THE ARCHITECT’S ALIBI

THE ARCHITECT’S ALIBI

On Kojo Parris, the Hard Rock Presidency, and the Cover That Makes It Work

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar September  2026

Kojo Parris has done this newsroom the courtesy it least often receives: he has read a piece of ours closely enough to disagree with it precisely. In “From Manufacturing Consent to Manufacturing Discontent,” published in the pages of Kiskadee Watch  on September 25, and Parris builds a four-part test for whether any political party’s leadership can discipline itself — electoral recall, obligation to the enriched, portability of hostility, and the willingness of an architect to dismantle his own building; and applies it with real rigor to Bharrat Jagdeo’s standing at the center of the PPP-C. He cites our earlier argument that Guyana’s governance is better read in tandem, Ali and Jagdeo together, and he credits it as the strongest objection his framework has to answer. We take that seriously, and we owe him a considered reply rather than a defensive one.

Parris is correct on the point he presses hardest. President Ali holds a mandate the electorate can withdraw. Jagdeo’s authority runs through a party list he himself controls, and no ballot reaches him directly. That asymmetry is real, and no amount of tandem-governance framing dissolves it. We concede it plainly, because a newsroom  that only concedes what costs it nothing is not making an argument; it is performing one.

WHAT THE TEST MISSES

But the concession does not carry as far as Parris needs it to, because his four-part test measures where authority originates. It does not measure how authority is exercised once it leaves the room. And the pattern this newsroom has documented across a year of institutional coverage — the May 2026 REO and Permanent Secretary reshuffle, the September re-warning delivered nearly verbatim four months later, the National Toshaos Council meeting and the $930 million in village contracts that followed it, the procession of ministers, accounting officers and constitutional-commission consultations convened under Jagdeo’s chairmanship — is not the record of a man running a rival engine.

It is the record of a man running the President’s engine, on the President’s instruction, with the President’s immunity standing behind every warning he issues and every consequence he declines to enforce.

That is the structural detail Parris’s architecture leaves out, and it matters because it changes what kind of building the PPP-C actually is. Parris writes as though a single man occupies the center and the party radiates outward from him. We would put it differently: this is not a one-man show. It is a one-party show, engineered so that its senior figures can act on their own initiative while the Presidency stands ready to absorb whatever fallout follows. We have watched Ali extend precisely this cover to his ministers, repeatedly and without exception, whenever their conduct drew fire. Jagdeo’s convening power is not evidence that he has escaped accountability. It is evidence that accountability in this system was never designed to reach the convener — it was designed to stop at whoever gave the instruction, and the instruction, formally, always traces back to Ali.

“The architect who has to demolish the building is not necessarily the one whose name is on the cornerstone.”

A NOTE ON THE ARITHMETIC

Parris reads the 2025 register growth against falling turnout as evidence of a PPP-C base going quiet — seething, in his word, beneath a result that still delivered the party more votes and more seats. It is a compelling image, but the seat arithmetic does not by itself support it. The PPP-C’s net gain of three seats is consistent with a transfer running APNU to WIN, not PPP-C to WIN. A party ninety days old outpolling APNU in Regions Three and Six tells us APNU bled; it does not tell us to whom. If WIN drew disproportionately from APNU’s coalition rather than the PPP-C’s, then the “smoldering frustration” Parris locates inside the PPP-C’s own base is better described as a hypothesis than a finding — the turnout decline and register growth are real, but the seething is, at present, a reasonable guess dressed as a diagnosis. We would not discard Parris’s instinct here; the twelve-point turnout drop deserves an explanation, and demobilization and defection are not mutually exclusive.

But the piece is entitled to no more than what the numbers can bear, and right now they cannot distinguish a quiet PPP-C base from a definitively absent one.

A SECOND EDIFICE, RISING

This bears directly on the fourth and, as Parris rightly says, the hardest of his four tests — that the structure must come down by the hand of someone who did not build it. We agree that Jagdeo, as chief architect of the machinery Parris describes, is constitutionally unsuited to dismantle it.

Where we would push further is in asking whether Jagdeo remains the only architect standing. Ali is not merely occupying a mandate Jagdeo cannot claim; he is actively constructing a second edifice beside it — a larger public purse than any predecessor has commanded, visible domestic development to campaign on, and a run of international partnerships that looked past Guyana for decades before oil made the country impossible to ignore. Measured in leverage, both domestic and abroad, Ali is on a trajectory to surpass the man Parris identifies as his mentor, not remain permanently in his shadow.

We would also caution against assuming this structure resolves itself when Ali eventually demits office. Parris’s essay treats Jagdeo’s removal as the fulcrum on which PPP/C renewal turns. Our reporting suggests the more durable problem is the structure itself — the reshuffle-without-enforcement pattern, the accountability mandates re-delivered nearly word for word months apart with no accounting for the warnings that went nowhere the first time. Ali’s relative youth gives that structure room to outlast this presidency in whatever form suits whoever inherits it next. Changing the face at Freedom House, as Parris himself notes by way of Nyerere and the CCM, is necessary but not sufficient. We would add: it is not even guaranteed to be attempted, because the man with the clearest incentive to preserve the cover-and-instruction architecture is whoever currently benefits from standing inside it — and that list is not limited to one name.

WHERE WE AGREE, AND WHERE THE DEBATE SHOULD GO

None of this diminishes what Parris has accomplished. His reading of Democratic Centralism as the PPP-C’s only operative leadership rule, his arithmetic on the 2025 register growth against falling turnout, and his account of WIN as an unclaimed container for rural discontent are contributions this debate badly needed and had not, until his piece, received in such disciplined form. We differ on where the load-bearing wall sits inside the house he has so carefully mapped. He locates it in one man’s refusal to demolish what he built.

We do not offer that as the last word. This is, as Parris’s own essay insists, a national conversation and not a private exchange of ideas  between two patriotic citizens. The 592 Guardian will continue to test the tandem-governance thesis against the institutional record as it develops — the next reshuffle, the next re-warning, the next contract award issued under whichever name signs it. We invite Parris, and anyone else willing to read the record as closely as he has, to keep testing it with us.

— The Board