Among its Terms of Reference (TORs), the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) into the May 21th fire at the Mahdia Secondary School female dormitory was asked to: inquire into and report on the events and circumstances leading up to and the cause of the inferno and to make such recommendations and observations deemed fit including measures and actions that the Commission may consider necessary and appropriate to prevent the recurrence of such tragedy.
In its report released on Saturday, it stated that the Mahdia tragedy occurred because a female student of the dormitory allegedly set it on fire.
“That apart, we view the tragedy as a result of the culmination of a number of systemic flaws in policy implementation, compounded by inefficiencies in management, and acts of negligence by certain officials. These were manifested in the circumstances that led to the tragedy and in the events that unfolded on the night…”
The closest the report comes to holding anyone responsible is its finding of dereliction of duty by the Chief Fire Officer (CFO,) Gregory Wickham in relation to the fire safety deficiencies in the dorm and the poor condition of the Mahdia fire station, which had been drawn to his attention, and the failure of the then Regional Education Officer (ReDO) for Region Eight, Annesta Douglas who was accused of not forwarding a fire officer’s report on deficiencies at the dorm to the council.
It would be interesting to see what the government will do in relation to the findings against the CFO. The matter should be taken to the Defence Board and if he is unable to provide satisfactory answers he should be removed forthwith.
What was unsettling and counter-intuitive about the report was its declaration that while inadequacies had been found in relation to fire prevention at the dorm “we found that a better-equipped facility would not have delivered a different result having regard to the cause of the fire, and the speed with which it became an inferno. The unpreparedness of the Guyana Fire Service to effectively respond to a fire of this magnitude did not help the cause. Indeed, no amount of fire prevention and fire protection measures in the dormitory, or fire emergency training and procedures would have made any substantial difference in the outcome”.
This is evidently false and at the same time contradicted by the statement that the unpreparedness of the fire service “did not help the cause”. It goes without saying that if the dorm was better equipped the odds would have been very high that more of the victims of the fire would have escaped or eventually been rescued. Indeed, dozens of occupants were rescued from the conflagration, some with the help of a person living close to the dorm. How many more might not have been alive today were there no grills on the windows, the existence of fire alarms, a sprinkler system and more fire extinguishers?
Another key plank of the CoI’s work and findings is its reliance on a report of 2017 generated by a Commission of Inquiry headed by former Chief Education Officer (CEO) Ed Caesar. The Mahdia CoI report said that the Caesar report placed high emphasis “on the deplorable state of student dormitories and made recommendations that they should be addressed”.
The Mahdia CoI then inquired during the hearings from the current CEO Saddam Hussein about the fate of the recommendations from the Caesar report.
Mr Hussein was reported as saying that “nothing was done by the Government at that time to implement the recommendations of the report…No steps, no steps were taken into 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, up to July…The Report identified dorms. I have seen from that document, a checklist on issues raised, whether those have been fixed from 2017, and dorms was not ticked. Nothing was done. Absolutely nothing was done, which is callous”.
This statement by Mr Hussein would later inspire the Mahdia CoI to declare in its findings that “We find the fact that no action was taken, in relation to the dormitory facilities in this country after the 2017 report, was a grave neglect of duty bordering on recklessness by the persons vested with power, during that period, for the care and welfare of the country’s children residing in dormitories.
“We therefore find that it was a blatant neglect of these facilities by those in whom authority was bestowed during the period of 2017-2020.
“Further we find that the issues highlighted in the report were to a great extent inherited by the current administration from the previous administration. It is to be pointed out that while those said issues are being addressed by the current administration, the magnitude of neglect which was inherited rendered full rectification a time-consuming exercise. Unfortunately, the tragedy struck before more could have been achieved”.
This was the Mahdia CoI clearly bending over backwards to absolve this administration from any culpability in this matter. What is astonishing is the failure of the CoI to ask Mr Hussein and certainly the Minister of Education Priya Manickchand, who should have been summoned before the Commission, why the implementation of the Caesar report had not continued between 2020 and 2023 notwithstanding the stated dereliction of the APNU+AFC administration.
Is the Commission suggesting that there is no continuity between governments and that a report produced by one government must simply be scrapped or ignored by its successor even if it is well put together? The Mahdia CoI might be interested to learn that this government is proceeding with a monumentally expensive gas-to-energy project based on assorted reports compiled under the APNU+AFC administration. Why didn’t the Mahdia CoI question the Minister as to whether she was aware of the Caesar report, accepted its findings and had decided to urgently repair the dereliction of the previous government? That question would not have been appropriate for Mr Hussein who had clearly been deputed to appear before the inquiry so that the minister would not have to. It would appear from the Mahdia CoI report that the commissioning by Ms Manickchand of a report funded by UNICEF put on hold any significant works on dorms even though there was an extant report on the matter.
When it addressed the Ministry of Education (MoE)/UNICEF report, the Mahdia CoI commended the Minister for her initiative and found that she had “elevated to a place of priority the dormitory facilities which were inherited in a woeful state of neglect across Guyana”. It still raises the question of what could have been done between August 2020 and May 2023 rather than wait on a new report which retraced some of the areas the Caesar report had addressed. As the person who commissioned the report, it was for the minister herself to defend what she had done or not done. What must also not be overlooked was the decision by Minister Manickchand and her government not to release the UNICEF-funded report to the public. It remained hidden away until unearthed by Stabroek News after the fire. Were it publicly ventilated in May 2022, a full year before the tragedy, it may have created its own momentum in bringing much needed change to the Mahdia dorm and others.
Apart from interrogating Ms Manickchand, the Mahdia CoI should also have summoned the Minister of Home Affairs, Robeson Benn and the acting Minister of Local Government, Anand Persaud. They were needed to speak respectively on the gross dereliction of the CFO and the local government system. In the case of the latter, how could the Region Eight council or for that matter the Mahdia Town Council not be aware of the dire plight of the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory. They didn’t need a report to prompt them to do their own inspections and learn about the situation. The local government system is clearly broken and dysfunctional, something that the current government which has held office for 26 of the last 31 years should be fully culpable for – particularly as over that period it has exercised substantial control over the RDCs through the agency of the Regional Executive Officers and in this case in Region Eight, Peter Ramotar, the brother of former President Donald Ramotar.
On the night of May 20, 2023, following an alleged act of arson, 20 children in the care of the state were fatally burnt as they were unable to flee or be rescued from a poorly constructed and grill-barred dormitory, with no fire safety aids, with staff totally untrained for such a situation and an ill-equipped Mahdia fire service. Yet, the best that this CoI could do is point a finger at a low-level education officer with little authority who was being shunted from one point to the next by the Education Ministry. Ms Douglas could have properly arrived at the conclusion that nothing she did with the urgent report from the Mahdia fire officer really mattered.
Most improperly, prior to the conclusion of the inquiry and notwithstanding the claim that there was an agreement, the government imposed a financial deal on the families of the victims, even while they were in the midst of trying to cope with this great tragedy. This deal must be revisited as it is woefully inadequate considering the loss of children in the care of the state.
