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Mayor Narine’s tenure

Jun 19, 2023 Editorial

Editorial…

Kaieteur News – When Pandit Ubraj Narine took over as the Mayor of Georgetown in January 2019, he quickly realised that he had his work cut out for him. In time, the ground would also be cut from under his feet. For better or worse, whatever residents of the capital city and Guyanese think of the state of the city, it is inevitably a reflection of the work and legacy of the mayor and the people he oversees. What has become more obvious with each development, Georgetown stands as a prime example of the crippling politics of this country. It is the most sensitive, most populated, and most problem- plagued area in Guyana, with all of its happenings and politics very visible.

The Mayor of Georgetown presides over a space that stretches from Cummings Lodge on the East Coast Demerara to Agricola, East Bank Demerara.  Areas of chronic concern are drainage, roads, garbage collection, markets, and security among many others. They are costly to maintain, and one of Mayor Narine’s biggest handicaps was that the money required to run the city efficiently was not coming from any source. He was being held hostage by politics.

He could do little to address an antiquated rates regime, until the Ministry of Finance completed a comprehensive property valuation exercise. Residential and commercial buildings are woefully undervalued, and though the rate levels appear to be high (44% for residences and 275% for businesses), the end result in terms of rates due to the municipality is laughable, so small they are. In truth, they have almost no relation to reality.  To provide a quick example, a four-story commercial property has been valued at $38,000, and that is in Guyana’s currency, not American.  One could not buy a dog with the rates collected from that building.  This has led to the Georgetown Municipality being saddled with multi-billion dollar annual operating deficits.

According to the mayor, the government is $13 billion in rates arrears.  GPL alone has a net amount of $7 billion due to the Georgetown City Council.  Moreover, the Local Government Commission, setup by central government essentially calls the shots at City Hall.  The Mayor’s Office cannot hire, or fire, or discipline.  It does not have enough money to cover its operations.  It can do little by way of revenue enhancement, through new rate collection levels, while numerous city residents and businesses have stopped paying their rates owed.

Unfortunately, the usual destructive partisan politics has intruded into the affairs of the city, leaving everyone poorer for it.  It is a disgrace how Georgetown, once hailed as the Garden City is now closer to a garbage city, with dereliction and decay in many sections, amid the flurry of modern buildings.  Though part of the mayorship of Pandit Narine, in fairness, much of this was inherited, and the situation worsened significantly when the PPPC Government returned to office in August 2020.

The PPPC Government overflowed with anger due to the delays and convoluted shenanigans of the APNU-AFC Coalition to thwart the results of the freely and fairly conducted general and regional elections.  Unfortunately, anything and anyone that had a Coalition relationship became fair game for the new Government’s pressures and games.  In effect, this meant that any programme of work, any vision that Mayor Narine had for the capital city and its outskirts became a victim of politics.  This is what has blotted Mayor Narine’s body of work for the greater part of his time in office.

On its own behalf, the PPPC Government kept up a constant drumbeat about cronyism, corruption, and incompetence running rampant throughout the Georgetown City Council, of which Mayor Narine was the head.  There is some truth in the Government’s allegations, but the government’s own hands are not clean, given that it has seized every opportunity either to stifle or to undermine the unfettered functioning of the mayor and his administration.  Key people were not taking orders from him, and the funds that he needed to get things done were largely withheld.  In many respects, from the time the PPPC Government went back into office, Mayor Narine was reduced to more and more of a lame duck incumbent as the days progressed, with residents suffering.

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