Whether the Georgetown City Council has simply been ‘worn down’ by the sheer persistence of street vendors or whether the Council has decided to embrace the spirit of Christmas and grant the vendors a seasonal ‘amnesty,’ street and pavement vending has returned to the capital with a vengeance.
In truth, at this time of year there is a tendency to balance the congestion resulting from itinerant vending against the ‘Christmas crush’ which many downtown shoppers with whom we spoke don’t seem to mind at all. At the same time it appears- based on what City Hall has told us – that an unwritten decision has indeed been made to ‘cut’ the vendors some ‘slack’ for the season and evidence of this is to be seen in the fact that vendors and the City Police have been operating cheek by jowl on the crowded streets over the past few weeks.
City Hall has said that while the vendors are being allowed to operate – for the time being at least – efforts are being made to find suitable locations for them. This, of course, is an old story and one that few people take seriously these days. And at any rate it is altogether inconceivable that the army of vendors that have already entrenched themselves on the various streets and sidewalks can be removed between now and the 11 days remaining before Christmas without some serious and even more disruptive confrontation.
Even so, there are risks involved in allowing the proliferation of street vending during this period, the most obvious of which are the encumbering of the sidewalks and the creation of a condition of confusion in which pickpockets can operate with greater ease.
These, however, are not the greatest risks. One of the concerns of which City Hall will have to be mindful is the large deposits of solid waste that vending activity will leave behind and the implications of this for the clogging of drains and the flooding of the city. Even as the Mayor seeks to provide assurances that the present heavy rainfall is unlikely to cause flooding in the city he ought, surely, to be mindful that his assessment is not undermined by what we understand is the Council’s decision that the vendors will operate during the pre-Christmas period. After all, it is not altogether uncommon for the municipality to make seemingly confident predictions only to discover subsequently that it has shot itself in the mouth.
What this newspaper has noted particularly about the appearance of itinerant vendors this season is that the overwhelming majority of them are women and that most of them appear to be teenagers or women in their early twenties. This, of course, is a poignant comment on the circumstances of high urban unemployment and early school – leaving that afflict Guyana. While it may be argued that vending is honest work and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with persons seeking to take advantage of the seasonal increase in commercial trading, the presence of so many young women among the vendors who have appeared on the streets in recent weeks ought to concern a government that professes to care about the welfare of women.
Finally, one hopes of course that the present seasonal vending ‘amnesty’ is not allowed to simply drift into the new year and eventually become entrenched again. City Hall needs to take seriously its own insistence that arrangements to provide adequate facilities are being pursued with a far greater measure of diligence than appears to be the case at this time.
