Leadership Cannot Hide Behind Livestreams

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

Leadership

EDITORIAL

A President’s Silence, Engineered

In times of national tragedy, leadership demands more than a carefully scripted video statement. It demands accountability, submitted in person, under questions the speaker does not control. With seventy-three lives lost, dozens still unaccounted for, and grieving families still waiting on answers, President Irfaan Ali’s continued refusal to face Guyana’s local press corps sends an unmistakable message.

A livestream is not a press conference. It asks nothing of the person delivering it. It permits no follow-up, tolerates no interruption, and closes the moment the recording stops.

This would be a serious enough failure of leadership on its own.

What The 592 Guardian has documented over the past two weeks, however, is not a single missed press conference. It is a pattern — a set of choices, made in sequence, that has had the cumulative effect of insulating the presidency from precisely the scrutiny a disaster of this scale demands.

A COMMISSION ASSEMBLED IN THE PRESIDENT’S OWN IMAGE

A Commission of Inquiry may, in time, establish how the MV Barima came to sink. It cannot substitute for the President’s own duty to answer the nation directly. And the manner in which that Commission was built gives Guyanese every reason to ask whether it was designed to find the truth, or to manage it.

Every member of the five-person Commission was appointed unilaterally by President Ali, sworn in behind closed doors at State House on July 30 with no press present.

Commissioner Nyree Dawn Alfonso, of the Trinidad and Tobago firm ND Alfonso and Associates, shares that firm with Keoma Griffith — now Guyana’s Minister of Labour — with whom she is documented as co-counsel in a 2025 Supreme Court matter.

Griffith’s own listing on the firm’s website was quietly removed in the days immediately before Alfonso’s swearing-in. Separately, Griffith has been named by families of the 2023 Mahdia dormitory fire as the attorney who pressed them toward a compensation package they now allege was coercive. The Commission’s newly named Secretary, attorney Javed Shadick, previously held the identical post for both the Mahdia inquiry and the 2020 elections Commission of Inquiry — and is the nephew of the late Bibi Shadick, a senior PPP parliamentarian and minister under the Jagdeo administration.

None of this proves that any individual commissioner will act in bad faith. But Article 13 of Guyana’s Constitution commits the State to inclusionary democracy — governance that is seen to be open, not merely asserted to be so.

An inquiry into a disaster of national scale, built entirely from the President’s own selections and undisclosed professional overlaps, does not meet that standard no matter how capable its individual members may be. The 592 Guardian has formally requested that the Office of the President publish the vetting records behind each appointment.

That request stands unanswered.

If the government believes in the independence of its own inquiry, it should have no fear of questions from the press.

 

THE AUDIT TEAM THAT CANNOT AUDIT ITSELF

The pattern repeats in the Safety and Compliance Audit Team President Ali announced on July 31 — Dr Ivor English, Volton Skeete, and Captain Joseph Lewis, tasked with reviewing the very maritime safety standards that failed on July 18. The 592 Guardian’s review of Dr English’s own published record found that he has remained a paid consultant to MARAD and the Transport and Harbours Department, and a director of the Guyana National Shipping Corporation board, continuously since 2015 — the same regulatory apparatus now under review.

English has separately dismissed the Alfonso-Griffith conflict-of-interest concerns as immaterial in public remarks.

An audit team drawn from inside the institution it is auditing is not oversight. It is the appearance of oversight, offered as a substitute for the real thing — and it fits the same design as the Commission itself: control the inquiry, and the need to face independent questions disappears.

CONSENT, PRE-WRITTEN

Perhaps the clearest evidence of that design is the one document families were asked to sign before any of this began.

The 592 Guardian has obtained a “Declaration of Agreement — MV Barima as Memorial Site,” pre-drafted to record relatives consent to leaving the vessel on the seabed, circulated to families before the government’s own consultation process had concluded.

A genuine consultation asks a question. This document supplied the answer in advance and asked only for a signature.

That sequencing matters because of what independent maritime law analysis has since found. A legal paper by maritime scholar Robert C. Millington, reported by Kaieteur News, identifies a regulatory blind spot in Guyana’s Shipping Act — the “24-Metre Gap” — under which a vessel the Barima’s size fell outside the stability and safety rules that would apply to a far smaller boat.

The same Act names MARAD’s own Director as the legal owner of state vessels, collapsing regulator and owner into a single office. A vessel raised from the seabed is a vessel that can be inspected against those findings. A memorial cannot be.

WHAT A LIVESTREAM CANNOT DO

Each of these threads — the Commission, the Audit Team, the memorial declaration — describes a different mechanism, but they share a single function. Each one moves the question of accountability away from a forum where the President himself could be asked, directly and without a script, why his ministers gave the public a series of accounts of this tragedy that had to be revised several times over several  days later; why the officials most exposed to scrutiny were removed from the sequence of events before the Commission had taken a single day of evidence; and why an inquiry meant to represent the nation was assembled entirely by his own hand.

Silence breeds suspicion. Avoiding the press only deepens public distrust at a moment when confidence in the State’s handling of this catastrophe is already dangerously fragile. Guyana has watched other nations answer disasters of this kind by putting their leaders in front of the press, not behind it — South Korea’s government faced sustained, adversarial questioning throughout the Sewol inquiry that ran for years; Senegal’s president answered directly to the press after the MS Joola sinking.

Guyana’s President has instead chosen recorded statements, delivered on his own terms, to an audience that cannot ask him anything at all.

If the government believes in the independence and credibility of its own inquiry, it should have no fear of questions from the press.

The 592 Guardian renews, again, its call for the Office of the President to publish full vetting records for every Commission and Audit Team appointee, and for the President to hold a press conference — not a livestream — at which Guyana’s journalists, not his own office, choose the questions.

— The Board

The Law Failed the Barima Before the Water Did

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊ GUYANA

The Law Failed

BOARD EDITORIAL
For three weeks, Guyanese have been told the sinking of the MV Barima was a tragedy — an act of the river, a matter of currents and cargo and a captain’s judgment.

A new legal analysis by maritime scholar Robert C. Millington, reported by Kaieteur News, says otherwise. It says this tragedy was written into our law books years before July 18.

Millington brings real weight to the claim. He is a retired U.S. Navy officer with 39 years across the military, maritime, and logistics sectors, and holds a U.S. Coast Guard license as both a Merchant Marine Deck Officer and Ship Pilot.

His finding is not sentiment. It is a reading of the statute book most Guyanese have never had reason to open.

Strip away the legal language, and his central point is simple: the MV Barima was, by law, one of the least protected vessels on our waters. Not because someone broke a rule, but because the rule that should have covered a boat her size never existed.

THE 24-METRE GAP

According to Millington’s analysis, Guyana has two sets of shipping safety regulations. One covers small boats — under 24 metres — and requires proper stability checks, passenger counts, and safety drills. The other covers cargo ships, but specifically excludes anything carrying passengers.

The MV Barima was roughly 40.26 metres long. Too big for the small-boat rules. Explicitly excluded from the cargo-ship rules. She fell into a gap where, legally, almost nothing applied. By Millington’s account, a wooden ferry half her size carried more statutory safety obligations than the vessel the state put 73 lives on.

That is not an accident of drafting. That is a hole regulators had years to notice and did not close.

THE REGULATOR WAS ALSO THE OWNER

Here is the finding that should trouble every citizen most: Millington points to Section 3(3) of the Guyana Shipping Act, under which the law treats the Director of MARAD — the very body meant to police safety — as the legal owner of state-owned vessels. The referee and the team are, on paper, the same person. The agency responsible for catching unsafe practices was also, in the eyes of the law, the one responsible for running them.

This is not a technicality. It is a structural conflict of interest that has sat in our statute books, unaddressed, while state ferries carried Guyanese across our rivers.

NOBODY HAD TO COUNT WHO WAS ON BOARD
Perhaps the most damning gap of all: per Millington’s review, Guyanese law never required anyone to keep a proper passenger list or headcount before a vessel like the Barima left the dock — unlike international standards under SOLAS, in place for decades. That is why, in the chaos after the sinking, officials could not even give the public a reliable number of who was aboard.

A GOVERNMENT THAT HAS KNOWN — AND NOT ACTED

None of this is hidden in obscure filings. These gaps sit in the plain text of laws that have gone unrevised for years. A government that governs is one that finds these holes before the water closes over them, not after.

 

OUR CALL: WAIVE THE CLOCK ON JUSTICE
Millington’s analysis surfaces a detail every grieving family needs to hear now, in plain terms: under Section 23 of the Transport and Harbours Act, families have six months from July 18 to take legal action against the Transport and Harbours Department — and must give one month’s written notice before doing so. That puts the notice deadline at roughly December 18, 2026, and closes the door entirely around January 18, 2027.

Families are still burying their dead. The Commission of Inquiry has not finished its work. Yet the legal clock demanding notice of a lawsuit is already ticking.

The 592 Guardian calls on the Government of Guyana to immediately and publicly suspend or waive this limitation period for all MV Barima victims and families, until the Commission of Inquiry has concluded and its findings are public.

No family should be forced to file a legal notice against the state before they even know, officially, what happened to their loved ones. Anything less turns a technical deadline into a second injury.

The sea did not write these laws. People did — and people can fix them. The first fix does not require new legislation, a committee, or a study.

It requires only a signature: waive the clock, and let grief have its time before the law forecloses it.

— The Board

The Village Roadshow: Development, Deflection Or  Deception?     

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

BOARD EDITORIAL
The Village Roadshow: Development, Deflection Or  Deception?
A second consultation tour launches while the first showcase city still has no completion date

August  2026
Nine days ago, President Irfaan Ali stood before families still burying their dead from the MV Barima disaster and asked them to sign away the wreck. The government’s “Declaration of Agreement” — pre-drafted, circulated before any genuine consultation had occurred — sought consent to leave the vessel on the ocean floor as a memorial. Relatives refused.

Days later, after international rescue crews had already departed and public pressure had built past the point of containment, the President reversed course and declared the boat salvageable after all. The engagement had never been about what the families wanted. It was about producing a signature that would let the government close the file.

Today, a different consultation tour begins. The Model Village Initiative sends the President and his ministers into villages across six of Guyana’s ten regions over the next eight days, soliciting resident input on roads, drainage, green space and recreational facilities.

The government is calling it inclusive planning. Examined against the record — including the government’s own record — it reads as the same playbook redeployed at scale, timed to compete for the nation’s attention against a fortnight in which the administration’s credibility has been under sustained and specific challenge.

A TOUR BUILT TO FAIL AS GENUINE CONSULTATION

The government hurried notice announcing this exercise gave residents only days of notice. The first session began at 9:00 a.m. today at Leonora Secondary School — a working Monday, during working hours, in a working-class community. The schedule that follows runs the same way: daytime sessions, weekday after weekday, in villages where economic necessity does not pause for a government motorcade. A genuine consultation exercise, if the goal were maximum participation, would be scheduled around the working lives of the people being consulted — evenings, weekends, or both.

A political campaign seeking votes would never be run this way; canvassers go where people are, when people are free. This is that same government’s operating knowledge, selectively unapplied here.

Nor does the format match the stated purpose. Gathering suggestions on infrastructure priorities across dozens of communities does not require a multi-region roadshow with the President and cabinet in attendance. A public online survey, promoted through the same state apparatus that produced this week’s notice, would reach more residents, at lower cost, without requiring anyone to take unpaid time from work to stand in a schoolyard.

The roadshow format serves a purpose the survey format would not: visibility. Photographs. A President seen to be listening, in a week when the more urgent question is whether his government has been listening to the survivors of Region One.

THE PRECEDENT: REGION ONE
This is not a novel tactic for this administration. Last week, the President, several ministers and the First Lady conducted a strikingly similar exercise in the communities affected by the MV Barima sinking — an outreach visit framed as the government’s fullest attention to grieving families. The underlying agenda, as this publication has documented, was to secure sign-off on leaving the wreck in place.

When families refused, the engagement effectively ended; questions about funeral costs, about intimidation allegations raised in relatives’ own accounts to press, about the sequencing of the Commission of Inquiry’s formation around the silencing of key witnesses, remain unanswered.

The pattern is now established: stage an appearance of consultation, extract or attempt to extract a predetermined outcome, and move on once resistance makes the outcome politically costly to pursue.

“Fix the mechanism that governs communities before touring them for input on how to improve them.”

THE COMPARISON THE GOVERNMENT WOULD RATHER AVOID: SILICA CITY

If this administration wishes to be credited with building model communities, it has one already under construction, and its record deserves scrutiny before a second is launched.

Silica City was announced in 2022. Its master plan was finalised in mid-2024. Construction on the first phase — 110 houses, against a stated eventual target near 15,000 units across 3,800 acres — began that year.

The Ministry of Housing’s own public statements chart the pace. In November 2024, Minister Susan Rodrigues reported the 110 homes fifty percent complete, with infrastructure — roads, drainage, utilities — declared finished and occupancy pending only a potable water connection. By August 2025, the figure had risen to ninety percent, described as “nearing completion.” By May 2026 — nine months later — the Ministry’s language had regressed to “steadily advancing,” with roads, drainage and electrical networks again cited as in progress, no completion date offered.

Four years after announcement, on a project whose full scale runs to fifteen thousand houses, the government has yet to hand over the first 110.

Independent scrutiny has gone further than this publication’s own findings. Christopher Ram, writing in Stabroek News in January 2026, characterised Silica City as operating in “near-complete secrecy” outside of “periodic, campaign-style announcements,” noting that allocations of houses have been announced with no accompanying disclosure of financing structure, eligibility criteria, or the institutional approvals governing who receives a unit and on what basis. That is not this news desk characterisation. It is the assessment of one of Guyana’s most rigorous independent commentators on public finance, and it has gone unanswered by the Ministry of Housing for seven months.

A President who wants credit for a national vision of model communities owes the country an accounting of the one already in motion: a public completion timeline for Phase One, a disclosed financing structure, and published eligibility rules for allocation. Until that accounting exists, a second consultation tour is not evidence of a strengthened commitment to community development. It is a demonstration that the government can generate an appearance of momentum considerably faster than it can generate a finished house.

THE MECHANISM MISSING FROM THE MESSAGE

There is a more fundamental problem with soliciting village-level input on roads and green space while the institution meant to carry that input forward barely functions. Local government in Guyana runs through Neighbourhood Democratic Councils, and in community after community, NDC capacity to plan, budget and execute is either absent or in visible disrepair. A consultation that bypasses this layer entirely — collecting resident wishes directly to the Office of the President rather than strengthening the elected local body responsible for delivering on them — does not build the local governance Guyana needs.

It concentrates the credit for community improvement in the President’s office and leaves the institutional weakness that will determine whether anything is actually delivered untouched.

Fix the mechanism that governs communities before touring them for input on how to improve them.

WHAT ACCOUNTABILITY REQUIRES

None of this forecloses that individual villages may see real improvements to drainage or recreational space in the coming months — this administration has delivered visible infrastructure before, Silica City’s completed road networks among them.

The objection is not to consultation as a method. It is to consultation deployed, on this timing, in this format, as a substitute for the answers still owed on the MV Barima disaster, the Commission of Inquiry’s compromised appointments, and a flagship housing project that cannot yet produce a finish date for its first 110 homes.

This news-media renews its standing calls: full public disclosure of the CoI’s commissioner vetting process; an answer, finally, to the families of the 73 who remain without one; and now, a published completion timeline, financing structure, and allocation framework for Silica City.

A government confident in its record does not need a roadshow to change the subject. It publishes the numbers and lets the record speak.
— The Board

“Enter the Political Kingdom” by Moses Bhagwan.

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦GUYANA

“Enter the Political Kingdom” by Moses Bhagwan. Ian Randle Publishers, 2026. 386 pp.

Book Review by: Christopher Ram

One afternoon in 1957, a young civil servant batting in the nets at the East Indian Cricket Club looked up and found Cheddi Jagan running in to bowl at him. Next morning, on impulse, he telephoned Jagan’s dental clinic on Charlotte Street, was shown into a corner of the surgery, said he admired what Jagan was doing, and was handed a bundle of pamphlets scooped off the floor. He walked out with the Daily Worker, the Soviet Weekly and an old Thunder, and read his way into a life.

What follows is a tell-all in which the teller refuses to cast himself as the hero. That is the most striking feature of this book – and the reason to trust it. A self-styled country boy, Moses Bhagwan, a lawyer by profession and a politician by vocation, spent fifty years in the front line of Guyanese politics, was detained by the British and jailed by Burnham, sat at Lancaster House and in Nkrumah’s office, and helped found the movement that broke a dictatorship.

Yet in over four hundred readable pages he effortlessly avoids shining the spotlight on himself. Even the title is borrowed and the loan declared: Nkrumah’s cry to seek first the political kingdom, which Burnham took up at Bourda Green in 1957, where Bhagwan notes only that he was in the crowd. A kingdom he entered, not one he craved.

The comparison is Tyrone Ferguson’s To Survive Sensibly, or to Court Heroic Death (1999), still the indispensable account of how Guyana’s political economy was managed between 1965 and 1985, and a book that never had the readership it earned. Ferguson’s account is of two decades behind a desk, formulating policy.

Bhagwan spent five decades wrapped in politics, and gives us his from the platform, the picket line and the lock-up. Together they cover a period much of the country now knows only as rumour.

He was the last of six children of a Presbyterian catechist and a plantation labourer.  The frankness appears early. He described his placement at Berbice High School as undeserved, but equally comfortable with comic books and with those by Hugo, Dickens and the Brontës. He judges himself a failure as a teacher. He was more than an occasional drinker and recalls a weekend back at the dormitory that had housed him and smashed two chairs, an ingratitude he considers inexcusable.

Banished to a school up the Mahaicony Creek, he sat alone one evening watching the lights on the water and asked himself what he was doing to himself. The same page gives the lie to his modesty: ignored for two months after applying to the civil service, he wrote to the Chief Secretary accusing it of discriminating against country people, and was called for interview a fortnight later. A man building a legend would have made that letter a set piece.

His political ascent was fast – Comrade X in the party paper, chairman of the Progressive Youth Organisation, MP for the Essequibo Islands at age twenty-six, Chief Whip, and a seat in Jagan’s inner circle. And here he does what almost nobody does.

The slogan that consecrated Jagan as Son of Guyana, Teacher of the People, Father of the Nation – founding text of a personality cult that outlived its subject – was his, written to shore up the leader when the party looked unsteady, and he sets it down and accepts responsibility. The same instinct preserves the embarrassing moments most memoirists lose – the budget speech with the plainly wrong calculation, the schoolchildren giggling in the gallery.

The break came over independence of mind. Detained without charge at Mazaruni in June 1964 – soldiers on his stairs before daybreak, a helicopter off a cricket field – he and the PYO leadership spent five months drafting the Mazaruni Papers, arguing for a Guyanese road to socialism distinct from the Soviet model. He wrote poetry there too, a Creolese piece about a cane cutter walking home short-weighted that won a prize fifty-five years later.

A year on, speaking in Ghana, he named race as central to Guyanese politics, and the repudiation reached him by cable before he returned home. His own diagnosis is the coolest sentence in the book: he had cast doubt on the party’s reliability to Moscow, and that was fatal.  Banished and disowned.  He recounts that his erstwhile hero Cheddi Jagan refused to share a platform with him, and only relented on the insistence of ASCRIA, a pro-black organisation.

That did not prevent Bhagwan attending Jagan’s cremation and shedding a tear.

He never held public office again; indeed, he refused it. He had been expelled for the very thing to which he would then dedicate the better part of his life, and it became his mission. It began in a corridor at Lancaster House in 1962, where without clearing it with his own delegation he approached the opposing camp to float a PPP-PNC coalition. It travelled with him on the Ghanaian mission of 1964; into IPRA, the Indian Political Revolutionary Associates through which he convened a joint race commission with its African counterpart, ASCRIA, and carried it to bottom houses in the East Coast villages; and into the Working People’s Alliance.

At eighty-nine he is still proposing it and still arguing it properly – from Arthur Lewis on the immorality of winner-take-all and Tocqueville on the tyranny of the majority to a constitutional threshold requiring two-thirds of Parliament to form a government.

Sixty-four years, one idea, and a mind still working.

Burnham tried repeatedly to buy him – the speakership dangled, audiences granted in a study where the visitor’s chair had been set conspicuously low. Refusing Burnham was itself an act of bravery. Bhagwan took nothing, and spent nineteen days in Camp Street rather than pay a fine over an opposition newsletter.

He had by then become one of the better lawyers of his generation, having earned his place at the table with the likes of Miles Fitzpatrick, Peter Britton, Doodnauth Singh and Benjamin Gibson, though the book will not say so. His account of thirty years at the bar is titled “Law and Politics” and the title is exact: treason, sedition, arson, capital murder, the activists for whom he was permanently on house call. His own practice gets one paragraph at the very end. The instinct was the public defender’s from the start – his first appearance in the Full Court was an appeal for a rice farmer from Mora Point who had once taught him to plough a field at night, and he won it.

The establishment noticed his politics, not his professional competence: his application for silk was never even acknowledged.

Somebody paid for this, and Bhagwan honours his late wife Samia as one of its victims. She watched soldiers take him, scaled a fence with two small boys when troops surrounded the house, and was the sole earner during his London law years. That a political autobiography ends on the tribute to Samia says as much about her as about the author.

It also explains the four forewords: because the author will not characterise himself, others had to. Vanda Radzik reads the book as a book, tracking its shifts from lyrical country passages to thriller pace to analytical legal prose. Nigel Westmaas supplies the man the pages omit – the office where comrades came for politics and a free meal, the joke that his Mass Activities Unit was the Menshevik department to their Bolshevik one, Bhagwan calm at the wheel of the WPA tapir as thugs set upon it.

What Bhagwan leaves is a legacy already being lost. Set the outspoken Bar Association of his day against the culture of habitual obedience Burnham bred – obedience not to the law but to its enforcers. Students who will not speak, public servants who will not sign, lawyers gone quiet or gone after the money. The dictatorship we thought was bad is gone; the habit has outlived it, and the courage that broke it was never handed down.

That loss is not Bhagwan’s. He files no complaint, and offers a programme rather than a lament.

Bhagwan now lives in New York, where for years he drove a school bus with Samia beside him as counsellor; she knew every route on the island. A man who once sat across a desk from Nkrumah, delivering children to school in Queens, and reporting it in the same level voice he uses for everything else. The country he left is rich now and still governed by the elections arithmetic he spent his life trying to break. His proposal has been on the table since 1965, and this book – precisely because its author never asks to be admired – is the most persuasive case anyone has made for it.

 Available on Amazon – just click the link below :

https://a.co/d/0dM2Bkcd

 The reviewer has known Moses Bhagwan for many decades.

“Enter the Political Kingdom” by Moses Bhagwan. Ian Randle Publishers, 2026. 386 pp.

Book Review by Christopher Ram

 

    

 

 

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

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA 

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

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

By Editor

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

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

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

THE FAMILY RECORD

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

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

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

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

A PATTERN, NOT AN ISOLATED APPOINTMENT

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

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

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

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

THE STANDING QUESTION

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

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

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

— The Board

The Audit Team That Audits Itself

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

 EDITORIAL

The Audit Team That Audits Itself

President Ali’s new Safety and Compliance Audit Team is staffed by the very officials whose oversight is now in question — and revisits a warning MARAD gave itself, and ignored, four years ago.

On July 31, 2026, President Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali announced the formation of a Safety and Compliance Audit Team, tasked with reviewing “the safety and compliance standards governing marine vessels operating in Guyana” in the wake of the MV Barima disaster of July 18, which has claimed dozens of lives in the country’s worst maritime tragedy.

The Team comprises Dr Ivor English, former Director-General of the Maritime Administration Department (MARAD); Mr Volton Skeete, former Harbour Master of Guyana; and Captain Joseph Lewis, described as a Marine Officer and Surveyor of Ships.

The announcement was framed, in the President’s own words, as part of “government’s continuing response measures to strengthen maritime safety and prevent future tragedies.”

A close reading of the record — and of the men chosen to conduct it — suggests something closer to the opposite: an audit built to return the same verdict the sector has already delivered once, in 2022, and that the government did not act on.

AN INSIDER REVIEWING INSIDERS

Dr Ivor English is not an outside expert parachuted in to interrogate MARAD’s failures. His own curriculum vitae, filed with the University of Guyana, lists him as a Director on the Board of the Guyana National Shipping Corporation since 2015 and a Consultant to the Maritime Administration and Transport and Harbours Department from 2015 to the present. He never left the institutional orbit he has now been asked to audit.

Nor is his role confined to institutional membership. English has already staked out a public position defending the composition of the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the Barima disaster — the very body whose independence this news-outlet and Transparency International Guyana Inc. (TIGI) have separately questioned.

Appearing on the YouTube programme Caribbean Tea, English dismissed concerns that two of the CoI’s five commissioners — Trinidadian attorney Nyree Dawn Alfonso and, by professional association, newly appointed Labour Minister Keoma Griffith — carry political and prior-client ties that this publication  has documented in earlier reporting.

“We live in a world where becoming apolitical is often a very difficult conceptualisation,” English said, acknowledging on record that Alfonso served as an election agent for Trinidad and Tobago’s ruling United National Congress in 2025, and that Griffith sat on the same legal team as Alfonso representing vessel owners in a 2022 Guyana High Court matter.

A man who has publicly waved away the conflict-of-interest question surrounding one accountability body has now been installed to co-lead another.

That is not independence. That is the government recycling a trusted name to launder a second process through the same reassurance the first one required.

A CAREER INSIDE THE CHAIN OF COMMAND

Mr Volton Skeete’s record is less politically entangled but no less institutional. Public reporting places him as Harbour Master as far back as 2008 and through at least 2012, during which he managed the Ports and Harbours Division, piloted vessels on the Essequibo, Berbice and Demerara rivers, and supervised launch and dredge crews.

His entire career sits inside the same chain of command — Transport and Harbours Department, MARAD, Ministry of Public Works — that is now the subject of the disaster it is being asked to review. Nothing in the public record implicates Skeete personally in any wrongdoing.

But a lifetime in the institution is not distance from it, and distance is precisely what an audit of that institution’s failures requires.

Captain Joseph Lewis is, by contrast, the least documented of the three. No independently verifiable public record establishes his prior institutional role beyond the title given in the President’s own statement. Whatever qualifications justify his appointment have not been made available to the public he is meant to serve.

THE WARNING MARAD GAVE ITSELF IN 2022

“This is not a small matter. So, things that are overlooked before, we have to look into now.” — Minister Juan Edghill, March 2022

The most damning context for this new Audit Team is not the men who sit on it, but the fact that its mandate has already been issued once before — and ignored.

In March 2022, following a separate fatal maritime incident, MARAD disclosed at a press conference that it had only six certified marine surveyors responsible for monitoring more than 2,000 vessels operating in Guyanese waters — roughly 1,800 artisan fishing vessels and 87 trawlers, representing some 10,000 operators.

The Board of Inquiry into that incident found the vessel involved had never been examined by a certified inspector before sailing, and that its captain operated under a licence MARAD itself had not issued. Minister Edghill, at that same press conference, declared it “cannot be business as usual” for the sector’s regulatory framework. MARAD’s Director-General at the time — Mr Stephen Thomas, appointed to the post by Edghill in September 2020 — said plans were “in place to increase this capacity.”

That promise was not kept. MARAD was still publicly advertising to fill a vacant Surveyor position as recently as December 2025, with applications closing January 9, 2026 — six months before the MV Barima went down. Whatever capacity increase was promised in 2022 had, at minimum, not been completed by the time it was needed most.

SAME DIRECTOR, SAME MINISTER, SAME DESK

Captain Stephen Thomas has held the MARAD Director-General post continuously since September 2020. He is the same official who received the 2022 surveyor-shortage warning and promised to fix it, and the same official who stood before the press in July 2026 — days after the Barima capsized — to declare, “based on his knowledge,” that the vessel was not overloaded, before any official inquiry had examined the wreck.

Minister Edghill has held ministerial responsibility over MARAD and the Transport and Harbours Department across the same span, formally reaffirmed by Gazette Order in October 2025, months before the disaster.

This publication has found no public record — no Estimates debate, no Auditor General value-for-money audit, no Public Accounts Committee transcript — showing whether Thomas ever formally requested the surveyor capacity and funding he said MARAD needed, and was refused, or whether the request was simply never made.

That distinction matters, and it is a question that belongs squarely within the Commission of Inquiry’s mandate, and within the mandate of this new Audit Team, if it is to mean anything at all. Absent that record, we do not allege dereliction of duty as a legal finding. But we do say this plainly: the same Director-General and the same Minister who received this warning in 2022 are the same two men now positioned to shape how — and whether — the public learns what happened to it in the years between.

WHAT THIS AUDIT TEAM IS, AND IS NOT

A genuine audit of MARAD’s safety and compliance regime would be conducted by persons with no institutional stake in its prior findings, no professional history inside the agencies under review, and no public record of defending the very accountability mechanisms this disaster has called into question.

The Safety and Compliance Audit Team, as constituted, satisfies none of these conditions.

This news-media renews its call — made in these pages following the CoI’s own swearing-in — for the Office of the President to publish the vetting record behind these appointments, and for Dr English to clarify, on the record, whether his standing consultancy to MARAD and his board seat at the Guyana National Shipping Corporation were disclosed and weighed before his selection.

Guyanese families still burying their dead deserve an audit that investigates the system that failed them — not one conducted by the system investigating itself.

— The Board

A Generation Introduces Itself With Silence

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

A Generation Introduces Itself with Silence

What We Saw Outside the Office of the President — and Why It May Outlast the Ministers Who Ignore It

By Hem Kumar, Editor

I have covered Guyanese politics long enough to know the difference between a crowd that has been organized and a crowd that has organized itself.

What gathered outside the Office of the President this past week belonged unmistakably to the second category. They did not arrive under a party banner. They did not chant the slogans of any of the coalitions that have spent the last two weeks fighting over the wreckage of the MV Barima.

They arrived under a name of their own choosing — We The People — in white T-shirts they had bought with their own limited means, to stand in solidarity with the Amerindian Peoples Association’s continuing action, and then, deliberately, to stand apart from it as well.

Listening to live feeds  with representatives of the group this is what I can deduce .

They did not give us a press release  or a spokesperson’s card; what they showed us  was a banner, five feet of red, green, gold and black, printed with a demand rather than a grievance: “We The People Demand — Ministerial Accountability — Edghill Must Resign.” Their message was bold and stated plainly:  this was not a political party’s operation, and no political party paid for it.

No one incurs an expense they can barely afford to stage a performance nobody asked for.

I want to be careful here, in the way this publication  has tried to be careful with every claim it has made about the Barima disaster since July 18. My own notes from that afternoon are a corraborated  account, not a transcript — we did not take names or recorded interviews off of social media .

What I offer first is my own judgment as an editor who has watched this country’s protest movements rise and dissolve for decades: these were young people, largely surviving on stipends and family support, who chose to spend what little they have on a shirt and an afternoon in the sun outside a government building. That is not the behavior of people staging a show for an audience. It is the behavior of people who have run out of patience with the alternative — waiting.

A MOVEMENT INTRODUCES ITSELF

What We The People represents is still, by its own account, less than two weeks old. It is, on the record now, more precisely described than I could offer from memory alone. Kisskadee Watch, reporting on the same demonstration, identified the protesters as drawn largely from the University of Guyana, gathered in solemn silence outside the Office of the President, holding placards and observing moments of silence for the seventy-three confirmed dead. That reporting confirms what we saw: this was not a chanting crowd or a rally in the mode of the Joint Opposition’s July 27 walk-in. It was quiet, deliberate, and unmistakably generational in its composition.

The same reporting adds a detail this publication thinks is important to state precisely, rather than round off into a cleaner story than the facts support. Organisers maintained that the protest was independent and non-partisan — and I have no reason to doubt that framing was sincerely held.

But members of the We Invest in Nationhood party and A Partnership for National Unity were present in support, alongside members of civil society. That is not a contradiction. A movement can hold its own identity, set its own terms, and still draw solidarity from people who arrive under other banners without becoming those banners.

What matters is who called the protest, who wrote the placards, and who is committing to return — and on all three counts, the record points to the students, not the parties standing behind them.

One of the organisers, Chandradatt Jagdeo, put his own name to a public accounting of the turnout on Facebook afterward: a movement “not even 2 weeks old,” he wrote, “NOT sponsored by any Political party,” that brought “hundreds, 300+ (I did not do a head count) people out.

I record that figure as his claim, made publicly and under his own name, corraborated independently by other attendees describing the same afternoon in the same terms — not as this publication’s own verified count. That distinction matters to me more than the number does.

A movement that can produce a named organiser willing to put a figure on the record, and independent attendees willing to describe the same event unprompted, has already cleared a bar that a great many protest claims in this country’s history have not.

WHY THIS MATTERS MORE THAN A SINGLE PICKET

Guyana has no shortage of protest. The Joint Opposition marched into the National Assembly in black on July 27. The Amerindian Peoples Association has picketed the Office of the President twice in the same week, led by Executive Director Jean La Rose, demanding accountability for communities in Region One that absorbed the disaster’s heaviest losses. Families of the accused T&HD crew have taken to the Den Amstel and Melanie public roads. Every one of these actions has been, in its own register, legitimate.

What distinguishes We The People is that it belongs to none of them.  It is not the opposition’s protest, dressed in the opposition’s colors, chanting the opposition’s slogans of “who must go.” It is not a union action, not a party rally repackaged as civil society, not a demonstration organized by anyone who stood to gain a seat, a ministry, or a headline from it.

It is, on the evidence before me, a generation that watched its government’s handling of a mass-casualty maritime disaster — the shifting timeline on what caused the sinking, the scrubbed commissioner biographies, the pre-drafted memorial-site declarations circulated to grieving families before any consultation had genuinely occurred — and concluded that the normal channels of Guyanese political life were not going to produce the answers it was owed.

That conclusion, if it holds, is the more significant story here. Political parties in Guyana have spent sixty years organizing along lines this news -media has documented at exhausting length.

A movement that explicitly refuses that architecture — that stands beside the APA’s action without folding into it, that borrows the opposition’s demand for Edghill’s resignation without borrowing the opposition’s identity — is doing something Guyanese civil society has rarely managed to sustain: building a constituency for accountability that neither the government nor its established opposition can claim as their own.

WHAT COMES NEXT

This is not intended as a single afternoon of catharsis. Organisers have described this as the first in a planned series of weekly demonstrations, with the next gathering set for the same location — outside the Office of the President — at 4:30 p.m. on Friday, August 7.

A movement that commits to a recurring date, in public, before it knows whether anyone will show up a second time, is making a claim about itself that either holds or collapses in full view. That is a more honest test than anything this paper could construct for it.

I do not know yet which this is. I am not going to promise our readers a Guyanese Spring, because that promise is not mine to make on behalf of people I saw for an afternoon.

What I can tell them is this: a generation that the political establishment has largely assumed to be disengaged showed up, on its own initiative, under its own name, to demand that a government answer for seventy-plus deaths in the manner a Westminster democracy requires of it.

Whether the Ali administration treats that as a passing irritation or as the leading edge of something it can no longer manage through press conferences and pre-drafted declarations will do more to shape the next decade of Guyanese governance than any single resignation anyone is currently calling  for.

This publication will be eagerly awaiting for August 7. Whether the government chooses to notice is, as ever, its own decision to make — and its own consequence to bear.

When a government treats a body count as a communications problem, it should not be surprised when the young decide that protest is the only language left that it understands.

— Hem Kumar, Editor

CHANGE OF VENUE & SOLIDARITY with MV BARIMA VICTIMS and SURVIVORS

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦GUYANA

PRESS RELEASE

“Enter the Political Kingdom” Book Launch

Saturday August 8th at 5.00 PM at the Georgetown Club

CHANGE OF VENUE & SOLIDARITY with MV BARIMA VICTIMS and SURVIVORS

 

 

“Enter the Political Kingdom”, the panoramic autobiography of Moses Bhagwan, spanning the unified Guyanese colonial struggle, the post-colonial era and its divisive politics as well as the Civil Rebellion inspired by the Working Peoples Alliance and Walter Rodney is veined with memorable insights into community life and social activism and the core values and priorities dedicated to family life, which spans some seventy years of a life well lived. 

The book will be launched on Saturday, August 8th at 5.00 PM before an assembly of Guyanese. (Please note that the venue is now the Georgetown Club, 230 Camp Street (Between Middle and New Market). The venue has changed from the Umana Yana because it has been assigned by the Ministry of Culture as the MV Barima Information Centre for affected families.

The book launch takes place at a time of a devastated nation in mourning for the loss of lives and the trauma and suffering of survivors and the impact upon the lives of families related to the victims, of the MV Barima tragedy, a horror affecting Guyanese lives – never before experienced in the modern history of our country.

In this context, the organizers of this event have considered it fit and humane to dedicate the event to all those in mourning and in grief, in particular to the memory of the lost lives and those as yet unrecovered which magnifies the grief of the families impacted by this tragedy.

Having read the book it is our conviction that its publication now is timely as within its pages many episodes relate and confirm the genius, resourcefulness  and fortitude of the people of Guyana to battle against adversities  and to hold hands and hearts in unity in times of tragedy like  this one – as we witness joint actions, heroic rescues and unified calls for concerted action across all groups and organizations of civil society and social and political leaders.

We take this opportunity to commend all efforts to locate the sources and causes of this  catastrophe, as well as initiatives taken to sustain the families impacted. We call upon all Guyanese to continue to exercise intense vigilance as the process of unearthing the facts as they unfold so as to ensure that no stone is left unturned or effort spared in order to recover all the missing and dead, and to determine the truth of the causes of this tragedy in an honest, collective, transparent and accountable manner.

Our Book Launch program has allotted time for expressing sympathy, support and solidarity with all victims and all mourners and prayers of comfort will be offered.

The Author and Editors of “Enter the Political Kingdom” join in issuing this Press Release.

Vanda Radzik, Christopher Ram, Wazir Mohamed (Organizers of the Book Launch)

Alissa Trotz, Sasha Ann Panaram, Nigel Westmaas (Editors)

Moses Bhagwan (Author)

Georgetown August 1st 2026

 

  

 

EMANCIPATION DAY 2026

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

EMANCIPATION DAY 2026

While the Slavery Abolition Act started taking effect on August 1, 1834, full freedom for all enslaved adults in British Guiana was only achieved four years later on August 1, 1838

Emancipation Day in Guyana marks 188 years since August 1, 1838—when chains were formally broken, but not entirely erased.

It is a day of remembrance, but also of reckoning. For while physical enslavement ended, the architecture of inequality, exclusion, and state imbalance has proven far more enduring. Too many citizens still navigate systems that marginalize, silence, or selectively empower.

Emancipation, then, remains unfinished business.

This year, the observance is shadowed by grief. The tragedy of the MV Barima lingers heavily across the nation, with families still waiting, still searching, still mourning.

Their pain reminds us that emancipation is not only about the past—it is about the dignity, value, and protection of life in the present.

This observance belongs to African heritage, but its meaning transcends ethnicity. Across Guyana, people of all backgrounds don traditional wear and participate in cultural celebration—not merely as ritual, but as recognition that freedom must be collective to be real. 

True emancipation demands more than memory; it requires confronting modern forms of capture—political, economic, and psychological—and insisting on justice that is visible, measurable, and shared.

Until then, the cry “free at last” remains not a declaration, but an aspiration.

Phillips’s Non-Answers Are the Story

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM GUYANA

 ANALYSIS ♦ MV BARIMA COMMISSION OF INQUIRY

Phillips’s Non-Answers Are the Story

The 592 Guardian  Board   |   Georgetown, Guyana   |   August 2026

Prime Minister Mark Phillips stood before the press on Tuesday and, in the space of one news conference, managed to confirm nearly every fear survivors and the public have had about how this government intends to handle the MV Barima wreck.

He did not need to admit a cover-up. He performed one.

A CONSULTATION BUILT BACKWARD

Start with the sequence, because sequence is where evasions hide. Before families were formally polled on salvage versus memorial, a “Declaration of Agreement” document was already circulating — pre-drafted, asking relatives to consent to the vessel remaining on the seabed. That document did not materialize in a vacuum. It followed Mr. Phillips’s own proclamation in the House that conditions were “not favourable” for salvage. The government reached its preferred outcome first and built the consultation process to arrive there. Calling that “yielding to the wishes of families” inverts the actual order of events.

The government reached its preferred outcome first and built the consultation process to arrive there.

TESTIMONY IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR EVIDENCE

Then there is the engine question, which Mr. Phillips was asked directly and answered by not answering.

Pressed on whether avoiding salvage conveniently avoids incontrovertible physical evidence of engine failure, he pivoted to survivor testimony — arguing witnesses “could say” whether the engine stopped and repairs were needed, so “either way, it can be done.”

That is not a rebuttal. It is a substitution. Eyewitness recollection of a mechanical event and a forensic engine inspection are not interchangeable forms of evidence, and Mr. Phillips — a former army officer who understands the difference between testimony and material evidence — knows this.

A Commission of Inquiry that settles for the former when the latter is retrievable is a COI built to reach a predetermined, defensible-on-paper conclusion.

THE ADMISSION INSIDE THE DEFLECTION

The “several discrepancies” admission is the tell inside the deflection. Mr. Phillips conceded that identifying one discrepancy — apparently the loading figures — means others likely exist.

That is precisely the kind of admission that makes physical inspection of the vessel indispensable, not optional.

You do not tell the public there may be undiscovered discrepancies and then structure the recovery decision around whether grieving families feel emotionally prepared to relive the loss.

Those are two different questions being deliberately fused into one.

A DENIAL NO ONE HAD FINISHED ASKING FOR

And then the flat denial — “Government has nothing to hide” — offered without being asked, before the accusation of cover-up was formally news to circle back to.

When a Prime Minister volunteers a denial to a charge that has not yet fully calcified in the public record, it usually means he has already seen the writing on the wall.

THE OFFER THAT WENT UNANSWERED

Mr. Mohamed’s funded international salvage offer, still unanswered by government as of this week, sits there as the counter-proof: the “we have engaged with several companies” line evaporates the moment an alternative recovery path — fully resourced, requiring no state funds — is placed on the table and simply ignored.

If the barrier to salvage were genuinely logistical or financial, that offer resolves it. It has not been touched.

None of this requires speculation about motive. The public record — his own words, the timeline of the memorial declaration, the unaddressed Mohamed offer — does the indicting on its own.

— The Board