Condolences From the Same Hands That Signed Away Justice

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