THE REVOLVING DOOR: WHEN “SACRED TRUST” BECOMES A RERUN

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

THE REVOLVING DOOR: WHEN “SACRED TRUST” BECOMES A RERUN

ACCOUNTABILITY & INVESTIGATIVE COMMENTARY

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Sixteen weeks after a purge conducted in its name, the government’s own appointee is now the one being sued for the offence “sacred trust” was supposed to end.

On September 7, Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo convened Ministers, every Permanent Secretary, every Regional Executive Officer, and the accounting officers of the state’s semi-autonomous agencies at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre. The subject was accountability: procurement transactions, government payment systems, the disclosure of information to the public. Compliance would be tracked. Breaches, the assembled officials were told, would carry consequences.

Govt Ministers schooled on Governance?

Read on its own, this sounds like governance. Read against the record, it sounds like a rerun.

THE SAME SCRIPT, FOUR MONTHS EARLIER

On May 14, 2026, President Irfaan Ali and Vice President Jagdeo convened a nearly identical meeting at the Office of the President — Cabinet members, incoming Regional Executive Officers, Permanent Secretaries, and officials of the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board.

That meeting produced more than talk. It produced a purge: all ten regional administrations received new or reassigned REOs, several sitting officers were removed outright, and the exercise was reported at the time, plainly, as a reshuffle carried out behind closed doors.

President Ali told the incoming officers that “sacred trust” accompanies public office. He warned that procurement breaches; including officials’ involvement with multiple companies or circumventing transparency laws — would mean immediate removal. Vice President Jagdeo added that every dollar of public expenditure must be measured strictly against its contribution to national development and citizen welfare. Artificial intelligence, the government said, would be deployed to monitor procurement in real time.

It was, in other words, exactly the speech Jagdeo delivered again on September 7.

The cast was the same. The warnings were the same. The only thing missing the second time around was any accounting of what had happened to the first mandate in the sixteen weeks between.

A SELECTION PROCESS, NOT A HIRING PROCESS

It is worth being precise about what actually happened in May, because the government’s own framing invites a mistake. These were not appointments drawn from a competitive, merit-vetted civil service pipeline. They were political selections, made directly by the President and Vice President in a closed session, with no published criteria and no disclosed rationale for who was chosen over whom.

The public was told who the new officers were. It was never told why those particular people, and not others, were judged fit to hold what the President himself was, in the same breath, calling a sacred trust.

The one public objection on record came from APNU’s Terrence Campbell, who questioned at the time whether the dismissals had been handled with fairness and due process. It went nowhere. No lawsuit followed. No grievance was lodged with the Guyana Public Service Union. No matter was referred to the Public Service Commission, the constitutional body actually vested with authority over such appointments. This stands in contrast to a comparable case in 2020, when the termination of a Permanent Secretary drew a formal union challenge on precisely those constitutional grounds. This time, an objection was raised in public and answered with silence — which is to say, the safeguard did not merely fail. It was never invoked.

“Sacred trust” was declared, not demonstrated. What follows is a test of whether it meant anything at all.

THE CASE THAT BREAKS THE ARGUMENT

If the May reshuffle was, as the government insisted, a genuine correction — new people, held to a new standard, replacing officers who had failed that standard — then the clearest test of that claim is what the replacements actually did once installed.

Region Ten offers that test, and it fails.

Dr. Gregory Harris was named Regional Executive Officer for Region Ten in the May reshuffle, replacing Dwight John. John’s tenure had already produced the precise failure the “sacred trust” language was meant to foreclose: at an October 2025 statutory meeting, with the Regional Chairman vote tied, John suspended the process and deferred it to ministerial discretion rather than allow the council to resolve it — leaving Region Ten as the only administrative region in the country without an elected chairman following the 2025 regional elections.

Harris was supposed to end that impasse. He has instead continued it. On August 20, 2026, WIN’s nine elected Region Ten councillors served a formal Pre-Action Notice giving Harris forty-eight hours to reconvene the council meeting. He did not. Two days later, the councillors filed a Fixed Date Application in the High Court, naming Harris directly, to compel him to perform the same statutory duty his predecessor refused to perform. As of this writing, Region Ten remains without an elected Regional Chairman or Vice-Chairman — not under the officer the government removed, but under the one it chose to replace him.

This is not a matter of interpretation or motive. It is a matter of record: the replacement appointee is now the defendant in litigation over the exact conduct his appointment was supposed to correct.

WHAT THE SEQUENCE ACTUALLY SHOWS

None of this requires assuming that cronyism or nepotism drove the May selections, although the opacity of the process invites exactly that suspicion and does nothing to dispel it. The sequence stands on its own without needing a theory of motive attached to it:

A closed political process replaced a slate of public officers under the banner of accountability. The government attached specific, threatening language to the exercise — immediate removal for breaches, AI monitoring of procurement, every dollar measured against outcomes. At least one of the replacement officers has since been taken to the High Court for continuing, not correcting, the conduct that justified his predecessor’s removal. And sixteen weeks after the original mandate was announced, the Vice President stood in front of substantially the same audience and delivered substantially the same warning — with no public reckoning of what enforcement, if any, had occurred in the interim.

A government that must re-issue its own accountability mandate to the people it personally selected to carry it out, without ever explaining what became of the first mandate, is not demonstrating vigilance. It is demonstrating that the first mandate was never enforced — and that nothing structural has changed to ensure the second one will be either.

THE REAL VACANCY

Guyana’s public administration does not suffer from a shortage of proclamations about sacred trust, transparency, or consequences. It suffers from the absence of any mechanism, independent of the President and Vice President’s own discretion, that determines who is selected, who is removed, and what happens in between. Until that mechanism exists — open selection criteria, a functioning role for the Public Service Commission, and a public accounting of consequences actually applied — each new meeting at each new conference centre will do no more than restate the last one.

Region Ten’s empty chairmanship, four months into the officer chosen to fill it, is not an exception to that pattern. It is the pattern, in the one place where it happened to end up in court.

— The Board