The Missing Logic Isn’t the Protesters’ — It’s Peeping Tom’s

The Missing Logic Isn’t the Protesters’ — It’s Peeping Tom’s

By Hem Kumar, Editor The 592 Guardian 

Peeping Tom spent an entire column asking what, exactly, the protesters are protesting about — since, in his telling, the cause of the MV Barima’s sinking has not yet been established and only the Commission of Inquiry can establish it. It’s a clever framing. It’s also a straw man, and a fairly transparent one.

Nobody serious is protesting to demand a verdict on why the vessel sank. That is, correctly, the Commission’s job, and no responsible voice in this movement has tried to pre-empt it. What the public is protesting is a set of facts that are already established, on the record, and that do not require a single day of the Commission’s evidence to evaluate.

Start with what the minister said, not what the ship did. Within roughly two hours of the tragedy, Minister Edghill made public claims about what had happened — claims that turned out to be wrong and took days and several revisions to correct. That is not a mystery for naval architects to solve. That is a minister’s own words, in public, misrepresenting a mass-casualty event as it was unfolding. You do not need the Commission’s final report to hold a public official accountable for what he told the nation while people were still being pulled from the water.

Then look at the manifest — or the absence of one. Weeks on, there is still no final, confirmed count of who and what was aboard that vessel. The numbers have shifted more than once. The total gross weight of the vessel remains unaccounted for by MARAD’s own administrative arm. A state ferry operator that cannot produce a reliable headcount for its own boat, after a disaster that killed dozens, is not a “cause not yet established” problem. It is an existing institutional failure that was true before the Commission was even sworn in.

Then look at the money. A vessel reportedly requiring a bill of quantities in the order of $125 million was nonetheless kept in active passenger service. Whatever the Commission eventually finds about structural cause, the decision to keep sailing a vessel with repair needs of that magnitude is a documented resource and oversight decision, made by named officials, on paper, before the tragedy. 

That is not speculation. That is an admission already sitting in the file.

Then look at the law itself. Maritime scholar Robert Millington’s published analysis of the Guyana Shipping Act found what he calls a “24-Metre Gap” — stability and safety regulations written to apply under 24 metres, and cargo-vessel rules that explicitly exclude passenger ships. The Barima, at roughly 40 metres, fell into neither category, leaving it with fewer statutory safety obligations than a small wooden boat. Section 3(3) of the same Act makes MARAD’s own Director the legal “owner” of the vessel — regulator and owner, one office, one person. That is not a question the Commission needs to resolve.

That is a structural indictment of the framework the ministry was operating under, written into law long before anyone boarded that ferry.

And then look at the prosecutors’ own standard. Three crew members were charged before the Commission had taken a single day of evidence, on what is by all accounts incomplete disclosure. Peeping Tom accepts that without complaint — the law permits it, he says correctly, and charges proceeded anyway. But he then insists the public must wait for the Commission’s full causal finding before treating a minister’s false public statements as fair game. 

That is not consistency. That is a standard applied by rank: incomplete evidence is sufficient to charge three crew members, but insufficient to criticise one minister.

Peeping Tom asked what the protesters know that the Commission does not. The honest answer is: quite a lot, and none of it requires the Commission’s permission to say out loud. A false public statement made in the first hours of a tragedy. A manifest that still doesn’t add up. A repair bill in the tens of millions ignored in favour of continued service. A statutory gap that left a passenger ferry less regulated than a canoe.

 A prosecutorial standard that finds “enough to charge” for deckhands and “not enough to criticise” for a minister.

That is not theatre missing its cause. That is logic Peeping Tom chose not to follow where it led.

THE 592 GUARDIAN