The protesters and the missing logic

Aug 08, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – Political protests and theatrics go hand in hand in Guyana. A small group gathers, placards are produced, faces are arranged into expressions of grave national concern, and someone discovers that a loud voice is a useful substitute for an argument. The cameras arrive.

The slogans begin. The country is informed that accountability is demanded. Nobody is quite sure what the accountability is for.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with protest. People have a right to protest peacefully. It is one of the privileges of living in a democracy. But the word ‘peacefully’ has a meaning. It does not mean that a person is peaceful merely because he is holding a placard while obstructing somebody else from going about their affairs.

The Opposition, however, has a more serious problem than the inconvenience caused by its demonstrations. It has to explain precisely what it is protesting about.

It cannot simply say, “We want accountability.”

Accountability for what?

The MV Barima sank. That is a fact. People died. That is a fact. It was a terrible national tragedy. That is  fact  but the precise causes of the sinking are not yet established. That is why there is a commission of Inquiry. The inquiry is not being conducted because the government has already solved the mystery and wishes to keep the answer secret. It is being conducted because the answer is not yet known.

One therefore wonders what the protesters know that the commission does not. Do they know why the vessel sank? Do they know whether there was mechanical failure, structural weakness, overloading, human error, weather, navigation error, inadequate maintenance, incompetence, regulatory failure, a huge wave or some combination of these things?  If not, what exactly are they protesting?

Perhaps they have decided that the ship was simply too old. This is possible. Old things do sometimes become unsafe. But if age is the explanation, the political arithmetic becomes rather inconvenient.

When APNU+AFC was in office, the Barima was also old. Yet the vessel was kept in service and underwent extensive repairs. At that time, was the vessel considered seaworthy? If it was seaworthy then, what has changed apart from the political party sitting on the government benches?

And if the vessel’s age is now sufficient to establish culpability, why are the protesters demanding the heads of only two people?

Ships do not sink through the action of one person standing alone in a government ministry. There can be a chain of culpability. If there was negligence, the inquiry should establish where it occurred and who was responsible.

Unless, of course, the purpose is not to discover the truth but to conduct a political lynching.

There is another difficulty. The opposition ought to approach the question of accountability with what lawyers call clean hands.

When the Camp Street Prison was burned and 18 prisoners were killed in one of the worst prison disasters in the Caribbean, the then APNU+AFC government did not demonstrate the same passionate interest in ministerial accountability that we now see. No minister was publicly marched toward a political guillotine. The dead were mourned; the political consequences were absent. There was not even a reshuffling of the Home Affairs ministerial portfolio.

There was also Linden many years ago, where three people were killed during protests. The Commission of Inquiry subsequently found some fault with aspects of the conduct of the organisers, including breaches of the conditions under which the police had permitted the protest. Yet the organisers were never held culpable by the APNU. Instead, they wanted the then Minister of Home Affairs to resign and be gagged in the National Assembly.

Then there are the allegations concerning large-scale gold smuggling out of Guyana. This is alleged to have started under the APNU+AFC government and said to have continued under the PPPC regime. If accountability is such an urgent national principle, one might reasonably expect the same voices to demand that every person responsible for such smuggling be identified and held accountable.

But the standard appears to change according to which political party occupies the office.

This is the difficulty with political morality in Guyana. Everybody wants standards. What is less common is the willingness to apply them to oneself.

The protesters may continue to protest. They have every democratic right to do so. They may wave their placards, chant their slogans and perform the familiar choreography of righteous indignation.

But before demanding accountability from others, they might consider demanding something from themselves.

Logic.

For the moment, the most obvious thing missing from the protest is not accountability. It is an established cause. How can you hold persons accountable when the cause of the sinking of the vessel is not yet established?

The Commission of Inquiry has been established precisely to determine that cause. Let it do its work. If it finds negligence, prosecute negligence. If it finds incompetence, expose incompetence. If it finds regulatory failure, identify those responsible. If it finds political responsibility, let political responsibility follow the evidence.

But to demand punishment before discovering the offence is to confuse justice with theatre. And theatre, in Guyana, has never suffered from a shortage of actors.

(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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• missing logic, Peeping Tom, Political protests, protesters

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