Dear Editor,
The spotlight is on KW’s October 1, 2026 editorial titled “Sleepless nights”. What to make of this presidential confession? Of his nocturnal torments, his dreamless nightmares. The ghosts of 100 dead swirl around his head like a crown of nails. Deserving, I think.
Ten weeks after the MV Barima tragedy, the deceptions and deviations continue apace. Three charged for murder. The innocent paraded before the Stabroek Market, then made to march to the perp walk. Such an injustice should strike the consciousness, reverse what valium tries to do. Two months after the Commission of Inquiry has been sworn in, it is still trying to locate its compass and its propellor. Like the Mahdia dorm conflagration and its revealing COI, so the MV Barima aquatic suffocation and its COI that has sham marked on its face from the beginning. If there was any interest in honouring the dead, and justice for the impacted families, then several reflexive, irreversible, steps had to have occurred within a week of the tragedy.
An apology for the smirk and scorn of “noise.” Those using that word should have resigned. I differ with Kiskadee Watch about waiting for the evidence. True men fall on their swords. Damnit! There’s that Port Kaituma wharf and that new boat that was temporarily converted to a sport boat and love boat. So, 100 were as good as doomed while the music played, the dancers gyrated. Let there be no quibbling here. Who honours their combat losses with the derisive contemptuousness of “noise?” The ministers should have resigned. The Prime Minister should have gone voluntarily. And the president in this instance has no claim on immunity. If there is neither president nor prime minister, then there’s no cabinet.
Editors of the Kiskadee Watch: that’s taking responsibility (not slurs about “noise”). Running oneself through is what eases the pangs of sleepless nights. Too often the most pious and the most belatedly reflective are the most defective. And self-destructive, too. All these billions and all these crimes that have no owner. Now, the conscience of the Guyanese people is savaged, the intelligence of Guyana’s indigenous belittled with “sleepless nights.” Does anyone dance at a house of mourning amid the wrenching dirges of loss and pain? Does anyone pretend at pain, when they were part of the plot that led to 100 dead, and a thousand beating their breasts, and a nation of a million asking: where is the responsibility? Who will be man or woman enough to say, I am responsible?
Give seafarers a basket for a boat, and a toothpick and a feather for lifejackets to brave the ocean, and there is a recipe for tragedy. In sleepless nights I hear an effort at sanctimoniousness that’s so risible, it incurs ridicule. The parties have continued. The charades live on. Neither a protest nor a placard is needed when responsibility has to be taken, and there is always that ultimate owner. The baton cannot be passed on, for there’s none other. I think that the MV Barima catastrophe was both foreseeable and avoidable. The condition and history of the boat. How the same people now crying in the day and talking to some false god in the night misused those keeping that boat going. When they pulled rank and overloaded that boat. When they added to its torturous and dangerous passages that took a few years too long before it collapsed under the weight of its own weakness and the might of the sea.
Last, I consider myself among the most sympathetic of individuals. But when there’s a long, sordid, history of swearing to one thing (many things), then contradicting oneself, the best I can summon is distaste, but still a prayer. Too many wrongs in this country can be rightly attached to government and leadership. From coverups of unsolved murders to character assassinations, from corruptions of words and budgets and oil money to the pathos of a gullible people. If sleepless nights did happen, then their source, I think, could be much more than a boat with 100 poor dead people responsible.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall
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