What Democratic Fragility Actually Looks Like

THE 592 GUARDIAN

ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM · GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

What Democratic Fragility Actually Looks Like

A response to Freddie Kissoon, “When does democracy become fragile?”

Freddie Kissoon wants Guyana to believe that democracy is a house with four pillars — government, opposition, media, civil society — and that his beat is watching the other three for cracks while the first is presumed sound. It is a convenient architecture for a columnist whose retainer depends on which pillar he is not permitted to inspect.

Strip the sermon down and the argument is this: civil society is politicised, the press went “into the gutter,” the opposition is narrow-minded, and therefore whatever the government does with a farm, a Commissioner of Information, or a set of fraud charges is beside the point. That is not political theory. That is a defence brief with footnotes.

Let us examine what he asks us not to look at.

THE INFORMATION VACUUM HE DID NOT MENTION

Kissoon writes as though civil society invented its concerns about transparency out of spite. He does not mention that Guyana’s Access to Information Commissioner — a one-man statutory body under the 2011 Act — has become, in the words of the Organisation of American States’ own Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, functionally unreachable. The Rapporteur’s 2026 report on Guyana documented complaints about the lack of response to information requests and recorded a protest outside the Commissioner’s office in March 2025, where press and civil society organisations — the Guyana Press Association, the General Workers’ Union, the Guyana Human Rights Association and the Guyana Transparency Institute among them — accused the Commissioner of failing to meet his obligations under the law and of obstructing legitimate requests. Protesters called for the process to be decentralised away from a single commissioner altogether.

Reporters Without Borders went further in its 2026 assessment, describing a virtual shutdown of public information characterised by the absence of ministerial press conferences — with one exception, called only to address a gas station bombing — and access to the Commissioner of Information as, in practice, impossible. Guyana slipped further in RSF’s global ranking this year and remains rated “problematic,” with Parliament itself moving in 2026 to restrict press access further, including banning news cameras. The Government of Guyana has disputed RSF’s characterisation and pointed to investment in media training and infrastructure as evidence of progress; that rebuttal is on the record too, and readers should weigh it. But a functioning FOI regime is not a matter of interpretation — it either answers requests or it does not, and by the account of the hemisphere’s own human rights body, it does not.

A country cannot claim robust democracy while its statutory transparency mechanism sits unresponsive to the people who fund it.

This is the actual metric of democratic health that Kissoon skips past: not whether civil society has the correct opinion of the government, but whether citizens can get answers from the state at all.

THE RECORD ON MR. ALI THAT KISSOON PREFERS TO FORGET

Kissoon spends several paragraphs establishing that Azruddin Mohamed’s entry into politics should have triggered alarm about democratic decay — sanctions, an extradition request, a name attached to a homicide investigation and a fatal road accident. These are serious matters and deserve scrutiny. But Kissoon’s selective memory is the story here, because the man he is defending by omission carries a comparable record that he simply does not raise.

In November 2018, Irfaan Ali — then a sitting MP and shortly to become the PPP/C’s presidential candidate — was charged by the Special Organised Crime Unit with nineteen counts of conspiracy to defraud the state, arising from the sale of state lands at Plantation Sparendaam and Goedverwagting, East Coast Demerara, between roughly 2010 and 2015, during his tenure as Minister of Housing. SOCU’s case, built on a forensic audit, alleged the lands — known collectively as the “Pradoville Two” scheme — were sold to a roster of PPP-aligned officials and relatives at a fraction of their assessed value: some $174 million in land sold against a forensic valuation near $212 million. Ali was granted self-bail and was not required to enter a plea, as the charges were indictable.

He spent the better part of two years contesting them. His attorneys sought a stay in the Magistrates’ Court and filed a constitutional challenge in the High Court arguing the charges were invalid; Justice Franklyn Holder dismissed that challenge in 2019, finding no evidence of bad faith by the prosecution and sending the matter back for trial. The case was still open — untried, unresolved — when Ali was selected as presidential candidate in January 2019, when he campaigned through 2019 and into the March 2020 election, and when that election’s outcome was itself consumed by months of recount litigation.

It was in the middle of this — on January 28, 2019, one day before Ali was due to fly to Toronto for diaspora engagements — that the Canadian High Commission in Port of Spain contacted him directly. Ali’s own public statement at the time confirms the substance: the High Commission advised him, citing a report connected to the nineteen SOCU charges, not to travel, and gave him thirty days to respond. He said he held a valid passport and visa and that the circumstances were “beyond his control.” Whatever the precise administrative status behind that advisory, the fact itself is not in dispute across contemporaneous reporting: a foreign government’s own vetting process treated a sitting Guyanese presidential candidate as a travel risk on the basis of live, unresolved fraud charges, in the same month he was selected to lead his party’s ticket.

The charges did not go to trial. They did not end in acquittal. They ended on August 14, 2020 — twelve days after Ali was sworn in as President on August 2 — when SOCU’s special prosecutor withdrew all nineteen counts, stating on the record that the withdrawal was because the office of President carries automatic constitutional immunity under Article 182(2), and that continuing would in any case be undermined by the eventual unavailability of witnesses over a presidential term. In other words: not innocence established, not a court’s finding on the merits, but a prosecutorial withdrawal triggered by the accused acquiring the one office in the Republic that makes prosecution impossible.

This is the man on whose behalf Kissoon is now defending a farm.

WHAT FRAILTY ACTUALLY MEANS

None of this is offered as proof of guilt — the charges were withdrawn before evidence was tested, and that matters, fairly stated. But Kissoon’s argument is not really about guilt or innocence. His argument is that democratic fragility is a function of who criticises government, not what government does or fails to disclose. That argument cannot survive contact with the actual record: a president who took the oath of office while nineteen fraud charges sat open against him, whose case disappeared not through vindication but through the acquisition of immunity, governing today over a state information architecture that the hemisphere’s own human rights monitors describe as non-functional.

Kissoon is right that democracy is a multi-dimensional organism. He is right that opposition, media and civil society all bear responsibility for its health. He is simply wrong — conveniently, consistently wrong — about which pillar he has spent a career refusing to inspect. The test of a free press is not whether it forgives the government for being the government. It is whether it asks the same question of the state that it asks of everyone else: show us the documents.

On that test, Guyana’s Commissioner of Information has failed for years, and the president currently invoking a farm’s privacy took an oath of office with an active fraud docket still open in his name. That is not a footnote to the fragility of Guyana’s democracy. It is close to the centre of it.

— The Board