After wrestling with this issue some more and trying to figure out the cause, I finally fingered Ubuntu as the culprit.
Something in my upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS subtly broke my system. Also I think a recent change in guix preventing me from doing a 'guix pull' unless logged in as root might have had something to do with it. I'm not quite sure what the final cause was, but I fixed the issue, and did a [quick write-up](https://fredmanglis.me.ke/blog/guix-apps-not-finding-glibc.html ) to help anyone else experiencing the issue. Muriithi Frederick Muriuki
