NOT ANALYSIS, BUT ANNOUNCEMENT

THE 592GUARDIAN ♦Independent Accountability Journalism
EDITORIAL

Not Analysis, But an Announcement:
The Nandlall Column Dressed as Political Science
July 2026
A recent column by ‘political analyst” Freddie Kisson purports to offer a comparative study of Keir Starmer and Irfaan Ali — two leaders, we are told, whose diverging fortunes turn on “the art of communication” and “the common touch.” Strip away the framing device, however, and the piece is not a comparison at all. It opens by naming its real subject in its very first line: a prediction that Anil Nandlall will be the PPP’s next presidential candidate, and that he will win by default — carried by oil revenue and a hollowed-out opposition rather than by any test of his own record.

Starmer an Ali are furniture. The column is a campaign launch wearing the costume of a political science essay.

That alone would be unremarkable — endorsements are not new to Guyanese commentary.

What is worth examining is what the endorsement had to leave out to make Nandlall look like a natural successor, and what a comparative analysis would have found had it actually been undertaken honestly.

Start with the flawed comparison itself. Starmer did not fall because British voters found him stiff. He fell because a Parliament, a press, and an electorate that could still hold a governing party to account did exactly that — job done, however uncomfortable the outcome. That is not national dysfunction; it is the system performing as designed.

Ali’s survival of criticism from the local press and civil society is offered as evidence of superior personality, but survival of scrutiny and vindication by scrutiny are not the same thing, and the column never asks which one actually occurred. To praise a leader for outlasting his critics while ignoring what those critics found is to mistake endurance for exoneration.

Having built its foundation on that inversion, the column then hands the reader its actual candidate — untested, unexamined, and, on the record of the last several months alone, carrying considerably more baggage than “campaign launch” prose allows for.

A single-issue résumé might be forgivable. What follows is not a single issue but a pattern spanning two separate encounters with the region’s apex court, the treasury, and the government’s own relationship with a foreign social media platform — each instance independently documented, none of it addressed in the column that positions this man as president-in-waiting.

A Repeat Offender Before the CCJ
The April rebuke was not Nandlall’s first brush with CCJ discipline. In October 2022, an advance and strictly embargoed copy of a CCJ ruling on an APNU+AFC election petition appeal was posted to Nandlall’s own Facebook page before the court had delivered it.

Justice Jacob Wit, speaking for the bench, called the breach “unacceptable” and capable of bringing the court’s integrity into disrepute, and personally ordered Nandlall to issue a public apology on the same platform where the leak occurred

Nandlall’s own Solicitor General had to appear in his place to beg the court’s “forgiveness and mercy,” while Nandlall, travelling abroad at the time, offered his apology only after the court’s directive. Two encounters with the same regional court, four years apart, both ending in a sitting Attorney General being formally instructed by CCJ judges to correct his own conduct — this is not misfortune. It is a record.

The CCJ’s Verdict on the AG’s Conduct
In April, Guyana’s Attorney General faced not a friendly domestic bench but the Caribbean Court of Justice — a court, unlike some at home, genuinely insulated from executive reach. The five-hour hearing in the Mohameds’ extradition appeal produced a sustained and pointed rebuke from three separate judges:

•CCJ President Justice Winston Anderson raised what he called the “elephant in the room”: the Attorney General’s repeated public commentary on a case still before the courts, and whether it represented, in the President’s words, the best way for government to express its position. •Justice Arif Bulkan directly confronted Nandlall’s submission that fair-trial protections under Article 144 do not apply to extradition committal proceedings, warning that such a position would be “extraordinary” — a challenge sharp enough that the Attorney General retreated on the spot. •Justice Chile Eboe-Osuji pressed further, questioning whether the AG’s “running commentary” on an active matter was compatible with encouraging public respect for the judicial process he is meant to steward.

The Court did not stop at questioning. It issued what amounted to a formal caution to counsel on both sides against public commentary capable of undermining the fairness of the proceedings — an unusual step for a regional apex court to take against a sitting Attorney General. Nandlall himself subsequently announced, on his own television programme, that he would “exercise restraint” going forward. That is not the language of a leader whose command of persuasion overawes his critics. It is the language of a senior law officer who was told, plainly, by his own region’s highest court, to stop talking.

A Treasury Bleeding on Two Fronts
The financial picture compounds the legal one. In November 2025, Justice Gino Persaud quashed the GRA’s imposition of over $421 million in taxes against Azruddin Mohamed relating to a Lamborghini and two Land Cruisers, ruling that the Revenue Authority’s own application to the court was “an abuse of process.” Nandlall’s response was to call the judge’s reasoning an “aberration” that “cripples the state’s power to recover taxes” — remarkable language for the state’s chief legal officer to use against a sitting High Court judge’s ruling.

Then, on July 2 of this year, Justice Persaud quashed a second, even larger assessment: nearly $800 million in taxes and attempted vehicle seizures against Hana and Bibi Mohamed, with the court finding the GRA’s long-standing remigrant concession conditions themselves unlawful and beyond its statutory power. Two rulings, over a billion dollars in disputed assessments, both going against the state within eight months of each other. That is not an isolated misstep. It is a pattern of the state’s own legal position collapsing under judicial scrutiny — the opposite of the “world-class legal system” the country has been promised.

The government’s own fiscal choices around the extradition matter raise a further, related question of institutional confidence. Guyana, as the requested state, bears responsibility for the legal costs of prosecuting the American extradition request — that much reflects international treaty practice and precedent under governments of both major parties, and is not seriously in dispute.

What is in dispute is the government’s decision to bypass its own Director of Public Prosecutions — an office with decades of institutional experience in extradition matters — in favour of high-priced foreign counsel, including Terrence Williams KC and, since, Douglas Mendes SC. As one letter writer to Stabroek News put it directly to the Attorney General in November, the State “already employs a corps of highly qualified, salaried lawyers” in the DPP’s Chambers who could have handled the matter “at zero additional cost to our nation’s coffers” — a rebuttal the AG’s public response, by the writer’s own account, never actually answered.

The optics compound the substance: taxpayers are underwriting an arrangement whose necessity has been publicly and specifically disputed, with no guarantee of recovering a cent of the sums the extradition is meant to vindicate.

The Meta Letter
Add to this the government’s own disclosure, offered by the Attorney General on his weekly programme, that it has written to Meta seeking a “formal institutional relationship” as part of a push toward social media regulation. The AG frames this exclusively as child protection, and the stated aim is not in question here. But a government that has just spent months being told by its own regional apex court to rein in its public commentary is not obviously the government whose assurances on the limits of a new relationship with the world’s largest social platform should go unexamined.

The public’s unease was foreseeable enough that Nandlall felt compelled to pre-empt it publicly — itself a signal of how thin the trust has worn.

What an Honest Comparison Would Have Required
None of this is to say Ali lacks political skill, or that Starmer’s failures were purely institutional rather than personal. Leaders matter, and communication matters. But a column that sets out to explain political durability and then omits its subject’s most consequential year in public office is not making an argument — it is clearing a path.

Had the column been the comparative analysis it claimed to be, it would have had to weigh Starmer’s accountability to functioning institutions against the specific, documented record of the man it proposes as Guyana’s next president: two separate CCJ rebukes four years apart, the second involving a rebuke from the region’s own apex court over conduct in the country’s highest-profile prosecution, two separate rulings quashing the state’s tax claims at a combined cost approaching a billion dollars, a public dispute over bypassing the state’s own prosecutorial service in favour of costly foreign counsel, and a disclosed approach to a global social media company for a “formal institutional relationship” that the AG felt compelled to publicly justify before it was even challenged.

None of this settles whether Nandlall would make a good or bad president — that is a judgment for an electorate, not an editorial. What it does settle is that the column in question is not the vehicle for making that judgment. A genuine comparative analysis invites scrutiny of all its subjects equally.

A campaign announcement invites scrutiny of none. Guyanese readers are entitled to know which one they were given.
— Staff Writer