Let’s save our capital city

Mar 09, 2015 Editorial

The City of Georgetown – Guyana’s more than 200-year-old national capital – is in a state of crisis.
It is a well-known fact that Greater Georgetown’s commercial, demographic and geographical expansion over the past four decades has been the major contributory factor to the present situation. The population has grown to about 250,000. The boundaries now include the former ‘rural’ plantations of Pattensen, Sophia and Turkeyen on the East Coast and the villages of Houston, McDoom and Agricola on East Bank Demerara.
The city is home to the main commercial port and is now served by its own municipal aerodrome at Ogle. It is the seat of the National Assembly; Supreme Court; Central Bank; Police and Defence Force Headquarters; government ministries and many more institutions.
The Mayor and City Council – M&CC – must be transformed if it is to be expected to respond to the challenge of managing a modern capital city. This has not happened. Few citizens, if any, think that the city is well-administered. More of them, however, are becoming aware of the causes of the current crisis in the municipality and its consequences for the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.
The political crisis, certainly, is the single most serious problem. There is little doubt that the People’s Progressive Party Civic administration has adopted an antagonistic attitude to the M&CC which it perceives to be controlled by affiliates or supporters of A Partnership for National Unity. This mindset has led to the PPPC’s refusal to solve the problems at hand, since it perceives every situation as an opportunity for political confrontation rather than municipal improvement.
The Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development – MLGRD – micro-manages the M&CC on a daily basis in order to maintain control of the city and trample on any traces of independence or initiative. The MLGRD’s contentious imposition of an unpopular Town Clerk against the wishes of the M&CC has aggravated the already adversarial relationship between the two.
The second crisis is that of financial management. It is a well-known fact that the M&CC’s revenue base is inadequate to sustain the management of the expanding population and an enlarged city. The central government has successfully blocked every single M&CC initiative to raise its own revenue by re-evaluating properties, introducing parking meters, launching a lottery and imposing a tax on containerized vehicles traversing the city, for example.
The biggest property owner in Georgetown is the central government, but it has been the biggest delinquent in the payment of its rates and taxes. The M&CC has had to resort to taking legal action to collect outstanding taxes from several taxpayers, but the wheels of justice turn very slowly in present-day Georgetown. There simply is not enough money to run the city efficiently, and it shows.
Flooding is a frequent and recurrent catastrophe. The city is built on a collection of old sugar plantations. It contains hundreds of kilometres of canals and drains designed to store excess water, remove it from the land and discharge it into the Demerara River and Atlantic Ocean. That does not happen efficiently.
Most waterways are clogged with aquatic weeds, builders’ waste, commercial and household refuse, garbage and other debris. Outfalls into the rivers quickly become silted. Aging, manually-operated kokers occasionally collapse. Mechanical pumps malfunction and cannot be kept in good repair. With every shower longer than a couple of hours, parts of the city are inundated.
Infrastructure maintenance is a perennial problem. Georgetown – embellished with the pretty Victorian wooden architecture of City Hall, the Supreme Court, the Cathedral of St George and other edifices – used to boast of being the ‘Garden City’ of the Caribbean. No longer. It is expensive to maintain wooden buildings in this weather, however elegant and eminent.
The M&CC does not have the capability nor does it possess the materials, money, manpower and machines to maintain the buildings, canals, gardens, kokers, markets, roadways and other infrastructure and property for which it is responsible.
The PPPC must demonstrate leadership in this crisis. It must re-engage the M&CC in a responsible manner and bring together the Opposition, trade unions, civil society and other stakeholders to save our capital city.

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