Two Nominees, Two Other Jobs

 Two Nominees, Two Other Jobs

OPINION BY : Staff Writer– August 2026

The President’s picks for the Judicial Service Commission and the Public Service Commission each already hold a second post close enough to the first to demand an answer before confirmation, not after.

T wo of the President’s nominees to Guyana’s constitutional commissions arrive already carrying another job — and in both cases, the second job sits close enough to the first to raise the kind of question that ought to be answered before either appointment is finalised, not after.

Retired Justice Carl Singh has been proposed for reappointment to the Judicial Service Commission, the body that expired on July 13 and that the President is now moving to reconstitute under Article 198(2). Singh is a natural pick on paper — a former Chancellor of the Judiciary, credentialed and well known to the institution.

“He is also, at this moment, the sitting Chairman of the Constitutional Reform Commission, appointed to that post by President Ali and sworn in alongside seventeen other commissioners in April 2024.”

The overlap is not cosmetic. The JSC’s own composition is built around the Chancellorship: by constitutional design, the Chancellor chairs the Commission, the Chief Justice sits on it, and the Chairman of the Public Service Commission sits on it as well.

A retired Chancellor joining that body is not an outsider being added to an unrelated panel — he is stepping into the specific institutional lineage the JSC was built to run through. That alone might be unremarkable, given Singh’s background. What makes it worth a second look is that Singh simultaneously chairs the body Guyana convened specifically to review and recommend changes to the machinery of constitutional appointments — including, potentially, the very judicial appointment provisions the JSC operates under. One man sitting at the head of both the commission that might reform the rules and the commission that operates under them is not evidence of wrongdoing.

It is, at minimum, a structural question about whether reform recommendations touching judicial appointments can be seen as arriving independently of the people who currently sit inside that system.

The Constitutional Reform Commission has itself struggled for legitimacy on unrelated grounds — the Guyana Human Rights Association called for Singh and the full membership to resign last September, citing the commission’s inertia and the shifted political landscape since its 2024 swearing-in. Singh has publicly acknowledged the commission’s sluggish pace, attributing it to administrative delay rather than institutional design.

Whatever the merits of that defence, it does not touch the separate question raised by his JSC nomination: whether the same person should simultaneously hold the chairmanship of the body reviewing the constitutional order and a seat inside the judicial body that order currently produces.

The second nomination raises a cleaner conflict. Maurice Gajadhar has been proposed for the Public Service Commission, the body responsible under Article 200 for appointments, discipline and removal across Guyana’s public service. Gajadhar is also, and has been since 2020, Chairman of the Board of Guyana Power and Light — a state-owned corporation, and not a small one.

That chairmanship already produced a public conflict-of-interest controversy on Gajadhar’s watch. In 2021, GPL purchased two vehicles from Rudisa Motor Company Guyana Inc., a company for which Gajadhar serves as Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Former-Public Infrastructure Minister David Patterson called it plainly: “That is a clear conflict of interest.” GPL’s response at the time did not deny the transaction — it defended the purchase as having gone through a National Competitive Bidding Process, which addresses the procurement mechanics without addressing the more basic problem: a state corporation buying vehicles from a company run by its own board chairman is a conflict irrespective of how the invoice was generated. Gajadhar was still chairing the GPL board as recently as February of this year, when he led a board inspection of the utility’s new National Control Centre.

To be precise about the shape of the concern: the Public Service Commission does not regulate GPL directly. Its Article 200 jurisdiction runs to the public service — the civil service proper — not to the governance of state-owned commercial entities, so this is not a case of Gajadhar being asked to police his own corporation from a new perch. The more grounded question is one of fitness. The PSC exists to safeguard the integrity of appointments and discipline across the public service; it is difficult to square that mandate with elevating a nominee whose own record as a public-corporation chairman includes a documented, publicly contested instance of exactly the kind of self-dealing the Commission is meant to guard against elsewhere in the state.

Neither of these facts, on its own, disqualifies either man. Guyana is a small country with a shallow bench of people credentialed enough to fill these seats, and some overlap between public roles is close to unavoidable. But “unavoidable in general” is not the same as “unexamined in this instance,” and nothing in the correspondence between Minister Teixeira and Opposition Leader Mohamed — nor in the Opposition’s brief, non-committal acknowledgments of the nominees — indicates that either overlap was raised, let alone resolved, before the names went forward.

The Opposition Leader’s responses to date have noted the nominees and their curricula vitae without expressly endorsing or objecting to either. That may still be the right posture while the record is incomplete. But it should not be the final posture.

Before Mohamed’s office signs off on Singh for the JSC or Gajadhar for the PSC, both men’s dual roles deserve a direct question, asked and answered on the record: what happens to the other seat if this one is confirmed. A commission built to guard against exactly this kind of overlap should not be the one asking Guyanese to take it on faith.

— The Board