Institutional decay is not on the itinerary

Dear Editor,

His Majesty King Charles III is in Guyana this week to mark sixty years of diplomatic relations between our country and the United Kingdom. He is welcome. Over his two days here he will travel new roads, pass new buildings and cross new bridges. The skyline of Georgetown is changing, and no honest critic would pretend otherwise. Notwithstanding, we remain well behind where a nation of our wealth ought to be and much of what he sees has come late, over budget and on loans Guyanese will be repaying for years.

But what the King will not see is the thing that matters the most because roads and bridges while welcome, do not carry a State. Institutions do. Laws, systems and the bodies that enforce them are what maintain a bridge, inspect a ferry, staff a hospital, audit a contract and keep the lights on. Where those institutions are hollowed out, every structure built above them stands on borrowed time.

Guyanese learned this the hard way in July. The MV Barima was not lost for want of a vessel. It was lost for want of a system to inspect it, to count its passengers and to come for them when it sank. Everything the King sees today will go the same way if the institutions beneath it are allowed to decay, and the truth is that those institutions, far from the route of any motorcade, are decaying now and fast.

The King’s own programme makes the point better than I could. He has had an audience with President Ali at State House. He has met the National Toshaos Council and attended the Global Biodiversity Alliance conference, he meets British businesses and greets the public on the Kingston seawall. Nowhere on that programme is the Parliament Building. The British High Commission has described the visit as a celebration of the “modern and dynamic partnership” between our two countries, and it has pointed to trade now worth £2.2 billion a year.^[1] Yet the most valuable thing Britain and Guyana hold in common is not trade. It is the parliamentary tradition we share with every member of the Commonwealth. Granted, that inheritance is not perfect but in Guyana today it is not even being allowed to function!

The record is not in dispute. The results of the 2025 general elections were declared on 6 September 2025. The Thirteenth Parliament did not sit until 3 November 2025, fifty eight days later, and that sitting did not even elect a Leader of the Opposition. That did not happen until 26 January 2026. The National Assembly then did not sit from 14 February to 5 June 2026, a period of more than one hundred days, with no explanation from the PPP Government. A sitting date was announced only after I petitioned the Clerk of the National Assembly and the diplomatic missions of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and the European Union publicly called for Parliament to reconvene.^[2] The British Government therefore already knows what I am describing. Its own mission said so in May.

Standing Order 80 requires the committees of the Assembly to be established at the commencement of each Parliament. Under the Speaker, Mr. Manzoor Nadir, they were not constituted until 5 June 2026, seven months late. Constituting them did not end the obstruction. The Public Accounts Committee, which exists to examine the reports of the Auditor General, failed to meet on several attempts because Government members did not attend. Since the Government changed the quorum rule in 2022, the committee cannot proceed without two Government members present. The consequence is that public accounts have been examined only up to 2018. Every dollar spent from 2019 to 2024, the very years in which oil revenue began to flow, remains unexamined by Parliament, and the Auditor General has now delivered the report for 2025 to add to the pile.

Where the sectoral committees have met, they have been summoned to State House. It is reported that in September the President briefed the Sectoral Committee on Economic Services there, and the committee on Foreign Relations on the proceedings before the International Court of Justice and the Third Country National Agreement with the United States.^[3] A committee of the legislature that travels to the house of the Executive to be told what the Executive has decided and done is not exercising oversight, it is attending an audience.

The breakdown runs through every sector the Assembly is supposed to supervise.

On public finance, Budget 2026 is the largest in our history at G$1.558 trillion. The pattern beneath it is token provisions at the main estimates followed by large supplementary requests later in the year. Financial Paper No. 1 of 2026 sought G$54.9 billion, and more than two thirds of it went to gas to power, housing and public works. Capital revenue for 2025 was budgeted at G$330 billion and only G$168 billion arrived, yet the same assumption was rolled into 2026. The National Cash Grant, more than G$60 billion paid to over 600,000 recipients, has no stated registry and no stated safeguard against fraud, and we know that money decided after scrutiny has passed is money that escapes scrutiny altogether.

On maritime safety, the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima has been doing the work Parliament was never permitted to do^[4], and what it has heard has shaken this country to its core. The Barima, an 87 year old ferry operated by the Transport and Harbours Department under the Ministry of Public Works, was certified to carry 125 persons. It sank with 179 aboard, and the true count was established only from closed circuit footage at the terminal, because the manifest was false. The Commission has heard that the vessel had no planned maintenance system and no operating manuals, that its chief engineer held no maritime certification for his post, and that mandatory safety drills were not conducted. It has heard that the Maritime Administration Department had never prepared a search and rescue plan for State ferries, and instead applied a plan written for a collision between a cruise ship and an oil tanker. It has heard that the national rescue centre could not receive satellite distress alerts directly and depended on the airport control tower to relay them, that MARAD had two operational vessels and had to rely on a private contractor, that no joint search and rescue exercise had been held in years, that no log was kept of the names or number of those pulled from the water, and that official rescue records relied on figures taken from media reports. It has heard testimony that the Minister of Public Works, Mr. Juan Edghill, urged rescuers not to release photographs that might create a stir in the media. More than seventy people died, and others were never found. Not one of these failures began on the night of 18 July. Each sat in plain view, in budgets, audits and inspection files, waiting for a Parliament that was not allowed to look.

In aviation, the cover up persists. On 6 December 2023 a Guyana Defence Force helicopter went down in Region Seven, near our border with Venezuela.^[5] Five servicemen died. They were Retired Brigadier Gary Beaton, Colonel Michael Shahoud, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Charles, Lieutenant Colonel Sean Welcome and Warrant Officer Class II Jason Khan. Almost three years later the Government still refuses to publish the accident report. The Minister of Public Utilities and Aviation, Mr. Deodat Indar, says the flight was a military operation and the report is therefore private. That argument cannot bear its own weight. The aircraft was entered on Guyana’s civil aircraft register. The investigation was led by an investigator of the Guyana Civil Aviation Authority under the Civil Aviation Act, not by a military board. Guyana has no separate military airspace. The United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, the very partners whose envoys sit in Georgetown, publish their military accident reports as a matter of course. Mr. Juan Edghill and Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo both committed to releasing it. Instead the Minister has disclosed that the draft was circulated to six or seven agencies and changed significantly afterwards, and a confidential version has since leaked into the public domain. A report the public may read in leaked form but not in official form is not being protected for national security, it is being protected from accountability. The families of five officers deserve better, and so does every person who will fly in this country after them.

On law and order, consider the Guyana Police Force. A serving woman inspector has reported that the Deputy Commissioner of Police who heads the Special Organised Crime Unit, Mr. Fazil Karimbaksh, raped her and threatened her with a firearm. He disputes the allegations and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. She is entitled to a system that works. The Constitution vests disciplinary control over senior officers in the Police Service Commission, and there is no Police Service Commission. It lapsed in July and has not been reconstituted. The Minister of Home Affairs, Ms. Oneidge Walrond, has conceded as much in public. The accused, through his lawyer, has refused the Commissioner’s instruction to proceed on leave on the ground that only the Commission can direct him, and that Commission does not exist. This is what institutional decay looks like. It is not a crumbling building. It is a constitutional body left empty until the law itself cannot act.

Set that beside the treatment of the Leader of the Opposition. Mr. Azruddin Mohamed is under indictment in the United States and is the subject of extradition proceedings. Those proceedings must be allowed to run their course, with full respect for due process and the protection of the law. They do not require the State to arrest him again and again while they do. On the eve of the King’s visit he was arrested yet again. So the same State that says it cannot discipline a senior officer accused of rape, because the commission that should do so does not exist, finds every power it needs to act repeatedly against the leader of the main opposition party. The harassment of opposition political figures is not law enforcement. It is the selective application of the law, and selective law is the surest sign that institutions have stopped serving the public and started serving power.

On health, the Government has commissioned six new regional hospitals and cannot staff them. Guyana has been losing nurses by the hundreds for years. The State now recruits nurses from Cuba and has authorised recruitment from Bangladesh, while the Ministry of Health trains replacements online. President Ali’s own answer is that in another few years salaries will be good enough to bring our nurses home. A hospital without nurses and doctors is a building. It is not a health system.

On electricity, Guyanese now live with blackouts every single day, and the Government’s explanations move from one excuse to the next. In December 2025 the Ministry of Public Utilities assured the nation that GPL had more than 250 megawatts of reliable generation to meet and far exceed a demand of 210 megawatts. By August the Minister, Mr. Deodat Indar, was blaming an unusual peak and El Niño and asking citizens to use less electricity. In September the head of GPL blamed households for running air conditioners, fans and lights. We are now told that demand is outpacing the network because the country is building so rapidly, as though that were an achievement rather than a confession. Every house lot this Government allocates and every connection it approves is a number it already holds. And it did forecast. The Low Carbon Development Strategy 2030 estimated a peak load of 407 megawatts by 2025, and GPL itself projected more than 300. Peak demand reached about 257 megawatts this year. Demand has not outrun the Government’s projections. It has fallen well short of them, and the grid still cannot carry it. The Gas to Energy project that was to halve the cost of electricity was promised for 2024 and is still not delivering power. A Government that can plan a power programme for 407 megawatts and cannot plan the wires for 257 does not have a capacity problem, it has a competence problem, and that is what follows when loyalty, not expertise, becomes the qualification for office.

On water, the Public Utilities Commission flagged iron, acidity and turbidity in the drinking water supplied to Regions Four, Seven and Ten. Guyana Water Incorporated, which answers to the same Minister, replied that these affect only the taste, colour and appearance of water and not its safety. Families who draw water the colour of clay from their taps have been told, in effect, that it is fine to drink. Dr. Vincent Adams, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, called that assurance misleading and dangerous. In the land of many waters, the State cannot deliver a clear glass of it.

On elections, the Guyana Elections Commission had not held a single meeting by August, almost a year after the 2025 general elections, and its composition still does not reflect the results of those elections.

Each of these failures has a single remedy in a parliamentary democracy. A Member rises, asks a question, moves a motion, and the Minister responsible must answer in public. That remedy is precisely what has been withheld. When the Assembly does not sit, the families of the Barima victims have no forum. When the Public Accounts Committee cannot meet, the taxpayer has no auditor. When committees meet at State House, the people have no voice of their own.

Finally, reparations. As a descendant of enslaved Africans, I say it is time to move beyond an apology, and that is a demand on both Governments. The British Government has advised the King against an apology, but Britain once found the answer readily enough. In 1833 it compensated the owners of the enslaved, paying millions of pounds to the planters of British Guiana alone, while the people they had owned received nothing. A Government that can make £3 billion in export finance available for projects in Guyana cannot plead that repair is beyond its means. Acknowledging the darkest days of our past is not the end of Britain’s obligation. It is the beginning of it.

At the same time, Guyana’s case abroad will only be as strong as our conduct at home. President Ali has told British television that an apology is the next step. An apology is a sentence. Reparatory justice is a programme. If he is to carry Guyana’s case to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Antigua and Barbuda in November, he should carry it with the authority of the National Assembly, through a motion that gives him a parliamentary mandate. And then he should come home to build what he asks others to fund. That means a national reparations policy laid before Parliament, a dedicated fund subject to audit, the resolution of the long standing land claims of African villages, sustained investment in the education, health and economic life of the communities that slavery and its aftermath left behind, and a national reparations body with the independence and resources to measure progress. A champion of reparative justice abroad must first be its champion at home, and that begins with respecting the rights of Afro-Guyanese in the policies of his own Government.

So I welcome the King, not only for what his visit represents, but because once again our major roads are properly marked and our major drains are clean. Guyanese may be forgiven for hoping he visits more often.

We will measure development by a harder standard than the view from a motorcade. A bridge delivered late tells you that a government can spend but it does not tell you that a government can be questioned. A State is measured by whether a ferry passenger is counted, whether a grieving family may read the report into a soldier’s death, whether a woman who accuses a senior officer has a commission to hear her, whether a new hospital has nurses, whether the lights stay on after dark, whether the water in the tap is clear, whether a family in an oil producing nation can afford fresh vegetables and a proper meal for its children, and whether the people’s representatives may sit. By that measure the decay in Guyana is not hidden. It is simply not on the itinerary.

References

1. His Majesty The King’s State Visit to Guyana will take place this weekvillagevoicenews.com ↩
2. Parliament should not function at the convenience of the executive - TIGCkaieteurnewsonline.com ↩
3. President Ali meets with Parliamentary Sub-Committee on Foreign Relations – Department of Public Information, Guyanadpi.gov.gy ↩
4. MV Barima Commission of Inquiry pauses hearings until November 10 – Department of Public Information, Guyanadpi.gov.gy ↩
5. 2023 Guyana Defence Force helicopter crashen.wikipedia.org ↩