By GHK Lall- Captain Kevin Price. Chief Mate Rondell Roberts. Goods Superintendent Delon Granderson. Three Guyanese officers that survived the MV Barima holocaust. Three public servants assaulted by another tragedy: the sledgehammer of a murder charge.
A travesty of circumstances, beginnings of a kangaroo trial. A rank injustice beyond the endless political injustices now so commonplace in Guyana. Those behind the murder charges should themselves be charged for misusing and disfiguring the responsibilities placed in their hands. And those who stand far above them should have those same murder charges hung around their necks.
Messrs. Price, Roberts, and Granderson were impaled on the sharp, toxic horns of that old dilemma. Damned if they do. Damned when they don’t. If they had refused to start the engines of that deathtrap and sail it into eternity, their fate would have been the firing line. They didn’t take that extraordinary step, so now they stand before a firing squad. The wrong men have been charged. The wrong Guyanese made into exhibits of national negligence, national failure, national disgrace.
The wrong workers transformed into fall guys for what rightly belongs way over their heads. Two ministers’ names make the rounds. Their heads demanded to ease loss and pain. Such stands as yet another example of misidentification, taking the clever way out. The real murderers are the high priests who live for blood sacrifices. In the spillage of the blood of innocents. Through the carnage of Guyana’s vulnerable. From the wreckage of the MV Barima. All eyes must turn upwards, all fingers point high.
For landlubbers, everyday commuters, try this searing audio that doubles as a chilling video. Give a man a passenger vehicle to operate. Give him that vehicle that has no brakes, no steering column, no door locks, and neither sufficient power nor lights, and what should one expect on a country backroad, then an open, highspeed expressway? One where the winds of turbulence buffet. One where there’s no bottom. Only a treacherous edge that could lead to a long, endless tumble to the jagged rocks waiting below, and thirsting for a taste of blood and bone.
Who could control such a machine, limping on its last legs, but now turned into a missile? Commanded by forces irresistible, beyond the physics of navigation. Switch the illustration from the sleek tarmac on land to the steel of the sea waiting to entomb in its womb. Messrs. Price, Roberts, Granderson have been salvaged from a disaster and paraded as murderers, when the accumulated recklessness and criminal negligence of men way above them are solely responsible.
Barges like the MV Barima were laughed at during the revelries on the MV Ma Liska. Cavalier approach first. Heinous abandonment next. Depraved indifference last. Those were and are all on public display. Against those backdrops, those high crimes and felonies, three adult whipping boys have been found and tied to murder charges. The mere thought of that abomination qualifies as a premeditated crime. If these three men are guilty of murder, of having a hand in the MV Barima deaths, or of anything, then every Guyanese, including myself, also stands guilty of murder.
To charge Price, Roberts, and Granderson with murder was the first copout and coverup. Done for oil wealth. Done when mass deaths bludgeon. My prediction and conviction are broadcast from now. The Commission of Inquiry is already shaping up to be the second coverup, and next in a string of criminal concealments. Men and women have sworn their oaths. Their responsibilities extend across Guyana, include everything in it. For some cunning reason, the MV Barima doesn’t fall within their list of duties. On the heads of Price, Roberts, and Granderson, that boat and its deaths belong.
I repeat what I have written before. Guyana is not a country, it’s a crime. Its government, the People’s Progressive Party, is an unindicted criminal coconspirator. Look high, look low, there’s the fullness of irrefutable proof. And the haunting cries of 100 dead.
