Condolences From the Same Hands That Signed Away Justice

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦. ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ♦. GUYANA 

Condolences From the Same Hands That Signed Away Justice

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

The Government of Guyana wants the country to believe it has learned how to grieve. In the wake of the MV Barima capsizing, ministers have taken up residence at the Umana Yana, hotlines have been switched on, and the language of “continuous emotional, psychosocial and practical assistance” has been deployed with the fluency of officials who have said it all before. That fluency is the problem. The State is not improvising a response to tragedy. It is executing a script.

Minister of Labour and Manpower Planning, Keoma Griffith, stood before the cameras at the Umana Yana on Friday to assure grieving families that “the efforts continue.”

Guyanese with functioning memories will recognise the irony immediately. Griffith is the same official who, as the State’s representative, sat across from the guardians of children killed in the May 2023 Mahdia dormitory fire and helped extract their signatures on a $5 million settlement, a sum families now allege was presented under duress, without independent legal counsel, and under the ultimatum that refusal meant nothing at all  

That matter is still before the courts. The Chief Justice has already found the settlement agreements cannot simply be waved away as the final word. And yet the same government has placed the same man at the centre of the response to a fresh tragedy involving dozens of lost and grieving families.

A government with any institutional self-awareness would have kept Griffith as far from Region One’s grieving families as possible. Instead it handed him a microphone at the Umana Yana.

THE LANGUAGE OF CARE, THE ARITHMETIC OF CONTEMPT

Minister Zulfikar Ally says the President has directed that every affected family receive “personal attention.” All the arms of government, he says, are reaching out. Three hotlines have been established. Counselling has been “activated.” This is the vocabulary of a public relations operation, not a State reckoning with what it owes the families of the dead. Words cost nothing.

What a government is actually prepared to do is measured in what it puts on the table, and on that count Guyana already has a precedent that answers the question before it is asked.

In 2023, the families of twenty children burned to death in a state-run dormitory were offered $5 million each, a sum so far beneath the scale of the loss that families are now suing for hundreds of millions in the courts, and a sum the State’s own representative helped secure their signatures on. Reports from that period describe a burial assistance figure of roughly $300,000 per victim, a number that does not begin to cover the cost of dignity, let alone loss.

If the standing rate this administration places on a Guyanese life lost to state or systemic failure is a few hundred thousand dollars for a funeral and a few million for a signature, then “continuous support” for the families of the MV Barima is not a promise. It is a warning.

SINCERITY IS NOT A PRESS RELEASE

We do not begrudge any family a hotline number, a counsellor, or a minister’s visit. Psychosocial support has real value, and social workers on the ground in Regions One and Two deserve to be distinguished from the ministers photographed beside them. Our objection is not to comfort. It is to comfort offered by a government that has shown, repeatedly, that its sense of what families are owed collapses the moment the cameras move on and the settlement papers come out.

Real help is not a hotline. Real help is a compensation framework negotiated in the open, with independent counsel for every family, set at a figure that reflects what a life is actually worth rather than what the Consolidated Fund finds convenient.

Real help is not sending the architect of the Mahdia settlement to stand at the Umana Yana and ask a new set of grieving families to trust the process. Until this government can show it has changed the arithmetic, and not merely the script, its condolences should be read for what they are: sincerity performed by officials who have already demonstrated, in a court record now open for public inspection, what their sincerity is worth.

— The Board

Candour Is Not Optional: Why the Defence of Minister Edghill Misses the Point

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY ♦ INTEGRITY  JOURNALISM 

 Candour Is Not Optional: Why the Defence of Minister Edghill Misses the Point

The doctrine of ministerial responsibility answers whether a minister must resign. It does not answer whether a minister told the truth.

A recent commentary by Kaieteur columnist Peeping Tom defending Minister Juan Edghill against calls for his resignation makes a case that is, on its own narrow terms, largely sound. It correctly distinguishes collective from individual ministerial responsibility. It correctly notes that the Transport and Harbours Department operates under its own board, and that a minister is not constitutionally expected to supervise the loading of cargo or the verification of passenger manifests. It correctly observes that political accountability in Guyana has been applied selectively, and that the 2017 Camp Street prison fire produced no resignation despite eighteen deaths and a finding of institutional failure.

All of that may be true, and none of it is the question that matters. The doctrine of ministerial responsibility governs when a minister must resign as a matter of constitutional convention. It has nothing to say about whether a minister, in his own public statements, met the baseline duty of candour that the office requires regardless of who is ultimately responsible for the underlying tragedy. Those are two different standards, and the commentary in question answers only the first.

WHAT THE MINISTER SAID, AND WHEN

The public record on the MV Barima disaster is now well established, and it is worth setting out in sequence, because sequence is precisely what the original defence omits.

On July 19, the day after the vessel capsized, Minister Edghill dismissed public concern about overloading and mechanical failure. He stated that the ferry was licensed to carry 284 tonnes of cargo and manifested at 268 tonnes, and that it was licensed for 397 passengers but carried only 116. He attributed the capsizing to a rough Atlantic tide.

Within twenty-four hours, that account began to unravel. On July 20, the Minister acknowledged what he called a discrepancy in the passenger count, conceding that the manifest did not accurately reflect the number of people aboard. Separately, he disclosed that rescued survivors were not listed on the official manifest at all, a fact he characterised as “mischief” committed by others. The same day brought disclosure that the vessel’s captain and first engineer had tested positive for narcotics, and the entire management team responsible for loading and dispatch was suspended.

The question is not whether the Minister knew the manifest was false when he first spoke. It is why he spoke with such certainty before he could possibly have known.

THE DISTINCTION THAT MATTERS

There is an important distinction here, and precision requires that we hold it rather than collapse it in either direction. To say that Minister Edghill knowingly lied — that he stated a falsehood while aware it was false — is an assertion the public record does not yet support. Nothing so far confirms what he knew at the moment he made his July 19 statements. That charge, if made, would need evidence this news outlet does not have and has not seen produced by anyone else.

But the absence of proof of a knowing lie is not the same as an absence of a leadership failure. What the record does establish, without any need for further inquiry, is this: the Minister went before the public and stated specific, confident, falsifiable facts about passenger counts and manifest accuracy at a moment when those facts could not yet have been verified, and had to be substantially reversed within a day. He offered certainty where the responsible course was to offer verification in progress. That is not a matter that awaits a Commission of Inquiry. It is already in the public record, in his own words, dated and quoted.

This is the standard the original commentary never engages. It asks only whether Article-161-style doctrine or the convention of political accountability compels resignation. It does not ask whether the Minister, independent of who ultimately bears operational fault for the T&HD’s manifest failures, met the ordinary duty of a public official not to assert as settled fact what has not been verified — particularly while families were still waiting on news of the missing.

WHY INSTITUTIONAL INSULATION DOES NOT ANSWER THIS

The original piece leans heavily on the fact that the Transport and Harbours Department operates with its own board, and that operational failures — loading, manifest accuracy, crew screening — belong to officials, not the Minister. That may well be correct as to who bears operational and possibly criminal responsibility for the manifest fraud itself. But it is beside the point raised here. The suspended loading team did not stand at a podium and tell the nation the passenger count was accurate. The Minister did. The distance the T&HD board provides from operational failure provides no distance at all from a minister’s own public statements. Those are his, made in his own voice, and they are the proper subject of scrutiny independent of any finding the Commission of Inquiry eventually reaches on the cause of the capsizing.

A NARROWER AND MORE DEFENSIBLE STANDARD

None of this requires abandoning the caution the original piece rightly urges. It remains true that we do not yet know whether the capsizing itself resulted from overloading, mechanical failure, crew impairment, or an unforeseeable event at sea, and it remains proper to await the Commission of Inquiry before assigning that cause. It also remains fair to note, as the original piece does, that Guyana’s political culture has applied the convention of ministerial resignation inconsistently, and that consistency is a legitimate demand.

But consistency cuts both ways. If the standard for judging a minister’s conduct is to be applied evenly, it should include not only the question of operational fault under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, but the separate and more basic question of candour: did the Minister’s public statements, made while the search for survivors was ongoing, meet the standard the public was entitled to expect from the man responsible for informing them?

On the record as it stands, the answer is no. That failure does not by itself resolve the resignation question under constitutional doctrine. It does, however, stand on its own, and it does not require a Commission of Inquiry to be seen.

— The Board

Praise Dressed as Journalism: A Response to the Barima Whitewash

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

Praise Dressed as Journalism: A Response to the Barima Whitewash

Calling Cabinet’s handling of the MV Barima disaster a “template for how a nation responds when tested” requires ignoring almost everything that has actually surfaced since July 19th.

Start with the manifest. This isn’t a minor administrative wrinkle — it’s the government’s own admission of collapse. Officials confirmed the manifest didn’t match the people pulled from the water, and Edghill himself described “severe operational breaches” and “mischief” . The passenger count has moved repeatedly as the story developed — a manifest of 133 against 179 aboard , while Opposition Leader Mohamed noted the toll estimate itself jumped from 67 to 77 within the same news cycle . That’s not the fog of an unfolding tragedy — Guyanese are being asked to trust an operation that, by its own minister’s account, couldn’t count its own passengers.

“Urgency” is contested by the people who lived it. Guyanese have publicly questioned why it took so long to rescue people, with survivors telling reporters they spent hours in the water , and one grandmother described nine hours in the water while she lost four grandchildren . That account doesn’t square with a narrative of flawless, immediate mobilization.

On integrity, the record cuts against the government, not for it. Edghill is currently facing calls for resignation from across the opposition spectrum — APNU, WIN, FGM, AFC and VPAC have all demanded he go  — precisely over the shifting manifest numbers and his own contradictory public statements. Edghill has maintained state agencies followed the same rules as private customers while police are still trying to determine who authorized the passengers and cargo aboard . That is an unresolved chain of accountability, not evidence of a minister who has “come clean.

On compassion, the $300K figure is real, and it’s being disputed by families, not invented by critics. APNU has said some families were offered just $300,000 for funeral expenses — an amount that wouldn’t even cover a burial . The government’s own position, stated by PM Phillips, is that this funeral assistance is explicitly not compensation, with any compensation decision deferred until after the Commission of Inquiry reports .

Families are being asked to bury their dead now and litigate what they’re owed later — which is a defensible logistical position, but it isn’t the “epic compassion” the editorial describes.

None of this means the Commission of Inquiry is worthless. An internationally staffed panel with subpoena-style reach into loading, manifests, crew fitness, and the rescue response is a real mechanism, and it’s worth holding the government to using it honestly. But the test of that commission is whether its findings survive contact with power — not whether a press release announcing it reads well.

A newsroom’s job right now is to document the manifest failures, the timeline discrepancies, and the compensation dispute as they stand, not to pre-certify the government’s handling of them as a national model before the inquiry has done a single day of work.

A House on Fire, and the PPP Chose to Do the Paperwork

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

A House on Fire, and the PPP Chose to Do the Paperwork

There is a particular species of contempt that reveals itself not in what a government says, but in what it does while a nation grieves. 

Yesterday, as Opposition Members of Parliament stood outside the Arthur Chung Conference Centre and inside the Chamber itself, demanding accountability for the more than one hundred Guyanese killed in the MV Barima disaster, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic administration answered with silence — and then with a supplementary funding bill. Business as usual.

The wreck of the Barima still sits on the seabed. The Ministers under whose watch it sank still sit in the Cabinet. And the PPP, given the loudest and most public accountability moment of this parliamentary term, chose to spend it moving money instead of moving Ministers.

Let the record show exactly what was asked, by whom, and why it was refused.

Members of both the Parliamentary and non-Parliamentary Opposition — APNU’s Vinceroy Jordan and Sherod Duncan, alongside Ganesh Mahipaul and Sharma Solomon — did not arrive at the National Assembly yesterday with vague grievances.                                          They arrived with a specific, named demand: the removal of Bishop Juan Edghill, Minister of Public Works, and Deodat Indar, the Minister with purview over the maritime sector. This is not rhetorical excess. 

These are the two Ministers whose portfolios directly govern the regulatory, infrastructural, and oversight failures that placed more than one hundred Guyanese aboard a vessel described by survivors as approaching ninety years old, unseaworthy, and overloaded.

Mahipaul’s account of the MV Ma Lisha is, on its own, a case study in administrative negligence that deserves to outlive this news cycle. A replacement vessel arrived in Guyana from India in 2023, publicly earmarked by Minister Edghill himself for the Port Kaituma route. Three years on, the stelling upgrades required to bring that vessel into service — phases two and three — remain undone. This is not an act of God. It is not an unforeseeable accident. It is a paper trail of a Ministry that acquired a solution to exactly the kind of catastrophe that has now occurred, and simply declined to finish the job. If the Ma Lisha had been in service on the Kaituma route, the question of whether the Barima should have been carrying the load and the passengers it was carrying may never have needed to be asked.

Solomon’s account cuts closer still, and it should sting more than it apparently does: he describes a Minister who “misled this country and remained defiant” until survivors themselves corrected the record with firsthand testimony of the conditions aboard the vessel. When the government’s account of a mass casualty event has to be corrected by the people who nearly died in it, that is not a communications problem. 

That is a Minister who either did not know the condition of a vessel operating under his sector’s oversight, or knew and said otherwise. Either finding is disqualifying.

The 592 Guardian is not in a position to adjudicate which of the two is true — but we note that the burden of proving it is not disqualifying rests with the Minister, not with the grieving families who are still waiting for him to meet that burden.

What happened inside the Chamber yesterday should be read plainly for what it was: Opposition MPs forced a five-minute suspension of sitting through sustained protest, chanting for the removal of two sitting Ministers in the presence of the Speaker, and the government’s response — once the sitting resumed — was to proceed with the supplementary $55B funding bill as though the interruption had been a matter of decorum rather than a matter of more than one hundred dead. 

No statement of intent to remove either Minister. No announcement of an independent inquiry with survivor and family participation built into its terms of reference. No acknowledgment, from the frontbench, that the day’s business might reasonably have waited.

We have written before in this space about the gap between Guyana’s institutional processes and its institutional accountability — a gap that runs through the Auditor General’s unactioned findings, through the Public Accounts Committee’s obstructed quorums, through a pattern the 592 Guardian has now documented across extractive governance, infrastructure, and public health alike.

The MV Barima tragedy is not an aberration from that pattern. It is its most lethal expression to date. A stelling left half-finished for three years is a budget line. A vessel that should not have been at sea, carrying passengers it should not have been carrying, is a body count.

Opposition’s demand is not maximalist. It is the floor, not the ceiling, of what accountability requires: that the two Ministers with direct sectoral responsibility step back so that an investigation into a disaster of this scale is not conducted under the authority of the men whose conduct is itself the subject of that investigation. That is not a partisan position. It is the minimum condition for any inquiry the Guyanese public — and the families still burying their dead — could reasonably be asked to trust.

The PPP had a choice yesterday between confronting that minimum condition and passing a funding bill. It chose the funding bill. Guyanese should understand what that choice communicates, because the government has now communicated it twice: once when the Barima went down, and once again when its Parliament had the chance to answer for it, and instead did the paperwork.

— The Board

AN INQUIRY INTO ITSELF

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY · GOVERNANCE · THE PUBLIC RECORD

 AN INQUIRY INTO ITSELF

Why a Presidentially-Appointed Commission Cannot Investigate. The Government that Appoints It — and What Must Change Before any appointments.  

Seventy-three people are confirmed dead. Thirty remain unaccounted for. Seventy-six survived. On the night of July 18, the MV Barima — an 87-year-old vessel operated by the state’s own Transport and Harbours Department — capsized off Iron Pun in the Pomeroon River en route to Port Kaituma, carrying, by the government’s own revised count following a review of departure-stelling CCTV footage, 179 people, a figure that itself diverged from the official passenger manifest. It is already being described, without serious dispute, as the deadliest maritime disaster in Guyana’s modern history.

President Dr Irfaan Ali has now committed to naming, on July 26, a five-member Commission of Inquiry. He will select its members. He will set its Terms of Reference. He will determine, by extension, what the Commission is permitted to look at, whom it is permitted to summon, and what happens to its findings once they are filed. This media sets out why that structure is a conflict of interest as a matter of basic institutional design — not an accusation of bad faith against any named individual — and what specific, verifiable safeguards must appear in the published Terms of Reference before this Commission can be called independent in substance rather than in name

1.. THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEM

A Commission of Inquiry in Guyana is an executive instrument. It is created, staffed, and scoped by the President, and in the ordinary course of things its findings are published — or not — at the government’s discretion, and acted upon — or not — by the same government whose ministries and state entities sit within its potential findings of fault. This is not a partisan characterization; it is the plain operation of the Commissions of Inquiry framework as it currently exists.

The entities whose conduct falls squarely within the scope President Ali himself announced — vessel loading, passenger boarding procedures, seaworthiness, maintenance history, compliance with maritime law, crew competence, and the passenger-manifest discrepancy already confirmed by government review — are not private actors. The MV Barima was owned and operated by the Transport and Harbours Department, a state entity. Its regulatory overseer is the Maritime Administration Department, a state entity. The ministries with policy responsibility — Public Works under Minister Juan Edghill, and Public Utilities and Aviation under Minister Deodat Indar — are Cabinet appointees of the same President who will select the Commission’s members and write its mandate.

The appointing authority and the subjects of the inquiry occupy the same executive branch. That is the conflict — not an allegation, a fact of institutional architecture.

International commissioners do not, by themselves, cure this. Expertise in maritime law or disaster investigation says nothing about who controls their mandate, their subpoena power, their access to Cabinet-level witnesses, or the fate of their report once it is filed. A foreign engineer sitting on a panel whose Terms of Reference were drafted by the government under investigation is still working inside a mandate that government wrote

II.FOUR LEVERS OF CONTROL

Four specific points of control determine whether this Commission functions as genuine accountability or as a managed exercise in the appearance of it. Each remains, as of this writing, entirely at the President’s discretion.

  • Terms of Reference. Whoever drafts the ToR decides what is investigated. A mandate that examines ‘operational factors’ without naming ministerial oversight, procurement decisions, or MARAD’s regulatory performance can produce a thorough-looking report that never reaches the political exposure. As of July 25, the government has not published a ToR. Opposition MP Dr Terrence Campbell has submitted a competing draft to the Speaker seeking to have Parliament — not the President alone — debate and shape it.
  • Appointment and removal. Commissioners serve at the President’s pleasure for appointment, and in the ordinary CoI framework, for removal. Independence of judgment does not eliminate awareness of who conferred the appointment.
  • Compulsion power. Whether the Commission can subpoena ministers, compel MARAD and Transport and Harbours Department records, and refer findings of criminal negligence or misconduct to the Director of Public Prosecutions is not automatic — it must be written into the ToR the President sets. Nothing announced to date guarantees this.
  • Publication and implementation. Neither the release of the Commission’s report nor the implementation of its recommendations is self-executing. Both remain at the discretion of the government the report may implicate.

III. WHAT IS ALREADY IN DISPUTE

This is not a hypothetical concern raised in the abstract. It is the live subject of political conflict in Guyana in the days before the panel is named.

Transparency International Guyana Inc. has called for the domestic Commission to be replaced altogether by an investigation led by the International Maritime Organization and staffed by global maritime experts with no institutional stake in the outcome — and has demanded, as a minimum threshold of the President’s own stated commitment to transparency, the immediate recusal of Minister Edghill, Minister Indar, and MARAD’s senior management from any role in the inquiry’s design or operation.

Opposition parliamentarian Amanza Walton-Desir has demanded the government publish the Terms of Reference, panel membership, and legal basis for the Commission before it proceeds, noting none had been made public as of her statement. Dr Terrence Campbell has submitted a motion to adjourn the National Assembly specifically to debate the ToR, proposing the Commission be empowered to summon witnesses, compel documents, and refer evidence of negligence, misconduct, or corruption for prosecution or disciplinary action — powers that are not guaranteed under the government’s own framing. Opposition figures including Sarabo Haley have publicly questioned whether the government’s proposed Commission will be sufficiently independent at all. Christopher Ram has separately urged that the Commission be established under the specific statutory authority of the Guyana Shipping Act, 1998, rather than as a discretionary executive order, and be allowed to work entirely free of interference.

If President Ali is sincere about the transparency and accountability he has personally promised the families of the deceased, this is the minimum test of that sincerity — not a discretionary courtesy to ministers he appointed.”

— Transparency International Guyana Inc

IV .WHAT THE TERMS OF REFERENCE MUST CONTAIN

Before the Commission is named on July 26, and before its Terms of Reference are finalized, The 592 Guardian sets out the specific, verifiable safeguards that distinguish a genuine inquiry from a managed one. Anything less should be understood by the public, the families of the seventy-three dead, and Guyana’s international partners as a failure to meet the standard President Ali has himself already promised.

  • Publish the full Terms of Reference before the Commission begins work, not after — including explicit, named scope over MARAD’s regulatory conduct, the Transport and Harbours Department’s operational conduct, and ministerial oversight by Minister Edghill and Minister Indar.
  • Bind the Commission with statutory subpoena power to compel testimony from sitting ministers and the production of MARAD and T&HD records, including all documentation bearing on the confirmed passenger-manifest discrepancy.
  • Secure the recusal of Minister Edghill, Minister Indar, and MARAD’s senior management from any role in shaping the Commission’s mandate, procedure, or resourcing.
  • Guarantee unconditional publication of the Commission’s final report in full, on a fixed statutory timeline, with no ministerial or Cabinet power of redaction or delay.
  • Establish a binding mechanism — parliamentary or judicial — for referring findings of negligence, misconduct, or institutional failure to the Director of Public Prosecutions, independent of executive discretion.
  • Resolve, transparently and in public, the competing proposal that primary investigative jurisdiction sit with the International Maritime Organization rather than a domestic executive instrument — a question the government has not yet    answered                                                                • None  of this is an accusation that the five individuals named tomorrow will act in bad faith. It is a statement of institutional fact: a commission’s independence is a function of its mandate, not the biographies of its members. A distinguished panel operating inside a narrow, government-drafted ToR, without subpoena power over ministers, without a binding publication guarantee, is not independent — it is credentialed.

Guyana has been here before. The families gathered at Charity, at the Operations Centre, waiting for word of the missing, are owed more than a well-staffed committee. They are owed an inquiry structurally incapable of protecting the government that appointed it. That is the test the Terms of Reference — not the five names — will actually decide. The 592 Guardian will publish and assess the Terms of Reference in full the moment they are made public.

— The Board, The 592 Guardian

Who’s Responsible, Who takes Responsibility

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THE 592. GUARDIAN ◊. ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA ◊ OPINION..

Who’s Responsible, Who takes Responsibility

OPINION: BY GHK LALL ◊ JULY 2026

A tragedy of catastrophic proportions is now Guyana’s to manage. An old passenger ferry boat went to the bottom. According to news reports of Saturday, 73 bodies have been recovered and 76 rescued. Taking the official count of 179 passengers on board the MV Barima, it means that 30 of them are still unaccounted for. Over a week after the disaster, there is still uncertainty about how many passengers, paying or not, with a ticket or lacking one, were onboard the vessel. The answers that have been provided have led to more skepticisms, questions. The leadership that is needed in this time of heavy loss and grief has failed to inspire, with adjustment of details shared, and the blame game growing in strength. Guyanese live it. I hear it.

On whose head should lie responsibility for this national human disaster?                 Is it the minister that has oversight? Is it the Cabinet that sits and reviews policy decisions, spending on capital projects, and such? Is it the leadership of the PPP/C Government? Does the political opposition taken as a unit, or in its separate parts, have some responsibility of its own, in taking a disaster and engaging in ‘mischief?’ The crew of the MV Barima on its last voyage has been subject to intense scrutiny. The management team of the Transport and Harbors Department has been sent on leave.

The fear is that there could be tampering with evidence. One senior government representative chose to use “noise” to describe in derogatory fashion the anger over the disaster, and the demands for straight answers.

Straightforward representations even in small amounts would have given citizens a shot of confidence. Those in charge more focused on sharing the truth with families and citizens, and not on seeking out opponents to score political points. There could be no worst time to be about public relations than when scores of lives are lost, with more likely to follow, as the days prolong. Men of stature and men observant of the demands of principle take responsibility. A disaster occurred with many lives lost and many families hurting. The people under whose watch that disaster occurred have one clear duty in front of them. Man or woman, they have to go. In real countries with serious standards, CEO’s do not look to distance from disasters.

They do not pass that tainted baton to captive administrative departments. They do not shift responsibility to those who are lower on the power ladder.

I now give a quick peek at how leaders in countries with standards react in the face of disaster. In South Korea, the MV Sewol disaster that resulted in the loss of over 300 lives, 250 of them children, was a contributor to the impeachment of President Park Guen-hye. Broader issues of corruption, targeting protesting South Koreans, attempts at coverup, and inconsistent and inaccurate releases in the initial hours of the MV Sewol disaster all led to her downfall. Her ceremonial Prime Minister, Chung Hong-won had resigned with days of the Sewol disaster. It was not enough for furious South Koreans, with President Park impeached later. In South Korea’s MV Sewol ferry disaster, there are some strange parallels to Guyana’s MV Barima disaster, of which Guyanese should take note. Providing inaccurate information, minimizing loss, shifting blame, targeting dissenters, and massive corruption in the background.

In Latvia, 54 people died when the roof of the Maxima shopping center collapsed on November 21, 2013. Two days later, Latvian President Andres Berzins termed the disaster a “murder of defenseless people” and said that “the perpetrators should be arrested.” On November 27, six days after the disaster, Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis took responsibility and resigned. Some Latvians thought that the mayor of the city where the roof collapsed, Zolipude, should have resigned, as he was more directly involved.

In Argentina, Egypt, and Greece, responsible ministers resigned immediately after train crashes that caused the loss of dozens of lives in all of those countries.

In each of these foreign situations, those sitting in government did the decent thing and resigned. There was no blowing smoke, no dismissing of outrage, no police action against civil society protestors.

Citizens are still waiting for someone in Guyana’s government to take responsibility and resign. I do. It is not with a one-man decision about a panel. It is of where the will of people should decide, seven-seat majority or none. Let all be put on public trial

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

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THE 592 GUARDIAN EDITORIAL•ACCOUNTABILITY •LABOR POLICY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What must happen now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Who benefits from inaction

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

 A test for leadership

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

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

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

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

MV Barima -Deflections, Dissembling and the Damning. 

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

 AN UNSPEAKABLE TRAGEDY· OPINION  ANALYSIS

MV Barima –Deflections, Dissembling and the Damning. 

There’s human devastation.  Still, the PPP Govt commits to deflection. The MV Barima disaster qualifies as extreme domestic devastation.  Families and communities battered.  The nation bowed.  Rather than strengthening citizens in a time of tribulation, the government engages in desperate measures at self-protection.  At continuation.  At what hurls damnation on its head.  Follow these.

The first words out of the government’s mouth were denials.  The MV Barima wasn’t overloaded.  There was no engine problem.  Those held briefly.   Then were buried under storms of social media rebuttals.  The government stumbled, recovered. 

Desperate to deflect attention from the blood on its head, the PPP Govt then reached for its remaining props: MV Barima crew members, a management team.  All tested for alcohol and other substance use.  Search for scapegoats.  Find them.  Shift attention and intensifying rage to them.  A tragedy had to unfold before that step was taken.  The test results have been shared.  Now how do those exonerate an unbelievably reckless government?  Or insulates government ministers?  Nothing does.  

Not when the MV Barima was an open-air steel casket waiting to close one last time.  The divers will find supporting evidence.  Testing of crew members must be both random and routine, given the culture and public practice of casual drinking pervading that boat’s operations.  With that as baseline, similar testing should be done for public transportation operators. 

The Guinness and grass cultures should provide good business for labs, and inform Guyanese that care about their dangers.

On that same fateful Sunday, one minister launch into a love song celebrating the president’s excellence before a largely indigenous audience.  There’s time and place.  Amid death and unknown casualties, came that disgrace.  The president has to be unimaginably poor in his job to need so many verbal props to sell him to Guyanese.  I still can’t believe that there was that cheapness, coarseness, and unmatched crassness.

Within hours of Disaster Sunday, the National Toshaos Council Conference kicked off in Georgetown. 

Maybe as many as 150 Guyanese dead, many of them of indigenous heritage, and a gathering for indigenous Guyanese proceeds. 

I have heard that the show must go on.  But not when so many died.  Or are feared dead.  Politics has hardened Guyanese.  There’s none harder than the PPP Govt.  Simple humanity and basic decency are the losers.  Hopefully, there are no big sporting bashes, as is the custom.  

There are many dead to mourn and still many bodies to find.  The MV Barima is Guyana’s World Trade Center; except for domestic hands that inflicted death on a scale unknown to Guyanese.  America erred terribly in the wake of the Kennedy assassination (football).  America didn’t repeat that failure on 9/11.  I was there.  I share. 

The National Toshoas Conference could have waited a week.  Written in neon lights is the callousness of a government committed first to propaganda and self-celebration.

It is now days since the tragedy, now a confirmed national disaster.  What about a period of national mourning?  Finally, three days announced.  I think a two-week period of mourning should have been the least.  But three days will have to do.  To honor the dead, the missing, and the grieving.  The magnitude of the disaster, as it seeped into consciousness on Sunday, mandated that national mourning should have commenced on that same day. 

I forget that the MV Barima was a boat without hope, and that Guyana was a country without a head, during those crucial early hours.

On Tuesday morning, there’s breaking news from a very visible and audible Pres Ali: a full, thorough and independent investigation.  I trust that this presidential investigation wouldn’t be like the Warren Commission investigation into the Kennedy assassination.  Or the Linden and Mahdia COIs into police killings, and a firetrap, respectively. 

What insults all Guyanese.  More camouflaging than convincing.  More PPP sponsored propaganda and what has no relation to the purity of facts in unfettered inquiry and testimony. 

Another thought -any credible commission of inquiry is only as good as its scope (Terms of Reference) and the people piloting that boat. 

If it’s a PPP Govt love boat COI, better scrap it before it gets started.  If it’s a lifeboat to save the PPP Govt’s behind, let it go the way of the MV Barima.  Down and out.  Welcome to Guyana, and the PPP Govt’s deflections, dissembling, and what damns it.

I wonder about all those sophisticated foreigners flocking to Guyana, and what they may be thinking of this sick, savaged country.

 

“NO PERMISSION REQUIRED”

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ◊ ACCOUNTABILITY◊ CIVIL LIBERTIES

 “NO PERMISSION REQUIRED”

The Kingston Seawall Arrests and the Constitution the State Keeps Forgetting

On the night of July 22, five bold women stood silently on the periphery of a government-organised vigil for the victims of the MV Barima ferry tragedy. They held signs.

They sang no counter-songs, shouted no slogans, disrupted no prayers. By their own account and by the account of no witness yet produced to contradict them, they did nothing but stand, watch, and hold a position on a matter of public consequence. For this, three of them were seized by officers of the Guyana Police Force, one dragged bodily to a police station, booked, detained, and released only after being told they lacked “permission to protest” and were carrying “illegal signs.”

There is no such thing, in the law of Guyana, as an illegal sign. There is no permit regime for peaceful assembly written into the Constitution these officers are sworn to uphold.

There is, instead, Article 147, which states plainly that no person shall be hindered in the enjoyment of the freedom of assembly, association, and the freedom to demonstrate peacefully.

The five women who stood at Kingston seawall on Wednesday night were not testing that provision. They were exercising it, in its most textbook form: silent, peripheral, unobstructive, and squarely on a matter of accountability for a public tragedy.

A charge that is dropped the morning after is a confession that the arrest should never have been made the night before.

THE TELL IS IN WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

The Force did not merely fail to defend its action. It abandoned it. By the following morning, all charges had been withdrawn, and a senior officer offered the women what can only be described as a conditional apology — sorry, but only “if you think you deserve one.” This is not the language of an institution confident it acted within the law. It is the language of an institution that knows precisely what it did, and is hoping the retreat will be quieter than the offence.

This publication has watched this pattern before, in other contexts and against other targets: an overreach, a public complaint, a quiet institutional walk-back once the exposure becomes inconvenient. The walk-back is not accountability

  It is damage control, and it should never be mistaken for the former. An apology conditioned on the victim first agreeing she was wronged enough to merit one is not an apology.

It is a further assertion of institutional power — the state deciding, even in retreat, that it alone gets to judge the harm it caused.

WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND FIVE NAMES

The specific facts here are almost beside the point, and that is precisely why they matter. If the Guyana Police Force can detain five silent, unarmed women standing at the edge of a public commemoration — women whose stated grievance was that the MV Barima tragedy was preventable and that a sitting minister should answer for it — then the constitutional guarantee of peaceful assembly exists only at the discretion of whichever officer is on duty that night.

A right that can be revoked on the spot, without citation to any law, by an officer unable to say what statute was being broken, is not a right. It is a permission, extended or withdrawn at pleasure.

 That is the real subject of this editorial, and it is why we return to it: not merely to recount what happened to Ms Nageer, Ms Bacchus-Hinds, Ms Collymore, Ms Lucas, and Ms Marcus, but to state without qualification what every citizen of this country is entitled to do, and to have that entitlement mean something the next time officers decide it is inconvenient.

WHAT ARTICLE 147 ACTUALLY GUARANTEES

Citizens of Guyana have :

◊ The constitutional right to assemble peacefully, in public, without seeking prior permission from the police, a minister, or any organ of the State.

◊ They have the right to hold signs criticising government officials by name, including ministers, up to and including calls for resignation or prosecution, provided the message itself does not incite violence or unlawful conduct.

◊ They have the right to do this at or near a state-organized event, so long as they do not obstruct, harass, or physically interfere with that event or its participants — a standard the five women plainly met, by the uncontested account of organisers and passersby alike.

◊ And they have the right, if none of this is honoured, to refuse to move on an officer’s say-so alone, and to ask that officer to cite the specific law allegedly being broken — a question the officers at Kingston seawall were, tellingly, unable to answer.

None of this required a permit that was never applied for, because no such permit exists to apply for.

None of it required the vigil organisers’ consent, because the seawall on that night was a public space, not a private one. And none of it was forfeited when the women declined to be moved, because the constitutional right to remain does not expire the moment an officer would prefer that it did.

THE LINE THIS NEWS MEDIA DRAWS

We publish this not as commentary on one bad night, but as a standing reference.                                                                                                          The right to peaceful assembly in this country is not contingent on the mood of the officer nearest you, the convenience of the event you are standing beside, or the popularity of the message on your sign. It is written into the supreme law of Guyana, and it does not require police permission to exercise — which is precisely the phrase the arresting officers got backwards.

It is the State that requires permission, under Article 147, before it may hinder a citizen’s peaceful assembly. It is not the citizen who requires permission to assemble.

The women arrested at Kingston seawall are reportedly weighing a constitutional case. This publication institutional position is stated plainly: they should bring it, and the constitutional court should be given the opportunity to say, once and unambiguously, what an apology offered on condition of the victim’s gratitude cannot say —.                  “that this was unlawful, that it does not become lawful because the charges were later dropped, and that the remedy is not silence at the top and forgetting at the bottom, but consequence for those who ordered five silent women removed from a public seawall for carrying signs the officers could not name a single law against.”

— The Board

 MV Barima -What is Truth….

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THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ACCOUNTABILITY& TRANSPARENCY 

 MV Barima –What is Truth….

‘What is truth?’  It was Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, who famously asked that of Jesus Christ.  I ask the same question of the PPP Govt: what is truth?  Relative to the now sunken MV Barima.  Then I go further: who in the PPP Govt has truth in them?  Re the MV Barima; beyond this boat to hell.  To draw closer to real truth, there was reaching out to people who plied that route for decades.  Plus, people in the shipping sector.  Plus, people of that area’s heritage; now its anguish.

For starters, cargo onboard can be much more (dangerously more) than what’s recorded.  Cargo loaded from top to bottom of what was a laboring, creaking, on-its-last breath dhow.  Add miners with the heavy equipment and appliances of their trade.  Add paying passengers with and without tickets.  Add children that may not be ticketed.  These all add up.  Only the surface is scratched, however.

Next, the MV Barima was an overdue ICU case.  Before putting out to pasture.  To pasture, not back in passenger service.  The truth is that, despite its severe handicaps, the MV Barima was repaired and patched up, when it ought to have been retired. 

Think in human terms.  Think of a dreadfully diseased ICU patient.  He is given some methylated spirits, and a full wheelbarrow to push, and a cart to load.  Last, the gasping patient himself has to haul the cart, as if it is a rickshaw.  There are neither mules nor donkeys around.

Separately, sending a management team home is a joke.  Too late to save one lost soul.  Means nothing for people shredded by their griefs.  Why wait for a disaster that was pending for years before there is action?

Truth be told, the entire PPP Govt has blood on its hands.  There are no innocents. 

Official spinning smears a tragedy.  It was the reflexive action Sunday morning.  Propaganda piles on indigenous agonies.  Crocodile tears degrade people dealing with unfathomable loss.  Losses for some.  While some were laffing and sportin’.

Today, the marine transport section of Guyana finds itself under harsh public glare.  I don’t think that’s a cure (sending home). 

I see a confluence of weaknesses; the sick way that this country is governed; part of the corruptions and coverups.  Year after year, state institutions and entities that form the bulwark of the Guyana Government’s face to the Guyanese people, have been infiltrated.  Then, generally overrun by politics and corruptions that dilute the standards and promise of Guyana.  Almost across the board, and in a long list of departments, PPP Govt selectees have turned a blind eye, dropped the ball, and fallen down in the performance of their jobs.  In the delivery of services that is safe and sound for Guyanese, what carries them to another level. 

In sum, the marine transport agency, and as harrowing as the MV Barima sinking is, it is not the disease itself.  Both are just symptoms, offshoots, of what festers fatally beneath the surface.  It is how a government has destroyed a country.  A government with virtually unlimited power and unquantifiable money, and that is all that it’s capable of: destroying a country.  Its standards.  Its morals.  Its systems.  Its funds.  Its aspirations.

In the PPP Govt, and with few exceptions, what Guyanese contend with is a combination of: Con artists, pathological deceivers, shifty concealers, and countless dirty tricksters.  Over 150 Guyanese, most of them poor, had to die, for the rest of Guyana to learn how the PPP Govt is a blight and a horror on this nation.

What is truth?  It is of men and women with only darkness in them. No truth.  No light.  Regardless, don’t lose hope.  There will be celebrating religious holidays before long.  Xmas is coming.  Why bother with a month of national mourning? 

Look at the kind of people that perished.  There’s that type of truth, too.  All should be pierced.  Could be the One Guyana that is desired.