Now that President Irfaan Ali has appointed the five-member Commission of Inquiry into the MV Barima tragedy – all from foreign!! – your Eyewitness ain’t surprised the opposition’s objections have become more strident!! Right off the bat, they’d implicitly insisted the Commission couldn’t be independent unless they had a hand in appointing it!! By that standard, judges should be nominated by litigants, auditors selected by the companies they audit, and cricket umpires appointed alternately by the batting and bowling sides!!
Under our law, the appointment of COI rests with the President – period!! Parliament enacted the legislation that gives him that authority. Yes…broader consultation sounded reasonable- but from the virulent attacks on the President and immediately on the Commissioners, it’s clear that option would’ve been an exercise in political grandstanding!! In the meantime, the nation was demanding answers!!
The President has exercised the authority Parliament entrusted to HIS office. The proper question therefore ain’t, “Who picked the Commissioners?” but “Are they capable of finding the truth?”!! One searches the opposition’s statements in vain for a principled critique of the commissioners themselves. Do they lack the legal, investigative or maritime expertise required? Have they shown themselves incapable of conducting an independent inquiry?
The victims’ families deserve better than constitutional improvisation masquerading as principle. There’s an irony here. If the President had packed the Commission with party loyalists, they would’ve had every reason to protest. Ditto if he’d selected obscure figures of doubtful competence!! But if the appointees are persons of recognized standing and professional accomplishment, then their credentials—not the opposition’s exclusion from the selection process—should dominate the national conversation!!
A Commission of Inquiry ain’t a coalition government in miniature nore are commissioners delegates representing political constituencies!! They’re appointed to follow evidence, test testimony and arrive at findings based on facts rather than partisan preference. Then there’s the question of accountability. Because the President alone appointed the Commission, the responsibility for its credibility rests squarely with him. If the inquiry proves biased or incompetent, he can’t hide behind a parliamentary committee or claim collective ownership of the appointments. The political responsibility is his. That’s precisely how executive accountability works.
The opposition is, of course, perfectly entitled to scrutinise every witness, every procedural ruling and every conclusion the Commission eventually reaches. Indeed, it should. Vigorous oversight is an essential feature of democratic life. But rejecting the Commission primarily because the President exercised the legal authority vested in him is rather like refusing to board a lifeboat because you were not consulted on the colour of the paint.
The nation owes the victims of the Barima tragedy something more serious than that- not by whether every political party managed to autograph the appointment letters!!
Let the COI begin!!

…Elegance of Distance
Ian McDonald’s passing reminds your Eyewitness of his effortless prose, impeccable literary references, and his love for Guyana’s landscape. Yet for most ordinary Guyanese, his weekly columns often felt like dispatches from a hilltop where the view was magnificent – but folks below were barely visible.
There was an unmistakable patrician air about his writing. Politics was often reduced to a lament over the decline of civility, while the rough-and-tumble realities of race, poverty and class conflict appeared as unfortunate interruptions to a more refined vision of society. The sugar worker, the market vendor and the minibus conductor rarely entered his essays as protagonists; they were scenery in a landscape painted with exquisite restraint.
McDonald’s Guyana was frequently populated by poets, cricketers, naturalists and philosophers rather than by citizens wrestling with the country’s harsher political contradictions. His columns celebrated beauty, moderation and good manners -sometimes at the expense of confronting uncomfortable truths.
That doesn’t diminish his literary achievements – just explains why ordinary readers skipped his columns, RIP.

…bodily trauma
A positive outcome coming out of the Barima tragedy, is a wider acceptance that traumas in accidents impact the psyche as well as the body. Almost immediately, the Ministry of Human Services started providing counselling – which was accepted.

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