Pushing… Mourning by Megaphone

Your Eyewitness has noted there’s a peculiar species of politician who only emerge after disasters!! They don’t arrive with life jackets, engineering reports, or practical solutions – they just descend on the scene armed with smartphones – even drones! – and carefully rehearsed expressions of solemn outrage!! The tragic sinking of the MV Barima has become their latest stage.
To be fair, one might have to make an exception for Sanction Man the LOO, who arrived in his fancy, high-powered, wanna-be yacht speed boat from which he used to fire high-powered rifles back in the day across the Demerara River while hosting “freak-off” parties!! He used his experience to recover several dead bodies. But further down and across the opposition food chain, the competition appears less about dealing with the tragedy than about auditioning for the role of Chief Mourner!!
Every utterance is more theatrical than the last; every Facebook post is soaked in freshly manufactured indignation; every interview is delivered as though Shakespeare himself had been retained as media consultant!! One almost expects black armbands embroidered with party logos!! Yes, dear readers, the Barima tragedy has sadly become a political talent show – with contestants competing to demonstrate who’s the most distraught, the most outraged, the most compassionate – all recorded, of course!! Curiously absent from this emotional marathon are serious technical proposals about ocean-going vessels which regrettably offer few opportunities for dramatic sound bites!!
Virtue signalling – which cynically is what these performances are all about – has become the easiest currency in politics!! It doesn’t need any investment beyond a press release and perhaps an appropriately sombre profile picture!! The objective ain’t to solve the problem but to be photographed looking devastated by it!! If social media reactions could repair hulls, Guyana would now possess the safest ferry fleet in the Caribbean!
The irony is that genuine accountability is painstaking work. It involves what the Government is doing – WAITING for investigations, examining maintenance records, identifying individual failures, exposing systemic weaknesses and, where negligence is proven, ensuring that those responsible face legal and professional consequences!! That process is slower than a Facebook livestream and considerably less glamorous!! Political opportunism, however, cannot wait: it demands immediacy. Every hour that passes without a dramatic statement is another hour in which a competitor might monopolise the outrage.
However, the families who lost loved ones deserve better than competitive grief: facts rather than theatrics, reforms instead of hashtags, and justice instead of performance art!! Perhaps the greatest tribute to those who perished would be to ensure that no politician ever again finds it profitable to turn a national tragedy into a campaign advertisement disguised as compassion!!
In Guyanese politics, some folks mistake standing at a graveside for standing on higher moral ground!

…Centrifugal Double Standards
It seems the US just discovered a revolutionary scientific principle: uranium enrichment ain’t dangerous – it just depends on whose centrifuge is spinning! For years, we were warned that Iran enriching uranium was an existential threat – worthy of sanctions, sabotage, air strikes and solemn speeches about the survival of civilisation!!
Now comes a deal to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia – with no stipulation to forbid enrichment, as with the UAE. Seems the centrifuges ain’t evil no mo!! They’ve just changed neighbourhoods!! Your Eyewitness imagines the uranium itself being thoroughly confused – “Yesterday I was the reason for war. Today I’m part of a strategic partnership??”
To be fair, Governments always give a free pass to allies and trust them with technologies that adversaries are denied. That distinction lies at the heart of most security alliances, innit?? But when one country’s enrichment is a casus belli while another’s is accommodated under a friendly agreement, folks are bound to ask whether the principle is non-proliferation…
Or simply selective proliferation!!

…against narco-smuggling
Your Eyewitness was beginning to wonder what happened to Venezuela’s comrade Mad Maduro, who’d been spirited away to New York on narco-trafficking charges – as head of the Cartel de las Solos!!
Seems like the trials are for June 1, 2027!!