THERE are two persons who hold the key to understanding the year 2025 in Guyana. One is Dexter Todd, a PNC parliamentarian and the lawyer for the Adriana Younge family. The other is Amanza Walton-Desir. If you listen or watch the weekly press conference of the Vice-President, Bharrat Jagdeo, he has a constant lamentation.
He would say that if a PPP personality makes a mistake, it is all over the press. Sections of society will crucify that PPP player. But if a well-known critic of the government commits a huge indiscretion, that section of the society willing to condemn the PPP defaulter just shuts up. Mr Jagdeo is right and you just have to look at the nature of Guyana to see how Mr Jagdeo feels.
I am looking back at my country in 2025 and I am not certain where it will lead, because there is simply too much to write about. The level of anti-government hypocrisy was oceanic last year. I eagerly go to the comments section of the letter pages of the online edition of Stabroek News (SN).
When I read those comments, one of two things go through my mind. Either the Guyana diaspora has become a de-educated, mindless school of people or SN hides their independent comments.
I never see any comment that demands accountability and transparency from the private press. Why are Guyana Times, the Chronicle and Kaieteur News free to read from top to bottom online, but not SN? Doesn’t that deserve a comment? Maybe there are such reflections, but SN does not carry them.
Do you know the Guyana Chronicle has a union that is certainly not pro-government and is a member of the TUC, not FITUG? Do you know the Kaieteur News and SN do not have trade union representation? Yet these papers are the leading critics of what they say are wrong-doings by the Government of Guyana.
So last year, these two newspapers never published even a one-line question to Todd and Walton-Desir about the Adrianna Younge tragedy. Todd told the nation that a private, international team was in Guyana to investigate the Younge death.
The year 2025 has passed into history and not one paragraph of the investigators’ report has been made public. Did Todd lie? Or they came and their report confirms accidental drowning and thus the hiding of the report?
Walton-Desir insisted that Adrianna Younge’s death was a brutal killing. This lady campaigned to be President of Guyana and not one of her supporters emulated the two persons when they saw the king without his new clothes.
Not one supporter approached her when she left the podium of one of her campaign meetings and politely asked her: “Madam, how was Adrianna killed?”
The Adrianna Younge tragedy/Adriana Younge scandal was the lowest point in Guyana in 2025 and one of the most repugnant examples of political degeneracy in recent memory in Guyana. A little girl accidentally drowned in a swimming pool. The family then became guilty of repulsive negligence.
The girl was in the pool and then could not be found. Commonsense then departed from the scene. I am a father and like the billions of parents in the world, if your child was seen in a pool and then no one can find her, then jump in the pool and search for her. That is the first thing the billions of parents would have done.
The relatives, from my understanding, did not do that. And their supporters instead of diving into the water, let bestial instincts take over. They burnt down the hotel. And all the while the poor child’s body was at the bottom of the structure. Then another type of instinct took over. The PNC, AFC and WIN wanted to make the Younge tragedy a political bandwagon to confront the government.
This was the agenda of the opposition. But it did not have to be the agenda of the family of Adrianna, primarily parents and aunt. In a macabre twist of things, the parents allowed their little daughter’s death to be smeared with the politics of opportunism.
Todd told the nation that the post-mortem results could not be relied upon because the circumstances at the hospital may have affected the capacity of the medical experts.
It was an ugly derogation of the career of the two pathologists and they let the deadline for libel past without suing Todd. On April 28, political desecration of the dead girl’s name reached its zenith with the attempted destruction by scrapeheads (no apologies) to burn down parts of Guyana.
The security forces saved Guyana. The next day, Nigel Hughes and Terrence Campbell heaped praise on the scrapeheads who attacked Chinese supermarkets, innocent civilians and burnt roads and bridges. Those two men, on September 1, 2025, wanted to administer Guyana. Imagine that!

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.