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No ‘Thunderous’ Call for Edghill to Resign
Dear Editor,
I do confess to always finding your columnist, G.H. K Lall, difficult and tiresome to read. He has a rambling, convoluted and often difficult- to-follow style of writing. There is an evident fascination with embellished language. I find many of his sentences vacuous, heavy on dramatic effect but light on analytical content. But that aside, his sheer literary output is astounding, even if too often superfluous.
His column of 23rd July (Let Edgehill stay, those above him must go) is anything but a confused and contradictory attempt to indict an entire government. The column’s opening salvo – “The clamour is thunderous: EDGHILL MUST GO!”—is perhaps its first and most glaring falsehood. There is no such thunderous national clamour. There are certainly critics of Minister Juan Edghill. There are legitimate questions for him to answer. But to pretend that Guyana is convulsed by an overwhelming nationwide demand for his resignation is simply fiction.
What exists is a familiar chorus of the usual political suspects who seize upon every national crisis as another opportunity to prosecute old partisan battles. They appear less interested in discovering what happened than in deciding beforehand who must be politically sacrificed.
Strangely, the column’s headlines are that that Minister Edghill should not go, only to spend the next few hundred words ensuring that the minister remains permanently associated with the tragedy of the M.V. Barima. One cannot simultaneously argue against a resignation while constructing an elaborate case to politically execute the very person one claims should remain in office.
Even more troubling is the column’s breathtaking leap from communication failures to allegations of mass governmental culpability. The columnist behaves as though the only conceivable explanation for the disaster lies in the delayed commissioning of another vessel. That is far from the truth.
The comparison with Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann represents perhaps the lowest point of the column. Invoking the Holocaust—the systematic industrial extermination of six million Jews—to describe a maritime tragedy is grotesque and morally indefensible.
Likewise, the repeated references to “death boat,” “steel chamber” and suggestions that Guyanese were treated as an “undesirable” is hyperbole.
Nor should anyone ignore the convenient political framing running throughout the column. The predetermined conclusion is that the People’s Progressive Party government itself must fall because of the tragedy. Is that analysis or political advocacy?
Regards,
Roopnauth Hardyal
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