Motions, distance, indifference

Sep 02, 2026 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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(Kaieteur News) – There’s a human tragedy.  Cotton Tree and two cousins.  Across Mandarin Bridge and an 11-year-old-child.  Police killings in Linden.  And, more lately, a boat that went down and took down over 100 Guyanese lives.  Poor ones.  The rich ones and big ones don’t sail, they soar.  A flight is ‘fine change’ for them.  The PPP Govt. has a practice.  Entourages roll into communities, before families.  Amidst human tragedy, caravans, and human dramas.  Political ones that follow a canned formula, a set procedure, what are now standard operations.  Follow the threads.

Visits.  Handholding.  Solemn expressions.  Proper clothing.  Words and carriage matching.  Police or politicians.  By golly, the PPP creates new science.  All that’s desired is truth and justice.  Hopes for truth and a sincere quest for justice are all that’s placed before visitors and professional mourners.  Political ones are the best.  Done!  Will be done!  Guaranteed with seal of public oath affixed.  Repeated.  Cotton Tree.  Tuschen.  Linden.  The national tsunami that was the capsizing, plunging, horror of the MV Barima.  Hope still stirs, springs.  Out of tragedy’s agonies, there will be duty to the people.  Truth and justice delivered.  Finality that brings blessed closure.  The ghosts of the stricken, fallen, find peace.  So, also the savaged spirits of families and communities.  So, begins and ends chapter one in the Guyana story of when tragedy stalks and the PPP Govt. mounts its rescue operation.  The first objective transcending all others is damage control.  Limit the spread.  Manage flareups that could incite more fallouts.

Chapter two reveals the hypocrisies that ran deep amid the solemnities, mourning, grieving, the speechmaking celebrating Guyanese resilience.  Theater in full swing, free political matinees for the masses.  Now, there’s distancing.  The machinery takes over.  PPP stars who were in the forefront, retreat, take distant seats.  To make themselves invisible, no stains reach.  A commission will be.  Guyanese hope.  The team is announced.  I discern a foul.  The sham registers deeply.  Are those the best?  Would this deliver?  What about trust?  Poor precedents exist.  Can’t be denied or wished away.  Try two: inferno, police mishaps.  The fire killed children; gunfire killed adults.  Whatever the objectives of those blood sacrifices, this is incontestable: the dead is still dead.  Something is conspicuous.  Where are those who were in the grieving vanguard?  To where have they disappeared?  Practice and process are the new headliners, with the right breed of people in place.

Prior whitewashes set to be repeated.  One dead, two dead, a hundred dead, it’s only a number.  Nothing to get worked up about.  It’s the new line of those who promised truth and justice.  That is, if they break their silence, narrow their distance.  Gruesome murders are ancient history.  A child drowned in mysterious circumstances, and the usual business continues.  Killings by the State, roll with them.  A hundred sent to their death, through criminal negligence at every level.  Yet those fingered are three poor working men, left with no choice.  Perhaps, that calumny (an official crime by itself) is all the truth and justice that families and Guyanese will ever get.  A travesty amidst tragedy.  Thus, the concerted effort at distancing.  Put a COI in the middle, one that developed a hernia and emergency appendicitis.  But that’s not all; a ruff case of tonsilitis has affected the Barima COI.  Can’t move.  Can’t talk.  Can’t collect its wits, can’t get its wheels rolling.  A month later.

Stretch out, so that there can be proper straining out.  The negatives.  The inconveniences.  The revealing memories.  A month later, and there is official indifference.  It’s the COI business, not that of leadership.  It’s of dead Guyanese.  Nobodies.  Why work up a sweat?  Why go near to what can bite?  Indifference confirms what I always pegged to insincerity.  Hypocrisy.  The pretense of shared pain overcome by political indifference.  The MV Barima is dynamite.  Whoever goes near to it risks being blown up.  Thus, distancing first, and now the indifference. Cruelty amid raw tragedy.  The reprehensible walking side-by-side with the indefensible.  PPP way of life.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)                     

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• Cotton Tree, distance, indifference, Motions, PPP

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