Music lovers, abusers, licensed to terrorize Guyanese

Music lovers, abusers, licensed to terrorize Guyanese

OPINION BY : GHK LALL  September 2026

Guyanese love their music.  I do, too.  The problem is that Guyanese love their music much too much.  It’s a big problem, a national one.  Citizens clash with members of the Guyana Police Force trying to do their job, establish sanity around the Kitty area.  Citizens in Leonora so caught up in the revelries, frenzies, and ecstasies of booming music that they forget it’s the birthplace of Guyana’s Pres Ali.  If thinking of the worsts way to disrespect Guyana’s head-of-state, music blasts at all hours do so.  Done almost round-the-clock.  Not a beat lost from the partying to care about insulting Guyana’s president, Guyana’s Police, Guyana’s people.

People such as working-class villagers, who toil for their honest dollars.  They count, don’t they?  People like dedicated students, who must put in time during the nighttime.  They are the future; said so, hasn’t it?  People include newborn babies, toddlers, and frail elders.  There’re still seen as people, aren’t they?  So, somebody in the PPP Govt, in the Police Dept, in the law division, should have the courage and courtesy to share with the sleep-battered, eardrum-bruised, and homestead-besieged in the capital city and countryside, how it is that noise explosions and noise casualties go unaddressed, are left on their own?

Today, I do something different: the personal pronoun is used for the Excellencies addressed humbly.  Are you, Dr. Ali, this captive to the private sector that noise explosions have become a negligible matter?  A condition that produces rolled eyes, chuckles, and winks and a nods in the PPP Cabinet.  In other words, boys will be boys and girls just wanna have fun. 

I regret that Pres Ali has done so poorly as leader.  On oil.  On noise nuisance.  On cost-of-living.  The president is on record as counseling Guyanese to eat out less. 

By the same distasteful logic, he should have his agents instruct bar owners, bar operators, event controllers, and music masters to deal in less decibels, with less distress on hapless neighbors, others.

Are you, Dr. Hicken, Guyana’s law enforcement powerhouse, this impotent– re: taking needed action so that there’re less breaches of the peace, a more civilized ambience in this globally luminous country?  If you, Dr. Hicken, have been reduced to a comedic police commander-in-chief, one that’s helpless when noise nuisance is such a menace in Leonora, then where can you police, Dr. Hicken? 

Are you, Prof Anil Nandlall, so highflying about the majesty of the law, yet so low crawling when it comes to the application of the law, sir?  Laws that atrophy into laws unenforced condemn you, Dr. Nandlall, to a caricature of what an attorney general shouldn’t be.  It is unbelievable and unacceptable, Drs. Ali, Hicken, and Nandlall that large bunches of widely scattered noise mongers can be coddled so much. 

Protected so much, they are confident that they can repeatedly pierce Guyanese with noise weaponized for their (mongers) pleasure to the injury of Guyana’s law-abiding population .

I regret personalizing these noise nuisance crime waves, with Pres Ali, Comm. Hicken, and AG Nandlall (exceptional overachievers) dragged into the public square and dissected before domestic and foreign audiences.  Not my way, nor my style.  But these crimes have lasted too long.  I believe that if Pres Ali, Comm. Hicken, and AG Nandlall are genuine about shutting down noise nuisance, it’s over.  None of this appalling asininity about insulating music rooms. 

Because the rum culture, and other less liquid cultures, still flourishes, with attendant chaos on roads and homes.  Government should never be a party to what damages society’s texture.  Leaders shouldn’t turn their faces, when an issue that can be solved is made unsolvable.  Cut the bull.  Begin with the bona fides that demolish noise nuisance explosions for good.