The first thing that crosses your mind when you see the massive mountain of garbage encroaching on the resting places of the departed in Le Repentir Cemetery is not which agency should be held responsible but how on earth such an unpardonable environmental atrocity could occur in a country aspiring to become a global advocate for a cleaner environment.
Central government and the Georgetown City Council see the garbage situation differently. They have made the blame game the central issue in the crisis rather than see it for what it really is: a national disgrace, even a potential health pandemic since who knows if and when – perhaps long after its stench and visual obscenity have disappeared – the effects will come back to haunt those currently dwelling in proximity.
We have, of course, grown used to the now familiar eleventh hour ‘interventions’ by central government, always at the behest of the President, ostensibly to save us all from the ‘scourge’ of City Hall. However, if you understand the dynamics of the relationship between the two protagonists you will recognize that these ‘rescue acts’ are, in fact, instances of political gamesmanship, manifestations of an insidious brinkmanship in a seemingly unending tussle between the two. Neither side has demonstrated any particular mindfulness of the consequences for those who must endure the garbage crisis.
Such political currency as the government seeks through its recent, belated allocation of resources to prevent the garbage from overwhelming the graveyard and perhaps even spilling out onto Cemetery Road is altogether undeserving. It acted only after it was satisfied that City Hall had been subjected to a politically satisfying level of public humiliation, without, it seems, giving any serious thought to the public health damage that may well have been done during its interregnum of indifference.
City Hall, on the other hand, has, over time, demonstrated a level of ineptitude in the pursuit of its various functions that has deservingly lost it the confidence of the citizenry. The other consequence of its failure to deliver is that it has made itself a soft target for a political administration that aggressively seeks to assert its own control over urban municipal affairs. That is why, at junctures of its choosing – the most recent example of which is its intervention in the garbage crisis – the government infuses carefully measured amounts of resources into showing up the municipality. That is why, too, it disdainfully ignored the authority of the council in its response to the recent situation outside the Stabroek Market.
If the Mayor’s incessant complaints that government in seeking to strangle the municipality is believed in some quarters to be not without merit, his voice has become drowned out amidst the revelations of corruption and incompetence inside City Hall which, just months ago, were graphically exposed by the Report of the Burrowes Commission of Enquiry. Indeed, not a few watchers have expressed the view that were citizens – including the considerable number of defaulting business houses – to become more compliant in the payment of their rates and taxes and if, in consequence, more monies were to become available to City Hall in its present state, the only outcome that can be guaranteed is that the municipality will then have more money to fritter away. The government, of course, understands the public mindset as far as City Hall is concerned and continues to use it as a weapon in its fight to remove the current administration.
Both sides, in the process, appear altogether content to subject the citizenry to a protracted denial of a better-kept capital with all of the attendant consequences. Just recently, the exchange between the two was significantly hyped by an absurd comment from the Local Govern-ment Minister about the desirability or otherwise of an urban pandemic, just to teach City Hall a lesson. That, it would appear, is the extent to which some officials are prepared to go if that is what it takes to see the back of the current municipal administration. It is gutter politics at its most sickening.
The garbage crisis may very well be pointing in the direction of a genuine public health malady, and if the government really wants to make a worthwhile intervention it could do much worse than undertake an urgent assessment of the extent to which the sustained exposure to the filth and stench of the garbage may have compromised the long-term health of those who live cheek by jowl with this open and festering sore. Who knows, it may well find reason to test the recent claim by the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation that it has the capacity to cope with multiple casualties in a situation of a medical emergency.
The government, particularly, has shown no sign of any willingness to rise above the political vitriol that customarily informs its ‘discourses’ with City Hall. Indeed, each time it makes an intervention in the City Hall-related crisis situation, it ensures that that intervention is attended by a good, old fashioned cussin’ out of the municipality. These outbursts are designed, first, to rub the municipality’s face in the proverbial dirt and, secondly, to sell itself to the citizenry as their knight in shining armour. The whole thing, of course, has now become so overdone that one wonders why the government persists with that particular ploy.
City Hall’s administration has no effective ‘weapons’ with which to engage the political administration. If it were performing efficiently it would at least have been able to claim a measure of moral high ground, since much of the government’s handling of municipal matters has smacked of contempt for the municipality. Its failure, despite numerous publicly pronounced plans, threats and offers of amnesty to collect the huge sums of outstanding rates and taxes, is perhaps the most poignant indicator of its underperformance. At this point it is difficult to see how it can recover from its present position of loss of public confidence which, surely, is part of the reason why its efforts to persuade the citizenry to be more compliant in their payments have not met with any real success.
But that is not the central issue here. What boggles the mind is that neither the government nor City Hall appears – based on their preoccupation with their ceaseless jousting – to be particularly mindful of the high price which all of us may have to pay for the garbage crisis. The playing out of the political endgame has assumed a paramountcy over the interests of the citizenry and whoever eventually wins, there is no mistaking who will be the real victims.
