A few days prior to Tuesday’s Mashramani Day Float Parade, sanitization workers were out in their numbers. They could be seen weeding and cleaning several areas in the city. Noticeably, they weeded the Merriman’s Mall and along Church and Irving streets. They cleaned the Church Street Canal as well as the one between Irving Street and Vlissengen Road. The area was spic and span after they were done and ready for the country’s 40th Republic anniversary celebrations.
They forgot, however, to place bins along the Mash route; or maybe that was deliberate and not an omission. By midday on Tuesday, after just a few floats had passed, the route was very noticeably littered with all manner of trash. By the time the last floats made their way to the National Park, revellers were literally tramping on garbage – plastic bags, bottles, plates and other utensils; styrofoam galore; paper bags and bits of tissue; cardboard and pieces from costumes that broke off as the spectators along Church and Irving Streets pressed forward much too close to the floats; bits of glass from broken beer and drink bottles casually tossed from the hands of drinkers with obviously no thought to the fact that they would break and could cause harm.
Yesterday morning, Georgetown and especially the Mash route looked – to put it mildly – like vomit. The Garbage City moniker really applied. As citizens made their way to work and school around 7 am, there was as yet no sign of the cleaning crews – probably they were all mashed up. By midday, however, the crews were at work, raking the tonnes of garbage up in piles and hauling tonnes more out of the canals to be black-bagged and loaded on waiting trucks for disposal.
While one recognizes that an event of the magnitude of Tuesday’s float parade must involve a clean-up effort afterwards, the disappointment remains that 40 years on there was not even an attempt to cater to the mass of humanity celebrating Mashramani, participating in the parade or congregating along the route to watch it. Millions of dollars are spent on costumes, food and drink and music by government and private sector entities, for most of whom the event is not a profit-making one. Why was no thought given to where people will dispose of their refuse? Or how they will relieve themselves?
How can the city or the government continue to speak of educating people with regard to protecting the environment and keeping their surroundings clean when a huge opportunity – like Mashramani – to drive the message home was so obviously disregarded? There should have been huge bins and perhaps a few skips out along the route so that people who are still used to disposing of their garbage correctly would have had the opportunity to do so. There could have been public address messages on all of the music sets along the route urging those who might have chosen to ignore the bins not to.
And what a waste of human resources; cleaning the Mash route before the float parade and then the gargantuan effort yesterday of doing it again. One wonders whether the sanitation workers doing the before-and-after Mash clean up are employed by the city or if they are the workforce of the garbage contractors paid millions every year by the City Council to clear away household waste.
If they are city employees then where are they for the rest of the year when other areas that desperately need cleaning remain in a filthy state for months on end. If they are attached to the private waste management companies, then just how is paying for the same job twice justified? Small wonder then that the city is in the state it is in.