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After the MV Barima: Guyana Needs a Consulted, Indigenous-Led Coastal Volunteer Programme
Dead Editor,
After the MV Barima capsized off Iron Punt this July, overloaded and undercrewed by state oversight, it was fisherfolk and boat owners, Mr. Haresh Singh and the LOTO among them (some of Guyana’s Heroes), who reached survivors first, tracking debris and bowlines to co-ordinates they radioed in before the Coast Guard arrived. That sequence exposes a sociological fact: coastal and Indigenous communities aren’t bystanders in maritime emergencies but an existing, informal first-response system, sustained by local knowledge of currents, vessels, and who owns a boat, knowledge Georgetown cannot replicate. The state’s role is to equip that system, not supplant it.
The Amerindian People’s Association, through Kako’s Mario Hastings and Mr. Lemmel Thomas, has already offered to organize coastal surveillance, if funding reaches communities directly. That offer should anchor any new program.
Canada’s Indigenous Community Boat Volunteer Program shows one workable structure: communities own and operate their boats; Ottawa funds, trains, and reimburses, folding vessels into the Coast Guard Auxiliary for up to a decade. Crucially, that model itself emerged from sustained consultation, not top-down design.
Canada’s Supreme Court, in Rio Tinto Alcan Inc. v. Carrier Sekani Tribal Council (2010 SCC 43), held that governments must consult Indigenous groups before decisions affecting claimed lands or resources, even unsettled claims. Guyana has no equivalent clause, but the same logic holds: communities along the Essequibo, Pomeroon, and Barima-Waini hold long-standing claims to these waters, and a rescue program operating in them is a decision that touches those communities directly.
Real consultation, not a funding announcement, is what ensures equipment matches the coastline and radios match GDF frequencies. It also treats this as an ongoing relationship, not a transaction. The tragedy has supplied urgency; it must not supply an excuse to sideline the people who already proved, that night, that they know these waters best.
Regards,
M. Shabeer Zafar, barrister
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