Round One to the People — But the Government’s Pandora’s Box Isn’t Empty Yet

THE 592 GUARDIAN◊ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM ◊ GUYANA

BOARD EDITORIAL

Round One to the People — But the Government’s Pandora’s Box Isn’t Empty Yet

Georgetown, August, 2026

By: Hem Kumar, Editor

The Government of Guyana has, for the first time since the MV Barima went down on July 18, done something that looks like listening. On July 31, the Maritime Administration Department (MARAD) issued a formal Invitation for Expressions of Interest for the salvage of the vessel — an implicit reversal of Prime Minister Mark Phillips’s earlier public position that “conditions” were not favourable for recovery, and that additional divers were unlikely to change the outcome.

That reversal did not arrive on its own. It arrived after the Amerindian Peoples Association picketed the Office of the President. After a Gen Z-led coalition held a silent vigil outside the same building. After Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed stood in front of grieving families and offered, publicly and repeatedly, to fund and facilitate the vessel’s recovery at no cost to the Guyanese taxpayer. After editorial pages — this one included — asked, in print, what the Government was afraid a floated MV Barima would show.

Round one belongs to the people of Guyana. Sustained public pressure, not government initiative, forced this outcome. That much should be said plainly, and credited to the families, the protesters, and the civil society organisations who refused to let the vessel — and the seventy-two lives lost with it, and the thirty still missing — disappear from the news cycle.

But round one is not the fight. The manner in which the Government has chosen to deliver on its own concession raises questions serious enough that the applause should be brief.

A Process Built for Delay, Not Urgency

The EOI MARAD issued is not an emergency mobilisation. It is a standard competitive procurement instrument, complete with a submission deadline of Friday, August 14 — more than two weeks after the notice was published, and a couple of weeks after the Opposition Leader first made his offer.

APNU parliamentarian Ganesh Mahipaul has laid out what comes after that deadline: evaluation of submissions for responsiveness, shortlisting, evaluation of bids, contract award, execution of the agreement, mobilisation of equipment and personnel, and only then the issuance of a commencement order. By his estimate — and it is difficult to dispute the arithmetic — actual salvage operations are unlikely to begin before late August, and quite possibly not until September.

We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) has made the same point in different words: the Government “buckled under pressure of the people,” but chose a procurement path that leaves grieving families waiting even longer for the answers they were promised.

“If there was ever a case that justified emergency procurement, surely the worst maritime disaster in modern Guyanese history is one.” — Ganesh Mahipaul, MP

Mr Mahipaul’s underlying argument deserves to be stated in full, because it is not an emotional appeal — it is an institutional one. Guyana’s procurement law permits emergency and sole-source procurement precisely for situations where the public interest demands immediate action.

The 592 Guardian has documented, repeatedly and on the record, this same Government’s comfort with emergency and sole-source procurement mechanisms for projects far less urgent than the recovery of a vessel that is now the final resting place of Guyanese citizens and the single most important piece of physical evidence in the country’s worst maritime disaster.

If the mechanism was available for lesser matters, its absence here is not an oversight. It is a choice. And the Government owes the country an answer as to why it made that choice.

Every Week Underwater Has a Cost

That choice carries a price measured in something other than money. Mr Mahipaul’s warning about evidentiary decay is not alarmist; it is basic marine forensics.

Salt water corrodes mechanical systems, degrades electronic equipment, and alters structural evidence over time. The Commission of Inquiry — whose composition and independence 592 Guardian has already had cause to question — cannot examine what has dissolved.

Every additional week the MV Barima spends on the seabed is a week in which the truth the country was promised becomes a little harder to recover, whether or not that is anyone’s intention.

The Offer the Government Never Answered

It bears repeating, because the timeline matters: Azruddin Mohamed’s offer to fund and facilitate the vessel’s salvage through a reputable international marine contractor, at no cost to the taxpayer, was public for days before MARAD’s EOI appeared.

The Government did not accept it. It did not formally decline it. It said nothing — until it produced its own process, on its own timeline, under its own name.

Whatever the merits of running a competitive procurement in the ordinary course of government business, this was not the ordinary course of business, and the silence in the interval invites a question 592 Guardian is not alone in asking: was the delay about due diligence, or was it about who gets to be seen taking Guyana’s dead out of the water?

We do not know. Multiple theories are circulating in Georgetown — that the delay serves to let compromised evidence lose its evidentiary value; that a competitive process opens room for financial arrangements a direct, funded offer would have foreclosed; that the Government could not tolerate handing the Opposition Leader a visible, unanswerable moment of moral authority ahead of the next election.

The 592 Guardian has not verified any of these as fact, and we will not print them as such. But their circulation is itself a symptom of a deeper illness: a Government that has, through its own conduct on this file and others, exhausted the public’s willingness to extend it the benefit of the doubt.

That erosion of trust is not the invention of a hostile press. It is the cumulative result of a commission sworn in behind closed doors, a memorial consent form circulated to families before any genuine consultation began, and a Prime Minister who told the country recovery was unlikely days before his own government opened a tender to attempt exactly that.

Do It Right, or Don’t Claim the Credit

If the Government insists on being the one to raise the MV Barima — rather than accepting an offer that would have put a salvage vessel over that wreck site weeks ago — then it owes the country a process that matches the gravity of what it is recovering.

That means emergency procurement, not routine tender. It means a public, dated commitment to when operations begin, not a rolling estimate. It means transparent chain-of-custody protocols for whatever the vessel yields, developed in consultation with the Commission of Inquiry rather than announced to it.

Anything less turns an act that should carry the dignity the victims are owed into one more exhibit in a pattern the 592 Guardian has now documented for two weeks running.

This is not business as usual. It cannot be treated as business as usual by a Government that spent the first two weeks after July 18 getting the basic facts of its own disaster wrong, correcting them days later, and asking the country to wait for a process it does not yet trust.

Round Two

The people won round one. The Government’s hand was forced, and the vessel will, in principle, come up. But a Pandora’s box of procedural discretion remains open in this Government’s hands — the pace of the tender, the composition of the evaluation, the handling of whatever the wreck yields, and the still-unresolved question of whether the Commission of Inquiry tasked with making sense of it all is itself independent and impartial, given what this Guardian has already documented about its own commissioners.

‘Round two is the accountability fight that does not end when the vessel breaks the surface. It ends when every official whose conduct — before, during, or after July 18 — bears on culpability has answered for it, and it does not end a moment before the Commission of Inquiry delivers findings the public has reason to trust.

The families of the MV Barima are still waiting for closure the Government has had the power to accelerate since the day Azruddin Mohamed made his offer. Every day of procedural delay from here is a day this Government chooses, and a day it will have to account for.

— The Board