HELD TO RANSOM

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Held to Ransom: How Political Failure Handed Guyana’s Energy Security to Private Power

When Leadership Fails: How Guyana Lost Control of Its Energy Sector

Guyana now finds itself in the untenable position of being effectively held hostage by two corporate entities, forced to choose between paying millions more each day or subjecting the nation to blackouts. This is not an accident. It is not a misfortune. It is the direct and foreseeable result of political decisions made at the highest levels of government.

Responsibility for this crisis rests squarely with the current administration and, in particular, with those entrusted with oversight of the energy sector and the execution of the Gas-to-Energy project. The President, who has taken personal ownership of this initiative, and the Minister responsible for energy and public utilities cannot now retreat into silence while the consequences unfold.

The Wales Gas-to-Energy project was presented to the nation as a transformational undertaking—one that would deliver reliable, affordable power and reduce dependence on costly stopgap measures. Instead, it has been plagued by delays, escalating costs, and a troubling lack of transparency. Years after its promised timelines, the project remains incomplete, with no credible, fixed delivery date.

This failure is not merely technical. It is managerial and political.

Critical national infrastructure was placed under the supervision of individuals whose primary qualification appears to have been political proximity rather than proven expertise in energy planning, project execution, or contract management. Competence was subordinated to loyalty. Oversight was weakened. And predictable risks were ignored.

The result is what Guyana is now experiencing: a government negotiating under duress, stripped of leverage, and exposed to demands it cannot reasonably refuse. When a country cannot allow a supplier to walk away without triggering a national crisis, it has already surrendered its bargaining power.

Karpowership’s demand for increased payments is therefore not the root problem—it is the symptom. The real issue is that the Government of Guyana created the conditions under which such a demand could be made with confidence.

The financial implications are severe. Millions of US dollars in additional annual costs for a single power vessel. Billions of Guyana dollars diverted from the treasury. And all of this occurring in a country now earning unprecedented revenues from its oil sector.

This is not development. It is waste.

It is also, unmistakably, a misuse of public funds. Taxpayer resources are being deployed not to expand capacity or improve efficiency, but to compensate for delays, miscalculations, and poor governance. Citizens are effectively paying a premium for the government’s failure to deliver on its own promises.

Equally concerning is the continued lack of transparency. Key officials, including the President and the responsible minister, have offered no clear public accounting of the situation. No detailed explanation of the contractual breakdown. No roadmap for resolution. In any functioning democracy, such silence in the face of a national vulnerability would be unacceptable.

This is not simply about one contract or one project. It is about a pattern of governance in which political control overrides institutional strength, and where accountability is treated as optional rather than essential.

Guyana’s growing oil wealth was meant to insulate the nation from precisely this kind of vulnerability. Instead, it has coincided with a governance approach that has weakened planning, diluted expertise, and concentrated decision-making without adequate scrutiny.

The country is now paying the price.

If there is to be any meaningful course correction, it must begin with acknowledgment. Not deflection, not silence, but clear acceptance of responsibility at the highest levels. It must be followed by transparency, professionalization of key sectors, and a firm commitment to ensuring that national projects are managed by those with the competence to deliver.

Anything less will guarantee that this episode is not the last of its kind.

Guyana cannot afford to be a nation rich in resources but poor in governance.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮 ,𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨. — ✦—

Guyana Dev Bank: Players likely already in Place

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THE 592 GUARDIAN|ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

JUNE 2026 —BY: GHK LALL

Guyana Dev Bank: Players likely already in Place

The Guyana Development Bank (GDB) has generated much excitement.  Not yet fully airborne, but still stirring considerable interest.  Guyanese sit, wait, smile.  They are ready.  One set anticipates what’s in it for them.  To get them off the bottom. 

Other Guyanese (guess who?) have their plans ready on how to milk this bank till it geh sickly and paglee.  For those who need clarity, rest easy.  Coming up shortly.

 The key players have already been handpicked.  Ready to rumble.  The PPP had a handful of names to choose from to move the GDB up the ladder, along the way.  There’s the way, truth, and life of Jesus.  Not the PPP way, regrettably.         

The PPP Govt has its own way.   Radically different.  In substance, results.  To condition Guyanese hopefuls, I conclude that senior positions-GDB chair, deputy chair, and CEO are as good as filled.  Done deals.  Before that GDB bill becomes law.  What’s there to debate?  There’s a seven-seat majority.  Who cares what the other sides, any Guyanese, think?  Including those who think less of the PPP’s standards of staffing?  Overseers and officers, for example.  Seven seats provide that electricity-sparking confidence [and disdain].

Qualifications for the jobs of chair, deputy chair, and CEO earn top marks for the following.  They don’t have to be thieves, but it helps

Known thieves are prized by the PPP Govt.  The logic is majestic.  Whoever teef caan taak.  The best are party loyalists who prosper when matters are upside down, shrouded in secrecy. 

Try this example.  The PPP loves overseers, commissioners, bank watchmen, senior bank officers who see a dog, hear a dog, know it’s a dog, but sell it as a duck or a donkey.

  Whoever heard a dog that sounds or looks like one of those creatures?  Best of all, are those who know how to keep their mouths shut, whatever the crimes committed.  It’s better when they’re part of the white-collar crimewave waiting inside that new bank.  With such trusted personnel seated, secrets stay secret.  Trouble is contained.  What happened in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.  Substitute GDB for local color.

With $40 billion around, there’s plenty for PPP boys and girls to play around with, have fun.  There’s a guarantee, two to be accurate.  Freedom House has their back.  And Office of the President has its own magistracy and rubberstamp ready

Nah maan! Nat dese peeple.  Dem is good PPP people.  Look how much ting deh duh fuh de paaty.  Can’t abandon them.  Cannot, will not, throw them under the bus.  Not with all those sharks waiting to rip them to pieces.  It’s basic democracy: taking care of one’s own is taking care of business.  They are due first bites at the fruits of victory and policy.  So, what if they mess up, make their hands fast?  Stuff happens.  Nobody is perfect.

Qualifications for the jobs of chair, deputy chair, and CEO earn top marks for the following.  They don’t have to be thieves, but it helps.

 The government is quick thinking: help to fix the loan documents.  Fix is preferred.  For other people: wrong color, wrong hairstyle, and wrong relationships, the GDB is just as warm and hospitable.  Welcome, sir, madam.  Take a number.  Have a seat.  Just a little wait.  The staff is out to lunch, in a meeting, gone golfing, or off to Congress.  Free seats.  Free updates.  Few could be so classless or tasteless to want more.  Wait until they hear ‘this loan application is receiving the highest consideration.  The bull just began.  No money, no love.  No $3 million loan.  Those kinds of Guyanese are on their own.  Stage is set.  Law ready. 

The games begin.  The chair’s in place.  I think that the whole kit and kaboodle (PPP kin)-chiefs and cooks are like corruption Oreos. 

Devilishly pious on the outside, wickedly devious inside.  A bank with a shank.

THE CURRENCY OF A COUNTRY’S SOUL

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The Currency of a Country’s Soul

The Story of a Currency and Its  People

When Guyana gained its independence in 1966, it did so with a currency and a dream. The one-dollar bill was never just paper. It was a modest symbol of a people stepping out of colonial shadows and into the bright, uncertain language of self-rule. It bore, silently but surely, the hopes of a generation that believed independence would mean more than a flag and an anthem — that it would mean bread on the table, dignity in work, and a future measured not by survival, but by progress.

Sixty years later, that same bill feels like a relic from another moral universe.

The story of the Guyana dollar is the story of a nation learning, painfully, that sovereignty alone does not guarantee strength. At independence, the exchange rate stood at about G$1.71 to US$1. Today it hovers around G$209 to US$1. What began as a respectable national symbol has been worn down by decades of inflation, mismanagement, policy drift, and economic vulnerability. But to speak only of exchange rates is to tell only half the story.

A currency falls because a country’s foundations have been weakened; and when money loses value, the people who live by wages, savings, and fixed incomes are the first to feel the wound.

This is where the history becomes less technical and more tragic.

For ordinary Guyanese, devaluation was never an abstract chart in an office. It was the rising price of rice, flour, medicine, fuel, rent. It was a salary that arrived on time but bought less than it did last month. It was the slow humiliation of watching effort lose its reward. Over time, the money in the pocket stopped reflecting the dignity of the labor behind it. The national promise narrowed. The horizon shrank. Families adapted not by thriving, but by enduring.

And that endurance, though admirable, should not be mistaken for justice.

A people can be made hardy by hardship, but they should not be forced to mistake hardship for destiny. Much of Guyana’s decline in value was not inevitable. It was shaped by leadership choices — by the absence of foresight, the failure of discipline, the habit of postponing difficult reforms, and the too-familiar tendency to place political survival above national stewardship.

When leadership is selfless, it builds institutions that protect the citizen from economic ruin. When leadership is timid, extractive, or vain, it leaves the citizen to absorb the cost of failure in silence.

 

So, the decline of the Guyana dollar is also the decline of a social contract.

That may be the hardest truth of all. Because when a currency is devalued over decades, it is not only the state that loses credibility. The people begin to lose confidence too — in systems, in promises, in the idea that tomorrow might be better than today.

The national mood darkens. Social status erodes. Hope grows cautious. Aspiration becomes expensive. And a country once birthed in optimism begins to resemble, in unsettling ways, the very vulnerability from which it sought escape.

Today, Guyana stands in a strange contradiction: a country with extraordinary resource wealth, yet one still haunted by the habits and inequalities of its past. Oil has changed the macroeconomic story, but it has not automatically healed the social one. The danger now is that the nation mistakes rising headline wealth for genuine national renewal, while inequality, mistrust, and uneven development continue beneath the surface. Without accountable and selfless leadership, even prosperity can become another chapter in the same old story.

Yet there is still meaning in the old one-dollar bill. Indeed, there is warning in it.

It reminds us that nations are not measured only by what they produce, but by how they protect the worth of their people’s labor. It reminds us that economic decline always becomes social decline when the burden is left to fall on the poor, the ordinary, and the unprotected. And it reminds us that independence is not a completed act, but a continuing obligation — one that demands honesty, courage, and sacrifice from those entrusted with power.

The old bill, then, is not merely a collector’s item. It is a witness. It stands as a paper archive of promise, loss, and the unfinished work of nationhood. It asks a difficult question of the present: what is a country worth if its money dwindles, its people struggle, and its leaders mistake motion for progress?

The old one-dollar bill therefore speaks with unusual force. It tells us that currencies do not collapse in isolation, and societies do not decay by accident. When the national economy is mishandled, the people pay first, longest, and hardest. And when a country loses sight of the public good, even its symbols — its money, its institutions, its promise — begin to look like relics of a future it never fully realized.

A nation can be born in hope and still age in neglect. Guyana’s one-dollar bill tells us that plainly.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨.

Mutual Respect, One-Sided Ledger: What Beijing’s Global Governance White Paper Leaves Out of Guyana

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY ♦TRUTH

Mutual Respect, One-Sided Ledger: What Beijing’s Global Governance White Paper Leaves Out of Guyana

 THE 592 GUARDIAN | EDITORIAL 

On Wednesday, Beijing’s State Council Information Office released a new white paper on global governance, the latest articulation of Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative—a framework built on the language of extensive consultation, joint contribution, shared benefits, and a “community with a shared future for humanity.” The document claims the backing of nearly 160 countries and more than 60 in a formal “Group of Friends.”

It positions China as a defender of UN-centered multilateralism against a turbulent, unequal world order. 

Guyana is not named in the white paper. It does not need to be. Guyana is where the doctrine gets tested against contract law, customs waivers, and a riverbed. 

 A live laboratory, not a footnote 

Guyana was the first English-speaking Caribbean nation to recognize the People’s Republic of China, in 1972. Half a century later it is China’s largest trading partner in the Caribbean. Chinese investment into Guyana in 2024 alone totaled US$10.6 billion; bilateral trade has quadrupled since 2019. When Foreign Minister Hugh Todd travelled to Beijing last year and met his counterpart Wang Yi, the language on both sides was the same language now repeated in the white paper — shared future, mutual respect, multilateralism, support for the UN Charter. Guyana’s government has, on the record, endorsed China’s global governance vocabulary almost word for word. 

The question this editorial puts plainly: does the conduct of Chinese state-linked capital inside Guyana’s borders bear any resemblance to the principles Beijing has just spent a five-part white paper describing? 

The contractors writing their own terms 

Start with China Harbor Engineering Company. CHEC’s contract for work on Guyanese infrastructure — reported by the Caribbean Investigative Journalism Network — secured full payment of the contract price while being released from paying taxes, duties, royalties, and fees ordinarily owed to central or local government. The same contract reportedly stipulated that sixty percent of non-technical labor be Chinese nationals,with specialized positions reserved exclusively for Chinese citizens.

This is not a contractor adapting to local content law. This is a contractor writing around it — in a country whose own Local Content Act requires Guyanese nationals to fill the overwhelming majority of positions in comparable sectors. 

Then there is China Railway Construction Corporation, the joint-venture partner awarded the US$260 million contract to build the new Demerara River crossing. CRCC was expelled by the World Bank in 2019 — alongside its subsidiaries and 730 controlled affiliates — for submitting manipulated information in the award of a highway contract in the country of Georgia.

Guyana awarded it the largest transport infrastructure contract in the country’s history regardless.

Construction began without a completed environmental and social impact assessment. Guyanese environmentalist Simone Mangal-Joly has warned that the absence of basic design information makes it impossible to assess the bridge’s effect on a river already carrying heavy sedimentation.

None of this required Beijing’s intervention. Georgetown signed it. 

CNOOC holds a twenty-five percent stake in the ExxonMobil-led Stabroek consortium, with $5.25 billion of its own capital committed — making the government’s repeated insistence that ExxonMobil’s audit disputes are a bilateral matter between Guyana and one American operator increasingly difficult to sustain. Bai Shan Lin’s logging record, Bosai Minerals’ manganese operations in Region Ten, and the slow transformation of Lethem into a Chinese-financed trading and transit hub round out a picture of saturation across timber, mining, hospitality, energy, and now cross-border logistics toward Brazil. 

The quarry fight nobody wanted to have on the record 

In May, truckers protesting a loss of income over sand and stone access forced Vice President Jagdeo onto the record. He insisted that none of the sixteen active quarries was Chinese-owned, that Chinese firms were merely contracted to operate them, and that none of the major housing programs on the East Coast used Chinese contractors. The public record does not support the ownership denial. Golden Rock Investment and Construction Co. — described in its own promotional materials and in NCN Guyana’s coverage as a Chinese company, with Managing Director Mike Wu unveiling the project at Guyana’s Building Expo — owns the quarry at Lanabali, Essequibo Islands-West Demerara, advertised as the country’s largest with a projected capacity of two to five million tons a year. And the Arisaru Mountain quarry in Region Ten, the actual site at the centre of the original trucker protests, has been identified in Kaieteur News’s reporting on Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill’s own response to those protests as a Chinese-owned quarry — the same report in which Edghill was defending the duty-free status of equipment operating inside it.

A Vice President cannot credibly deny Chinese ownership of the quarry sector while his own Minister of Public Works is on record managing the fallout from a quarry that reporting consistently identifies as Chinese-owned.

Jagdeo’s more honest line came earlier in the same remarks, where he volunteered the actual justification for why Chinese firms keep winning these awards: in his words, the Chinese may be able to do it faster and, in some cases, cheaper. That is a coherent economic argument.

It is not the argument in the white paper. The white paper sells partnership and shared benefit

 The Vice President, under pressure from his own truckers, sold speed and price — while denying an ownership pattern his own ministry had already been forced to manage in public.

 Self-certification, again 

This publication has spent the past several months documenting how Guyana’s extractive governance — gold, carbon credits, the EITI framework itself — collapses under the weight of self-certification without independent external verification. The same structural flaw governs the China file.

There is no independent registry of Chinese state-linked contracts in Guyana, no published evaluation criteria for the fourteen bidders who competed for the Demerara Bridge award, no public accounting of which contracts carry tax and royalty waivers, and no legislative mechanism requiring parliamentary ratification of contracts above a defined threshold. What exists instead is a closed loop: Beijing’s white paper affirms its own good conduct, and Georgetown’s diplomatic statements affirm Beijing’s affirmation. Nobody outside that loop is asked to verify anything. 

 What accountability requires 

A government that has publicly embraced the vocabulary of mutual respect and shared benefit owes the public the documents that would let citizens judge whether that vocabulary describes reality. The National Assembly should require disclosure of the full CHEC and CRCC contract terms, including labor quotas and fiscal waivers, currently known to the public only through investigative reporting rather than government publication. The Local Content Secretariat should be asked, on the record, whether the sixty percent non-technical labor provision attributed to CHEC was ever reviewed against the Local Content Act, and if not, why not. The Environmental Protection Agency should explain how a $260 million bridge across a sediment-heavy river proceeded without a completed impact assessment, and whether that omission would have been tolerated from any contractor not carrying the weight of a head-of-state relationship behind it.

And given CRCC’s documented blacklisting by the World Bank, the Public Procurement Commission owes the country a public explanation of how that history factored, or failed to factor, into the award. 

 None of this requires hostility toward China, toward Chinese workers, or toward the genuine economic opportunity that Chinese capital has brought to a country starved of infrastructure financing for decades. It requires the same thing this outlet has demanded of every other concentration of unaccountable power in Guyana: documents, named officials, and answers that don’t arrive pre-laundered through the language of friendship.

Iran: Two victory parades, Then both cancelled

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY♦TRUTH

Iran: Two victory parades, Both cancelled

OP-ED BY: GHK LALL

The controllers of Tehran call it a victory.  The Washington dealmaker insists he came out ahead.  Perhaps, both sides won.  Skeptics can split the difference.  My take is simple.  Somebody got out-wheeled, left with the wrong side of that peace deal.  Scratch the Persians.  Hurts to say that as an American.  But what other options are on the table?

First, there were bombs to beat the ayatollahs into submission.  Some did bite the dust.  The survivors threw more dust back at Washington and its chief bluffer.  The formula was old, battle-tested.  The friend of my enemy is my enemy.  Neighborhood airport and assets targeted.  Some screamed bloody murder behind the scenes. 

Happens to those who grow soft from sweet living.  Who needs nukes?  Why, when there are those Achilles heels right nearby?  From punishing embargoes to bunker busters, and the men in turbans still held out.  I had warned that their kind of pitched battle is not CNN material.  Nor the type that pleases Fox News and Friends.  These people know hardship.  They have weathered from Leonidas to Alexander the Great. 

They are still standing.  A little bruised and black-and-blue.  But still standing.  Fighting spirit intact.  The spirit of martyrdom itching for a showdown.

Have soldiers arrayed in a ring?  Bring ’em on!  A ring of fire is waiting.                                                                                                                     Somehow, somebody with some sense in DC finally prevailed.  This is not America’s war.  This is all Netanyahu.  A desperate gamble to get free land and lavish oil supplies.  A couple of bombs, a few dead civilians, a loss of that feeling of invincibility is a cheap price to pay.  A better Iron Dome could be built.  The U.S. Congress would see that it’s funded.  What, do otherwise, and risk losing being re-elected?

The champion warrior and master dealmaker found that his book was out of pages.  What to do?  Bring in Rawalpindi.  The Swiss had reserved a conference room. 

Iran took a battering, but got home safely.  Money.  Security.  Guarantee.  They wrote their own deal book.  So, what did Mr. Manifest Destiny take home to the American people? 

A dog with its tail between its legs.  His own people are already having a fun time, kicking it from left to right. 

 When the kicking is done, hundreds of billions are still needed.  Gone are those bad ole days of not negotiating with terrorists.  Get used to the New World Order.  In Guyanese: knack gah knack bak.  It is not easy for a man accustomed to do the smacking to get smacked around.

Hello!  What about nukes?  Well, what about them?  The Iranians bought time.                                                                                                  Washington says that’s fine.  Then concoct some strange lines.  To justify.  Pacify Netanyahu.  Smooth things over at home and abroad.  It’s smooth sailing in the Strait of Hormuz.  Never heard of something so straightforward getting so tangled up, mined up, muddied up. 

What’s next in the cauldron that’s the Middle East?  Netanyahu isn’t a fellow to take his licks lying down.  He is already plotting.  Weighing whether to rollout his own marbles.  Activating that facility buried in the desert.

Desperate men losing friends fast think the unthinkable.  Attempt the desperate, the face-saving. 

 If there could have been Dresden and Frankfurt-in-Main in Germany almost a hundred years ago, there could be Teheran.  Teach dose peeple a lesson.

Listen up, people.  Get this straight.  There’s a new bully in town.  No 80-year-old washed up has been playing at James Cagney or Russell Crowe.  If there are any people good at playing mad, there are none better than the Iranians.  They hold the cards.  They wear the smirk.  To prove.  Ceasefire shaky.  Straits of Hormuz closing.                                                                                    Still working at figuring out which side got the better deal?  Keep on figuring.                                                                                                                    Continue playing the fool.  Risk being taken for a sucker, another fall guy.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙨 𝙖𝙣 𝙞𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙢𝙢𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙮 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙩 𝙘𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙘𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙘, 𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡, 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙧𝙚𝙜𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨

GECOM Seats -Laws don’t make Men, Men make Laws

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUBTABILITY♦INTEGRITY♦TRUTH

GECOM Seats -Laws don’t make Men, Men make Laws

A wise political veteran weighed in on the thickening differences over GECOM commissioners.  The pros and cons.  The issues of resignations or terminations, and replacements.  What the Constitution says, and where silence filled the place of substance.  Impressive, I say.  There were many intersections.  Constitution.  Politics.  Mathematics.  Logic.  Leadership.  Practices.  Precedents.  Then, still more.  Overpowering, even more impressive, I submit.  What I offer pales in comparison.  Anemic.  Hopefully still meaningful, in this, my last round in this ring.  A little, not much.  Yet what should convey how men function differently in testing environments.  Respond to the prompts of different stimuli.

Oil blocks.  Two went out of Guyana’s hands under a cloud.  Secrecy.  A PPP big man said no law broken.  He was right according to the law.  Because there was no literal provision in the law against how those oil blocks changed hands.  Though he was right, all Guyana knew that he had it wrong.  Wrong when two tranches of the people’s precious inheritance secretly went from one hand to another.  Strange.  If aboveboard, why go underground?  In such circumstances, no law is needed to differentiate right from wrong.  Not even schooling.  Only native intelligence.  Some basic instincts.  The PPP Big Man who said no law was broken forget something.  Men make laws.  Laws don’t make men.  But, a man without the benefit of any law, with the worst constitution (or none) knows when he just must be a man.  What it takes.  Where he must stand.  How he must be.  To grow from a small man to a big man.  Whatever the education one has, there’s none to beat that kind.  Thus, I stand.

From two oil blocks, I proceed to Oil Money.  The stewardship of it, for which the law provides.  Dr. Terrence Campbell used a sophisticated word: “rubberstamp.”  It has common utility.  Then, there’s its dark side: uncommon indecency.  What a rubberstamp smears over.  When rubberstamps are put to such use, it’s celebrated here.  All Guyana can say that Terrence Campbell has it wrong.  I will swear that he has it right.  Is right on the money.  Too close for the comfort of the people who suddenly didn’t want him around it (or in their company). 

Who could be so self-degrading, an ignoramus, to swallow “national development priorities”, and conclude that their oversight responsibilities are done?  Apologies to Dr. Terrence Campbell.  But that’s not a rubberstamp.  It’s a used condom. 

Guyanese are being taken for skunks.  For politeness, I subbed skunks for another word that spells almost like it, and sounds and rhymes with it.

From oil blocks and oil money, to an (that) oil contract.  Another PPP Big Man insisted that ‘review and renegotiate’ will be the fate of all contracts.  In his sleep he had a dream.  Exxon and retention of political power.  A safe harbor was desperately needed.  Sanctity of contract was belatedly discovered, used to rescue befogged minds.  I invite Guyanese to form a jury.  Safe harbor or the sixth sense of wily political operators prioritizing protection of their own skin.  For country or men hungry for dirty power. 

 

Last, Framers of the Constitution are dead.  Refiners are alive, but might as well be not.  Such specimens of the living, walking dead they have become.  Constitutions don’t make men.  Men make constitutions.  Wrangle ever after. 

Leaders can put their heads together to find a way out of their GECOM impasse.  To find a commonsense, workable, out-of-court settlement, as such.  There are three seats in contention.  Agree to assign one to each.  Far from Solomonic logic.  Just compromise that leads to a smoother path, higher level.  Didn’t vote for the one-seat Guyanese.  But now vote for her to get one.  To build the broken.  To shout where there’s silence.  In the Constitution. 

Let’s not muzzle our minds amidst great darkness.  We have had 60 years of liberty and not advanced one step.  Six minutes could help Guyana get somewhere.

Bhagwandin’s Word-Fog Cannot Bury the One Question He Won’t Answer: Who Holds the Pen?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY

Bhagwandin’s Word-Fog Cannot Bury the One Question He Won’t Answer: Who Holds the Pen? 

Joel Bhagwandin has written 1,800 words to avoid answering one question. That, in itself, is the story. 

His letter in the Guyana Chronicle on the Guyana Development Bank is a masterclass in a particular genre of public-relations writing: bury the politically inconvenient question under a landslide of technical vocabulary, and hope the reader mistakes density for substance.

Peer-cluster vetting. Staged disbursement. Credit-scoring architecture. Quarterly portfolio dashboards.

 It reads like a man performing competence rather than demonstrating it — and performance is precisely what is required when the actual answer is unflattering. 

Strip away the jargon and what remains is this: the Bill gives one office-holder the power to appoint the Board and the management structure of an institution that will control public lending capital, with no requirement for parliamentary consensus and no meaningful external check on that appointment power. Bhagwandin does not dispute this. He does not even really engage with it. He simply changes the subject — at length, and with great technical confidence — to talk instead about what happens after the appointments are made.

That is not an answer. That is a diversion dressed up as expertise. The architecture doesn’t operate itself 

 Bhagwandin’s entire defense rests on a quiet but load-bearing assumption: that peer review clusters, credit committees, and internal audit functions are self-executing — that once written into a manual, they enforce themselves regardless of who sits above them.

This is not how institutions work, and a financial analyst of his stated standing knows it. 

 

A credit manual is not a force of nature. It is a document that can be amended, reinterpreted, or quietly unenforced by anyone with authority over the people enforcing it. Centralised appointment power doesn’t get neutralised by decentralised paperwork. It sits above the paperwork, with its hand on the pen. 

This is why “who appoints the Board” is not, as Bhagwandin frames it, a narrow obsession of people who haven’t thought it through.

It is the load-bearing wall of the entire structure he’s describing. Every technical safeguard he cites is downstream of it. The tomfoolery of false modesty

There is something almost theatrical in Bhagwandin positioning himself as the lone adult in the room, calling for “a more mature debate” while declining to mention that he is, by public account, among those positioned for leadership inside the very institution he is publicly defending. If that is accurate, it is not a footnote — it is the single most relevant fact missing from his letter, and its absence does more to explain the tone of the piece than anything actually written in it. 

The public is entitled to a straight answer, not a paragraph about portfolio dashboards: is Joel Bhagwandin a prospective officer of the Guyana Development Bank? If so, say so on the page, in the first paragraph, before the lecture on financial maturity begins. 

And while he is disclosing, the public has a second, older question still sitting unanswered.

As a sitting member of the Public Procurement Commission, what was his role — and what was the Commission’s role — in the handling of the Tepui Construction matter, reported to involve some $167 million in public funds?,

A man who wants to be trusted with the design of a public lending institution’s accountability architecture should be willing to account, in detail, for his own record on a public accountability body. Silence on that front, while writing lecture-length essays on “institutionally costly” arbitrary lending elsewhere, is not a good look. It is, in fact, exactly the kind of thing his own framework would flag as an early-warning signal. 

The peer-cluster sleight of hand 

Even taken on its own terms, the peer-cluster model does no work against the actual risk. Whether a weak loan application is dressed up by a cluster of borrowers below or waved through by a minister’s appointee above, the final decision still passes through a structure controlled, top to bottom, by people, one office-holder put there. Decentralising the origination of applications while centralising control of the people who approve them is not a safeguard. It is theatre with extra paperwork. 

What the debate actually requires 

Guyana needs a development bank. No one credible disputes that. What the country cannot afford is a Bill that lets its strongest advocate write 1,800 words defending the institution’s internal mechanics while saying nothing about who controls its leadership — and possibly say nothing because he stands to be part of that leadership. 

Until Bhagwandin, and the Bill’s sponsors, answer the appointment question directly — not technically, not procedurally, but directly — no quarterly dashboard and no credit scoring matrix will mean anything at all. The architecture he is so eager to discuss is only as honest as the hand that built it.

Right now, that hand belongs to one man, and the public still doesn’t know if that man is also the bank’s prospective CEO

That is the level at which this debate should now proceed. Bhagwandin chose not to go there. We will.

“Kwakwani’s Floods: A Recurring Crisis Demanding a Permanent Solution”

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY

“Kwakwani’s Floods: A Recurring Crisis Demanding a Permanent Solution”

Another flood season, another round of assurances, and once again the people of Kwakwani find themselves navigating rising waters, damaged homes, and disrupted livelihoods. The recent statements from Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha—that water levels are expected to recede as rainfall declines—may offer temporary comfort, but they do little to address a far more troubling reality: Kwakwani’s flooding is no longer an occasional crisis. It is a predictable, recurring event.

For decades, the community has endured seasonal inundation driven by heavy rainfall, overtopping of the Berbice River, and tidal influences. What was once described as a phenomenon occurring every ten years has now evolved into a far more frequent cycle, exacerbated by climate change and environmental shifts. Yet, despite this well-documented pattern, the national response remains largely reactive—mobilizing relief supplies, conducting assessments, and waiting for waters to recede.

This cycle is not just environmentally unsustainable; it is fiscally irresponsible.

Each flood event triggers a cascade of public expenditure: emergency response deployment, infrastructure repair, drainage interventions, and social assistance. Beneath these visible costs lie deeper, less quantified burdens—lost income, disrupted education, health risks, and the psychological toll on affected families. In effect, the State is repeatedly paying to manage a problem it already understands, without committing to a permanent solution.

The question therefore arises: at what point does recurring expenditure outweigh the cost of decisive intervention?

Successive administrations have long acknowledged Kwakwani’s vulnerability. As far back as 2006, efforts were initiated to relocate residents from flood-prone waterfront areas to higher ground. Yet, nearly two decades later, that initiative remains incomplete, underutilized, and largely ineffective. The reasons are not difficult to identify—insufficient incentives, weak planning, limited infrastructure, and a failure to align relocation with the economic realities of residents whose livelihoods are tied to the river.

But these challenges do not justify inaction. They demand better policy design.

A modern, responsible approach to Kwakwani must move beyond short-term relief and toward a structured, long-term resilience strategy. This requires a holistic framework grounded in three key pillars.

First, the government must pursue a voluntary but incentivized relocation programme. This means more than allocating land—it requires fully serviced housing schemes, secure land titles, and financial support mechanisms that make relocation both viable and attractive. Residents cannot be expected to abandon their homes for uncertainty.

Second, any relocation effort must be accompanied by livelihood transition planning. Economic displacement is one of the primary barriers to resettlement. Ensuring access to transportation, markets, and alternative income opportunities is critical if relocation is to succeed. Without this, relocation efforts will continue to face resistance.

Third, there must be targeted investment in resilient infrastructure. Not all areas can or should be abandoned. Strategic flood defenses, improved drainage systems, and climate-adaptive planning are essential to protect critical assets and reduce vulnerability where relocation is not feasible.

Equally important is the enforcement of land-use policies to prevent further expansion into high-risk zones. It is counterproductive to relocate some residents while allowing others to settle in the same vulnerable areas.

 

The situation in Kwakwani is not unique. It is emblematic of a broader governance challenge in Guyana—where known risks are repeatedly managed rather than resolved. In an era of increasing climate uncertainty, this approach is no longer tenable.

If the government is serious about protecting citizens and managing public resources responsibly, it must shift from a reactive posture to a proactive strategy. The science is known. The risks are clear. The costs—both human and financial—are mounting.

Kwakwani does not need another promise that floodwaters will recede. It needs a plan to ensure that when they do, they do not return with the same devastating regularity

.Recurring floods should not mean recurring failure.

 

GECOM Seats: Why discuss, What’s to discuss?

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ TRUTH♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY♦ JUNE 2026                                            OP-ED |POLITICS                              BY: GHK LALL

GECOM Seats: Why discuss, What’s to discuss?

Impressive and inspired are those writings addressing the issue of GECOM commissioners.  There’s a collision with stonewalls.  No PNC commissioner is moving.  The fact of public writings, positions taken, and actions recommended confirms the existence of those stonewalls of resistance. 

Immovable.  Apply whatever force believed necessary.  No PNC leader is flexing.  No PNC commissioner is resigning on his own.  Unbelievable.  There I stand.  Troubling in messages sent.

What message is sent to citizens?  It is okay to lose, but still lining up to claim a prize is right.  Is a right.

Taken to the extreme ends of Guyana’s electoral arithmetic, that claim, that reasoning, would still rule, if not a single seat is held in parliament. 

 Going beyond the beyond, if not a single vote was gained.  Something doesn’t add here.  Loose ends.  Like persistently irritating specks in the eye, they don’t leave.  If I tell fellow citizens to walk straight, play fair, and obey the will of the people, and am still looking to hang on to what is politically weak, what redounds to my discredit, then what the hell am I about?  Who am I?  What standards set for Guyana’s largest demographic, the young?

I have absorbed provisions in the Constitution read this way and that way.  Laws crafted.  Rules made.  And procedures to bolster. 

Whether all three are at their comprehensive best, or lacking in compelling power, there is still, there is always, what’s failsafe.  Failsafe, even tamper resistant.  Because it is of infallible and nonnegotiable standing when it confronts honorable men and women.  The constitution that is written within, deeply and inerasably.  The laws that are carved out and followed.  Because they are of my mind and my hand. 

For those come from the internal texts that form the basis for rules and the procedures that are followed.  Win, lose, or draw.  If when those tests of character come, I am found wanting, hedging, dodging, then I would not only have lost my head.  There would be no face left to lose.                                 The PNC should think carefully of sinking so low.

I hear that there is no such creature as a good loser; that a good loser is a loser.  I disagree.  Today and anytime such a statement is made. 

 What I have said repeatedly to PPP Govt leaders, I re-emphasize to PNC leaders.  A man, a woman, must have a code by which he or she operates.  It’s their personally inscribed Bible, Koran, Bhagavad Gita.  In good times.  In times that are so tough that there are no tears left.  The spirit is that decimated.  But it is on the tests of the worst times, that the best must come out.  For then is when that code must be followed.  In letter.  Most of all, in its spirit.  In other words, my personal constitution is more stringent, more demanding, more controlling than any national constitution, as robust as such may be.

The now forgotten side of this issue would be the 109,000 Guyanese who voted for WIN.  When they are seen as mere election fodder, inconsequential soft balls to be pitched around, then I submit that all they are worthy of is being kicked from pillar to post, for all the regard that they command.  So, who is representing them around GECOM’s table?  The stronger question is: representing what? 

What generated so much disillusionment?  What led to the electoral experimentation of Guyana’s desperate?  The dreams of Guyana’s scorned and left out, the other side of One Guyana.  When GECOM seats are disputed post September 2025, that’s not a fight for empowerment of poorly represented Guyanese. 

It’s fighting for self-perpetuation, self-empowerment.  Aggregate and summarize.  Neither termination nor resignation.  Therefore, talk of discussions.  Guyanese need, ask for, bread.  They are forced to contend with stones.

The Missing Agency in a Billion-Dollar Conversation

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦ JUNE 2026

The Missing Agency in a Billion-Dollar Conversation

BY: HEM KUMAR                                                                  Guyana’s rapidly expanding investment profile continues to attract international attention, but a recent meeting between Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill and a visiting U.S. delegation raises questions that go beyond routine diplomacy and into the core of governance practice.

At the center of the concern is not merely the meeting itself, but its structure—and what it reveals about the evolving approach to governance. The delegation reportedly included representatives tied to a prospective industrial-scale project in  Upper Berbice. This venture falls squarely within the realm of heavy industry, natural resource utilization, environmental regulation, and fiscal planning. Yet, the primary government interface was the Ministry of Public Works.

That is an unusual starting point.

Public Works plays a critical supporting role in national development, particularly in roads, bridges, and logistics corridors. But it is not the state’s principal gateway for negotiating or assessing industrial investments of this scale and complexity. That responsibility rests with institutions such as the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest), supported by technical agencies and sector-specific ministries. 

These bodies exist precisely to ensure that proposals are rigorously evaluated across legal, environmental, economic, and fiscal dimensions before any policy alignment is even contemplated.

 According to reports, the discussions touched on potential alumina refinery operations in Berbice—an undertaking that demanded interaction with the mandated State agency. Yet, the apparent absence of the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest) from this engagement is both conspicuous and troubling.

Guyana has invested in building out agencies like GO-Invest with technical staff, policy frameworks, and statutory responsibilities. Taxpayer resources sustain these institutions for a reason. When they are sidelined—whether deliberately or through informal parallel processes—it raises a fundamental question: are these agencies central to national development strategy, or are they being reduced to ceremonial back-end processors of decisions shaped elsewhere?

GO-Invest is not a ceremonial body. It is the state’s designated investment facilitation agency, staffed with the technical, legal, and policy expertise required to evaluate proposals, guide investors, and ensure alignment with national development priorities. Its role is foundational, particularly at the early stages of complex, capital-intensive ventures such as an alumina refinery.

This raises a simple but unavoidable question: was GO-Invest invited to participate, and if not, why not?

 

The absence—at least publicly—of technical personnel or inter-agency representation in such a meeting only sharpens the concern. This is not a minor administrative detail. It goes directly to process integrity. Standard practice in serious investment discussions, even at preliminary stages, involves technical accompaniment to ensure that conversations are grounded in feasibility, regulatory constraints, and national interest considerations. Without that, engagements risk becoming politically driven rather than technically informed.

It also opens the door to perception—and in governance, perception is often as consequential as reality.

 If the agency was excluded, it suggests a deliberate sidelining of institutional processes in favor of a more centralized, minister-led approach to investment engagement. If it was invited but absent, that raises an entirely different set of concerns about coordination and operational coherence within the state’s investment architecture. Neither scenario inspires confidence.

If this was merely an informal, exploratory courtesy call, then that should be clearly communicated. But if substantive discussions were entertained regarding a refinery and associated industrial expansion, then the process appears misaligned with established institutional roles. And that misalignment is not an isolated concern. It reflects a broader and increasingly visible pattern in which ministerial offices appear to supersede or bypass constitutionally and administratively mandated agencies.

This is where the issue moves beyond protocol into principle.

The issue is compounded by the choice of lead ministry. While Public Works is integral to infrastructure development, it is not the primary interface for negotiating or assessing industrial investments. Its role is supportive—ensuring that roads, bridges, and logistical networks can sustain economic expansion—not defining or vetting the investments themselves.

Equally significant is the reported absence of technical accompaniment. Serious investment discussions, even at exploratory stages, are typically supported by teams capable of interrogating feasibility, regulatory requirements, and long-term implications. Without that layer of expertise, such meetings risk becoming politically driven engagements untethered from the rigorous analysis that projects of this magnitude demand.

There is also an economic inversion worth noting. Investors pursuing industrial projects—particularly in extractive or processing sectors—are generally responsible for developing or financing the infrastructure necessary for their operations.

Governments facilitate and regulate; they do not ordinarily serve as the entry point for pitching industrial ventures. When that line begins to blur, it invites scrutiny.

To be fair, direct ministerial engagement is not inherently inappropriate. Governments often use high-level access to signal openness and accelerate investor interest. In a competitive global environment, that can be a strategic tool.

But strategy cannot come at the expense of structure.

When constitutionally and administratively mandated agencies like GO-Invest are absent from critical early engagements, it signals more than a procedural lapse—it suggests a governance model that is shifting away from institutional accountability toward centralized discretion. Over time, that shift can erode transparency, weaken safeguards, and create parallel decision-making channels that are difficult to track or challenge.

Guyana is operating in a high-stakes environment where investment decisions carry long-term consequences for its economy, environment, and sovereignty over resources. That reality demands stronger institutions, not their quiet displacement.

Until there is clarity on whether GO-Invest was engaged—or deliberately bypassed—the question will persist: why is the very agency designed to manage and scrutinize investment not at the table when it matters most?