Dear Editor,
I extend personal congratulations to the BK Group for nabbing that $1.034 billion MV Barima salvage award. Great job, guys! Amid those congratulations, there’s personal consternation. Did this really happen? Is this flesh-and-bones real, or am I hallucinating? In a PPP Guyana, a country where Sinbad the sailor fantasies reign unchecked, it is all too real, and that’s part of my troubles. I speak for no one, but myself. Families may disagree. The PPP may be up in arms. I call, as I see.
First up, I think that the BK Group was the winning bidder from the get-go. All the other noise about foreign salvage boats, secret dealings, and backdoor conversations, those were decoys. To throw Guyanese off the track. The BK Group came with an edge. It was the stealth candidate, a sleeper so to speak, a bidder biding its time. Knowing how the territory is mapped and laid out in Guyana. No hustle, no sweat. Most of all, no calling attention to itself and its own interest in floating the boat. I like a group that knows how to keep its mouth shut, how not make any waves, and how to play along to achieve its objectives. Calls for a ton of corporate smarts. Now this brings me to a touchy place.
For there is this second strain of consternation. With every regard for the winning MV Barima salvage bidder, can this team bring this boat back to the surface in one piece? At a fundamental level, and in a crude description, some placement of holes, and the boring of them are going to have to be a part of the lifting the Barima exercise. This may be done to the best of available local knowhow, but is it enough? More pointedly, can the MV Barima be dragged up as gently and skillfully as possible (almost like a neurosurgeon) to the sea top and then to shore, with all of its contents intact? I repeat so that this point registers with my fellow Guyanese. Considering the breadth of local expertise available to the winning bidder, can the MV Barima be hauled up with all of its lifeless human cargo still fastened in place, and not one body falling overboard, lost forever in the fathomless depths? Can all of its other physical cargo, without one big or small sack of materials, or one piece of heavy-duty machinery slipping unexpectedly out of its hold, and not available for some form of scrutiny by the MV Barima Commission of Inquiry?
There is concern about these elements in the MV Barima tragedy, part of an ongoing national mystery. No question that the salvage award ran contrary to the expectations of the families who lost loved ones, and now live with that grimness and distress. Their reactions alone give more than a hint of where they stand, and what they think of the direction in which the COI is heading. The BK Group may do the best salvaging job possible that it is capable of, and considering the challenges of the circumstances. But this fact must not be ignored: the table of dispute and disagreement is already set, and it promises to lengthen as the days go by.