Archive for category: Featured

THE BARRICADE IS THE MESSAGE

What “Consultation” Actually Means to This Government

BOARD EDITORIAL— The Board · August, 2026

Walston Martins did everything right. He is the elected Chairman of the Buxton/Foulis Neighbourhood Democratic Council. He received an invitation to the government’s Model Village Initiative consultation at Melanie Damishana. He showed up.

He was pushed behind a police barricade and told he would be arrested if he did not comply — in his own jurisdiction, for the offence of standing where he was invited to stand.

By Martins’s account, the sequence began when police ordered a group of young women waiting nearby to leave the area outside a business opposite the venue. When Martins asked why, Assistant Commissioner of Police Mahendra Siwnarine allegedly told him to move behind the barricade or be arrested.

Martins refused on principle — he said he had broken no law and was standing within the territory his own council governs. The warning was repeated. He was, by his own account, effectively forced out.

This is one man’s account, on the record, and Martins says he intends to pursue the matter further. The 592 Guardian treats it as an attributed allegation, not yet an adjudicated fact. But it does not stand alone. It is the latest entry in a pattern this news media has been documenting for two weeks, and taken together, that pattern tells you something the government has not said out loud: these “consultations” were never built to hear from the public. They were built to be seen.

A WEEK OF BARRICADES

Consider what else happened in the same seven-day span.

On August 4, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo held an outreach at Watooka House in Linden. Residents waited thirty minutes for a promised meeting that never happened. When opposition supporters and Region 10 residents pressed forward, barricades gave way. A six-hour standoff followed. The Vice President left under security escort without addressing the crowd he had promised to meet.

On the very next day August 5, in Koberimo village, Barima-Waini, Minister Juan Edghill’s own stop on the Region One outreach tour was met by a handful of mostly women holding placards — and a heavy police presence in flak jackets. Not a security detail sized to the moment. A show of force sized to deter it. Sending Edghill, one of the two ministers residents are demanding resign over the Barima disaster, into the region that lost the most people to that disaster, and greeting the women who came to meet him with body armour, is not caution.

It is a message about who the state expects trouble from — and it is not the minister.

On that same day, a Coast Guard patrol intercepted a speedboat carrying Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed near the Pomeroon Floating Base, bound for a peaceful protest in Moruca — inside the very region Edghill and Indar were touring. The government’s account calls it a routine documentation check. Mohamed’s account says the same vessel had passed the same checkpoint that same morning without incident, and that the demand for paperwork came only after a soldier took an interest in who was aboard.

He was turned back before he reached Moruca at all. On August 6, Walston Martins was barricaded out of a meeting he was invited to attend.

When the public shows up uninvited — or shows up invited but inconvenient — the state’s answer is flak jackets and a line of officers, not a conversation.

Four incidents in three days. Three different arms of the security apparatus — regular police, joint services, Coast Guard. Four different targets — a group of placard-holding women in a Region One village, an opposition leader headed to a protest, a crowd of Region 10 residents, a sitting NDC chairman.

One thread runs through all of them: when the public shows up uninvited, or shows up invited but inconvenient, the state’s answer is flak jackets and a line of officers, not a conversation.

THE ROADSHOW WAS NEVER ABOUT LISTENING

This newsroom has argued from the first day of the Model Village tour that its structure gives away its purpose. Daytime, weekday-only sessions that working people cannot attend. No online alternative, despite one being trivially available and far more inclusive than a bus tour through six regions. Local NDC governance structures that are, by the government’s own inaction, too broken in many communities to meaningfully receive village-level input in the first place.

Add now a fourth feature: security postures that treat elected local officials, protesting citizens, and even a handful of women with placards as threats to be contained rather than constituents to be heard.      Assistant Commissioner Siwnarine did not simply ask Martins to step back for crowd management. He is alleged to have threatened arrest against a sitting NDC Chairman who had done nothing unlawful, in the area his own council governs — while opposition supporters demonstrated outside.

In Koberimo, the flak jackets arrived before the trouble did, because in this government’s arithmetic, showing up with a placard is treated as the trouble.

You do not barricade the people you are consulting. You barricade the people you are performing for an audience without.

WHAT THE THEATRE IS COVERING FOR

Strip away the outreach branding and ask what these events are actually accomplishing. A predetermined infrastructure plan gets a photograph of a minister among residents. A government under sustained pressure over the MV Barima disaster — the unanswered questions about Commission of Inquiry appointees with undisclosed professional ties, the silenced witnesses, the six-month statutory clock now running against victims’ families — gets a news cycle about roads and recreation grounds instead.

An administration facing a second consecutive week of youth-led silent protest outside the Office of the President gets to point to a roadshow as evidence it is “people centered,” even as its own security forces make that phrase harder to say with a straight face by the day.

None of this requires believing in a grand unified conspiracy. It requires only noticing that every barricade this week has fallen on the same side: between the government and the people it says it is going out to meet.

WHAT WE’RE ASKING

The 592 Guardian renews, plainly, the questions this pattern demands answers to:

Why was an invited, elected local official prevented from attending a consultation in his own jurisdiction?

On whose instruction did Assistant Commissioner Siwnarine act?

Was the threat of arrest authorized, or improvised in the moment?

And if the Model Village Initiative is genuinely a listening exercise, why does listening keep requiring a barricade?

Martins says he is pursuing this further. We will be watching what “further” produces — and whether the government answers the question directly, or simply moves the roadshow to its next stop and waits for the story to move with it.

— The Board

Facing the Fire Together

BOARD EDITORIAL By Hem Kumar, Editor

 Agency, Consent, and the Case for Conditional Solidarity

There are truths about Guyana today that require no argument, only acknowledgment. The rising cost of living is not a talking point — it is what a mother in Georgetown calculates every time she stands at a market stall. The outward migration of skilled and unskilled Guyanese alike is not abstraction — it is the empty seat at a family table that used to be full.

The reliance of the wealthy on foreign goods and services, and the quiet relocation of officials’ own families and wealth to North America even as they preside over the systems the rest of the country is told to trust, are not rumors — they are patterns, observed and repeated, in an oil-rich era that promised otherwise.

These are lived truths. This editorial does not dispute a single one of them.

But truth, on its own, is incomplete without the question of agency. Governance is not a force that operates in a vacuum, imposed from above onto a people with no part in its continuation. It is sustained — reinforced, legitimized — by consent, and consent can be active or it can be passive.

At public outreaches and political engagements across this country, we see crowds gather, applaud, and reaffirm support for the very administrations presiding over the inequities so many, rightly, lament

That matters. It cannot be waved away.                                         And yet — this is not an indictment of the Guyanese people. It is an indictment of the conditions that manufacture their acquiescence.

To call for accountability from citizens without naming the mechanisms that constrain their choices would be dishonest.

♦Patronage networks that tie land, employment, and opportunity to political loyalty.

♦Ethnic mobilization that converts elections into referenda on identity rather than governance.

♦Information environments that reward loyalty and punish dissent.

These are not excuses offered on behalf of a passive electorate — they are the architecture within which “choice” is exercised.

A people who have survived under structures engineered to produce dependency are not, by that fact alone, complicit in their own condition. They are, in significant part, victims of circumstances not of their own making.

That distinction matters — and it is precisely why the answer cannot be resignation, from anyone, anywhere.

There is a temptation, particularly among those of us who observe from a distance, to translate frustration into judgment, and judgment into a verdict rendered from safety upon those who remain. That temptation must be resisted, and resisted first by us. No one — least of all those of us writing from the comfort of the diaspora — has standing to demand discomfort of others while seeking refuge from it ourselves.

If the call is for those at home to stop sitting and start standing, that same call must be answered by those abroad. It is not enough to send remittances that, however well-intentioned, can quietly reinforce the very dependency structures under critique. It is not enough to critique from a position that carries none of the daily risk borne by those who critique — or organize, or vote differently — while still living under the systems in question.

No one gets to stand outside the fire and issue verdicts on who is standing in it correctly.

This is the meaning of we are all in this together. Not a slogan, but a discipline. No one — not the citizen at home weighing loyalty against livelihood, not the diaspora member weighing comfort against contribution — gets to stand outside the fire and issue verdicts on who is standing in it correctly.

What, then, is the alternative to both resignation and unconditional charity? It is conditional partnership — solidarity with terms. In the local vernacular: we will not simply give you a fish ; we will teach you to fish.    Diaspora engagement, if it is to mean anything beyond ceremony, cannot be unconditional loyalty repackaged as remittance, nor can it be charity that asks nothing of its recipients and changes nothing in its givers.

It must be capacity-building: support for independent institutions rather than individuals, investment in civic and legal literacy, resources tied to demonstrated organizing rather than to silence bought through comfort. And it must be reciprocal — a partnership that asks as much discomfort of those who give as of those who receive.

This is not a theoretical posture. It has been tested. In the wake of the MV Barima tragedy, as a new and unprecedented Gen Z-led movement surfaced demanding accountability, the instinct among those of us in civil society who have done this work for years was not to co-opt it but to support it — to identify its ideological authors, consult experienced organizers on how structure could be offered without control, and extend a hand.

That hand offered guidance, mentorship, the accumulated experience of those who have organized and advocated in this country for decades.  The response was nothing silence.

 An outreach offering both editorial engagement and a seat at a multi-stakeholder table, was met with silence.

“That hand was extended three times — not merely for comment, but for a seat at the table where civil society, business, and government were already being convened. It was not once acknowledged.”

Another separate attempt was met with a request — specific and equipment-based: a drone, and a controller capable of producing high-quality YouTube footage, offered in exchange for footage of protest actions.

A street protest does not require broadcast-quality aerial video. It requires people, presence, and the will to stand where they can be seen. Every image of every protest to date has come from a phone in someone’s hand, and that has been enough. When guidance is met not with a question about strategy, sustainability, or structure, but with a request for equipment better suited to content production than to accountability, it is worth naming plainly what that reveals.

This is not raised as grievance. It is raised as diagnosis. A movement’s readiness to receive structured partnership is itself information — and what it reveals here is not a lack of good faith, but a gap in the very capacity that partnership exists to build. If the immediate need is not yet the ability to organize a sustained coalition but something more basic — coordination, communication, the infrastructure of trust — then that is the need to be met first, honestly, before anything more ambitious is proposed. Anything else is simply theater  in a different costume and   not advocacy. It is another version of the sitting-and-waiting this editorial has already named as the problem.

This is not without precedent. This nation did not arrive at independence because its forebears had the comfort of waiting for someone else to secure it on their behalf. They did not have the luxury of remaining seated. Whatever else separates that generation from this one, the standard they set was not comfort — it was risk, undertaken in common cause. That standard remains available to us. It has not expired.

No one can fight harder for a people than that people is willing to fight for itself — and no diaspora can stand indefinitely on behalf of those unwilling to stand with it. But the reverse is equally true: no one at home should be expected to stand alone while those abroad remain seated in safety, offering critique in place of contribution.

The trajectory of this nation will not be changed by complaint alone, nor by charity alone, nor by loyalty offered without condition. It will be changed when those at home and those abroad recognize the fire as shared — and choose, together, to face it.

“THEY POWER OF THE PEOPLE IS GREATER THAN THE PEOPLE IN POWER”

— The Board

The 592 Guardian  |  Accountability Journalism for Guyana

 A Cherry-Picked Contractor

BOARD EDITORIAL

What Paul Koole’s Record Means for the MV Barima Salvage

August, 2026

The Government of Guyana did not simply fail to run an open, competitive process for the recovery of the MV Barima. It went further: while publicly opening a bidding exercise to reassure grieving families that the process would be transparent, it had already privately invited a specific Dutch firm — Koole Onshore and Koole Offshore (KMS) — to submit a salvage proposal.

That much was established by Kaieteur News’s reporting on the no-bid invitation. What Kaieteur has now added, and what The 592 Guardian holds to be the single most damning piece of evidence produced in this entire tragedy, is who that firm is.

Paul Koole founder and owner of KMS

Paul Koole, the founder and owner of KMS and its extensive constellation of related entities, was arrested by Italian police in 2019 and held in custody following an Interpol alert originating from Nigeria, where he faced an embezzlement matter. His lawyer at the time called the arrest incomprehensible. Kaieteur’s research further documents a decade of entanglement — administrative battles with the Dutch state, trademark litigation with BMW, U.S. federal court discovery disputes, and a Dutch Supreme Court ruling that a financing structure tied to the broader Koole corporate family constituted deliberate tax abuse.

This is not a single blemish on an otherwise clean record. It is a pattern, documented across multiple jurisdictions and multiple courts, of a corporate operator whose dealings repeatedly attract the scrutiny of law enforcement, regulators, and rival counsel.

A government that wanted a clean recovery would have run a clean process. Instead it hand-picked, in secret, an operator with a rap sheet that spans three continents.

THE NO-BID INVITATION, RESTATED

Set aside for a moment who KMS is, and look only at how it was engaged. Kaieteur News reported that the Dutch firm was invited to submit a salvage proposal for the MV Barima days before any official publicly opened a competitive bidding process. That sequencing is not incidental. A bidding process opened after the preferred vendor has already been approached is not a bidding process — it is a formality staged for public consumption, run in parallel with a decision that had, in substance, already been made. This newsroom and others focused, understandably, on that procurement irregularity in isolation. It is now clear we were looking at only the first layer of the story.

WHO THE GOVERNMENT CHOSE

KMS is headquartered in the Netherlands and has recently established a base in Suriname specifically to mobilise staff and resources into Guyana. It has previously completed casualty-removal contracts for this government on the Demerara River — meaning the relationship predates the Barima disaster and predates this procurement entirely. That prior relationship is precisely what should trouble the public: it suggests a standing, informal channel between this administration and Koole’s operation, one comfortable enough to bypass competitive process when a new job arises.

The record on Paul Koole personally is not a matter of dispute or rumour. It is documented by a media outlet in his own country, Netherlands-based AT5, which reported his 2019 arrest and detention in Italy under an Interpol alert tied to a Nigerian embezzlement matter. Kaieteur’s research adds the wider corporate picture: the 2023 Fremantle Highway salvage, in which Koole purchased a fire-gutted vehicle carrier for a symbolic €1 and then fought the Dutch Environmental and Transport Inspectorate over whether the wreck was a vessel or hazardous waste, ultimately prevailing only after his own company’s initial legal filing was thrown out of the wrong court; the BMW trademark injunction that followed, which found decisively against Koole’s commercial handling of the salvaged cargo; and the Hoge Raad’s ruling that a financing vehicle connected to the Koole Tanktransport family of companies existed for no purpose other than artificially reducing Dutch tax liability.

None of this makes Koole unique in the high-risk, high-reward world of maritime salvage, an industry that inherently attracts aggressive operators willing to gamble on distressed assets. What it does establish, cumulatively, is that this is an operator with a documented history of skirting regulatory boundaries, litigating aggressively against oversight bodies, and structuring transactions to minimise legal and financial exposure.

That is precisely the profile a government should want nowhere near a vessel that is, right now, both a mass grave and a body of physical evidence in an active Commission of Inquiry.

TIMELINE: THE PATTERN BEHIND THE NAME

WHAT IS AT STAKE IF THIS COMPANY GETS THE MANDATE

The MV Barima is not an ordinary wreck. It is the resting place of victims still unrecovered, and it is the single most important physical exhibit available to the Commission of Inquiry now examining why more than a hundred people died. Whoever raises that vessel controls, in the first instance, what the public and the Commission ever get to see of it — how it is handled, what is documented before it is moved, what condition its structure and cargo are in when it reaches shore, and what account of that process the public receives.

Handing that mandate, through a process already established to have bypassed open competition, to an operator with a documented history of contesting regulatory classification, litigating jurisdiction to his own advantage, and structuring outcomes to his commercial benefit, is not a technical procurement question.

It is a decision about who controls the evidence. A firm that has spent a decade fighting the Dutch state over what counts as hazardous waste, what counts as a vessel, and what counts as a fair price is not a neutral custodian for the physical remains of a disaster that this administration has every political incentive to see resolved quietly and quickly.

Whatever evidence is on that ferry does not surface by accident. It surfaces because the process demands it — or it does not surface at all

THE ADMINISTRATION’S EXPOSURE

This finding does not sit apart from the pattern The 592 Guardian has documented since the disaster: the undisclosed professional link between two Commission of Inquiry appointees; a Safety and Compliance Audit Team stacked with an official who has publicly dismissed those same conflicts as immaterial; a Commission Secretary appointed through a family channel traced to the same small island as the President’s own ancestry; a declaration of consent circulated to grieving families before any genuine consultation process began.

Each of these, on its own, could be argued away as coincidence, poor optics, or bureaucratic convenience. Together, and now joined by a no-bid invitation to a salvage contractor with an Interpol arrest and a Supreme Court tax-abuse finding on his record, they describe something else: an administration that, at every point of discretion available to it since July 18, has chosen the option that keeps control closest to itself and scrutiny furthest away.

We do not assert, because we cannot yet prove, that this administration selected KMS knowing precisely what Koole’s record contained. We do assert, on the documented facts now before the public, that it had every obligation to know, and that a competitive, transparent process — the kind government publicly claimed to be running — would have surfaced this record before any contract was signed, not after a newspaper found it.

The failure to run that process is the failure that matters. Everything Kaieteur has now uncovered about Paul Koole is what a due-diligence process exists to catch. Guyana did not have one. Or it had one only for show.

WHAT THE 592 GUARDIAN DEMANDS

• The Government of Guyana immediately suspend the private invitation extended to Koole Onshore and Koole Offshore (KMS) pending full public disclosure of how and when that invitation was made, and by whom.
• The competitive bidding process, if it is to retain any credibility, be re-run with full public visibility of all applicants, their ownership structures, and their litigation and regulatory history.
• The Commission of Inquiry be given a formal, binding role in approving any salvage contractor, given that the vessel constitutes evidence directly relevant to the Commission’s mandate.
• The Attorney General’s Chambers and the Ministry of Public Works publicly confirm or deny any prior contractual or informal relationship with KMS or Paul Koole predating the MV Barima disaster, including the Demerara River casualty-removal work referenced in Kaieteur’s reporting.
• Any salvage contract entered into for the MV Barima include independently verified, publicly disclosed chain-of-custody protocols governing the recovery, documentation, and preservation of the vessel, its cargo, and any remains, before the vessel is moved or altered in any way.

— The Board

The Weekday-Crowd Anomaly Deserves Answers

OPINION BY: Staff Writer

The Government’s Model Village consultations have produced an unmistakable political image: large, enthusiastic crowds gathered across the country to hear President Irfaan Ali, Cabinet members and senior officials outline plans and receive concerns from residents.

Public consultation is necessary. Citizens should have access to the people and institutions that make decisions affecting their homes, land, livelihoods, communities and futures. No fair-minded observer should object to Government going into communities and listening.

But the scale of the turnout—and, more importantly, the timing of these events—raises questions that cannot be dismissed by photographs, applause or celebratory press releases.

These are not weekend gatherings or evening town halls. They have largely been convened during ordinary working hours, when thousands of Guyanese are expected to be at offices, construction sites, farms, shops, factories, schools, public agencies, markets and private businesses. Yet substantial crowds have appeared, stayed for extended periods and engaged the President and Cabinet.

That is the anomaly.

Civil-society organisations understand the basic arithmetic of public participation. If one wants workers, parents, students, small-business people and ordinary citizens to attend a public forum, meeting, protest or demonstration, the event is normally arranged after the workday or on a weekend. The GenZ protest scheduled for 4:30 p.m. is an obvious example. Its timing is not accidental; it recognises that people must first complete their work obligations before they can exercise their civic rights.

Why then are state events capable of producing massive weekday crowds while independent civic initiatives must carefully accommodate people’s work schedules to secure even modest participation?

That question is neither mischievous nor partisan. It is a question of transparency, labour-market reality, institutional integrity and fairness.

No one should leap to the conclusion that every person at a Model Village event is unemployed, paid to attend, instructed to attend or politically mobilised. Crowds cannot, by themselves, establish any of those claims. Many people may be self-employed, retired, unemployed, underemployed, on shift work, conducting informal business, on leave, between jobs, or simply willing to sacrifice several hours to bring an issue directly to the attention of the President and Cabinet.

But those possibilities do not remove the need for explanation. They sharpen it.

If persons are taking unpaid time from work to attend, then the economic cost falls on households already managing the pressures of food, transportation, rent, utilities and other living expenses. If workers are being released with pay, particularly in the public sector, then taxpayers deserve to know the extent of that release and its cost. If private-sector employees are absent during productive hours, employers facing recruitment and labour-retention difficulties have a legitimate interest in knowing whether their workforce is being disrupted by state-sponsored daytime events.

And if attendance is facilitated—through public-sector release time, transportation, community networks, contractors, beneficiary groups, state agencies or political structures—then that too should be openly disclosed. Transparency does not weaken a Government that is confident in its public support. It strengthens the credibility of the process.

There is a second and still more troubling issue.

The roadshows have also become a venue for citizens to raise routine grievances: housing matters, land concerns, drainage, roads, employment, licences, welfare, community development and services that should ordinarily fall within the remit of ministries, regional administrations, neighbourhood democratic councils, municipal bodies and statutory agencies.

It may be politically effective for a minister or senior official to solve a problem in front of a crowd. But it is not good governance for citizens to believe that a travelling Cabinet is their most reliable pathway to administrative relief.

A functioning state does not require people to wait for the President’s motorcade, abandon a workday and stand in a crowd to obtain answers on matters that should be handled through permanent institutions. Citizens should be able to submit a complaint, receive acknowledgement, know which agency is responsible, obtain a timeline, monitor action and appeal delays or failures.

If a Model Village consultation is the only time an unresolved problem receives attention, then the roadshow is revealing the weakness of the institutions it is meant to complement.

The Government should therefore answer plainly:

◊ Why were so many consultations held during regular working hours rather than through a mix of evenings, weekends and after-work sessions?

◊ What was the verified attendance at each event, and how long did persons remain?

◊ Were public servants granted time away from work, and was that time paid?

◊ Were ministries, regional bodies, NDCs, contractors, state agencies, community groups or programme beneficiaries asked to encourage or facilitate attendance?

◊ Was transport, food, reimbursement, per diem, priority service or any other form of material support provided?

◊ How many persons attended with individual grievances rather than to discuss the Model Village programme itself?

◊ Which agencies had responsibility for those grievances before they reached the Cabinet roadshow?

◊Will Government publish an anonymised record of concerns raised, the responsible agency, the promised action, the deadline and the eventual result?

The Bureau of Statistics must also help clarify the broader labour-market picture. Headline unemployment figures alone cannot settle the question raised by large weekday crowds. The country needs regular, accessible data on underemployment, labour-force participation, informal employment, discouraged workers, working poverty and regional differences in employment opportunities.

Employers, too, have a perspective that should not be ignored. If the country faces a labour shortage in key industries, there must be some accounting of the productive hours lost when sizeable numbers of employees attend daytime public events.

The Government cannot celebrate full crowds while businesses quietly absorb disruptions, unless it is prepared to demonstrate that no such disruption occurred.

This is not an argument against consultation. It is an argument for consultation that respects the time, income and working lives of citizens—and for institutions that work every day, not only when the Cabinet arrives.

Government events should not be immune from the standards of accountability expected of civil society, private enterprise or any other public-facing institution. If civil society must schedule demonstrations and meetings after working hours to permit ordinary Guyanese to participate, then Government should explain how it secures remarkable weekday participation and at what cost.

The crowds may indeed reflect public enthusiasm. They may also reflect unmet needs, unequal access to public institutions, carefully facilitated mobilisation, or a labour market that is weaker and more precarious than official narratives suggest.

The public is entitled to clarity—not speculation, not slogans, and not staged impressions of success.

The Barima Scandal: Governance by Secrecy, Theatre by Design

OPINION BY: STAFF WRITER

If the leaked proposal now in the public domain is authentic—and there is every indication that it is—the Ali administration has crossed from questionable judgment into outright contempt for transparency.

The revelation that a Dutch firm, Koole Onshore and Offshore (KMS), was quietly invited to submit a proposal to raise the sunken MV Barima days before a public Request for Proposals (RFP) was issued is not a minor procedural irregularity.

It strikes at the heart of public procurement integrity. It raises a fundamental and uncomfortable question: was the tender ever meant to be competitive, or merely cosmetic?

This is not a routine infrastructure contract. This is a vessel lying on the seabed with human remains possibly still trapped inside—lives lost, families grieving, and a nation demanding answers. Every decision surrounding the recovery must be beyond reproach. Instead, what is emerging is a pattern of pre-selection, back-channel engagement, and administrative theatre dressed up as due process.

The timeline alone is damning. The MV Barima sank on July 18. By July 28, a foreign firm had already submitted a detailed, 13-page proposal at the government’s invitation—complete with methodology, timelines, and an $8 million price tag. Yet the official RFP was only issued on August 2.

This is not how transparent governance operates. It is how outcomes are managed.

The government may argue that preliminary outreach is standard in complex salvage operations. That argument would carry weight if such engagement were disclosed, structured, and extended to multiple firms in a documented and equitable manner. But secrecy negates legitimacy. If other companies were similarly invited, the administration must say so—immediately and unequivocally.

Silence, in this context, is not neutrality; it is complicity.

More troubling is the moral dimension. Families of the deceased and missing have been led to believe that decisions are being taken with care, dignity, and procedural fairness. Instead, what they are now confronting is the possibility that critical decisions were being shaped behind closed doors while public assurances were being carefully staged.

The government cannot have it both ways—claiming transparency while operating in opacity.

The technical aspects of the KMS proposal—parbuckling, buoyancy-assisted righting, recovery in one piece—may well be sound. That is not the issue. The issue is whether the process used to arrive at that solution is legitimate, fair, and defensible.

Even the most technically competent plan becomes tainted when born out of a compromised process.

The vessel may hold critical evidence for the Commission of Inquiry. Any perception that its recovery was pre-arranged risks undermining the credibility of the entire investigative process before it even begins.

This is how public trust erodes—not in dramatic collapses, but in a series of calculated shortcuts justified in the name of expediency.

The Ali administration must now answer, clearly and without evasion:

⇒Who authorised the invitation to KMS?

⇒Were other firms similarly engaged prior to the RFP?

⇒What criteria were used to select KMS for early engagement?

⇒And why was the public not informed?

Anything less than full disclosure will confirm what this episode already suggests—that governance is being conducted in the shadows, while transparency is performed in the spotlight.

The families of the dead do not need theatre. They need truth. The nation does not need managed optics. It needs accountable leadership.

And at this moment, both remain in short supply.

Editor’s Note:

Under Guyana’s Procurement Act, Cap. 73:05, public procurement is governed by core principles of transparency, competition, fairness, and accountability. The Act establishes open tendering as the default method of procurement, with alternative methods—such as restricted tendering or single-source procurement—permitted only under clearly defined and strictly justified circumstances.

Section 25 of the Act outlines the conditions under which restricted or sole-source procurement may be used, including situations of extreme urgency, national emergency, or where only one supplier is capable of performing the contract. However, even in such cases, the procuring entity is required to document the justification, ensure that the process remains as competitive as practicable, and secure the necessary approvals, typically through the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB).

Critically, the law does not permit a procuring entity to engage a preferred supplier in advance and subsequently issue a public tender merely to regularize or legitimize that prior engagement. Such conduct, if established, would undermine the integrity of the procurement process and may constitute a breach of both the letter and spirit of the Act.

Additionally, the Act and accompanying regulations impose obligations for equal access to information among bidders, proper record-keeping, and the avoidance of any practice that could give rise to an unfair competitive advantage. Any deviation—particularly in high-value, high-sensitivity contracts involving public safety or national emergencies—demands heightened scrutiny and full public disclosure.

In this context, the sequence of events surrounding the MV Barima salvage operation raises serious questions as to whether the procedural safeguards required under the Procurement Act were observed, or whether the appearance of competition was substituted for its lawful execution.

THE 592 GUARDIAN