THE Facebook comment sections have been on fire this week, and for good reason. Azruddin Mohamed, Leader of the Opposition, businessman, and a man under federal indictment in the United States, has spent recent days accusing President Irfaan Ali of corruption over a farm the President owns along the Soesdyke-Linden Highway.
It is worth asking, plainly, on what basis?
Start with what we actually know. The property predates President Ali’s time in office. Its acquisition can be traced through banking records and other official documentation.
The President has made the declarations required of him to the Integrity Commission, the very body that exists to answer exactly the kind of questions Mohamed is raising. And by every account made public so far, the farm has received no special treatment, no state resources, and no preferential access because of who owns it.
That is not spin, that is what the paper trail shows.
Compare that to what Mohamed has offered in return: no documents, no valuation, no forensic accounting, just a 24-minute video and a claim that the President is “corrupt.”
Serious allegations require serious evidence. An assertion is not an audit. If Mohamed possessed a professional appraisal showing the farm’s value was wildly out of step with the President’s declared income, that would be a story. He has produced nothing of the kind, because, as far as the public record shows, nothing of the kind exists.
There is something else here that Guyanese are right to sit with. Mohamed is not a neutral commentator lobbing rhetorical questions.
He is, according to a federal indictment out of Miami, alleged to have been at the centre of a gold-smuggling scheme that cost the Guyanese state an estimated US$50 million; recycled government seals, empty boxes shipped through Dubai and Miami, bribes allegedly paid to customs officials.
These are not minor procedural charges. They go to the heart of the same question he is now asking of someone else: where did the money come from, and was it obtained honestly?
That is the real double standard citizens have been calling out. Sean Graham and others raising this point on social media aren’t asking for perfection from public figures. They’re asking for consistency.
If declaring assets and sourcing income are the standards Mohamed wants to hold the President to, it is entirely fair, and frankly overdue, to ask him to meet that same standard himself.

Accountability that only points in one direction isn’t accountability. It’s a talking point.
None of this means the President should be above scrutiny. No public official should be, and Guyanese are entitled to keep asking hard questions about anyone’s wealth, including the President’s. But scrutiny has to rest on something.
So far, the record shows a President who has disclosed what the law requires him to disclose, and an accuser facing serious federal fraud charges who has disclosed nothing at all about his own finances while demanding total transparency from someone else.
If Mohamed wants to lead the credibility of Guyana’s opposition on the question of clean money, the fastest way to do it isn’t another video. It’s to open his own books, the same books prosecutors in Miami are already asking about and let citizens judge for themselves.
Until then, the accountability he’s demanding of others is exactly what he owes them. He must practise what he is attempting to preach.