Georgetown can be saved

Dec 10, 2013 Editorial

In recent weeks Central Government has been undertaking a series of works in the city, particularly in the area of garbage removal and cleaning the waterways. This is really nothing new because Central Government has been known to repair city roads and even certain facilities in Georgetown.
On occasions, when the city council found itself in dire straits with nothing in its coffers the government had been known to pay up its rates and taxes, sometimes in advance, so that the council could undertake necessary things like paying its staff and paying the Guyana Power and Light Corporation for street lighting.
At one stage City Hall actually opted to surrender the responsibility for the street lights but the government vehemently said that this could not be the case. The government said that it has been spending lots of money from its coffers. We did question this when we queried the money collected for certain import taxes.
Yesterday, Home Affairs Minister, Clement Rohee, did not spare blame nor did he mince his words when he attacked Mayor Hamilton Green and his council for the poor administration that has led to the multiple garbage piles and the blocked drains. We know how this happens. People with utter disregard for decency and cleanliness, just dump garbage anywhere.
There have been very few cases of prosecution. The City Constabulary only needs patrol the markets for the litterers, the people who would dispose of the Styrofoam boxes and other bits of garbage from their daily operations. The amount of money would have been more than enough to undertake certain of the council operations, the piles would have become non-existent and the city would have been the pride and joy of the people of Guyana.
This might have been what Minister Rohee was talking about, the failure of the council to maintain clean streets and garbage free drains. The cities in the developed world with populations ten times larger than Guyana’s have been able to maintain clean cities because of the harsh penalties they impose of litterers.
What is strange is that there is no correlation between the City Constabulary and the regular police. The latter should also be arresting people and issuing citations for littering. This does not happen and the result is that the nation has come to believe that Guyana has a culture of garbage and dirt. And it would seem that the poorer the community the greater the garbage.
Last week the Works Ministry undertook to clean drains in the Albouystown/Charlestown community. The comments were certainly not flattering. One worker contended that the job was tougher than any he had undertaken elsewhere. Another said that he had never seen so much garbage in one place.
It was not a case of the place never being cleaned. Rather the residents had adopted a lifestyle that saw them comingling rather easily with garbage. They were too poor to care and there was no one to tell the others that they were doing something wrong when they simply dump their garbage in any waterway.
What is of interest is that each councilor is responsible for a ward. It must be that the councilors are not working and therefore should be discarded. However, the electoral system does not make the councilors accountable to any of the voters.
Since Georgetown is the capital, the government is duty bound to work with the City Council. Collaboration could easily see an end to this situation but the government talks about ‘us’ and ‘them’. There is no dedicated help for the council because the majority of the councilors are members of the political opposition.
But we must look at another issue. The government poured a lot of money for a forensic audit of the council. It yielded the Keith Burrowes Report. This report was to see a reversal in the fortunes of the council. No one in the council was devoted to see the recommendations contained in the report put into practice—not the Town Clerk, not the City Treasurer, not the city council.

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Georgetown can be saved

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