Jacquelyn Hamer is a retired Guyanese diplomat and a Director of the skills training organization Visions of Excellence.

By Jacquelyn Hamer
I comment on the relevance rather than the correctness of the views expressed by Bilaal Eusi Nantambu in his letter published in the Tuesday May 25 issue of the Stabroek News titled vending is only the illusion of private entrepreneurship. Public discourse about vending and the various ways in which it impacts on national life, the validity of the pursuit as a form of entrepreneurship, whether or not the practice does further injury to a capital which, even without vending, is in dire straits and whether or we ought not to consider a complete ban on the practice is, of course, nothing new.

As an aside, I was curious about the colourfulness of the writer’s language, wondering in the process of reading whether or not his focus on colour did not detract from what, otherwise, might not have been a far more thorough assessment of the phenomenon of vending. Certainly, I found that his use of colour appeared contrived to thoroughly overdo the painting of an unwholesome picture of the practice image of vending. At least, however, still, Mr. Nantambu’s submission helps to keep the whole issue of vending and, by extension, the far more relevant issue of small business practice as a means of making a living, in the public eye which, is where, in my opinion, it ought to be.

By way of dealing first with what appears to be the main thrust of Mr. Nantambu’s submission, that is, the incremental ghettoization of Georgetown arising out of the practice of vending, I make the point that the manifestations of coloor graphically – and, I repeat, entirely overdone – set out in his letter, is neither a mysterious aberration nor is it a manifestation of a vindictive lawlessness. All of the horrors.

Vending, to which Mr. Nantambu alludes derives from other societal considerations and, in essence, boil down to what, unquestionably, is the right of people to find honest ways of ensuring their own survival. This is not, of course, an argument that seeks the embrace the practice, but, quite simply, the statement of an unquestionable fact. Vendors, at least those that encumber the pavements, and leave their mark on the city harbour no “illusion of private entrepreneurship.” What they harbor, quite simply, is a preoccupation with survival and the nature of that preoccupation – regrettably – supersedes any concern with those considerations of good order articulated by Mr. Nantambu.

If, for example, you challenge the practice of vending in its present form, vendors are probably likely to respond by pointing out – sometimes rudely, I agree – that their circumstances – poverty, sub-standard education, single parenthood and the various other social ills –  have brought them to the streets and that to challenge the practice of street vending is to challenge their right to make a living since vending – at least at this particular point in time is – the best they can do.

I have seen some of the inconveniences that manifest themselves in the practice of vending and I too tend of fret in the moment. On the other hand I have always sought to interpret those inconveniences in the context of the wider dislocations in our society and against the backdrop of an understanding that if we are to fix the vending problem we need to fix so many other things. Here, the most fundamental agreement is that which suggests that to remove vending from the streets is to run the risk of creating new social problems and worsening existing ones and we must ask ourselves which is the lesser of the evils.

I find the argument about vending being “the illusion of entrepreneurship” intriguing for more than one reason. First, vending is the illusion of nothing. Whatever we determine entrepreneurship to mean, vendors, at least most of them, are under no such illusions. Vending, I repeat is about survival about – in most cases – what we loosely describe as a hand to mouth existence, today’s struggle for tomorrow’s meal. Vending reflects the courage an underclass, a whole army of people whose circumstances invariably leave them with no option but to press themselves and, often, their children into service for the sake of their survival.

While it has become commonplace for us to be critical of parents who use their children as helpers in the vending trade I am inclined to take a somewhat different view. Whenever I see a child vendor – some of them in school uniform – I worry about how much their vending pursuits are taking away from their schooling. At the same time, however, I wonder whether any kind of schooling would be at all possible unless they earn their keep in homes that cannot otherwise afford to keep them. Child labour, as the practice is loosely described, is a complex phenomenon that is not always explained by pointing fingers at parents. It is a regrettable reflection of other things that are wrong with our society.
Finally, we need, it seems, to remind ourselves, of a period of time not that long ago when the demands of the market dictated by the scarcity of a number of items spawned a whole host of traders who travelled to various other countries in the Caribbean and elsewhere and brought those items back to Guyana to offer them for sale. These too were vendors, or else, vendors provided the primary market for their products. I am aware that many of these suitcase traders as they used to be called are now thriving entrepreneurs in the real sense of the word.