The Corentyne Crossings

 

 

 

 

 

I. Nine Days

 

A ferry is a proof. Not a metaphor for one — an actual proof, executed daily, that two shores a river has separated can be reliably joined. Every morning the vessel leaves Moleson Creek and arrives at South Drain, and the claim is demonstrated again. When the demonstration fails, more than a boat has failed. The two states’ claim to have reliably joined the banks has failed with it.

 

The most important fact about the suspension of the Canawaima service is that the public has not been given one coherent explanation for it.

 

Here is what we know. By Friday 21 August, passengers were stranded at South Drain in Nickerie and at Moleson Creek in Springlands. On the twenty-second, the Canawaima Ferry Service issued a public notice, over the name of Terminal Manager Deyne Harry, that the service was suspended and that management was working assiduously to resolve technical issues on board. That same evening, Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill released a statement in the company’s name giving a fuller and different account: two technical inspections had recently been carried out by maritime experts from both countries, both concluded in writing that the vessel could remain in operation until a drydocking within three months, and the Maritime Authority of Suriname nonetheless insisted that matters intended for the drydock be undertaken at once. Responsibility for maintenance and drydocking, the statement noted pointedly, rests with Suriname.

 

Kaieteur News reported the same events differently: a fresh technical breakdown arriving days after the vessel had cleared a critical safety inspection.

 

These are not necessarily contradictory accounts, but neither is complete enough to reconcile with the other. A new technical problem may have arisen after the thirteenth of August. The regulator may instead have taken a stricter view of matters the joint experts believed could wait for the drydock. Both may be true at once. What the public has not been told is what defect triggered the suspension, whether it appeared after the re-inspection, or on what basis MAS rejected a written assessment from experts of both countries.

 

Those are not technical niceties. They determine whether this was a mechanical failure or a failure of the arrangement by which safety judgments are made, reconciled and communicated.

 

Note, too, whose voice we have heard. The regulator’s earlier deficiency notice of 7 August has entered the public record, and its requirements have been reported in detail. What MAS has not issued in its own name is any account of the later intervention: what it required this time, what changed after the thirteenth, and why it declined to accept the joint experts’ written conclusion. Every version of that story has reached Guyanese citizens through Georgetown or through the joint company.

 

The scandal, then, is not that an ageing ferry was suspended. It is that the only regulated surface crossing between two neighbouring states rests upon one ageing vessel, two governments, divided responsibility, incompatible expert judgments, and no ready substitute. Before the public can know whether the hull failed, it must be shown what each authority concluded about the same vessel, and why.

 

II. One Ferry

 

The service was launched on 6 November 1998, a joint undertaking of the two governments, managed by the Canawaima Management Company N.V. The MV Canawaima carries roughly two hundred passengers and about two dozen vehicles. It is the only legal surface crossing between Guyana and Suriname.

 

Read that again, slowly. Not the principal surface crossing. Not the most convenient. The only regulated one — and it rests on a single hull that entered service the year before the millennium turned.

 

The record of that hull is public, and it is not the record of a sudden failure. An engine was damaged in September 2017 and the company could not secure funds for the routine repair; a tug was pressed into service to move passengers. The vessel was out of commission from June to October 2019, with the MB Sandaka substituting. A second engine failed in September 2022. The service was suspended on 4 February 2026 for emergency works, leaving Guyanese stranded on the Surinamese side while authorities scrambled to procure tugs for a repatriation. Then the August ultimatum. Then this.

 

This is not merely a machine that broke. This is a machine that has been telling us the same thing for nine years, in a plain voice, and we have each time treated the message as an inconvenience to be managed rather than a fact to be acted upon.

 

 

Consider also what was said a year ago. In September 2025, meeting at Nieuw Nickerie, President Ali and President Geerlings-Simons issued a joint statement emphasising the importance of the Canawaima service to border communities and to bilateral trade, and agreeing on the urgent need to review its operation so as to improve its reliability. Two heads of state, in writing, using the word urgent. Twelve months later the vessel is grounded and the word has not been converted into reliability.

 

III. The Arithmetic Nobody Disputes

 

Here is where the story stops being about an old boat.

 

The traffic is not declining. It is growing, quickly. Figures given by the Minister of Public Works and the ferry’s General Manager at a press conference in January 2025 record 114,389 passengers moved in 2024, against 97,333 the year before, and 19,721 vehicles, against 15,973. Passenger demand rose by roughly a sixth in a single year, and vehicle traffic by nearly a quarter, on one hull.

 

 

The money moved in the same direction. By the same official account, passenger ticket revenue rose from about GY$176.8 million in 2023 to about GY$315.7 million in 2024, with a further US$91,585 in foreign-currency ticket sales and some GY$45.5 million from the canteen. Total expenditure rose from GY$143.7 million to GY$204.8 million — an increase the General Manager attributed mainly to repair and maintenance and to the wage bill. Management reported the year’s profit at GY$110.2 million together with US$91 thousand, a combined figure near GY$129.2 million, and described the result as a forty-one percent net profit.

 

 

I set out those numbers at length because the shape of them matters more than any single one. Revenue grew by something near GY$139 million. Expenditure grew by about GY$61 million, and maintenance was among the stated reasons. On the operator’s own account, then, more money did go into the vessel.

 

And yet, twenty months after that press conference, a regulator found it necessary to threaten a sailing ban in order to obtain working fire detection, prescribed safety equipment, and crew holding valid Basic Safety Training and Crowd Management certificates.

 

That contradiction admits several honest explanations. The increase in maintenance spending may have been too small against a backlog accumulated over two decades. It may have gone to the stelling and the washrooms — both were being renovated — rather than to the systems MAS later found wanting. The obligation may simply sit elsewhere: the operating surplus belongs to the ferry service company, while responsibility for maintenance and drydocking rests, by the agreement’s own terms, with Suriname. Money and duty may be recorded in two different sets of books.

 

Each of those is plausible. Not one of them can be checked. The audited accounts of the Canawaima Management Company N.V. and the Canawaima Ferry Service Inc. are not, so far as I can establish, published anywhere a Guyanese or Surinamese citizen may consult them. We are told the surplus. We are not shown the ledger.

 

“We are told the surplus. We are not shown the ledger.”

— T.R.B.

 

I note fairly that when the Suriname-Guyana Chamber of Commerce proposed a private-sector-led takeover of the service’s management and operations, Minister Edghill rejected privatisation, described the service as a strategic asset, and instructed the board and General Manager to upgrade facilities and manage the rising traffic. That is a defensible position and I do not dispute it here. But public ownership of a strategic asset carries a corresponding obligation. A ministry that declines to hand a profitable crossing to the private sector accepts the duty to show its own public how the surplus connects to maintenance, renewal, safety systems and trained crew.

 

IV. Two Sovereigns

 

Which returns us to the arrangement itself.

 

Under the joint venture agreement, Suriname holds responsibility for the maintenance and drydocking of the vessel. Guyana supplies the fuel, the lubricants and the batteries. The terminal manager has said publicly that maintenance has historically lapsed on the Surinamese side, and that Guyanese authorities intervened in the recent discussions with MAS and the Suriname board to establish minimum operational requirements and keep the link alive.

 

The users on both banks carry the consequences. Nickerie suffers what Springlands suffers. But responsibility for preventing failure is divided between two governments and concentrated, in the matter that determines whether a hull stays sound, on one side only. The party supplying the consumables does not control the maintenance. And no citizen on either bank can hold the other country’s ministry to account at an election.

 

It is a coordination problem in which responsibility is divided but accountability is not shared. Georgetown is left negotiating over maintenance it does not directly control, and the Guyanese trader at Moleson Creek has no vote in Paramaribo.

 

“That is not a partnership. That is exposure with a partnership’s paperwork attached.”

— T.R.B.

 

I am not making a nationalist point, and I want to be explicit about that. On the available evidence Suriname’s regulator did its job. MAS is a statutory authority, not a commercial party. It inspected. It found deficiencies. It set a deadline. It was prepared to ground a vessel that two governments and a profitable joint company all had reasons to keep sailing.

 

The uncomfortable question is not what MAS did. It is what our own system would have done had the deficiencies sat on our side of the arrangement — and whether anyone in Guyana holds the authority, the independence and the political cover to say this vessel does not sail today about a service two presidents have called vital.

 

V. The Question Barima Asked

 

We know why that question sits differently now than it would have sat in June.

 

The Canawaima is not the Barima. They are separate vessels under different arrangements, and there is no public evidence that they shared the same defects. The Commission of Inquiry, formally established by Extraordinary Gazette and chaired by Justice Godfrey Phillip Smith, must determine what happened aboard the Barima without speculation from us.

 

The connection is institutional, not mechanical, and it is a single question: who was empowered to say no, and did the system permit that person to say it? Who certifies. Who inspects, and how often. Whose signature is on the certificate, and what happens to that person if they decline to sign.

 

Note, then, what the gazetted terms of reference require. That Commission is mandated to recommend reforms strengthening vessel inspection and certification, and to report within two months unless extended. A commission is therefore sitting at this moment on precisely the institutional question the Corentyne has raised — and the Corentyne has supplied a contemporaneous case against which its eventual recommendations can be tested.

 

There is something almost hopeful in the Canawaima episode, and I say so deliberately, because a country that narrates only its failures loses the ability to recognise success when it appears. Consider the two regulatory moments carefully. A regulator identified deficiencies and set a deadline; the threatened ban of 14 August did not take effect, apparently because sufficient corrective action was demonstrated. Then, days later, when experts from both countries advised in writing that other matters could await the drydock, MAS exercised its authority again and required immediate action. Whatever the still-unpublished technical explanation, that is what regulatory independence looks like.

 

The encouragement is thin, and the reason it is thin is the calendar. Nine days.

 

VI. What a Stoppage Costs

 

Ask at Springlands and at Corriverton what a suspended ferry costs, and the answer will not come in percentages.

 

Moleson Creek to South Drain is a working corridor: produce, hardware, small consignments, family visits, medical appointments, a Nickerie market that Berbice farmers have supplied for generations. Nearly twenty thousand vehicles a year cross that water. When the crossing closes, that traffic does not evaporate. It migrates — to the airlines for those who can afford them, and to the backtrack for those who cannot.

 

That last displacement deserves our attention above all the others, and it will not appear in any ministry release. Each day the regulated crossing stays closed increases the pressure on ordinary travellers to use the unregulated one: speedboats operating outside the formal passenger, manifest and inspection system, licensed to carry a handful and known to carry more. We have closed a channel we can see, and pushed people toward one we cannot.

 

February showed us the human form of this. Guyanese citizens sat at South Drain for days, told to return tomorrow and then the day after, given no information and no official to ask. This week they were stranded again, from Friday, before any notice was published. On 25 August, Guyana opened a legal backtrack boat route from Springlands to Nickerie — passengers clearing immigration at Moleson Creek Terminal and again at Nieuw Nickerie — as an improvised substitute for the regulated crossing. The route worked, in the way that a bucket works when the roof leaks. Whatever else a bilateral service owes its passengers, it owes them a name and a number to call when the vessel does not come, and a contingency that does not require improvisation under duress.

 

VII. Three Things a Citizen Cannot Find Out

 

I want to be candid with readers about the limits of this essay, because those limits are not mine alone. In preparing it I could establish the traffic, the reported revenue and surplus, the regulator’s deadline, the deficiency list and the competing official accounts. Three things I could not establish, and neither can any other member of the public.

 

First: what actually stopped the ferry. No technical description of the 21–22 August defect has been published — not by the company, not by the Ministry, not by MAS. A country still awaiting answers about one maritime disaster is entitled to know what stopped another passenger vessel, in ordinary language, within days rather than months.

 

Second: when the vessel was last drydocked, and what was done. The Minister’s statement refers to a drydocking due within three months. Due since when? Following what previous drydocking, on what date, at what yard, and with what works completed? The maintenance history of the only regulated crossing between two countries is not a commercial secret. It is the single most important safety document on the Corentyne, and no citizen of either country can read it.

 

Third: how the reported surplus was allocated. A substantial profit was announced with some pride in January 2025, alongside a rise in maintenance spending. Both may be entirely true and the August deficiencies may still have an innocent explanation. But the audited accounts of both companies are not published, and without them the public cannot distinguish between insufficient investment, misdirected investment, an inherited backlog, and an obligation that sits in another country’s books.

 

Note what these three have in common. Not one is a matter of national security, commercial confidence, or diplomatic sensitivity. Each is an ordinary operating fact about a public service, of the kind that any regulated ferry operator in the Caribbean might be expected to disclose without being asked. Taken together, their absence looks less like an isolated oversight than a settled feature of the arrangement — which is why the same essay could have been written in 2019 and in 2022 with the dates changed.

 

VIII. A Mirage of a Bridge

 

And what of the answer we have been promised for seven years?

 

The Corentyne River Bridge is the structural solution, and it has been the structural solution for so long that its perpetual imminence has become a kind of policy in itself. A feasibility and design contract in 2022. Bids received and evaluated. A shortlist. A design with a hundred-year life. Ministers photographed at signings. Then, in mid-2026, Suriname announcing it would finance and manage the bridge alone; Guyana’s Foreign Ministry rejecting that in July, insisting the project remains joint and that financing was always a matter for joint deliberation rather than unilateral determination. Construction has not begun. No financing is closed. No construction contract is final.

 

 

Each of those announcements was reported as progress. Laid end to end, they describe a receding horizon.

 

That is what makes it a mirage rather than a delay. A delayed bridge is a bridge that is late. A mirage is a bridge that has been continuously visible for seven years and has never once required an inspection, a certificate, a competent crew, or a drydock. It is the only element of the Corentyne arrangement that has never had to prove anything.

 

The two governments are, this week, divided over who will finance and control a bridge that does not exist, while the ferry that does exist sits idle and the passengers sit at the stelling.

 

IX. What Should Be Done

 

Four things, each assignable to a named office within a defined period.

 

One. Publish the three missing documents.

 

The technical explanation of the August defect; the drydocking and maintenance record, with dates, yard and scope, for the last three cycles; and the audited accounts of both companies. Publish also the Surinamese findings and the joint expert assessment that reportedly concluded the vessel could sail until drydock. Two governments that expect to be believed must show their working, and the public cannot evaluate a disagreement it is not permitted to read.

 

Two. Appoint a joint independent marine surveyor,

 

jointly funded, whose reports go simultaneously to both boards and both national regulators. The surveyor’s findings should govern the company’s maintenance plan — without limiting either regulator’s statutory authority to stop the vessel. What the present arrangement permits is two defensible opinions about one hull, held by parties who need not reconcile them. That is an intolerable basis on which to carry two hundred people across a river.

 

Three. Ring-fence renewal, and contract the redundancy.

 

A defined share of net revenue committed to maintenance, drydocking and vessel renewal before any distribution, and reported publicly each year — so that surplus and seaworthiness are visibly connected whichever company’s books they pass through.

 

With it, a standing relief-vessel arrangement with published activation triggers and a binational passenger protocol: a named duty officer at each terminal, a published notification channel, a defined obligation to the stranded. The Sandaka precedent exists. On 29 August, as the Canawaima returned to service, authorities confirmed that negotiations are underway to secure a replacement vessel during the upcoming drydock period. That is the right conversation, and it is overdue. The task now is to convert that negotiation into a published instrument — with a vessel named, a timeline attached, and activation criteria that do not depend on the goodwill of whichever minister happens to be in office when the hull next fails.

 

Four. Put the bridge dispute on a published timetable.

 

Refer the ownership and financing questions to the Joint Technical Working Group with a date attached, and identify and publish the preparatory work that can lawfully proceed while they are resolved. A sovereignty argument is not a reason to halt the preparatory work on which both countries already agree.

 

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Coda

 

 

 

 

References

 

1. Kaieteur News, “Suriname lapsed in obligations to maintain Canawaima ferry—Foreign Ministry,” 6 June 2019. kaieteurnewsonline.com
2. Kaieteur News, “Suriname ‘ferry’ service restarts; Canawaima back in operation on Oct. 16,” 27 September 2019. kaieteurnewsonline.com
3. Stabroek News, “Guyana/Suriname ferry down due to engine failure,” 23 September 2022. stabroeknews.com
4. Kaieteur News, “Canawaima breaks down days after safety clearance,” 23 August 2026. kaieteurnewsonline.com
5. Demerara Waves, “Suriname insists on suspension of MV Canawaima ferry service—Edghill,” 22 August 2026. demerarawaves.com
6. Department of Public Information, Guyana, “MV Canawaima ferry service resumes,” 28 August 2026. dpi.gov.gy
7. Demerara Waves, “Guyana not interested in sale of Canawaima Ferry—Public Works Minister,” 4 January 2025. demerarawaves.com
8. Kaieteur News, “Govt. invites bids for construction of Corentyne River Bridge,” 10 May 2022. kaieteurnewsonline.com
9. Kaieteur News, “Guyana rejects Suriname’s claim it was told of solo bridge financing,” 6 July 2026. kaieteurnewsonline.com

 

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