The recent release from the Ministry of Public Works of a statement on the topic of “Emergency Repairs Update for MV Kimbia & MV Barima” shows that “restoration work” on both boats is “ongoing and will be complete it soon. ”
The disclosure comes on the heels of signing an agreement between the Government of Guyana and the Government of India in which the Indian military shipbuilding company Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers Ltd. (GRSE) is building a new ship for Guyana that will help strengthen. communication links between the coast and some of Guyana’s hinterland regions.
In the context of Guyana’s long-standing challenges in communications in the country, including the movement of people and cargo, to and from coastal locations, ordinary Guyanese as much as the business community will monitor progress towards realizing the deliverables of this agreement.
To return to the issue of the absence of the MV Kimbia and the MV Barima from service, what this means is that the downtime for these vessels places limitations on the efficiency of communication links between large parts of coastal and hinterland Guyana, a circumstance which, for all sorts of reasons, is, to say the least, undesirable.
The fact that these two vessels appear to require considerable attention, at the same time, raises the question of whether or not these vessels have a maintenance and repair regime and whether these regimes are being followed.
We believe that the answers to these questions should come from the Ministry of Public Works and the Department for Transport and Harbors (T&HD).
The Government has, over time, seized upon itself the tension of pronouncing on issues of particular national importance in the kind of take-or-leave-it method that, all too often, lacks any sense of accountability or, for that matter, concern with the consequences of prejudice and delay. This is nothing new.
There can be no question that creating sustainable links between the coastal and inland regions of Guyana to facilitate the movement of people and cargo is vital to the development of the country. Whatever other promises the country’s oil and gas activities might hold, development must be informed by a certain level of strategic thinking that addresses issues such as building an infrastructure network designed to create integrity concerning the peculiarity of our country as well as that critical sense of territorial integrity, which, for us, is an important issue at the moment. Where we neglect to be mindful of these holdings we remain, in more than one, hobbling, a physically divided country, as clearly demonstrated by the protracted underdevelopment of our inner regions and ‘ r the unequivocal trademarks of underdevelopment that include, in the cases of some regions, significant levels of food insecurity.
All of this, in our view, relates to the issue of holding government to account. Experience would have taught us that leaving the decision-making process in the hands of one political administration alone, without vigorously pushing back against poorly thought out and obviously counterproductive decisions, has worked for us . Indeed, a trend that leaves important targets spontaneous, a result that often resembles self-censorship by those in control. Examples of incompetence and mismanagement are attended by a kind of suck-up and move-on attitude that engenders an overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the entire population. That continues to be the case under successive political administrations and unless decision-making begins to be more responsive to a greater sense of accountability (to the specific wishes of the people, generally) then, as we should have learned from our experience, over the years, we are on a hiding place.