The Guyana President Himself Said A New Ferry Beat The One That Just Killed 73 People. It Never Sailed The Route. 

News Americas, GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Mon. July 27, 2026: On April 23, 2023, President Irfaan Ali stood at Georgetown’s GuySuCo Sugar Terminal and personally commissioned a new $2.5 billion (US$12.7 million) ferry, the MV Ma Lisha, telling the country it would replace the aging MV Barima on the Port Kaituma route. The Ma Lisha, he said, could make the 24-hour MV Barima journey in just 15 hours, while saving the Transport and Harbor Department the roughly G$12 million a month it was spending to keep the almost 90-year-old, pre-independence vessel running.

More than three years later, the Ma Lisha has still never sailed to Port Kaituma. The MV Barima was still running that exact route on July 19, when it capsized off the Essequibo coast, killing at least 73 people, with 30 more still unaccounted for.

The reason, according to Guyana Public Works Minister Juan Edghill, is a newly built wharf at Port Kaituma developed structural problems after the surrounding soil shifted, forcing sections to be rebuilt. Construction on that wharf began in January 2023 – the same month the Ma Lisha was flagged to Guyana – at a cost of $1.4 billion, with an original completion target of April 2024. It remains unfinished today.

That hasn’t been for lack of budget. Guyana’s 2024 budget allocated G$2.9 billion for the Ma Lisha’s final loan payment and the wharf’s completion. In March 2026, the government issued a G$440 million tender to rehabilitate three vessels – G$199.3 million earmarked for the Ma Lisha itself, and another G$124.5 million for further work on the MV Barima, the very ship it was meant to retire. River transportation funding climbed from G$9.9 billion in the 2025 budget to G$11.2 billion in 2026. Yet according to at least one analysis, no line item in that spending was ever earmarked to actually retire the MV Barima outright.

A member of the opposition, APNU party, MP David Patterson has called the wharf project “a clear example of mismanagement… so poorly designed it required major corrective works.”

Port Kaituma residents began publicly calling for a newer, faster vessel as early as 2010. By 2015, officials under the previous administration were already acknowledging the fleet serving the North-West District was aging and needed urgent attention. The Ma Lisha’s 2023 commissioning was supposed to be the answer.

Instead, the ship the president called faster, cheaper, and safer has spent three years sailing to Kumaka – a different route altogether -while the vessel it was bought to replace kept making the Port Kaituma run, until it didn’t.

NewsAmericasNow will continue tracking the investigation into the MV Barima disaster and the status of the Port Kaituma wharf project.