This could be seen as a bug in GNU Guix (or Nix?) as well but, the test suite of ngircd uses some "kill -0" calls to determine whether a process is still alive after receiving a SIGTERM, and that doesn't work in Guix's build processes because it's a strongly encapsulated environment in which PID 1 is a Guile process running a certain script which apparently doesn't fulfill the expected role, of a real PID 1 (init) process, to wait(2) for disowned and killed processes, which makes them turn into zombies.
I don't know of a trivial solution, so do as you wish. :-) (The Guix recipe will just disable the running of 'make check' for now.)
Taylan