MV Barima: The Games the PPP Govt Plays

By GHK Lall- One has to live here to come to grips with the PPP Govt’s ways.  When developments favor, it charges forward at a full gallop.  When it is disadvantaged, all the leadership tricks accumulated over the years are rolled out.  The exhuming of the MV Barima from its underwater grave is illuminating of how the government works at buying time and giving itself space.

One of the objectives of the delaying tactics is to help it with creating a fresh, self-serving narrative on a tragedy that the ruling party wishes that the people will forget.  The faster the better.  The more complete the forgetting is, the more content the brutish national leadership is.

It was inevitable that rank politics would intrude in the midst of raw tragedy.  A boat at the bottom with bodies in it to be brought up.  From the record, there’s slowing down with devotion to every T crossed and every I dotted.  There are still many X’s and O’s missing.  Cargo.  Bodies.  Numbers.  Shipshape.  In a free-flowing marine environment time doesn’t standstill.  Time tears apart what’s left.  Steel corrodes.  None should need an education on how rapidly the flesh erodes.  Or how underwater predators flourish in a strange, new, feeding ground.  I am trying to be delicate here; maybe didn’t do too well.

How well the government is doing isn’t debatable.  It isn’t doing well at all.  Beyond engaging in its tortured review process, its slow walk to nowhere idea, and its gambling on salvaging half of a ship.  Recover the ship and produce the evidence will indicate some diligence.  Of a special sort.  Dubious.  Disfigured.  Trying to piece together the shards of that wreckage could be the mother of all fixes.

I think that this is part of the depraved vision of the PPP Govt.  Salvage completed.  Vessel delivered.  Time to wash hands.  Watch developments.  There is a Commission of Inquiry in place.  It provides confidence (to the government) that duty will be done, with few feathers stirred the wrong way.  It’s well to remember that many families are mourning.  It would be tasteless to raise a ruckus.

Before proceeding, I register a concern.  My hope is that the ill-omened MV Barima reaches the surface intact.  With the PPP, I have learned to expect anything.  Anything that’s on life’s darker side.  Because when note is taken of a group of men who ignores precedent, who dismisses standards, who mocks principles, there is astonishment at the same gents suddenly transformed into major disciples of process and procedure.

What could be afoot?  What mischief is in the air, but still under the table?  These questions are relevant.  For there’s a government that is desperately trying to shake the stench of a human disaster (discard maritime) that sticks to its pores.  If it can’t shake the stench, then it could certainly shake the dice so that it rolls to the government’s favor.

There may be conscientious Guyanese who think, who expect, who hope, for a fair and straight process-tender, probe, depth, truth, and admission-from this government’s brain trust, relative to the MV Barima postmortem.  I feel sorry for those citizens.  They need to have their own heads probed and excised of its toxins.  When has the PPP Govt dealt straight with the Guyanese people?  Police killings.  Sacrificial killings.  Copter killings.

Why should it start now with boat killings of 100 or so?  Why would the PPP Govt see it fit to be straight after all of its lies, its secret assassins (who aren’t so secret), its distortions and its deformities?  Get some sense, Guyanese.  Be true to thy self.  There is no reason for the PPP Govt to be energized and genuinely committed to salvage exercise, to review exercise, when the blood of over 100 Guyanese is on its head.  Blood on its hands.  Blood on its lips.  Blood that stains its wasted soul.

Fellow Guyanese: the MV Barima salvage process is about buying time.  About arranging the outcome.  About preparing the narrative to sell another set of falsehoods.  So, there can be more drinking of the blood of Guyanese.  I call it, as I see it.