THE GATE, NOT THE GARDEN

THE GATE, NOT THE GARDEN

How a Barred Chairman Exposes the Model Village Initiative as a Campaign, Not a Consultation

 OPINION — August, 2026

At the Melanie Nursery School on Thursday, villagers of Melanie Damishana and Non Pareil sat through a public consultation on the government’s Model Village Initiative. President Irfaan Ali told them the exercise was about resilient, sustainable communities — that the transformation of a village is bound up with the transformation of the economy, the transformation of the country.

He promised culverts, bridges, walkways, streetlights, green space. He said their input would be incorporated into the plans.

Outside, and then behind a police barricade, stood the one person whose presence should have made that promise credible:              Walston Martins, Chairman of the Buxton/Foulis Neighbourhood Democratic Council, the elected local government official for the very jurisdiction hosting the consultation. He had an invitation. He was told to leave anyway, and warned he would be arrested if he refused.

A consultation that excludes the elected voice of the community is not a consultation. It is a performance staged in front of one.

THE SALES PITCH

Circulating alongside the Melanie Damishana outreach are two renderings that tell you plainly what this initiative is actually selling. The first is a gateway sign — stone pillars, hanging lanterns, a warm sunset backdrop — reading “Welcome to Melanie Damishana.” The second is a before-and-after board: on the left, an aerial photograph of an undeveloped, waterlogged stretch of land beside the public road, labelled “Existing”; on the right, the same stretch of land transformed into a manicured “Family Park,” complete with a splash pad, gazebos, landscaped walking paths, and playground equipment, labelled “Proposed.”

 Concept render of a proposed “Melanie Damishana” village gateway sign, presented at the Model Village Initiative consultation.

“Existing vs. Proposed” concept board for a village park, presented at the same consultation.

These are not blueprints. They are not budgeted works orders with contractors attached and completion dates fixed. They are architectural concept renders — the same genre of image a developer uses to sell condominiums that do not yet exist. Nothing on either board discloses a procurement timeline, a funding source, or a date.

What they disclose is a feeling: this is what your village could look like, if. The “if” is the part no one is saying aloud. Ask what compels these plans to become a market with vendors in it, a park with a working splash pad, a gateway sign that is stone and not vinyl — and the honest answer, on the government’s own timeline, arrives sometime after the next Local Government Elections.

The visual aid is not a construction schedule. It is a ballot.

THE PRECEDENT ALREADY ON THE RECORD

This newsroom  does not have to speculate about what happens to a glossy village render once the cameras move on.                         Silica City — announced in 2022 as the flagship of this kind of transformation — still has no completion date for the 110 homes of Phase One, four years later.

The public language around it has not hardened toward delivery; if anything it has softened, drifting from claims of near-completion toward vaguer assurances of steady progress. Christopher Ram, writing in Stabroek News earlier this year, described the project as operating in near-complete secrecy, with no disclosed financing structure and no disclosed allocation criteria for who actually receives a home.

A model village is, in that sense, a smaller and more portable version of a model city. The scale changes. The mechanism — announce, render, tour, promise, and let the follow-through go quiet once the political calendar has moved past it — does not.

WHY EXCLUDE THE ONE PERSON WHOSE JOB THIS IS

Local government exists, constitutionally and in practice, precisely to handle the granular business the Model Village Initiative claims to be doing: how wide a road should be, what species of tree goes where, where a streetlight is needed, where a playing field belongs. That is the statutory function of a Neighbourhood Democratic Council and its elected Chairman.

It does not require a sitting President, a Vice President, and an entourage of ministers touring the country village by village to determine where a culvert goes.

So when Walston Martins — the Chairman actually elected to make exactly these decisions for Buxton/Foulis — is stopped outside a business across the road, questioned by police for asking why a group of young women were being moved along, and then told by Assistant Commissioner Mahendra Siwnarine that he would be arrested if he did not retreat behind a barricade, the question answers itself.

Martins had committed no offence. He said as much on the spot: “This is my jurisdiction. Why must I go? I am not doing anything that is illegal.” He was removed anyway.

No statute empowered that removal. No bylaw, no provision of the Local Government Act, gives the State authority to bar an elected NDC Chairman from a public consultation held inside his own jurisdiction. What operated in his place was a police officer’s discretion, applied at a government-branded campaign event, against the one local figure positioned to ask an inconvenient question on the record.

A PATTERN, NOT AN INCIDENT

Thursday’s barricading of Martins is not an isolated overreach.      It follows the same script this news media  has already documented at Watooka House in Linden, where barriers were breached and joint security forces mobilised within minutes; at Koberimo in Region One, where a handful of women with placards were met by police in flak jackets; and on the Pomeroon River, where the Opposition Leader’s vessel was intercepted and turned back over paperwork that had not been demanded of the same boat hours earlier that morning.

Each time, the government’s public-facing message is outreach, consultation, listening. Each time, the security posture on the ground says something else entirely.

Melanie Damishana and Non Pareil, like Linden, are communities without a history of PPP electoral dominance. That is not incidental to where this tour has gone. A government confident that its development promises would be judged on delivery would have no reason to fear the one person in the room who could ask, on the record and in front of his own constituents, whether any of it is actually funded.

WHAT THIS PUBLICATION  IS ASKING

The 592 Guardian is formally asking the Office of the President and the Guyana Police Force to disclose: under what legal authority Chairman Martins was ordered behind a barricade and threatened with arrest at a public consultation in his own jurisdiction; whether any funding, procurement, or delivery timeline exists for the works depicted in the Melanie Damishana renderings, and if so, to publish it; and whether local government chairs and councillors across the Model Village tour route are being invited to these consultations as a matter of course, or selectively excluded where their presence is politically inconvenient.

Villagers deserve real culverts, real walkways, real streetlights. They do not deserve to have their patience rented out as backdrop for a campaign that dares not let their own elected representative into the room.

— The Board