The Long Creek Arithmetic

THE 592 GUARDIAN

Accountability Journalism · Georgetown, Guyana

The Long Creek Arithmetic: Satellite Measurement Puts Ali’s Estate at 155 Acres — More Than Double What He Claimed on Facebook Live

President’s denial rests on assertion, not documents. Ours rests on Geospatial  Vector Data                                                      By the 592 Guardian Editorial Board · Georgetown · July 2026

President Irfaan Ali went on Facebook Live Thursday to dismiss questions about his Long Creek estate as settled business. He offered no acreage figure of his own beyond a denial — insisting only that the property is “not even half” the roughly 150 acres Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed has publicly claimed, which would place it under 75 acres. He offered no title, no survey, no lease schedule, and no answer to the one question that actually matters: how large is this operation, in fact?

We decided to answer it ourselves. Using satellite imagery centred on the estate’s coordinates — approximately 6°20’44″N, 58°1’W, off the Linden-Soesdyke Highway — this newsroom traced the visible cleared and developed footprint of the property: the poultry houses, shade houses, feedlots, access roads, ponds, and cultivated blocks that are plainly discernible from above. The resulting polygon measures 627,128.62 square metres, with a perimeter of 3,502.71 metres. That converts to 155.0 acres — a figure derived from a reproducible measurement tool, not from a press conference.

WHAT DEMERARA WAVES REPORTING ESTABLISHED

In reporting published Thursday afternoon, Denis Chabrol recorded Dr Ali maintaining that his farm was “not a discovery” and that Mr Mohamed had long known of its existence. The President disputed the size Mr Mohamed has claimed, saying it was “not even half” of that figure, but at no point in the remarks Chabrol reported did Dr Ali state what the actual acreage is. He also did not dispute the estimated GY$2.2 billion investment figure Mr Mohamed has put forward, and he did not address the opposition’s calls — from WIN, APNU, and the AFC alike — for full public disclosure of his assets.

That combination is worth sitting with. A sitting president disputed a specific number without supplying an alternative one, declined to engage the disclosure question entirely, and asked the public to accept his account of scale on his word alone. This newsroom does not accept assertions in place of documentation, from any official, on any file.

THE MEASUREMENT

Our trace was conservative by design. We bounded only the cleared and operational area visible on current satellite imagery — the developed core of the estate — using Google Earth’s polygon-area tool rather than manual point-to-point distance estimates, which we tested first and discarded precisely because they cannot be defended without known bearings between measurement points. The polygon method requires no such assumption: it computes area directly from a traced boundary anchored to visible terrain features, and it is independently reproducible by anyone with access to the same imagery and coordinates.

Geospatial Vector Data points

Two things follow from this table. First, our independently measured figure is more than double the ceiling implied by the President’s own words — he said the property was under half of 150 acres, and our trace shows a developed footprint slightly above 150. Second, and more strikingly, our number essentially corroborates Mr Mohamed’s public figure, landing within roughly three percent of his ~150-acre estimate — a variance well inside the ordinary margin of tracing a cleared-field boundary by eye on satellite imagery. The President did not just understate the acreage. He understated it in the direction that happens to contradict the one figure already in the public record, while declining to offer any figure of his own that could be checked.

Exact measurements totalling 155 acres

WHAT REMAINS UNANSWERED

— The President did not dispute the estimated GY$2.2 billion investment figure, but he also did not explain, beyond stating that loans were taken and profits reinvested, how that scale of financing and operation was assembled or documented.

— He did not address the calls by WIN, APNU, and the AFC for public disclosure of his full asset holdings — a call this newsroom regards as the more consequential of the two questions on the table.

— He referenced disclosures made to the Integrity Commission “in and out of government” without releasing those disclosures, or any documentation of them, to the public.

— He threatened to release the contents of a private text message from Mr Mohamed that he characterised as blackmail, but did not do so — a threat that itself belongs in the disclosure conversation, not as a substitute for it.

WHY THIS MATTERS

This is not a dispute over a rounding error. The gap between “under 75 acres” and a measured 155 is not the kind of gap that survives good-faith imprecision — it is the kind of gap that exists when a public official prefers a smaller number be believed than the one the land itself will show. Guyana’s citizens are entitled to know the scale of wealth accumulated by those who hold executive office, particularly when that wealth is accumulated contemporaneously with decisions over state land, leases, and the very highway corridor on which this estate sits. A verbal denial, however forcefully delivered on a livestream, is not disclosure. A traceable satellite measurement, published with its method and coordinates so that any reader can check it, is a starting point for one.

We invite the Office of the President, the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, or any competent authority to publish the actual lease schedule and surveyed acreage for this property. Until that happens, the public record now includes a reproducible independent measurement — and it does not support the President’s account.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board