The Architecture of Sycophancy

THE 592 GUARDIAN   |   Accountability Journalism

EDITORIAL RESPONSE

The Architecture of Sycophancy

Khemraj and Pasha have dressed in academic clothing for a defense brief. Economics — properly understood — is the study of incentives and structures. By that standard, their case for the Guyana Development Bank Bill fails on first principles.

Professor Tarron Khemraj and Mr. Sukrishnalall Pasha have offered what presents itself as scholarly analysis of the Guyana Development Bank Bill. It is, in substance, a defence brief dressed in academic clothing — and a troubling one at that.

Their central claim — that the Bill’s mention of board independence constitutes actual institutional independence — confuses legislative language with institutional reality. This is not an error a student of economics should make, let alone a professor of it. Economics, properly understood, is the study of incentives and structures. It asks not what a document says, but what behaviour the underlying architecture produces. By that standard, the Bill fails on first principles.

“A Board member who owes their appointment, their tenure, and their professional standing to ministerial favour does not exercise independent judgment — they exercise calibrated compliance.”

When a Minister appoints every director, selects the Chairperson, and retains the power of removal on terms broad enough to swallow any inconvenient dissent, there is no independence to speak of. There is only the performance of it. A Board member who owes their appointment, their tenure, and their professional standing to ministerial favour does not exercise independent judgment — they exercise calibrated compliance. No clause in any bill can override that arithmetic.

Guyana is not a one-party state. It should not be governed as though it were. The entire premise of institutional design — central banks, development finance institutions, regulatory bodies — is that democratic states require structures insulated from the appetites of the party in power at any given moment. The Bill does not provide that insulation. Khemraj and Pasha do not demonstrate that it does. They assert it, repeatedly, and call the assertion scholarship.

One must hope that what Professor Khemraj signs his name to in public does not reflect what he teaches in the classroom. Because what he has defended here is not economic analysis.

It is an alibi — and an unconvincing one.

The 592 Guardian

Independent Accountability Journalism — Guyana