Phased Reform, Permanent Damage: How Guyana’s Constitution Is Being Held Hostage

A Response to AG Nandlall views on Electoral Reform

Part 1 of 2

Attorney General Anil Nandlall can speak of “phases” and commissions all day, but the truth is in plain sight: Guyana’s democratic soul is being steadily eroded by prolonged delays, executive overreach, and the systematic neutering of constitutional institutions. The government’s posture is not one of reform; it is one of strategic delay and gradual consolidation of power. The longer that posture persists, the deeper the damage becomes — not merely institutional, but civilisational. A nation cannot build a durable democracy on a constitution held under duress by the very branch of government that constitution is meant to restrain.

The Architecture of Delay

The Constitutional Reform Commission was established with fanfare, staffed with formidable legal minds, endowed — as commentator Christopher Ram has rightly noted — with a “big fat budget” and the country’s most respected legal minds, including Justice Carl Singh, the Head of the Bar Association, the Attorney-General, Senior Counsel, and prominent attorneys-at-law. By September 2025 — with a general election having just passed — the Commission had produced no periodic report to the National Assembly, no published timetable, no quantified deliverables. Both major parties promised constitutional reform in their manifestos of 2015, repeated the pledge in 2020, and again in 2025.

That is a decade of promises dissolving into what Ram rightly called “a spectacle of delay and inertia” that insults the intelligence of the people.
This is not incompetence. Incompetence is random. What Guyana is witnessing is patterned, predictable, and purposeful. The Commission’s silence mirrors the executive’s comfort. A commission that reports to a Parliament that the executive controls, on a timeline the executive does not publish, is not an instrument of reform — it is an instrument of managed postponement.

The Constitutional Pathology:

A 1980 Document in a 2026 Crisis
To understand the constraints on reform, one must first understand what is being reformed — and why the current occupant of the Office of the President has every structural incentive to resist meaningful change. Guyana’s 1980 Constitution, brought into being under Forbes Burnham through what critics have long described as a rigged referendum, was explicitly designed to centralise power. It centralises power, weakens parliamentary oversight, and denies real agency to the Guyanese people, who vote for political parties rather than individual representatives accountable to constituents. Under this system, party leaders select candidates from closed lists, entrenching cronyism and insulating parliamentarians from public accountability.

That architecture has never been dismantled. What the PPP/C inherited from the PNC was not merely an office — it was a constitutional instrument of dominance. The President, under Article 107, holds all ministerial portfolios until he chooses to distribute them. The Speaker, under Article 184(1), possesses what critics have called excessive, near-dictatorial authority that operates above meaningful constitutional restraint, including the power to delay or obstruct parliamentary processes through the indefinite suspension of sittings. The abuse is compounded by the fact that a sitting Speaker from the ruling party has no institutional incentive to restrain himself. When “indefinite” becomes permanent, as one commentator has noted, it transforms discretion into domination.

This is the constitutional environment in which reform must be achieved: a document that empowers delay, a legislature that can be suspended at will, and a reform commission whose findings must ultimately be accepted by a National Assembly that the ruling party controls with a majority.

What the Carter Center Actually Said — and What the Government Heard

The Carter Center’s final assessment of Guyana’s 2025 elections presents a study in contrasts: technical excellence undermined by systemic failure. While the Center lauded the vote’s execution as the most efficient in its monitoring history, this praise was sharply tempered by a warning that the electoral architecture remains fundamentally flawed.
At the heart of the critique is the “winner-takes-all” model, which the report argues fails to ensure genuine proportional or regional representation. By excluding significant portions of the population from meaningful governance, this system continues to serve as a primary driver of national instability.

The Center’s key recommendation is the depoliticization and reform of GECOM. It urged the Constitutional Reform Commission to resume its work immediately and consider alternative, independent structures for the country’s election management body, noting that the current structure, based on an “outdated” formula, has resulted in a polarised body prone to gridlock and a lack of trust among the broader public and smaller political parties.

Critically, the report also flagged a specific procedural concern — a potential conflict of interest involving the Attorney General, who provided legal advice to the Commission while simultaneously running as a candidate. That is not a footnote. That is a structural integrity problem sitting at the centre of the reform process. The chief legal officer of the State cannot advise a constitutional commission while standing as a partisan candidate seeking office. That Nandlall continues to present himself as the authoritative voice on reform — after that conflict was publicly noted by international observers — speaks to the degree to which the government views criticism as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a standard to be met.

The Carter Center also recommended that the constitutional review process consider Guyana’s electoral system and corresponding methods of delimiting boundaries to ensure that equal suffrage is upheld, noting that the country’s population has changed significantly in the 24 years since the boundaries were last drawn — a change now confirmed by the 2022 national census released in January 2026.

A Carter Center team is scheduled to visit Georgetown in June 2026 to discuss the report and its recommendations with the government and key stakeholders. That visit should be treated not as a courtesy call but as an accountability moment. Civil society must prepare submissions. The media must demand public reporting. And Parliament, if it is in session, must formally receive the Carter Center’s final report as a tabled document for debate.

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