Politics Grows Up When Someone Actually Does the Reading

 Politics Grows Up When Someone Actually Does the Reading

A Response to “Guyana Deserves Better Politics: Beyond the Noise, the Likes and the Political Circus”

By The Board♦ August, 2026

A Guyana Chronicle  commentary is circulating this week under the Crossfire column — instructing Guyana’s political opposition to stop chasing likes, start reading the Budget documents, dissect the supplementary financial papers, and study the Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima disaster instead of holding placards.

The advice is not wrong. It is simply describing, almost word for word, the work that has already been done — not by WIN, not by APNU, and not by the author of that piece.

It has been done by this newsroom.

The column asks for exactly the kind of scrutiny it never once demonstrates.

WHAT “STUDYING THE COI” ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

The piece urges the opposition to “study the COI, the MARAD findings and processes, the regulatory framework… the procurement and maintenance history of the maritime fleet.”

Fair enough. Here is what that study has already surfaced, on the public record, weeks before this editorial’s publication date.

♦ The Commission’s own attorney-commissioner, Nyree Dawn Alfonso, has a documented prior professional association — through her own firm’s case record — with a lawyer who is now a sitting Cabinet minister.

♦ The CoI’s Secretary is the nephew of a former senior PPP official.

♦ The government’s own “Safety and Compliance Audit Team,” announced days after the tragedy, includes an official who has spent years as a paid MARAD consultant reviewing the very agency he was appointed to audit.

♦ MARAD itself disclosed back in 2022 — after an earlier fatal incident — that it had six certified marine surveyors for more than two thousand vessels, and was still advertising an unfilled surveyor vacancy months before the Barima went down.

♦ A retired U.S. Navy officer’s legal analysis of the Shipping Act has identified a regulatory loophole — the “24-Metre Gap” — that left a vessel the size of the Barima with fewer statutory safety obligations than a small wooden boat.

None of that came from a press release. It came from reading the documents — case records, CVs, gazette notices, procurement histories — the same documents the commentary insists nobody in Guyana’s political class is willing to open.

THE CONTRACTOR NOBODY ASKED ABOUT

Then there is the salvage contractor. The government quietly invited a Dutch firm to recover the wreck before any public bidding process opened — the same wreck that is itself physical evidence in an active inquiry into 73 deaths.                                                                                    That firm’s owner has a 2019 Interpol arrest record out of Nigeria, a Dutch Supreme Court finding of deliberate tax abuse tied to his corporate group, and an unrelated trademark dispute with BMW over salvaged vehicles. A commentary genuinely concerned with “procurement, expenditure, and national priorities” might have found that detail more useful than a paragraph about Facebook likes.

READINESS IS NOT AN OCCASION

The column singles out the Barima tragedy as proof the opposition should trade placards for policy substance — while ignoring that the same government it defends mobilized the GDF Coast Guard, the Police Marine Unit, and joint services within minutes to secure a Vice President facing a political protest at Watooka House, on a day and location the government itself had scheduled.

The Barima’s distress call, by the documented and still-uncorrected public timeline, went unanswered by a rescue vessel for roughly seven hours.

That is not a question of noise versus substance. It is a question of where the state’s readiness goes when the emergency isn’t the Vice President’s afternoon.

WHOSE POLITICS IS ACTUALLY IMMATURE

The piece frames its critique as concern for Guyana’s democratic maturity at 60 — disagreement without destruction, policy over personality, parliament over performance. Those are reasonable standards. They would be more persuasive from a byline willing to attach a name to them, and from an outlet willing to apply the same standard of documentary rigor to the government it consistently declines to scrutinize as it applies, in the abstract, to an opposition it has already decided is unserious.

Demanding a minister’s recusal on a documented conflict of interest is not “political thuggery.” It is the plain application of the same accountability standard the commentary claims to want.

♦ Asking why a legally compromised contractor was handed a no-bid mandate over evidence in a fatal-disaster inquiry is not chasing likes.       ♦ Asking why a rapid-response apparatus exists for a Vice President’s protest but not for seventy-three passengers taking on water is not political theatre.

It is the Budget-document, contract-reading, institution-strengthening work the column claims to be pleading for — already published, already on the record, and conspicuously absent from the piece’s own account of what “serious politics” requires of the government it does not name.

Guyana does not need a lecture on political maturity from a piece that cannot bring itself to look at the ministry it is defending as closely as it looks at the opposition it is scolding.

If growing up means reading the documents, strengthening the institutions, and following the money — this newsroom will keep doing exactly that. The invitation to join us remains open.

— The Board