A House on Fire, and the PPP Chose to Do the Paperwork

A House on Fire, and the PPP Chose to Do the Paperwork

There is a particular species of contempt that reveals itself not in what a government says, but in what it does while a nation grieves. 

Yesterday, as Opposition Members of Parliament stood outside the Arthur Chung Conference Centre and inside the Chamber itself, demanding accountability for the more than one hundred Guyanese killed in the MV Barima disaster, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic administration answered with silence — and then with a supplementary funding bill. Business as usual.

The wreck of the Barima still sits on the seabed. The Ministers under whose watch it sank still sit in the Cabinet. And the PPP, given the loudest and most public accountability moment of this parliamentary term, chose to spend it moving money instead of moving Ministers.

Let the record show exactly what was asked, by whom, and why it was refused.

Members of both the Parliamentary and non-Parliamentary Opposition — APNU’s Vinceroy Jordan and Sherod Duncan, alongside Ganesh Mahipaul and Sharma Solomon — did not arrive at the National Assembly yesterday with vague grievances.                                          They arrived with a specific, named demand: the removal of Bishop Juan Edghill, Minister of Public Works, and Deodat Indar, the Minister with purview over the maritime sector. This is not rhetorical excess. 

These are the two Ministers whose portfolios directly govern the regulatory, infrastructural, and oversight failures that placed more than one hundred Guyanese aboard a vessel described by survivors as approaching ninety years old, unseaworthy, and overloaded.

Mahipaul’s account of the MV Ma Lisha is, on its own, a case study in administrative negligence that deserves to outlive this news cycle. A replacement vessel arrived in Guyana from India in 2023, publicly earmarked by Minister Edghill himself for the Port Kaituma route. Three years on, the stelling upgrades required to bring that vessel into service — phases two and three — remain undone. This is not an act of God. It is not an unforeseeable accident. It is a paper trail of a Ministry that acquired a solution to exactly the kind of catastrophe that has now occurred, and simply declined to finish the job. If the Ma Lisha had been in service on the Kaituma route, the question of whether the Barima should have been carrying the load and the passengers it was carrying may never have needed to be asked.

Solomon’s account cuts closer still, and it should sting more than it apparently does: he describes a Minister who “misled this country and remained defiant” until survivors themselves corrected the record with firsthand testimony of the conditions aboard the vessel. When the government’s account of a mass casualty event has to be corrected by the people who nearly died in it, that is not a communications problem. 

That is a Minister who either did not know the condition of a vessel operating under his sector’s oversight, or knew and said otherwise. Either finding is disqualifying.

The 592 Guardian is not in a position to adjudicate which of the two is true — but we note that the burden of proving it is not disqualifying rests with the Minister, not with the grieving families who are still waiting for him to meet that burden.

What happened inside the Chamber yesterday should be read plainly for what it was: Opposition MPs forced a five-minute suspension of sitting through sustained protest, chanting for the removal of two sitting Ministers in the presence of the Speaker, and the government’s response — once the sitting resumed — was to proceed with the supplementary $55B funding bill as though the interruption had been a matter of decorum rather than a matter of more than one hundred dead. 

No statement of intent to remove either Minister. No announcement of an independent inquiry with survivor and family participation built into its terms of reference. No acknowledgment, from the frontbench, that the day’s business might reasonably have waited.

We have written before in this space about the gap between Guyana’s institutional processes and its institutional accountability — a gap that runs through the Auditor General’s unactioned findings, through the Public Accounts Committee’s obstructed quorums, through a pattern the 592 Guardian has now documented across extractive governance, infrastructure, and public health alike.

The MV Barima tragedy is not an aberration from that pattern. It is its most lethal expression to date. A stelling left half-finished for three years is a budget line. A vessel that should not have been at sea, carrying passengers it should not have been carrying, is a body count.

Opposition’s demand is not maximalist. It is the floor, not the ceiling, of what accountability requires: that the two Ministers with direct sectoral responsibility step back so that an investigation into a disaster of this scale is not conducted under the authority of the men whose conduct is itself the subject of that investigation. That is not a partisan position. It is the minimum condition for any inquiry the Guyanese public — and the families still burying their dead — could reasonably be asked to trust.

The PPP had a choice yesterday between confronting that minimum condition and passing a funding bill. It chose the funding bill. Guyanese should understand what that choice communicates, because the government has now communicated it twice: once when the Barima went down, and once again when its Parliament had the chance to answer for it, and instead did the paperwork.

— The Board