Mr. President, Whose Decisions Are These?
Mr. President, Whose Decisions Are These?
OPINION BY: Hem Kumar October 2026
Ali’s CNN answers leave the central question unanswered: how freely does an oil-rich Guyana exercise its sovereignty?
President Irfaan Ali should know by now that an international interview is not a domestic public-relations exercise. CNN is not NCN. A question cannot always be answered by changing the subject, reciting achievements or wrapping an uncomfortable issue in the language of partnership.
Before CNN’s Jim Sciutto, the President faced a question that reaches beyond diplomatic pleasantries: how independent is Guyana when the interests of the United States are involved?
His answer, as quoted, was categorical: “I don’t see the U.S. as trying to force us, or trying to be a dominant force with Guyana.”
That is an assurance. It is not an explanation. And an explanation is precisely what this country requires.
The issue is not whether Guyana should maintain good relations with Washington. It should. The issue is not whether American investment, security cooperation or diplomatic support can serve Guyana’s interests. They can.
The issue is sovereignty: who makes the decisions, whose interests determine the outcome, and whether the Guyanese people are being told enough to judge the difference between cooperation freely negotiated and compliance quietly extracted.
President Ali cannot settle that question by announcing what he does not see. He must account for what his government has done.
An assurance is not an accounting
There is a convenient way to discuss foreign influence: look only for an explicit threat, a written ultimatum or a public command.
Under that narrow test, a government can insist that nobody forced it to do anything while declining to explain the pressures surrounding its decisions. But influence need not arrive as an order. The relevant questions are whether a foreign government sought a particular outcome, what leverage it possessed, how Guyana responded and what alternatives were considered.
Those are the questions President Ali must answer.
Were decisions taken because they advanced a clearly identified national interest? Were they taken to avoid displeasing Washington? Or did the government calculate that the political, diplomatic or economic costs of saying no were too high?
These possibilities are not interchangeable. Citizens deserve to know which applies.
The President’s declaration that he sees no coercion does not remove the obligation to disclose the circumstances in which consequential decisions were made.
The Cuban question cannot be waved away
Consider the concerns surrounding Cuban medical personnel.
The account of their departure raises serious questions about what changed, who sought that change and how the government assessed its consequences. If American pressure influenced Guyana’s arrangements with Cuba, the public is entitled to a direct explanation. If it did not, the government should establish the actual reasons rather than leave suspicion to fill the silence.
What arrangements were ended or altered? How many personnel were affected? What communications did Guyana receive from Washington? What options did the government consider? What provisions were made to protect the delivery of healthcare?
These are questions of administration and accountability, not merely foreign-policy symbolism.
Cuba’s longstanding relationship with Guyana gives the matter an additional moral weight. A government should not treat an established partner as disposable simply because another partner finds the relationship objectionable. Nor should it conceal a difficult decision behind language designed to make responsibility disappear.
There may be contractual, financial, regulatory or other explanations for changes to a medical program. If so, publish them.
But President Ali cannot reasonably ask the nation to accept an unqualified declaration of independence while withholding the information necessary to test it.
Friendship does not exempt any arrangement from scrutiny. Neither does American displeasure establish a sufficient reason to terminate one.
Deportees: whose obligations would Guyana assume?
The same demand for disclosure applies to any arrangement concerning third-country nationals whom the United States wishes to remove.
The essential distinction is between returning Guyanese citizens and accepting people who are not Guyanese. Those are different questions, with different implications.
What, precisely, has Guyana been asked to accept? What has it agreed to? Under what legal authority? Who would bear the costs? What protections would apply to the people transferred and to the communities receiving them? Could Guyana refuse particular cases?
Above all, what national interest would such an arrangement serve?
A government does not demonstrate independence merely by describing a decision as voluntary. It demonstrates independence by explaining its terms, defending its benefits and showing that it retained a meaningful ability to decline.
If there is no agreement, say so clearly. If negotiations exist, disclose their scope to the extent legitimately possible. If commitments have been made, the public should not have to reconstruct them from foreign announcements and scattered official remarks.
Guyana is a country, not an administrative convenience for another country’s immigration policy.
Wales: public money requires public justification
Then there are the reported concerns involving Lindsayca and the Wales Gas-to-Energy project, including the reported request for an additional US$102 million and claims of intervention by the United States Embassy.
Those reports require verification and a substantive official response. They should not be treated as established findings simply because they are politically explosive. But neither should their seriousness become an excuse for official evasion.
The questions are straightforward.
Was additional money requested? By whom? For what contractual purpose? What amount, if any, is properly due? What independent technical and financial assessments support the request? What representations, if any, did the embassy make?
An embassy may advocate for a company from its country. That advocacy does not establish the company’s entitlement to Guyanese public money.
The government’s duty is to the contract and the taxpayer—not to the nationality of the contractor or the diplomatic weight behind it.
If the administration is resisting an unjustified demand, it should explain and defend that position. If a payment is justified, it should publish the basis. If the matter is disputed, it should identify the dispute without pretending that public accountability must disappear until every disagreement is resolved.
A diplomatic relationship is not a substitute for a certified payment obligation.
The Chinese companies and the missing explanation
The questions raised about two Chinese companies and a deep-water-port project demand the same discipline.
Before conclusions are drawn, the government should establish the record: which companies were involved, what formal standing they held, whether they were removed or replaced, who made that decision and on what grounds.
Was there a procurement issue? A financing problem? A technical deficiency? A security assessment? A change in the project’s design?
Or did objections from an outside government influence the outcome?
These are materially different explanations. They cannot be blurred into a general claim that everything was done in Guyana’s interest.
If Washington requested the exclusion of Chinese participation, the public should know whether Guyana accepted that request and why. If Washington made no such request, the administration should correct the allegation with a clear account. Neither an American preference nor a Chinese commercial interest should determine Guyana’s decisions automatically. The governing standard must be demonstrable national benefit, established through a defensible process.
Oil wealth makes disclosure more urgent
At the center of this argument sits the oil-and-gas sector.
The question is not simply whether the United States exercises influence. It is whether Guyana possesses—and uses—the institutional strength to negotiate with powerful governments and corporations without confusing their interests with its own.
Diplomatic support must not purchase immunity from scrutiny. Investment must not purchase preferential treatment. Security cooperation must not become an unspoken obligation to accommodate unrelated commercial demands.
Nor should the government present every criticism of an American company as hostility towards the United States. A country can value a diplomatic relationship and still enforce a contract, reject a demand or insist on better terms.
That is not ingratitude. It is government.
Guyana’s wealth makes these distinctions more important, not less. The greater the resources at stake, the more exacting the obligation to explain who benefits, who pays and who decides.
Put the decisions on the record
President Ali’s CNN appearance should therefore be judged not by whether he remained composed or delivered a confident denial, but by whether he answered the underlying question.
On the account presented, he did not.
The corrective is not another speech asserting that Guyana is independent. It is a public accounting of the decisions now under challenge. Publish the relevant agreements, subject to narrowly justified redactions. Explain the policy changes. Identify the decision-makers. State what foreign governments requested and what Guyana accepted or refused. Put disputed expenditures before proper scrutiny.
The President need not disclose every confidential diplomatic exchange to provide a credible explanation. But confidentiality cannot become a blanket under which every politically inconvenient fact disappears. Nor must critics prove that Washington dictates every decision before they are entitled to question a particular one.
Accountability does not begin only after coercion has been conclusively established. It is the process by which citizens determine whether their government acted properly in the first place.
Mr. President, the question is not whether you see an American command. The question is whether the Guyanese people can see an independent decision.
Show them the record.
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