PRESS RELEASE -JULY 29 2026.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM♦ GUYANA 

PRESS RELEASE
The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has issued a second statement on the MV Barima tragedy, raising pointed concerns that the State’s response—particularly the sweeping decision to institute seventy-two murder charges against three individuals—may be drifting toward spectacle rather than substance. As government officials move to project decisive action, the GHRA is warning against any attempt to obscure unanswered questions, sidestep accountability, or compromise due process under the cover of legal aggression. The intervention places renewed focus on whether justice is genuinely being pursued, or strategically performed, in the aftermath of one of Guyana’s deadliest maritime disasters.

 

PRESS RELEASE 

GHRA MONITORING  OF MURDER CHARGES IN MV BARIMA TRAGEDY

The GHRA is carefully following the statements of Defense Counsel and of the Director of Public prosecutions (DPP) regarding the seventy-two murder charges brought against three accused persons in the MV Barima tragedy. Lawyers for the accused have raised the points of intent and of protection against self-incrimination and the DPP has come out with a statement. When taken in conjunction with the announced Commission of Enquiry, the filing of murder charges appear intended to show that the government is taking massive action.

The GHRA would like to stress the importance of observing the rule of law in everything that is done in pursuit of the truth about the sinking of the Mv Barima with its extensive loss of life; the imperative need to ascertain the facts, underlying causes, and corrective measures required. Against this background, the GHRA is particularly alert to the importance of respecting and  protecting the rights of the accused.

The GHRA would also like to underline the importance of the ruling party showing inclusiveness towards the Opposition in the aftermath of the disaster. Wisdom and justice demand this.

Executive Committee

Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA)

July 29 2026

56B Austin Place & Hadfield Street, P O Box 10653, Georgetown, Guyana, South America

Tel: (592)-226-1789/-227-4911     e-mail: ghraguy@gmail.com

The Street Corner Was in the Prime Minister’s Mouth

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 592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

EDITORIAL

The Street Corner Was in the Prime Minister’s Mouth

On the Office of the Prime Minister’s statement, Kwame McCoy’s condemnation of Hadiyyah Mohamed, and the video that says otherwise

There is a particular species of political statement that survives only in the dark — issued in the confident hope that no one troubled themselves to record what actually happened. The Office of the Prime Minister’s Monday release on the confrontation between Prime Minister Mark Phillips and Hadiyyah Mohamed does not have that luxury. Guyana has the video. It has had it since the moment the exchange occurred inside the precincts of Parliament, in full public view, during a sitting convened in the shadow of the MV Barima tragedy. 

The Office’s statement asks the country to disbelieve its own eyes.

Let us be exact about what is being alleged and by whom. The Prime Minister’s office says Ms. Mohamed “forced herself into the precincts of Parliament” and directed “offensive and distasteful remarks” at the Prime Minister. It says the precincts “must not be reduced to a stage for intimidation, disorder and Opposition theatrics.” It commends Mr. Phillips for a “composure” it says reflected “discipline, dignity and restraint.” Each of these claims is checkable against a public record that shows something close to the reverse.

WHAT THE PUBLIC BUILDING ACTUALLY CONTAINS

Hadiyyah Mohamed did not force her way anywhere. Family members of MV Barima victims — a tragedy that has already claimed lives the government has yet to fully account for — came to Parliament to see the Leader of the Opposition, Azruddin Mohamed, whose party had spent the sitting wearing placards bearing photographs of the dead. It was the Prime Minister who inserted himself into that meeting, approaching grieving relatives to offer condolences the Opposition contends were overdue and unearned given the ministerial record on the disaster. When Ms. Mohamed pressed him on when the government intended to correct what she and others regard as its failures, it was Mr. Phillips who told her to “get from here” and demanded to know why she was in the building — a public building, funded by the public, that she has every right to enter. It was his personal security detail that made physical contact with her. And it was Mr. Phillips himself who called it off: “leave her, don’t touch her.”

Throughout, by every account and every frame of footage that has circulated, Ms. Mohamed remained composed. She addressed the Prime Minister of Guyana as “sir.”

That is not the vocabulary of a street thug. It is the vocabulary of a citizen who understood, even as she was being physically handled by state security inside a legislative building, that she was the one behaving correctly.

THE OFFICE’S STATEMENT INVERTS THE RECORD

Which makes the Prime Minister’s office’s chosen framing worth sitting with. Parliament, the statement says, “is not a political street corner.” Correct. And on the available video, it was not Ms. Mohamed who turned it into one. A Prime Minister who tells a grieving citizen to “get from here” while his security lays hands on her has not modeled discipline; he has demonstrated exactly the disorder his own office now attributes, backwards, to the person on the receiving end of it.

Composure is not what a camera recorded. What a camera recorded was a public official losing control of an encounter he initiated, and a young woman keeping hers.

The statement goes further, invoking Ms. Mohamed’s

That is not an accountability argument. It is guilt assigned by bloodline, dressed up in the language of institutional standards. The 592 Guardian has covered Azruddin Mohamed’s legal jeopardy on its merits and will continue to; it is a different matter entirely, and beneath the dignity the Office claims to be defending, to use a brother’s indictment as a cudgel against his sister’s conduct in an encounter the video shows she did not instigate.

A FAMILIAR VOICE, A FAMILIAR PATTERN

This is not the first time the Mohamed’s  has been cast as the aggressor by officials whose own conduct invited scrutiny. Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister Kwame McCoy has built something of a specialty out of it, previously accusing her of running a “deliberate misinformation campaign” during last year’s election recount — an accusation issued, as this one was, in a statement rather than in any forum where the claims could be tested against contrary evidence. The pattern is consistent: an official statement asserts a narrative; the available video contradicts it; no correction follows. Guyanese are entitled to notice the pattern, and to weigh a government’s fondness for it against its professed devotion to institutional standards.

None of this excuses genuine disorder in the National Assembly, wherever it originates, or license for any citizen — related to an indicted figure or not — to disrupt the proceedings of Parliament.

That is a real standard, and this publication  holds all sides to it. But the Office of the Prime Minister’s own statement is not a defense of that standard. It is an attempt to relocate blame from the official whose security touched a citizen to the citizen who was touched, and to do so using her brother’s legal troubles as aggravating evidence against her.

The nation has the footage. It does not need a taxpayer-funded press release to tell it what it watched.

WHAT ACTUALLY WARRANTS REJECTION

The Prime Minister’s office is right about one thing: Guyana must firmly reject this level of political hostility and disrespect. It should start by rejecting it from whichever side of an encounter it actually originated — and on the record so far available to the public, that is not the side the statement names. If the Office of the Prime Minister believes otherwise, the remedy is simple and available to it: release the full, unedited footage in its possession, alongside a transcript, and let the public standard the statement invokes be applied evenly.

Short of that, this cannot and must not become the new normal either — a government official manhandling a grieving citizen in a public building, and then authoring the official record that says she did it to him. —The Board

A Grave of Convenience

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THE 592 GUARDIAN. ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

 A Grave of Convenience

The Government Has Not Exhausted Every Option. It Has Exhausted Its Patience.

July,, 2026

Ten days. That is the distance between “we are sparing no effort” and “the vessel is likely to remain there as is.” Ten days between a President’s promise, published by his own Department of Public Information, and a Prime Minister’s public concession that the search has effectively ended. Somewhere in that span, without a vote in the National Assembly, without a published technical assessment, and without the Commission of Inquiry so much as convening, this administration decided that Guyana’s citizens — the majority of them Indigenous — would be left where they drowned.

Call it what it is. Not a memorial. An abandonment, dressed in the language of reverence.

THE SACRED WORD, USED CHEAPLY

Prime Minister Mark Phillips wants the nation to believe that turning the MV Barima wreck into a permanent sea grave is a gesture of respect for the dead. He should know better than most how quickly this government’s memorials evaporate once the cameras leave.      Three years ago, twenty children were killed in the Mahdia dormitory fire. The nation was told there would be a memorial. Three years later, there are wreaths laid once a year by the same minister now overseeing the Barima file, candlelight vigils that end at dusk, and families still fighting the State in court over settlement caps they say they were coerced into signing.

No memorial has been built. If this is what “sacred” gets you from this Government, the families of the Barima dead have every right to be afraid of the word.

A “Declaration of Agreement” was placed in front of grieving relatives on a Saturday, asking them to sign away the recovery of their own loved ones under the language of “concurrence” and “heartfelt wish.”

That is not consultation. That is a liability release wearing a eulogy’s clothes — and it was circulated before an independent Commission of Inquiry has been allowed anywhere near that hull.

ASK THE QUESTION NOBODY IN CABINET WANTS ASKED

Why the rush?

The wreck lies in relatively shallow, near-shore waters — not in the deep trenches where marine salvage genuinely reaches the outer limits of engineering. Guyana’s waters host, at this very moment, floating production platforms and heavy marine infrastructure operating in far more demanding conditions than a capsized, 87-year-old inshore ferry lying close to the coast. A nation with the capacity to help build and service some of the most technically demanding offshore infrastructure in the hemisphere is being asked to accept, within ten days of the sinking, that raising a far shallower, closer-to-shore vessel is beyond us.

That is not a credible technical judgment on its face. It is a political one, arrived at before the people whose job it is to investigate this disaster have been given the chance to do so.

 If the vessel is entombed now, on the government’s timeline, under the government’s own draft document, then any structural evidence bearing on why an 87-year-old ferry with 250 life jackets and functioning safety certification rolled over in open water goes down with it — permanently, and by administrative choice, not by nature’s.

WHAT “EVERY POSSIBLE AVENUE” ACTUALLY REQUIRES

The Government does not get to invoke President Ali’s promise that “every available asset is being deployed” and then, ten days later, quietly retire that promise through a Prime Minister’s aside to reporters outside the Assembly.

If every possible avenue has genuinely been exhausted, that finding belongs in a report — public, technical, signed, and defensible — not in a press gaggle. It belongs before the Commission of Inquiry, not before it.

And it belongs to Parliament, which has not been asked to debate this decision at all, despite having found time this same week to pass a $54.9 billion bill and observe one minute of silence for the very people it is now poised to leave on the seabed.

The families in Charity are not asking for miracles. They are asking that the country which found the money and the machinery to chase offshore oil into some of the deepest water on the continent find the will to bring their children, their parents, their spouses home from water a fraction of that depth. They are asking that “we will honour and respect their wishes” — the President’s own words — be tested against actual, hired, funded, and deployed international salvage capacity before the state declares the question closed.

Guyana is not a poor country anymore. It has not been a poor country for years. What it has, still, is a government that finds it easier to build a monument than to keep a promise.

The 592 Guardian calls on the Government of Guyana to:

  • Immediately publish the full technical assessment — engineering, hydrographic, and cost — underlying Prime Minister Phillips’s claim that the vessel cannot be raised, before any memorial declaration is finalized;
  • Suspend circulation and execution of the “Declaration of Agreement” until the Commission of Inquiry has physically inspected the wreck site;
  • Bring the salvage decision to a full debate and vote in the National Assembly, not leave it to a ministerial aside after a sitting;
  • Solicit and publish competing bids from international marine salvage firms with documented capability in comparable coastal wreck conditions, so families and the public can judge for themselves whether “every possible avenue” was truly exhausted;
  • Guarantee, in writing, that no memorial declaration will be finalized until every family of the missing has given informed, unpressured, individually witnessed consent — not consent gathered under a draft letter delivered on a Saturday with an implicit three-day clock attached.

The seabed is not sacred because the government calls it so on a Tuesday. It becomes a grave of convenience the moment a nation stops trying before it has to.

— The Board

The Wreck, the Words, and the Questions- MV Barima

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

 The Wreck, the Words, and the Questions– MV Barima

The country is being asked to absorb two messages that do not sit comfortably together.

On one hand, the President told the nation, in the immediate aftermath of the MV Barima disaster, that the state was sparing no effort, that every available asset would be deployed, and that the recovery mission would continue until every possible avenue had been exhausted. On the other hand, the Prime Minister has now signaled that the vessel is likely to remain where it lies, that bringing in more divers will not change the situation, and that the sunken wreck may simply be left on the seabed. Those are not minor differences in tone. They are two very different political and moral positions.

That contrast matters because this was never just a routine marine incident.

The MV Barima tragedy has devastated families, shattered communities, and left the nation grieving over scores of dead and missing citizens.

In such a moment, words are not ornamental. They are part of the state’s promise to the public. When the head of state speaks in the language of determination, exhaustiveness, and total commitment, the people understand that as an assurance that no avenue will be abandoned prematurely. When a senior government figure then appears to lower the horizon, the public is entitled to ask whether the state has changed course — and, if so, why.

The problem is not merely semantic. It is a problem of credibility.

A government cannot first project resolve and then, days later, sound as though the matter has already moved from rescue and recovery into resignation. If the vessel can no longer be salvaged, say so plainly, and explain the technical reasons. If the wreck is being preserved for evidentiary purposes, say so. If the state has concluded that further intervention would endanger divers, machinery, or recovery crews, say that too.

What is unacceptable is a drifting public narrative that leaves citizens to infer, from conflicting signals, that the tragedy is being managed as much for political optics as for truth and accountability.

This is where the issue becomes larger than the wreck itself. The nation does not simply want bodies recovered; it wants answers. It wants to know how the vessel came to capsize, whether there were mechanical failures, whether there were regulatory failures, whether there were ignored warnings, and whether all recoverable evidence will be preserved. A vessel on the seabed is not only a tomb. It is also a possible witness. To leave it there without a transparent explanation is to invite suspicion, especially in a country where citizens have learned too often that official reassurances can outpace official candour.

The government therefore has a duty to speak with one voice, or at least with one intelligible chain of command.

◊ Who is actually leading the response?

◊. Is the Prime Minister acting as the operational coordinator, while maritime authorities retain technical control?

◊ Has the Cabinet endorsed a decision not to raise the wreck?

◊ Did the President’s earlier assurance reflect an intention that later became unworkable, or did the state simply overpromise before the facts had been properly assessed?

These are not hostile questions. They are the questions a serious government should welcome if it believes its response is sound.

What is especially troubling is the appearance of a gap between political language and operational reality.

The President’s message was solemn, absolute, and emotionally charged. The Prime Minister’s recent statement was cautious, flat, and final-sounding. One promised full pursuit; the other sounded like a retreat from it. That is how public confidence is eroded — not only by failure, but by inconsistency.

None of this proves bad faith. It does, however, demand explanation. If the decision has been made to leave the vessel in place, then the state owes the public a full and technically grounded account. If the vessel can still be raised, then the message that it is “likely to remain there as is” must be interrogated immediately. And if there is disagreement within the government about the proper course, then that too is a scandal of leadership.

In a tragedy of this magnitude, the people are not asking for polished phrases. They are asking for coherence, competence, and truth. The state cannot demand patience while speaking with divided tongues. It cannot promise total commitment in one breath and near abandonment in the next. And it certainly cannot expect grieving families to accept silence where clarity is overdue.

The MV Barima disaster has already taken too much from Guyana. The government must not now add confusion to grief

 The. 592. Guardian 

Condolences From the Same Hands That Signed Away Justice

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦. ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦. GUYANA 

Condolences From the Same Hands That Signed Away Justice

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

The Government of Guyana wants the country to believe it has learned how to grieve. In the wake of the MV Barima capsizing, ministers have taken up residence at the Umana Yana, hotlines have been switched on, and the language of “continuous emotional, psychosocial and practical assistance” has been deployed with the fluency of officials who have said it all before. That fluency is the problem. The State is not improvising a response to tragedy. It is executing a script.

Minister of Labour and Manpower Planning, Keoma Griffith, stood before the cameras at the Umana Yana on Friday to assure grieving families that “the efforts continue.”

Guyanese with functioning memories will recognise the irony immediately. Griffith is the same official who, as the State’s representative, sat across from the guardians of children killed in the May 2023 Mahdia dormitory fire and helped extract their signatures on a $5 million settlement, a sum families now allege was presented under duress, without independent legal counsel, and under the ultimatum that refusal meant nothing at all  

That matter is still before the courts. The Chief Justice has already found the settlement agreements cannot simply be waved away as the final word. And yet the same government has placed the same man at the centre of the response to a fresh tragedy involving dozens of lost and grieving families.

A government with any institutional self-awareness would have kept Griffith as far from Region One’s grieving families as possible. Instead it handed him a microphone at the Umana Yana.

THE LANGUAGE OF CARE, THE ARITHMETIC OF CONTEMPT

Minister Zulfikar Ally says the President has directed that every affected family receive “personal attention.” All the arms of government, he says, are reaching out. Three hotlines have been established. Counselling has been “activated.” This is the vocabulary of a public relations operation, not a State reckoning with what it owes the families of the dead. Words cost nothing.

What a government is actually prepared to do is measured in what it puts on the table, and on that count Guyana already has a precedent that answers the question before it is asked.

In 2023, the families of twenty children burned to death in a state-run dormitory were offered $5 million each, a sum so far beneath the scale of the loss that families are now suing for hundreds of millions in the courts, and a sum the State’s own representative helped secure their signatures on. Reports from that period describe a burial assistance figure of roughly $300,000 per victim, a number that does not begin to cover the cost of dignity, let alone loss.

If the standing rate this administration places on a Guyanese life lost to state or systemic failure is a few hundred thousand dollars for a funeral and a few million for a signature, then “continuous support” for the families of the MV Barima is not a promise. It is a warning.

SINCERITY IS NOT A PRESS RELEASE

We do not begrudge any family a hotline number, a counsellor, or a minister’s visit. Psychosocial support has real value, and social workers on the ground in Regions One and Two deserve to be distinguished from the ministers photographed beside them. Our objection is not to comfort. It is to comfort offered by a government that has shown, repeatedly, that its sense of what families are owed collapses the moment the cameras move on and the settlement papers come out.

Real help is not a hotline. Real help is a compensation framework negotiated in the open, with independent counsel for every family, set at a figure that reflects what a life is actually worth rather than what the Consolidated Fund finds convenient.

Real help is not sending the architect of the Mahdia settlement to stand at the Umana Yana and ask a new set of grieving families to trust the process. Until this government can show it has changed the arithmetic, and not merely the script, its condolences should be read for what they are: sincerity performed by officials who have already demonstrated, in a court record now open for public inspection, what their sincerity is worth.

— The Board

Candour Is Not Optional: Why the Defence of Minister Edghill Misses the Point

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY ♦ INTEGRITY  JOURNALISM 

 Candour Is Not Optional: Why the Defence of Minister Edghill Misses the Point

The doctrine of ministerial responsibility answers whether a minister must resign. It does not answer whether a minister told the truth.

A recent commentary by Kaieteur columnist Peeping Tom defending Minister Juan Edghill against calls for his resignation makes a case that is, on its own narrow terms, largely sound. It correctly distinguishes collective from individual ministerial responsibility. It correctly notes that the Transport and Harbours Department operates under its own board, and that a minister is not constitutionally expected to supervise the loading of cargo or the verification of passenger manifests. It correctly observes that political accountability in Guyana has been applied selectively, and that the 2017 Camp Street prison fire produced no resignation despite eighteen deaths and a finding of institutional failure.

All of that may be true, and none of it is the question that matters. The doctrine of ministerial responsibility governs when a minister must resign as a matter of constitutional convention. It has nothing to say about whether a minister, in his own public statements, met the baseline duty of candour that the office requires regardless of who is ultimately responsible for the underlying tragedy. Those are two different standards, and the commentary in question answers only the first.

WHAT THE MINISTER SAID, AND WHEN

The public record on the MV Barima disaster is now well established, and it is worth setting out in sequence, because sequence is precisely what the original defence omits.

On July 19, the day after the vessel capsized, Minister Edghill dismissed public concern about overloading and mechanical failure. He stated that the ferry was licensed to carry 284 tonnes of cargo and manifested at 268 tonnes, and that it was licensed for 397 passengers but carried only 116. He attributed the capsizing to a rough Atlantic tide.

Within twenty-four hours, that account began to unravel. On July 20, the Minister acknowledged what he called a discrepancy in the passenger count, conceding that the manifest did not accurately reflect the number of people aboard. Separately, he disclosed that rescued survivors were not listed on the official manifest at all, a fact he characterised as “mischief” committed by others. The same day brought disclosure that the vessel’s captain and first engineer had tested positive for narcotics, and the entire management team responsible for loading and dispatch was suspended.

The question is not whether the Minister knew the manifest was false when he first spoke. It is why he spoke with such certainty before he could possibly have known.

THE DISTINCTION THAT MATTERS

There is an important distinction here, and precision requires that we hold it rather than collapse it in either direction. To say that Minister Edghill knowingly lied — that he stated a falsehood while aware it was false — is an assertion the public record does not yet support. Nothing so far confirms what he knew at the moment he made his July 19 statements. That charge, if made, would need evidence this news outlet does not have and has not seen produced by anyone else.

But the absence of proof of a knowing lie is not the same as an absence of a leadership failure. What the record does establish, without any need for further inquiry, is this: the Minister went before the public and stated specific, confident, falsifiable facts about passenger counts and manifest accuracy at a moment when those facts could not yet have been verified, and had to be substantially reversed within a day. He offered certainty where the responsible course was to offer verification in progress. That is not a matter that awaits a Commission of Inquiry. It is already in the public record, in his own words, dated and quoted.

This is the standard the original commentary never engages. It asks only whether Article-161-style doctrine or the convention of political accountability compels resignation. It does not ask whether the Minister, independent of who ultimately bears operational fault for the T&HD’s manifest failures, met the ordinary duty of a public official not to assert as settled fact what has not been verified — particularly while families were still waiting on news of the missing.

WHY INSTITUTIONAL INSULATION DOES NOT ANSWER THIS

The original piece leans heavily on the fact that the Transport and Harbours Department operates with its own board, and that operational failures — loading, manifest accuracy, crew screening — belong to officials, not the Minister. That may well be correct as to who bears operational and possibly criminal responsibility for the manifest fraud itself. But it is beside the point raised here. The suspended loading team did not stand at a podium and tell the nation the passenger count was accurate. The Minister did. The distance the T&HD board provides from operational failure provides no distance at all from a minister’s own public statements. Those are his, made in his own voice, and they are the proper subject of scrutiny independent of any finding the Commission of Inquiry eventually reaches on the cause of the capsizing.

A NARROWER AND MORE DEFENSIBLE STANDARD

None of this requires abandoning the caution the original piece rightly urges. It remains true that we do not yet know whether the capsizing itself resulted from overloading, mechanical failure, crew impairment, or an unforeseeable event at sea, and it remains proper to await the Commission of Inquiry before assigning that cause. It also remains fair to note, as the original piece does, that Guyana’s political culture has applied the convention of ministerial resignation inconsistently, and that consistency is a legitimate demand.

But consistency cuts both ways. If the standard for judging a minister’s conduct is to be applied evenly, it should include not only the question of operational fault under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, but the separate and more basic question of candour: did the Minister’s public statements, made while the search for survivors was ongoing, meet the standard the public was entitled to expect from the man responsible for informing them?

On the record as it stands, the answer is no. That failure does not by itself resolve the resignation question under constitutional doctrine. It does, however, stand on its own, and it does not require a Commission of Inquiry to be seen.

— The Board

Praise Dressed as Journalism: A Response to the Barima Whitewash

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

Praise Dressed as Journalism: A Response to the Barima Whitewash

Calling Cabinet’s handling of the MV Barima disaster a “template for how a nation responds when tested” requires ignoring almost everything that has actually surfaced since July 19th.

Start with the manifest. This isn’t a minor administrative wrinkle — it’s the government’s own admission of collapse. Officials confirmed the manifest didn’t match the people pulled from the water, and Edghill himself described “severe operational breaches” and “mischief” . The passenger count has moved repeatedly as the story developed — a manifest of 133 against 179 aboard , while Opposition Leader Mohamed noted the toll estimate itself jumped from 67 to 77 within the same news cycle . That’s not the fog of an unfolding tragedy — Guyanese are being asked to trust an operation that, by its own minister’s account, couldn’t count its own passengers.

“Urgency” is contested by the people who lived it. Guyanese have publicly questioned why it took so long to rescue people, with survivors telling reporters they spent hours in the water , and one grandmother described nine hours in the water while she lost four grandchildren . That account doesn’t square with a narrative of flawless, immediate mobilization.

On integrity, the record cuts against the government, not for it. Edghill is currently facing calls for resignation from across the opposition spectrum — APNU, WIN, FGM, AFC and VPAC have all demanded he go  — precisely over the shifting manifest numbers and his own contradictory public statements. Edghill has maintained state agencies followed the same rules as private customers while police are still trying to determine who authorized the passengers and cargo aboard . That is an unresolved chain of accountability, not evidence of a minister who has “come clean.

On compassion, the $300K figure is real, and it’s being disputed by families, not invented by critics. APNU has said some families were offered just $300,000 for funeral expenses — an amount that wouldn’t even cover a burial . The government’s own position, stated by PM Phillips, is that this funeral assistance is explicitly not compensation, with any compensation decision deferred until after the Commission of Inquiry reports .

Families are being asked to bury their dead now and litigate what they’re owed later — which is a defensible logistical position, but it isn’t the “epic compassion” the editorial describes.

None of this means the Commission of Inquiry is worthless. An internationally staffed panel with subpoena-style reach into loading, manifests, crew fitness, and the rescue response is a real mechanism, and it’s worth holding the government to using it honestly. But the test of that commission is whether its findings survive contact with power — not whether a press release announcing it reads well.

A newsroom’s job right now is to document the manifest failures, the timeline discrepancies, and the compensation dispute as they stand, not to pre-certify the government’s handling of them as a national model before the inquiry has done a single day of work.

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

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

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

Civil Society Withholds Confidence in the MV Barima Commission, and Sets Out Five Tests

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦.ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL GUYANA INC.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Georgetown, Guyana — Monday, 27 July 2026

Civil Society Withholds Confidence in the MV Barima Commission, and Sets Out Five Tests

Transparency International Guyana Inc. convened a national civil society consultation on the MV Barima disaster. Following the appointment of a Commission of Inquiry without consultation, TIGI today publishes the standard against which that Commission will be measured.

Transparency International Guyana Inc. (TIGI) extends its condolences to the families of those lost in the capsizing of the MV Barima on 18 July, and to the communities of Region One who have borne this loss most heavily. Seventy-three deaths are confirmed. Thirty of our fellow citizens remain unaccounted for. We hold the bereaved and the survivors in our thoughts, and we thank those still engaged in the work of recovery.

On Saturday 25 July, TIGI convened a virtual national consultation bringing together some two dozen participants: indigenous and community organisations, faith leaders across the Hindu, Christian and Islamic communities, the trade union movement, disaster management and maritime professionals, the press, academics at home and in the diaspora, and citizens who have lost family in this disaster. This statement reflects the substance of that consultation

What we acknowledge

The rescue was real. The Coast Guard went out at night. Private boat operators with no obligation to anyone went out alongside them. Trinidadian and Brazilian teams came. Seventy-six people are alive today who would otherwise not be. That deserves the nation’s thanks, and it has ours without reservation.

The decision to appoint an international Commission responds to a central public demand, and we recognise it as such. Guyanese civil society, the parliamentary opposition, the National Toshaos Council and the Guyana Human Rights Association all called for an inquiry that could not be accused of investigating itself.

Nothing that follows retracts either acknowledgement.

Why we cannot presently give this Commission our confidence

A competent rescue does not answer the question of why the rescue was necessary. And the appointment of non-Guyanese commissioners is not the same thing as an independent process.

The Commission was constituted without consultation. Neither the parliamentary opposition, nor the National Toshaos Council, nor the affected communities of Region One, nor civil society were consulted on the composition of this body. Article 13 of the Constitution establishes inclusionary democracy as a principal objective of our political system, and provides for the increasing involvement of citizens in the decisions that affect their well-being. The Caribbean Court of Justice has held that the obligation to consult is to be understood broadly. The President’s discretion to appoint under the Commissions of Inquiry Act is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether that discretion may be exercised without the consultation our Constitution contemplates, on a matter of this gravity, affecting a State-operated service in which seventy-three citizens died.

The MV Barima was a State vessel. It was regulated by a State agency, operated by a State department, and falls under a Ministry whose leadership remains in place. This is not a government matter. It is a State matter, and the resources involved belong to the people of Guyana. A body examining the conduct of the State cannot be constituted by the State alone if it is to command public confidence.

The Terms of Reference have not been published, and no undertaking has been given that the Commission’s report will be released in full. Guyana has held Commissions of Inquiry before whose reports the Guyanese people have never seen.

TIGI therefore does not at this time have confidence in the Commission as constituted. We say this without prejudice to the individual commissioners, whose professional standing is not the subject of this statement. Our objection is to a process that excluded the people most affected from any part in constituting the body that will judge what happened to them

Five tests

TIGI and the organisations that joined our consultation will assess this Commission against five measures. Each is specific and each is verifiable.

  1. Publish the instrument of appointment and the Terms of Reference — now. Both should be published in full and laid before the National Assembly at its sitting today, before the Commission begins work. Parliament does not sit again until the autumn. If the scope of this inquiry is not opened to public and parliamentary scrutiny today, it will not be scrutinised at all before the Commission reports.
  2. Require each commissioner to publish a declaration of interests. This is ordinary practice in serious inquiries and no reputable commissioner would object to it. Each member should publish, before taking evidence, a signed declaration of any commercial, professional, institutional, familial or financial connection to the Government of Guyana, to any State agency or official, to the maritime sector in Guyana, or to any party with an interest in the outcome — together with the terms and value of their engagement. Independence that cannot be verified is not independence; it is an assurance. The public is entitled to the former.
  3. Guarantee publication of the report, in full, in advance. The undertaking should be given now, in writing, with a date. A report delivered privately to the authority that commissioned it is not an inquiry; it is a consultation.
  4. Separate the safety investigation from the criminal process. The purpose of a marine safety investigation is to prevent recurrence, not to allocate blame, and every mature maritime jurisdiction keeps the two apart. Crew, dock staff and ticketing personnel must be able to give evidence about what actually happens on that route without that evidence being used to prosecute them. Without testimonial protection, the Commission will not be told the truth. And a prosecution must not be permitted to stand in for an explanation: if this ends with a conviction and no reform, we will have held someone accountable and changed nothing.
  5. Name who owns the recommendations, and by when. This is the test Guyana has failed before. Ask who now recalls what the Mahdia inquiry recommended, or which of its recommendations were implemented. Every recommendation this Commission makes should carry a named responsible office, a published deadline, and progress reports laid before the National Assembly at six and twelve months. An inquiry whose findings have no owner is an inquiry designed to be forgotten 

What we propose

The remedy is neither complicated nor unprecedented. We call upon the President to suspend the commencement of the Commission’s work and to convene, within seven days, a consultation with the Leader of the Opposition, the National Toshaos Council, representatives of the affected communities and civil society, for the purpose of agreeing the composition of the Commission and its Terms of Reference.

On composition, we propose that the technical members be drawn from established marine casualty investigation bodies of long standing — such as the United Kingdom’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, or the Australian Transport Safety Bureau — whose investigators are career accident specialists, subject to institutional discipline, and demonstrably without connection to any party with an interest in the outcome. Technical cooperation may be sought from the International Maritime Organization in support of that work.

This costs the Government nothing but a week. It would convert a contested appointment into a national on

What must not wait for the Commission

Four matters require action now and should not be deferred pending any report.

Families must not be asked to sign away their rights. We are aware of the practice, following the Mahdia fire, of presenting bereaved families with one-time payments conditioned on documents foreclosing legal action against the State. We say plainly to every affected family: you are under no obligation to sign anything, and no payment should be conditioned on your surrender of any legal right. A compensation framework should be published, with defined amounts and timelines, that requires no waiver.

The orphaned children need a plan, not sympathy. Guardianship, schooling continuity and long-term care must be arranged now, with a named point of contact for each affected family and public reporting at six and twelve months. In the short term, those families who have lost their foodstuffs and other supplies should be helped with replacements.

Psychosocial support must reach the people it is meant to reach. Guyana has trained disaster-response personnel. Participants in our consultation with direct knowledge of that training report that those responders have not been deployed to this incident. That should be corrected this week.

The route must be made safe or suspended. A replacement vessel for this route was purchased for US$12.7 million and has not entered service because the necessary shoreside works at Port Kaituma remain incomplete. Government should publish a completion date. Until the route is demonstrably safe, subsidised alternative transport should be provided to the communities that depend on it

The standard

Region One has no road. For the people of Mabaruma, Port Kaituma and the surrounding communities, that vessel was not a convenience — it was the connection between a community and its country. The oldest vessel in the fleet was assigned to the citizens with the fewest alternatives. That is the fact this inquiry exists to confront.

TIGI does not raise these matters in a partisan spirit, and we decline the framing that treats questions as an attack. No child aboard that vessel belonged to a political party. What we are asking for is not a change of government but a standard of competence in matters where competence is the only thing between our citizens and the sea: that every passenger on every State vessel is counted before it sails, that no eighty-seven-year-old hull carries schoolchildren, and that when an inquiry tells this country what went wrong, someone is named to fix it.

We invite every Guyanese organisation and citizen willing to hold that standard — whatever their party, faith or region — to stand with us in it. Should the consultation we propose take place, TIGI will participate in good faith and will offer the Commission our full cooperation. We will report publicly on its progress against these five tests.

Media contact: Mike Singh, + 1 305 607-5587 (WhatsApp), MSIngh@TelkomCaribe.com

About Transparency International Guyana Inc. TIGI is the Guyana chapter of Transparency International, the global anti-corruption movement headquartered in Berlin and active in more than 100 countries. TIGI works for accountability, transparency and the rule of law in Guyana.

          

AN INQUIRY INTO ITSELF

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY · GOVERNANCE · THE PUBLIC RECORD

 AN INQUIRY INTO ITSELF

Why a Presidentially-Appointed Commission Cannot Investigate. The Government that Appoints It — and What Must Change Before any appointments.  

Seventy-three people are confirmed dead. Thirty remain unaccounted for. Seventy-six survived. On the night of July 18, the MV Barima — an 87-year-old vessel operated by the state’s own Transport and Harbours Department — capsized off Iron Pun in the Pomeroon River en route to Port Kaituma, carrying, by the government’s own revised count following a review of departure-stelling CCTV footage, 179 people, a figure that itself diverged from the official passenger manifest. It is already being described, without serious dispute, as the deadliest maritime disaster in Guyana’s modern history.

President Dr Irfaan Ali has now committed to naming, on July 26, a five-member Commission of Inquiry. He will select its members. He will set its Terms of Reference. He will determine, by extension, what the Commission is permitted to look at, whom it is permitted to summon, and what happens to its findings once they are filed. This media sets out why that structure is a conflict of interest as a matter of basic institutional design — not an accusation of bad faith against any named individual — and what specific, verifiable safeguards must appear in the published Terms of Reference before this Commission can be called independent in substance rather than in name

1.. THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEM

A Commission of Inquiry in Guyana is an executive instrument. It is created, staffed, and scoped by the President, and in the ordinary course of things its findings are published — or not — at the government’s discretion, and acted upon — or not — by the same government whose ministries and state entities sit within its potential findings of fault. This is not a partisan characterization; it is the plain operation of the Commissions of Inquiry framework as it currently exists.

The entities whose conduct falls squarely within the scope President Ali himself announced — vessel loading, passenger boarding procedures, seaworthiness, maintenance history, compliance with maritime law, crew competence, and the passenger-manifest discrepancy already confirmed by government review — are not private actors. The MV Barima was owned and operated by the Transport and Harbours Department, a state entity. Its regulatory overseer is the Maritime Administration Department, a state entity. The ministries with policy responsibility — Public Works under Minister Juan Edghill, and Public Utilities and Aviation under Minister Deodat Indar — are Cabinet appointees of the same President who will select the Commission’s members and write its mandate.

The appointing authority and the subjects of the inquiry occupy the same executive branch. That is the conflict — not an allegation, a fact of institutional architecture.

International commissioners do not, by themselves, cure this. Expertise in maritime law or disaster investigation says nothing about who controls their mandate, their subpoena power, their access to Cabinet-level witnesses, or the fate of their report once it is filed. A foreign engineer sitting on a panel whose Terms of Reference were drafted by the government under investigation is still working inside a mandate that government wrote

II.FOUR LEVERS OF CONTROL

Four specific points of control determine whether this Commission functions as genuine accountability or as a managed exercise in the appearance of it. Each remains, as of this writing, entirely at the President’s discretion.

  • Terms of Reference. Whoever drafts the ToR decides what is investigated. A mandate that examines ‘operational factors’ without naming ministerial oversight, procurement decisions, or MARAD’s regulatory performance can produce a thorough-looking report that never reaches the political exposure. As of July 25, the government has not published a ToR. Opposition MP Dr Terrence Campbell has submitted a competing draft to the Speaker seeking to have Parliament — not the President alone — debate and shape it.
  • Appointment and removal. Commissioners serve at the President’s pleasure for appointment, and in the ordinary CoI framework, for removal. Independence of judgment does not eliminate awareness of who conferred the appointment.
  • Compulsion power. Whether the Commission can subpoena ministers, compel MARAD and Transport and Harbours Department records, and refer findings of criminal negligence or misconduct to the Director of Public Prosecutions is not automatic — it must be written into the ToR the President sets. Nothing announced to date guarantees this.
  • Publication and implementation. Neither the release of the Commission’s report nor the implementation of its recommendations is self-executing. Both remain at the discretion of the government the report may implicate.

III. WHAT IS ALREADY IN DISPUTE

This is not a hypothetical concern raised in the abstract. It is the live subject of political conflict in Guyana in the days before the panel is named.

Transparency International Guyana Inc. has called for the domestic Commission to be replaced altogether by an investigation led by the International Maritime Organization and staffed by global maritime experts with no institutional stake in the outcome — and has demanded, as a minimum threshold of the President’s own stated commitment to transparency, the immediate recusal of Minister Edghill, Minister Indar, and MARAD’s senior management from any role in the inquiry’s design or operation.

Opposition parliamentarian Amanza Walton-Desir has demanded the government publish the Terms of Reference, panel membership, and legal basis for the Commission before it proceeds, noting none had been made public as of her statement. Dr Terrence Campbell has submitted a motion to adjourn the National Assembly specifically to debate the ToR, proposing the Commission be empowered to summon witnesses, compel documents, and refer evidence of negligence, misconduct, or corruption for prosecution or disciplinary action — powers that are not guaranteed under the government’s own framing. Opposition figures including Sarabo Haley have publicly questioned whether the government’s proposed Commission will be sufficiently independent at all. Christopher Ram has separately urged that the Commission be established under the specific statutory authority of the Guyana Shipping Act, 1998, rather than as a discretionary executive order, and be allowed to work entirely free of interference.

If President Ali is sincere about the transparency and accountability he has personally promised the families of the deceased, this is the minimum test of that sincerity — not a discretionary courtesy to ministers he appointed.”

— Transparency International Guyana Inc

IV .WHAT THE TERMS OF REFERENCE MUST CONTAIN

Before the Commission is named on July 26, and before its Terms of Reference are finalized, The 592 Guardian sets out the specific, verifiable safeguards that distinguish a genuine inquiry from a managed one. Anything less should be understood by the public, the families of the seventy-three dead, and Guyana’s international partners as a failure to meet the standard President Ali has himself already promised.

  • Publish the full Terms of Reference before the Commission begins work, not after — including explicit, named scope over MARAD’s regulatory conduct, the Transport and Harbours Department’s operational conduct, and ministerial oversight by Minister Edghill and Minister Indar.
  • Bind the Commission with statutory subpoena power to compel testimony from sitting ministers and the production of MARAD and T&HD records, including all documentation bearing on the confirmed passenger-manifest discrepancy.
  • Secure the recusal of Minister Edghill, Minister Indar, and MARAD’s senior management from any role in shaping the Commission’s mandate, procedure, or resourcing.
  • Guarantee unconditional publication of the Commission’s final report in full, on a fixed statutory timeline, with no ministerial or Cabinet power of redaction or delay.
  • Establish a binding mechanism — parliamentary or judicial — for referring findings of negligence, misconduct, or institutional failure to the Director of Public Prosecutions, independent of executive discretion.
  • Resolve, transparently and in public, the competing proposal that primary investigative jurisdiction sit with the International Maritime Organization rather than a domestic executive instrument — a question the government has not yet    answered                                                                • None  of this is an accusation that the five individuals named tomorrow will act in bad faith. It is a statement of institutional fact: a commission’s independence is a function of its mandate, not the biographies of its members. A distinguished panel operating inside a narrow, government-drafted ToR, without subpoena power over ministers, without a binding publication guarantee, is not independent — it is credentialed.

Guyana has been here before. The families gathered at Charity, at the Operations Centre, waiting for word of the missing, are owed more than a well-staffed committee. They are owed an inquiry structurally incapable of protecting the government that appointed it. That is the test the Terms of Reference — not the five names — will actually decide. The 592 Guardian will publish and assess the Terms of Reference in full the moment they are made public.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian