Dear Editor,
Even I wondered what I was doing in front of Stabroek Market on a darkening Sunday afternoon two days ago. But I was there. Then all the debate about the Brigadier – President’s 2016 oil contract with Exxon and it’s subsidiaries; all the preparations for some Afro-Guyanese – sponsored “emerging Apartheid” symposium, all the alleged discrimination, outlined by Opposition Leader Comrade Aubrey, being perpetuated by an “installed government”, put there for us by the Americans, Canadians, British, the EU and CARICOM in 2020; all that took a back seat in my patriotic mind as I behold the garbage, the stink, the disorderliness where this historic portion of Georgetown should have been scrupulously cleaned; landscaped and beautified; dominated by a well-painted market façade with a working clock and fairy-lights to be activated from time to time.
Oh citizens where is our aesthetic? How did we inherit such a city council? What separates our capital’s citizens from those proud West Indians living or working in CARICOM’s other capitals? Do Guyanese have to travel outside our borders or migrate to enjoy a town’s municipal governance which breeds orderliness, cleanliness, town-planning and plain beauty? I grew up in a garden-city Georgetown where even the drains were cleaned twice every week (Water Street, as in Havana, Cuba, was once hosed and swept every morning!!). Alas, the city “grew” – thousands of vehicles; clogged drains under concrete; parking anywhere; stores and hundreds of vendors now never made to enforce or observe the by-laws; extreme complete, unwanted chaos. Central government/City Hall friction – with both little trust and funding now bequeaths a Georgetown now the worst town in the Caribbean.
I expect to be advised that this happens when a town expands swiftly and suddenly. Give me a break! Was not expansion expected by those in government or at city hall trained for such obvious eventualities? Absent male parents, younger teachers, artificial “religious” entities have all produced a generation of Guyanese with little sense of orderliness and beauty. Gardens of flowers are inconsequential as long as there are cell-phones and lap-tops. Coastal city Georgetown seems destined to become a garbage-ridden community where stores and vendors force citizens off pavements onto crowded streets and where a primitive jungle-like national cemetery no longer even marks us ashamed. I worry about Georgetown’s unenlightened dot-com generation and keep wondering: “what is to be done?
Sincerely,
Allan Arthur Fenty
