There is no enforcement

Oct 30, 2009 Editorial

There was a story about miracles on Thursday. It was a story about desperate action on the part of two little girls, both of whom are alive today, but who must be surely scarred for a long time. According to reports, one of them was so shocked that hours after her escape she was still not uttering a word.
We are not in apposition to know how these children slept last night; we do not know the impact it may have on them in the coming days and years—the flashbacks and their reaction now and in the future on the presence of large vehicles on the road.
There is this large trailer coming around a turn, driven by a driver who seems incapable of paying attention to what is on the roadway that he is using. His rear wheels threaten the two girls who manage to do what few people would do, dive under the very vehicle that threatened their lives. For an instant one of them must have believed that they were diving to certain death.
But all of this need not have happened. There are laws governing the movement of heavy vehicles on the city streets. The city by-laws stipulate that vehicles above a certain weight should not be traversing the inner streets of the city. And this remained the case until somehow there was an absence of enforcement.
Guyana is being touted as a country big on laws but weak on enforcement. There are laws that govern just about every aspect of life; there are laws for road use, laws for damage to property, laws for the payment of rates and taxes, laws for school attendance, laws for relationships and even laws for the care of pets.
Not so long ago, the Ministry of Works announced that given the traffic on the East Bank Demerara, there would have been a time when trucks and carts would have been banned from the roads.
For a while this worked well until everything just unraveled. Trucks are competing with cars and carts to use the roadway at any time. The regulation has fallen away.
The laws provide for every child below the age of 14 to be in school. However, police ranks and people employed to monitor the welfare of children would see young children wandering and do nothing. The laws seem not to apply.
The city by-laws stipulate that each property owner pay his rates and taxes, failing which there would be a move to the courts and possible loss of property. This is not happening because the City Fathers say that they are filled with the milk of mother’s kindness and therefore think it hard to deprive anyone of his property.
The result is that there is no terrifying penalty, therefore, many people do not pay their taxes. This changes when there is a significant threat. And the list of relaxed laws goes on. And because of this relaxation, two little girls nearly lost their lives on the roads. How was it that a large container trailer is travelling on the roads during school hours? Surely, given the extent of police patrols on the streets, someone must have seen this out-of-place vehicle but took no action.
There is a dire need for enforcement if there is to be order in the society. Far too many things have slipped and efforts to correct the situation become difficult, if not impossible. The actions in schools merely represent the result of failed enforcement and with each passing day, what was illegal or outside the norms of acceptable behaviour becomes the accepted standard.
That is one of the reasons for the large vehicle to be traversing the inner city streets and threatening the lives of people.
Indeed, there are those of us who would later remark that we are minding our business because we want to avoid confrontation and abuse. So little children walk the streets and use obscene language in our presence; drivers fail to observe traffic signs and abuse us when we fail to jump out of the way in time; and large trucks are driven through the streets at all hours.

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