issued, and the public-interest determination the Minister made under Section 18(2) in reaching that decision.
3.If no application was made or no consent was granted, state on what legal basis the change of control affecting G2’s Guyana-registered mining licenses was permitted to proceed and be given effect within Guyana.
4.Disclose whether the Commission or Ministry has, in the past five years, required Section 18 consent for any other change-of-control transaction involving a foreign-incorporated mining license holder — and if so, name the transaction and the date consent was granted, for comparison against the record sought above.
5.State whether the Commission intends to apply the same documentation and approval standard it is now demanding of small tenure holders under threat of non-recognition of their instruments; to future changes of control among corporate concession holders operating at district scale.

These are not rhetorical questions. Section 18 gives the Minister the express statutory power to call for whatever information is necessary to make a consent determination; the Commission maintains records of licenses, their holders, and the conditions attached to them. The proof, if it exists, is a matter of producing a document already required by law to exist. Its absence would itself be the story.

The 592 Guardian will publish the Ministry’s and Commission’s response, in full, alongside this piece.

— The Board

Four Sittings, Two Bills: What Guyana’s Parliament Actually Did With Its Time

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  592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Four Sittings, Two Bills: What Guyana’s Parliament Actually Did With Its Time

A Parliament convened for government business

OPINION BY: Staff Writer— September 2026

The issue is not simply that Guyana’s 13th Parliament has met remarkably infrequently. It is that, when it has met, the public record suggests a chamber convened principally to receive, process and pass the executive’s agenda—not to test it. Parliament’s own homepage listed the fourth sitting, on June 5, 2026, as a “Budget Presentation 2026” sitting, while external reporting records that the Development Bank Bill was passed at the fifth sitting on July 27.

That distinction matters. A legislature is not measured only by whether bills eventually become Acts. It is also measured by whether ministers are questioned, decisions are explained, spending is scrutinized, opposition voices are heard, and the public can reliably see when and how national decisions are made.

The calendar tells a story

Four dated sittings across 299 days would already be an extraordinary statistic for a National Assembly charged with oversight of a rapidly expanding oil-producing state. But the more troubling point is qualitative: the sessions identified so far appear overwhelmingly tied to inauguration, budget business and the movement of government legislation.

One sitting swore in MPs. Two were designated budget presentations. The June 5 sitting introduced major financial business, including the Guyana Development Bank Bill and supplementary spending. Then, 52 days later, the bill was passed in a fifth sitting that was visible in Parliament’s video and social-media footprint but apparently not readily available as a dated entry in the published sittings index.

A public institution cannot expect citizens to follow its work if its own official record leaves them having to reconstruct fundamental events from news reports, livestream titles, or social-media posts.

Lawmaking without deliberation

The July 27 sitting is especially revealing because it was not a minor procedural matter. The Guyana Development Bank Bill established the legal framework for a state development bank that may provide loans with or without collateral and with or without interest—powers that plainly require robust safeguards, transparent criteria and serious parliamentary examination.

Yet Kaieteur News reported that the bill passed without debate or arguments from the Opposition, while opposition MPs were protesting over the MV Barima tragedy and calling for the resignations of Ministers Juan Edghill and Deodat Indar. The Speaker reportedly suspended proceedings twice amid disorder, and government backbenchers proceeded with their contributions unchallenged.

That is not meaningful legislative deliberation. It is a bill being carried through at a moment when the chamber’s capacity for adversarial scrutiny had effectively collapsed.

More than a procedural complaint

The government may say, with some justification, that parliamentary work is not confined to the floor of the National Assembly. Committees exist. Ministries answer questions through other channels. The budget process itself may involve extensive administrative preparation and sectoral review.

But none of that erases the special constitutional role of plenary sittings. The chamber is where ministers must account publicly, where votes are recorded, where alternative views are stated for the national record, and where citizens can watch their representatives confront the decisions made in their name.

Committee work cannot become a substitute for a Parliament that rarely assembles. Nor can a livestream substitute for a properly maintained, searchable and complete official record.

 The development-bank test

The Development Bank Bill was precisely the kind of measure that required more, not less, open scrutiny. A state-backed lender handling tens of billions of dollars raises unavoidable questions:

♦ Who selects the board, and what limits exist on political influence?

♦  What disclosure rules will govern loans, beneficiaries, defaults and related-party transactions?

♦ What independent oversight will ensure that credit is not distributed as patronage?

♦ What appeal or review mechanism will protect applicants from arbitrary decisions?

♦ Will Parliament receive regular reports sufficient to examine whether public funds are reaching productive enterprises rather than preferred interests?

The reported framework allows the bank to support small and medium-sized enterprises through loans that may be unsecured and interest-free. Those objectives may be defensible, even desirable, but they heighten; not reduce—the need for clear eligibility rules, published decisions, audited accounts and independent supervision.

A development bank can become a useful engine for productive investment. Without strong guardrails, it can also become a politically managed dispenser of favors. Parliament was the place to draw that line in public.

Accountability cannot be incidental

The July 27 sitting also exposes a deeper failure of parliamentary scheduling. A maritime disaster that reportedly claimed 73 lives had become the immediate political emergency. The Opposition used the sitting to demand ministerial accountability. The government, according to the report, did not substantively answer those calls before its legislation moved forward.

That sequence should concern even those who support the Development Bank Bill. It suggests that national emergencies and executive legislation are not being given the separate, sustained parliamentary time they deserve. Instead, a crisis of public accountability became background noise while the government’s financial business continued.

A confident government should welcome a full sitting devoted to the Barima disaster: ministerial statements, documentary disclosures, direct questioning, motions, and a public accounting of what failed, who knew what, and what corrective action followed. If Parliament cannot create room for that, it is hard to argue that it is functioning as the country’s central forum of democratic accountability.

Questions Parliament must answer

The immediate demand is not theatrical confrontation. It is administrative clarity and constitutional seriousness. Parliament should publish, in one accessible place:

♦ A complete dated calendar of every sitting of the 13th Parliament.

♦  The Order Paper, Hansard, votes and video for the July 27 sitting.

♦ The texts, amendments, committee referrals and voting record for the Guyana Development Bank Bill and Supplementary Financial Paper No. 1.

♦  A forward calendar showing when questions, private members’ motions, opposition business and ministerial statements will be heard.

♦  Regular committee reports on the Development Bank’s governance, lending portfolio, beneficiaries, defaults and audited financial statements.

The government should also explain why a bill of such financial and institutional consequence was passed in circumstances where full opposition engagement did not occur. “Passed” is not the same as “scrutinized.” A parliamentary majority can lawfully carry a vote; it cannot turn the absence of examination into proof that examination was unnecessary.

 A sharper editorial close

Guyana does not need a Parliament that merely opens, presents, tables and passes. It needs one that sits often enough and openly enough—to ask difficult questions before the money is committed, before the contracts are signed, before the agencies are empowered, and before public grief becomes another item displaced by government business.

The central concern is not that the government won a vote. Governments with parliamentary majorities win votes.

The concern is that the National Assembly appears to be meeting so seldom, and so narrowly around executive priorities, that scrutiny itself is becoming an exception rather than the ordinary business of democratic government.

Five sittings in ten months is already an alarming number. But the real indictment lies in what those sittings reveal: a Parliament increasingly used to authorize power, rather than examine it.

Sources

1. Development Bank Bill rushed through Parliament without … https://kaieteurnewsonline.com/2026/07/28/development-bank-bill-rushed-through-parliament-without-debate

2. National Assembly of the Parliament of Guyana | Parliament of … https://parliament.gov.gy

3. Parliament of Guyana https://www.youtube.com/@parliamentofguyana1710

4. Guyana Development Bank Bill

5. Guyana | IPU Parline: global data on national parliaments https://data.ipu.org/parliament/GY/GY-LC01

6. Guyana Development Bank 2026: Zero-Interest SME Loans https://592hub.com/guides/development-bank-guide

7. 3RD SITTING – 13TH PARLIAMENT |2026 BUDGET- … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGUeBT8Pbpo

8. Development bank risks becoming welfare agency – former … https://kaieteurnewsonline.com/2026/06/11/development-bank-risks-becoming-welfare-agency-former-ambassador

9. National Assembly (Guyana) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Assembly_(Guyana)

10. The Guyana Development Bank Bill was today passed … https://www.facebook.com/100064540276050/posts/the-guyana-development-bank-bill-was-today-passed-during-the-5th-sitting-of-the-/1464167832411212

Published, Not Served: The Legal Vacuum Behind GPF’s Rolling List of Named Traffic Offenders

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   592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA 

Published, Not Served: The Legal Vacuum Behind GPF’s Rolling List of Named Traffic Offenders

 0PINION BY: Hem Kumar —September 2026 

 Since President Irfaan Ali’s declaration that government would begin “publishing  the names of individuals with the highest number of outstanding traffic offences” as a matter of accountability policy, the Guyana Police Force has been doing precisely that not once, not as a symbolic gesture, but as a running institutional practice now stretching past one hundred and twenty pages. A list dated 27 August 2026 and circulated under the banner “GUYANA POLICE FORCE — OUTSTANDING TRAFFIC TICKETS — PUBLICATION LIST,” broadcast through the Force’s own Radio Eve Leary channel and redistributed via Facebook and unsolicited text message, places on publicly circulated  pages  the full names, vehicle registration numbers, and ticket counts of Guyanese citizens, some appearing under four separate registrations, their entire unresolved driving history rendered as a public ledger.

A Sample with Names and Plate numbers redacted

 

The 592 Guardian has examined the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act, Chapter 51:02, in both its current L.R.O. 1/2012 revision and its 1998 predecessor, together with the enforcement provisions of the Summary Jurisdiction (Procedure) Act. The finding is unambiguous: no provision in either statute authorises the Guyana Police Force, the Traffic Department, or any other arm of the executive to publish the identities and violation histories of individual citizens as a mechanism of notice, service, or enforcement. The publication drive rests on nothing more than presidential policy announcement — exercised in a jurisdiction where the one law capable of constraining such disclosure, the Data Protection Act 2023, remains without a functioning commencement order more than three years after passage.

The Act tells you exactly how a citizen is meant to learn they are in breach of it. Mass publication is not that method — it appears nowhere in its 118 sections.

WHAT THE ACT ACTUALLY REQUIRES

Section 8 of the Summary Jurisdiction (Procedure) Act establishes the traffic ticket itself as the statutory notice mechanism: a document issued by a member of the Guyana Police Force to an individual at the point an offence is committed or alleged. Section 45 of the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act (numbered 46 in the 1998 revision) reinforces this for the offences most commonly ticketed — speeding, reckless or dangerous driving, careless driving, by requiring that a person cannot be convicted unless one of three conditions is met: a contemporaneous warning at the scene; a summons served on the accused within fourteen days; or written notice served personally or sent by registered post to the accused or the vehicle’s registered owner, also within fourteen days.

Every one of these mechanisms is individualised, time-bound, and directed at a named recipient. None contemplates public disclosure as an alternative or supplement. The Act’s drafters anticipated the problem of an offender who cannot be traced — the proviso at s.45(i)(A) excuses non-compliance only where “neither the name and address of the accused nor the name and address of the owner of the vehicle could with reasonable diligence have been ascertained” — but even this exception produces no publication remedy. It simply permits conviction to proceed without the normally-required notice. At no point does the statute pivot to public identification as a substitute for individualised service.

“PUBLICATION” UNDER THE ACT MEANS SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY

The Act does contain a publication provision — but it is not the one the Force’s list rests on, whether by design or by conflation. Section 105 (Cap. 51:02, L.R.O. 1/2012) reads in full:

“All orders made by the Minister or by the Commissioner of Police under the powers conferred upon them by this Act shall be published in the Gazette, and shall come into operation on the date of such publication or on such later date as may be specified in the order.”

 

This is a transparency requirement running in the opposite direction from what the Force’s list purports to do. It obliges the state to publish its own rules — speed limit orders, road-use restrictions, parking designations, and the regulations the Minister is empowered to make under section 104 covering vehicle construction, driver licensing, and public service vehicle conduct — before those rules can bind the public. It has no bearing on, and cannot reasonably be extended to cover, the publication of a private citizen’s name, registration number, and personal violation count. The same logic that requires government to publish its rules before enforcing them contains no reciprocal power to publish a citizen’s record before, or instead of, serving them.

Section 104’s regulation-making power is itself bounded by an exhaustive list; vehicle construction and weight, identification marks, speed limits, driver licensing and testing, traffic and pedestrian regulation, public service vehicle conduct, and goods vehicle conditions — with breach penalties capped at ten thousand dollars or three months’ imprisonment. Nothing in that list, and nothing in the adjoining section 106 (governing duplicate licenses and certificates, a wholly unrelated administrative matter), supplies the missing authority.

A POLICY RUNNING AHEAD OF THE LAW

The publication drive traces to a Department of Public Information report in which President Ali, addressing the rollout of the Safe Road Intelligent System’s automated camera network, announced that government would begin naming individuals with the highest volumes of outstanding tickets. “This is about accountability,” the President said. “The system will only work if we have compliance. And Guyana must do better.” At the time of that announcement, the electronic system had already generated 42,000 tickets, of which only 10,000 had been paid; a compliance gap the publication list appears designed to close through public pressure rather than through any of the enforcement pathways the Act actually provides.

That framing is telling in itself: the President described the measure in the language of policy and compliance strategy, not in the language of legal notice or statutory service. Nothing in the public record reviewed by this newsroom shows the policy being implemented through an amendment to the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act, a regulation made and gazetted under section 104/105, or any other instrument that would bring it within the Act’s framework. It appears, instead, to have moved directly from presidential announcement to operational practice; a Traffic Chief briefing the public on outstanding balances via Radio Eve Leary, and a rolling published list executed by the Force without any visible statutory footing.

THE DATA PROTECTION GAP

The absence of authority under the traffic Act would matter less if Guyana’s data protection framework were positioned to test the practice on separate grounds. It is not. The Data Protection Act 2023 (Act No. 18 of 2023) received presidential assent in August 2023 and would, on its face, govern precisely this kind of processing — the collection, keeping, and dissemination of personal data by a public authority. But as of the most recent independent confirmation available to this newsroom, the Act has not been brought into force. Its commencement requires an order that, unlike the parallel Digital Identity Card Act — gazzetted and operational since March 2026; has not been issued. A Data Protection Commissioner has been appointed and describes the Data Protection Office as still being “actively engaged in the process of formally establishing” itself, language that stops short of confirming the Act’s substantive and enforcement provisions are live.

This is not a hypothetical concern. The European Union Election Observation Mission’s final report on Guyana’s September 2025 general and regional elections explicitly warned government to “activate the 2023 Data Protection Act to block a repeat of the malicious use of Guyanese personal data,” after finding that “politically motivated doxing occurred with impunity” in the absence of an operative law and a functioning Data Protection Office. That warning, issued in November 2025, addressed the exposure of cash-grant recipients’ personal data. It applies with equal force to a state agency mass-publishing the names, vehicle registrations, and violation histories of ordinary drivers; some of whom, like the four registrations listed under a single name on page 81 of the 27 August list, have their entire outstanding record compiled into a single public profile with no visible mechanism to contest an entry before it appears.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE TICKET LIST

The traffic list is a small case with a large implication. Guyana is administering an automated, camera-driven ticketing regime — the Safe Road Intelligent System; capable of generating tens of thousands of penalties with minimal human discretion, while simultaneously running a compliance-pressure publication campaign built on no statutory authority, inside a data protection regime that exists in statute but not in practice.

The Force has separately had to warn the public that fraudulent text messages impersonating GPF ticket notices are circulating and directing people instead to the official lookup at speed.gpf.gov.gy. That warning was necessary precisely because GPF-branded, personally identifying financial and legal information moving through informal channels; text blasts, Facebook shares — has become common enough to require a fraud advisory. A genuine GPF publication list, moving through the same informal channels the Force has warned the public to distrust, does nothing to narrow that confusion.

Nothing in this analysis suggests the underlying debts are fictitious, or that the individuals named do not in fact owe outstanding fines. The question this newsroom is raising is narrower and more fundamental: by what legal authority is that information being made public, in this form, through this channel, absent the individualised notice the Act requires and absent any operative check under the law meant to govern the handling of personal data? On the present record, the answer appears to be none. The publication rests on executive policy alone — announced by the President, executed by the Police Force, and unreviewable by any data protection authority that does not yet exist in practice.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES

The 592 Guardian is putting the following questions to the Guyana Police Force, the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Attorney General’s Chambers, and will publish any response in full:

  1. Under what specific statutory provision, regulation, or Cabinet instrument is the Guyana Police Force publishing named individuals’ outstanding traffic ticket records?
  2. Does the Force consider inclusion on this list to constitute legal notice for the purposes of section 45 of the Motor Vehicles and Road Traffic Act, and if so, on what basis?
  3. What mechanism, if any, exists for a listed individual to contest an entry before or after publication?
  4. Has the Attorney General’s Chambers issued any opinion on the compatibility of this practice with the Data Protection Act 2023, notwithstanding its non-commencement?

A government that campaigned on transparency owes the public more than the assurance that the underlying debts are real. It owes an accounting of the authority under which their disclosure is made. Until that authority is shown, the publication list is not accountability. It is exposure without a statute behind it.

— The Board

Playing The PPP Game, Then Distancing, Last Indifference

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592 GUARDIAN♣ ACCOUNTABILITY♣INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♣GUYANA

Playing The PPP Game, Then Distancing, Last Indifference

OPINION BY: GHK LALL— September 2026

There’s a human tragedy.  Cotton Tree and two cousins.  Across Mandarin Bridge and an 11-year-old-child.  Police killings in Linden.  And, more lately, a boat that went down and took down over 100 Guyanese lives.  Poor ones.  The rich ones and big ones don’t sail, they soar.  A flight is ‘fine change’ for them.  The PPP Govt has a practice. 

Entourages roll into communities, before families.  Amidst human tragedy, caravans, and human dramas.  Political ones that follow a canned formula, a set procedure, what are now standard operations.  Follow the threads.

Visits.  Handholding.  Solemn expressions.  Proper clothing.  Words and carriage matching.  Police or politicians.  By golly, the PPP creates new science.  All that’s desired is truth and justice.  Hopes for truth and a sincere quest for justice are all that’s placed before visitors and professional mourners.  Political ones are the best.  Done!  Will be done! 

Guaranteed with seal of public oath affixed.  Repeated.  Cotton Tree.  Tuschen.  Linden.  The national tsunami that was the capsizing, plunging, horror of the MV Barima.  Hope still stirs, springs.  Out of tragedy’s agonies, there will be duty to the people.  Truth and justice delivered.  Finality that brings blessed closure.  The ghosts of the stricken, fallen, find peace.  So, also the savaged spirits of families and communities.  So, begins and ends chapter one in the Guyana story of when tragedy stalks and the PPP Govt mount its rescue operation.  The first objective transcending all others is damage control.  Limit the spread.  Manage flareups that could incite more fallouts.

Chapter two reveals the hypocrisies that ran deep amid the solemnities, mourning, grieving, the speechmaking celebrating Guyanese resilience.  Theater in full swing, free political matinees for the masses.  Now, there’s distancing.  The machinery takes over.  PPP stars who were in the forefront, retreat, take distant seats.  To make themselves invisible, no stains reach. 

A commission will be.  Guyanese hope.  The team is announced.  I discern a foul.  The sham registers deeply.  Are those the best?  Would this deliver?  What about trust?  Poor precedents exist.  Can’t be denied or wished away.  Try two: inferno, police mishaps.  The fire killed children; gunfire killed adults.  Whatever the objectives of those blood sacrifices, this is incontestable: the dead is still dead.  Something is conspicuous.  Where are those who were in the grieving vanguard?  To where have they disappeared?  Practice and process are the new headliners, with the right breed of people in place.

Prior whitewashes set to be repeated.  One dead, two dead, a hundred dead, it’s only a number.  Nothing to get worked up about.  It’s the new line of those who promised truth and justice.  That is, if they break their silence, narrow their distance.  Gruesome murders are ancient history.  A child drowned in mysterious circumstances, and the usual business continues.  Killings by the State, roll with them.  A hundred sent to their death, through criminal negligence at every level. 

Yet those fingered are three poor working men, left with no choice.  Perhaps, that calumny (an official crime by itself) is all the truth and justice that families and Guyanese will ever get.  A travesty amidst tragedy.  Thus, the concerted effort at distancing.  Put a COI in the middle, one that developed a hernia and emergency appendicitis.  But that’s not all; a ruff case of tonsilitis has affected the Barima COI.  Can’t move.  Can’t talk.  Can’t collect its wits, can’t get its wheels rolling.  A month later.

Stretch out, so that there can be proper straining out.  The negatives.  The inconveniences.  The revealing memories.  A month later, and there is official indifference.  It’s the COI business, not that of leadership.  It’s of dead Guyanese.  Nobodies.  Why work up a sweat?  Why go near to what can bite?  Indifference confirms what I always pegged to insincerity.  Hypocrisy.  The pretense of shared pain overcome by political indifference.  The MV Barima is dynamite.  Whoever goes near to it risks being blown up.  Thus, the distancing first, and now the indifference.

Cruelty amid raw tragedy.  The reprehensible walking side-by-side with the indefensible.  The PPP way of life.

Gunboat Resource Diplomacy Returns to the Caribbean

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  592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Gunboat Resource Diplomacy Returns to the Caribbean

OPINION BY: Staff Writer August 2026

The reported United States–Venezuela oil arrangement raises a question far larger than the commercial value of 65 billion barrels of petroleum: can military power, political coercion and external pressure be converted into a claim over another country’s natural resources?

If the essential reports are accurate, Washington’s proposed control over major Venezuelan oil fields would mark a disturbing return to gunboat resource diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere. It would signal that a powerful state can use blockades, threats, regime pressure and security intervention not merely to pursue strategic objectives, but to secure long-term access to the wealth beneath another nation’s soil.

That is not a precedent the Caribbean or Latin America should accept lightly.

Venezuela’s petroleum sector has suffered from years of mismanagement, corruption, underinvestment, sanctions and institutional decay. Its people urgently need jobs, functioning public services, investment, and an oil industry that can once again generate broad public benefit. None of that, however, gives a foreign power the moral or legal right to dictate terms over Venezuela’s most important national asset.

A nation may seek foreign capital, technical support and commercial partners. It may enter production-sharing agreements, service contracts, joint ventures or other lawful arrangements. But there is an immense difference between voluntary investment negotiated by a government accountable to its people and an agreement reached under the shadow of foreign military pressure and political dependence.

The distinction matters because sovereignty over natural resources is not ceremonial language. It is a core principle of international law and post-colonial statehood. Venezuela’s oil belongs to Venezuela. Past disputes over expropriation, compensation or the nationalisation of foreign companies do not create a permanent US entitlement to Venezuelan oil reserves. Corporate claims can be litigated, arbitrated or settled. They cannot become an open-ended licence for a foreign government to assert ownership over a country’s underground wealth.

Claims that the United States has “taken back” Venezuelan oil are therefore especially alarming. They echo an older and uglier doctrine: that the resources of weaker states can become the spoils of geopolitical victory.

 

The language matters. So does the method.

For much of the Caribbean and Latin America, the history of foreign intervention is not an academic subject. The region remembers occupations, blockades, political interventions, covert destabilisation, unequal concessions and commercial arrangements negotiated when local governments had little practical ability to refuse. The old gunboat did not always arrive solely to seize territory. Often, it arrived to secure trade routes, debt repayments, plantations, mining rights and oil concessions.

Today’s tools may look different: sanctions, asset freezes, naval deployments, security operations, diplomatic recognition and control over banking channels, but the central danger remains the same. A weaker state may be formally sovereign while being denied the conditions required to exercise meaningful choice.

That is why transparency is essential. If there is indeed an agreement involving Venezuelan fields and long-term US control, its full terms must be published. The Venezuelan people should know who controls the fields, what share of production and profits will remain in the country, what taxes and royalties will be paid, what environmental standards will apply, and whether future elected governments will have the right to review or renegotiate the deal.

The question is not whether Venezuela needs investment. It plainly does. The question is whether reconstruction will be carried out through transparent, lawful and mutually beneficial arrangements—or through a formula in which political survival is exchanged for control of national resources.

A Warning for Guyana

Guyana’s circumstances are different. Its oil sector is governed by its own constitutional order, petroleum laws and contracts with private operators. Its territorial controversy with Venezuela is before international legal processes, and Guyana’s sovereign rights over petroleum activities in its maritime areas must be respected.

Still, Guyana cannot afford to regard this regional development with indifference.

As an emerging oil producer located beside a larger neighbour with a long-running territorial claim, Guyana knows better than most that natural resources can intensify geopolitical pressure. The country’s security, its maritime rights and the integrity of its oil operations depend not only on military preparedness and diplomatic partnerships, but also on an unwavering regional commitment to law over force.

Guyana has every right to welcome international investment and security cooperation. But it must be careful never to endorse principles that could later be turned against small states: that power creates entitlement, that oil can be claimed through coercion, or that strategic resources belong to whoever has the means to impose terms.

The strongest protection for Guyana is not dependence on any one powerful patron. It is a consistent defence of international law, territorial integrity, transparent contracts, multilateral diplomacy and the principle that every people retains sovereignty over its own resources.

The Caribbean Community, too, has a responsibility. CARICOM cannot be silent when the language of “taking” another state’s oil is celebrated as foreign-policy success. Silence risks normalising a doctrine that threatens all small states, irrespective of ideology, geography or alliance.

Venezuela’s recovery should be supported. Its people deserve relief from economic hardship and political instability. But no country’s crisis should become an opportunity for external powers to place a permanent hand on its national patrimony.

The Caribbean has seen this play before. It should not be asked to applaud when the gunboats return under a new name.

The Outreach Is the Indictment

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  592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

The Outreach Is the Indictment

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar– August 2026

In the Sunday Chronicle editorial section,there is a line buried in the case being made for the President’s community outreaches that deserves to be read twice, because on the second reading it does not say what it was written to say. The argument goes that this style of governance matters because “too much can be lost between a complaint made in a community and a report that eventually reaches an office in Georgetown.” When decision-makers are physically present, the argument continues, residents can explain a drainage problem, an unstable electricity supply, a deteriorating road, in terms no paperwork could capture.

Pres. Ali grounding with residents at Kuru Kuru

Read plainly, that sentence is not a description of good governance. It is a confession that the ordinary channel of governance, the one running from a resident’s complaint through an NDC, a Regional Democratic Council, a permanent secretary, a minister’s desk, does not work. It is so unreliable, so lossy, so slow, that the Head of State himself must personally travel to Kuru Kuru, to Moruca, to Melanie Damishana, to hear what a functioning drainage department, a functioning GPL, a functioning public works ministry should already know.

That is not proactive governance. That is triage.

WHAT PROACTIVE GOVERNANCE ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Proactive governance does not require the President’s physical presence to discover that a village has a drainage problem after heavy rainfall. It requires an NDC empowered and resourced to log that complaint, a regional engineer’s office that inspects and schedules the fix, and a public works ministry that funds it on a cycle residents can set their watch to — with or without a Presidential motorcade announcing it on the evening news.

Proactive governance looks like a reporting system residents trust enough to use, because they have seen it produce results before. It looks like a Local Government Commission that is more than a name on a letterhead, functioning with real appointees empowered to hold regional administrations accountable between elections, not only during them.

It looks like agencies that publish what they fixed and when, so that “the outreach” is not the only visible evidence that government noticed a problem existed.

What we are shown instead, outreach after outreach, region after region, is the opposite: the President and his ministers doing the job the system was built to do on its own, in public, with cameras present, because the system does not do it quietly, out of public view, on its own.

A MISSION WITH NO END IN SIGHT

The defenders of this approach will say it reflects a President who cares, who listens, who shows up. No one disputes that showing up has value — visibility creates a form of pressure that paperwork cannot. But visibility is not the same as capacity, and the test of any outreach was always going to be what survives after the motorcade leaves.

Kuru Kuru is not the first stop of this kind, and by the government’s own conduct, it will not be the last. Region One in August. Melanie Damishana and Non Pareil before that. Rose Hall. Karrau Village in May. Over forty individual village plans rolled out within a single week during the height of the Model Village tour. The tour does not conclude; it relocates. If the outreach model were actually closing the governance gap it claims to address, the list of communities requiring a Presidential visit to get a pothole noticed should be shrinking. It is not.

It is a rotating itinerary, and every stop on it is itself evidence that the last stop’s promise either has not yet arrived or arrived at a pace no ordinary resident would call urgent.

This is the same pattern this media  has already documented elsewhere. When noise-nuisance complaints resurfaced this month, the government’s answer was self-regulation, soundproofing financing, and a task force — the same instruments tried, and quietly abandoned, in 2022 and again in 2023, down to the same decibel meters handed to the same police force that has never been resourced to use them consistently. The remedy for an unenforced system was announced again, not fixed once. The outreach model is the same instinct scaled up to the size of a country: rather than repair the mechanism that is supposed to catch a complaint the first time, stage the appearance of catching it, on schedule, indefinitely.

THE BILL NO ONE WANTS TO ITEMIZE

Ask what a single day of Presidential outreach costs — the security detail, the ministerial delegations, the technical officers, the transport and logistics of moving Cabinet level government into hinterland sub-regions with no fixed schedule and no announced end date and the answer will not come easily.

No ministry publishes it. No line item in the budget separates “outreach” from ordinary ministerial travel. That is itself worth noting: an initiative repeated often enough to constitute a governing style, yet not transparent enough to be costed for the taxpayers financing it.

We will not manufacture a number the government has not disclosed. But readers do not need a number to draw the obvious inference. A multi-region tour with Cabinet level participation, replicated month after month with no terminal date, is not a free exercise. Every day a minister spends in a village listening to a complaint that a functioning regional office should have already logged is a day of that minister’s time, that ministry’s transport budget, and that delegation’s security costs spent compensating for an institution that was never fixed.

Multiply that across the “several years, and especially in recent months” the practice has run, across every region it has covered, and ask what that same money and that same senior attention could have done if it had gone instead into resourcing the NDCs, the regional engineers’ offices, and the reporting systems whose absence necessitated the outreach in the first place.

That comparison is not a figure. It is an indictment that does not require one.

FIX THE SYSTEM ONCE

There is a name for solving the same problem in the same way indefinitely rather than solving it once: not governance, but micromanagement dressed as governance. A president should not have to personally hear about a drainage problem in Kuru Kuru for that drainage problem to reach a work order. The fact that he does, repeatedly, and that the practice shows no sign of concluding, is not a credit to this administration’s attentiveness. It is the clearest evidence available that the machinery beneath the outreach, the actual departments, actual budgets, and actual accountability lines this government inherited and has had years to strengthen, remains broken.

“Hit dem in the pocket. Everything else is a press conference” — and the same discipline applies here: fix the mechanism, not the messaging.

Fix the system once. Regulate it. Resource the local government bodies whose statutory job this already is. Publish what gets fixed and when, so residents do not need a Presidential visit to find out whether their complaint was heard. Do that, and the outreach becomes unnecessary, which is the actual measure of whether it ever should have been necessary at all.

— The Board

MV Barima -Silence and Sloth

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  592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

MV Barima –Silence and Sloth (real Terms of Reference)

OPINION BY: GHK LALL September 2026

The death plunge of the MV Barima qualifies as a national catastrophe; an unprecedented local human tragedy.  Obvious beyond argument, above denial.  Yet, in its grim aftermath, there’s the reverse of what should be happening.  With intensity and honesty.  With frequency in duty to families and country.  Where, when, and how have those been?  Instead, the strategies and tactics of PPP Govt operators have centered on two prongs that sabotage a disaster of this numerical, emotional, grimness. 

The prongs are silence and sloth.  Both have slippery, tricky objectives.  Both also represent another fork with two pointed horns.

Silence in this small country for a tragedy as big as the MV Barima exposes its purveyors.  Resonates piercingly in the tiny national echo chamber.  From mouth to mouth and ear to ear.  Guyana is that interconnected.  Everyone is on the same time zone, the same platform.  Why silence?  What’s there to fear?  To hide?  The PPP brass should have learnt what other government did belatedly. 

Silence doesn’t suppress.  Silence attracts attention.  Silence intrigues.  Why silence after the great, excessive outpouring of manufactured pieties from the head-of-state to those who head nothing, to others who can’t account for their own heads?

Then, there’s the twin of silence.  Sloth is its name.  Astonishingly, sloth in the murky wake of 100 dead, and hundreds wrapped in wrenching mourning.  Like silence, what purpose sloth?  Sloth confirms that there is much to rearrange and reset; much to cleanup and coverup.  Sloth buys time and space.  Silence furnishes the blanket.  I foresee a Commission of Inquiry (COI) on a tortured journey to nowhere.  An indication of my contempt re delivery on its terms of reference.  Wherever the journey takes, make it look real.  Most importantly, chart a course that doesn’t take to the bottom of this Guyana horror story. 

I use nautical expressions.  For the MV Barima was of nautical life; and a nautical death that shouldn’t have happened, and what sits like a bloody crown on the head.

Getting to the very bottom of the MV Barima’s death spiral would raise up the worm-eaten, snake bitten, and the bitter.  Bodies are not involved.  A cruel and inhuman PPP Govt is.  Recklessness, criminal negligence, orphaned again.  Who would own up to such failures?  Which leader, which lackey? 

Hence, silence and sloth flourish.  Drag this COI out.  Go about its demands, expectations, on the quietest feet.  A month after the swearing-in of the COI, hands are still stuck on Bible, Koran, Bhagavad Gita.  (Or the Devil’s dictionary).  Scripture records some struck with dumbness or paralysis.  It is clear that both have taken up residence in MV Barima Guyana.

Gone but not Forgotten -several victims still unrecovered

The second jagged and twisted horn on the silence and sloth fork is less tangible, less immediate.  It is more ordinary, more of the usual that informs about Guyana so brilliantly.  The weaknesses of silence and sloth: they don’t fool, don’t work.  The deeper the silence, thicker the sloth, the longer that farm and its Garden of Eden inhabitants avoid the limelight, dodge the spotlight’s harsh glare.  Call this whatever pleases.  Skepticism.  Cynicism.  Hair-raising rhythms of Guyana’s political life.  Nothing is innocent, pure.  Guyanese taught how ulterior motives and hidden agendas are inseparable from official life.  I applaud the PPP.  A farm shielded, steered from harm’s way.  Momentarily only.  Silence and sloth on Barima afford space to move around, tidy up, and closeout loose grass on that farm.

Last, silence and sloth facilitate the eerie.  Create atmospherics, provide distance, instill dread.  Convert the MV Barima into a ghost ship.  Ancient superstitions unearthed.  Citizens flinch.  Speak in hushed, fearful tones.  Voices heard crying.  Shadows screaming for justice.  Observers on land shrinking, retreating.  Amid a grey, grim time, remembrance comes. 

The 1970s Argentinian junta conducted its Dirty War against Argentines.  In this century, the PPP wages its Dirty War on Guyanese.  Silence and sloth now weaponized against citizens. 

To its watery grave went the MV Barima and its human cargo.  To its unmarked grave that COI, with silence shrouding, and sloth contributing to its stillborn existence, and ghastly death.

 

 

 

 

“Facts Before Facebook — Except When Crossfire Needs Them”

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  592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

“Facts Before Facebook — Except When Crossfire Needs Them”

OP-ED BY: Staff Writer —August 2026

A response to Michael Younge’s “Crossfire” column on the Mohamed river interception

Mr. Younge  opens by demanding Guyana “pull itself back” from a culture where allegation substitutes for fact. The Board agrees completely. Which is why his own column deserves the standard he invokes.

The timing he doesn’t examine. Crossfire accepts at face value that a “routine” joint Coast Guard–Police patrol happened to be on the Demerara River at 9:45 p.m. But this publication has already documented, in real time, the government’s own stated position that maritime and Coast Guard response capacity does not extend reliably to nighttime hours — that was the explanation offered for the delayed MV Barima rescue response. 

Crossfire does not ask why a “routine” patrol was active at night, on the exact evening the Leader of the Opposition was known to be returning from a humanitarian visit to Barima survivors in Region One — a visit that was itself public and reported. We do not assert this was a directed stakeout; we do not have the evidence to say so, and neither does Crossfire have the evidence to call it routine.

The honest position is: this contradiction has not been explained, and the government owes the public that explanation before anyone, Crossfire included — gets to call the encounter self-evidently lawful.

The footage that doesn’t exist. 

Crossfire repeats the officers’ claim that a bag was thrown into the river, unable to say by whom or what it held. He does not ask the obvious next question: where is the bodycam footage? A joint-services maritime operation, ending in the arrest of a sitting Leader of the Opposition and a sitting MPs, is precisely the kind of encounter bodycam policy exists to document. None has been produced. None has even been referenced by the police, MARAD, or the government’s defenders — Crossfire included. An unproduced recording is not corroboration; it is a gap. Guyana does not resolve gaps by filling them with the officers’ word and calling that “facts before Facebook.”

The line Crossfire crosses himself. 

Crossfire devotes real estate to the conduct of MPs Odessa Primus and Natasha Smith-Lewis, reaching for a “comedian” and “devout Muslim” framing that reads less like accountability journalism and more like personal characterization of two women parliamentarians. If the standard is that public office demands restraint and seriousness, that standard applies to columnists describing MPs as much as it applies to the MPs themselves.

The admission buried in his own conclusion. 

Crossfire closes by demanding “the government must enforce the law.” Set aside the rhetoric , that sentence concedes the very thing under dispute.

In a functioning constitutional order, the Guyana Police Force and GDF Coast Guard enforce the law on their own institutional authority, not as an arm directed by the executive. 

If Crossfire believes government must be the one enforcing it, he has conceded the opposition’s underlying complaint: that this operation carries the fingerprints of political direction rather than routine policing. That is not a defense of institutional independence. It is a description of its absence.

None of this requires believing Mohamed’s account over the police’s, or vice versa. It requires believing that MARAD’s licensing finding, the unexplained overnight patrol timing, the missing bodycam footage, and the loose talk of government “directing” enforcement are all facts that belong in the same column that lectures Guyana about facts.

Mr. Younge asked the right question — accountability for everyone, regardless of power or popularity. The Board simply insists he answer it about the state as rigorously as he answers it about the Leader of the Opposition.

—The Board

   

 

 

 A Brother’s Fortune: Inside the Sigma Engineers Contracts and the President’s Family at State House

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

 A Brother’s Fortune: Inside the Sigma Engineers Contracts and the President’s Family at State House

OPINION BY: Staff Writer – August 2026

Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed alleges a company tied to President Irfaan Ali’s brother collected over $12 billion in GWI contracts within years of incorporation. The 592 Guardian examines the documented record and calls for the claims that go beyond it to be independently tested.

What Is Documented

Sigma Engineers Limited was incorporated on October 6, 2022. Corporate incorporation filings reviewed by this newsroom identify Tamjeed Rahmaan   a Bangladeshi-Canadian national, as incorporator and director, and list him also as company secretary, with a registered address at 225F New Market Street, North Cummingsburg, Georgetown , a commercial, not residential, address.                   

Public procurement records confirm Sigma Engineers as an active bidder and awardee on multiple Guyana Water Inc. (GWI) contracts processed through the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB), a pattern corroborated independently by prior reporting on GWI’s water treatment expansion program.

The documented contract record, as compiled by the Leader of the Opposition and reviewed by this newsroom, includes:

Project  Date Awarded Value (GYD) 
Caledonia Facility -works 2022 $687,000,000
Cummings Lodge treatment plant 2022 $1,304,000,000
Bachelors Adventure-treatment plant 2022 $1,647,000,000
Bachelors Adventure- additional works Feb 2024 $254,000,000
Hope treatment plant Nov 29 2024 $3,569,000,000
Wakenaam /Leguan treatment plant Oct 28 2024 $1,486,000,000
Shelter Belt rehabilitation Dec 31 2025 Not Disclosed in Source
Four Wells-Melanie, Frendship,  Westminister, GWI HQ May 20 2025 $411,000,000
Port Mourant Well May 7 2026 $153,000,000
Garden of Eden Well May 7 2026 $129,000,000
Shirlely Field Ridley Well May 20 2026 $124,000,000
Better Hope ECD May 20 2026 $124,000,000

Figures as presented by Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed; this newsroom has independently corroborated Sigma Engineers’ status as a named GWI/NPTAB contractor but has not independently verified every individual contract value or award date listed above.

The Family Connection

Mohammed Aqtar  Ali, brother of President Irfaan Ali, returned to Guyana from Canada in 2022, two years into his brother’s presidency and the year of Sigma’s incorporation. Mohamed alleges that Aqtar Ali — previously a factory worker in Canada with no prior business record — is the true beneficial party behind Sigma, with Rahmaan fronting as the named director. This newsroom has reviewed the incorporation and financial documents Mohamed cites; they establish Rahmaan’s formal roles and Aqtar  Ali’s appearance on Sigma’s financial records.

Enitity Documents for Sigma Engineering

They do not, on their face, establish a beneficial-ownership or control arrangement — that characterization is Mohamed’s allegation and remains to be tested by an independent authority with investigative and subpoena power.

“How does a newly incorporated company move from being an unregistered entity to receiving billions of dollars in government contracts in five working days?”

— Azruddin Mohamed, Leader of the Opposition

Mohamed further alleges that Junaid Bayat — described as Aqtar Ali’s religious leader, formerly an imam in Toronto, joined Sigma as a director in May 2024 despite no disclosed business or engineering background, and that Bayat used mosque pulpits during last year’s campaign to attack Mohamed politically. This newsroom has not independently verified Bayat’s compensation history in Canada or the pulpit conduct alleged; both are reported here as Mohamed’s claims.

The Phagwah Day Drowning

Ten-year-old Jayden DeCourcy and his eight-year-old sister Tiana drowned on March 3, 2026, near the GWI facility at Bachelor’s Adventure. Technical and GWI documentation reviewed by this newsroom establishes that a backwash discharge from the water treatment system at Bachelor’s Adventure, the facility built under Sigma’s contract  is documented as a factor in the conditions at the site where the children died. This is the most serious element of the record and, unlike the ownership and fronting allegations above, is treated by this newsroom as independently documented rather than as attributed claim alone. The 592 Guardian is seeking comment from GWI and the Ministry of Housing and Water on the facility’s backwash protocols and any internal review conducted since March.

Procurement: Ten Bidders, One Winner

Mohamed’s account of the well-drilling tenders describes a pattern in which ten contractors bid and nine were rejected, with Sigma awarded the work — repeated, he says, across separate NPTAB tenders for wells at Melanie, Friendship, Westminster, GWI headquarters, Port Mourant, Garden of Eden, Shirley Field-Ridley, Better Hope and Goed Fortuin. This newsroom has reviewed NPTAB bid-opening records for at least one of these tenders showing multiple bidders including Sigma; it has not yet independently confirmed the full nine-rejected pattern across every tender listed and is seeking the underlying evaluation reports from NPTAB.

Approval Letters from NPTAB

On the pricing question, Mohamed cites unnamed engineering sources placing markups on some Sigma contracts at 70 to 100 percent above comparable cost — a figure this newsroom is reporting as an anonymously sourced allegation, not a verified finding. No named quantity surveyor or engineer has been produced to attach their professional judgment to that number, and The 592 Guardian has not independently reviewed a bill of quantities for any Sigma contract. Readers should treat the 70–100 percent figure accordingly, pending named or documentary corroboration.

State House and Community Land

Mohamed alleges that Aqtar Ali resides at State House and exercises influence over staff there, and that a portion of community land at Eccles , previously earmarked for community purposes and the subject of resident displacement — was made available for a Sigma bond, generating complaints from residents about dust, noise and disruption. These are presented here as Mohamed’s claims; this newsroom has not independently confirmed Aqtar Ali’s residency arrangements or the land-allocation decision and has sought comment from the Office of the President and the relevant regional authority.

The Call for Investigation

Mohamed has called on the Special Organised Crime Unit (SOCU) and the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) to investigate the Sigma contracts — the procurement process, the bid evaluations, the beneficial ownership, and the flow of funds. He has also directed a public challenge to Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, in his capacity as PPP General Secretary, to act on the allegations rather than remain silent.

“Irfan has corruption in his DNA, and the entire PPP knows this.” — Azruddin Mohamed

The 592 Guardian is not in a position to adjudicate the central allegation — that Sigma Engineers functions as a vehicle for the president’s brother, sustained by preferential procurement  on the documents made available to us alone. What is established on the record is narrower but still serious: a company with no operating history prior to October 2022 secured over $12 billion in GWI contracts within four years, its named director’s professional background does not evidently correspond to engineering or water infrastructure, and a technically documented backwash issue at one of its facilities coincided with the deaths of two children. Those facts alone warrant the SOCU and FIU review Mohamed has demanded.

The remaining allegations — fronting, beneficial ownership, the scale of markups, and the conduct of individuals connected to the president’s family , are serious enough that they should not rest on a political speech in either direction. They require subpoena power, not press conferences.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

Editor’s note: This report is based on a public statement by Leader of the Opposition Azruddin Mohamed and on documents provided to this newsroom. Claims attributed to Mr. Mohamed are reported as allegations pending independent verification, except where this newsroom states it has separately corroborated the underlying record. The 592 Guardian has sought comment from the Office of the President, Guyana Water Inc., and the individuals named, and will publish any response received.