The Chairman’s Denial: Paul Cheong’s Own LinkedIn Contradicts His Sworn Claim on L’Heureuse

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The Chairman’s Denial: Paul Cheong’s Own LinkedIn Contradicts His Sworn Claim on L’Heureuse

OPINION BY: Staff Writer –August 2026

GuySuCo CEO sues Opposition Leader for defamation over a road-contract conflict-of-interest claim — while his own professional profile lists him as Chairman of the very company he says he has no role in

Dr. Paul Cheong, Chief Executive Officer of the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), has filed suit in the High Court of the Supreme Court of Judicature, Demerara, against Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed, seeking upward of $10 million in damages and an injunction against further publication over a Facebook video posted on August 11, 2026. In his Statement of Claim, Cheong swears he is “not the owner of L’Heureuse Construction Services or L’Heureuse Construction Services Inc.” and that he holds “no ownership, management or decision-making role” in the company. This publications  own review of the public record complicates that sworn position.

THE ALLEGATION THAT TRIGGERED THE SUIT

Mohamed’s video linked Cheong to L’Heureuse in connection with a $6.8 billion bid submitted under a $121 billion, seventeen-lot national road tender — the Parika-to-Versailles four-lane highway among them — and questioned the propriety of a sitting state-corporation chief executive holding an interest in a company competing for government road works.

L’Heureuse itself issued a public statement on August 11 denying that Cheong holds any ownership, management, or decision-making role in the company, and noting it was incorporated on August 11, 2017. Cheong’s subsequent Statement of Claim, filed August 17, tracks that denial closely: he says he has never bid on or been awarded a government road contract.

WHAT THE COMPANY’S OWN DIRECTORS SAY ABOUT THEMSELVES

This publication reviewed the LinkedIn profiles maintained by Paul Cheong and by Marvin Cheong, who is publicly listed as an officer of L’Heureuse.

Both are self-authored, current professional profiles — not third-party claims, and not statements attributed to Mohamed or to this news outlet .

Paul (Christopher) Cheong’s LinkedIn headline reads: “Chariman at Lheureuse Construction and Services Inc.” [sic]. It is listed as his current position, above a separate line identifying him with the Private Sector Commission of Guyana.

Marvin Cheong’s LinkedIn headline reads: “Managing director at L’Heureuse Construction and Services Inc.” — also listed as a current position, under the “Experience” heading with the title “Managing director.”

Chairman and Managing Director are governance and management titles, by definition — the very categories Paul Cheong’s sworn claim disavows.

Chairman and Managing Director are, on their face, management and governance titles. That places Paul Cheong’s own self-description in direct tension with the specific language of his Statement of Claim — not with the broader, separately unresolved question of who owns L’Heureuse’s shares, but narrowly with his sworn assertion that he has “no ownership, management or decision-making role” in the company.

WHAT THIS EVIDENCE DOES AND DOES NOT ESTABLISH

This publication draws a firm line here. A LinkedIn title is not a shareholder register, and it is not proof of who actually controls or benefits from L’Heureuse Construction and Services Inc. The claim, circulating separately, that Marvin Cheong — listed as the company’s owner of record — is fronting for his father is a distinct allegation this newsroom  has not independently verified through company registry filings, and it is treated here as such: unverified. What is verified, because it is self-published and current, is that both Paul and Marvin Cheong publicly describe themselves as holding management roles at the same company at the same time that Paul Cheong has sworn in a Statement of Claim that he holds no such role.

The company’s public documented work includes the roundabout and dual carriageway on the Schoonord-to-Crane four-lane highway, running north from the roundabout to within roughly ten metres of the A Line concrete bridge. That segment’s defects-liability period expired August 29, 2024, and the company has maintained the pavement remains in good condition — a claim that bears directly on Mohamed’s assertion, made in the video that prompted the suit, that the road is already deteriorating.

WHY IT MATTERS

Guyana’s state corporations sit at the centre of the country’s oil-era procurement boom, and the credibility of their leadership rests on a clean separation between public office and private contracting interest. A defamation suit is Cheong’s legal right, and Mohamed will have to substantiate his claims before a court under the ordinary rules of evidence. But when a plaintiff’s own sworn pleading and his own public professional profile point in different directions on the narrow question of what role he holds in the company at issue, that contradiction belongs in the public record alongside the litigation — regardless of how the underlying ownership dispute is ultimately resolved.

This newsroom  will continue to track the proceedings, any response Cheong’s attorneys file addressing the LinkedIn discrepancy, and any registry documentation that speaks to the actual ownership structure of L’Heureuse Construction and Services Inc.

— The Board

Two Nominees, Two Other Jobs

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 Two Nominees, Two Other Jobs

OPINION BY : Staff Writer– August 2026

The President’s picks for the Judicial Service Commission and the Public Service Commission each already hold a second post close enough to the first to demand an answer before confirmation, not after.

T wo of the President’s nominees to Guyana’s constitutional commissions arrive already carrying another job — and in both cases, the second job sits close enough to the first to raise the kind of question that ought to be answered before either appointment is finalised, not after.

Retired Justice Carl Singh has been proposed for reappointment to the Judicial Service Commission, the body that expired on July 13 and that the President is now moving to reconstitute under Article 198(2). Singh is a natural pick on paper — a former Chancellor of the Judiciary, credentialed and well known to the institution.

“He is also, at this moment, the sitting Chairman of the Constitutional Reform Commission, appointed to that post by President Ali and sworn in alongside seventeen other commissioners in April 2024.”

The overlap is not cosmetic. The JSC’s own composition is built around the Chancellorship: by constitutional design, the Chancellor chairs the Commission, the Chief Justice sits on it, and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission sits on it as well.

A retired Chancellor joining that body is not an outsider being added to an unrelated panel — he is stepping into the specific institutional lineage the JSC was built to run through. That alone might be unremarkable, given Singh’s background. What makes it worth a second look is that Singh simultaneously chairs the body Guyana convened specifically to review and recommend changes to the machinery of constitutional appointments — including, potentially, the very judicial appointment provisions the JSC operates under. One man sitting at the head of both the commission that might reform the rules and the commission that operates under them is not evidence of wrongdoing.

It is, at minimum, a structural question about whether reform recommendations touching judicial appointments can be seen as arriving independently of the people who currently sit inside that system.

The Constitutional Reform Commission has itself struggled for legitimacy on unrelated grounds — the Guyana Human Rights Association called for Singh and the full membership to resign last September, citing the commission’s inertia and the shifted political landscape since its 2024 swearing-in. Singh has publicly acknowledged the commission’s sluggish pace, attributing it to administrative delay rather than institutional design.

Whatever the merits of that defence, it does not touch the separate question raised by his JSC nomination: whether the same person should simultaneously hold the chairmanship of the body reviewing the constitutional order and a seat inside the judicial body that order currently produces.

The second nomination raises a cleaner conflict. Maurice Gajadhar has been proposed for the Public Service Commission, the body responsible under Article 200 for appointments, discipline and removal across Guyana’s public service. Gajadhar is also, and has been since 2020, Chairman of the Board of Guyana Power and Light — a state-owned corporation, and not a small one.

That chairmanship already produced a public conflict-of-interest controversy on Gajadhar’s watch. In 2021, GPL purchased two vehicles from Rudisa Motor Company Guyana Inc., a company for which Gajadhar serves as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Former-Public Infrastructure Minister David Patterson called it plainly: “That is a clear conflict of interest.” GPL’s response at the time did not deny the transaction — it defended the purchase as having gone through a National Competitive Bidding Process, which addresses the procurement mechanics without addressing the more basic problem: a state corporation buying vehicles from a company run by its own board chairman is a conflict irrespective of how the invoice was generated. Gajadhar was still chairing the GPL board as recently as February of this year, when he led a board inspection of the utility’s new National Control Centre.

To be precise about the shape of the concern: the Public Service Commission does not regulate GPL directly. Its Article 200 jurisdiction runs to the public service — the civil service proper — not to the governance of state-owned commercial entities, so this is not a case of Gajadhar being asked to police his own corporation from a new perch. The more grounded question is one of fitness. The PSC exists to safeguard the integrity of appointments and discipline across the public service; it is difficult to square that mandate with elevating a nominee whose own record as a public-corporation chairman includes a documented, publicly contested instance of exactly the kind of self-dealing the Commission is meant to guard against elsewhere in the state.

Neither of these facts, on its own, disqualifies either man. Guyana is a small country with a shallow bench of people credentialed enough to fill these seats, and some overlap between public roles is close to unavoidable. But “unavoidable in general” is not the same as “unexamined in this instance,” and nothing in the correspondence between Minister Teixeira and Opposition Leader Mohamed — nor in the Opposition’s brief, non-committal acknowledgments of the nominees — indicates that either overlap was raised, let alone resolved, before the names went forward.

The Opposition Leader’s responses to date have noted the nominees and their curricula vitae without expressly endorsing or objecting to either. That may still be the right posture while the record is incomplete. But it should not be the final posture.

Before Mohamed’s office signs off on Singh for the JSC or Gajadhar for the PSC, both men’s dual roles deserve a direct question, asked and answered on the record: what happens to the other seat if this one is confirmed. A commission built to guard against exactly this kind of overlap should not be the one asking Guyanese to take it on faith.

— The Board

Change Eating Habits -Seriously, Pres Ali?

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Change Eating Habits -Seriously, Pres Ali?

OPINION BY: GHK LALL – August 2026

Pres Ali means well.  I wonder, though, whether he is serious.  Or, if he takes himself seriously.  I put it gently.  He should listen to himself.  The parts of his speeches that are not AI influenced.  (Follow-up planned).  Change eating habits.  Well-intended.  But, Swiss cheese.

First, there must be a range of food options before people can change their eating habits.  They have choices.  Food options found affordable, in the basket.  Bitter reality for a third to a half of Guyana (maybe) is that they don’t have enough to eat.  If there isn’t enough, what is there to change?

When Guyanese are down to the bone, what opening for changing their eating habits?  When there’s a scramble to put together a simple meal, changing eating habits, for better or worse, is a luxury that eludes.  The focus is on quantity, not quality.  Quality is also costly. 

It’s about bulkage and less about roughage.  Nutrition would be nice to have, but the emphasis is on avoiding starvation. 

Does a man lost in the jungle, or adrift on the ocean, get picky and choosy?  Whither that luxury?  Especially when the only food around is the dead body of a past companion.  The president and his people disagree with me on plenty; I don’t think they can disagree on this point.

Second, Pres Ali took aim at ‘eating out.’  Sure, it’s expensive.  But if the masses don’t treat themselves, now and then, make the sacrifice, then how do investors flocking here recoup their cash?  Guyana has been marketed as business friendly.  Why transform Guyana, the culinary and hospitality part, to being bad for business? 

There’s a contradiction there.  I seek pardoned for tabling.  Some Guyanese use alcohol (other stuff) to numb their senses, relieve the pain of living in Guyana.  Others seek a bite to make them forget how hard it is in this luscious, fabulous, oil rich frontier that has the whole world drooling. 

While the whole world drools, it takes a hard man to shove locals away from what gives them some temporary ease.  See the children smile.

Instead of a Tylenol, poor Guyanese address their migraine and stomach pangs with a Taco or burrito, a burger or pizza.  I’m not talking about Japanese sushi, beluga caviar, or Hungarian goulash for Guyanese who struggle to get enough to eat.  Me, I am a roti and curry man, a peas and rice man.  So, it’s perplexing that the president (who should know better) suddenly is the new voice for a change in local eating habits.  I doubt that anyone could have imagined that presidential call in an oil rich country.  Here a billion is gone through by the PPP Government as if it’s a bottle of rum guzzled down, then to the next?  Meanwhile, poorer Guyanese, chronically short of funds and food, are counseled to change how they eat.

Third, it’s unlikely that Guyanese minimum wage workers, or local pensioners, or lower tier public servants even think of shopping at the high-end supermarkets.  Their minds may wander and settle on the wonders in those high-end and high-priced shops.  Reality check: when prices at municipal markets embarrass them, chase them home, what interest can they have about partaking of expensive goodies in supermarkets?

Fourth, the president and the PPP hierarchy are forever celebrating some new commercial arrival, some splendid ribbon cutting, some promising sod turning.  Now, there is this development that amounts to:  Beware of Supermarkets.  Bypass those megastores.  The Chinese put Guyanese corner shops out of business.  Remaining options, anyone?  What about those investors who plunked down their millions in the calculation that Guyanese sample their goods?  I hope that local entrepreneurs (supermarkets) aren’t included.

In reading what Pres Ali said, I recall that local beauty.  Belly full maan tell hungry belly maan -bare yuh chafe, bruddah.  Ting gun be bettah.  The mystery: change when there’s nothing.

Two Hundred and Three Years Later: What Got the Facts Wrong, What Got Ignored, and What Got in the Way

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Two Hundred and Three Years Later: What Got the Facts Wrong, What Got Ignored, and What Got in the Way

OPINION BY:– Hem Kumar– August 2026

On August 18, a post from a Facebook page called Library of West Indian History began circulating on WhatsApp, marking the 203rd anniversary of the Demerara Rebellion. It got the broad shape of the story right — Jack Gladstone, his father Quamina, the Success plantation, the two-day uprising, the brutal suppression. It also got specific facts wrong, and the underlying question it raised — why does this story get so little sustained attention — turned out to be more precise, and more damning, than the post itself realized.

The corrections

The post names “Joe of Le Reduit” as the man who alerted authorities to the rebellion plan, saying he informed his master at 6 a.m. The documented record names the informant as Joseph Packwood, an enslaved house servant, who told his owner John Simpson — who then informed Governor John Murray. The plantation and the hour may be garbled from a secondary retelling; the name in the post does not match the primary accounts.

The post states 19 people were executed. Sources diverge here, and the divergence is worth stating plainly rather than picking whichever number is most dramatic: some accounts put the figure at 14 rebels tried and sentenced to hang, with roughly 200 more killed outright — including beheaded — as the militia moved through the plantations before formal trials began.

Other accounts put the number sentenced at 45, with 27 executed. Quamina was not among the tried; he was hunted down with dogs and killed on September 16, 1823. The precise death toll of the Demerara Rebellion has never been settled in the historical literature, and any single figure presented without qualification should be treated as provisional.

Jack Gladstone’s deportation destination is also unsettled across sources — most credible accounts point to St. Lucia, not Bermuda as the post hedges. This is a minor point next to the death toll, but it illustrates the same problem: a viral repost compressing genuinely contested history into confident-sounding numbers.

One further note, for anyone tracing this story back through a search engine: a Wikipedia mirror site currently in circulation attributes the rebellion’s leadership to a fabricated individual and invents a cause of death for him. That page is not Wikipedia and should not be cited by anyone doing further reading on this subject.

What actually happened on the anniversary itself

The more interesting failure isn’t the Facebook post. It’s what didn’t happen in Guyanese media  and more notably the State on August 18, 2026.

Three years ago, at the bicentenary, the story got real institutional weight. The University of Guyana held a symposium — “Honouring Our Ancestors’ Sacrifices” — with a keynote from Hamilton College’s Nigel Westmaas and a lecture on the Battle of Bachelor’s Adventure from historian Shammane Joseph Jackson. Stabroek News ran retrospectives. The 1823 Monument on the Georgetown Seawall, unveiled in 2013, became a point of public reference again. Even then, Westmaas himself noted what he called a “widespread lassitude on matters of history in present day Guyana” — an admission, from inside the commemorative effort, that public engagement was thin even at its peak.

This year, that peak has passed and nothing has replaced it. Kiskadee Watch — the digital outlet built from Stabroek News’s former staff after that paper’s closure in March 2026 — ran no news item, no editorial, no letter, and no opinion piece on the anniversary this week, despite a front page otherwise dense with accountability journalism: the MV Barima Commission of Inquiry, the Sigma Engineers procurement questions, an editorial naming the President’s brother directly. 

Kaieteur News’s archive for the same period shows the same gap. Guyana Chronicle’s most recent coverage of the rebellion traces back to the 2023 bicentenary concert — a government-organized one-off, not ongoing editorial attention.

What got in the way, this year specifically

August 18 was not a quiet news day. President Ali held a press conference that day announcing Guyana’s share of Stabroek Block production had risen to 39.8%, that a fifth FPSO vessel worth $12.7 billion was arriving that week, and that the MV Barima Commission of Inquiry would open the following month.

He also used the same appearance to push back directly on corruption allegations from Azruddin Mohamed concerning an undeclared farm. 

Any one of those stories would lead a news day on its own; together, they did.

That is a real, competing claim on newsroom attention, not a manufactured distraction — the oil production figures and the Barima COI timeline are legitimate accountability stories in their own right. But it sits on top of a structural problem that predates this particular week: Stabroek News, the one outlet that had treated 1823 as a subject worth returning to, no longer exists in its original form, and its successor is two months old and still finding its footing.                   

 A newsroom rebuilding itself from a closure has less institutional slack for a story that isn’t breaking that day — even a story that matters enormously and comes around, predictably, every August 18.

None of this excuses the errors in a WhatsApp repost. But it does mean the post was asking the right question by accident.

The story of Quamina and Jack Gladstone does not require an anniversary to be told correctly. It does, evidently, require someone to choose to tell it — and on its 203rd anniversary, in a news cycle crowded with oil barrels and a Commission of Inquiry, no one did.

A Recognition Gap: What the Record Shows About Fisher and Mohamed

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A Recognition Gap: What the Record Shows About Fisher and Mohamed

OPINION BY: Staff Writer –August 2026

Sometime in early June 2026 — within his first two months as British High Commissioner to Guyana — Joseph Fisher sat for a photograph with a delegation from A Partnership for National Unity. It has the look of a standard early courtesy call: new envoy, opposition party, flags either side, the kind of introduction most incoming high commissioners work through in their first weeks. Around the same period, Fisher was photographed separately with Amanza Walton-Desir, leader of the Forward Guyana Movement, in a one-on-one portrait rather than a group shot.

There is no equivalent photograph, and no documented meeting of any kind, between Fisher and Azruddin Mohamed — or between Fisher and We Invest in Nationhood as a party. This is despite WIN holding sixteen seats in the National Assembly, more than APNU and Forward Guyana combined, and despite Mohamed having held the constitutionally recognised office of Leader of the Opposition since January 2026.

The timing complicates the obvious explanation

The APNU meeting falls in early June — before the Caribbean Court of Justice dismissed Mohamed’s extradition appeal on July 29, and well before his legal team’s mid-August campaign accusing CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson of bias, a campaign the Guyana Chronicle described as a coordinated effort spanning multiple WIN-linked social media platforms.

Whatever explains the absence of a Fisher–Mohamed meeting, it cannot be explained by conduct that had not yet happened. If Fisher’s early courtesy rounds reached the smaller opposition parties within his first eight weeks and did not reach the largest one, that gap predates the events most likely to be cited in its defence.

This does not resolve the question. It narrows it.

The precedent Fisher inherited

Fisher’s predecessor, Jane Miller, did not treat Mohamed’s US indictment as a reason for diplomatic distance. In January 2026, as the government and the Speaker of the National Assembly delayed the swearing-in of an Opposition Leader, Miller told Stabroek News on the record that the election of a Leader of the Opposition should proceed “without delay,” explicitly naming a functioning legislature as the priority — a position she took alongside the US, Canadian and EU missions, all of whom pressed for Mohamed’s confirmation despite his legal position being, by then, already public and unresolved.

Miller went further than neutrality; she used her office’s public voice to support the institutional recognition Mohamed was seeking.

Whatever the current posture reflects, it did not begin as British diplomatic orthodoxy in Guyana. It is, at minimum, a change from the position the previous High Commissioner staked out in writing.

Two explanations, neither proven

There are two honest ways to read the gap, and the record does not yet allow a confident choice between them.

“The first is that something shifted in the UK’s posture independent of Mohamed’s conduct — a judgment call by Fisher, made early and for reasons not publicly stated, to keep the largest opposition party at arm’s length while extending ordinary courtesy to the smaller ones.”

The second is that Mohamed’s own position made him progressively harder to engage — an indicted politician contesting extradition through the courts is a different diplomatic proposition than one merely facing an unresolved case, and a politician whose legal team is publicly attacking the integrity of the region’s highest court is a different proposition again.

On this reading, the calculus may simply have hardened as 2026 went on, even if it was not yet fully formed in June.

The honest difficulty is that the documented timeline fits neither story cleanly. The absence predates the CCJ campaign, which weakens the second explanation as a complete account. But Miller’s precedent shows the indictment alone was not, on the UK’s own recent conduct, treated as disqualifying — which weakens the idea that Mohamed’s legal jeopardy in isolation explains everything either.

Something in between is more likely than either extreme, and this publication is not in a position to assert which.

What this means for the appeals now underway

What can be said without speculation is this: Mohamed has, over recent months, written directly to Fisher on the Region 10 impasse, seeking his intervention with the same posture he has brought to letters addressed to President Ali and to the CCJ Registrar — treating the recipient as a good-faith channel whose engagement can reasonably be expected. The documented record does not support that assumption in Fisher’s case. It shows a High Commissioner who found time for Mohamed’s smaller rivals and, so far as this publication has been able to establish, none for him.

That gap may be snub. It may be consequence. It may be some combination that changed over the course of the year. What it is not, on the evidence available, is a settled diplomatic relationship capable of delivering the intervention Mohamed’s letters ask for.

 

Continuing to write as though it is one is, at best, an appeal to an audience whose willingness to listen has not been demonstrated — and, at worst, another entry in a pattern this news outlet has now traced across GECOM, Region 10 and the CCJ: letters addressed with confidence to authorities whose capacity or willingness to act on them remains, on the public record, unproven.

 

A Letter Ali May Not Be Able to Answer

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592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

ELECTORAL GOVERNANCE

A Letter Ali May Not Be Able to Answer

The Constitutional Hole at the Centre of Mohamed’s GECOM Campaign

592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL BOARD – August 2026

Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has now written President Irfaan Ali on the composition of the Guyana Elections Commission enough times that the letters have started to blur into one another. The latest, sent in the wake of The Carter Center’s statement on the GECOM impasse, asks Ali to give “urgent consideration” to appointing Mohamed’s three nominees — his own private attorneys, Roysdale Forde, Siand Dhurjon and Damien Da Silva — in place of the three sitting opposition-nominated commissioners. It is, by any reasonable count, his fourth or fifth attempt since June.

What has not changed across any of these letters is the assumption sitting underneath them: that this is a request Ali is capable of granting.

THE QUESTION THE LETTER TREATS AS SETTLED

Mohamed’s position rests on reading Article 161(3)(b) of the Constitution as attaching to an office, not a person. The Leader of the Opposition’s power to advise the President on GECOM appointments, on this view, belongs to whoever currently holds that title — so when the office changed hands from Aubrey Norton to Mohamed following the 2025 elections, the basis on which the three sitting commissioners were appointed changed with it.

University of Guyana law lecturer Neville Bissember has made this case seriously: the relevant constitutional language speaks of “the Leader of the Opposition” as a role, not a named individual, and a role that has been reconfigured cannot indefinitely bind the President to advice given by its previous occupant.

It is a real argument. It is not, however, the only one, and it is nowhere close to settled.

The competing reading draws on Article 161(6), which imports the removal protections of Article 225 into GECOM membership — the same protections that shield judges from arbitrary dismissal. On this view, a commissioner can only be removed for cause: infirmity, misbehaviour, the standard categories that apply to constitutional officeholders generally. 

A change in the opposition’s parliamentary arithmetic is not a recognised cause for removal. The sitting commissioners — Vincent Alexander, Charles Corbin and Desmond Trotman — have made exactly this argument in their own defence: that appointment created a personal constitutional tenure, not a leash held by whichever party leader happened to nominate them.

Both readings have been argued in good faith by people who understand the Constitution. Neither has been resolved by a court.

Mohamed’s letters to Ali do not acknowledge this. They proceed as though the “office not person” interpretation is simply correct, and as though the only obstacle to Ali acting on it is inattention or bad faith.

THE DEEPER PROBLEM: EVEN IF MOHAMED IS RIGHT, ALI MAY NOT BE ABLE TO SAY SO

This is where the letter-writing campaign runs into its real difficulty, and it is a difficulty that survives even a charitable reading of Mohamed’s constitutional argument. Legal opinion aired publicly in July concluded that there is, at present, no vacancy on GECOM for the President to fill — because nothing in the Constitution gives the President the unilateral authority to decide, on his own initiative, which of two competing constitutional interpretations governs.

That determination belongs to the courts.

Put plainly: Mohamed is not simply asking Ali to act quickly. He is asking Ali to resolve, by executive letter, a genuine and unresolved dispute about the meaning of Article 161(3)(b) — a dispute serious enough that it has produced dueling legal opinions in the national press for months.

Even if Ali agreed entirely with Mohamed’s reading, replacing sitting constitutional officeholders on that basis alone would be an act of constitutional interpretation the Presidency does not clearly have the standing to perform unilaterally. It would almost certainly invite the very litigation Mohamed says he is prepared to bring — except brought against the President, by the displaced commissioners, rather than by Mohamed against the President.

This changes what “no response” actually means. Ali’s silence need not be read as obstruction or political convenience, though it may be that too. It can just as easily be read as the more legally cautious course available to him: declining to adjudicate a live constitutional question that properly belongs before a judge, rather than acting on one party’s account of it and creating a fresh cause of action in the process.

WHAT THAT DOES TO THE LETTERS THEMSELVES

If this reading is right, the recurring letters to Ali were, in a meaningful sense, never going to work — not because the President is unresponsive, but because the request was addressed to an office that most likely cannot grant it. That reframes the entire exercise. A letter asking for something the recipient cannot lawfully give is not really a request for action.

It is a public record being built: evidence, for a later court filing or a later international appeal, that “urgent” correspondence was sent and ignored.

Whether or not that is Mohamed’s actual strategy, it is the practical effect. And it sits inside a pattern that is now difficult to miss. The same posture — treat a contested legal question as though it is obviously resolved, address the request to an authority who may not have the power to grant it, invoke the international community rather than the courts — has now appeared in Mohamed’s approach to the Region 10 impasse and in his legal team’s demand letter to the CCJ Registrar over Justice Anderson’s participation in his own extradition proceedings.

In each case, the domestic judicial remedy that could actually settle the underlying question — judicial review, injunctive relief, a constitutional motion — remains unused, while the letters multiply.

The answer the moment requires is a judicial one, not another letter to an office that has now been asked, repeatedly, to do something it may not be constitutionally positioned to do.

The GECOM commissioners’ dispute deserves an answer. Guyana’s electoral machinery cannot indefinitely run on a commission whose composition even its own members and the Chairperson herself have publicly disputed, and the country cannot deliver credible Local Government Elections while that dispute drags on unresolved.

But the answer the moment requires is a judicial one, not another letter to an office that has now been asked, repeatedly, to do something it may not be constitutionally positioned to do.

— The Board

 

The Stopgap That Never Closed the Gap: Guyana’s Solar Billions and the Blackouts That Won’t Stop

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The Stopgap That Never Closed the Gap: Guyana’s Solar Billions and the Blackouts That Won’t Stop

OPINION BY : Staff Writer  August 2026 

Solar farms were sold to the public as the fix for Guyana’s power shortfalls. Months and years after commissioning, the shortfalls are still here — and no one in government has published the numbers to explain why.

Guyana’s electricity grid failed again this month. Not in a remote hinterland outpost waiting on infrastructure that has not yet arrived, but in Linden — a town where the government has been promising a 15-megawatt solar solution for years, and where residents are now enduring rolling blackouts while they wait for it to switch on. The Linden Electricity Company confirmed the outages stem from a straightforward supply shortfall: demand has outgrown the 14.5 MW available from Bosai, the solar farms meant to close that gap remain under construction, and the government has been forced back to the negotiating table with the same bauxite company whose limits triggered the crisis in the first place.

This is not an isolated embarrassment. It is the clearest illustration yet of the question APNU parliamentarian Ganesh Mahipaul has now put to the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, the Guyana Energy Agency, and Guyana Power and Light: if hundreds of millions — and in some cases billions — of taxpayer dollars have gone into solar infrastructure explicitly framed as an urgent fix for Guyana’s power reliability problems, why does the reliability problem persist?

A STOPGAP BY DESIGN, NOT YET A FIX IN PRACTICE

The solar programme was never pitched to the public as a long-horizon decarbonisation project on a fifteen-year timeline. It was pitched, repeatedly and specifically, as an immediate answer to diesel dependency, generation shortfalls, and the reliability failures that have plagued the Guyana Power and Light network and isolated hinterland systems alike.

That framing is precisely what makes the current moment so difficult to explain away. Linden’s own case makes the point without any need for interpretation: the government’s own public messaging around the Linden solar project describes it as the intended remedy for a demand surge that has now arrived before the fix did — leaving residents on rolling blackouts while the solution sits half-built.

Guyana Power and Light’s own numbers, meanwhile, show a national system running close to its edge. As of mid-August, GPL reported available generation capacity of roughly 266 megawatts against peak demand ranging between 235 and 240 megawatts — a reserve margin of about 26 megawatts on a system that has separately been described as recording its highest-ever demand reading this year. A country that has spent years and tens of billions of dollars building solar capacity should not still be operating this close to the margin. If the installed solar capacity that Mahipaul has catalogued were reliably feeding the grid at anything close to its rated output, that reserve margin should look very different.

WHAT HAS ACTUALLY BEEN SPENT

Mahipaul’s letter assembles, for the first time in one place, the individual price tags behind Guyana’s solar buildout. The figures span both hinterland stand-alone systems and the larger grid-connected GUYSOL program:

Facility Capacity  Cost Status Claimed
Mabaruma Solar  400 kW ≈G$272 M Operational
Lethem Solar 1 MW G$472–490 M Operational
Bartica / Daag 1.5 MW G$625M -$703M Operational
Mahdia (storage) 650 kW G$362.41M Operational
Onderneeming-GUYSOL 5 MW 10.4M USD Completed  18MWp
Hampshire-GUYSOL – GUYSOL (inc) Completed  18MWp
Prospect- GUYSOL 3 MW $5.5 M USD Completed  18MWp
Trafalgar (GUYSOL)
 4MW $8M USD Completed 18MWp
Charity-GUYSOL 3MW $14M USD Completed 18MWp
GUYSOL (TOTAL) 33MWp(34 storage)  $83.3 USD 8 sites mixed status
Linden (3 phases) 15MW undisclosed 1st phase due 2026

Individually, each of these numbers might be defensible. Solar infrastructure is capital-intensive, hinterland logistics are expensive, and battery storage adds real cost. Collectively, they represent a sum large enough that the public is owed more than installed-capacity press releases — it is owed operating data.

CAPACITY IS NOT THE SAME AS DELIVERY

This is the distinction Mahipaul’s letter turns on, and it is the correct one. A solar farm’s rated capacity — its megawatts or megawatt-peak figure — describes what it could theoretically generate under ideal irradiance conditions. It says nothing about actual output over a year, nothing about downtime, nothing about how much of that output ever reaches a consumer’s meter rather than being curtailed, stored, or lost.

The government’s own projections for two of the completed GUYSOL sites illustrate why the distinction matters: Onderneeming is projected to generate approximately 7,700 megawatt-hours annually, saving an estimated G$447 million a year in avoided fossil-fuel costs; Charity is projected at roughly 4,600 megawatt-hours annually, worth an estimated G$267 million.

These are meaningful numbers — if they are being realised. The government has published the projections. It has not published a single quarter of actual generation data to show whether those projections are holding, falling short, or being exceeded.

Mahipaul’s letter also raises a technical point that deserves more attention than it has received: connection to a local distribution network is not the same as export to the national interconnected grid. GUYSOL facilities connect to 13.8-kilovolt distribution networks in their respective areas, and several hinterland installations operate on isolated systems entirely separate from the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System. A solar farm described in a press release as “connected to the grid” may in practice be feeding a small local network with no meaningful bearing on the national reliability picture that ministers invoke when defending the programme’s cost.

The public has been given capacity figures. It has not been told, facility by facility, where the electricity generated actually goes.

THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN UNANSWERED

Mahipaul’s demand is specific and, on its face, unobjectionable for a government that maintains its solar investments are performing as promised: publish, for every facility, the total expenditure and how it compares to the original contract price; the contractor and procurement record; monthly generation figures; diesel volumes actually displaced; realised financial savings against fossil-fuel-cost projections; battery storage performance; and operational status including downtime and maintenance history.

“Guyana cannot simply count solar panels and call that energy transformation.”

That is the crux of it. Guyana has, over several years now, been shown ribbon-cuttings, capacity announcements, and projected-savings press releases. It has not been shown a single consolidated account of what these facilities have actually produced, what they have actually saved, and what has happened when demand outpaced supply in the very communities the solar farms were built to serve.                    Linden is not a hypothetical test of that gap. It is the test, running in real time, right now.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND THE BALANCE SHEET

Guyana’s oil revenues have created the fiscal space to make investments of this scale without the immediate budgetary strain such spending would once have imposed. That is precisely why the accounting standard should rise, not fall. Money that is easy to spend is not thereby immune from scrutiny — if anything, the ease of spending is the reason scrutiny becomes more necessary, not less.

A government sitting on record oil revenue has fewer excuses, not more, for leaving a reserve margin this thin, a hinterland town on rolling blackouts, and a national solar programme’s actual output undisclosed years into its rollout.

The Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, the Guyana Energy Agency, and Guyana Power and Light have the generation data. Smart meters, inverters, and battery management systems on modern solar installations record output automatically; this is not information that would need to be reconstructed from scratch. If the political message accompanying each commissioning — that this facility would ease the shortfall, cut diesel costs, and strengthen reliability — was accurate, the underlying data will bear that out and the disclosure costs the government nothing but the paperwork.

If it will not bear that out, Guyanese taxpayers who have funded hundreds of millions and, cumulatively, billions of dollars in solar infrastructure are entitled to know why — and who signed off on projects that did not deliver what they were sold as delivering.

The stopgap was supposed to close the gap. Linden’s blackouts this month are the clearest evidence yet that, on the government’s own timeline and its own terms, it has not. The figures exist to settle the question either way. The government’s continued silence on them is itself an answer of a kind.

— The Board

FOURTEEN YEARS, TWO ADDRESSES, ONE LESSON UNLEARNED

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

FOURTEEN YEARS, TWO ADDRESSES, ONE LESSON UNLEARNED:

What Fip Motilall’s Grocery Store Should Have Taught Guyana About Vetting Foreign Contractors — and Why GWI Didn’t Learn It

In 2010, the Government of Guyana handed Makeshwar “Fip” Motilall a US$15.4 million contract to build the access road to the Amaila Falls hydro site, on the strength of a company, Synergy Holdings Inc, whose listed American headquarters turned out to be a grocery supermarket in Florida. Motilall admitted it himself, at a press conference, after the contract collapsed.

Fourteen years later, Guyana Water Incorporated signed a GYD $1.49 billion contract with a joint venture whose listed Canadian headquarters is a house on a residential street in Scarborough, Ontario.

Nobody at GWI has admitted anything, because — as far as the public record shows — nobody at GWI has asked.

THE PRECEDENT GUYANA ALREADY PAID FOR

Motilall’s Synergy Holdings Inc was awarded the Amaila access road contract in March 2010, tasked with upgrading roughly 85km of existing roadway and constructing 110km of virgin roadway through some of Guyana’s most difficult terrain, plus two river crossings. Its listed head office was 951 Sansbury’s Way, Suite 204, West Palm Beach, Florida — an address shared with a second Motilall entity, Synergy Energy Solutions Inc, according to Florida’s own corporate registry. Independent investigations at the time found no evidence Motilall had ever built a road, managed a hydroelectric project, or employed technical staff of the kind the contract required.

The government defended the award anyway. Then-Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh and Winston Brassington, head of the Privatisation Unit, both went before the press to vouch for Motilall’s qualifications. Brassington predicted the project would finish on time and “in excellent fashion.” By December 2011, only 40 percent of the works were complete. Motilall himself later conceded that of 161km of contracted road, only 9km had been finished to specification.

The contract was terminated in January 2012, days after failing to meet the deadline for submitting the new valid performance bond from an acceptable financial institution. —by the Jagdeo administration who was in his second term in  office — and Motilall, cornered by reporters, admitted the truth about his American headquarters at a press conference rather than in response to any government audit or due-diligence review that caught it first.

The government didn’t catch the grocery store. Motilall confessed to it, after the money was already spent.

THE PATTERN REPEATS

Guyana Water Incorporated’s October 2024 contract with the Sigma Engineers Ltd & Hebei Wansheng Environmental Protection Engineering Co. Ltd joint venture — GYD $1,486,448,800 for water treatment facilities at Leguan and Wakenaam — names the JV’s principal place of business as 6 Poplar Road, Toronto, Ontario, and describes it in the contract’s own text as “a company under the Laws of Canada.” This publication obtained a street-level image confirming that address is an ordinary detached house: driveway, garage, personal vehicles parked outside. Nothing about it resembles the office of an international engineering joint venture executing a nine-figure public contract.

A subsequent title search through Ontario’s land registry, detailed in our earlier reporting, found no name connected to Sigma, its Guyana director M. Tamjeed Rahmaan, or Mohamed Aqtar Ali anywhere in that property’s ownership history.

That absence does not resolve the question of why the address appears on the contract at all — it sharpens it.

Whoever drafted, reviewed, and signed this agreement on GWI’s behalf allowed a residential address to stand as the registered seat of a Canadian corporate partner in a public contract worth close to a billion and a half Guyana dollars, without — so far as the public record shows — verifying it.

SIDE BY SIDE

The two cases differ in scale and in the nationality of the address involved. They do not differ in the underlying failure: a foreign-registered address attached to a Guyanese public contract, unverified before signature, discovered only by outside scrutiny after the fact.

  Synergy Holdings Inc   Sigma/Hebei Wansheng JV 
Contract value  $15.4 M USD  $1.4 Billion GYD
Awarding body Govt of Guyana GWI/NPTAB
Foreign address  West Palm Beach FL. Scarborough Ontario
Use Type Supermarket(Grocery)  Residential
Prior Experience None -established Not independently verified
Responsible Party Ashni Singh / Winston Brassington CEO Shaik Baksh
Outcome Contract terminated after ~40% completion, 9 of 161km delivered Contract active; commissioning delays on Bachelor’s Adventure

GWI CEO Shaik Baksh has publicly defended Sigma’s contracts as the product of competitive, NPTAB-run tenders and stated he was unaware of any involvement by Aqtar Ali in the procurement process. That defense addresses bidding process. It says nothing about whether GWI verified the physical, operational reality of the Canadian entity named as co-contractor on a JV worth GYD $1.49 billion — the same category of gap that let Motilall’s grocery-store headquarters go unnoticed in 2010.

WHAT DUE DILIGENCE WOULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE

Confirming that a joint-venture partner’s listed address corresponds to an actual business premises is not a forensic undertaking. It requires a property search, a corporate registry check, and — at minimum — a phone call.

Ontario’s land registry, the same public tool this publication used to trace 6 Poplar Road’s ownership history, was available to NPTAB and GWI before either signed the CDB Lot 2 contract in October 2024.

There is no indication either institution used it, or any equivalent Bangladesh-side verification of Sigma’s own claimed “more than two decades of engineering experience” — a claim GWI’s own contracting behavior appears to have simply accepted. 

If it did , it would have discovered that Sigma Engineering Inc. was under investigation by Bangladesh Anti- Corruption Commission for contract fixing since 2019 and was subsequently charged in 2020

Guyana does not lack the institutional memory to know better. The Motilall case was extensively documented by Stabroek News, Kaieteur News, and other outlets across four years, and it cost the country a road that still, by Motilall’s own admission, was barely a sixth complete when the contract collapsed. The lesson available from that failure — verify the contractor’s stated address before, not after, signing — does not appear to have reached the officials responsible for vetting Sigma’s Canadian joint venture partner fourteen years later.

WHAT THIS IS, AND ISN’T

This is not an allegation that Sigma Engineers or the Hebei Wansheng joint venture will fail to deliver the Leguan and Wakenaam facilities, or that the arrangement mirrors Motilall’s in outcome.                  Hebei Wansheng is a real, independently operating manufacturer with its own factory in Hebei Province, China — a fact this publication confirmed and has already reported.

What this is, is a documented pattern in how Guyana’s procurement institutions treat the addresses foreign contractors supply: as details to be recorded, not verified.

Fourteen years and one failed hydro road separate the grocery store in Florida from the house in Scarborough. The distance between them, institutionally, appears to be zero.

— The Board

Pres Ali’s Procurement Rap, New Song Sung

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Pres Ali’s Procurement Rap, New Song Sung

OPINION BY: GHK LALL– August 2026

Those visits by Pres Ali into places of worship may be paying off.  He sees the light.  He may insist that he sees god (meaning himself); I settle for light.  Light is late in coming.  Its speed slowed down by GPL wires and thick political darkness.  But light has arrived in Guyana and it struck Pres Ali first. 

Opposition and civil society could participate in the national procurement process, part of the oversight mechanism.  Now lightning has struck me.  Really?  After a half decade of PPP cronies and family members ripping off billions from the treasury and reaming Guyanese taxpayers, it may be time for the Opposition and civil society to be involved.  Not in the teefin, but in the new PPP stop the stealing campaign.

Pres Ali wouldn’t be Pres Ali if he didn’t see an opportunity to showcase his cute side.  Adorable he is not.  The national procurement setup has multi-stakeholder presences with little involvement by the government.  If the president is going to crack a joke, it should be one that makes Guyanese laff. 

His multi-stakeholder plot fell flat.  Hence, I beg to differ with him. 

Take a look fellow Guyanese, almost all of those so-called multi-stakeholder presences in the national procurement system are either beholden to the PPP Govt, or proxies for it.  When they are in procurement programs, the government has many seats at the table.  There is no need for a minister, or PPP flunkies.  Such would give away the storyline.  The evaluators are largely PPP loyalists or PPP indentured and indebted. 

Which one was going to go against the tide of corruption?

Recall how quickly the PPP got rid of Geoffrey Vaughn.  There were other components to his departure.  Recall Dr. Terrence Campbell and his exposé on how Oil Fund oversight really works.  One word is adequate enough: rubberstamp.  Recall how obstinate the same PPP Govt has been whenever the idea, the push, for opposition and/or civil society presences within the procurement system came up.  If the procurement system was pure, if it was untouched by politics, then non-PPP presences would have been seated already. 

There was nothing to hide.  No prearrangements to conceal.  No bloated pricing models to stuff under a seat.  No highly favored contractors calling after hours and outside of channels and claiming the right to be the winner of a tender.

Now I hear the government is pondering.  The law could be amended.  Recall what I said earlier about the Pres Ali seeing the light.  It took him a half decade plus to reach this place.  He had a dream.  In Georgetown, not Georgia.  Or, some pressure from foreign diplomats, with the Yankees leading.  Good, ole, Uncle Sam salvaging the situation, seeking to tidy up past messes between now and 2030.  

It’s evident that corruption has become so rampant it is now out-of-control.  Bidders make their own rules.  Evaluators finalize their own numbers.  The procurement system follows through with its eye on Freedom House and Office of the President.  Waiting for a signal, maybe.

The president mentioned the cabinet.  The cabinet doesn’t know its ankle (a euphemism) from its elbow.  Its members see a bid and they see dollars.  Friends due for a partnership, or shakedown. 

Bagmen who should come in for a piece of the action. 

I am sorry, but this business of the president and the cabinet finding religion overnight neither impresses nor inspires.  A bargain, perhaps, to sidestep or go easy on questionable PPP spending in the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. 

The PPP does nothing for nothing.  There’s always a catch.  So, when I hear of the president with his latest sensationalism, two things register.  There’s a hidden trapdoor in this development of opposition and civil society presences in the procurement system. 

Certainly, the rewards are so rich that it may prove irresistible to some of the newcomers. 

By then, it’s too late.  Can’t say that the PPP using the procurement system fuh teef.  And, if there’s teefin, is nah dem alone teefin. 

Apologies, Excellency Ali.  Government tricks return to condemn.

The Tap, Not the Tax: How Guyana Inverted the Redistribution Debate

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592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ INTEGRITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA

The Tap, Not the Tax: How Guyana Inverted the Redistribution Debate

BOARD EDITORIAL

State Wealth, Discretionary Dispersal, and the Erosion of an Independent Civil Society

Every recent American argument against redistribution begins from the same premise: wealth is born dispersed, in private hands, and the state’s task is to gather it up. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani want the state to do more of the gathering. Their critics, invoking Friedrich Hayek and pointing to fortunes that financed abolitionism and suffrage and even Karl Marx’s own writing desk, warn that the gathering itself is the danger — that authority migrates from citizens and civil society to the centre, one tax return at a time.

Guyana does not have this problem. Guyana has the opposite one.

WEALTH THAT NEVER LEFT THE STATE

In the American frame, private wealth is the baseline and the state is the intruder. In Guyana, the state is the baseline. Petroleum revenue arrives already concentrated in government hands through the Natural Resource Fund and the terms of the Stabroek Block production-sharing arrangement, before a single dollar has touched a private ledger.

There was no antecedent class of dispersed owners for the state to expropriate, because the wealth in question was never dispersed to begin with.

The moral hazard the American essayists worry about — a government that acquires what belonged to someone else — does not describe Guyana’s condition. The government here is not acquiring resources it must first take from citizens. It is sitting on resources it already holds and deciding, at its own discretion, who gets a share and on what terms.

This is not a semantic distinction. It changes where the danger sits. Redistribution, in the classic critique, is dangerous because it transfers authority from the private sphere to the state. In Guyana the authority was never in the private sphere. The live question is not whether the state should take. It is whether the state, having already taken, will ever let go — and on what terms it chooses to.

DISPERSAL WITHOUT RELINQUISHMENT

The state can hand out money without ever giving up the authority to decide who deserves it.

This is where patronage enters, and where it must be distinguished sharply from redistribution proper. A genuine dispersal of state-held wealth back into private hands would look like a rule: a published formula, a transparent eligibility test, an entitlement a citizen could claim without asking anyone’s permission.

Guyana’s Development Bank Bill, passed without debate on July 27, 2026, was pitched publicly as interest-free and collateral-free lending for ordinary Guyanese. Its actual text tells a different story: Section 5(2) preserves discretionary collateral and interest terms, Section 23 carries no citizenship-eligibility requirement, and the board of up to forty billion dollars in disbursement authority answers to no one but the Finance Minister, who alone appoints every director. There is no opposition seat, no civil-society nominee, no published criteria.

Within days of the Bill’s passage, the pattern that discretion invites was already visible. At a Model Village consultation in Rose Hall, the President instructed bar and entertainment-venue owners to draw on Development Bank financing to soundproof their premises against noise complaints — this from a bank that, at the time of the remarks, had no application process, no disbursement portal, and had not yet held its formal launch.

The lending priority existed before the lending mechanism did. That sequence only makes sense if the money was never intended to move by rule. It was always going to move by instruction.

 

This is dispersal without relinquishment. The state hands out access to its wealth, but it never hands over the authority to decide who receives it, when, or why.

A citizen with a rule-bound entitlement does not need to stay in anyone’s good graces to keep it. A citizen or business dependent on discretionary allocation does.

That dependency is the entire point, and it is the opposite of what the American redistribution debate assumes redistribution produces.

THE VILLAGE AS THE UNIT OF PATRONAGE

The Model Village Initiative supplies the clearest illustration of the mechanism at village scale. Launched August 3, 2026, as a multi-region consultation tour, it was scheduled on weekday daytimes — structurally excluding the working residents it claimed to be consulting — and delivered polished concept renders (a gateway sign, a landscaped park with splash pad and gazebos) with no attached funding, procurement process, or delivery date. Over forty individual village plans were produced within the tour’s first week, a volume of cabinet-level coordination that does not happen in three weeks and was, on the evidence, substantially pre-planned rather than assembled in response to public pressure.

The tour’s own security posture undercuts the consultation framing further. In Buxton/Foulis, the local NDC chairman — holding a personal invitation — was barricaded out of the very meeting convened to hear him, and threatened with arrest for asking why young women were being moved along near the venue. In Koberimo, placard-holding women met a flak-jacketed police presence. A boat bound for a Moruca consultation was intercepted by the Coast Guard.

A government engaged in genuine damage control de-escalates. A government staging a pre-scripted electioneering tour polices its own audience.

None of this is redistribution in the sense the American essayists mean. No wealth tax was levied; no private fortune was seized. But the effect the essayists fear — citizens taught to see their material circumstances as something dispensed from above rather than built through their own initiative — is being produced anyway, and produced more directly, because the wealth was concentrated at the source and the dispersal itself is being timed to an electoral calendar rather than a citizen’s claim of right.

WHAT THE ESSAY GETS RIGHT, READ BACKWARDS

The American case against redistribution rests on an empirical claim: that dispersed private wealth finances things governments will not — dissent, unpopular causes, independent institutions, art and scholarship hostile to the prevailing order. Friedrich Engels’ textile profits paid for the writing of Capital.

Private fortunes, in the American telling, bankrolled abolitionism and suffrage years before either enjoyed public approval.

Guyana’s civil society and independent press have no equivalent financial base to draw on. There is no class of private petroleum wealth in domestic hands sitting parallel to the state’s share, available to fund criticism the state finds inconvenient. What independent institutions exist are financed by advertisers with state-linked interests, by foreign donors, or not at all.

The essay’s own safeguard against centralised authority — a dispersed private sector wealthy enough to fund its own critics — is close to absent here. That is not an argument for redistribution in the American sense. It is an argument that Guyana’s civil society is more exposed to the concentration-of-authority risk the essay describes than the American essayists’ own country is, because it lacks the very buffer their argument assumes every modern state still has.

The essay closes by quoting Hayek: that a minimum of food, shelter, and clothing can be assured to everybody, but that it does not follow that the state should become the standing manager of incomes, opportunities, and social life. Guyana’s government has reversed the order of that sentence. It has not assured a minimum through any rule a citizen can claim.

It has made itself the standing manager first, and left the assurance of a minimum to whichever village gets a roadshow stop, whichever bar owner gets a soundproofing loan, and whichever chairman is let past the barricade.

THE ACTUAL REMEDY

If the essay’s warning has any purchase in Guyana, it points toward the opposite of what its American authors intended. The problem is not that too much wealth might be redistributed by rule. It is that too little is. A transparent, formula-bound Natural Resource Fund withdrawal schedule; a published, contestable Development Bank lending criterion; procurement records a citizen can inspect without a court order — these are the dispersal mechanisms that would actually return authority from the centre to individuals, the very outcome the American essayists claim to want and fear losing.

Guyana does not need to be warned off redistribution. It needs redistribution conducted by rule instead of by favour — the thing patronage is built to resemble without ever becoming.

— The Board