Silence and sloth

Sep 03, 2026 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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(Kaieteur News) – The death plunge of the MV Barima qualifies as a national catastrophe; an unprecedented local human tragedy.  Obvious beyond argument, above denial.  Yet, in its grim aftermath, there’s the reverse of what should be happening.  With intensity and honesty.  With frequency in duty to families and country.  Where, when, and how have those been?  Instead, the strategies and tactics of PPP Gov’t operators have centered on two prongs that sabotage a disaster of this numerical, emotional, grimness.  The prongs are silence and sloth.  Both have slick, tricky objectives.  Both also represent another fork with two pointed horns.

Silence in this small country for a tragedy as big as the MV Barima exposes its purveyors.  Resonates piercingly in the tiny national echo chamber.  From mouth to mouth and ear to ear.  Guyana is that interconnected.  Everyone is on the same time zone, the same platform.  Why silence?  What’s there to fear?  To hide?  The PPP brass should have learnt what other government did belatedly.  Silence doesn’t suppress.  Silence attracts attention.  Silence intrigues.  Why silence after the great, excessive outpouring of manufactured pieties from the head-of-state to those who head nothing, others who can’t account for their own heads?

Then, there’s the twin of silence.  Sloth is its name.  Astonishingly, sloth in the murky wake of 100 dead, and hundreds wrapped in wrenching mourning.  Like silence, what purpose sloth?  Sloth confirms that there is much to rearrange and reset; much to cleanup and coverup.  Sloth buys time and space.  Silence furnishes the blanket.  I foresee a Commission of Inquiry (COI) on a tortured journey to nowhere.  An indication of my contempt re delivery on its terms of reference.  Wherever the journey takes, make it look real.  Most importantly, chart a course that doesn’t take to the bottom of this Guyana horror story.  I use nautical expressions.  For the MV Barima was of nautical life; and a nautical death that shouldn’t have happened, and what sits like a bloody crown on the head.

Getting to the very bottom of the MV Barima’s death spiral would raise up the worm-eaten, snake bitten, and the bitter.  Bodies are not involved.  A cruel and inhuman PPP Gov’t is.  Recklessness, criminal negligence, orphaned again.  Who would own up to such failures?  Which leader, which lackey?  Hence, silence and sloth flourish.  Drag this COI out.  Go about its demands, expectations, on the quietest feet.  A month after the swearing-in of the COI, hands are still stuck on Bible, Koran Bhagavad Gita.  (Or the Devil’s dictionary).  Scripture records some struck with dumbness or paralysis.  It is clear that both have taken up residence in MV Barima Guyana.

The second jagged and twisted horn on the silence and sloth fork is less tangible, less immediate.  It is more ordinary, more of the usual that informs about Guyana so brilliantly.  The weaknesses of silence and sloth: they don’t fool, don’t work.  The deeper the silence, thicker the sloth, the longer that farm and its Garden of Eden inhabitants avoid the limelight, dodge the spotlight’s harsh glare.  Call this whatever pleases.  Skepticism.  Cynicism.  Hair-raising rhythms of Guyana’s political life.  Nothing is innocent, pure.  Guyanese taught how ulterior motives and hidden agendas are inseparable from official life.  I applaud the PPP.  A farm shielded, steered from harm’s way.  Momentarily only.  Silence and sloth on Barima afford space to move around, tidy up, and closeout loose grass on that farm.

Last, silence and sloth facilitate the eerie.  Create atmospherics, provide distance, instill dread.  Convert the MV Barima into a ghost ship.  Ancient superstitions unearthed.  Citizens flinch.  Speak in hushed, fearful tones.  Voices heard crying.  Shadows screaming for justice.  Observers on land shrinking, retreating.  Amid a grey, grim time, remembrance comes.  The 1970s Argentinian junta conducted its Dirty War against Argentines.  In this century, the PPP wages that Dirty War on Guyanese.  Silence and sloth now weaponised against citizens.  To its watery grave went the MV Barima and its human cargo.  To its unmarked grave that COI, with silence shrouding, and sloth contributing to its stillborn existence, and ghastly death.

(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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• death plunge, GHK Lall, MV Barima, Silence and sloth

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