AS Guyana marks Amerindian Heritage Month, its hinterland communities deserve real attention. Not a stage for someone else’s legal defence.
Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed’s burst of community visits should raise eyebrows, not applause.
This is a man who has been under US sanctions since 2024 over alleged gold-export tax evasion, who was named with his father in an 11-count federal indictment out of Miami covering conspiracy, mail and wire fraud and money laundering, and who is now fighting, hearing date after hearing date, to avoid being sent to face it.
Minister Kwame McCoy is right to say plainly what many Guyanese are already thinking: A public image built now, while committal hearings grind on in Georgetown, is worth more to Mohamed than any policy he might propose.
None of this means Indigenous and hinterland Guyanese haven’t earned real attention; they have, and the PPP/C government has spent years trying to deliver it.
.Amerindian Heritage Month itself exists because the PPP/C moved to correct decades of neglect of Guyana’s First Peoples.
That commitment continues in concrete form: The ongoing Soesdyke-Linden Highway upgrade, and initiatives like the 500 Homestead programme are opening economic opportunity to communities along that corridor. That is the yardstick against which a hinterland “outreach” tour by a man facing extradition should be measured, and it does not come close.
The deeper danger here isn’t just cynicism; it’s division. Guyana is a plural, multi-ethnic society still learning to hold its differences without letting them curdle into grievance. A politician who tells hinterland communities that years of government investment achieved nothing for them isn’t offering them anything real; he is offering them anger, dressed up as advocacy, at precisely the moment his own legal fate depends on public sympathy. That is a transaction, not solidarity.
Guyanese voters don’t owe sympathy to a man contesting extradition, and Indigenous communities don’t owe him the story he wants them to tell about themselves. They are entitled to ask harder questions: What, concretely, has changed in any village because he visited? What has he built, compared to what the State has built? McCoy’s underlying point holds, regardless of how anyone feels about him personally: A country still converting new oil wealth into roads, clinics and opportunity for once-neglected communities cannot afford to let that fragile progress become a backdrop for someone else’s courtroom strategy.
Unity isn’t a slogan for the government to claim for itself; it’s a standard every leader should be held to, including the ones touring villages this month while, in another courtroom entirely, their lawyers argue over whether they’ll still be in the country to do it again.
