The Guyana Chronicle Asks Guyanese to Take the State’s Word for It

THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ OBJECTIVITY ♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL

The Guyana Chronicle Asks Guyanese to Take the State’s Word for It

A taxpayer-funded newspaper is defending the President’s finances by asserting a paper trail it has never shown the public — while demanding, of his accuser, exactly the transparency it will not practise itself.

By The 592 Guardian Editor-July 2026

The Guyana Chronicle wants Guyanese to believe a case has been made. It has not shown us the case — it has told us the case exists. On July 6 and 7, the state-owned paper published two pieces defending President Irfaan Ali’s ownership of a sprawling agricultural estate and private ranch at Long Creek, off the Soesdyke-Linden Highway, in response to allegations from Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed that the property, and its rapid development, cannot be reconciled with a presidential salary of roughly GY$3.7 million a month.

ASSERTION IS NOT DOCUMENTATION

Read the Chronicle’s defence closely and a pattern emerges: every load-bearing claim is asserted, not demonstrated. The property “predates” the presidency — no deed is reproduced, no date of acquisition given, no title search shown. The purchase is said to be “traceable through banking records and other official documentation” — which records, held by which institution, examined by which independent party, the reader is never told. The President “has made the declarations required” to the Integrity Commission — a body whose own record of proactive public disclosure is, on any honest accounting, one of the thinnest in the hemisphere. None of this has been shown. All of it has been asserted, by a paper the state itself owns and funds through the public purse.

That is the detail worth sitting with plainly. The defence of the President’s private finances was published in an outlet financed by the very taxpayers whose scrutiny it is now trying to foreclose. Guyanese are being asked to fund the argument that they should stop asking how public office and private wealth intersect at Long Creek.

That is not accountability journalism. That is the state marking its own homework and mailing citizens the invoice.

A FAIR POINT, TURNED INTO COVER

None of this excuses Azruddin Mohamed of his own obligations. A man facing an eleven-count federal indictment in the Southern District of Florida — accused, alongside his father Nazar, of a gold-smuggling and mislabelling scheme that prosecutors estimate cost the Guyanese state some US$50 million — inviting scrutiny of anyone else’s income is entitled to exactly the scrutiny he applies to others. If Mohamed wants the moral standing to demand the President’s books, opening his own is the fastest way to earn it.

But the Chronicle takes that fair point and turns it into cover for its own evidentiary emptiness. Two people can owe the public documentation at the same time. Pointing at one man’s indictment does not discharge the other’s obligation to show his work — least of all when the other is the sitting head of state, and the outlet demanding proof from his accuser is the government’s own newspaper.

WHAT EVEN THE FRIENDLY COVERAGE CONCEDES

It is worth noting what has already surfaced in reporting sympathetic to the President, because it undercuts the Chronicle’s own case for taking his word alone. The PNCR/APNU has pointed out that one of nineteen fraud-related charges brought against Ali before he assumed office concerned lands along this same Linden-Soesdyke corridor — charges later discontinued after he took office. Other outlets have reported the Long Creek arrangement involves a lease running to roughly GY$25 million annually, a figure that itself invites reconciliation against the scale of development described: poultry infrastructure for tens of thousands of birds, an electrical network with two transformers and roughly 6,600 metres of distribution line, a private road. None of these figures are drawn from Mohamed’s video. They are already in the public record, sitting unreconciled beside the Chronicle’s insistence that nothing here merits a second look.

THE REMEDY IS SIMPLE

If the paper trail is really there, the Chronicle does not need another editorial. It needs to publish the trail. Publish the deed. Publish the purchase or loan documentation. Publish the Integrity Commission filing, or press the Commission — which has for years resisted proactive disclosure to the public it serves — to release it. Reconcile the reported lease terms with the scale of the estate..

Anything short of that is not a rebuttal to Mohamed’s allegations. It is state media asking citizens to trust the government’s account of the government, written on the government’s dime.

Guyanese do not owe deference to assertions dressed as documentation — from either side of this fight. They are entitled to the actual papers, not a columnist’s word that the papers exist. Until the Chronicle produces them, its editorial proves only one thing: that state media can write “the record shows” in a taxpayer-funded font. That is not accountability. It is a talking point wearing the costume of one.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board