Dear Mr. President,
On 21 July in an open letter, I asked two things of you. You granted the first, a period of national mourning.[1] That is appreciated. The second was that you establish an independent Commission of Inquiry under the Guyana Shipping Act, 1998. That request has neither been granted nor refused. It has been passed over in silence.
Yesterday, the prime minister said that the government had not yet considered the role of the opposition in the commission of inquiry. Today, Demerara Waves reported that you announced that you would name five commissioners tomorrow.
This letter is written tonight, before you do so, and intentionally so.
I have read the terms of reference reported in Demerara Waves. Strong on the details: the loading; the boarding; seaworthiness and maintenance; compliance with maritime law; conduct and competence of the master and crew; the weather; the rescue efforts. Without exception, every one concerns the night of 18 July. Not one concerns the years before it. Your Commission will inquire exhaustively into a voyage without asking why that voyage was made in that vessel at all.
The MV Kalliopi N arrived in May, two months before the disaster. She is new, built for this service, and was assigned by your own public works minister to this very Region One route. She lies at her berth still, awaiting a date for a commissioning ceremony convenient to you. Throughout those two months an eighty-seven-year-old hull built in 1939 carried our people to Port Kaituma, Morawhanna, Kumaka and Mabaruma, because she was their only lifeline. Your minister has since called it unfortunate that the Barima went down before she could be replaced.
And what became of the earlier expectation that the MV Ma Lisha, commissioned in 2023 at some twelve point seven million United States dollars, would relieve the Barima of this service? If that was never her purpose, the country should be told what she was bought for while the North West kept a hull built for a long past era.
None of this was misfortune. These were decisions, taken by identifiable people who had new ships in the water, a designated route, and a river transport budget running into billions of dollars this year. Nothing in your ToR permits the Commission to examine them.
Please bear with me while I raise with you a few issues before you name the Commissioners tomorrow.
The law under which this commission is constituted. You did not say. This cannot be left open and unaddressed.
The investigation required under Part XVIII of the Shipping Act? Recall that I referred to this in my first Open Letter to you. It is a statutory obligation that has so far gone unused. It must be chaired by a Judge or Magistrate – not retired ones – with expert assessors, holding the powers of a Magistrate’s Court, able to cancel the certificates of those found seriously negligent. Parliament passed the law hoping that a disaster of this magnitude does not happen. It has, under your watch. That adds a moral dimension to a statutory duty.
Enlargement of the Terms of Reference. It is vital not to exclude inquiring into the circumstances leading to the decision to keep the Barima in service, including why the Kalliopi N was not deployed on arrival and the decision that her activation was subject to your availability and the known condition of the Barima then. It is not enough that the country spends hundreds of millions on a report about a ship and not about a government.
The funding of your Commission of Inquiry. Under Articles 216 and 217 of the Constitution, no sum leaves the Consolidated Fund save as Parliament authorises. You hold the Finance portfolio yourself. The man appointing the Commission, writing its terms, receiving its report and deciding on its publication is also the man signing the cheque. Do you find that reassuring?
Two undertakings are also owed: that the report be published in full by a stated date, and that Minister Edghill and the Director General of MARAD stand aside while the Commission sits, and attend and answer before the Commission. You have no doubt read that the Minister of Education in India resigned over the leaking of exam papers. I am sure you recognise the principle and the contrast.
And one direction that cannot wait. Every record touching this vessel – all the documentation required under Part XVIII – including surveys, certificates, manifests, maintenance logs, deficiency notices, and the files on the Ma Lisha and the Kalliopi N sit tonight in the institutions to be examined. Official accounts of how many were aboard have already varied. I ask that you now direct that nothing is removed, altered or destroyed, and that all be secured in independent custody. A government with nothing to hide loses nothing by giving that direction.
These documents are not merely material for your commission. They are evidence in civil proceedings which the bereaved are entitled to bring, and the duty to preserve them arises now, not when a writ is filed. Their loss, alteration or destruction would carry consequences in any such proceedings, and for those responsible.
Finally, Mr. President, please reflect on this. A new ship sat at her moorings waiting for you. In its stead, an old one sailed without you and did not come back, with more than one hundred innocent and unsuspecting lives lost. The least the country and its Chief Citizen owe them is a full and independent investigation. Guyana has had inquiries whose findings the country never read, and inquiries that reached no higher than a junior officer. The Rodney Commission came thirty-four years too late, and its report was repudiated by the government that received it. Mahdia reported after the parents had already been made to sign. This one must serve the dead and not you, your Administration or your party.
You may grant what I have asked. You may refuse it. What you cannot do, after tonight, is say that you were not asked.