Dear Editor,

The appearance in the press on August 15 of a notice dated June 23, 2026, signed by Attorney-at-Law Javed Shadick, Secretary to the Constitution Reform Commission, is the first public indication in some time that the Carl Singh-led Commission is still alive and, after more than two years in office, has finally reached the first stage of public consultation.

The notice invites written proposals until December 31, after which comes the second stage – public engagements. More remarkable than the timetable is that the matters on which submissions are invited are substantially a wholesale transposition of the mandate Parliament gave the Commission in Act No. 16 of 2022. This means that nearly four years after the Act and more than two years after the Commission was sworn in, it has arrived at the starting point Parliament prescribed for it.

This is not a snail’s pace. The snail, at least, keeps moving towards its destination.

There is a ready benchmark for judging this performance, and it is one which the present Commission itself invited. Ms. Gail Teixeira, now Vice-Chair of the Commission, told the National Assembly in 2022 that “repeating what happened in 1999 is the model that has been most progressive and most innovative not only in Guyana but in the entire region.” Very well. Let us make the comparison.

The 1999 Constitution Reform Commission was born out of the political crisis following the 1997 elections and the Herdmanston Accord. Its circumstances were difficult: it was the first wholesale examination of the justifiably derided 1980 Constitution; its issues were contentious; and its timetable demanding. Yet, sworn in in January 1999, the Commission considered some 4,600 proposals drawn from oral and written submissions, public hearings, organisations and individuals across the country, including substantial proposals from the PPP/C and PNCR. It drew on Guyanese and international expert advice, deliberated and reported by July, making 171 recommendations.

In roughly six months, under far greater political pressure and under the chairmanship of Mr. Ralph Ramkarran, S.C., the 1999 Commission substantially completed an exercise which the Carl Singh-led Commission, after more than two years, has barely begun.

Attorney General Anil Nandlall – never short of words – was emphatic during the debate on the legislation. He described the Commission as “time-bound and assignment-bound” and said it would have the institutional support to operate “effectively and efficiently”. Most appropriately, he told the National Assembly that the people must hold accountable those who make promises and do not deliver.

Let us apply his test.

This is not a resource-starved exercise. Hundreds of millions of public funds have been allocated to constitutional reform and its supporting machinery. I understand that the monthly payment to the Chairman is $1.3 million, the Vice Chair $500,000, each Commissioner $200,000, and the Secretary $600,000. Farcically, egregiously and unconscionably, Commission members accepted payment for each of the four months that the Commission went into recess for the 2025 elections campaign. And when it was meeting, things were hardly better: Chairman Singh himself acknowledged publicly in September 2025 that attendance by Commissioners had been a problem. Knowingly accepting public money for work one does not perform strikes me as conduct of an altogether different order from mere absenteeism.

Incredibly, the Commission and its members are entitled to the same privileges and immunities as the National Assembly and its members. Is this Government serious, or has the entire National Assembly taken leave of its senses? In any case, these privileges cannot convert non-performance into public service or unearned remuneration into value for money.

The Commission is expressly charged with considering the safeguarding of public funds and integrity in public life. It can start with itself. Every member should therefore have no difficulty confirming that the appropriate taxes have been paid on the remuneration received.

Nor is the Commission short of personnel, experience or political clout. Its twenty-one members include five Government nominees, all Ministers when appointed and already remunerated from the public purse, among them Vice-Chair Gail Teixeira and Attorney General Anil Nandlall, S.C.; four Opposition nominees; attorneys Timothy Jonas, S.C. and Kamal Ramkarran; and private-sector representative Ramesh Persaud. 

Responsibility for the Commission’s dismal performance is therefore collective. It is inconceivable that these politicians, professionals and businesspeople would tolerate such delay, cost and paucity of output if their money was being spent. 

There is an even more fundamental problem with the Commission’s composition. The 2025 elections swept away the political configuration on which it was constituted. Nigel Hughes, to his credit, resigned when the AFC disappeared from Parliament. Yet, the representative from the Joinder parties – ANUG, Liberty Justice Party and The New Movement – none of which is represented in the National Assembly post – 2025 remains on the Commission while WIN, with sixteen seats and now the principal Opposition party, has no representative at all.

The Attorney General himself recognised the problem. In October 2025, Mr. Nandlall acknowledged that the Act had been drafted for the previous parliamentary configuration and said that amendments had already been made to a draft Bill to reflect the new Opposition arrangement. Yet the Commission is now proceeding with public consultation without that acknowledged defect having been corrected.

The absurdity does not end there. Whatever recommendations the Commission eventually produces must enter the parliamentary process. WIN now holds sixteen of the twenty-nine Opposition seats. The Commission is therefore attempting to devise constitutional reform without the principal Opposition party, only eventually to send its proposals to a National Assembly in which that party’s support may be indispensable.

Measured against the time, resources and output, this performance amounts to gross incompetence.

While the Commission sits and waits more than four months for submissions – perhaps expecting the public to function at a pace similar to that of the Commission – the Attorney General and the Minister responsible for Finance should produce and publish a full accounting of expenditure and remuneration, while the Commission publishes its meetings and attendance, research undertaken and substantive work produced.

This Commission has had ample time to carry out a detailed assessment of the 1999 Report – including the submissions, the action taken on its recommendations, and the issues arising from their implementation or non-implementation. Where is its assessment of what was implemented, what was not, what worked, what failed and why? That should have been both its starting point and part of its invitation to the public.

Those who still hope for something useful from this exercise should remember that two genuine heavyweights – Haslyn Parris and Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine – were centrally involved in preparing the 1999 Report. But that was not all – and here I stand guilty of omissions. The Commission drew on constitutional experts including Justice Albert Sachs of South Africa, Professor Kathleen Mahoney of Canada, Anund Hylland of Norway, and our own Professor Keith Massiah, Professor Harold Lutchman and Professor Rudolph James. The question is what comparable intellectual firepower has the present Commission assembled?

Twenty-five years of experience have meanwhile supplied important issues requiring examination: the concentration of presidential power and presidential immunity; the failure to give meaningful effect to Article 13 and inclusionary democracy; constitutional appointment deadlocks, including at the apex of the judiciary; GECOM’s partisan architecture; parliamentary oversight; and genuine local government autonomy.

Guyana in 2026 is not Guyana in 1999. Petroleum wealth now raises fundamental constitutional questions about stewardship of natural resources, intergenerational equity and accountability for national wealth. Above all, constitutional reform must distinguish constitutional deficiency from constitutional non-compliance. There is little point endlessly rewriting the Constitution if governments and constitutional actors fail to observe the provisions already there.

Mr. Shadick’s advertisement has therefore performed one useful public service. It has told the country where the Commission stands in August 2026. Unfortunately, after more than two years, continuous remuneration and substantial public expenditure, it is scarcely beyond where Parliament placed it in November 2022.

Mr. Shadick himself also has some accounting to do. How does he discharge this important function as Secretary to the Commission alongside his appointment as Secretary to the presidential Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima disaster?

And Mr. Nandlall needs no reminding. He himself told Parliament that those who make promises and do not deliver must be held accountable. That Guyanese may have forgotten the existence of the Commission about which he spoke so confidently is no excuse for its failure to account.

I am not usually a pessimist, but on the application of any reasonable test – including the Attorney General’s own metric – the Carl Singh-led Constitution Reform Commission is already a colossal failure. Nothing in its record so far suggests to me any reasonable prospect of redemption.

The question therefore is no longer whether this Commission needs more time. It is whether it should be permitted to continue in its present form. In my view, it should not. The present exercise should be ended and the task returned immediately to the constitutional Parliamentary Standing Committee for Constitutional Reform, where the political representation reflects the present National Assembly. That Committee can determine, transparently and with appropriate expert and civil-society participation, the arrangements for taking constitutional reform forward within a firm timetable and with proper accountability for public expenditure.

Yours faithfully,

Christopher Ram

Dear Editor,

For a columnist who does not usually respond, Peeping Tom has spent the past several days doing little else. In each of his offerings he has attempted to address the points I raised concerning President Ali’s farm. Tom either considers the matter serious, or he is troubled by the implications of what I wrote. Either way, we are agreed that it is no small thing.

I am told that my analogy is false; that a farm is not a crime scene; that on my reasoning every owner of a refrigerator must account for himself. I have to admit, I did not see the one about the refrigerator coming. But since he has a problem with Phala, I offer an example with some notable parallels – Nkandla. That involved the homestead of South African President Jacob Zuma. There were no missing dollars; no currency in the furniture; no stolen money; no criminal proceeds; no suspicious transaction – all elements which Peeping Tom tells us are the indispensable threshold. What it had, on 13^th  December, 2011, was a complaint from a member of the public, asking the Public Protector, under an Act by that name, to establish whether a newspaper report was true. A citizen wanted to know if what was published in the press was accurate. Two years earlier, the Presidency had met a similar report with a denial that State finances were used. There was unsubstantiated explanation. There were no documents. The reader may find the arrangement familiar.

The Public Protector investigated anyway. She was not obliged to prove anything first; she was obliged to find out. What she found – that the President had knowingly derived undue benefit from a swimming pool, an amphitheatre, a cattle kraal and a chicken run built at the State’s expense, on works whose cost had escalated to over R215 million – was the product of the inquiry, not its precondition. Zuma did not accept it. It took the Constitutional Court to hold, unanimously, that her remedial action bound him. He repaid R7.81 million.

Now apply Peeping Tom’s test. In December 2011 there was no credible evidence at Nkandla – only a newspaper article and a citizen’s question. On his reasoning the Public Protector had no business lifting a finger, and nothing would ever have been repaid. Yet that same inquiry cleared Zuma on one count, accepting that he had spoken to Parliament in good faith and finding no breach of the ethics code on that count. That is what inquiries do – they exonerate as readily as they indict. It is the President’s friends, not his critics, who should want one, for an inquiry is the only thing that can convert an assurance into a finding. Instead, we are offered the assurance and denied the inquiry.

Nor is this my invention. In The Public Protector v Mail & Guardian Ltd 2011 (4) SA 420 (SCA), the Supreme Court of Appeal upheld the setting aside of a Public Protector’s report – not because he had investigated without evidence, but because he had not investigated at all. The argument made on his behalf will be familiar: that the journalist had produced no evidence contradicting the Director-General, had not shown why his word should be doubted, and that a man of high office could not be questioned merely because a journalist disbelieved him.

Nugent JA gave it short shrift. Truth and deceit, he said, know no status or occupation. The hallmark of that failed investigation was that responses were sought from people in high office and “recited without question as if they were fact”, and an investigator in that state of mind is no more than a spokesman. There is no justification, the Court added, for telling the public it must accept that nothing improper occurred merely because nobody has proved the contrary. The investigator is not there to decide whether an onus has been discharged. He is there to be sure.

The same Court said something else that Tom should read. The politicians who asked for that investigation had no independent knowledge of anything. They had read the newspaper. That was enough, for as the Court held, a request for an inquiry must not be scrutinised as if it were a pleading.

Tom is right that a farm is not the offence, and that the circumstances surrounding the object are what matter. That is my point exactly. The circumstances here are that twenty acres of State land were leased to a man who is now Head of State, by a man who is now his Vice President; that the acreage is disputed between the President and the Leader of the Opposition; that the financing, the approvals and the tax treatment rest on assertion alone; and that beyond the lease unearthed by this newspaper, the President has produced not a single document. Tom mistakes the asking for the alleging. He has done so in every column, and I begin to suspect it is not a mistake. Nor is he finished: several of my points remain untouched, and at his present rate we may look for them by the weekend. I only hope he is not crowding out the other Toms. I am told there is more than one.

And let me save him some trouble. If a letter should shortly appear over a name we have not met, making these same points in this same order – that questions are not evidence, that he who asserts must prove, that an inquiry is a fishing expedition – the reader will have read it already, and will know what he is reading. I say no more than that.

Tom tells us that institutions worthy of the name should pursue facts. On that we agree entirely. My suggestion is for the process to begin.

Christopher Ram

Dear Editor,

In its column of Saturday July 11, Peeping Tom proceeds on a simplistic proposition. He argues that my call for a Commission of Inquiry into President Ali’s agricultural enterprise amounts to a “fishing expedition” because I have raised questions rather than produced evidence of wrongdoing. That is an attractive slogan. It is also a false premise.

He treats me as though I have accused the President of criminal conduct. I do no such thing. My position has been consistent. Where legitimate questions arise concerning the conduct of the holder of the highest constitutional office in the Republic, particularly where those questions relate to a substantial private enterprise operating in a sector directly affected by Government policy, those questions deserve independent verification. That is not an allegation of guilt. It is a constitutional principle.

In invoking concepts such as burden of proof and prima facie evidence, Peeping Tom conjures up a courtroom in a criminal trial. He is too clever not to recognise that the issue is accountability, not criminality. In doing so, he treats the President as though he were merely an ordinary businessman defending a private investment. Ali is no ordinary businessman. He is Head of State, Head of Government and Chairman of Cabinet. The Government over which he presides allocates State lands, formulates agricultural policy, grants tax concessions, administers environmental laws and exercises enormous executive authority. The standard of transparency expected of such an office-holder must necessarily be higher than that expected of private citizens.

Curiously, after devoting an entire column to my letter, Tom never addresses the questions themselves. He does not tell us how or when the additional lands were acquired, or the sources of his massive borrowings. Or whether all the necessary environmental approvals were obtained before development commenced. Or whether the President declared his personal interest before permanent tax concessions benefiting agriculture were introduced. Nor does he tell us of the financial implications of those concessions for the enterprise, the terms on which it was financed, or whether every statutory obligation has been fully discharged. Or whether his farm income, not being part of his “official emoluments”, is declared on his annual tax return, and taxes paid.

If Tom knows the answers, he should publish them. If he does not, he should still say whether he accepts that the Guyanese public has a right to the know.

Instead, he advances the remarkable proposition that because these questions remain unanswered, they should not be independently examined. That turns accountability on its head. He also suggests that because the President first acquired twenty acres some fifteen years ago, much of the controversy evaporates. It does not. The issue has never been the original twenty acres. It is the development of what is now a substantial agricultural enterprise by a sitting President exercising the highest executive authority in the State. The chronology answers none of the questions concerning the acquisition of the additional lands, the financing of the enterprise, the regulatory approvals, the tax concessions or the management of possible conflicts of interest.

Finally, Peeping Tom devotes considerable attention to explaining why a Commission of Inquiry may not be the appropriate mechanism. Reasonable people may differ on that question. If another genuinely independent process exists that can command public confidence and answer these questions transparently, I would welcome it.

My concern has never been the label attached to the investigation. It has always been the independence of the investigation. The President’s explanation deserves to be heard. It does not deserve to become the investigation, the evidence, the findings and the verdict.

In the new Guyana, where public office now carries unprecedented economic significance, the people of Guyana are entitled to nothing less.

 Christopher Ram

Independent Commission of Inquiry needed into President’s farm

ByStaff EditorThu, July 9 2026, 2:15 AM GMT-4

Dear Editor,

President Ali was assigned by CARICOM in 2022 to lead the regional effort to reduce the Community’s food import bill by 25% by 2025. That target was not achieved, and CARICOM has since shifted the horizon to 2030.

Earlier this year, in the first budget of his Ali’s second term, the Minister in the Office of the President announced the permanent removal of corporation tax on income from agriculture and agro-processing. No one can accuse our enterprising President of failing to embrace the region’s agricultural ambitions. If anything, he appears to have taken the assignment, shall we say, a bit too personally.

Indeed, while the rest of CARICOM struggled to reduce the region’s food import bill, our President was apparently busy reducing his own dependence on an extravagant presidential salary. He was quietly – very quietly – diversifying both the economy and, it would seem, his own income base. So quietly, in fact, that it took a lifelong friend and party financier, Azruddin Mohamed, to reveal the scale of the enterprise.

The achievements are impressive. Import substitution through herds of Blackbelly sheep from Barbados and halaal cattle from Brazil; eradication of the contraband import of chickens replaced by fattened birds from the Presidential Hatchery; bringing some 150 acres of idle land into productive use; and demonstrating that, in agriculture as elsewhere, some animals are more equal than others.

This is surely a case study waiting to be written. The University of Guyana’s School of Entrepreneurship and Business Innovation could hardly ask for a better illustration of entrepreneurial achievement. The finance faculty might even consider a companion course: Building a Multi-Billion-Dollar Enterprise While Holding One of the Most Demanding Public Offices in the Country.

President Ali often speaks of making Guyana “world-class.” On that score, he may already have succeeded. It is no ordinary feat to lead CARICOM’s campaign to expand regional agriculture while simultaneously finding the time, energy and business acumen to develop what has become the country’s most talked-about private agricultural enterprise.

This is no small feat. In fact, Ali has now won for Guyana its first ever gold medal in multitasking an equivalent of Trump’s Peace Prize.

As he waves proudly to his friends, family and favourites before ascending the podium, here comes the crème de la crème of the Guyana press to ask our dearly beloved president to reflect on his incredible achievements in such a short time, on a fixed salary that is so low that Parliament decided to make it tax-free.  

As the applause dies away and the President prepares to mount the podium, the Guyana press corps edges forward.

“Congratulations, Mr. President. Before you celebrate your remarkable achievements, the Guyanese people would like you to help them understand just how you did it.

1. Mr. President, we understand that you acquired twenty acres of land during the Jagdeo presidency. Under whose administration did you acquire the remaining 130 acres which together comprise your agricultural enterprise, and what process was followed in making them available to you?

2. Were all the environmental approvals obtained before development commenced, and will you publish every permit issued in respect of the project?

3. Can you assure Guyanese that no Government agency gave your enterprise any treatment that would not have been available to any other farmer?

4. Your government has permanently removed corporation tax on agriculture and agro-processing. Given your own substantial interests in that sector, did you declare that interest and absent yourself from any discussions leading to that decision?

5. What is the estimated tax benefit that your enterprise will enjoy because of that measure, and do you accept that many Guyanese will regard the timing as, at the very least, remarkably convenient?

6. Your explanation is that the project was financed by bank loans. Will you authorise the publication of the loan agreements so that the public can judge the matter for itself?

7. Will you also publish the financial statements of the enterprise, together with evidence that all taxes, NIS contributions and other statutory obligations have been fully discharged?

8. Mr. President, you have repeatedly asked Guyanese to trust you. Given the controversies that have followed you throughout your public career, do you accept that many citizens believe trust now requires independent verification rather than personal assurances?

9. Finally, Mr. President, if you have nothing to hide, will you today announce an independent Commission of Inquiry with full powers to examine every aspect of this enterprise, and to publish its findings?

Thank you, Mr. President. Enjoy your medal, and the vast opportunities of fortune and fame from your thankful and appreciative country people.

Yours faithfully,

Christopher Ram

Dear Editor,

In my Stabroek News column # 177 published yesterday reflecting on the journey of writing on Guyana’s oil and gas sector, I acknowledged several individuals and institutions that helped sustain the national conversation on petroleum governance. I regret, however, that I failed to acknowledge a media house that played an important role in bringing many of those issues to a wider audience.

Over the years Kaieteur News, under the leadership of its publisher Mr. Glenn Lall, frequently drew on several of my oil and gas columns as the basis for investigative reports and news stories. In doing so, the newspaper helped extend the reach of those analyses and placed matters relating to petroleum contracts, fiscal arrangements and transparency before a broader section of the Guyanese public.

Reporters such as Ms. Kiana Wilburg, Davina Bagot and their colleagues deserve particular recognition for the diligence with which they pursued those stories. I therefore owe and extend to them a personal apology.

With the closure of Stabroek News, the space for independent scrutiny of public policy inevitably narrows. The responsibility for informed and fearless journalism therefore becomes even more important. It is my sincere hope that media institutions, especially Kaieteur News, will continue to carry forward the task of informing the public and asking the difficult questions that democratic accountability requires.

Yours faithfully,

Christopher Ram