Vendors across Guyana, small entrepreneurs, lost confidence in APNU+AFC long ago

Jan 17, 2019 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,

Our children were forgotten by their government for almost four years now. This APNU+AFC Government also forgot most ordinary Guyanese, like the vendors in Georgetown and across Guyana. When Bharrat Jagdeo and the PPP challenged APNU+AFC with a no-confidence motion in Parliament on December 21st 2018, it was because of the daily cries of ordinary people everywhere in Guyana.
Every day, everywhere in Guyana, we have reminders of big and small reasons for no-confidence in the APNU+AFC government. While there is a desperate effort to avoid the will of the people after the parliamentary no-confidence defeat, APNU+AFC continues to display arrogance, and an obnoxious disregard and disinterest in the problems that ordinary citizens face on a daily basis.
The PPP’s no-confidence motion in Parliament reflected the total loss of confidence that people across Guyana feel.
Whether it is ordinary working class people, small vendors and small business owners or large businesses, whether it is junior or senior public servants, teachers, doctors and nurses, police officers and soldiers, people have become demoralized and have lost all confidence in this government.
Like other citizens, it must make vendors in Georgetown and across Guyana upset and angry that APNU+AFC, faced with an election after the December 21st No-Confidence Resolution in Parliament, suddenly remember them, suddenly wants to dance and prance with them, suddenly wants to meet with them.
After neglecting and treating them as not important and as not good enough for the bourgeois in Government to deal with, after ill-treating them and casting them aside, APNU+AFC now treats them as the most important people in our country.
Almost immediately after the No-Confidence Motion, the Ministers showed up by Stabroek Market and wanted to share beers and food and wanted to make merry with the vendors and their clients. Election time is here and those who think they are the elite in society, the upper-class bourgeois, now pretend that the vendors are their sisters and brothers, their long-forgotten sisters and brothers. But the vendors will not easily forget how badly APNU+AFC treated them in the almost four years they have been in government.
Take the story that played out last week. A week after more than a dozen vendors with stalls in the Stabroek Market lost electricity last week Wednesday (January 9th), they still had no electricity. No one in control of the market cared that these vendors could not ply their trade adequately for more than week. No one at the Georgetown Mayor and City Council, which manages the market, cared.
No one at the Ministry of Communities bothered to find out what was wrong; the Minister of Communities, like all his other Cabinet colleagues, was missing in action. GPL claimed it was not their problem. The disinterest is amazing, but totally deplorable. This government’s disinterest, coupled with their mismanagement, incompetence and corruption knows no end. While this problem affected a small group of vendors at the Stabroek Market, it is a microcosm of the problem vendors, small businesses and citizens across the board too frequently experience across Guyana.
Vendors in Georgetown and across Guyana are hard-working people trying to make a living for themselves and family. Often, their daily sale helps them to put bread on the table for that day. By no means are these rich people. These are the hard-working people for whom government matters. They are not asking government for a handout; they simply want government to empower them and make it possible for them to earn a decent and honorable living.
Many of them, especially those in Georgetown, are active supporters of the PNC and, therefore, of APNU+AFC. Their votes were important in 2015 to permit APNU+AFC to barely win the 2015 elections. But immediately after the election in 2015, and for three-and-a-half years now, APNU+AFC betrayed the vendors. Grossly ungrateful, they deliberately, aggressively took steps to make it difficult for the vendors to make a living and this was most visible in Georgetown. For APNU+AFC, beyond a shadow of doubt, the vendors were only important for their votes. Immediately after the elections, the vendors became victims, like so many other ordinary Guyanese.
Soon after the May 2015 elections, APNU+AFC, using the clean-up campaign as an excuse, decided that one of the major causes for Georgetown being a dirty city is the vendors. They targeted the vendors in the clean-up campaign and sought to remove them from the various vending sites.
APNU+AFC started with the vendors in front of Demico House and in front of the Stabroek Market, warning them to vacate the area, without making any provision to relocate the vendors. Without notice, they dismantled some of the stalls, manhandling many of the vendors and threatening to jail them, after many of the vendors protested the harsh treatment.
After weeks of being out of business, the government provided a temporary arrangement for the vendors when they relocated the vendors into a privately-owned area by Hadfield Street, behind Parliament Buildings. After several months of free-use of the area, the private owner asked that vendors be removed, because the Government failed to make any arrangement to continue the use of the area. To this day, the vendors have found no place to earn a living. They keep moving from place to place. The party they voted for forgot them, until they were defeated in the No-Confidence Motion and found use again for the vendors.
APNU+AFC and the Mayor and City Council of Georgetown – which APNU controls – also removed vendors along the Georgetown Wharf area, an area behind Stabroek Market.
The excuse this time was the wharf had to undergo repairs. These repairs have been conducted in a snail-pace slow manner and the vendors are still looking for a place to sell their goods. Every day vendors in Georgetown, around Stabroek, Bourda Market, along Robb and Regent Streets and other places, are subjected to intimidation and harassment from government and city officials. They have to pay more than one group of people in order to conduct business. The vendors’ only fault is they are poor people at the mercy of the elite in government.
But election time is here. APNU+AFC is desperately trying to run away from the elections, however, even they know they can run, but they cannot hide. Suddenly, they want to be friends with the vendors, they want to be equal with the vendors, they swear that they have to find solutions for the vendors. They are conveniently now sidestepping cold hard facts – for almost four years they ignored and neglected and punished the vendors.
As election approaches, these vendors will not forget the truth – they have no confidence in APNU+AFC. The PPP and Bharrat Jagdeo’s No-Confidence Motion in Parliament was because of the travails and agony of ordinary people like these vendors.

Dr. Leslie Ramsammy

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