OPINION: Thirty Families, One Chessboard: A Reply to Freddie Kissoon on the MV Barima

Last Updated on Saturday, 15 August 2026, 8:58 by Denis Chabrol

By Dexter O. Fraser

The wreck of the MV Barima lies in soft mud, 13 to 15 metres down, off the Essequibo coast, where the current runs strong, and the water holds almost no light. It has rested there since the night of July 18. Guyana’s Opposition Leader has publicly relayed what the families of the dead have told him directly: they want their people back, even if only bones remain, because that is the only way grief can begin. At least 73 people are confirmed dead. Roughly 30 more are still unaccounted for, as of early August. Somewhere inside that hull, or near it, lies the difference between a family that can finally bury someone and one that cannot.

None of that appears in Freddie Kissoon’s August 4 column, “Raising the MV Barima Urgently: A Political Trap.” Kissoon writes at length about salvage companies, competing tenders, Malaysia, Italy, and the motives of opposition politicians. He does not write about the dead, the missing, or the families of either. That omission is not incidental to his argument; it is the argument. A column built entirely around how a government should choose a contractor, without a single sentence on who is waiting at the other end of that contract, has already told the reader what it thinks matters here.

To be fair to him: Kissoon does not oppose raising the ferry. By his own account, the government first floated the idea of leaving it as an underwater memorial; the public and the victims’ families rejected it outright, and the government reversed itself. The live argument, as he frames it, is narrower: whether the state should rush to appoint a salvage contractor without properly surveying the field, given that an unvetted operator could exploit the government’s urgency and charge accordingly. That is not a foolish concern on its own terms, and a columnist with Kissoon’s four-decade record of chasing government corruption has earned the right to raise it. The trouble is what he built on top of it.

Kissoon’s column rests on a binary: either the government rushes, recklessly, to whichever firm answers the phone first, or it takes the time to do this properly. Guyana’s own law does not recognise that binary. Section 28(c) of the Procurement Act, Cap. 73:05, permits single-source procurement “owing to a catastrophic event” where urgency renders other procurement methods “impractical” because of the time they take, language that could have been written for this exact situation. It is the same general mechanism Guyana has invoked before, imperfectly, for urgent hospital supplies.

Opposition Member of Parliament Ganesh Mahipaul said precisely this in public on August 3, the day before Kissoon’s column ran: he did not ask the government to skip due diligence. He asked it to invoke the emergency powers Parliament had already given it, warning that the open tender MARAD chose instead, Expressions of Interest due August 14, followed by shortlisting and a further request for proposals, would likely push actual salvage operations into September. Kissoon’s column never mentions this option. He built his case against a version of the opposition’s position that nobody serious was making, and knocked it down.

He also gets the arithmetic wrong, and the arithmetic does most of the emotional work in his column. Kissoon anchors his estimate at “almost a US$1 million,” allowing that it “may be more.” It is more: the Attorney General has since put the figure nearer to US$10 million, roughly 10 times Kissoon’s anchor. That is not a small correction. An operation of that scale is not the casual handshake deal his column warns against; it is precisely the kind of contract that gets robust safeguards written into its terms from the outset. MARAD’s own tender documents already require bidders to carry adequate insurance, maintain documented safety-management systems, and preserve forensic evidence for the Commission of Inquiry. The safeguards Kissoon insists only time can buy are already built into the process. What is actually missing is not diligence. It is speed.

And here is the question Kissoon, of all people, should have asked: how has this same government’s clock behaved elsewhere in this same tragedy? Reuters reported that within 10 days of the sinking, the state found the legal and administrative machinery to charge three named men, the captain, the chief mate, and a Transport and Harbours Department superintendent, with murder. Their own attorneys, alongside independent voices including chartered accountant Christopher Ram and Forward Guyana’s Amanza Walton-Desir, have argued publicly that this happened before the mandatory statutory marine casualty investigation, the one that would actually establish whether these men were at fault, had even begun.

The Director of Public Prosecutions has said the criminal case and the Commission of Inquiry can proceed simultaneously, which is a fair position. It does not explain why simultaneous means 10 days for a charge and, at minimum, weeks for a recovery. Ram has said the marine investigation itself should instead have proceeded under Part XVIII of the Shipping Act, with a sitting judge or magistrate empowered to compel evidence. A government that can decide, in 10 days, whom to blame is asking the country to accept that it needs six more weeks to decide who gets to go and look. Kissoon spent a career teaching Guyanese to ask who benefits from the pace of a decision. He did not ask it here.

This is not merely a policy preference; it runs counter to Guyana’s constitutional architecture. The Constitution protects the right to life under Article 138, and, through Article 154A, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is written directly into that protection and made enforceable by the ordinary courts against the executive. The UN Human Rights Committee is explicit about what Article 6 requires: any death that may involve state failure must be investigated independently, promptly, thoroughly, and transparently, and the right to life itself extends to the entitlement to be treated with dignity in death, a principle that runs through the wider human rights tradition since the Universal Declaration. Recovering the wreck is not a courtesy outside that duty. It is a condition of fulfilling it which is precisely why the government’s own tender ties the salvage operation to preserving evidence for the Commission of Inquiry. The state has already conceded, in its own procurement paperwork, that recovery and investigation are the same obligation. Kissoon’s column treats them as two separate arguments about political strategy.

There is a wider irony here that a political scientist, of all people, should appreciate. Guyana was the 60th country to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, on 16 November 1993, the ratification that, under the Convention’s own terms, brought the entire modern law of the sea into force for the world exactly one year later. A country whose signature quite literally started the clock on the international law governing sovereignty over territorial waters is now asking for patience. At the same time, it decides how urgently to exercise that same sovereignty over 15 metres of its own coastline.

I have spent much of the past two years developing a leadership framework I call the Fraser Theory of Intellectual Stewardship Leadership. Its central claim is that a leader’s task is not to know everything personally, but to convert the knowledge distributed around them into timely, accountable action. Two of its components apply directly here. The first, the Epistemic Proportionality Principle, holds that the intensity of knowledge-seeking a decision deserves should be proportional to that decision’s complexity, uncertainty, and consequence, weighed against the time actually available to act; it rejects the idea that more consultation is always the safer choice. The second, Knowledge-to-Action Stewardship, holds that a leader may distribute the gathering of information as widely as a problem demands, but cannot distribute the responsibility to decide once enough is already known to act.

A leader who hides behind process is not being careful. Carefulness is a discipline; delay dressed up as caution is an evasion wearing carefulness’s clothes. By that standard, an open-ended tender for a catastrophic emergency the law already anticipated, running weeks past the date the state itself needed to charge three men with murder, is not diligence. It is a choice, and someone made it.

You taught political science at the University of Guyana for 26 years, Mr Kissoon. You know, better than almost anyone writing in this country today, that a state’s legitimacy is not really settled in a courtroom or a commission’s final report; it is settled in whether the people it failed believe it is trying, in good faith, to make things right. So, answer plainly. If Guyana’s own Procurement Act already contains a lawful pathway built for precisely this kind of catastrophic emergency, why does your column never mention it? If the state can decide within 10 days which three men to charge with murder, why does deciding which company may lift a hull need six more weeks even to begin? And if this is truly a trap, as your headline insists, whose trap is it, when the government wrote the tender, set the deadline, and chose the pace, and the only people who never got a vote in any of it are the families still waiting for someone to come home?

None of this is a brief for the opposition, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. The real trap in this country is not an opposition demanding urgency. It is a political class so fluent in blame that government sees only conspiracy, opposition sees only cover-up, and the dead become scenery for an argument neither side actually wants to end. There is nothing to admire in a politician who discovers urgency only when a camera is present. But the cure for that habit is not Kissoon’s cynicism, which treats every call for speed as manipulation and thereby excuses the government from ever justifying its own calendar. The hull is still down there, in the dark, on a floor of mud that has never once cared about a tender document. It will stay there for exactly as long as Guyana’s leaders decide a chessboard is more urgent than a grave. The families have already said what they need, plainly and in public: their people, even if only the bones remain, so that grief finally has somewhere to stand. That is not a political trap. It is the only urgent question in this entire affair, and it is the one Freddie Kissoon’s column never thought to ask.

Mr Dexter Orin Fraser is a strategic thinker, management professional, researcher, and writer, passionate about leadership, governance, economic development, and technological transformation supported by a combination of military, business, and academic experience with a bold commitment to turning knowledge, innovation, and strategic thinking into practical solutions that create lasting impact