Leadership Cannot Hide Behind Livestreams

Leadership

EDITORIAL

A President’s Silence, Engineered

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

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

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

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

A COMMISSION ASSEMBLED IN THE PRESIDENT’S OWN IMAGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

That request stands unanswered.

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

THE AUDIT TEAM THAT CANNOT AUDIT ITSELF

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

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

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

CONSENT, PRE-WRITTEN

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT A LIVESTREAM CANNOT DO

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

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

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

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

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

— The Board