The Wrong Question: Why the COI Debate Is Burying the One Thing That Matters

THE 592 GUARDIAN

Accountability Journalism for Guyana

EDITORIAL  By  Staff Writer 

The Wrong Question: Why the COI Debate Is Burying the One Thing That Matters

July, 2026

Kaieteur News’s Peeping Tom and Christopher Ram’s Kiskadee Watch letter have spent the past few days arguing past each other, and Guyana is worse off for it. One side insists a Commission of Inquiry cannot be conjured from suspicion alone. The other insists that in a captured institutional environment, suspicion is all a citizen will ever be permitted to have. Both are half right, which is the same as saying both are incomplete — and the debate between them has quietly become a substitute for the disclosure it was supposed to force.

We take no institutional pleasure in adjudicating a fight between a satirist and a chartered accountant. But the stakes here are not rhetorical. They concern whether a sitting Head of State’s acquisition of roughly 155 acres of state or formerly state-adjacent land, financed by mechanisms he has not detailed, developed under a permanent corporation-tax exemption his own government legislated for the sector he operates in, is a matter the public is entitled to verify — and through what mechanism.

WHERE PEEPING TOM IS RIGHT

The columnist’s core legal point survives scrutiny: a Commission of Inquiry is not a general-purpose instrument for resolving public curiosity. It is expensive, coercive, and traditionally reserved for matters where a prima facie case already exists — an identifiable incident, a specific transaction, a documented failure. Handing the machinery of the state to a fishing expedition, however well-intentioned, sets a precedent that could just as easily be turned against any successful Guyanese entrepreneur a future government wishes to harass. That is not a hypothetical concern in this country’s political history.

Peeping Tom is also correct that voluntary non-disclosure, standing alone, is not evidence of wrongdoing. The burden of proof runs from accuser to accused, not the reverse. A citizen does not forfeit that principle merely because the citizen in question happens to be President.

WHERE RAM IS RIGHT

But Peeping Tom’s framework only holds in a jurisdiction where the ordinary channels — the Integrity Commission, the Auditor General, an independent DPP, a functioning parliamentary oversight committee — are actually available to generate that prima facie case before a COI becomes necessary. Guyana’s institutional record over the past several years does not support the assumption that those channels are open. The Integrity Commission’s history of inertia on comparable matters, the six-year Public Accounts Committee audit backlog, the reduction in sectoral committee meetings, the pattern by which watchdog bodies have been either understaffed, underfunded, or stocked with appointees answerable to the very administration they are meant to scrutinise — these are not abstractions. They are the documented operating conditions of the state Ram is writing into.

Ram’s strongest point is not the COI demand itself. It is the one Peeping Tom’s rebuttal treats too lightly: the corporation-tax removal on agriculture and agro-processing, legislated by the President’s own government, does not merely raise a generic conflict-of-interest question.

It raises a specific, checkaItble one — whether the President declared his own agricultural holdings and recused himself from a decision that directly benefits them. That is not speculation dressed as a question. It is a request for a documented fact: was the declaration made, and was the recusal taken. Either the record shows it or it does not.

THE THIRD POSITION

The debate as currently framed offers Guyanese only two options: a COI that may or may not be warranted, or silence dressed as due process. Both outlets have missed a narrower, faster, and more defensible path that does not require resolving the abstract argument about what a COI is for.

The Integrity Commission already possesses, by statute, the authority to receive and examine the President’s asset declarations, verify the source of funds behind acquisitions, and confirm whether conflicts of interest were declared ahead of the corporation-tax decision.

That is not an extraordinary instrument requiring a prima facie threshold — it is the ordinary one, sitting idle. The Guardian’s position is that the Commission’s chair should be asked, on the record, whether that examination has occurred, and if not, why not.

If the Commission is, as its critics allege, structurally incapable of independent action, that failure should be documented publicly and specifically, not inferred rhetorically. A pattern of institutional refusal, established fact by fact, is itself the prima facie case a COI would eventually need — and it would be considerably harder for any administration to wave away than a satirical letter.

Separately, the specific documents Ram has requested — the loan agreements, the environmental permits, the financial statements — do not require a Commission of Inquiry to be produced. They require only that the President, or the financial institution involved, choose to release them. Nothing in Peeping Tom’s argument explains why that voluntary step should not happen now, regardless of whether a COI is ever appointed

The absence of disclosure may not be proof of wrongdoing, but neither is silence proof of innocence, and the President is the only person who can end the ambiguity by choosing transparency over assurance

WHAT WE BELIEVE, AND WHY WE ARE NOT STOPPING HERE

We are on record, and remain, in favour of independent verification over personal assurance — not as a rhetorical flourish, but as institutional practice.

ENODO Global’s forensic sentiment analysis of the public reaction to this controversy, and TIGI’s formal intervention on related transparency questions, both point to the same underlying deficit: a widening gap between what citizens are told and what they are shown.

There is more to this story than either Peeping Tom’s procedural caution or Ram’s satirical demand has yet surfaced — the chronology of the acquisition, the identity of the lender, the sequencing of the tax decision against the President’s declared interests, and the actual state of Integrity Commission practice on this file. We intend to pursue each of those threads on the facts, independent of which side of the COI argument they end up supporting.

Readers should expect follow-up reporting, not further commentary on the commentary.

— The Board