My position on Hon Minister of Public Works, Juan Edghill relative to the MV Barima tragedy is well known. Calls for his resignation or termination is mistaking a sardine for a shark. The tragedy is bigger than a minister (or two), bigger than the Cabinet. It reaches to the top, encircling all below. All the years of cursing at Guyanese who called for an end to secrecies and coverups led to the MV Barima going down. All the energies expended on twisting facts, concealing how millions and billions were spent, and attacking those who insisted that the many wrongs will come back in the worst way to unnerve Guyanese, came to pass with a hundred dead. Mainly indigenous and Black, mainly poor and without options, but now dead. The head of Minister Edghill is not big enough to fetch the responsibility for that horrendous tragedy. Responsibility belongs at the head table. Not on a secondary contributor to the horror that dispatched 100 to the depths.
On the other hand, the Port Kaituma wharf was directly in his hand, under his constant watch. The correlation is too close to be denied. To spread around. Thus, it is on his head. He should have lost his head. Fired. Soil shifting is shifting from foot to foot. Searching for a peg on which to hang that $1.4 billion snafu that languished for years, without correction. For the enlightenment of Guyanese unfamiliar with that acronym, snafu, it reads this way: situation normal all f—ed up. The Americans coined it. The PPP Govt lined up to claim monopoly ownership of it. What is not f—ed up in this country with the PPP at the helm? The wharf is Minister Edghill’s and he alone. My thinking is unsparing.
I have given him some cover with the MV Barima death boat. For, it is my belief, that was a function of culture and practice, of arrogance and ignorance (from the peaks of government to its pits), of recklessness and contemptuousness for the indigenous of Guyana, and Guyana’s poor. I insist, I persist, with my position that the stricken boat and the 100 or more stricken from the scrolls of the living land firmly in the lap of the whole government. None spared. None should make themselves small; in the futile hope that the winds of rage will die down. Or that Minister Edghill will be the sacrificial lamb offered to appease those howling for blood. I think that he is being made into the sole scapegoat, when there is a large herd of such goats that stand as prime candidates for that unwanted office.
I’m adamant on the boat and its cargo of dead, and how high and wide the ownership of those catastrophic losses should reach. I’m just as unmoving in thinking that Minister Edghill owns lock, stock, and barrel responsibility for the unfinished $1.4 billion Port Kaituma wharf. First of all, $1.4 billion is neither eating out, nor supermarket spending, money. How many billions have not been borne on the backs of Guyanese? How many more such billions have to be? Then, when the Port Kaituma wharf was not ready for years, the chain of events that kept the MV Barima in operation and to its fatal end strengthened and lengthened towards that final, fateful crossing. It meant that the MV Ma Liska couldn’t dock. It meant that the MV Barima had to chug along on a paddle made of straw and a propeller existing on spit and rubber bands. Her end was all but inevitable, with July 18, 2026 being when the Grim Reaper brandished his scythe and started its gruesome arc.
If a key operator, a political director, cannot deliver on his division, then he has no right staying where he. Begone! This is even if the last journey of the MV Barima didn’t lead to where the whole ugly history of the PPP capsized and broke apart before the gaze of a transfixed world. The wharf is all Minister Edghill. The MV Barima, now a marine funeral home of Guyana’s dead, is owned by the PPP govt in its entirety.
