Politicization: Guyana’s Loop That Never Closes

 

The Sunday Essay · MV Barima

Politicization: Guyana’s Loop That Never Closes

The MV Barima, 18 July 2026

Our recurring failure is not an absence of investigations. It is the absence of any permanent, public mechanism connecting what an investigation discovers to an assigned owner, a deadline, and an obligation to act before the next tragedy arrives.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · July 26, 2026

There is a sequence we now perform from memory.

Something fails. The failure kills people, disproportionately poor people, usually far from Georgetown. Grief arrives first, then questions. The questions are met with an announcement that an investigation will be launched. Someone in the opposition says the investigation cannot be trusted. Someone in the government says the opposition is politicizing a tragedy. A Commission of Inquiry sits, hears evidence, and issues a report. The report recommends. The nation moves on. And some months or years later, in a different region, with different families, the sequence begins again.

We have run this loop through the killings of Isaiah and Joel Henry in 2020. We ran it through the Mahdia dormitory fire in 2023, which killed twenty people, nearly all of them Indigenous schoolchildren from Micobie, Campbelltown, El Paso and Chenapou, whose families had sent them to their own regional centre to be educated. They had not even left the hinterland; the failure found them where they were. We ran it through the death of Adrianna Younge in 2025 and the unrest that followed a contested official account. We are running it now, this week, in the water off Charity, where divers from Brazil, Trinidad and Tobago, and France are working alongside our own Coast Guard to recover the dead from an eighty-seven-year-old ferry.

The MV Barima left Georgetown for Port Kaituma at a quarter past three on a Saturday afternoon with, we are now told, one hundred and seventy-nine souls aboard. The official manifest recorded one hundred and thirty-three.^[2] She went over shortly before midnight, some eight hours out. As of Friday, seventy-six were known to have survived and seventy-three bodies had been recovered; the search continues. Among the recovered are a mother and three of her children. A vessel launched in 1939 was still carrying Guyanese citizens across open Atlantic water in 2026, in the seventh year of the oil era, in a country the international press describes as the fastest-growing economy on earth.

This essay is not primarily about the ferry. It is about the loop.

And the argument is narrower than it may appear. It is not that we fail to investigate our failures. It is that we possess no permanent, public mechanism connecting what an investigation discovers to an assigned owner, a deadline, parliamentary oversight, and an obligation to act before the next tragedy arrives.

I. The Alibi

Within seventy-two hours of the capsizing, the familiar accusation appeared: that those demanding answers were politicizing a tragedy.

It is worth being precise about what this charge does, because it is not a claim about the content of criticism. It is a claim about its timing. Criticize while bodies are being recovered and you are exploiting grief. Criticize once a Commission of Inquiry has been announced and you are prejudging a process that must be allowed to work. Criticize after the report is delivered and you are rehashing a settled matter for electoral advantage.

Note what this leaves. The window in which criticism of the state is legitimate is, by construction, empty. There is no moment at which a citizen may ask why an eighty-seven-year-old vessel was still in service and be heard as a citizen rather than as an agent of a party.

An accusation that cannot in principle be avoided is not an argument. It is a jurisdictional claim — the assertion that the executive alone owns the interpretation of its own failures. Call it what it is: an alibi. Not a lie, necessarily, and not always cynically deployed. But an alibi is a device for being somewhere else when accountability arrives, and that is precisely the function this charge performs in Guyanese public life.

On Friday morning, the Guyana Times published that argument in the form it takes when no one is being careful.^[3] Set aside the personal abuse aimed at the Leader of the Opposition, which is beneath response and beneath the dead. Attend instead to two sentences.

The first defines genuine accountability as what the Government is doing — “WAITING for investigations.” The capitals are the paper’s own. The second lists the sequence that waiting will produce: maintenance records examined, individual failures identified, systemic weaknesses exposed, and consequences imposed where negligence is proven.

Read that sequence again, because it is the whole argument of this essay written by the other side. Accountability begins with waiting and ends with negligence — a category that attaches to persons. The systemic weakness appears fourth on a list of five, with no owner, no deadline, and no mechanism by which its exposure obliges anyone to do anything. There is nothing here about who was institutionally responsible for keeping an eighty-seven-year-old passenger vessel in service, what enhanced inspection regime governed that decision, or why its replacement could not yet operate. Nothing about the register that would record whether the last inquiry’s findings were ever acted upon. The word implemented does not appear anywhere in the sequence, and I would suggest that this is not an oversight of style.

The column also sets the opposition a test: stop performing and produce serious technical proposals about ocean-going vessels. It is a fair demand and the opposition has failed it. But consider what a serious technical proposal would require — the maintenance file, the survey certificates, the MARAD inspection history, the loading records, the engineering reports on the Port Kaituma wharf whose structural failure has kept the vessel intended to replace the Barima off this route for three years. The State holds these documents. It has released none of them. The standard is therefore: produce expert analysis of evidence we will not give you, and until you do, your grief is performance.

“A standard no one outside the executive can meet is not a standard. It is a wall with a sign on it.” — T.R.B.

There is one further feature of that column worth noticing, and it is not the vulgarity. In the course of dismissing the opposition as a troupe of performers, the writer concedes that the Leader of the Opposition took his own boat out and recovered bodies from the water — and offers this as further evidence of vanity. When an accusation absorbs its own counter-evidence, it has stopped being an empirical claim about anyone’s conduct. It has become a rule about who is permitted to speak.

Now set that column beside the President’s words the same morning, which were gracious and, I think, sincerely meant: that the time for justice will come, but that this is a week for comfort and mourning.^[4] Nobody could object to the sentiment. But notice that it is the same instrument in dress uniform. Both sentences perform a single operation — the deferral of the accountability question to a later date that no one is obliged to name. The column does the enforcing; the presidential statement does the legitimating. That pairing is not a coincidence of tone. It is a division of labour, and it is why arguing with the columnist is a waste of a Sunday. The column is not the argument. It is the argument’s working clothes.

II. Two Questions, Deliberately Fused

The alibi works because our discourse insists on fusing two entirely different questions.

The first is who is to blame. This question is attributive, zero-sum, and denominated in electoral currency. Its answers are people, and its outcomes are prosecutions and resignations.

The second is what in the system failed, and what is the fix. This question is diagnostic, positive-sum, and denominated in lives not yet lost. Its answers are procedures, standards, budget lines, and institutions.

Both of our political formations have an interest in keeping these fused. Blame is the opposition’s only reliable currency; systems reform is slow, undramatic, and confers no advantage at the ballot. And for the government, the fusion is what makes the alibi sound reasonable — if all criticism is blame-seeking, then dismissing criticism as political is not evasion but common sense.

So the fusion is not the government’s doing alone. It is jointly produced. That is the honest starting point, and it is the only one from which this argument can be made without immediately being absorbed into the thing it describes.

The first official explanations to reach the public concerned the crew’s positive drug tests and the thirty-two rescued passengers whose names appeared on no manifest. Both are individual-fault stories. Meanwhile, two other facts sat in plain view: a hull built in 1939 and kept in service into 2026, and a US$12.7 million replacement vessel, the MV Ma Lisha, in the country since 2023 and never once run to Port Kaituma.^[5] Both are systems stories.

Let me be careful here, because the distinction matters more than the accusation. Age alone does not establish unseaworthiness; the government notes that the vessel was dry-docked and overhauled in 2024 and was certified to sail. Nor does any fact yet in public establish why she went over. That is precisely the point. None of these facts, taken singly, tells us the cause. What they tell us is which facts our political system reaches for first, and what kind of remedy each one invites.

Same disaster. Two epistemologies. One asks whom to punish. The other asks what must change before the next voyage. A competent state answers both — through processes designed so that the first does not make the second impossible.

III. The Loop

Here is the claim I want to press hardest, because I think it reframes everything, and because it is not a partisan claim at all.

Guyana’s problem is not that we fail to investigate. We investigate. Mahdia produced a Commission of Inquiry. Adrianna Younge produced one. The MV Barima will produce one; the Prime Minister has already announced it, has said the government has nothing to hide, and has promised consequences for whoever is found responsible. I take him at his word.

Our problem is the second half of the mechanism. I am aware of no public register of what any previous inquiry recommended — no record of which minister or agency owned each recommendation, no deadline, no status field reading open, in progress, or implemented, no annual report to Parliament on the disposition of the last inquiry’s findings before the next tragedy generates a new one. If such an instrument exists, it has escaped both me and, so far as I can tell, every journalist who has gone looking since Mahdia. That is itself the point: a tracker no one can find is not tracking anything.

I am a mathematician by training, so permit me the language of control theory, which I mean here literally rather than as ornament. A system that measures its error but does not feed that measurement back into its behaviour cannot correct itself in response to what it learns. It may drift, it may diverge, it may simply repeat the same failure. What it cannot do is reliably converge on the state we want. The precision of the sensor is irrelevant if the signal never reaches the actuator.

“That is Guyana. Our commissions are excellent sensors. We have never run the wire.” — T.R.B.

The loop does not need a commission in order to fail, and on this route it had been failing for a decade before anyone drowned.

The project to replace the North West vessels began in 2015, with a grant and then a line of credit. Pre-qualification ran in 2017, bidding through 2018, and an award was made, appealed, and re-evaluated. The government changed. A contract was signed in 2021, and the vessel arrived in 2023, at which point the country was told she would sail to Port Kaituma by December. The wharf built to receive her was reported around sixty per cent complete, with the contractor urged to finish for the Christmas season. Three years later the Minister of Public Works told the National Toshaos Council that the maiden voyage still had not been made, because the soil beneath the new wharf had shifted and sections required rebuilding.

Read that as a control problem rather than a scandal, because it is the more damning reading. The measurement was correct. The State knew in 2015 that the North West fleet was ageing, said so, and set about replacing it — a decision that was itself an official finding that these vessels had to go. What failed was everything downstream of the measurement: the sequencing of wharf against vessel, the verification of ground conditions before construction, and any standing mechanism that would have obliged someone to answer publicly, in any year of the eleven, for the distance between what was known and what was done.

This is not a claim about why the Barima capsized. Nobody yet knows that. It is a claim about why she was still the answer.

And this is what converts the Commission of Inquiry from an instrument of learning into a ritual of catharsis. Its recurrent practical effect, whatever anyone intends, is to absorb public pressure and allow it to dissipate over the life of the inquiry and the months after the report is delivered. It succeeds at that. An inquiry can of course be well equipped to investigate and to recommend, and ours have been. What I cannot find is a standing mechanism that obliges the State to convert those recommendations into assigned, time-bound and publicly verifiable action.

IV. Why the Loop Stays Open

Three forces hold it open, and none of them is reducible to the wickedness of any individual.

The first is the criminal-first reflex. Within forty-eight hours, the captain and first engineer were in custody following positive drug tests. Whatever the merits of that decision, consider its effect on knowledge. Once criminal jeopardy precedes diagnosis, every person in the causal chain — the loading supervisors, the dispatchers, the MARAD inspectors, the officials who signed off on continued service for a 1939 hull — acquires an overwhelming interest in silence. They lawyer up. They remember less. The systemic account becomes far harder to obtain, not because anyone conspired to hide it but because we designed a process that makes candour irrational.

Aviation and marine safety solved this problem decades ago, and the solution is architectural rather than cultural. The nearest model to our own circumstances is the United Kingdom’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch, which operates within the same body of merchant shipping law that our own maritime statute inherits.^[6] Its investigators do not prosecute. Witness evidence and protected safety records are subject to strong disclosure restrictions, released only under prescribed legal procedure. The investigation is structured around prevention rather than the assignment of civil or criminal liability. The result is to make candour rational and systemic learning more likely. We have inverted the sequence — and we have inverted it inside a legal tradition that already contains the remedy.

The second is the coordination failure. Schelling taught us that two parties can be locked into an outcome neither prefers, simply because neither can move first without loss.^[7] Our situation is exactly this. If the opposition drops the blame frame and argues systems, it forfeits its only political asset and gains nothing, because the government has no incentive to reciprocate. If the government concedes systemic culpability, it hands the opposition a weapon and gains nothing, because the opposition has no incentive to stop swinging. Both would prefer a Guyana in which hinterland families do not drown. Neither can reach it unilaterally. This is not a morality problem. It is a coordination problem, and coordination problems are solved by changing the payoff structure, not by appealing to conscience.

The third is the ethnic reading. Hintzen’s work on our political sociology explains why the alibi is so unusually potent here.^[8] His argument, put briefly, is that ethnic mobilization is not an occasional distortion of party competition in Guyana but its organizing logic — parties do not primarily compete for policy majorities, they consolidate and defend ethnic constituencies, and every contest for state power is therefore experienced as a contest between communities. The consequence for our subject is direct. In such a polity, a claim against the state is heard, without anyone needing to say so, as a claim by one group against another. The government does not have to argue that criticism is ethnic mobilization; the audience supplies that reading for free. This is what gives “politicization” a rhetorical power in Guyana that it does not possess in Barbados or Trinidad.

Now let me concede the government’s case at its full strength, because I think it is stronger than its own newspaper knows how to argue.

Some criticism this week has been opportunistic. Premature causal claims during an active recovery do real damage; the Younge case showed how quickly rumour becomes fire. A government asking for facts before conclusions is not, on its face, unreasonable.

But the charge of pure performance no longer holds, and I want to record that plainly, because an earlier draft of this essay asserted it. On Friday the lead APNU parliamentary member, Dr Terrence Campbell, wrote to the Speaker seeking leave under Standing Order 12 to move an urgent adjournment at Monday’s sitting, so that the Assembly might debate and adopt terms of reference for the inquiry.^[10] The motion, seconded by Juretha Fernandes, is specific and it is systemic. Its terms reach the vessel’s maintenance history and structural integrity, the adequacy and timeliness of the search and rescue, the manifest discrepancies and what they imply for port management and enforcement, the inspection systems and enforcement practices of the Maritime Administration Department — and, precisely the question this essay has pressed, why the Ma Lisha and the Kalliopi N were not deployed to the Port Kaituma route despite the known age and condition of the Barima. It goes further still: it asks the Commission to recommend legislative and regulatory reform. That is drafting, and the columnist’s demand has been met by the very side he was addressing.

Which is why I want to be careful about the credit and exact about the gap, because the gap is visible in the document itself. The motion asks the Commission to recommend legislation. Nothing in it obliges anyone to enact the recommendation, or names who will own it, or fixes when it must be answered, or requires that the answer come back to the Assembly at all. Note too that the reporting timeframe is left to be specified by “the Commission’s establishing instrument” — that is, by the executive whose conduct is under examination. So the finest parliamentary instrument our politics has produced this week ends where every one before it ended: at a recommendation, addressed to no one in particular, due on no particular date. It is a better sensor. It is a much better sensor. It is still not the wire.

Note also what has not been tabled by anyone, on either side: a proposed inspection regime, a costed replacement schedule for the coastal and riverine fleet, or a single specific amendment to the penalty provisions of the Shipping Act — provisions so antique that the fines attaching to conduct which endangers passengers would not cover the cost of a life jacket.^[9]

So my claim survives in a narrower and more useful form. Our opposition has called for a Commission of Inquiry after every one of these tragedies. I can find no instance, across the period covered here, in which either major opposition converted that demand into a bill establishing a permanent implementation mechanism. That is not merely a missed opportunity; it is the same preference for the inquiry over the institution that I have attributed to the government. Both formations are optimising for the same currency. Neither is optimising for whether the next vessel floats.

Which is why the answer to “Mourning by Megaphone” is not a rebuttal. It is a bill. Monday is the day for it. A motion that adopts terms of reference and, in the same sitting, gives notice of a Transport Safety Board Act, a costed fleet schedule, and a Recommendations Register backdated to Mahdia would be unanswerable on the government’s own stated standard. The charge of politicization would have nothing left to attach to. That move is available to the government too, which could pre-empt it and take the credit. Neither has yet made it.

That is the dysfunction, stated at full strength, with no party spared.

V. Who Actually Drowns

Now look at the constituency.

Mahdia: hinterland children. Port Kaituma: hinterland families, travelling a route with no road, on the state vessel assigned to carry them.

It would be easy, and wrong, to call this neglect. Region One and Region Eight are not ignored. They are visited, courted, and addressed. Both parties campaign there in earnest; both have made the hinterland central to their language about a shared national future; ministers arrive, projects are announced, and Amerindian Heritage Month is observed by everyone with a microphone. The problem is not that these communities are outside our politics. It is that they are inside our politics and outside our engineering.

“Attention that arrives in a campaign season and departs before the survey certificate is renewed is not representation. It is courtship without provision.” — T.R.B.

That gap is the whole indictment, and it is sharper than neglect would be. Neglect can be explained by distance and cost. What we have instead is a state that knows these citizens well enough to seek their votes and does not know them well enough to ensure that the hull beneath them was fit to make the crossing. Electoral attention and infrastructural attention have come apart, and the second is the one that determines whether a family arrives at Port Kaituma. Attention that arrives in a campaign season and departs before the survey certificate is renewed is not representation. It is courtship without provision.

This is Rodney’s argument and Best’s argument in contemporary dress: a coastal state, inheriting the geography of the plantation, extracting from an interior it governs and addresses but does not quite regard as itself.^[11] The oil has not yet dissolved this relation. The new wealth has increased the State’s capacity, but capacity has not reliably crossed the old geographic distance between the administrative coast and the communities of the interior. We have discovered that a country can become one of the fastest-growing economies on earth and still not be able to carry its own citizens between Georgetown and Port Kaituma without drowning scores of them.

The recurring victims of Guyana’s competence deficit are the Guyanese for whom the distance between being spoken to and being provided for is greatest. That is not a PPP failure or a PNC failure. It is a structural failure — eleven years and three administrations, as we have seen — that has outlasted every government we have had, and it is therefore the one frame in this entire argument that neither party owns and neither party can dismiss as politicization.

VI. Closing the Loop

Exhortation is cheap, so let me be specific. Four things Parliament could do in its next session, none of which requires anyone to admit fault for the MV Barima.

One: a standing Transport Safety Board, established by statute, reporting to Parliament rather than to the executive. The objection that a government cannot credibly investigate itself has been raised loudly this week, and it is correct. It is also unfixable so long as inquiries are appointed by the President into the failures of the President’s own administration. The fix is permanence and independence, not better appointments.

Two: a public Recommendations Register, backdated to Mahdia. Every recommendation from every inquiry, with a named owner, a deadline, and a live status. Published quarterly. This single instrument would transform our public argument. Instead of “you are politicizing” versus “you are covering up” — an exchange with no factual content and no possible resolution — we would argue about whether recommendation fourteen has been implemented. That is an argument someone can win, with evidence, in public.

Three: presumptively protected safety testimony, separated from the ordinary criminal process. Prosecute negligence, by all means, on evidence gathered by prosecutors. But stop treating the safety investigation as an evidentiary shortcut for prosecution, because that choice makes candour less likely and systemic learning harder.

Four: multiparty oversight, with the committee chaired by the opposition. This is the move that breaks the coordination trap, because it changes the payoffs. It buys the opposition out of the blame market by giving it real, continuing authority — something more valuable than a news cycle. And it gives the government a defensible answer to public anger that is not “wait for the report.”

None of this is achieved by a statutory name. Independence would require fixed terms, protected funding, multiparty appointment, limited grounds for removal, compulsory access to records, a defined class of protected material with a stated rule for what happens when safety evidence discloses intentional wrongdoing, and a duty to report directly to the National Assembly. Standing orders would need amendment for the fourth item alone. These are the questions a serious drafter has to answer, and answering them is the difference between an institution and a slogan.

Coda

A culture of competence is not a matter of will. It is not produced by better people, or by more sincere ministers, or by a more responsible opposition. It is produced by architecture — by institutions designed so that the truth about failure becomes obtainable, and so that what is learned in one disaster is structurally obligated to arrive before the next one.

We have never built that architecture. We have built, instead, a highly refined mechanism for converting grief into argument and argument into nothing.

The families gathered on the Charity waterfront this week are not participants in that mechanism. They are its raw material, as the families at Mahdia were, and as families in some other region will be in two or three years’ time, unless something in the design changes.

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The loop will close when we decide to close it.

Until then, every inquiry we hold
is a measurement we have already agreed in advance to discard.

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References

1. UPI, “Guyana to launch independent inquiry after ferry disaster kills 53,” July 22, 2026. upi.com
2. Al Jazeera, “Guyana ferry disaster: families demand answers as around 100 feared dead,” July 23, 2026. aljazeera.com. See also Kaieteur News, “MV Barima Disaster… Brazil, T&T come to Guyana’s rescue,” July 23, 2026.
3. Guyana Times, “Pushing… Mourning by Megaphone,” Eyewitness column, July 24, 2026. guyanatimesgy.com
4. Guyana Times, “MV Barima tragedy: ‘Time will come for justice… but today we comfort and mourn’ — Pres Ali,” July 24, 2026.
5. 592 Guardian, “The MV Ma Lisha and the Government’s Undelivered Promise Three Years Later,” July 23, 2026, reporting the Minister of Public Works’ disclosure to the National Toshaos Council Conference. 592guardian.com
6. United Kingdom Marine Accident Investigation Branch, “About us.” gov.uk
7. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).
8. Percy C. Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
9. “An Open Letter to His Excellency Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali, President of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana,” Kaieteur News, July 22, 2026, on the penalty provisions of the Guyana Shipping Act 1998. kaieteurnewsonline.com
10. Kiskadee Watch, “Campbell seeks urgent parliamentary debate on terms for MV Barima CoI,” July 25, 2026. kiskadeewatch.com. See also Kaieteur News, “APNU submits parliamentary motion to discuss scope of MV Barima inquiry,” July 25, 2026. kaieteurnewsonline.com
11. Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Lloyd Best, “Outlines of a Model of Pure Plantation Economy,” Social and Economic Studies 17, no. 3 (1968).

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