The Office, Not the Man: Ali’s “Continuity” Fiction and Article 127 Breach

Dear Editor,

There is a particular species of executive overreach that does not announce itself with a raised fist. It arrives instead in a lawyer’s phrase, offered almost as an aside, and it is more dangerous for the modesty of its delivery. This week it arrived as “a grey area that we have to navigate carefully.”

That is how President Irfaan Ali characterised the question of whether he is constitutionally obliged to consult Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed on the substantive appointments of the Chancellor of the Judiciary and the Chief Justice. There is no grey area. Article 127(1) of the Constitution is not ambiguous, and it does not run to the President’s convenience. It states, without qualification:

The Chancellor and the Chief Justice shall each be appointed by the President, acting after obtaining the agreement of the Leader of the Opposition.” Not notice. Not courtesy. Agreement — from the Leader of the Opposition, a constitutional office presently held by Mr Mohamed, not by a letter Dr Ali wrote to his predecessor

The theory, in the President’s own words

Pressed on why he had not engaged Mr Mohamed directly, Dr Ali offered a “continuity of government” theory: that because his administration continued after the September 1 elections, the recommendation he had put to then-Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton in October 2025 “remains the position of the government” and requires no fresh engagement with the man who has held the office since January 26. Asked again, directly, whether that position had been communicated to Mr Mohamed, the President repeated only that the recommendation “has not changed” — an answer to a question that was not asked, and a studied evasion of the one that was.

This is worth sitting with, because it is not a slip. It is a legal theory, articulated by a head of state, in defence of a decision not to perform a constitutional duty.

Reduced to its essence, the theory holds that “consultation” under Article 127 is satisfied once, in perpetuity, regardless of who subsequently occupies the office of Leader of the Opposition — that the President’s obligation attaches not to the constitutional office and the person Guyanese voters and parliamentarians have placed in it, but to whichever individual happened to be convenient to consult at the moment the President first formed a view.

Mr Mohamed’s rebuttal was plain and correct: “Mr Norton is not the Opposition Leader. He needs to write me or call me and mention that he wants to meet on whatever issue. We can’t go with that letter.” Put another way — the Office survives the transition of the person occupying it, and so does the President’s duty to it. That is not a novel constitutional proposition. It is the ordinary operation of Westminster-derived office.

The courts have already answered this question

The President is not improvising in a vacuum. Guyana’s High Court has already ruled — directly and specifically — on the character of the Article 127 obligation, in litigation arising from Dr Ali’s own decade-long refusal to make these very appointments. In April 2023, Justice Damone Younge held that “for as long as there are no substantive appointments to the offices of Chancellor and Chief Justice under Article 127(1) of the Constitution, the President and the Leader of the Opposition are under the continuous mandatory constitutional duty and obligation to engage in a process which results in compliance with Article 127(1) of the Constitution.”

Continuous. Mandatory.               

Those are the court’s words, not the Opposition’s rhetoric. A continuous duty cannot, by definition, be discharged by a single static communication frozen at a moment in time and preserved thereafter as if the office to which it was addressed had not changed hands. If the duty is continuous, it necessarily runs to whoever currently holds the office being consulted — otherwise the word “continuous” means nothing at all. Dr Ali’s own government has never challenged this characterisation of the duty; it has only ever argued about timing, never about to whom the duty is owed.

Indeed, it is the government’s own former courtroom position that now undercuts the President’s “continuity” theory. In the same 2023 proceedings, Attorney General Anil Nandlall argued on the State’s behalf that the President retained discretion over when to initiate the Article 127 process — “as soon as is reasonably practicable” — while never once disputing that the party owed consultation was the sitting Leader of the Opposition. The government’s litigated position, then, conceded implicitly what Dr Ali now wishes to avoid conceding explicitly: that the obligation tracks the office as currently occupied. He cannot rely on a letter to Mr Norton to satisfy a duty his own Attorney General has already told a judge is continuous and mandatory.

Anticipating the deflection

There is a precedent the government may reach for, and it should be dealt with before it is deployed. Mr Nandlall has separately noted, in relation to the appointment of the Commissioner of Police, that the constitutional consultation requirement did not apply at a moment when there was, in fact, no Opposition Leader in office to consult — a genuine vacancy, not a change of occupant. That is not the present case. Mr Mohamed is the duly elected Leader of the Opposition.                                                 

There is no vacancy for Dr Ali to invoke, no absence of an interlocutor, only his own reluctance to pick up the telephone.

Any attempt to graft the Police Commissioner precedent onto this dispute should be recognised for what it would be: a false equivalence between an empty office and an occupied one the President would simply prefer not to deal with.

A demand grounded in the Office, not the man

Some will note, correctly, that Mr Mohamed and his father are presently the subject of United States sanctions and an extradition fight tied to allegations of gold export tax evasion, wire fraud, and money laundering. That is a serious matter, and it is entirely beside the point. The Constitution does not condition the President’s Article 127 duty on the Opposition Leader’s personal legal standing, his popularity, his business history, or Dr Ali’s evident discomfort with him. It conditions the duty on the office.

592Guardian publication has never hesitated to hold power to account regardless of who wields it or who opposes it, and we extend the same standard here: the demand that Dr Ali consult with Mr Mohamed is a demand that he respect the Office of Opposition Leader, exactly as we would make of any president confronting any opposition leader, popular or reviled. To excuse the President from a constitutional duty because the current occupant of a co-equal office is personally unpalatable to him is to hand him a permanent veto over which opposition leaders he must respect the Constitution for — a veto no president should have and none was given.

The pattern this fits

This is not an isolated lapse. It is the latest instance of a governing style this publication has documented repeatedly: a President who treats the constitutional bodies and processes designed to check him as optional formalities to be honoured only when convenient, and who prefers his own unilateral pronouncement to the deliberative process the Constitution actually requires.

We now see it in the judiciary’s top two offices — offices that have sat without substantive appointments for more than two decades, a fact the Caribbean Court of Justice’s own President, Adrian Saunders, has publicly and pointedly lamented.

Seventeen years without a substantive Chancellor. Seventeen years without a substantive Chief Justice. A High Court ruling, sought by his own government’s political opponents, that already tells him the duty is continuous and mandatory. And still, in July 2026, the President’s answer is a “grey area” and a letter written to a man no longer in office.

 Mr Mohamed says he is prepared to test court, as the opposition did successfully in 2023. He should. The Constitution, and the ruling already on the books, are on his side.

Yours truly,
Hemdutt Kumar