A Commission built on sand: Why the Inquiry needs local voices

Aug 01, 2026 Letters

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Dear Editor,

The PM says the Barima COI is beyond political influence. He cited the COI Act. That satisfies the letter of the law. It does not satisfy the moment. 75+ lives were lost. A disaster of that scale isn’t a legal formality to be discharged by statute, it’s a collective trauma, and legitimacy for such an inquiry cannot be conjured by credentials alone. As Phillippe Zittoun argues in Policy & Society (Vol. 45, Iss. 1, Jan. 2026), how a government responds to crisis, whether it governs during, or governs by the crisis, shapes whether the public ever accepts the outcome. Readers can find the abstract themselves; it is worth the two minutes.

The State’s position amounts to this: because so many died, the public’s demand for local, hinterland, and Opposition representation on the panel is somehow unreasonable. That gets the logic backwards. The scale of the tragedy is precisely why composition matters.

Four defects are fatal, not cosmetic.

First, a 5-member panel led by Justice Smith was assembled in haste, with no real deliberation on who should sit on it.

Second, not 1 of the 4 non-Chair members can claim expertise superior to Parliamentarian Amanza’s lived knowledge of the routes and the communities the ferry served. Imported credentials aren’t a substitute for local knowledge, they’re a different thing entirely, and here the wrong one was chosen.

Third, Region 1’s Indigenous MP was excluded by the same stroke that bypassed Parliament, cutting out the very people whose tragedy this inquiry exists to examine. An inquiry into a community’s loss, built without that community, cannot claim their trust.

Fourth, the President consulted neither MP, nor the Opposition Leader, nor the leader of the third-largest party. In a presidential system, that isn’t an oversight. Refusing to consult other branches is how power consolidates — one defensible shortcut at a time, until the shortcuts are the system.

The remedy is straightforward: add a Region 1 MP, add Amanza, and consult opposition leaders before appointments are made, not after public anger forces the government’s hand.

There’s a deeper legitimacy problem still. It’s unclear whether Guyana’s past COI reports were ever even published. And Justice Smith’s own recent career as a politician who lost office in Belize invites exactly the impartiality questions this inquiry cannot afford. A CARICOM appointee insulated from domestic rivalry, His Right Honourable D. Douglas, for instance — would avoid that question by simply standing outside it.

Local figures Hastings, Debideen, Amanza, La Cruz belong on this panel not as symbolic gestures but as a matter of sound method. Expertise isn’t only credentialed; it’s also situated. Route-level knowledge and community standing are a form of tacit competence that no outside expert, however qualified on paper, can replicate. To exclude it is to mistake formal authority for actual insight and to reproduce the very knowledge hierarchies that let systemic failures go unexamined in the first place.

The inquiry must answer why an unseaworthy vessel still ran an essential route, and who allowed it. That is a question of diffused institutional responsibility, decisions made, deferred, or avoided at every level accumulating into disaster. Where oversight is weak, culpability scatters; the task is to trace that diffusion to its source, not to charge the first doorman found at the locus quo with 75 counts of murder because he opened a door.

That isn’t how secondary liability works. Guyanese and CCJ authority require proof of actual participation in, or intentional assistance toward, the criminal purpose, not mere physical proximity to where others acted. In Roy Jacobs v The State (Guyana, CCJ), liability for murder within a joint criminal enterprise attached only to those who shared the murderous design, not to every person connected to the scene. The UK Supreme Court’s correction in R v Jogee, now standard reference across Commonwealth Caribbean courts confirms that foresight or presence isn’t enough; the secondary party must intend to assist the crime with knowledge of its essential elements. To convict a doorman of 75 murders because others committed crimes in offices, he unlocked inverts this: it punishes position, not participation, while those with actual decision-making authority “get away scot-free.”

The precedent for process is not speculative. South Korea’s Sewol disaster (2014, 304 dead) saw unilateral government response produce years of deadlock, resolved only by an independent panel with reserved family seats and prosecutorial power. Grenfell saw a judge appointed with no survivor input, until 150,000 signatures forced an expanded panel. Both teach: technical competence cannot substitute for a legitimate selection process. International partners Scotland Yard, the FBI, MARIN can lend forensic capacity without displacing local legitimacy, as MARIN’s own delayed Sewol investigation shows.

The panel should be expanded to include Hastings, Debideen, Amanza, and La Cruz, with families heard before findings are finalized.

To be clear: removing officials is for Parliament, not the courts, the two mustn’t be conflated. Accountability runs through the DPP and a completed file. Due process is an argument for building trust, not for delay.

A commission assembled without Parliament, Opposition, affected communities, or independent forensic partners may not yet be a constitutional crisis but it points toward one.

Sincerely,

Zafar Mohamed Shabeer

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• Barima, COI, Letters, Zafar Mohamed Shabeer

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