I SENT in my Tuesday column in the morning and I noted that it would be unconscionable for any human to use this tragedy to score political points.
I made that pronouncement because I saw what the editorial of Kaieteur News, the editorial of Kiskadee Watch, former Mayor, Ubraj Narine and others did. I believe that they were using the tragedy to get at the government.
I am typing this piece here on Tuesday morning so I have available to me all of what people wrote and said about the tragedy on Monday. This country is so predictable. Guyana may have lost dozens and dozens of lives including a substantial number of children in one of the Caribbean’s worst disasters but persons and organisations, like vultures, see this tragedy as an opportunity to score political points.
When you do that, you are guilty of disrespecting those that have died and you are being hurtful to the feelings of those who have lost loved ones in the disaster. It went on yesterday (Tuesday); it will go on as the days and weeks unfold. No sad day for Guyana is exempted. The political agenda comes first.
Here is what Janet Bulkan, writing from British Columbia in Canada wrote yesterday: “I was glad to see that the Leader of the parliamentary Opposition, Azruddin Mohamed, is leading by example, the only MP whom I have seen out on the water to help the rescue efforts directly.”
This is repugnant ignorance. Mr. Mohamed is no ordinary Guyanese citizen. His business assets may run into a trillion dollars. This is an enormously rich man whose source of wealth has been under question for years now. Where are Ministers of Government, parliamentarians and other politicians going to find the money to secure rescue operations like Mohamed?
Obviously, Ms. Bulkan chose not to highlight the kind of rescue boats Mr. Mohamed brought with him. You as a reader have to be naïve not to believe that Ms. Bulkan is using the tragedy to plug for Mohamed.
Ms. Bulkan has access to the internet so she must have seen and read stories of unprecedented heroism by private citizens who went in search of survivors including fishermen. One GDF soldier is being lauded by his village as a hero. But Ms. Bulkan wasn’t interested in highlighting those acts of unprecedented valour.
Her agenda was to highlight Mohamed and of course in doing so, the victims of Guyana’s third saddest tragedy (for me the first was Jonestown, and the second was the ethnic cleansing of East Indian in Wismar in 1974) have become pawns in a political game. There are no words to describe this act of opportunism.
GHK Lall in his piece yesterday engaged in political vulgarity that makes you feel something deeply troubling runs through this man. I swear on my parents’ grave, I do not read Lall for an inexplicable reason but of course there is a rational explanation. I read David Hinds, Tacuma Ogunseye, Janet Bulkan, Henry Jeffrey and others of their ilk but I do not read GHK Lall. I think the reason may be he is a genuine male parvenue that made no contribution to Guyana.
But I know people like him will use the tragedy to get at the government. I read him yesterday. The cynical politics was all over his mind. This guy tells us he is an official of the Catholic Church. Because of my studies in ontology and existentialism, I am not a believer but I wonder sometimes at how some people could be the children of God, is there is an Almighty?
Here is the Kaieteur News of yesterday (Tuesday) about the ferry tragedy: “A government that has so much money at its disposal that its people are sucked into one instance of depraved indifference, then another and another.” How can any citizen write that political miasma in the midst of Guyana’s third worst tragedy?
Since Monday, the Kiskadee Watch has been at it. Here is what it published yesterday (Tuesday): “Three days after the catastrophe, there can be no refuting of the unmistakable human errors, mismanagement, negligence and misbehaviour that caused this calamity.”
Where did the Kiskadee Watch get this information from? There has been no detailed information on causal factors and the common talk is that a monster wave came upon the ferry.
This is what we will see in the coming days. It is going to be a deluge of anti-government outpouring and the deaths of dozens of perished souls will simply be reduced to a non-recognisable factor. Dozens of lives lost in the Atlantic Ocean come second in a political game played by dark mind.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.