Letter:𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐫𝐮𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐈𝐬 𝐚 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐮𝐮𝐦, 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐚 𝐂𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐔𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐏𝐏𝐂

Dear Editor,

Corruption, in Guyana, is not treated as an event. It is not a scandal that erupts, gets investigated, and closes with consequence. Under successive PPPC administrations and now well into a second consecutive term for President Irfaan Ali, corruption behaves more like a climate than a crime: constant, ambient, something the population is expected to simply live with. That has to change, and it starts with citizens refusing to normalize what should never have become normal.

A Long Reign, A Long List

The PPP/C has now governed Guyana, across its various periods in office, for decades, and its current term arrives on the back of the largest windfall in the country’s history. A multi-billion-dollar oil boom that has made Guyana one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. Yet even the government’s own allies concede that more than half the population still lives in poverty despite the soaring GDP.
Growth has been extraordinary. Distribution has not.

That gap is not incidental. It is the direct consequence of a governing culture in which allegations of corruption against senior officials have piled up for years without ever quite landing anywhere. President Ali himself came to the presidency in 2019 carrying nineteen counts of conspiracy and fraud from the Special Organised Crime Unit, tied to claims that state lands at Plantation Sparendaam and Goedverwagting were undersold to officials and their associates. Those charges never reached a full court hearing before he became President. That is the PPP/C pattern in miniature: an allegation surfaces, the matter is contested as “political,” and then it simply fades, unresolved, unadjudicated, and unrepeated as a lesson.

The Mohamed Affair — A Case Study in Complicity

Few episodes illustrate the PPPC’s relationship with corruption better than its entanglement with Azruddin Mohamed and his family. The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Azruddin Mohamed, his father, Nazar Mohamed, their companies, and a senior Guyanese government official for an alleged scheme to evade more than US$50 million in taxes on gold exports. Separately, Mohamed was charged domestically with tax evasion and fraudulent customs declarations tied to a Lamborghini Aventador, and released private WhatsApp exchanges that he says show President Ali’s direct involvement in approving and reducing the duties owed on that vehicle. President and Vice President Jagdeo have denied that claim and instead dared Mohamed to “release the evidence.” He did release messages, and the matter remains publicly unresolved.

What should alarm every Guyanese is not simply that a sanctioned businessman behaved badly. It is that this behavior allegedly unfolded with the tacit cooperation of the people meant to be the gatekeepers of tax fairness and customs law and that the government’s response to being implicated was to attack the accuser’s credibility rather than open its own books. Guyanese are also entitled to ask: how many other “Azruddin Mohameds” exist quietly, without a public falling-out with the party to expose them?

The President’s Farm, and the Land Guyanese Can’t Get

Against this backdrop, images and reports of the scale of President Ali’s own farming operation have circulated widely on Guyanese social media, prompting an obvious and uncomfortable question: how does a sitting president come to hold and develop farmland at that scale, and under what terms? To date, no detailed public accounting of the land’s acquisition, size, or valuation has been offered by the Office of the President.

Compare that silence to the daily reality of the ordinary Guyanese farmer. Government’s own officials have acknowledged that a significant number of small-scale cultivators, many working thirty acres or less are stuck renting from absentee landlords or larger landowners because they cannot get title to land of their own. Farmers routinely wait years for drainage and irrigation infrastructure, access roads, and storage facilities that are promised at outreach after outreach but arrive on no one’s urgent timeline. Meanwhile, the government speaks comfortably of opening up tens of thousands of acres and even converting 100,000 hectares into “mega farms” for large investors. The land exists. The will to distribute it equitably to ordinary citizens, on transparent terms, is what is missing unless, it seems, you are already positioned close to power.

That is not a technical failure. It is a governance failure, and it is precisely the kind of double standard that turns citizens cynical about “development” rhetoric no matter how many billions are quoted in a budget speech.

Guyanese Must Stop Tolerating This

None of this will change until ordinary citizens change their own posture toward it. A wealth gap is widening in real time between officials and PPPC-connected figures who acquire land, vehicles, and contracts with apparent ease, and citizens who cannot get a title, a drainage canal, or a straight answer from a ministry. That gap will not close through budget announcements. It closes when the electorate insists, without exception and without regard to which party benefits, that corruption is corruption, not a partisan talking point to be waved away as “political victimization” whenever it is the government’s own people implicated.
Guyanese must hold their government to the standard it claims for itself: transparency, accountability, and rule of law, applied evenly, including to the man at the top.

A Tangible Test: Audit the President’s Farm, Audit Them All

Talk is cheap in an oil economy. If President Ali is serious about transparency, he should welcome, not resist, an independent financial audit of his own farm and landholdings, covering how the land was acquired, its size, its financing, and its relationship to any state resources or approvals. That audit should be extended, as a standing practice and not a one-time gesture, to the landholdings, assets, and business interests of all senior government officials.
An administration with nothing to hide has no principled reason to decline this. An administration that hides behind procedure, “grey areas,” or claims that such scrutiny is unprecedented is an administration confirming exactly what citizens already suspect. Corruption is a continuum, not a crime under the PPPC.

Structures Are Not Substance

The government will likely point to institutions it has already created or reformed as evidence of its seriousness. Guyanese should not be fooled. The recent restructuring of the Public Accounts Committee is a case in point: even as it was repackaged as a step toward stronger oversight, government members have reportedly failed to show up to PAC meetings, forcing postponements and prompting the Committee’s chairman to accuse the PPPC of deliberately stalling its work. A watchdog that cannot convene a quorum is not a watchdog. It is a plaque on a door.

Guyana does not need another commission, committee, or unit whose only real function is to be cited in a press release. It needs a genuinely independent anti-corruption body, established by law, insulated from executive appointment and removal powers, adequately resourced, and mandated to actively monitor every level of government—not merely respond after a scandal has already gone viral. Anything less is theatre, and Guyanese have sat through enough of that particular show.

Corruption in Guyana has persisted as a continuum precisely because it has never been treated as a crime with consequences attached for anyone, regardless of their proximity to Freedom House. Citizens now have the wealth, the information, and the platforms to demand better. The only remaining question is whether they will use them.

Sincerely,
Lumumba Angoy, MBA
A Concerned Citizen