The Bourda vendors who ply their trade on Robb Street between Alexander Street and Orange Walk may have been given a directive to resume trading yesterday after being subjected to two successive days of loss of earnings but that does nothing to conceal the continually deteriorating relationship between City Hall and the urban vending community, on the one hand, and on the other the patently quixotic management style of the new municipal regime in matters pertaining to addressing the issue of vending in the capital and more.
To begin with, there appears to exist a perception that City Hall has settled for a regime of high-handedness and intimidation in its dealings with the vendors in order to ‘keep them in line,’ so to speak. The events of the past two days bear that out. The temporary halt on vending on a section of Robb Street was crudely and rudely executed to the point where even the customarily stern-faced city constables who were manning the barriers ringing the no-go area voiced their bewilderment. Whatever the stated reason it appeared that no account was taken of either the significant loss of earnings which the vendors would have suffered or the shameful spoilage of good food that would probably have been one of the consequences of City Hall’s action. Further, in a twist that underlines the quixotic condition in which City Hall finds itself, Deputy Mayor Sherod Duncan who, ironically, was deputizing for the substantive Chief Citizen at the time, conceded to this newspaper that he was clueless as to just why the vendors had been required to stop trading.
City Hall’s assertion that its action arose out of the vendors’ failure to honour an understanding regarding garbage disposal is neither here nor there. Nothing can justify the kind of high-handedness that played out on Tuesday evening. Having the vendors turn up to trade only to find the area cordoned off was not only an act of crass eye-pass but a decision that reflected a callous unmindfulness for the welfare of a legitimate section of the Guyanese community and more particularly of their right to work and earn. This newspaper is not aware that either City Hall or any of its servants has the right to treat vendors in that manner.
This, mind you, does not gainsay City Hall’s responsibility to enforce high standards of sanitation among the vendors. The point that is being made here is that there are tolerable limits to City Hall’s coarseness and however much the Town Clerk and his officers crow about their prerogatives as far as the management of Georgetown is concerned, a point has now been reached where they should be pointedly educated by the authority that governs the whole country not only about the higher authority that exists but also about the inalienable rights of the vendors as citizens of the Republic.
President Granger already having pronounced on the right of vendors not only to trade but to be suitably accommodated, one might have expected that in the light of City Hall’s unacceptable coarseness, there might have been some suitable official reminder regarding the rights of vendors. Perhaps more to the point there has been no word from any of the major Business Support Organizations (BSOs) on the incident. This, despite the pro small business pronouncements that we have heard from some of these organizations in recent times.
The other new development in all this is the recent appearance of a vendors’ union, the Guyana Market Vendors Union, whose advent, it appears, is the direct result of the growing rift between the Council and the vendors, particularly in the wake of the displacement of the Stabroek Market square group and their consignment to an area close to Parliament Buildings known as Jurassic Park. The new Union has already written to the Town Clerk seeking an introductory meeting though his response suggests that the vendors’ union may be made to jump through hoops before it gets an audience.
Whatever the extent to which City Hall insists on its right to manage the City without ‘outside intervention’ it appears hell bent on making its own case for such a course of action.
