Archive for category: Opinions

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

BOARD EDITORIAL

Reassurance Is Not Evidence: The Fish-Safety Question the Minister Didn’t Answer

August , 2026 ♦By The Board

Fishermen along the Essequibo Coast and vendors at Bourda Market are watching their livelihoods erode over a claim no one has actually tested. In the three weeks since the MV Barima went down off Essequibo with the loss of scores  of lives, a rumour has spread on social media that the fish sold in Guyana’s markets is contaminated by the disaster.

WHAT THE RECORD ACTUALLY SHOWS

Two institutional voices have now spoken to the rumour, and they arrived in the same place from different directions. The Guyana National Fisherfolk Organisation (GNFO) issued a statement over the weekend of August 1-2 arguing there is no scientific evidence that Guyana’s fish supply is unsafe, and noting, correctly, that the Atlantic Ocean spans roughly 106 million square kilometres and that commercial catch is not drawn from a single point on the map.

Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha followed on Tuesday, telling reporters the established fishing grounds fishermen actually work are far from the wreck site, that there has been no scientific analysis showing contamination, and appealing to the public to keep supporting the industry.

Both statements are geographically and logically sound as far as they go. Guyana’s commercial fishing grounds are a matter of public record and are not located at the Barima wreck site off Essequibo. A ferry sinking, however catastrophic in human terms, does not on its own contaminate an ocean.

The vendors losing income at Bourda Market and on the Essequibo Coast are being hurt by a claim that has no documented basis — including, notably, AI-generated images being recirculated as if they were contemporary evidence, which the 592 Guardian does not treat as credible sourcing in any context.

WHERE THE ARGUMENT BREAKS DOWN

The problem is not that Mustapha is wrong. The problem is that “no scientific analysis has shown contamination” is being offered as though it were equivalent to “testing has shown no contamination.” It is not.

The first is an absence of evidence. The second is evidence of absence. Guyana’s own Environmental Protection Agency operates a real-time water quality monitoring network for the country’s rivers and creeks, built specifically to detect contamination early and inform public health response. Nothing in the public record indicates that instutional, or any comparable marine and fisheries testing regime, was deployed at or near the Barima site in the aftermath of July 18.

This is the accountability gap the Minister’s Tuesday remarks did not close. A geography lesson about where fishing grounds sit is not a substitute for a water sample. An appeal to “good sense” is not a substitute for a laboratory result. If the government is confident enough in the science to ask grieving fisherfolk and struggling vendors to absorb weeks of lost income on the strength of that confidence, it should be confident enough to commission the testing that would settle the question beyond a minister’s assurance.

An appeal to good sense is not a substitute for a laboratory result.

THE QUALIFICATIONS QUESTION, FAIRLY STATED

Critics are right to note that Agriculture Minister Mustapha is not a marine biologist, toxicologist, or public health scientist, and that his portfolio covering Fisheries does not by itself confer technical authority to pronounce on contamination science.

That is a legitimate structural point about how the government communicates on matters requiring technical expertise.                              But it should be aimed precisely, not broadly. The correct response to an unqualified minister making a scientifically plausible claim is not to assume the claim is false — it is to demand the ministry produce the technical finding that would let the public verify the claim for itself, ideally issued by or attributed to the relevant scientific and public health authorities rather than delivered as a minister’s personal reassurance at a press conference.

Put simply: Mustapha’s underlying position — that the established fishing grounds are distant from the wreck and that there is no basis to believe the catch is contaminated — is very likely correct on the geography and the biology.

Guyana’s commercial fisheries do draw from grounds well removed from a single riverine wreck site, and ocean currents do not concentrate contamination the way social media rumour suggests. But “very likely correct” delivered without supporting data is not the same as a government fulfilling its duty to verify and disclose.

The gap between those two things is exactly where public trust is being lost, and exactly where it could be recovered.

WHAT SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED

In the immediate aftermath of a maritime disaster of this scale, a baseline environmental response is standard practice internationally: ⇒Test the water at and around the site for fuel, cargo, and other contaminants

⇒Sample fish tissue from the surrounding area if there is any plausible pathway of exposure;

⇒And publish the results, whatever they show, so that reassurance rests on data rather than on a minister’s say-so.

There is no public indication this happened. Absent that, the Ministry of Agriculture is asking the public to trust an assertion it has not yet backed with its own evidence — a position no more scientifically rigorous than the rumour it is trying to dispel, even though the underlying claim is almost certainly right.

The 592 Guardian’s position is not that the fish is unsafe. The evidence available, including basic marine geography and the fishing industry’s own account of where it operates, suggests it is not. The 592 Guardian’s position is that “trust us, there’s no evidence of contamination” is an inadequate answer to a public health and livelihood question of this magnitude, three weeks into a national tragedy that has already exposed serious gaps in this administration’s crisis communication. Fisherfolk and vendors deserve a government response built on a published test result, not a press conference.

THE 592 GUARDIAN’S POSITION

We renew this news outlet’s  standing view that reassurance without disclosed testing is not a communications strategy the public should be asked to accept on faith, particularly from an administration whose handling of the Barima disaster has already required repeated correction.

We call on the Ministry of Agriculture, in coordination with the Environmental Protection Agency and any relevant public health authority, to commission and publish water and tissue sampling from the waters surrounding the wreck site and the commercial fishing grounds nearest to it.

If the results confirm what the Minister has already said, that finding will do more to protect the livelihoods of Guyana’s fisherfolk than any appeal for calm. If they do not, the public has an even clearer right to know now rather than later.

— The Board