A Name From the Same Small Island: What the Shadick Appointment Adds to the Pattern     

A Name From the Same Small Island: What the Shadick Appointment Adds

The newly named Secretary to the MV Barima Commission of Inquiry is the nephew of a career PPP Cabinet minister and GECOM commissioner. It is the third consecutive Barima-related appointment carrying an undisclosed party lineage                                                                                    .

By Editor

Kaieteur News reported this weekend that attorney Javed Shadick has been named Secretary to the Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima disaster, with the Commission’s Terms of Reference expected to be gazetted over the course of the weekend.

Shadick is not a stranger to this role. He previously served as Secretary to the Commission of Inquiry into the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory fire, and to the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the March 2020 General and Regional Elections.

That record of service is, on its own, unremarkable. Secretaries of Commissions of Inquiry are administrative officers, not adjudicators, and experience in the role is a reasonable qualification for it. What is remarkable is who Javed Shadick is.

THE FAMILY RECORD

Javed Shadick is the nephew of the late Bibi Shadick — a founding-generation figure in the modern PPP. Bibi Shadick served as a Member of Parliament and as Minister of Human Services and Social Security under President Bharrat Jagdeo, later as Chairperson of the Guyana National Broadcasting Authority, and from 2020 until her death in August 2022, as a PPP-nominated Commissioner on the Guyana Elections Commission — a position from which she played a central role in the effort to certify the outcome of the disputed March 2020 election, the very election whose Commission of Inquiry her nephew would go on to serve as Secretary for.

Javed Shadick lived with his aunt and was at her side when she died; he confirmed her passing to the press himself. This is not a distant or disputed connection. It is a matter of public record, reported without qualification by Guyana’s own state and independent press at the time of her death.

We are, separately, in possession of the Shadick family’s origin on Leguan Island in the Essequibo River — the same small Essequibo Islands community from which President Irfaan Ali’s family draws its own ancestral ties.

We have not independently verified the specific claim of a shared ancestral or genealogical connection between the two families, and we do not assert one here. We flag it only because, in a country this size, the overlapping geography of Guyana’s governing class is itself part of the story this news-media  has been telling for weeks — and it deserves to be named even where it cannot yet be proven.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ISOLATED APPOINTMENT

This is now the third time in three weeks that this publication  has documented an appointment to the machinery of the MV Barima Commission of Inquiry carrying an undisclosed connection to the governing party.

Commissioner Nyree Dawn Alfonso’s professional association with Labour Minister Keoma Griffith — scrubbed from her own firm’s website in the days before her swearing-in — was the subject of our August 1 editorial “A Commission Sworn In the Dark.”

The Safety and Compliance Audit Team named by President Ali on July 31 included Dr Ivor English, whose ongoing MARAD consultancy and Guyana National Shipping Corporation board seat we documented in “The Audit Team That Audits Itself.” Now the Commission’s own Secretary — the officer who will control its records, correspondence, and administrative through-line — is the nephew of one of the PPP’s most senior long-serving figures.

No single one of these facts, standing alone, proves that the Commission of Inquiry into the deaths of 73 Guyanese citizens has been compromised. We have been careful, in each of these pieces, not to overreach that line, and we do not cross it here. What the pattern does establish is a governing style: appointments made unilaterally, without published vetting criteria, without disclosure of the personal and professional networks binding appointees to the party in power — and revealed, in each case, not by government transparency but by press inquiry after the fact.

THE STANDING QUESTION

This news-media  has, since July 30, called on the Office of the President to publish the vetting records behind its Commission of Inquiry appointments.

That call has gone unanswered. It is not diminished by this latest finding — it is reinforced by it. A Commission of Inquiry into the worst maritime disaster in Guyana’s modern history should not require an independent media outfit  to discover, weeks into its work, who its own personnel are related to.

That is a transparency failure, and it belongs to the government that built this Commission behind closed doors, not to the media  that keeps finding out what was left out of the announcement.

— The Board