Sixteen Lives Lit a Fire in Serbia. More Than One Hundred Could Not Stir Guyana’s Students

592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY♦INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM♦GUYANA

Sixteen Lives Lit a Fire in Serbia. More Than One Hundred Could Not Stir Guyana’s Students.

OPINION BY : Hem Kumar October 2026

In Serbia, the deaths of  16 people in the collapse of a railway-station canopy did not disappear beneath official condolences, routine inquiries and the passage of a few news cycles. Students recognized the tragedy for what it was: a possible indictment of neglect, corruption, weak oversight and a political system insulated from the consequences of its failures.

They did not merely mourn. They mobilized.

Serbian students transformed public grief into a sustained national challenge to power. They widened the lens beyond one catastrophe and connected it to the wider wounds of their society: decaying institutions, alleged corruption, economic insecurity, the erosion of democracy, failing public services, rural decline and the arrogance of entrenched political power. They seized a moral moment, organized peacefully, built democratic structures and placed themselves at the centre of a movement now capable of changing Serbia’s political landscape.

That is what civic consciousness looks like.The comparison with Guyana is devastating.

More than 100 Guyanese died in the MV Barima sinking—a catastrophe of such magnitude that it should have permanently altered the national conscience. Entire families and communities bore the grief. Children lost parents; parents lost children; breadwinners, workers, travellers and ordinary citizens vanished beneath the water.

Yet the disaster did not produce the sustained national agitation that such a mass loss of life demanded. It should have forced relentless questions about the safety of public transport, vessel certification, inspections, overloading, enforcement, rescue capacity, regulatory failure, and the role of officials entrusted with protecting human life. Instead, Guyana mourned, the news cycle moved on, and too many citizens—including those who should be the country’s most questioning generation—returned to silence.

Guyana’s students had every reason to rise—not for spectacle, not for partisan theatre, but for truth, justice, accountability and reforms that could prevent another family from enduring such horror.

Instead, there was a brief, subdued and largely symbolic presence. A few days of silence. A passing display of sympathy. Then, for too many, a return to ordinary life as if 100- plus deaths were just another event to be processed, posted about and forgotten.

Sixteen deaths ignited a firestorm in Serbia. More than 100 deaths failed to ignite sustained student outrage in Guyana.

That is not merely a difference in political culture. It is a disturbing measure of how far civic responsibility, compassion and moral courage appear to have receded among a section of Guyana’s educated youth.

A Generation Detached From Its Country

The failure was not simply one of organization. It was a failure of empathy.

The people who died aboard the MV Barima were not an old headline, a historical footnote or an inconvenient death toll to be recalled only on anniversaries. They were Guyanese whose lives were placed in the hands of systems that were supposed to regulate safety, prevent avoidable danger and respond when danger came. Their deaths ought to have become a permanent demand for answers: Who failed? What rules were ignored? What warnings went unheeded? Who was held responsible? What safeguards were put in place so that no other family would have to receive the same unbearable news?

Yet Guyana’s campuses did not become centers of sustained remembrance, investigation or public pressure. There was no enduring student campaign calling for the official record to be fully laid bare; no sustained demand for stronger maritime-safety laws, independent vessel inspections, emergency-rescue readiness, passenger protections, or consequences for negligence and official failure.

The silence was not harmless. It helped allow a national tragedy to be packed away into memory, while the deeper conditions that make ordinary Guyanese vulnerable remained insufficiently confronted.

Why not?

Were students too afraid to speak? Too politically aligned to confront the Government? Too accustomed to outsourcing public responsibility to a handful of activists, journalists, families and civil-society advocates? Or has a culture of resignation taken hold—a learned belief that nothing changes, that protest is futile, and that survival requires silence?

These questions are uncomfortable. They should be.

Education Is a Right, Not a Favour

The popular political language around “free education” has done real damage when it is used to cultivate gratitude and compliance among young people.

Education in Guyana is not a favor granted by any government. It has long been enshrined as a basic right. Publicly funded education is not benevolence, patronage or a personal gift from politicians. It is a constitutional and social obligation, funded by the people of Guyana.

Students must reject any suggestion that their access to education requires silence about injustice, corruption, incompetence or preventable tragedy. A government cannot invoke free education as a shield against criticism, particularly when the State itself bears responsibility for ensuring that such tragedies should have never occurred in our “world -class ecosystem”

A student who asks why people died in a sunken ferry is not ungrateful. A student who demands accountability for public money is not disloyal. A student who protests unsafe infrastructure, poor services, environmental destruction, corruption or inequality is not an enemy of the State.

That student is doing what citizenship requires.

The Indictment

Guyana’s students cannot continually reserve their activism for matters that touch them personally—fees, accommodation, registration problems, delayed stipends, examinations, Wi-Fi access or campus administration—while treating the anguish of poorer, rural, Indigenous and politically unconnected Guyanese as somebody else’s burden.

That posture is morally indefensible.

A society cannot claim to be developing when its university and college population is insulated from the suffering around it. It cannot speak of national transformation when the young people expected to inherit the republic show little sustained interest in whether public institutions work, whether the vulnerable are protected, or whether those in authority answer for failure.

If students can be mobilized only when a problem reaches their doorstep, they are not being prepared for national leadership. They are being conditioned for private survival.

Guyana’s students must understand the cost of that conditioning. The same indifference that permits a dormitory tragedy to fade from national memory will permit public money to disappear without explanation, communities to remain underserved, land and rivers to be compromised, health systems to fail, and political elites to govern without meaningful restraint.

Silence is not neutrality. In a country where power is concentrated and accountability is fragile, silence is permission.

More Than Mourning Is Required

No one is demanding that Guyanese students replicate Serbia or import another country’s political culture. Guyana has its own history, divisions and challenges. But our students must recover the elementary principle that an injury to citizens—especially children—demands more than a vigil, a social-media post or a momentary expression of grief.

It demands sustained civic action.

Students should be organizing forums and research initiatives, monitoring the implementation of official recommendations, demanding access to information, partnering with affected communities, questioning ministers and public agencies, and mounting peaceful, independent campaigns for public safety and accountability.

This is the indictment of a student population that too often awakens only when its own immediate comfort, fees, registration, accommodation or campus privileges are affected. It is not enough to display grief briefly, post a black image, attend a vigil, and return to private ambitions untouched by the suffering of fellow citizens. If the loss of more than 100 Guyanese could not produce sustained compassion, moral outrage and civic action among the country’s educated youth, then what exactly will? A generation unwilling to demand accountability when human life is lost cannot credibly claim it is prepared to lead a nation.

The young people of Serbia turned 16 deaths into a national reckoning. Guyana’s students allowed the deaths of more than 100 people to pass without a sustained reckoning.

That should trouble every parent, lecturer, policymaker and student in this country.For it raises a grave question: if the death of over 100 fellow  citizens cannot awaken a generation to public responsibility, what will?

“Change is clearly necessary. The state must belong to its people, not to the mafia and criminals. ” “The way they treat the judiciary, the catastrophic conditions at the local level, NDC ‘s resorting to violence and gangsterism, dying villages – along with dubious privatizations, money laundering, the erosion of every single institution, police being reformed into thugs, and an education system vanishing before our eyes… these are some of the reasons why change is needed,”