The Commission Is Qualified. The Process Is Not Explained.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM · GEORGETOWN, GUYANA

 The Commission Is Qualified. The Process Is Not Explained.

President Ali names five credible experts to the MV Barima inquiry — and answers none of the questions his method has raised

By the Editorial Board

There is no serious case to be made against the competence of the five people President Irfaan Ali named on Sunday to the Commission of Inquiry into the capsizing of the MV Barima. On paper, this is as strong a panel as Guyana could plausibly assemble on short notice from within the Caribbean’s own bench of maritime and legal expertise. The problem is not who they are. It is that no one — not the President, not the Department of Public Information, not any minister — has said how they got there.

THE CREDENTIALS ARE NOT IN DISPUTE

Justice Godfrey Phillip Smith SC, the Commission’s chair, is a former Attorney General and Foreign Minister of Belize who went on to sit as a High Court judge and an acting Justice of Appeal of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court. He has appeared before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the Caribbean Court of Justice, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and currently serves as CARICOM’s High-Level Representative for Law and Criminal Justice — a position to which regional Heads of Government, not Georgetown, appointed him. Colleagues across the Eastern Caribbean bar have described his judgments as fast, rigorous, and difficult to challenge on appeal.

Dr Andrzej Jasionowski brings the technical core the inquiry will need. A Polish naval architect and marine engineer with a doctorate in damaged-vessel hydrodynamics from the University of Strathclyde, he has spent three decades building the forensic tools — flooding simulation, capsize-time modelling, structural failure analysis — that maritime accident investigators rely on internationally.

Captain Hamada Fouda is a working Senior Maritime Surveyor and Compliance Auditor with the Maritime Authority of Jamaica, giving the Commission a regulator’s eye on vessel condition, certification, and compliance history — precisely the terrain the MV Barima’s maintenance record will require.

Nyree Dawn Alfonso, an Attorney-at-Law in Trinidad and Tobago with a stated specialisation in Admiralty and Maritime Law, has litigated shipping and port-authority matters before that country’s Court of Appeal. Maritime law is a narrow bar; her inclusion is not decorative.

Rear Admiral (Ret’d) Hayden Pritchard served as Chief of Defence Staff of Trinidad and Tobago and was the first officer of that country’s Defence Force to hold flag rank, with thirty-three years in uniform spanning naval operations and security.

None of this is filler biography. It is the strongest possible answer to anyone tempted to dismiss the Commission on grounds of competence. This news media will not make that argument, because the record does not support it.

WHAT THE PRESIDENT HAS NOT SAID

Competence, however, is a different question from process — and it is on process that the President’s Sunday announcement said nothing at all.

Guyanese were told, in a video statement to Facebook, that these five “have been carefully selected for their independence, technical expertise, and proven ability.” They were not told who did the selecting, on what criteria, following what search, or with whose advice. No terms of appointment have been published. No enabling legal instrument exists yet — the President himself said on Sunday that “the necessary legal instruments required to give effect to this decision are currently being formalised.

 Five names were announced to a nation in mourning before the legal document constituting the body that will investigate its worst peacetime disaster had even been drafted.

Five names were announced before the document creating the Commission had even been drafted.

This is not a small omission. A Commission of Inquiry derives its authority, and its credibility, from the instrument that creates it and the transparency of the process that populates it.

Guyana has, within the past week, watched a broad and unusual coalition — APNU, WIN, the Forward Guyana Movement, the Alliance For Change, the Vigilant Political Action Committee, and the Guyana Human Rights Association — converge on a single demand: that the composition of this Commission not be decided by the executive alone, and that whatever process was used be transparent enough to survive scrutiny.

The President’s answer to that demand, so far, has been to proceed regardless and offer no account of the process afterward.

THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN OPEN

This new outlet is raising the following questions directly to the Office of the President, the Ministry of Legal Affairs, and the Department of Public Information, and will publish their answers in full when received:

  1. Who identified these five individuals? Was a shortlist prepared, and if so, by whom — a ministry, an external search, personal recommendation, or a regional body such as CARICOM?
  2. Were any of the five approached or consulted before Sunday’s announcement, and if so, when did those conversations begin? The timeline matters: was this a decision made in the days after the tragedy, or one that had been under consideration on a longer horizon?
  3. Was any facilitator, search firm, or intermediary organisation involved in identifying or vetting candidates, and if so, who commissioned that work and what did it cost the public purse?
  4. What vetting was conducted for conflicts of interest — financial, professional, or personal — between any Commissioner and any party whose conduct the Commission may examine, including the Ministry of Public Works, the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, the Maritime Administration Department, and any private contractor connected to the MV Barima’s construction, refit, or the March 2026 rehabilitation tender?
  5. Why was the parliamentary opposition not consulted, given that the Leader of the Opposition has publicly confirmed he was not, and given that the National Assembly was scheduled to debate opposition motions on the same matter the following day?
  6. When will the legal instrument establishing the Commission be published, and will it include the selection process, the terms of reference in full, and the Commission’s funding and reporting arrangements?

None of these questions casts doubt on Justice Smith, Dr Jasionowski, Captain Fouda, Ms Alfonso, or Rear Admiral Pritchard. They cast doubt on a government that has, once again, treated the manner of its own decision-making as beneath explanation — even when the subject is the deadliest peacetime disaster in the country’s history, and even when the demand for transparency came not from a single opposition voice but from across the political spectrum and civil society alike.

Guyanese families are owed a Commission whose findings they can trust. That trust is built twice — once in the quality of the people asked to do the work, and once in the visible integrity of how they were chosen.

The President has, this week, answered only the first half of that obligation. This publication will keep asking about the second until he answers it too.

— The Board

When a Nation Normalizes Inhumanity

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊ GUYANA

 When a Nation Normalizes Inhumanity.

Being an upstanding ,law abiding citizen  in this country is not a easy task.   A multitude of shortcomings, misgivings—-lack of empathy and compassion, makes it  a constant assault on the conscience. You see cruelty to animals, violence against children and women, brutality, partiality amongst citizens, and then you watch a political and judicial culture that rewards silence, obedience, and convenience. Too many people have learned that the safest way to “get things done” is to align with whoever holds power, no matter how rotten the arrangement may be. 

That is not pragmatism. It is moral surrender.

What makes it worse is that many of the same people who benefit from this system insist on calling it progress. We are told to be grateful for the basics — roads, water, electricity, schools, hospitals — as though these are gifts from rulers rather than the minimum duties of a state. But these are not privileges to be dispensed like charity. These are rights. And every time a government treats them like favors, it reveals how little respect it has for the people it claims to serve.

 A culture of impunity

One of the greatest dangers facing Guyana is not simply corruption in the abstract. It is the normalization of corruption as a way of life. When people begin to believe that influence matters more than law, that connections matter more than merit, and that political loyalty matters more than public duty, the republic starts to rot from within.

This is how abuse becomes ordinary and normalized. This is how public office becomes a private feeding trough. This is how citizens are conditioned to accept mediocrity, delay, and deception as the price of living under a government that says it is building a better future. And this is why so many people turn a blind eye when they are handed a small “tap up” or a temporary favor. They may know the system is broken, but they have been taught to survive inside the breakage instead of demanding repair.

The real tragedy is that this logic has seeped into every level of social life. It is seen in the quiet tolerance of abuse, the indifference to the suffering of the vulnerable, and the refusal to challenge power unless one’s own interest is directly threatened. A society cannot remain healthy when its moral compass is permanently bent toward survival at any cost.

Elite comfort, public suffering

The contrast between rulers and the ruled is often obscene.The people sweat in traffic while officials glide past in convoys with sirens. The people sit through blackouts while state functionaries enjoy generators and full air conditioning. The people are urged to conserve electricity while the offices of power remain cool, comfortable, and fully insulated from the hardship being imposed on everyone else.

We are also told that healthcare and education are improving, yet the evidence of confidence is revealing: those making the claims often do not rely on the same systems they praise. Their children are not the ones waiting in overcrowded wards or under-resourced classrooms. Their families are not the ones praying that public services will work well enough to save a life. Their private safety nets are robust precisely because the public ones are not.

This is why token projects are not enough. A handful of visible works, ribbon-cuttings, and publicity campaigns cannot erase the larger reality of failed governance. A clean road here, a renovated school there, or a gleaming building in the capital does not absolve a state that remains indifferent to the daily humiliation of ordinary people. Citizens should not have to kneel in gratitude for what the state is already obligated to provide.

The human cost

Behind every act of corruption is a person who pays the price. Sometimes that price is medical treatment delayed until it is too late. Sometimes it is justice denied because the poor cannot afford lawyers, connections, or endless court battles. Sometimes it is a child exposed to abuse because institutions meant to protect the vulnerable are weak, compromised, or absent. Sometimes it is a family trapped in poverty while public money disappears into favoritism, vanity, or political reward.

That is the real discrepancy and effects of bad governance. It is not only theft from the treasury. It is theft from life chances, from dignity, from safety, and from hope. When billions are wasted, the poor do not merely become poorer. They become invisible. And when citizens die because they cannot afford to seek care overseas, while the political class quietly preserves access to better options for itself, the message is unmistakable: there are two Guyanas, and only one of them is protected.

This is also why the abuse of law is so dangerous. When cybercrime laws, or any other laws, are used to intimidate critics, suppress lawful protest, or chill dissent, the state crosses from incompetence into authoritarian habit. The constitution becomes decorative. The right to speak becomes conditional. The right to protest becomes something the powerful tolerate only when it is harmless.

The apologist’s excuse

There is always someone ready with the same tired defense: “At least things are improving,” or “Where were you when the other side was in power?” These lines are not arguments. They are escape hatches. They are the language of people who have made peace with failure because they fear the consequences of demanding better.

Yes, governments differ. Yes, history matters. But no administration gets a free pass simply because its predecessor was also defective. That logic has trapped this country for too long. It encourages citizens to compare disappointments instead of demanding standards. It turns national life into a contest of who disappointed us less, rather than who served the public best.

Progress that depends on silence about disconnected governance and corruption is not progress. Development that coexists with selective justice is not development. And reform that asks people to be grateful while their rights are still being treated as favors is not reform at all.

What must change

Guyana does have money. What it lacks is consistent political will, institutional courage, and an electorate that refuses to be managed by fear, handouts, or partisan loyalty. If the country is serious about recovery, then the standard must rise across the board.

That means real accountability, not staged outrage. It means independent oversight bodies that can act without political interference. It means procurement systems that are open to scrutiny. It means courts that are accessible to ordinary people, not only to those with connections. It means laws that protect dissent rather than punish it. It means Parliament behaving like a democratic institution, not a place for self-serving bargains and selective ethics.

It also means citizens must stop confusing survival with consent. Taking a small benefit from power does not erase the damage that power is doing. A “tap up” is not a substitute for justice. A project is not a substitute for integrity. A speech is not a substitute for service.

A final demand

This country does not need more excuses, more propaganda, or more photo opportunities. It needs leaders with the will to do right by the people and a public willing to hold them accountable when they do wrong.

We must stop accepting a system in which the powerful live large while the people are told to endure. We must stop treating rights as privileges. We must stop praising the minimum as though it were mercy. And we must stop rewarding the very habits that keep the country wounded.

The people’s lives are hard enough already. They should not also have to carry the cost of elite greed, political cowardice, and institutional failure. Guyana can do better than this. But it will only do better when its people decide that mediocrity is no longer acceptable, and that silence is no longer a safe place to hide.

 


THE 592 GUARDIAN 

Recuse Them Now: The MV Barima Inquiry Cannot Begin While Its Subjects Still Hold the Keys

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THE 592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL ♦  ACCOUNTABILITY.♦ JUSTICE

 EDITORIAL

Recuse Them Now: The MV Barima Inquiry Cannot Begin While Its Subjects Still Hold the Keys

July, 2026

On Tuesday, calls for the resignation of Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill were dismissed by Prime Minister Brigadier (Ret’d) Mark Phillips as noise — the Prime Minister’s own word, offered when he was asked directly whether the minister should go. BY Friday, on Boom FM, the same Prime Minister was speaking a markedly different language: commissions of inquiry, mandatory testing regimes, expanded CCTV coverage, psychosocial support for the bereaved. The velocity of that conversion should trouble every citizen paying attention, not reassure them. This is not principled evolution.

It is damage control, arriving days after Transparency International Guyana Inc. and virtually the entire parliamentary opposition had already said, in far plainer terms, what needed to happen.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY BEING ASKED

The demand is not novel, and it is not partisan noise. TIGI has called for the immediate recusal of Minister Edghill, Minister of Public Utilities and Aviation Deodat Indar, and the senior management of the Maritime Administration Department from any supervisory role in the investigation into this tragedy. The Opposition — APNU, the AFC, WIN and others rarely aligned on much else — has converged independently on the same position: both ministers should stand aside, and MARAD’s Director General should go with them, pending an inquiry conducted by qualified external maritime expertise. This news media  joins that call without reservation. Recusal is not resignation and it is not a verdict of guilt. It is the minimum precondition for an inquiry anyone can trust.

THE INTEGRITY PROBLEM THE PRIME MINISTER WILL NOT NAME

An independent Commission of Inquiry is only as credible as the evidentiary record it is built upon. Passenger manifests, ticketing records, port-clearance logs, dry-docking documentation, drug-testing compliance files — precisely the categories the Prime Minister himself listed as within the inquiry’s scope — do not exist in a vacuum.

They exist in filing systems and databases under the administrative custody of the ministries and the department now under scrutiny. TIGI has already flagged what it calls manifest fraud: initial records reportedly listing 116 passengers and 17 crew, against a death toll that has climbed past 100 with dozens still unaccounted for. Where the officials responsible for that manifest’s accuracy retain authority over the records during the investigative window, the opportunity to shape, misplace or quietly correct inconsistent documentation is not a hypothetical risk. It is a standing invitation, and it is precisely the condition recusal exists to foreclose.

MARAD cannot credibly investigate its own regulatory conduct without independent oversight.

Line management at MARAD and the Transport and Harbours Department has already been sent on administrative leave. That step, taken swiftly, only sharpens the question of why the ministers with direct oversight responsibility for those same agencies have not been asked to do the same. A department can be managed on an acting basis for the duration of an inquiry. The absence of that basic firewall between the investigated and the investigation is the gap this editorial exists to name.

THIS IS NOT GUYANA’S FIRST REHEARSAL OF THIS SCRIPT

The pattern is familiar, and it has a recent name: Mahdia. The 2023 dormitory fire that killed twenty children produced an inquiry, a report, and years of litigation in which the state has fought its own citizens in court rather than settle what its own process found. TIGI has explicitly invoked that precedent in demanding there be no repeat of it here.

Guyanese citizens are entitled to ask, in plain terms, whether the MV Barima inquiry is being designed to establish truth or to manage a news cycle until public attention moves on — while the state, years from now, is once again on the opposite side of a courtroom from the families it promised to stand with this week.

This is Guyana, and this pattern is commonplace here in a way it is not treated as normal elsewhere. That should be a source of national shame, not resignation.

THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS

The government’s decision to offer some families a flat GY$300,000 toward funeral expenses is being defended by the Prime Minister as emergency relief rather than compensation, with any compensation decision deferred until after the Commission of Inquiry reports. That distinction may be legally tidy. It is not the point. A sum that families and the parliamentary opposition alike have noted would not cover a burial was arrived at and disbursed without any visible consultation with the families receiving it.

Grief does not strip citizens of the standing to be consulted about what is done in their name and with their dead. An arbitrary figure, however well-intentioned, delivered top-down in the immediate aftermath of mass loss, reads less like empathy than like efficiency — the state moving to close a line item before it has finished counting bodies.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY CANNOT MEAN

The Prime Minister’s Friday remarks describe prospective reform: stronger testing, better port security, more cameras on the wharves. They say nothing about retrospective accountability for the specific chain of decisions that put an eighty-seven-year-old vessel, reportedly loaded well beyond any accurate count, on the water on the eighteenth of July. Reform of future procedure is not a substitute for accountability for this tragedy, and a government under sustained public pressure has every incentive to let the first stand in for the second. We will not allow that substitution to pass without challenge.

WHAT THE 592 GUARDIAN WILL BE WATCHING

We will be tracking, specifically: whether Minister Edghill and Minister Indar recuse themselves from any supervisory role over the Transport and Harbours Department and MARAD pending the Commission’s findings; whether the Commission’s terms of reference guarantee independent, unmediated access to original records rather than records filtered through the ministries under investigation; and whether the compensation process that follows the inquiry is negotiated with the families it concerns, rather than announced to them. The families of the MV Barima’s victims were promised truth.

Truth requires a record that has not been tampered with, and a process that treats the bereaved as parties to be consulted rather than a crisis to be managed. On the government’s current posture, neither has yet been demonstrated — only promised, in the same breath as an inquiry whose credibility depends on both.

— The Board

Nadir’s Confidentiality Directive Preceded APNU’s Bid for a Parliamentary Commission on of Inquiry 

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦PARLIAMENT / MV BARIMA

 Nadir’s Confidentiality Directive Preceded APNU’s Bid for a Parliamentary Commission on of Inquiry  

Speaker’s reminder on committee secrecy arrived with no committee assigned to the Barima matter — as the opposition moved to force a House-adopted inquiry with binding terms of reference

Georgetown, Guyana — July, 2026

Two moves inside the National Assembly this week, read together rather than apart, describe the shape of a single contest: whether Parliament — not the Executive — will set the terms on which the MV Barima disaster is investigated, and whether Monday’s sitting will be permitted to become the venue for that fight at all.

On Friday, Clerk of the National Assembly Sherlock Isaacs wrote to all Members of Parliament at the direction of Speaker Manzoor Nadir, drawing their attention to Standing Order No. 101 on the confidentiality of committee proceedings and Standing Order No. 103 on the premature publication of evidence.

The letter cautioned MPs against press statements, interviews, social media commentary or any public remarks on “committee proceedings” unless expressly authorised, and confined media briefings on such matters to a committee chairperson or another member the committee itself designates.

The difficulty, according to opposition parliamentarians, is that no committee proceeding exists for the directive to attach to. Members of the APNU opposition say they have received no written notice from the Clerk’s office assigning any Barima-related matter to a sectoral, special select, or any other parliamentary committee — and under the Assembly’s own practice, such an assignment would come to them in writing. As of this publication will neither the Speaker’s office nor the Clerk has responded to queries on which committee proceeding, if any, the July 24 directive was meant to protect.

If Standing Order 101 protects committee proceedings, and no committee has been assigned this matter, the directive is invoking a protection that currently has nothing to protect.

— Editorial assessment, The 592 Guardian

THE APNU LETTER

The confidentiality directive was issued the same week APNU parliamentary leader Dr Terrence Campbell wrote to Speaker Nadir proposing that the National Assembly use Monday’s sitting to debate and adopt terms of reference for an independent commission of inquiry into the July 18 sinking of the 87-year-old, Scottish-built MV Barima — a disaster that has unofficially claimed more than 100 lives.

Campbell’s letter proposes that the House itself, rather than the Executive alone, define and adopt the inquiry’s mandate. His draft terms of reference include:

  1. Establishing the facts of the sinking, including timeline, passenger and manifest records, cargo, and weather and navigation conditions.
  2. Determining causes and contributing factors, including vessel seaworthiness, crew qualifications, and compliance with maritime law and safety standards.
  3. Examining the adequacy and timeliness of the search-and-rescue response.
  4. Assessing the regulatory framework, inspection regimes and enforcement practices of maritime and port authorities, and identifying systemic failures.
  5. Examining any allegations of negligence, misconduct, corruption or breach of statutory duty, with recommendations for legal or disciplinary action.
  6. Recommending measures to improve passenger and crew safety and emergency preparedness.
  7. Empowering the inquiry to compel documents and summon witnesses, and to produce a full public report within a specified timeframe.
  8. Adopting interim measures to protect public safety pending the inquiry’s outcome.

PNCR General Secretary Sherwin Benjamin, whose party is APNU’s largest coalition partner, has signalled the opposition will not confine its pressure to the floor of the House. He has raised the prospect of “mass political activities” — a term opposition figures have used to mean street protest — if government does not accede to the demand for a parliamentary-adopted inquiry.

WHAT THE SEQUENCE SUGGESTS — AND WHAT IT DOESN’T YET PROVE

Opposition parliamentarians who spoke to this publication characterised the timing as more than coincidence, asserting that Campbell’s request for a House-adopted commission of inquiry is what prompted the Speaker’s confidentiality directive, and reading it as a signal that Nadir does not intend to allow APNU’s motion to proceed Monday. That is, at this stage, an account attributed to opposition sources describing their understanding of Nadir’s intent — not a confirmed sequence of cause and effect, and this publication has not independently established which letter reached the Speaker’s desk first, nor obtained any account from Nadir’s office of its own reasoning.

What is independently verifiable is narrower, and arguably still damning enough on its own terms: a confidentiality directive citing committee-secrecy provisions was issued with no committee assignment on record; it landed inside the same week the opposition moved formally to wrest control of the Barima inquiry’s terms away from the Executive and place them before the full House; and neither the Speaker nor the Clerk has yet explained, publicly, what proceeding the directive was protecting.

A Speaker acting to safeguard a live committee process does not normally need to explain himself. A Speaker whose directive appears to precede any such process does.

Monday’s order paper — specifically, whether Campbell’s motion is permitted to reach the floor at all — will be the more reliable indicator of intent than anything said about this week’s sequencing. If the motion is scheduled, debated and put to a vote, the confidentiality directive will read as an unrelated, if badly timed, procedural reminder. If it is deferred, ruled out of order, or quietly kept off the agenda, the pattern opposition MPs are describing will have hardened into something closer to demonstrated fact.

OUTSTANDING QUESTIONS

  • Which committee, if any, does the Speaker’s July 24 directive relate to, and when was it constituted?
  • Did Campbell’s letter reach the Speaker’s office before or after the Clerk’s directive was issued?
  • Will Campbell’s motion on CoI terms of reference appear on Monday’s order paper?
  • Has the Parliamentary Sectoral Committee on Economic Services — of which Minister Edghill is a member — met or been asked to consider any Barima-related matter?

This report distinguishes verified findings — the content of the Clerk’s letter, the absence of any recorded committee assignment, and the text of APNU’s proposed terms of reference — from claims attributed to opposition sources regarding the Speaker’s motive, which remain unconfirmed pending response from the Speaker’s and Clerk’s offices.

— The Board

Bought, Berthed, and Buried in Paperwork: How Guyana Let the MV Barima Sail Alone

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦EDITORIAL · ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM 

MARITIME GOVERNANCE / REGION ONE / INTERIM RESPONSE

Bought, Berthed, and Buried in Paperwork: How Guyana Let the MV Barima Sail Alone

An open cargo barge now stands in for a passenger and freight service to Port Kaituma that a $12.7 million Indian-built ferry was supposed to be running by 2023 — and the vessel that did make the run, uninsured and unaccompanied by an accurate passenger count, has taken dozens of lives.

THE 592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL BOARD

An “IMPORTANT NOTICE” posted this week by the Ministry of Public Works, over the joint seal of the Ministry and the Transport and Harbours Department (T&HD), announces an “interim arrangement” for cargo shipment to Port Kaituma: an open barge, loading at the Kingston Goods Wharf on Saturday, July 25th, 2026, departing Georgetown on Monday, July 27th at 5 p.m. Cargo and essential supplies only. No passengers. The notice describes the service as “provided free of charge,” as though the state were extending a courtesy rather than discharging an obligation it has held, uninterrupted, since it became the sole operator on this route in 2019.

The notice does not name what it is standing in for. It does not have to. Nine days earlier, the vessel that has carried Region One’s cargo and passengers for more than four decades, the MV Barima, launched from that same Kingston wharf toward that same destination and never arrived. It capsized roughly seven miles off the Essequibo coast near Iron Punt on the night of Saturday, July 18th. As of this week, dozens are confirmed dead, dozens more remain missing, and the government’s own passenger manifest has been shown to not reflect who was actually on board.

A VESSEL BOUGHT, THEN LEFT IDLE FOR THREE YEARS

The government’s answer, when asked why an 87-year-old ferry was still the sole vessel on Guyana’s most isolated passenger and cargo route, has been consistent: a replacement already exists. Officials told the Associated Press that a US$12.7 million vessel purchased from India, the MV Ma Lisha, was “awaiting the completion of a special pier at Port Kaituma.”

That answer requires scrutiny, not acceptance. The Ma Lisha is not a vessel in transit or under construction. It is a finished ship that has been sitting in Guyanese waters, largely unused for its intended purpose, for more than three years.

2021

 Guyana signs a deal with Indian state shipbuilder Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers Limited to construct the MV Ma Lisha, financed by a loan from the Government of India that required the vessel be built in India.
Apr 2023

 The MV Ma Lisha arrives in Guyana, acquired specifically to improve river transportation for hinterland communities in Region One — including Port Kaituma
2023 – 2026

 The Ministry of Public Works had announced, ahead of the vessel’s arrival, plans to upgrade the Port Kaituma wharf to receive it. The upgrade is not completed. The Ma Lisha instead sails a shorter route to Kumaka. It has still not made a maiden voyage to Port Kaituma.
 Jul 18 2026

 The MV Barima — the sole remaining vessel on the Georgetown–Port Kaituma route since 2019 — capsizes roughly seven miles offshore near Iron Punt with, by the government’s own later estimate, as many as 179 people aboard against a manifest of 116 to 133.
Jul 22, 2026

 Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill tells the National Toshaos Council that the Ma Lisha still has not sailed to Port Kaituma because the rebuilt wharf developed structural problems after the soil beneath it shifted, forcing sections to be reconstructed.
Jul 25–27, 2026

 The Ministry issues the “interim arrangement” notice: an open cargo barge, no passengers, to Port Kaituma — the service this newspaper is examining here.

Set beside each other, the record shows a government that had already diagnosed the exact failure now being mourned. The wharf upgrade was announced before the Ma Lisha even arrived in the country. The infrastructure gap was not discovered in the aftermath of the Barima tragedy — it was known, budgeted around, and left open for three years while the only alternative kept the route alive on borrowed time.

A FERRY THE MINISTER CALLED THE “VESSEL OF CHOICE” — DAYS BEFORE IT SANK

In the same National Toshaos Council remarks in which he explained the Ma Lisha’s continued idleness, Minister Edghill described the Barima, prior to its sinking, as the vessel “of choice for both residents and business people to get into Port Kaituma,” and said extensive maintenance work had been carried out on it. This was not an isolated defense. Following the capsizing, Edghill has repeatedly and specifically rejected the characterization that the vessel was unseaworthy.

“There was no report of any kind that suggested the vessel was unseaworthy. It was in line for dry docking in keeping with the schedule.”

— Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill, government press briefing, July 19, 2026

According to Edghill, the Barima was last dry-docked in 2024 and was scheduled to return to dry dock in the latter half of 2026, alongside the MV Malali and MB Hercules. That defense is narrower than it may appear. A vessel can pass a maintenance schedule and still be the wrong vessel for the route and the volume it was carrying. As one commentary in Guyana’s press put it in the days after the sinking:

There is a difference between a vessel that passes a paper test and a vessel that is right for the job. We kept a 1939 hull as the sole lifeline to Port Kaituma, Morawhanna, Kumaka and Mabaruma long after we told ourselves we would retire her.

— Demerara Waves, staff commentary, July 22, 2026

This publication will takes. no position on the technical seaworthiness of the MV Barima; that is precisely what a Commission of Inquiry and independent naval architects, not politicians and not this editorial board, must determine. What is not in dispute, because the government has stated it directly, is this: the Barima operated without commercial insurance, and its passenger manifest failed to account for everyone who was aboard.

NO INSURANCE, NO ACCURATE COUNT OF WHO WAS ABOARD

Two admissions from senior officials, made at a Tuesday press briefing, deserve to be read together rather than separately, because each describes a different layer of the same failure of oversight.

First, on insurance. Minister Edghill confirmed that the Barima was not insured when it capsized, and characterized this as long-standing government practice: state-owned vessels operate without commercial insurance, with the government itself assuming the financial risk of loss or compensation.

Officials did not say whether a dedicated fund or formal self-insurance mechanism exists for maritime accidents of this scale, and it remains unclear what compensation, if any, is available to survivors and to the families of the dead.

Second, on the manifest. Prime Minister Brigadier (Ret’d) Mark Phillips acknowledged “a breakdown in the system” after it emerged that a substantial number of rescued passengers were never listed on the vessel’s official manifest — meaning that in the earliest and most critical hours of the search, rescuers did not have a reliable count of how many people they were even looking for. The Guyana Police Force has since extracted surveillance footage from the Kingston Goods Wharf specifically to reconstruct the loading and dispatch sequence, because the paper record could not be trusted to do so.

Both admissions came bundled with reassurance rather than resignation. Phillips said the manifest breakdown would form part of the forthcoming Commission of Inquiry, which he said would investigate “the extent of the failures” and recommend disciplinary measures. That the Prime Minister of an oil-producing nation now sitting on some of the largest per-capita petroleum revenues in the hemisphere must convene a Commission of Inquiry to establish how many people were on a government ferry is, in itself, the story.

WHAT THE RECORD DOES NOT YET SHOW

In the interest of the strict distinction this news media draws between verified finding and attributed allegation, it should be stated plainly: no inspection or technical report has been shown, in the public record reviewed for this piece, to have specifically failed the MV Barima or to have triggered a denial of insurance coverage. Minister Edghill has repeatedly and specifically denied that any such report existed. Separately, opposition figures — including former Minister of Public Infrastructure David Patterson and Forward Guyana Movement leader Amanza Walton-Desir — have called for the vessel’s full maintenance, inspection, dry-docking, and certification history to be handed to independent investigators, and have noted that a prior system of independent vessel inspectors was disbanded and, to their knowledge, never replaced with equivalent oversight.

Those are two different, unresolved questions, and this news media will not conflate them: whether the Barima’s technical condition was properly assessed before it sailed, and whether the oversight architecture meant to catch a failure like that even still existed. The government’s insistence that no report declared the vessel unfit does not answer the second question. It may not need to have declared the vessel unfit for the system to have failed.

QUESTIONS THE 592 GUARDIAN IS PUTTING TO THE MINISTRY OF PUBLIC WORKS

This news-media is formally requesting, and will continue to press for, answers to the following from the Ministry of Public Works and the Transport and Harbours Department:

  1. What is the current, itemized completion status of the Port Kaituma wharf upgrade, including the date the soil-shift defect was first identified, and by whom?
  2. What was the total cost, to date, of the MV Ma Lisha’s three years of idleness — including berthing, crewing, and maintenance costs for a vessel not performing its intended function?
  3. Will the Ministry release the MV Barima’s full maintenance, inspection, dry-docking, and certification records to independent investigators, as called for by former Minister David Patterson, and on what timeline?
  4. When was the independent vessel-inspection system referenced by opposition leader Amanza Walton-Desir disbanded, who made that decision, and what oversight mechanism, if any, replaced it?
  5. Is the current “free of charge” open-barge cargo notice intended as a temporary bridge to restored Ma Lisha service, and if so, what is the projected date passenger service to Port Kaituma resumes on any vessel?

The people of Port Kaituma, Morawhanna, Kumaka, and Mabaruma were not asking for luxury. They were asking, for well over a decade by some accounts, for a seaworthy, adequately overseen, and accurately accounted-for way to reach their own capital and return. A government that can find US$12.7 million for a new hull ought to be capable of finishing a wharf, insuring a vessel carrying human lives, and counting its own passengers. Until it demonstrates that capability, an open barge carrying only cargo — offered, notice says as a free service — is not evidence of state generosity. It is the visible residue of a state that built the boat and forgot the dock.

— The Board

Guyana’s Boom Shouldn’t be Built on the Backs of Unprotected Workers

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THE 592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL•ACCOUNTABILITY •LABOR POLICY

Guyana’s Boom Shouldn’t be Built on the Backs of Unprotected Workers

This week, Amy Pope, Director General of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), visited Guyana to discuss opportunities to strengthen IOM’s support to the Member State in managing migration to help power that growth.

Guyana’s headline GDP numbers — nearly 20 percent growth last year — have been celebrated as proof that the country has arrived. But beneath the gloss of construction cranes and energy deals is a labour landscape fraying at the edges: a rapidly expanding demand for workers met, in far too many places, by ad‑hoc recruitment, opaque contracts, and an almost complete absence of formal policy or oversight. The result is predictable: migrant workers filling key roles without basic protections, Guyanese workers exposed to wage pressure, and public institutions scrambling to catch up after harm has already occurred.

 My reporting for the 592 Guardian uncovered two patterns that make this crisis neither theoretical nor incidental:

First, in the so‑called Cuban situation, groups of foreign nationals were brought in under promises of secure housing and formal employment but ended up living in overcrowded camps, paid in cash below the legal minimum, and prevented from freely leaving by recruiters who retained passports.

Second, an influx of Indian nationals recruited through a firm operating under the trade name Ekaa HRIM revealed systemic use of upfront recruitment fees, opaque contracts tied to single employers, and layers of subcontracting that insulated primary contractors from responsibility when conditions deteriorated. In multiple cases, workers described being charged sums that created de facto debt obligations, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and unable to press complaints.

 These are not isolated anecdotes. Across project sites and company camps, employers desperate for labour lean on recruiters — some legitimate, many not — who deliver foreign nationals under verbal arrangements. Work permits and formal contracts are inconsistent; where documents exist they are often confusing, short‑term, or tied to a single employer. Wages are sometimes paid late or in cash below legal minimums. Complaints to labour offices take months, if they are logged at all. Vulnerable workers, lacking legal knowledge and language access, face intimidation and threats of deportation when they try to assert rights.

 This is not a peripheral problem. The sectors driving Guyana’s growth — construction, energy, and healthcare — are precisely those where rushed hiring and subcontracting are most common.

When the state tolerates informal labour supply chains, it enables exploitation and corrodes labour standards across the board.

Local workers see downward pressure on wages and weaker bargaining power. Communities absorb strains on housing, health services and infrastructure with no compensatory planning or investment. The political fallout is real: where officials appear to side with employers or large projects, resentment builds and scapegoating of migrant populations becomes likely.

 International agencies such as the IOM position migration as a development tool when “managed well.” That is correct in principle; what is missing here is management that is anchored in enforceable rules and institutional capacity. Guyana has received technical assistance for migration governance since 2009, yet the practical mechanics of matching labour demand to supply — transparent recruitment, standard contracts, occupational credential recognition, regularised temporary work permits, and accessible complaint mechanisms — are still woefully underdeveloped.

What must happen now

 1) Formalise and fast‑track sectoral work permits with safeguards. Implement clear, time‑limited permits for high‑demand sectors that require signed employment contracts, defined wage floors, social protection contributions, and portability clauses allowing workers to change abusive employers.

 2) License and audit recruiters; criminalise exploitative fees. All recruitment agencies and brokers must be licensed, publicly listed, and subject to independent audits. Charging workers recruitment fees that create debt bondage should attract criminal penalties and immediate repatriation support. Investigations like those published in the 592 Guardian show how firms operating under trade names such as Ekaa HRIM exploited regulatory gaps; licensing and audits would expose these networks and their subcontracting chains.

 3) Strengthen labour inspection and access to justice. Increase the number and capacity of labour inspectors, fund legal aid for migrant and low‑income workers, and provide complaint channels in relevant languages with protections against retaliation. Inspectors must have the authority to demand payroll records, housing logs, and recruiter contracts when evidence of abuse surfaces — as it did in the Cuban camps we documented.

 4) Create interoperable migration‑labour data systems. Permits, payroll registration, social security contributions and complaints must be tracked in an integrated database to flag abuse patterns, sectoral shortages, and illegal hiring practices.

 5) Protect public services and host communities. Require companies hiring large numbers of foreign workers to contribute to local infrastructure (housing, clinics, schools) through transparent levies tied to project approvals.

6) Pursue accountability in procurement and contracting. Public and private project approvals must require disclosure of labour supply chains and proof of lawful recruitment. Where Ekaa HRIM and similar intermediaries were involved in supplying labour, contracts should be reviewed and sanctions applied if evidence shows evasion of employer responsibilities.

7) Negotiate regional mobility protocols with safeguards. CARICOM‑level mobility must be coupled with mutual recognition of credentials, social benefit portability, and joint anti‑trafficking enforcement.

 Who benefits from inaction

In the gaps left by weak policy, private interests and middlemen prosper. Recruiters charging fees, unscrupulous subcontractors who ignore safety and labour laws, and, occasionally, complicit local officials benefit from informality. That dynamic must be disrupted not only for moral reasons but also to safeguard long‑term development: a workforce that is exploited, underpaid, and politically alienated cannot sustain inclusive growth.

 A test for leadership

Guyana’s leadership faces a choice. It can treat migration purely as a technical matter to be outsourced to consultants and international agencies, or it can own the politics and create enforceable systems that protect workers and communities alike. Implementing the measures above requires political will: funding for inspectors, legal reforms, and the courage to sanction powerful actors who flout the law.

 Time is short. As construction projects multiply and the energy sector scales up, the number of migrant workers in Guyana will grow.

If policy does not catch up, we will watch inequality widen and labour standards erode — a grim irony for a country touting exceptional growth.

Guyana’s boom must not become a business model built on unregulated migration. Sound governance, transparent recruitment, and enforceable protections are not optional niceties — they are the price of sustainable development.

Guyana Absorbs 12.5% US Tariff as Forced Labour Framework, Not Findings, Becomes the Standard

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ OPINION ♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦ TRADE POLICY

Guyana Absorbs 12.5% US Tariff as Forced Labour Framework, Not Findings, Becomes the Standard

July, 2026

Guyana’s exports to the United States will carry a 12.5 percent additional tariff under final action taken by the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) on July 23, placing the country among 46 economies deemed to have failed a specific legal test: the absence of an enforced prohibition on importing goods made with forced labour.

The determination closes out a Section 301 investigation opened on March 12, 2026, at President Trump’s direction, covering 60 trading partners. USTR concluded in June that all 60 economies under investigation had failed to impose and effectively enforce such a prohibition, and invited written comment and testimony before finalising the applicable rate. Guyana was never among the candidates for the lower 10 percent tier — Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United Kingdom qualified there by holding an existing import ban, a partial enforcement regime, or a firm commitment under an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade. Guyana had none of the three, and so was assigned to the residual 12.5 percent bracket alongside 45 other economies, including Brazil, India, South Korea, Japan, and Trinidad and Tobago’s Caribbean neighbours the Bahamas and Dominican Republic.

WHAT GUYANA ARGUED, AND WHERE IT FELL SHORT

Guyana did not go to Washington empty-handed. Foreign Secretary Robert Persaud confirmed ahead of the July 7–9 hearings that the Ministry of Labour and Manpower Planning had submitted a request for Guyana to appear and respond directly to the USTR findings.

When the government’s case was ultimately delivered, it was Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sharon Roopchand-Edwards, who spoke for Guyana at the hearing — a detail that raises a fair question about which ministry actually led the country’s defence on a matter of labour enforcement.

USTR’s final determination was only released Thursday evening, and this publication has not yet had the opportunity to put that question to either ministry; it is one worth pursuing as reaction to the tariff decision develops.

Roopchand-Edwards’s testimony was substantive on its own terms. She told USTR that the Government of Guyana was “not aware of evidence demonstrating that goods produced through forced labour are being manufactured in, imported into, or exported from Guyana,” and cited more than 2,000 labour inspections conducted across economic sectors as of June 2026 without substantiated findings of forced labour. She pointed to the Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act, constitutional prohibitions, Guyana’s obligations under ILO Conventions 29 and 105, and ministerial authority under the Customs Act to block imports “where credible evidence exists.” She also noted that Guyana and the United States are in active discussions toward an Agreement on Reciprocal Trade.(ART)

“The Government of Guyana is not aware of evidence demonstrating that goods produced through forced labour are being manufactured in, imported into, or exported from Guyana.”

— Sharon Roopchand-Edwards, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs

None of this moved Guyana into the 10 percent bracket, and the reason is instructive rather than punitive. USTR’s tiering was not, on the public record, a verdict on any single country’s enforcement record measured against its neighbours. It was a binary test of legal architecture: does the country have a standing import prohibition, a partial regime, or a concluded ART commitment addressing forced labour goods specifically. Guyana’s ART discussions remain exactly that — discussions, not a concluded instrument — and its Customs Act authority to block imports is framed as reactive, triggered only once forced labour in a specific supply chain is “conclusively determined,” rather than a standing prohibition of the kind USTR credited elsewhere. Countries with comparably contested labour records, including Bangladesh and Cambodia, landed in the lower tier because they held the qualifying instrument, not because USTR found their enforcement superior to Guyana’s.

THE EXPOSURE BEHIND THE STATISTICS

Roopchand-Edwards’s inspection figures and legal citations describe a framework. They do not resolve the open domestic case most likely to be cited against Guyana’s position going forward: the Ministry of Labour’s ongoing investigation into Ekaa HRIM Earth Resources Management, the India-headquartered operator of a quarry at Batavia, Region Seven, where 38 Indian nationals alleged passport confiscation, unpaid wages, hazardous conditions, and confinement, and where the Ministry confirmed it is investigating the death of a worker, Sekhar Chhetri, on May 12, 2026. Ekaa HRIM has denied the allegations and stated it is cooperating fully with the Government of Guyana, the Guyana Police Force, the Trafficking in Persons Unit, and the High Commission of India.

The Ekaa HRIM matter was not cited by name in the USTR proceeding, and this publication is not asserting that it drove the 12.5 percent determination — the rate applies to 46 economies under a common legal test, most of which have no comparable case attached to them at all. But it stands as the clearest illustration available of the gap between Guyana’s stated framework and a live, unresolved allegation of exactly the practice the tariff regime is designed to penalise.

It is the kind of case a government pointing to “no substantiated evidence” would need to resolve convincingly, and quickly, if it wants its next hearing before USTR — or before Guyana’s own public — to land differently.

WHAT THE TARIFF MEANS GOING FORWARD

The 12.5 percent duty applies to substantially all Guyanese goods entering the US market, subject to product-specific exemptions USTR has reserved for raw materials where domestic US supply would otherwise be threatened, goods that cannot be sourced elsewhere in sufficient quantity, and cases where the tariff would cause broader economic disruption. Guyana’s US-bound exports are concentrated in commodities and extractive-sector output, some of which may qualify for exemption under those categories; the applicable Federal Register notice and its annex will determine exposure product by product, and this publication will report on that breakdown as it becomes available.

Roopchand-Edwards’s closing argument to USTR — that two decades of export growth and a significant American commercial presence in Guyana’s energy sector demonstrate that “U.S. commerce is neither restricted nor burdened in the Guyanese market” — is the argument of a government that sees itself as a trade partner in good standing being caught by a blunt instrument. It may well be.

But the instrument does not ask whether Guyana is a good partner. It asks whether Guyana has closed the specific legal gap USTR identified, and as of this week, the record shows that it has not.

— The Board

Guyana’s Democracy Is Not Collapsing Overnight — It Is Being Erased Piece by Piece

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THE 592 GUARDIAN •EDITORIAL ACCOUNTABILITY •CIVIL LIBERTY 

Guyana’s Democracy Is Not Collapsing Overnight — It Is Being Erased Piece by Piece

Guyana’s democracy is not being demolished in one dramatic act. It is being “picked apart”— steadily, deliberately, and with a confidence that should alarm every citizen who still believes power must answer to the people.

That is the real scandal. Not whether the country still holds elections. Not whether government spokesmen can recite the vocabulary of democracy on command.

The question is whether democracy still has substance when dissent is narrowed, scrutiny is resented, institutions are bent, and public accountability is treated like an inconvenience rather than a duty. What we are witnessing is not normal governance under pressure. It is the slow normalization of democratic erosion.

This country has entered a dangerous phase in which warning signs are dismissed as exaggeration, criticism is recast as hostility, and legitimate concern is waved away with political arrogance.

That is how democratic decline advances — not always through open force, but through a steady corrosion of standards.                  One restriction becomes another. One silence becomes a habit. One abuse becomes precedent. The alarm has already been sounded by human-rights and governance observers who warn of shrinking political and civic space. That warning should not be shrugged off.                         

It should be confronted. A society does not lose its freedom only when the constitution is torn up. It loses it when power begins to act as though it is beyond question, beyond restraint, and beyond consequence.

Press freedom is one of the first casualties when democracy starts to thin out. When journalists are pressured, when access becomes selective, when the state grows allergic to criticism, and when public scrutiny is treated as an affront, the message is unmistakable: know your place, or be made to know it.

That is not democratic culture. That is disciplinary politics.          Recent reporting has shown Guyana slipping further on global press freedom measures, with concerns about a worsening media environment and tighter restrictions. That matters because the press is not decoration in a democracy.

It is one of the last remaining lines between power and impunity.  Once that line is weakened, the public is left to rely on official narratives alone — and official narratives are always most comfortable where contradiction is weak.

The same pattern is visible in the wider civic space. When civic groups, activists, and opposition voices are made to feel that criticism will be met with hostility rather than engagement, the state is not governing democratically. It is managing dissent. And the management of dissent is often the first polished step toward deeper authoritarian habits.

 Let us be blunt: elections alone do not make a democracy healthy. Elections can coexist with intimidation, unequal access, institutional capture, and a media climate that chills accountability. That is why citizens must stop being comforted by the mere existence of ballots and start asking harder questions about the conditions under which those ballots are cast, debated, reported, and understood.

Guyana’s problem is not just bad optics. It is the gradual normalization of imbalance. When power becomes more concentrated, when oversight weakens, when institutions appear more protective of authority than of public interest, the democratic architecture begins to warp.

And once that warp becomes accepted, the public is asked to lower its expectations. First comes frustration. Then comes resignation. Then comes surrender. That is the road no serious nation should travel. The government will no doubt insist that this is all partisan drama, that Guyana remains democratic, that critics are overstating the case. But that defense is precisely what makes the danger more acute. Systems in decline rarely admit their decline. They insist that everything is fine right up until the moment it is no longer possible to pretend.

Guyana must resist that trap. If the nation is serious about democracy, it must defend the freedom to criticize, the independence to investigate, the courage to question, and the institutional discipline to check power before power consumes the checks.

A democracy cannot survive by demanding obedience and calling it stability. Nor can it thrive when citizens are told that silence is maturity and compliance is patriotism.

 What is at stake is bigger than one administration, one controversy, or one media cycle. What is at stake:

♦ Is whether Guyana remains a republic in any meaningful democratic sense.

♦ Or whether it continues drifting toward a system where elections remain, but freedom is thinned; where institutions remain, but independence is weakened; where power remains, but accountability is staged.

That is the warning. That is the fight. And that is why Guyana must not be lulled into accepting democratic erosion as ordinary politics.

A country does not have to become a dictatorship to fail democracy. Sometimes it only has to stop defending it

WE HEAR THE NOISE” IS NOT AN ANSWER.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN. ◊ RELEASE◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM

 

WE HEAR THE NOISE” IS NOT AN ANSWER: TIGI  DEMANDS AN INTERNATIONAL INVESTIGATION AND RECUSAL OF EDGHILL, INDAR, AND MARAD LEADERSHIP.

IMMEDIATE PRESS RELEASE 

 Transparency International Guyana Inc. The Amerindian Peoples Association Rescue Guyana and 592 Gurdian demand an IMO-led international investigation and the recusal of the ministers and agency heads whose oversight failed.

 THE SCALE OF THE FAILURE

The MV Barima capsized off the Pomeroon coast late Saturday, July 18, carrying far more people than the government first acknowledged. Initial reports placed 116 passengers and 17 crew aboard; that figure was later revised upward to 179 after officials reviewed boarding footage. As of this week, 27 bodies have been recovered, 69 people rescued, and 83 remain unaccounted for. The vessel was 89 years old.

The gap between the manifest and the true passenger count sits at the center of this tragedy, not its margins. Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill has himself called the discrepancy “criminal.” The captain and first engineer are in police custody after both reportedly tested positive for narcotics.

A TRAGEDY FORETOLD

The Amerindian Peoples Association said plainly what North-West residents have said for years: this was a tragedy waiting to happen. The route is used disproportionately by Indigenous Guyanese, for whom river travel is not a convenience but the only affordable way to reach medical care, school, and commerce in Georgetown. An 89-year-old vessel was allowed to keep carrying that population, undetected overloading and all.

CONTRADICTIONS AT THE TOP

Minister of Public Utilities and Aviation Deodat Indar — who, until September 2025, served as Minister within the Ministry of Public Works with shared responsibility for the Transport and Harbours Department — first stated categorically that the MV Barima was not overloaded, then reversed himself days later, alleging criminal conduct. A sitting minister cannot publicly prejudge the very facts an independent investigation exists to determine and then oversee that same investigation. The same conflict applies to Minister Edghill and to MARAD’s own leadership, who cannot credibly investigate their own regulatory failures.

Prime Minister Mark Phillips’s response, when asked directly whether Edghill should go, was that he “hears the noise” — while pointing to President Ali, who was out of the country in Canada when the disaster struck. That is not leadership. It is the delegation of accountability to an absent principal.

Safe transportation is not a privilege; it is a fundamental right that every person in Guyana deserves, regardless of whether they travel by road, air or river.

— Amerindian Peoples Association

TIGI JOINS THE CALL

Transparency International Guyana Inc., through Executive Member Fred Collins, has now added its voice to Rescue Guyana’s and the APA’s. Collins was direct: Guyanese have no appetite for another domestic inquiry that collapses into what he called a “circus maximus.”

The reference is not abstract. In May 2023, 20 children — most of them Indigenous girls — burned to death in the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory fire. A Presidential Commission of Inquiry followed. Three years later, families remain in the High Court, alleging the State pressured them into grossly inadequate settlements without independent legal advice, then fought to have their claims struck out entirely. That is the precedent Collins is naming: a domestic process that ended not in justice, but in the state litigating against grieving families for years. No one is prepared to watch that repeat.

WHAT MUST HAPPEN NOW

TIGI, joined by civil society groups The Amerindian Peoples Association and Rescue Guyana — with the full backing of The 592 Guardian — demand:

  1. An independent, impartial and objective international investigation led by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), staffed by global maritime experts with no institutional stake in the outcome — not a domestic Commission of Inquiry under government control.
  2. The inclusion of international civil society organisations with an established presence in Guyana as full members of that Commission, not observers.
  3. The immediate recusal of Minister Juan Edghill, Minister Deodat Indar, and MARAD’s senior leadership from any role in the investigation. 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.
  4. No repeat of the Mahdia model. The public will not accept another inquiry that produces a report while the state simultaneously fights its own citizens in court for years afterward.
  5. Full public accounting of the manifest fraud — how dozens of additional souls went uncounted, who is responsible, and what enforcement follows.

A SEPARATE, UNVERIFIED CONCERN

Separately, reports circulating today allege that Opposition Member of Parliament Sherod Duncan was arrested at Charity, Essequibo, while operating a drone near the area where families are gathered awaiting news of loved ones. Duncan has reportedly said he was filming recovery vessels offshore, as he had done on prior days, when a police officer instructed him to stop; two senior officers then told him they were acting on instructions. The 592 Guardian has not independently verified this account and will update as it is confirmed. If accurate, it raises a legitimate question the government owes the public an answer to: why restrict press and public documentation at a site the state says it is handling with full transparency?

THE STAKES

Guyana’s institutions have exhausted the public’s trust. This is no longer a domestic accountability question alone — it is a call for the international community’s attention and assistance, so that the families of the MV Barima can get what the Mahdia families are still fighting for years later: the truth, and justice, without having to sue the state to get it.

 

MONEY, MONEY EVERYWHERE AND WE GOING NOWHERE

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY & TRANSPARENCY 

MONEY, MONEY EVERYWHERE AND WE GOING NOWHERE

OPINION BY: Leyland Chitlall Roopnaraine

While the Guyanese populace is presently consumed with President Ali’s multi-billion-dollar farm there are more sinister lumps of taxpayers’ money going down the drain. Guyana lacks the ability through the legislative process to investigate any fraud surrounding this 150 acres mega project while PPP apparatchicks continue to defend this highly questionable acquisition. Of course, President Ali is no stranger to land giveaways, as he was slapped with 19 counts of land fraud in 2015. 

The Gas to Energy (GTE) project, now 2 years overdue is facing colossal engineering problems as on- site tests reveal that the concrete turbine foundation is substandard. And the project costs keep shooting North from an initial US $750 million to over US$2 billion. The national airport, under renovation for the past 15 years, has been allocated more money-a whopping 3.2 billion dollars.

The electricity sector is in a messy scramble to upkeep an expired contract with the Turkish Karpowership generators. This Berbice- stationed ship was contracted in 2024 at 7.6 cents a unit; it’s 9.5 today after ‘negotiations’- a hike of 25 % for the same 36 megawatts, off the same vessel that hasn’t moved from Everton in two years.  This translates to US$5.8 million more a year, about G$3.4 million more a day on a ship with a new contract locked in for two more years. Would it not be wise to buy our own generator which the country could keep as back-up power supply?

Now to the Health sector. The government hired the Austrian firm VAMED Engineering to design and build two major state-of-the-art hospitals:

  1. The Guyana Pediatric and Maternal Hospital (Ogle, East Coast Demerara): A massive 5-story specialty hospital with 256 beds designed specifically for mothers and children. 

The cost: €149 Million ($33.5 Billion GYD).

  1. The New Amsterdam Hospital Campus (Region 6): A modern regional hospital with a cardiac unit, psychiatric wing, and digital training facilities. 

The cost: €150 Million ($33.7 Billion GYD).

On June 2, 2026, the Ministry of Health officially told VAMED it intended to fire them from both projects.

On July 16, 2026, VAMED fired back by filing a lawsuit in international arbitration, demanding €45.5 Million ($10 Billion GYD) that they claim the One Guyana government (on your behalf) has refused to pay.

The argument boils down to a classic “chicken-and-egg” problem:

What the One Guyana government says: VAMED is way behind schedule, missed its deadlines, didn’t bring in enough workers, and hasn’t delivered the high-tech medical equipment it promised. President Ali and the Health Ministry say they gave VAMED several chances , but the pace was just too slow to accept.

What VAMED says: VAMED claims it had to slow down because the Government stopped paying them in May 2025. They argue that no contractor can build a multi-billion-dollar hospital for over a year entirely out of their own pocket. In the meantime, Guyanese continue to spend colossal sums at private hospitals, bypassing the state owned and poorly run facilities.

Finally, it is amazing ,the lengths to which this government goes to deny important matters.  When it is unable to deny, it deflects.  However, when efforts at deflecting come to naught, it is time for minimization to takeover. In fact, less than 24 hours after Natural Resources Minister Vickram Bharrat flatly denied reports of a pipeline rupture to Demerara Waves, two state regulatory bodies issued a joint statement admitting to a pipeline “anomaly”.

In any modern democracy, public confidence is not built on personal assurances from political allies so it is not surprising that the chief lawman has come to the defense of the Uitvlugt University graduate stating that loans were obtained to construct the poultry and lack belly farm. This project reeks of use of state equipment, as evidenced with Pradoville 2, yet the Chatree stamps his approval with the  reference to there being “no law” preventing a President from owning a business is equally unconvincing.

Legality and accountability are not the same thing. Many actions can be perfectly legal while still raising serious questions about ethics, transparency, conflicts of interest. Now the nation awaits the unlimited ex-president pension and expenses.

Meanwhile, after 5 years, with black belly Ali possessing 1500 house lots (1 acre = 8   (50X100) house lots, I am still waiting for my house lot.