Georgetown has long been disfigured

Nov 28, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

(Kaieteur News) – I was recently scrolling social media when I encountered a young lady who had achieved the rare Guyanese feat of turning victimhood into performance art. With great passion and the conviction of someone unveiling the Unified Field Theory, she lamented that people like to give you a fight down when you go and sell in front of their place.

She was genuinely outraged that homeowners object to strangers setting up full retail enterprises in front of their property. This young philosopher seems to have discovered very late that Guyana is apparently not the Wild West she imagined.

She needed to be advised a long time ago that there is no legal right to plant a stall anywhere gravity permits. After all, every country is supposed to have rules and is not a free-for-all.

But who can blame her? For decades, illegal vending has been not merely tolerated but nurtured like a national hobby. The PPPC government, among others, has so vigorously encouraged informal commerce that many citizens genuinely believe the Constitution contains an Article 23C titled: The Inalienable Right to Sell Wherever Yuh Feel Like.

We have created a culture where it feels perfectly normal for someone to claim hereditary rights to a piece of pavement, as if their great-great-grandfather fought the Dutch for that specific spot in front of Demico.

And this is how civilizations collapse—slowly, then all at once, then with someone erecting a snow-cone stand in your living room. Mark my words: one day, someone is going to stride boldly into a homeowner’s yard, drop a tent, prop up a table, and inform the startled resident that they are opening a shop. “I used to sell here,” they will announce with historical authority.

It won’t matter that they have never been within 50 feet of the yard. That’s irrelevant detail. What matters is the sacred principle: I feel like selling here. And feelings, as we know, are the highest form of law in the land of the lawless.

We have arrived at this moment because lawlessness has been treated not as a problem but as acceptable conduct. If someone parks a truck in the middle of the pavement and sells mangoes with the confidence of a diplomat, you’re expected to applaud their entrepreneurial spirit. If you object, you are labeled anti-poor, anti-business, anti-Guyana, and anti-whatever the speaker invents next.

The government, meanwhile, is clinging to the delusion that it can beautify Georgetown while simultaneously accommodating every stall, booth, table, cart, bucket, cooler, tarp, tent, and wandering mobile haberdashery that pops up on the pavement and streets. This is magical thinking of the highest order. It is on par with believing you can clean your house while 200 relatives are throwing a wedding reception in your living room.

Georgetown, let’s face it, has already been permanently disfigured by illegal vending. The beauty we seek is somewhere underneath, like a fossil of a dinosaur no one is quite sure existed. And the garbage—oh, the garbage! If illegal vending were a factory, its main output would be litter. The city is drowning in Styrofoam containers, chicken-bone sculptures, and an archaeological layering of soda bottles dating back to the early Jagdeo era.

And then there is the Ministry of Local Government’s bright and bold new design for the Stabroek Market Square. A design so mind-boggling, so avant-garde, so absolutely detached from the realities of Georgetown that it could only have been drawn by someone who has never set foot in the place. The truth is simple: the design should never have been conceived, far less unveiled.

What Stabroek Square needs—what it has always needed—is not another design, but a miracle. Or failing that, a bulldozer. Clear the entire space. Remove every single illegal vendor, hire-car operator, minibus driver, and the dozen people who always seem to be leaning against a post doing nothing yet somehow blocking traffic. Level it. Scrub it. Turn it into a pedestrian zone where humans can, for once, walk without being wedged between a ram-goat, a taxi, and a pot of food being cooked on site.

But this will never happen. Because the PPPC believes in placating vendors the way parents placate toddlers—yes darling, you can have the knife, but don’t run with it. Now that the WIN leader has visited the disgruntled vendors upset about a protective wall that screens them from the street, the government will appease them even more. There is no appeasement too large, no rule too sacred, no civic principle too necessary to sacrifice on the altar of political convenience.

And so, Georgetown will continue, as it has for decades, to remain the same: a chaotic, aromatic, aesthetically adventurous landscape—an unintentional installation of disorder. A monument to the fact that when everyone gets to sell wherever they please, nobody gets a city worth living in.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

---

• disfigured, Georgetown, ictimhood, Peeping Tom, PPPC Government

---