Georgetown is once again experiencing one of those periods during which we appear to be overwhelmed by a profusion of garbage just about everywhere and the fact that this has been hardly cause for public comment says a lot about just how ‘comfortable’ we all appear to have become in our condition of squalor This has been a recurring theme of editorials in this newspaper but even at the risk of being repetitive we believe that the state of the capital has become nothing short of a scandal and that until there is a genuine and sustained effort to remedy the problem the issue cannot be allowed to disappear from public view.
There is something both absurd and thoroughly shameless in the practice of engaging in cosmetic ‘cleaning’ exercises every time an important regional or international event is billed for Guyana only to nonchalantly accept the inevitable relapses into the accustomed squalor at the end of the particular event.
The practice is reflective of a twisted logic that suggests that we really care little for the condition of our capital but set much store by what visitors think about it. Frankly, the ‘logic’ of this approach, which appears to have been embraced by both the municipal and state authorities is mind boggling – to say the least.
Nor is it any longer sufficient to lay the blame at the feet of a hapless and hobbled City Council. The Council is what it is and at any rate the practice of pointing fingers at the municipality has become a means by which we seek to conceal our collective guilt in the matter. The City Council may have now reached a point of near implosion but, surely, life has to go on.
What, perhaps, needs to come much more under the spotlight is the callous and unrelenting delinquency of the downtown commercial sector, particularly, business people who appear to feel – and some of them actually say it – that somehow the fact that they pay rates and taxes is a perfectly good excuse to dump their garbage in drains and on parapets. They, unquestionably, have been the chief culprits in the desecration of our city and the absence of any law enforcement mechanism to put an end to this practice is, frankly, nothing short of an outrage. These business people, after all, see the city as no more than space in which to trade after which, at the end of the trading day they simply retire to their own better-appointed environment.
No less outrageous is the pointed indifference of the various private sector bodies – the PSC, the GMSA and the GCCI – agencies that have perfected a strategy of making occasional statements and convenient and vacuous promises to help tackle the problem, which promises, at the end of the day, amount to nought. What about the leaders of these organizations, Ministers of Government, high officials of both the public and private sectors – people who surely ought to feel a collective sense of guilt and shame over the garbage dump that Georgetown has become. Even they, however infrequently, must catch glimpses of the piles of garbage that ‘decorate’ the streets and the refuse that clogs our drains, creating the same inevitable misery every time there is a sharp shower of rain.
To suffer the inconvenience, the serious health risks and the loss of revenue that accrues in various ways – and repetitively – and still not to seek to do anything to at least try to remedy the problem, amounts to a posture of unfathomable stupidity.
The sorry truth is that the absurd excuses about a lack of resources no longer masks the real and deeply worrying truth, that is, that we have long become a nation of individuals, individual ‘hustlers’ who are so preoccupied with our personal pursuits that we have lost entirely that sense of community without which we really see nothing wrong with the continued abuse of our capital.
