Readiness Is Not an Occasion — It’s a Standing Duty

Readiness Is Not an Occasion — It’s a Standing Duty

OPINION BY: Staff Writer

The Watooka deployment shows the State can move fast. The MV Barima disaster shows what happens when it doesn’t have to.

On August 4, 2026, the Vice President’s public outreach at Watooka House in Linden met a wall of protest. Barriers went down. Gates were forced. And within a short window, the machinery of the Guyanese state answered in full: GDF Coast Guard, the Police Marine Unit, and elements of the Joint Services on the ground to secure the Vice President and his entourage.

No one disputes that the safety of state officials matters. What the  592 Guardian is asking — on behalf of the families of over 100 people who did not come home from the MV Barima — is why that same machinery, with those same institutional muscles, which was reportedly less than 2  hours away from a stricken vessel and a distress call placed at approximately 10:00 p.m. was not operationalized in a similar manner? 

THE EXCUSE THAT DOESN’T HOLD

The predictable defense is that Watooka was scheduled and Barima was not — that planners had daylight and lead time for one, and only a dark river for the other.

We have made this argument’s rebuttal before, and we make it again here in sharper terms: a standing military and security apparatus does not get to claim surprise. Readiness for the unexpected is the entire premise of what these forces exist to do, in Guyana as everywhere else. 

“A Coast Guard that cannot answer a night distress call is not an underfunded Coast Guard having an off night — it is a Coast Guard that has failed at its only non-negotiable function.”

GUYANA HAS EVEN LESS EXCUSE THAN MOST

This is not an abstract, textbook point for this country. Guyana’s Joint Services live under a standing, unscheduled threat posture already — repeated incursions and shooting incidents along the Venezuela border have required exactly the kind of no-notice, any-hour readiness that a night-time maritime distress call also demands.

The State cannot simultaneously maintain that its forces are postured and prepared for sudden hostile action across the western border, and then explain away a slow response to a sinking ferry as an unavoidable casualty of the hour.

Either the readiness exists as a standing condition — in which case it should have reached the Barima that night — or it does not, in which case the country deserves to know what, exactly, all the preparedness rhetoric around border security has actually bought it.

WHAT TODAY’S DEPLOYMENT PROVES

We are not asking the State to explain why it protected the Vice President today. That response was appropriate. We are asking the State to explain why the same coordination, the same speed, and the same command reflexes were not already the baseline — every night, on every river, for every vessel — before 179 people needed them and did not get them in time.

THE QUESTIONS BEFORE THE COMMISSION

These are not accusations. They are questions the Commission of Inquiry has both the mandate and the obligation to answer, plainly and on the record:

• Could a Watooka-level response have reached the MV Barima in to save additional lives?
• What emergency response systems were actually in place and operational on the night of July 18?
• Were the State’s legal obligations on vessel inspection, maritime safety, and emergency preparedness fulfilled — not in principle, but in fact, that night?                                                                                       

The people of Guyana have now watched their state move with speed and coordination when the safety of an official was on the line. They are entitled to ask why the same was not true when the safety of  one hundred and seventy-nine ordinary citizens was on the line. Preparedness cannot be occasion-specific. Accountability cannot be either. ONE GUYANA?

— The Board