The Choice to Serve, Not the Right to Profit

THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY ◊OBJECTIVITY  JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

The Choice to Serve, Not the Right to Profit

On Freddie Kissoon’s defense of the President’s farm — and what he leaves out about public trust

The Editorial Board   |   July , 2026

Freddie Kissoon’s latest column asks Guyanese to accept a strange inversion: that scrutiny of a sitting president’s expanding commercial farm is not accountability journalism but an imported Western prejudice, and that the proper comparison is a US senator’s index fund. It is worth taking the argument seriously enough to show precisely where it fails, because the failure is instructive — not just about the President’s farm, but about the model of public service some of Guyana’s most prominent commentators are now asking the country to accept.

THE CATEGORY ERROR AT THE CENTER OF THE ARGUMENT

Kissoon’s entire case rests on a single comparison: Western cabinet ministers and senators hold shares and stocks, so why shouldn’t a Guyanese president hold and expand a business? The comparison collapses on inspection, because it treats two entirely different things as identical.

An actively expanding agricultural estate is not passive capital. It requires land, financing, inputs, and market access — every one of which touches an apparatus the President himself sits atop: land allocation and titling, agricultural licensing and subsidy regimes, financial sector oversight, and public procurement.

 The question was never whether a Head of State may own property. It is whether a Head of State can expand a commercial enterprise while he alone controls the levers that determine whether that expansion succeeds, without the public being able to see whether those levers were touched.

That is not a cultural argument about the Global South versus the West. It is a structural one about where power and profit intersect, and it applies with equal force in Washington, London, or Georgetown. The reason Western democracies build disclosure regimes around exactly this intersection is not colonial condescension. It is because they learned, the hard way and often through scandal, that this is precisely the point where public office curdles into private enrichment.

The question was never whether a Head of State may own property. It is whether he can expand a commercial enterprise while alone controlling the levers that determine its success.

A CIVICS LESSON KISSOON SKIPPED

Kissoon invokes “almost every Cabinet Minister in the Western world” as though the comparison ends with the fact of outside income. It does not begin there — it begins with the machinery built around that income. US federal officials file public financial disclosures annually, itemizing assets, liabilities, and outside positions, reviewed by ethics offices with statutory teeth. Many jurisdictions require divestment or blind trusts for holdings that could be affected by official decisions. Ministers in the UK register interests in a public record any citizen can inspect. Recusal from decisions touching a personal financial interest is not a courtesy in these systems; it is frequently a legal obligation with consequences for breach.

None of this is a favour these democracies extend to their officials. It is the price those officials pay for the public’s continued trust — a trade-off, not an exemption.        Kissoon’s own aside about “open source data” gestures at exactly this without following it to its conclusion: the reason Western officials can hold outside interests with less public alarm is that the interest, its scale, and its interaction with official decisions are open to inspection by design. Remove the disclosure architecture and keep only the outside income, and you have not imported the Western model. You have taken the one part of it that benefits the office-holder and discarded the part that protects the public.

Guyana does have an Integrity Commission and an asset-declaration regime on paper. Whether that regime functions as a genuine check or as a formality that can be preempted or left unenforced is a separate question — and it is the operative one. A disclosure law that exists in statute but is not meaningfully enforced does not give a public official the protection of the Western model Kissoon invokes. It gives him the appearance of that protection while leaving the public with none of its substance.

WHAT PUBLIC SERVICE ACTUALLY IS

Kissoon’s column is, at bottom, a plea on behalf of officials who sacrifice their health and years to public life and deserve a secure retirement. That plea deserves a serious answer, not a dismissive one: a modest, publicly-funded pension for former Heads of State is a legitimate policy question, and reasonable people can debate its design.

But that is a different question entirely from whether a sitting president may grow a private commercial enterprise, in real time, while he holds the very authority that could make or break it.

Public office in a democracy is not entered into as a business opportunity deferred. It is a choice — freely made, never coerced — to place the machinery of the state at the service of the public rather than the office-holder’s private interests for the duration of the term. That is the whole of the bargain. An official who wanted to build a commercial empire unconstrained by conflict-of-interest scrutiny remained free, at every point before taking the oath of office, not to seek it. Having sought it, and having accepted the trust that comes with it, the obligation runs toward the public that conferred it — not toward a theory, borrowed or otherwise, that recasts personal enrichment in office as trailblazing.

This publication has reported separately, and in detail, on the specific financing and provenance questions surrounding the President’s Long Creek estate. This editorial does not restate that reporting. It responds to Kissoon’s argument on its own terms, because the argument — that scrutiny itself is the imported prejudice, and that expansion of commercial interests by a sitting Head of State is a matter of pride rather than disclosure — is one Guyanese should be wary of accepting regardless of what the underlying facts of any single case turn out to be.

Weaken the principle to defend one presidency, and it will not be there to constrain the next.

— The Editorial Board, The 592 Guardian