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

WILL THE PPP EVER ACCEPT ITS MISTAKES? 

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THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM◊ GUYANA

WILL THE PPP

OPINION BY: Leyland Chitlall Roopnaraine 

In the aftermath of the worst maritime tragedy in Guyana, the public is incessantly being fed with a variety of excuses and pseudo-reasoning concerning the sinking of the 87-year-old Barima.

A freak wave, captain’s error, overladen cargo, excess passengers…  ad nauseam. Regardless of the excuses emanating from Freedom House, the Barima should have been decommissioned two decades ago, as is the norm worldwide, even in impoverished countries. 

The underlying ineptitude lies in the non- completion of the Port Kaituma wharf. International Import and Supplies, owned by Parmeshwar Jagmohan, won the Port Kaituma Stelling contract through public tender on December 30, 2022. Physical works started January 17, 2023, with an April 17, 2024 completion target, at G$1.4 billion notwithstanding any proper feasibility, evaluation of soil stability, river currents and silting.

The scope was limited to building the physical structure, while design and project supervision sat with a separate local consultancy firm CEMCO, a firm the gov’t retained-not the builder. Hereafter we encounter a sequence of errors:

•As of February 18, 2024, the contractor reported 90% completion, and was on schedule. 

•The fissures appeared afterwards, during the final stages of pile-cap casting, in the backfilled zone. 

•Work stopped immediately, and the Ministry and consultant were notified. 

•What came out of the investigation was clear enough: the tie rod strength in the original design was inadequate. 

•An independent third-party firm brought in to review it found further deficiencies in the affected section. 

•The Ministry then retained that same third-party firm to run a “new” geotechnical survey and produce a revised design, calling for longer, thicker piles and tie rods. 

•According to the contractor’s account, materials for the redesign had been procured, and work was preparing to resume IN 2024. 

Now this wharf was built to receive a specific vessel: the US $12.7 million MV Ma Lisha which arrived in Guyana in April 2023. This 250-passenger and vehicle-carrying ferry was built in India by Garden Reach Shipbuilders under a 2021 deal financed by the  Indian government –  through a loan that required Indian construction.

In August that year, Edghill stood at the Port Kaituma site and told the contractor to deliver the facility by the end of November so the Ma Lisha could start sailing there “early December 2023.”

A timeline that  is now more than two and a half years and counting. The Ma Lisha has spent her entire service life running to Kumaka instead, because there has never been a finished wharf at Port Kaituma for her to berth.

A  final determination concluded that  soil shifting and pier structure problems were the major issues. The firm that made that conclusion that the first consultant got it wrong, ended up being the same firm the Ministry paid to get it right the second time—a scenario where you write your exams and then mark your own test papers!

This is a government that profusely blames everyone  else but itself where culpability must be assigned. Given the fact that Minister Juan Edghill presided over the Ministry of Public Works commandingly for the last six years, he must be held accountable for the failings of the T&HD and MARAD which triggered this ongoing disaster.

Given the fact that he was fully apprised and  aware of every issue that existed with the project, he should have  done the honorable thing and  recused himself from office, to ensure  a comprehensive and unimpeded investigation into the circumstances that led to the largest maritime disaster in the nation’s history,  he has still  not removed himself for the helm of the Ministry. 

Reports on the ground indicate that the project has failed for the second time after this still un-named firm entered the picture. But hold on: The Teddy Bear Sundaze sponsored Parika to Supernaam Orange Pop Boat Cruise on board one of the two new vessels bought to replace the MV Barima has been cancelled.

So where is the truth? Can anyone believe the PPP will tell the truth? All are guilty for this horrific loss of over 100 lives

 

 

The Arithmetic the Chronicle Won’t Print

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

The Arithmetic the Chronicle Won’t Print

EDITORIAL

A response to state media’s answer to Bloomberg Opinion’s “resource curse” assessment of Guyana

The government’s mouthpiece has taken it upon itself to answer Bloomberg Opinion columnist Juan Pablo Spinetto, who, after visiting Georgetown, concluded that Guyana displays weak state capacity, fragile institutions, labor shortages and a trajectory some analysts compare to Venezuela, Nigeria and Chad.

Rather than engage that critique, the Chronicle offers a different exercise: a column built entirely on gross figures, silent on every number that would complicate the story.

We correct the record.

WHAT THE CHRONICLE COUNTED, AND WHAT IT DIDN’T

The op-ed states, accurately, that more than US$9 billion in cumulative petroleum receipts has flowed into the Natural Resource Fund since first oil. It does not state the fund’s current balance.

That omission is not incidental — it is the entire trick.

As of end-May 2026, the Bank of Guyana reported the NRF holding approximately US$3.96 billion. Of the roughly US$9.3 billion deposited since 2020, more than US$6 billion has already been withdrawn to finance annual budgets.

Put plainly: for every nine dollars this country has earned from its oil, six are already spent. What remains in trust for a nation of fewer than 800,000 people sits under US$4 billion — roughly US$4,000 per citizen, by one recent estimate submitted directly to the National Assembly

A sovereign wealth fund that pays out two-thirds of its lifetime deposits within its first six years is not building a legacy. It is running a budget subsidy with an oil-fund label attached.

THE $60 BILLION QUESTION

The Chronicle cites, with evident pride, more than US$60 billion in contractor investment across seven sanctioned Stabroek Block projects. What it does not explain is what that investment buys the contractor — and what it leaves Guyana.

Under the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement, up to 75 percent of gross production each month is set aside as “cost oil” — revenue that returns to ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC to recover their investment before Guyana sees a cent of profit. The remaining 25 percent, “profit oil,” is split evenly: 12.5 percent to the consortium, 12.5 percent to Guyana. Add the 2 percent royalty, and the state’s confirmed take — stated by the Minister of Natural Resources himself — is approximately 14.5 percent of gross revenue.

That is not an opposition estimate. It is the government’s own defense of the deal, offered after ExxonMobil, Hess and CNOOC posted a combined US$12.5 billion in profit for 2025 against roughly US$2.5 billion that reached Guyana’s account — five times the state’s share, by the ministry’s own arithmetic.

Separate published analysis of the Liza 1 project estimates that the absence of ring-fencing on cost recovery alone has cost Guyana on the order of US$9.7 billionin captured revenue that a fairer contract structure would have secured for the state.

Whatever return the contractor group is realizing on its US$60 billion — and independent estimates place it well above what Guyana receives per dollar produced — it is not disclosed in the pages that celebrate the investment figure.

Scale of spending is not evidence of a fair contract. It can just as easily be evidence of a favorable one, for whoever is doing the spending.

“THE RESOURCE CURSE IS NOT INEVITABLE” — ACCORDING TO WHOM?

The Chronicle piece closes by insisting the resource curse can be avoided through “strong institutions,” “transparency” and “careful planning” — without naming a single institution currently failing to deliver any of the three.

This is the genre at its purest: solemn abstraction standing in for accounting.

The Bloomberg piece it purports to answer was considerably less generous than the Chronicle’s framing suggests. Spinetto’s reporting found Guyana falling short on transparent and competitive rights allocation, local content participation, and structuring contract terms to capture a fair share of resource value — the precise indicators the Natural Resource Charter uses to flag countries at risk.

It was not a piece about fiscal space. It was a piece questioning whether execution can match ambition.

If the Chronicle wishes to rebut that assessment, the honest way to do it is with the balance sheet — the actual NRF balance, the actual profit-oil split, the actual pace of expenditure against the actual pace of intake. Not a column that cites the top-line inflow number and stops before the number that matters: what’s left.

THE STANDARD WE’RE HOLDING THIS TO

This publication does not dispute that oil has changed what Guyana can finance. It disputes the claim, made by implication rather than argument, that spending has kept pace with wisdom.  years into a Natural Resource Fund that has already disbursed nearly two-thirds of everything it has ever received, with the state’s own minister confirming a 14.5 percent take on a resource that belongs constitutionally to the Guyanese people, it will take more than lofty prose to make this windfall outlast the wells.

We will keep publishing the numbers the state paper leaves out.

— The Board

SOURCES

Bank of Guyana, Natural Resource Fund monthly reports (April–May 2026)

Ministry of Natural Resources, public statement on Stabroek Block PSA revenue share (June 2026)

Natural Resource Fund Act 2021, Production Sharing Agreement (2016), Articles 11 and 15.6

Bloomberg Opinion, “Oil’s Resource Curse Hangs Heavy Over Guyana,” Juan Pablo Spinetto (July 29, 2026)

A Big Wave Doesn’t Explain A Lying Minister

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY♦ TRANSPARENCY♦THE PUBLIC RECORD

 A Big Wave Doesn’t Explain A Lying Minister

A Response to Kaieteur News’s “Peeping Tom” on the MV Barima Accountability Question

By Staff Writer

August 2026◊Editorial◊Board Response

Kaieteur News’s “Peeping Tom” column of July 31, 2026, poses a hypothetical dressed up as an argument: if the Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima disaster ultimately finds that an extraordinary wave, and not human failure, capsized the vessel, would the public still demand a minister’s resignation? It is a fair question to put to a mob. It is not a fair question to put to the actual record, because it is not the question that has been asked. The 592 Guardian rejects the premise, and the mounting institutional record shows we are far from alone in doing so.

THE QUESTION PT NEVER ASKS

PT’s column is built entirely on the premise that resignation calls are about ministerial responsibility for the vessel itself — its maintenance, its weather envelope, its structural fate on the night of July 18.

On that framing, demanding Minister Juan Edghill’s head over a rogue wave would indeed be unreasonable. But that is not the demand on the table, and no amount of rhetorical construction changes what the record actually shows.

Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc. (TIGI) has not called for Edghill’s resignation over the sinking. It has called for his recusal — a materially different and far more defensible demand, one PT’s column does not engage with even once.

“The appointment of non-Guyanese commissioners is not the same thing as an independent process.” — TIGI

TIGI has, on the public record and repeatedly since the tragedy, demanded the immediate recusal of Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill, Minister of Public Utilities and Aviation Deodat Indar, and the senior leadership of the Maritime Administration Department (MARAD) from any supervisory role in the investigation.

Its reasoning has nothing to do with prejudging what sank the ferry. It has everything to do with conflict of interest: the inquiry may have to examine decisions taken by the very ministries and agencies these officials head, and a minister cannot credibly oversee scrutiny of his own department.

That is not a mob reaching for a scapegoat. That is a governance principle so basic it barely needs stating outside of Guyana — and TIGI has said as much, on record, more than once since July 18.

A MINISTER WHO PREJUDGED THE FACTS HIMSELF

PT insists that accountability must wait for the evidence. The 592 Guardian agrees — and asks why that standard was not observed by Minister Edghill himself. Within roughly two hours of the disaster, Edghill was in front of cameras offering claims about what had happened.

Those claims did not hold. It took him days, and several visible changes of position, to arrive at anything resembling an accurate account of passenger numbers, vessel condition, and the circumstances of the sinking.

This is not incidental. The passenger manifest discrepancy is now a matter of public record: initial figures placed 116 passengers and 17 crew aboard; that number was later revised upward to 179 once officials reviewed boarding footage.

TIGI has flagged this discrepancy as “manifest fraud” and demanded a full public accounting of how dozens of souls went uncounted, who is responsible, and what enforcement follows. Edghill himself has since described the discrepancy as potentially “criminal.”

A minister does not get to call a discrepancy criminal while simultaneously asking the public to trust that his own early, wrong, hastily delivered public statements were made in good faith and deserve no scrutiny.

This columnist is a freelance blogger operating without the machinery of the state, and makes every genuine effort to verify facts before publishing them. A sitting Cabinet minister, backed by situation rooms, technical agencies, the Coast Guard, and direct lines into MARAD, managed a lower standard of care with his public statements than an independent blogger holds for their own copy. That is not a detail PT’s column has room for. It should be the headline.

PT’S SELECTIVE DUE PROCESS

Here is the asymmetry that guts PT’s own argument. Three members of the MV Barima’s crew have already been charged, well before the Commission of Inquiry has reported a single finding. PT raises no objection to that. There is no column asking whether it is fair to charge crew members ahead of the evidence, no invocation of “wait for the facts,” no concern that the court of public opinion has moved faster than the courts of law.

Yet the same columnist insists that a minister facing calls for recusal — not resignation, not prosecution, simply recusal from overseeing an inquiry into his own department — deserves the full benefit of a process that has not yet concluded.

What, precisely, distinguishes the circumstances of three incarcerated crew members from the circumstances of a Cabinet minister, such that due process is optional for one and sacrosanct for the other?

PT does not say, because the honest answer is uncomfortable: one group has no political constituency defending it, and the other does.

WHAT TIGI’S RECORD ACTUALLY SHOWS

Far from validating PT’s framing, the institutional response since July 18 has moved in the opposite direction. TIGI has:

  • Called for the International Maritime Organization to lead an independent investigation, arguing Guyana’s institutions have “exhausted the public’s trust”;
  • Demanded the recusal of Edghill, Indar, and MARAD’s senior leadership from any supervisory role in the inquiry, on conflict-of-interest grounds distinct from any finding about the cause of the sinking;
  • Rejected the government’s claim that appointing non-Guyanese commissioners is, by itself, sufficient to make the Commission independent;
  • Warned explicitly against a repeat of the Mahdia-style inquiry model, where a report is produced while the state simultaneously fights the same victims’ families in court for years afterward.

None of that is the language of a mob that has “already decided who must carry the political consequences,” to borrow PT’s phrase.

It is the language of an institution asking, with precision, for structural safeguards — declarations of interest from commissioners, public terms of reference, separation of the safety investigation from the criminal process, and guaranteed publication of the final report.

PT’s column never mentions a single one of these demands. It is far easier to rebut a caricature of “hoff with his head” populism than it is to rebut a sober institutional case for recusal on conflict-of-interest grounds. PT chose the easier target.

THE REAL QUESTION

PT asks: what if it was a big wave? The 592 Guardian’s answer is that the question is irrelevant to the actual demand on the table. Nobody serious is asking Minister Edghill to resign because the Atlantic produced a wave of sufficient force to overwhelm an 87-year-old vessel.

TIGI is asking why a minister who prejudged the facts within two hours of a tragedy, and who took days and several shifting accounts to get them right, should be permitted to help oversee the inquiry into his own ministry’s role in that same tragedy.

Those are not the same question, and a columnist who conflates them — while staying conspicuously silent on why three already-charged crew members do not receive the same procedural grace — is not defending due process. He is defending a minister.

The public is not required to choose between prejudgment and forgetfulness. It is entitled to ask why the standard of care demanded of a freelance blogger was higher, in practice, than the standard of care exercised by a Cabinet minister with the full resources of the state behind him.

Until PT answers that question, the big wave is beside the point.

— The Board

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 Commission Sworn In the Dark: What the Griffith-Alfonso Link Says About Ali’s “Truth”

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THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

EDITORIAL — ACCOUNTABILITY WATCH

A Commission Sworn In the Dark: What the Griffith-Alfonso Link Says About Ali’s “Truth”

By Hem Kumar, Editor
Georgetown — August, 2026

President Irfaan Ali stood before the country on Thursday and made a promise. The Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima disaster, he said, would deliver “a full, fair and impartial account of what occurred, why it occurred, and what must be done to ensure that such a tragedy is never repeated.” He praised his five hand-picked commissioners for their “exceptional professional standing and distinction,” and assured the nation that the panel meets “the highest benchmarks of independence, impartiality and objectivity.”

Seventy-three Guyanese are dead. Thirty more remain missing off the Essequibo Coast. The families deserve every word of that promise to be true. This editorial exists because the record, as it stands on the day the commissioners were sworn in, does not yet support it.

A SWEARING-IN WITHOUT THE PUBLIC

The commission was constituted entirely by presidential selection — no parliamentary consultation, no public nomination process, no engagement with the Leader of the Opposition, whose own constituents are disproportionately represented among the dead and missing. That is not a technical quibble.

It sits uneasily against Article 13 of the Constitution, which commits the State to a political framework of inclusionary democracy — one in which citizens, through their organizations, participate meaningfully in decisions affecting their lives.

An inquiry into the deadliest maritime disaster in the nation’s history is precisely the kind of decision Article 13 contemplates being shared, not reserved to the Executive alone.

The oath-taking itself compounded the problem. Four commissioners were sworn in at State House; the Chairman took his oath virtually, from outside the country. There is no indication in the government’s own account that the ceremony was opened to public observation beyond a curated photo release. A President who spent his address invoking public confidence, transparency and the nation’s right to know chose, for the one concrete act that actually constitutes the commission, to do it behind closed doors.

If the process that creates the truth-tellers cannot itself withstand scrutiny, what standing does it have to demand scrutiny of anyone else?

NO SECRETARY, NO MACHINERY — YET THE CLOCK ON “TRUTH” IS ALREADY RUNNING

There is a further and more practical irony sitting underneath the rhetoric. As of this writing, no Secretary has been named to the Commission of Inquiry.

In inquiries of this kind, the Secretary is not ceremonial — that office typically manages evidence intake, public hearing notices, submission processing and the administrative backbone that allows a commission to actually function as a public-facing body. Without one, the commission the President has already credited with the nation’s truth-telling cannot yet formally receive a single public submission. The 592 Guardian is not aware of any government explanation for the omission, nor of any coverage of it in the state-owned press.

THE PROFESSIONAL LINK THE GOVERNMENT HAS NOT ADDRESSED

Commissioner Nyree Dawn Alfonso, the Trinidad and Tobago attorney sworn onto the panel on July 30, is the principal of ND Alfonso and Associates, trading in Trinidad as TT Attorneys. Her firm’s own published case record — a still-live litigation summary dated March 2025 — states in the firm’s own words that “the Owners” in a Supreme Court of Guyana matter were represented by Alfonso alongside two colleagues, one of them named as Keoma Griffith. That is not a 592 Guardian inference. It is the firm’s own account of its own case.

Keoma Griffith is now Guyana’s Minister of Labour, serving in President Ali’s administration. According to the 592 Guardian sourcing, Griffith was engaged, in his capacity as an attorney prior to his ministerial appointment, to act for families of victims of the Mahdia fire in negotiations over compensation packages — an arrangement now contested.

Several of those families allege in ongoing litigation that they were coerced into signing packages they were told represented the government’s final offer. The 592 Guardian has not independently verified who engaged Griffith for that representation, and the coercion allegation remains before the courts and unproven. It is reported here as an allegation, not a finding.

What is independently documented is this: Griffith’s professional profile was removed from TT Attorneys’ website in the days immediately preceding Alfonso’s swearing-in. The firm’s dedicated page for Griffith now returns a dead link. The firm’s public team listing, last modified July 25, no longer carries his name. The firm’s contact page, last modified July 26, has dropped the line that once read “C/O Mr. Keoma D. Griffith” under its Guyana office. Alfonso was sworn onto the Barima commission on July 30 — within days of that record being altered.

WHAT IS DOCUMENTED, AND WHAT IS ALLEGED

• DOCUMENTED: TT Attorneys’ own March 2025 case record names Alfonso and Griffith as co-counsel for the same client in Guyana’s Supreme Court.
• DOCUMENTED: Griffith’s individual profile page on the firm’s site is now a dead link (404).
• DOCUMENTED: The firm’s team page (modified July 25) and contact page (modified July 26) were both edited to remove Griffith’s name in the days before the July 30 swearing-in.
• DOCUMENTED: Griffith now serves as Minister of Labour in the Ali administration.
• ALLEGED, NOT PROVEN: That Griffith was engaged by the Attorney General’s Chambers specifically to represent Mahdia fire families.
• ALLEGED, NOT PROVEN, BEFORE THE COURTS: That families were coerced into signing compensation packages they were told were final.
• UNESTABLISHED: Any direct link between Alfonso personally and the Mahdia matter itself. Her documented connection is to Griffith as a professional associate, not to the Mahdia litigation.

 THE QUESTION, NOT THE VERDICT

The 592 Guardian is not asserting that Nyree Alfonso is compromised, nor that her appointment was engineered.

We are asserting something narrower and, we believe, unanswerable by silence: a commissioner selected by the President for her independence was, until roughly seventy-two hours before her swearing-in, a named professional associate of a sitting minister in that same President’s Cabinet — a minister whose own prior legal conduct is currently the subject of litigation by grieving families elsewhere in this country. The public record of that association was edited during the exact window in which the appointment was being finalised.

That sequence of dates is not an accusation. It is a timeline.

And a government that wanted to demonstrate the “highest benchmarks of independence, impartiality and objectivity” it has promised would get ahead of that timeline with disclosure, not leave it for a news-media to reconstruct from cached pages and dead links.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR

The 592 Guardian is formally requesting that:

♦ The Office of the President disclose the full vetting record for each Barima commissioner, including any conflict-of-interest declarations obtained prior to appointment.

♦ We are separately requesting that Commissioner Alfonso clarify, on the record, the nature and duration of her professional association with Minister Griffith, and confirm or deny whether that association played any role in the timing of the changes made to her firm’s public-facing website.

♦ We are further requesting that the Office of the President name a Secretary to the Commission without further delay, and explain the reason for the delay to date.

Guyana buried seventy-three of its own over the past week. Thirty families are still waiting for bodies that may never surface.

They were promised the truth, sworn under oath, in a ceremony they were not invited to watch. The least this government owes them now is a process that does not have to be reconstructed from a Google cache.
— The Board

The Barima Test Case: A Nation Weighs Its Dead Against Its Discretion

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

SMOKE AND FIRE — PART II OF III

The Barima Test Case: A Nation Weighs Its Dead Against Its Discretion

By Hem Kumar, Editor

Georgetown — August, 2026

This is the second of a three-part series examining Guyana’s oil-era governance through the lens of Bloomberg Opinion’s July 29, 2026 feature “Oil’s Resource Curse Hangs Heavy Over Guyana” by Juan Pablo Spinetto, read against The 592 Guardian’s own investigative record. Attributed excerpts below are drawn from Spinetto’s published column; all further findings are the Guardian’s own unless otherwise sourced. Some allegations described below remain sourced but not independently verified by this newsroom, and are labeled as such.

Juan Pablo Spinetto gave the MV Barima disaster four sentences. He had a week in Georgetown and a great deal of Guyana to cover — Exxon, the port at Berbice, the census, the ranch. Even so, what he chose to notice in those four sentences is instructive: the age of the vessel, the scale of the loss, the poor emergency response, and — the detail he singled out for its own clause — that  civil activists were briefly arrested for staging a peaceful demonstration during a vigil for the victims.

In a revealing display of the authorities’ low tolerance for dissent, three civil activists were briefly arrested for staging a peaceful demonstration during a vigil in solidarity with the victims.— JP Spinetto, Bloomberg Opinion, July 29, 2026

That sentence is the one a visiting columnist can write from a week of interviews and a news wire. It correctly identifies a reflex. What this news-media has spent the past two weeks establishing is that the reflex did not stop at a vigil. It runs through the funeral arrangements, the salvage decision, the parliamentary sitting, and now the Commission of Inquiry meant to investigate all of it.

WHAT BLOOMBERG SAW FROM THE OUTSIDE

Spinetto’s column places Barima inside a broader argument about “weak state capacity” and institutions under strain — accurate, and consistent with what this publication has documented in far greater granularity since the ferry went down on July 18.

He was not in the halls of the Arthur Chung Conference Centre on July 27, when the Joint Opposition marched into the National Assembly chamber in black, wearing placards bearing photographs of the dead, to demand the resignations of Public Works Minister Juan Edghill and Minister within Public Works Deodat Indar.

He did not witness the confrontation between Hadiyyah Mohamed, sister of Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed, and Prime Minister Mark Phillips, in which this publication has verified that Phillips personally told her to “get from here” before his own security made physical contact with her — contact Phillips himself then called off. Parliament proceeded, that same sitting, to pass a $54.9 billion appropriations bill. a $40 billion funding bill for the State Development Bank, and observe one minute of silence for an estimated 100 dead.

THE MEMORIAL QUESTION NOBODY ASKED FOR

Before any of that, this newsroom obtained a document being circulated to victims’ relatives: a pre-drafted “Declaration of Agreement — MV Barima as Memorial Site,” complete with a signature table for name of deceased, relative, relationship, address, phone, and signature.

It was in circulation before the government’s own stated family-consultation process had meaningfully begun. The 592 Guardian’s editorial on this point asked a direct question, and repeats it here: what is government afraid a floated MV Barima will show?

That question sharpened further after this new-media reviewed a still-unconfirmed account — sourced from a relative interviewed amid the July 29 Amerindian Peoples Association picket outside the Office of the President — alleging that the President personally told a grieving family they would be paid $200,000 for burial, and separately told them not to record photos or video on threat of police arrest.

This publication has not yet independently confirmed either claim and is awaiting a cleaner transcript before treating them as established. They are reported here as exactly what they are: a serious, sourced allegation still under review — not yet a 592 Guardian finding.

THE COMMISSION SWORN IN THE DARK

On July 30, President Ali unilaterally swore in a five-member Commission of Inquiry at State House: Chairman Justice Godfrey Phillip Smith of Belize, sworn in virtually; Captain Hamada Fouda of Jamaica; Nyree Dawn Alfonso, a Trinidad and Tobago attorney; Dr. Andrzej Jasionowski of Poland; and Rear Admiral (Ret’d) Hayden Pritchard of Trinidad and Tobago. No Commission Secretary has yet been named. The swearing-in proceeded without press access.

This newsmedia’s review of ND Alfonso and Associates’ own published case record finds that the firm’s March 2025 entry states Alfonso represented “the Owners” in a Supreme Court of Guyana matter — alongside Asif Hosein-Shah and Keoma Griffith, who is now Guyana’s Minister of Labour in the Ali administration.

Griffith’s individual attorney bio page on the firm’s website now returns a 404 error; a cached version confirms he was listed there as admitted to practice in both Guyana and Trinidad since 2016. The firm’s team page was modified on July 25, and its contact page on July 26 — in the days immediately preceding Alfonso’s July 30 swearing-in as a Barima Commissioner.

A commission sworn in the dark cannot be trusted to bring what happened on the Barima into the light.— The 592 Guardian, editorial, July 30, 2026

A second, more serious thread runs alongside this one, and this publication is explicit that it remains an allegation, not an established fact: sourcing describes Griffith as having been engaged by the Attorney General’s Chambers to represent Mahdia fire victims’ families in compensation negotiations, where families now allege in ongoing litigation that they were coerced into accepting a package Griffith presented as government’s best and final offer.

This news-media’s published piece treated Griffith’s subsequent ministerial appointment as a timeline juxtaposition worth placing on the record — not as a proven causal claim of reward for outcome. Alfonso herself has no documented connection to the Mahdia matter; her only established link is as a professional associate of Griffith’s at the same Trinidad firm, a link the firm’s own website was edited to obscure in the run-up to her Barima appointment.

TWO WAYS OF SEEING THE SAME COUNTRY

Put Bloomberg’s four sentences next to the Guardian’s two weeks of reporting and the difference is not one of disagreement. It is one of altitude. Spinetto, writing at the level of a nation’s institutional trajectory, correctly clocked that Guyana’s authorities show “low tolerance for dissent.”

This news-media, writing from inside the specific case, can show what that intolerance costs in practice: a memorial consent form drafted before consultation, a burial-cost allegation still pending confirmation, a Prime Minister’s security making contact with a grieving woman in a public building, and a Commission of Inquiry sworn in without press access, containing a commissioner whose firm scrubbed a colleague’s public profile in the same week the President appointed that colleague’s law partner to investigate the deaths of a hundred people.

This publication has formally requested that the Office of the President disclose its commissioner vetting records, that Alfonso clarify the Griffith association on the record, and that a Commission Secretary be named without further delay. As of this writing, none of the three requests has been answered.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Bloomberg’s column ends its treatment of Guyana’s institutions with a diagnostic instrument — the Natural Resource Charter’s twelve benchmarks, several of them, in Spinetto’s own account, only partially met.

Part III of this series turns to that same diagnostic question through the instrument built to answer it domestically: Guyana’s electoral machinery, the unresolved dispute over Article 161(3)(b) and the composition of GECOM, and what the Carter Center’s own findings — cited approvingly in Spinetto’s piece — leave out.

This is Part II of a three-part series. Part I: “The Elite Capture Story” has run. Part III: “Democracy on Paper” will follow.

— 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

Two Ceremonies, One River

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ATHE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦ GUYANA

 Two Ceremonies, One River

On praise, pillars, and a country still counting its dead

EDITORIAL— August, 2026

Two weeks ago, thirty-eight Guyanese families were still waiting for a body to bury. Two weeks ago, a ferry built in 1939 — a vessel older than Guyanese independence itself — lay capsized off the Essequibo Coast with an unknown number of the missing still inside it.

This week, the President of the Republic marked Emancipation Day by invoking the Village Movement, by speaking of ancestors who “fixed their gaze steadily upon the future,” and by declaring that the pillars our forebears built are the pillars upon which modern Guyana now stands.

The same week, the state-owned Guyana Chronicle ran the International Monetary Fund’s Article IV assessment as vindication: prudent fiscal policy, the lowest debt-distress risk in the hemisphere, a Natural Resource Fund swelling with oil wealth. Other government-aligned outlets went further, framing the consultation as confirmation that Guyana is, full stop, the fastest-growing economy on Earth.

Both stories are true. That is precisely the problem.

WHAT THE FUND ACTUALLY SAID

The IMF’s concluding statement is not a fabrication, and this publication has no interest in pretending otherwise.

Guyana’s fiscal deficit is expected to widen in 2026 on account of social transfers and electricity subsidies, with an improvement projected for 2027 as the Natural Resource Fund’s built-in withdrawal lag moderates spending. The Fund did credit the country with a rapid accumulation of NRF balances and one of the lowest debt-to-GDP ratios in the hemisphere. It did note progress on digital procurement, cost-oil audit resolution through arbitration, and a comprehensive approach to anti-money-laundering compliance tied to the 2024 Caribbean Financial Action Task Force evaluation.

None of that is in dispute. What is in dispute — what this Board insists on stating plainly — is the use to which that assessment has been put by state and state-aligned media.

An Article IV consultation is a technical exercise in macro-fiscal surveillance. It is not, and was never intended to be, a verdict on whether oil wealth is reaching the people the Constitution says it belongs to.

Reporting it as the latter is not journalism. It is laundering a narrow finding into a broad absolution.

THE FASTEST-GROWING ECONOMY, MEASURED FROM WHERE

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Juan Pablo Spinetto spent time on the ground in Georgetown around Guyana’s independence anniversary — including, by his own account, standing before the Golden Arrowhead at midnight at a ceremony he later described in blunt terms as an embarrassment rather than a triumph.

His subsequent column measured Guyana against the Natural Resource Charter, a set of governance benchmarks developed in 2010 for exactly this situation: a small state suddenly rich, and at risk of squandering it the way so many petro-states have before.                                              Guyana meets four of those benchmarks outright, including accountable public decision-making and revenue smoothing. It only partially meets others — public spending efficiency, economic diversification, an inclusive national strategy.

Spinetto’s most damning finding was not a number. It was an absence of one.

He wrote plainly that positive economic indicators abound — vehicle sales, a booming mortgage market — while poverty data remains unreliable and difficult to access. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a structural description of how a government chooses what to measure and what to leave dark.

This Board has tried to fill that dark space honestly, because the alternative — letting a single contested figure become a talking point in either direction — serves no one. The World Bank’s most recent published estimate puts Guyana’s poverty rate at 48.4 percent, but that number rests on a 2019 baseline; seven years and a full oil boom later, no comprehensive updated household survey has been published.

The Inter-American Development Bank’s cross-country documentation cites a considerably higher 58 percent, split between 32 percent in extreme poverty and 26 percent in moderate poverty — a figure that has itself become a subject of domestic argument precisely because no current government household survey exists to settle it.

We do not resolve that dispute here. We note it, because the eleven-point gap between two credible multilateral estimates is not a footnote. It is the story. A government cannot claim to be managing oil wealth transparently while the most basic measure of who that wealth has and has not reached is seven years stale.

 THE VESSEL BENEATH THE NUMBERS

It is against that backdrop that this news-media  places the Emancipation Day address beside the ferry. The President spoke of ancestors who built villages as “crucibles of culture” and “seedbeds of nationhood,” who farmed and mined and built enterprises so that later generations might “stand taller, reach further, and dream broader.”

These are not empty words, and this Board will not pretend the history behind them is anything other than real. The Village Movement was a genuine act of collective self-determination by a formerly enslaved people with almost nothing, and it deserves the honor the President gave it.

But the MV Barima sailed under the same government being praised this week for prudent fiscal stewardship. It sailed in 2026 as a 1939-built vessel, older than the nation’s independence, carrying by the government’s own revised count some 179 people against a manifest that listed 133 — a discrepancy that has never been adequately explained. Seventy-seven people are confirmed dead. More than two dozen remain unaccounted for, weeks later. Families in Charity waited by the shore for news of children who were never found.

A Commission of Inquiry now sits, appointed unilaterally, with its own unresolved questions about commissioner conflicts that this Board has documented at length in prior editions. A government audit team convened to review maritime safety was staffed by officials with years-long institutional ties to the very regulator whose failures the disaster exposed.

This is not a story about incompetence in isolation. It is a story about sequencing and priority inside a state managing, by its own telling, one of the best-run oil windfalls in the hemisphere.

A nation capable of the digital procurement platforms and detailed medium-term fiscal projections the IMF praised is a nation capable of maintaining a passenger ferry manifest. The failure was not a lack of capacity.

It was a lack of will to apply that capacity where poor and rural Guyanese — disproportionately Indigenous, disproportionately far from Georgetown — actually live and travel.

THE QUESTION WORTH ASKING

Do the people who write these state-aligned pieces — the ones hailing the IMF report as proof of a nation transformed, in the same week the country buried ferry victims and marked Emancipation Day with talk of pillars — actually believe what they are writing?

This Board does not know, and will not pretend to divine motive where evidence is unavailable. What we can state is this: a free press exists precisely to hold the space between an IMF technical statement and a lived reality of stale poverty data and a sunken 87-year-old ferry.  

When state media collapses that space — when it reports the former as though it resolves the latter — it is not covering the country. It is covering for it.

Guyana’s ancestors, the President said correctly, did not greet freedom with bitterness. They built. This Board asks only that the government being praised this week for its stewardship of a $40-billion sovereign fund show the same resolve their ancestors showed with far less: an honest accounting, published and current, of who in this country is still waiting for the pillars to reach them.

— The Board

By Hem Kumar, Editor