The Commission Is Qualified. The Process Is Not Explained.

 The Commission Is Qualified. The Process Is Not Explained.

President Ali names five credible experts to the MV Barima inquiry — and answers none of the questions his method has raised

By the Editorial Board

There is no serious case to be made against the competence of the five people President Irfaan Ali named on Sunday to the Commission of Inquiry into the capsizing of the MV Barima. On paper, this is as strong a panel as Guyana could plausibly assemble on short notice from within the Caribbean’s own bench of maritime and legal expertise. The problem is not who they are. It is that no one — not the President, not the Department of Public Information, not any minister — has said how they got there.

THE CREDENTIALS ARE NOT IN DISPUTE

Justice Godfrey Phillip Smith SC, the Commission’s chair, is a former Attorney General and Foreign Minister of Belize who went on to sit as a High Court judge and an acting Justice of Appeal of the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court. He has appeared before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the Caribbean Court of Justice, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and currently serves as CARICOM’s High-Level Representative for Law and Criminal Justice — a position to which regional Heads of Government, not Georgetown, appointed him. Colleagues across the Eastern Caribbean bar have described his judgments as fast, rigorous, and difficult to challenge on appeal.

Dr Andrzej Jasionowski brings the technical core the inquiry will need. A Polish naval architect and marine engineer with a doctorate in damaged-vessel hydrodynamics from the University of Strathclyde, he has spent three decades building the forensic tools — flooding simulation, capsize-time modelling, structural failure analysis — that maritime accident investigators rely on internationally.

Captain Hamada Fouda is a working Senior Maritime Surveyor and Compliance Auditor with the Maritime Authority of Jamaica, giving the Commission a regulator’s eye on vessel condition, certification, and compliance history — precisely the terrain the MV Barima’s maintenance record will require.

Nyree Dawn Alfonso, an Attorney-at-Law in Trinidad and Tobago with a stated specialisation in Admiralty and Maritime Law, has litigated shipping and port-authority matters before that country’s Court of Appeal. Maritime law is a narrow bar; her inclusion is not decorative.

Rear Admiral (Ret’d) Hayden Pritchard served as Chief of Defence Staff of Trinidad and Tobago and was the first officer of that country’s Defence Force to hold flag rank, with thirty-three years in uniform spanning naval operations and security.

None of this is filler biography. It is the strongest possible answer to anyone tempted to dismiss the Commission on grounds of competence. This news media will not make that argument, because the record does not support it.

WHAT THE PRESIDENT HAS NOT SAID

Competence, however, is a different question from process — and it is on process that the President’s Sunday announcement said nothing at all.

Guyanese were told, in a video statement to Facebook, that these five “have been carefully selected for their independence, technical expertise, and proven ability.” They were not told who did the selecting, on what criteria, following what search, or with whose advice. No terms of appointment have been published. No enabling legal instrument exists yet — the President himself said on Sunday that “the necessary legal instruments required to give effect to this decision are currently being formalised.

 Five names were announced to a nation in mourning before the legal document constituting the body that will investigate its worst peacetime disaster had even been drafted.

Five names were announced before the document creating the Commission had even been drafted.

This is not a small omission. A Commission of Inquiry derives its authority, and its credibility, from the instrument that creates it and the transparency of the process that populates it.

Guyana has, within the past week, watched a broad and unusual coalition — APNU, WIN, the Forward Guyana Movement, the Alliance For Change, the Vigilant Political Action Committee, and the Guyana Human Rights Association — converge on a single demand: that the composition of this Commission not be decided by the executive alone, and that whatever process was used be transparent enough to survive scrutiny.

The President’s answer to that demand, so far, has been to proceed regardless and offer no account of the process afterward.

THE QUESTIONS THAT REMAIN OPEN

This new outlet is raising the following questions directly to the Office of the President, the Ministry of Legal Affairs, and the Department of Public Information, and will publish their answers in full when received:

1. Who identified these five individuals? Was a shortlist prepared, and if so, by whom — a ministry, an external search, personal recommendation, or a regional body such as CARICOM?
2. Were any of the five approached or consulted before Sunday’s announcement, and if so, when did those conversations begin? The timeline matters: was this a decision made in the days after the tragedy, or one that had been under consideration on a longer horizon?
3. Was any facilitator, search firm, or intermediary organisation involved in identifying or vetting candidates, and if so, who commissioned that work and what did it cost the public purse?
4. What vetting was conducted for conflicts of interest — financial, professional, or personal — between any Commissioner and any party whose conduct the Commission may examine, including the Ministry of Public Works, the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, the Maritime Administration Department, and any private contractor connected to the MV Barima’s construction, refit, or the March 2026 rehabilitation tender?
5. Why was the parliamentary opposition not consulted, given that the Leader of the Opposition has publicly confirmed he was not, and given that the National Assembly was scheduled to debate opposition motions on the same matter the following day?
6. When will the legal instrument establishing the Commission be published, and will it include the selection process, the terms of reference in full, and the Commission’s funding and reporting arrangements?

None of these questions casts doubt on Justice Smith, Dr Jasionowski, Captain Fouda, Ms Alfonso, or Rear Admiral Pritchard. They cast doubt on a government that has, once again, treated the manner of its own decision-making as beneath explanation — even when the subject is the deadliest peacetime disaster in the country’s history, and even when the demand for transparency came not from a single opposition voice but from across the political spectrum and civil society alike.

Guyanese families are owed a Commission whose findings they can trust. That trust is built twice — once in the quality of the people asked to do the work, and once in the visible integrity of how they were chosen.

The President has, this week, answered only the first half of that obligation. This publication will keep asking about the second until he answers it too.

— The Board