Business Support Organisations and the urban garbage disposal crisis

If it has long been accepted that the filth and desecration that is commonplace on the streets and sidewalks and in gutters and alleyways in our city are, by and large, the remains of the trading day and that much of the onus is on our urban traders – whether they be street vendors or established merchants – to take some measure of responsibility for the disposal of garbage, the practice of indiscriminate dumping persists unabated.

It really makes little sense in pursuing the same line of discourse regarding the shortcomings of the City Council and the seeming lack of any real concern among stakeholders – government, the municipality, the business support organisations (BSOs) and the traders themselves – though it is apposite to mention that the BSOs (Private Sector Commission, Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association) have been decidedly delinquent insofar as they have failed miserably to mount any kind of sustained lobby/pressure which, we believe, can help arrest the problem.

The fact of the matter is that we have grown accustomed to the ugliness of our capital and are therefore quite prepared to persist in the sickening lip service we pay to the desirability of an enhanced urban environment. The truth of the matter is that we have come to accept that there is nothing wrong with having our city held hostage to the dictates of commerce rather than recognising that however important urban trading might be to the economy, that pursuit cannot be allowed to outweigh the imperative of an environmentally-friendly capital.

Some of the most sickening dimensions to the problem include the preoccupation of the politicians – and increasingly, these days, the private sector – with a familiarly sterile agenda the primary themes of which are political one-upmanship, the constant cackling about Guyana’s role as a ‘friend’ of the environment and the hollow and persistent drumbeat about the potential of a country that is patently incapable of managing its urban waste disposal to become a ‘tourist haven’. In each of these pursuits we are simply whistling in the wind, seeking to create a façade of seriousness and persisting in our appetite for mouthing vacuous and insincere pronouncements as though they were sincere undertakings upon which the citizenry can rely.

The truth of the matter is that we are far too busy creating more trading spaces and importing increasingly larger quantities of consumer goods (a reminder, incidentally, that, food apart, we continue to produce perilously little of what we consume) which arrive at our ports wrapped in tons upon tons of polystyrene and plastics which, at the end of the day, come back to haunt us.

Leaving aside the shortcomings of the City Council, which have not been remedied whatever has been tried, the problem reposes in a culture of hypocrisy that prevents the authorities – municipal and state – from sincerely setting their faces against the current environmental degradation arising out of indiscriminate garbage disposal and reading a relentless riot act against the defaulters. It is well known that these defaulters are mainly the city traders who recruit junkies to remove their garbage from in front of their own premises to some other location where it poses an equally worrying environmental hazard and vendors who leave the nearby gutters filled and overflowing with garbage when they retire for the evening and expect to find it removed when they return the next day.

It is, at the highest of levels, a matter of sheer hypocrisy. Some of those who help to desecrate the city administer the disposal of their own domestic waste with considerable scrupulousness and invariably at some cost, which of course suggests that they are mindful of the garbage problem only insofar as it affects them in their home settings.

If it remains true that we cannot rely on our formal municipal institutions to manage the garbage problem – or, for that matter, the government to embrace the responsibility of picking up the slack rather than playing politics with the issue – we must raise questions about the role of the business community itself, more particularly the BSOs. They must work with their members to at least reduce the level of indiscriminate garbage disposal. Apart from working with their own members, the downtown traders and the vendors, the BSOs need to monitor and insist on the enforcement of the by-laws associated with garbage disposal and the imposition of penalties for offenders.

What we seek in response to this column, is not some platitudinous pronouncement or set of pronouncements itemising the various isolated interventions made by the Private Sector Commission or the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce to address the urban garbage disposal problem. Nor, for that matter, do we seek a surfeit of responses that seek to link an enhanced garbage disposal regime with local government elections (we do not, incidentally, accept the existence of a nexus). But the creation of a plan of action – to which the BSOs are prepared to commit themselves – for a sustained and unceasing lobby to address this problem.