Barima-deflections, dissembling, and the damning

Jul 27, 2026 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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(Kaieteur News) – There’s human devastation.  Still, the PPP Govt commits to deflection. The MV Barima disaster qualifies as extreme domestic devastation.  Families and communities battered.  The nation bowed.  Rather than strengthening citizens in a time of tribulation, the government engages in desperate measures at self-protection.  At continuation.  At what hurls damnation on its head.  Follow these.

The first words out of the government’s mouth were denials.  The MV Barima wasn’t overloaded.  There was no engine problem.  Those held briefly.  Then were buried under storms of social media rebuttals.  The government stumbled, recovered.  Desperate to deflect attention from the blood on its head, the PPP Govt then reached for its remaining props: MV Barima crew members, a management team.  All tested for alcohol and other substance use.  Search for scapegoats.  Find them.  Shift attention and intensifying rage to them.  A tragedy had to unfold before that step was taken.  The test results have been shared.  Now how do those exonerate an unbelievably reckless government?  Or insulates government ministers?  Nothing does.  Not when the MV Barima was an open-air steel casket waiting to close one last time.  The divers will find supporting evidence.  Testing of crew members must be both random and routine, given the culture and public practice of casual drinking pervading that boat’s operations.  With that as baseline, similar testing should be done for public transportation operators.  The Guinness and grass cultures should provide good business for labs, and inform Guyanese that care about their dangers.

On that same fateful Sunday, one minister launch into a love song celebrating the president’s excellence before a largely indigenous audience.  There’s time and place.  Amid death and unknown casualties, came that disgrace.  The president has to be unimaginably poor in his job to need so many verbal props to sell him to Guyanese.  I still can’t believe that there was that cheapness, coarseness, and unmatched crassness.

Within hours of Disaster Sunday, the National Toshaos Council Conference kicked off in Georgetown.  Maybe as many as 150 Guyanese dead, many of them of indigenous heritage, and a gathering for indigenous Guyanese proceeds.  I have heard that the show must go on.  But not when so many died.  Or are feared dead.  Politics has hardened Guyanese.  There’s none harder than the PPP Govt.  Simple humanity and basic decency are the losers.  Hopefully, there are no big sporting bashes, as is the custom.  There are many dead to mourn and still many bodies to find.  The MV Barima is Guyana’s World Trade Center; except for domestic hands that inflicted death on a scale unknown to Guyanese.  America erred terribly in the wake of the Kennedy assassination (football).  America didn’t repeat that failure on 9/11.  I was there.  I share.  The National Toshoas Conference could have waited a week.  Written in neon lights is the callousness of a government committed first to propaganda and self-celebration.

It is now days since the tragedy, now a confirmed national disaster.  What about a period of national mourning?  Finally, three days announced.  I think a two-week period of mourning should have been the least.  But three days will have to do.  To honor the dead, the missing, and the grieving.  The magnitude of the disaster, as it seeped into consciousness on Sunday, mandated that national mourning should have commenced on that same day.  I forget that the MV Barima was a boat without hope, and that Guyana was a country without a head, during those crucial early hours.

On Tuesday morning, there’s breaking news from a very visible and audible Pres Ali: a full, thorough and independent investigation.  I trust that this presidential investigation wouldn’t be like the Warren Commission investigation into the Kennedy assassination.  Or the Linden and Mahdia COIs into police killings, and a firetrap, respectively.  What insults all Guyanese.  More camouflaging than convincing.  More PPP sponsored propaganda and what has no relation to the purity of facts in unfettered inquiry and testimony.  Another thought -any credible commission of inquiry is only as good as its scope (Terms of Reference) and the people piloting that boat.  If it’s a PPP Govt love boat COI, better scrap it before it gets started.  If it’s a lifeboat to save the PPP Govt’s behind, let it go the way of the MV Barima.  Down and out.  Welcome to Guyana, and the PPP Govt’s deflections, dissembling, and what damns it.  I wonder about all those sophisticated foreigners flocking to Guyana, and what they may be thinking of this sick, savaged country.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

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• Barima, GHK Lall, MV Barima disaster, PPP Govt.

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