IN the weeks since the MV Barima went down off the Essequibo Coast in the worst maritime disaster in Guyana’s history, President Irfaan Ali has resisted the easiest, most politically tempting response: naming a perpetrator before the facts are in. That restraint is not evasion. It is leadership.
Look at what has actually happened. Within hours of the sinking, the government mobilised the largest search-and-rescue operation the country has ever run, pulling together the Coast Guard, MARAD, the Fire Service and ordinary fishermen who put their own boats to sea.
That effort recovered 73 of the dead and rescued 76 survivors, even as 30 people remain lost to the Atlantic. Nothing about that response was slow or indifferent. Nor has accountability been shelved.
Within days, the Director of Public Prosecutions, who was acting under her own constitutional authority and independent of the Cabinet, reviewed the police file and moved to charge the vessel’s captain and two other crew members with murder.
That is not a government stalling for time; it is Guyana’s institutions functioning as they should, each in its own lane, without an anxious executive reaching for a headline.
And where public conversation has outrun the facts, as with claims that the 87-year-old ferry had been neglected, officials say it was on a routine maintenance schedule, with dry-docking already planned for later this year alongside two other vessels in the fleet.
That is precisely the kind of claim a commission of engineers and disaster investigators exists to verify, not a press scrum.
The commission itself deserves the same confidence. It is chaired by a Belizean judge and staffed with a Jamaican maritime surveyor, a Trinidadian attorney, a Polish naval architect and a retired Trinidadian rear admiral; this reflects a genuinely independent, international panel with no incentive to protect anyone in Georgetown.
Asking Guyanese to wait a few more weeks for that panel’s on-the-ground work, rather than demanding an instant verdict from a podium, is not weakness. It is exactly what a “thorough, transparent and impartial” inquiry requires.
The calls to suspend or remove ministers before that inquiry reports are understandable as grief, but premature as policy. Firing an official to satisfy a news cycle would not make a single family whole, and risks punishing the wrong person while the real causes go unexamined.
The President is right to say those decisions belong after the findings, not before them.
What families need most, this government is already delivering, and it has rightly defined “families” to include those still missing loved ones and the relatives of crew, not only the bereaved.
The Heart Initiative’s medical, mental-health, spiritual and financial support reaches through regional hubs rather than funnelling grief through Georgetown, while salvage of the wreck moves through a careful, competitive process rather than a rushed one that could cost more lives in dangerous waters.
Thirty families are still waiting for their dead. They deserve a government that gets this right, not one that simply moves fast.