One of the issues in Finance Minister Winston Jordan’s 2015 budget presentation that has raised a fair measure of public comment is the announcement that government is allocating $300 million to an urban restoration exercise in the capital.
The first thing that must be said about the disclosure has to do with the inadequacy of the stated amount to effect a restoration exercise in the capital. Indeed, restoring Georgetown would not only require a financial allocation that goes beyond the amount that has been announced in the budget but would also require, crucially, a certain mindset that has to do with things like pride in ourselves and our city, just how fed up we are of seeing Georgetown in its prevailing utterly disgraceful state and how much value a restored capital would add to the country as a whole. After all, it is not just a question of cleaning up the filth that we have created but also ensuring that we maintain the capital in a fit state. That, we believe, could turn out to be the more challenging task.
The announcement by Mayor Hamilton Green reported in another section of the media that central government and the Georgetown Municipality have begun discussions arising out of the announced allocation for the urban cleanup hardly provides a measure of either comfort or assurance. That announcement would more likely have triggered a here-we-go-again reaction, a collective expression of public doubt as to whether City Hall can get the job done properly. That is the reputation that the municipality has created for itself.
One should add that the central government administration would have to be mindful of the dangers of putting further undue strain on what is still being described as its post-elections ‘honeymoon’ by running the risk of financing a cleanup exercise in Georgetown executed by the municipality that could blow up spectacularly in our faces.
Few would question the claims that the Council is likely to make that under the previous administration its ability to deliver on its mandate had been hampered and considerably so by a political environment that was, to say the least, unhelpful. In the same breath, however, the frank and honest in our midst can hardly help but draw attention to the shocking levels of incompetence, ineffectiveness, inept financial and administrative management practices, corrupt practices, lack of care for the appearance of the capital and human resource deficiency that have been displayed by the municipality over a protracted period of time.
To take the current state of our municipal markets and its impact on urban trading and private sector commercial activity, for example, one can hardly deny that the present thoroughly deplorable state of these vermin-infested and collapsing facilities is, in large measure, a function of City Hall’s failure to come even remotely close to providing the requisite services in terms of upkeep over the years. The collapsing wharf at Stabroek Market, for example, is, quite simply, one of the more compelling examples of the ineptitude of the Council.
On the basis of the available evidence it would be an act of folly, to say the least, for government to simply sign on to an open-ended urban “restoration” exercise with the municipality.
Finance Minister Winston Jordan’s assertion in his budget presentation on Monday that the $300 million allocation will “assist in the resuscitation of our capital city,” by “encompassing an intense clean-up campaign, while enforcing laws on littering,” amounts, at this stage, to no more than, perhaps, well-meaning, but, unfortunately, familiarly dubious rhetoric of the kind that attended the previous administration’s one billion dollar urban cleanup programme.
Given the municipality’s track record, central government would be running an altogether unacceptable risk unless its holds City Hall’s feet firmly to the fire by ensuring, first, that in all of the various respects it has capacity to effect the assigned exercise to the extent that the financial allocation can. More than that, no such exercise should be undertaken by the municipality unless we are made aware, beforehand, of the details of what it seeks to accomplish so that we can literally do a ‘check off’ of what is accomplished against what was promised in the first place. That is in order to guard against the misallocation of resources – in other words, corrupt diversion of those resources and ensure accountability. At the end of the day even if the municipality ends up being assigned the task its track record suggests that it has to be held strictly accountable. If that does not happen and if this latest attempt to help restore Georgetown turns out to be no more than a botched and sloppy job and waste of our scarce tax dollars then it is the political administration (that allocated the funds in the first place) that has to carry the can.
