Mr. Baksh, the Tomfoolery Must Stop

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL RESPONSE

Mr. Baksh, the Tomfoolery Must Stop

A response to Nazim Baksh’s “Forget the Noise: President Ali’s land revolution is already underway,” Guyana Chronicle, July 19, 2026

Nazim Baksh wants the country to “turn the page” on President Irfaan Ali’s Long Creek farm. He wants us to forget the noise. He asks Guyanese to instead take a guided tour through Dutch plantations, Jamaican land settlement acts, Zimbabwean collapse, South African redistribution failure, and Singaporean public housing triumph — a journey spanning four centuries and five countries — all to arrive nowhere near the actual question on the table.

That question is simple. Does a sitting president hold an undisclosed landholding of roughly 155 acres at Long Creek, under a lease naming “Mohamed Ali” rather than Irfaan Ali, and if so, why has neither the fact nor the discrepancy been addressed?

Mr. Baksh does not answer that question. He does not raise it. He does not acknowledge it exists. Instead he changes the subject with such scale and confidence that the maneuver itself becomes the story.

THE TACTIC, NAMED PLAINLY

This is deflection by magnitude. Baksh’s argument, stripped of its historical scaffolding, runs: the President has a large and admirable housing programme, therefore scrutiny of his personal land-holding is a “strange obsession.” Sixty thousand house-lot titles are invoked as a kind of moral offset — proof, apparently, that the public should stop asking what the President himself holds and how he holds it.

This is not analysis. It is substitution. A government’s public housing record and a president’s private land-holding are two entirely different accountability questions, and no volume of achievement on the first settles the second. Guyanese citizens are capable of holding both thoughts at once: that a housing programme can be real and substantial, and that a president’s undisclosed assets still warrant an answer.

Baksh’s column asks readers to trade the second question for the first, as though accountability were a zero-sum ledger.

Note, too, what the column does not do. It does not dispute the satellite acreage measurements. It does not address the 2011 State Lands lease — File No. 411123/688, Lease No. A 23480 — naming Bharrat Jagdeo as Lessor and “Mohamed Ali” as Lessee for Lots 33 and 35 at Long Creek, totalling 20.338 acres per GL&SC Plan No. 50318. It does not explain the name discrepancy. It does not engage Christopher Ram’s call for a Commission of Inquiry. On every point of documented fact, the column is silent. It is 1,000 words of silence dressed as historical erudition.

WHAT THE DOCUMENTS ACTUALLY SHOW

The record, independent of Mr. Baksh’s detour through Singapore’s Housing Development Board, is this:

A duplicate 2011 State Lands lease exists, naming Bharrat Jagdeo as Lessor and a lessee identified as “Mohamed Ali.”
The leased parcels, Lots 33 and 35, total 20.338 acres by GL&SC’s own plan.
Satellite polygon tracing of the broader Long Creek holding measures closer to 155 acres — a figure far exceeding what has been publicly acknowledged.
The identity question — whether “Mohamed Ali” is the President, a relation, or an unrelated party using a similar name — has never been answered on the record, by the President or by his office.

These are not matters of colonial history or comparative land policy. They are matters of a signature on a lease, a name that does or does not match, and an acreage that does or does not add up. They are answerable this week, with documents that already exist, by people who already hold them.

TURN THE PAGE TO WHAT, EXACTLY?

Baksh closes by casting President Ali as the architect of “the most ambitious land distribution programme in this nation’s post-independence history.” Perhaps so. But architects of public land programmes are not thereby exempted from disclosing their own. If anything, the scale of the public housing ambition makes the private landholding question more urgent, not less — a government asking citizens to trust it with the survey and title of 20,000 acres of new land should have no difficulty explaining 20 of its own.

The tomfoolery is not the public’s scrutiny. It is the columnist’s insistence that scrutiny be abandoned in favour of a world tour.

Baksh had an opportunity to address the lease, the name, and the acreage. He chose Zimbabwe instead.

We will not forget the noise. We will keep asking the only questions that matter: whose name is on the lease, how many acres does it actually cover, and why, after all this time, has the President’s office still not said.

— The Board