The Spin Has Begun — Don’t Let It Work

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA

The Spin Has Begun — Don’t Let It Work

The MV Barima did not sink because a captain tested positive for marijuana. It sank because an 87-year-old vessel, reportedly known to have come close to sinking before, was still in national service.

A FAMILIAR SEQUENCE

Within hours of the MV Barima going down off Guyana’s coast, the story on offer from officialdom was that the captain and a crew member had tested positive for marijuana. It arrived fast, it arrived with specificity, and it arrived before the country had any clear count of who had survived. That timing is not incidental. It is the opening move in a pattern this newsroom has now watched play out after tragedy following tragedy: introduce a human failing early, let it dominate the headline, and let the institutional failure recede into background noise.

An impaired crew member is a serious allegation. If proven, it is a crime, and it should be prosecuted as one, fully and publicly. But intoxication does not build a hull. It does not certify a vessel seaworthy. It does not decide whether an 87-year-old ferry, reportedly known to have come close to sinking on previous occasions, should still be carrying more than a hundred passengers on the Georgetown–Port Kaituma run. Those are decisions made — or not made — by people who answer to the state, not by whoever was on watch that night.

THE QUESTION THAT MATTERS

 The fundamental question is not what was in a crew member’s bloodstream. It is why a vessel with a documented history of trouble was still certified, still scheduled, and still loaded with families and children when it went down. Every day that question goes unanswered in favour of a drug-test headline is a day the actual accountability chain — procurement, maintenance, inspection, oversight — goes unexamined.

A drug test does not explain a vessel that had, by reputable account, already come close to sinking more than once.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ACCIDENT

This is not the first time the country has been offered a human-scale distraction in place of an institutional reckoning. Twenty children died in the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory fire. Siblings drowned in a trench at Bachelor’s Adventure. A children’s home at Enmore burned. Each of these was, in its moment, described in the language of individual tragedy — bad luck, bad judgment, isolated failure. Each time, the systemic questions that actually mattered — building codes, staffing ratios, supervision protocols, infrastructure maintenance — were raised, discussed, and then allowed to fade from the news cycle before they produced reform.

That is the cover. Not a denial that something went wrong, but a redirection of exactly what went wrong — from the systems the state is responsible for, to the individuals who were merely present when those systems failed. It lets institutions describe themselves as tragic bystanders rather than as the parties whose decisions and omissions made the tragedy possible.

It is a way of appearing infallible while the machinery of governance goes unexamined.

ACCOUNTABILITY CANNOT BE SEASONAL

This newsroom’s position does not depend on which party holds office. Regardless of which government is in power, the standard must be the same: those entrusted with public safety are accountable for the conditions they allow to persist, not only for the incidents that finally expose them. A society that only demands answers in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, and then permits the file to close quietly once the news cycle moves on, should not be surprised when the next disaster arrives wearing a familiar shape.

We have insisted before, and we insist again: transparency after a tragedy is not optional, and it is not satisfied by an arrest of the people who were on board when the failure surfaced. It requires answers from those who set maintenance schedules, those who signed certifications, and those who had prior knowledge — if prior knowledge existed — that this vessel was not fit to carry the public.

WHAT CITIZENS SHOULD DEMAND

Search and rescue must remain the immediate priority, and nothing in this argument should be read as minimizing that effort or the grief of the families waiting for answers. But alongside that effort, citizens have standing to demand a parallel and public accounting: the maintenance and inspection history of the MV Barima; the identity of every official who had authority to withdraw it from service and did not; and a transparent, independent — not internal — inquiry into how a vessel with a documented history of near-disaster remained in national passenger service.

Governing for the people means answering to the people when the state’s own assets fail them. Governing over the people means managing the story instead. The spin is already in motion. Guyana’s citizens do not have to accept it.

— The Board