Everything about this headline screams institutional confession.
Maybe, the suggestion of issuing a paternal statement was made to get ahead of national sentiment.
But Daddy didn’t bring this home.
Instead, he exposed what was hidden for decades –that the handling of public transport was a freestyle of operator discretion paired with luck and the blessings of good weather.
Auditing Maritime safety and compliance moves past looking at simple mechanical failure, past treating the incident as an isolated, unpredictable, occurrence.
It seems that the government is admitting that multiple defence layers–scheduled maintenance, supervisory audits, routine safety cultures– all failed simultaneously.
We’re not professing to have any knowledge more than the headline confesses.
Its combination of government’s CRISIS and communications management, which goes beyond the typical need -to -know info flow, reads like “mea culpa, if you get it” .
Several things arrest attention.
An Expert Team has been assembled. The President, and not the Minster of Public Works, makes that announcement.
And, not that we’re nostalgic. But, we reached back to compare government’s previous outreach for external expertise during calamitous events, to see if this promises answers.
The nearest to national tragedy was the decade of the criminal ‘Troubles’.
We won’t say that there was copious use of external interventions as a political shield. We won’t say they were used to create the illusion of government action to fight the gun and cocaine culture.
But it sure looks like it…given the complaints of the countries and their institutions that were hired or helped…not to mention absence of any solutions …that we could find.
And that causes concern.
When government seeks expertise to quell internal mayhem then fights with its vendors, it looks like the ‘Optics over Substance’ metaphor.
The appearance of governing, seems more the goal than solution to the crisis.
They get to shift accountability, not to the original sin– bad governance– but to the hired help.
They get to announce massive financial packages, only when they set it aside, not when they don’t pay because the deal fell through.
Then, they get to delay and dilute setting up the Expert Team for the Audit. These former Ministers of Home Affairs staked their reputation on this operating system.
Imputing blame and berating characters for failed projects was their explanation of the failed partnerships. They read like prepackaged tactical maneuvers to survive the fallout.
Hence their headline, is our deduction.
Its ‘Announcement’ came in strategic parts. The top brags of locals who will be on the team.
Waaay down at the bottom, after primary/initial attention would have been expended, it mentions experts from multiple countries.
This is a technique used to manipulate public perception, while maintaining legal or professional deniability.
Political optics. Controlling the information hierarchy. It’s just as powerful as censorship.
We’re not saying this is so…just that it looks like it.
Guyana’s Maritime Administration Department –MARAD – has the Bible for marine disaster recovery, as detailed in the national Multi Hazard Disaster Preparedness and Response Plan.
It is the duty and obligation for every form of investigation to be launched, especially because what seems to have led up to the tragedy is the absence of its routine precursor.
Granting sweeping powers to accelerate an investigation that will be comprehensive and conclusive is commensurate with the duty and obligation of the office.
It is not an outlier – irrespective of opinion-shaping in public media by rounds of verbal applause.
And, what reads like a Greek Tragedy, is the soliciting of ‘Expressions of Interest (EOI)’ from salvagers to raise the sunken ferry.
‘Expressions of Interest’ to clear Davey Jones locker are so irreverent. It’s like the highfalutin way of making the recovery of these victims of government transportation a sterile rescue mission. It may be corporate jargon, we understand, but misplaced and impious nonetheless.
Now, seventy eight confirmed dead bodies later, the government is all for precision and execution by measure.
Seeking reputable salvage companies? As opposed to what?!
Outlining their corporate profile is not a sudden stab of genius but generic requirements for this type of operation.
We’re not saying that there is passive indifference to infra structure. We’re not gauging the monstrous overnight constructions of out sized buildings which blight the nation’s skyline. No thoughts, have we, on the craters in the roadways and the habitual flooding that cause vehicle hydroplaning when not their stalling.
But this sure looks like the institutional survival mechanism at play.
If we’re aware of anything, it’s communications and crisis- management public relations. We understand the tactics used to control narrative, absorbing blame to deflate sentiment. An exhaustive to-do list, as implied in the news paper article, offers as much cover.
We’ve never seen as much attention to microscopic detail as revealed there. Its provision is as clinical and antiseptic as it sounds.
It’s not about the tragedy on the government owned and operated Barima. It’s about how the efficient government will clean up its mess and the rigor it will deploy to recover those who perished under their care.
In the end though, it will come back to those in grief and those in support of the grieving – Guyanese everywhere –to assess.
Political liability has already been assigned. The pledged flurry of activity is a public relations strategy to survive its own failure.
Making it known by emblazoning it in government publications is the ‘just in case switch’ to be tripped …if ‘government’s fault’ remains the prevailing sentiment. The Insurance Policy “it’s right here in writing” …is an appendage of performative politics.
It is a tactical misdirection we’re hoping the Opposition is noting and will respond to with its own counter offensive.
Calling on Edghill to go when he enters Parliament, is just noise, fixes nothing and takes away opportunity to represent its collective constituency. It’s equally as counterproductive as interrupting a meeting that requires armed security to restore order.
Imagine if the Opposition had hosted its own meeting to dismantle the Government’s checklist of blame deflection.
Wouldn’t constituents understand rules and practices read from the national Multi Hazard Disaster Preparedness and Response Plan? Wouldn’t they understand that something had to be wrong if the manifest had to be revised repeatedly? Wouldn’t they better understand that salvage divers wouldn’t have to be hired if ferry dry docking was a practiced priority?
Were questions properly scripted? Was there going to be an orderly sequence of delivery and not a crescendo of mass screams? What answers were they looking for? And how were they going to determine their veracity if they were not advised on their answers?
Again, we cite the members with formal education, which, coupled with their experience, know that complex issues require calm discussion. Their non political occupations have taught them the skills of negotiations and reaching common ground.
This is why the whole busting in to the Jagdeo meeting was a disservice to their constituents who look to them for leadership and applicable solutions.
What they got out of it was a headline that declared the Government the winner in an exchange that was an impenitent demonstration of political one-upmanship while bodies are still floating.
Jagdeo got to give his version of comforting discourse, seated facing a seemingly attentive audience projecting calm, simulating intimacy, shifting from authority to empathy… as if he had the text book on ear piece.
With all of the Seasoned Opposition’s experience, we ask again, when are they going to grow tired of a leadership that’s chaotic, short sighted and incapable of proffering solutions?
It is one thing to have lost historic standing by coalescing behind a leader who was demonstrably out of depth, from inception.
It is worse, we think, to make it an institutional pathology by incorporating the failures of the leader into daily operations. The loop of losing is now the brand of the Seasoned Opposition; not because they are losers but because they refuse to show us that they are not.
There’s only so much pointing to oppressive governance and showing of righteous indignation before constituents move on to another Party that taps in to their immediate needs. This time it won’t be ‘purchasing’ their membership but empowering them to understand what their elected leaders owe them.
And for the seasoned Opposition, with all of its qualifications, it will be more than an opportunity lost. It will be a poaching of a constituency that will expect tangible relief… not the show.
That will be the tragedy … the skeletonization of the once formidable Party, the PNC, which retains historic presence in the memoirs of the evolution of the country.
Its cataclysm will come because its current members will trade off the value they are expected to deliver to their voters for a 30 second blip in the news and some social media emojis.
Hard to comprehend how people of academic and political experience would trade that for the ‘show’.
No. This is not the Paradox of ‘Attention versus Achievement’.
It is the replacement of difficult work by citing low- effort social media icons as grades for a job well done. Politicians bank on the visual stimulation to impress their constituents who operate within their closed party ecosystem.
In the end, it is the voter who is denied their due diligence because their leaders’ focus is on Party image and not its service to its voters.
Public service is not for applause. These politicians focus on the wrong incentive.
And their constituents are left to do the 40 year wander in the dessert.
