Tragedy compounded by travesty – Kaieteur News

(Kaieteur News) – There will be commissions on the sidelines of Guyana.  Citizens of this country, shocked men and women, will conduct their own postmortems.  Public commission or private inquiry, the outcome will terminate at the same revealing place.  The sinking of the MV Barima and the loss of many envelop a tragedy fuelled by the accelerants of travesty.

The PPP/C Government, through its tightly knit bunch of spokespeople, was already on the move.  To steer the conversations and reactions away from failure.  They failed abjectly, due to the fact that several revelations could not be suppressed, hidden from the public, the fate of so many worrying issues in Guyana.  Rather than disappearing obediently into the fast-moving streams of news developments, the travesties took over, would not be denied, and took on a life of their own.  About indiscipline with overload, recklessness with alcohol, and a boat older than Independent Guyana.  Dozens of lives probably lost, and the first efforts are at damage control, with a spinning machine revving up to leap into top gear.  It did, but only made matters worse.

We at this paper shall not add to the clamour of angry voices, not add to the disgust, at the government.  A government that has so much money at its disposal that its people are sucked into one instance of depraved indifference, then another and another.  In their essences, a litany that sends a jolt of electricity through members of an unbelieving public.  How could this disaster waiting to happen be allowed to get to that tragic stage, while the men and women with the power to introduce change engage in boisterous revelries?  We will be back to this at the proper time.  This is a time for searching long stretches of water, so that the bodies can be picked up.  Hopefully, all of them will be recovered, and with those more than a few miraculous survivors.

This country and its citizens are in urgent need of a few miracles.  To vanquish the darkness that hangs over Guyana and devastates it.  To find, against all the odds, a survivor or two, so that deep in the heart of a national tragedy, there is a rare opportunity to cheer.  To prepare for that other long travail, that of burying this country’s dead with all the dignity they deserve, with all the honest care that never was theirs while alive.  It would be an assault on the grief of those who try to cope with their loss for the usual big, solemn speeches from those who stand as monuments to the hypocrisies that torment Guyanese, then degrade them.  On the other hand, Guyanese have become so accustomed to hypocrisies from the highest levels that they are now numbed beyond feeling.

What is one more assault, one more instance of leadership cruelty, when there were so many before that the senses are stunned?  One family is struggling with the unbearable and that is from the mere thinking of their horror.  A reported seven family members may be lost.  Locked within a huge national tragedy, there is this larger family catastrophe.  Probably seven of such, and all at once.  It is people like the Moonsammy family, the people of Guyana, many likely from Region One, who are entitled to every drop of care and concern that can be given to them at this time.  There have been many failures that dragged them to this fateful, sorrowful day.  There must be a day of reckoning for those egregious failures at many levels, with none spared.  Those must be taken apart rivet by rivet, so that there is real justice for the dead and the living, but only after the last goodbyes have been said.  Not until after the last of the fallen have been put to their final resting place.

In a time of mass deaths, the decency must be found in all (from the highest to the angriest) to breathe clean air and quiet grace into what follows from here.  The simplest and softest of manners is the best way that all of Guyana can pay tribute to those now gone, to the families and communities left behind to put their lives back on track.