A Checklist Appears, and So Does the Question: Cover for Whom?

A Checklist Appears, and So Does the Question: Cover for Whom?

By; Hem Kumar, Editor

There is a particular kind of document that only ever surfaces after a tragedy — never before it.

Gerry Gouveia, National Security Adviser to President Irfaan Ali, has posted to Facebook a polished, 28-point “Captain’s Pre-Departure Safety and Seaworthiness Checklist,” complete with an invocation of a “Captain’s Oath” declaring that “the decision to sail rests solely with the Captain” and that “no owner, manager, government official, charterer, customer, or commercial interest has the authority to compel a Captain to sail an unsafe vessel.”

The timing is not incidental. It arrives as the preliminary hearing against Captain Kevin Price and crew members Rondell Dwayne Roberts and Delon Granderson — the three men charged with 77 counts of murder each over the MV Barima disaster — has been rescheduled to give prosecutors more time to prepare their case, and as the Commission of Inquiry into the disaster gathers pace.

A senior presidential adviser choosing this moment to circulate a document whose entire architecture places “sacred responsibility” and “sole authority” on the captain’s shoulders is not a neutral act of public education.

It is advocacy, dressed as instruction, aimed squarely at the inquiry and the courtroom before either has finished its work.

A document with no provenance. To the best of the Guardian’s knowledge, this checklist has never previously surfaced in any public accounting of the MV Barima’s operations, MARAD’s regulatory framework, or the Transport and Harbours Department’s own procedures.

If such a checklist genuinely governed Guyana’s ferry operations before July 18, the obvious question is why it was never made public to demonstrate compliance — or non-compliance — with the standard it describes.

A safety document produced after a disaster, to explain who should be blamed for it, is not evidence of a system that existed. It is, at best, a statement of what officials now wish had existed. At worst, it is a script ,

The double standard the 592 Guardian has already documented.       This publication’s rebuttals to Kaieteur’s Peeping Tom column made the point plainly: government and its allies have applied a “wait for the process” standard rigorously to Minister Edghill’s recusal question while showing no comparable patience toward the three men already in custody.

Gouveia’s post deepens that asymmetry. It does not ask the public to wait for the Commission of Inquiry to establish the chain of causation. It preemptively supplies the answer — the captain alone decides, the captain alone is responsible — while the men who might have relied on a functioning regulatory apparatus, an accurate manifest, or a properly resourced MARAD are still awaiting their day in court.

What the checklist conveniently omits.

Nothing in Gouveia’s post references the “24-Metre Gap” identified in the Millington legal paper the 592 Guardian has already covered — the regulatory loophole under which a vessel the Barima’s size fell outside both the passenger-ship stability rules and the cargo-ship safety requirements.

Nothing references Section 3(3) of the Guyana Shipping Act, which makes MARAD’s own Director the legal “owner” of state-registered vessels, collapsing the line between regulator and operator.

Nothing references MARAD’s own 2022 disclosure that it had six certified surveyors for over 2,000 vessels, or that a Surveyor post sat vacant into 2026.

A checklist that assigns total moral and legal weight to the man on the bridge, while remaining silent on the statutory and institutional failures identified by independent maritime scholarship, is not safety education. It is a liability transfer.

The DPP’s timeline invites its own scrutiny. The charges against Price, Roberts, and Granderson were laid with visible speed — a week that suggested the Director of Public Prosecutions had her case fully assembled.

The subsequent decision to push back the preliminary hearing to give prosecutors more preparation time sits awkwardly against that initial alacrity.

Either the charges were laid before the evidentiary foundation was complete, or something has changed in the interim about what the State believes it can prove and against whom. The public deserves to know which.

A National Security Adviser publishing a document that pre-argues the defendants’ culpability, in the same window in which prosecutors have asked for more time, is not a coincidence this news-media is prepared to treat as innocent.

The standing demand. The 592 Guardian has repeatedly called on the Office of the President to disclose the vetting and provenance behind appointments connected to this disaster — the Commission’s commissioners, the Audit Team, the CoI Secretary.

We now extend that call to this document.

⇒Where did this checklist originate?

⇒When was it drafted?

⇒Was it ever circulated within MARAD or the Transport and Harbours Department before July 18?

⇒If it existed, why was it never published as evidence of the standard the state expected its ferry captains to meet?

And if it did not exist until now, the public is entitled to call this what it is: a last-minute framework built to survive an inquiry, not to have prevented a tragedy.

Seventy-three people are dead. The instinct to find a single, simple villain is understandable — but instinct is not investigation, and a Facebook post is not a finding.

The Commission of Inquiry exists precisely so that institutional failure and individual conduct can both be examined, without either being pre-judged by whoever moves fastest to shape the narrative.

Guyana does not need officials doing the Commission’s job for it in advance. It needs the Commission left to do its own.