There are now less than three weeks left until polling day and there are signs of a belated national focus on a general elections campaign that took its own sweet time to generate a meaningful level of public interest. Political rallies grow more intense, more rousing. We now appear to be in the zone – so to speak – and until the outcome of the poll is determined, who governs for the next five years will be our primary preoccupation. The media too will be focused on the rest of the campaign, the polling and the outcome of the elections.
What this means is that other occurrences, some arguably deserving of no less attention and which, in different circumstances would have gotten that attention, are likely to be simply noted and set aside, or else, will slip virtually unnoticed under the national radar.
Some of those occurrences will be unwholesome. Bad news, unlike general elections campaigns, has no season. It is our focus that is seasonal. It is our selective attention that sometimes allows disturbing occurrences to pass without receiving merited attention.
The point is, however, that national preoccupation with an event like general elections often has the effect – not only in Guyana but elsewhere in the world – of diminishing public response to such occurrences, though cynics might say that bad news has now become so commonplace in our country, that occurrences like rape, murder and domestic violence are nowhere near as shocking as they used to be.
In recent days disturbing occurrences have passed with relatively little public comment, like the two pictures published on the front page of the Kaieteur News of Thursday November 3, the first showing a truck depositing garbage in the Le Repentir Cemetery on what appears to be a footpath leading to the burial grounds and the second showing four men picking their way past the truck and the deposited garbage bearing a coffin towards the burial grounds. In both pictures tombs are clearly visible in the background.
Visual images speak for themselves in a manner that words rarely ever do. The two images convey a truly sickening sight, speaking directly to a macabre urban disfigurement which we have had to endure for years, and however much we may be preoccupied with general elections, lawlessness of such magnitude ought not to be allowed to pass without public response.
It appears, after years of animated public controversy over the transformation of a section of Le Repentir into a health-threatening garbage dump, that the practice of desecrating the cemetery persists, and that the ritual of burying the dead still takes place in the shadow and stench of piles of rotting garbage. The dumping of garbage in the cemetery, it seems, now proceeds alongside what we are told is a current multi-million dollar initiative to try and transform Le Repentir from the truly foreboding and, frankly, frightening place that it has become, so that the question arises as to whether the cemetery cleanup exercise is not, ultimately, a perfect waste of time anyway.
And though the truck in the photograph bears no markings that provide evidence of ownership, City Hall officials surely ought to be tumbling over themselves to have the desecration stopped forthwith.
However, much we might be preoccupied with current political events, we do ourselves and the quality of our lives the gravest disservice by paying less than merited attention to what appears to be the persistence of this loathsome example of degeneracy that continues to devour us. As would appear to be the case, private operators in the refuse-disposal industry (hopefully not a renegade M&CC truck) have resumed the desecration of Le Repentir. That, general elections or otherwise, surely merits our attention though, since last Thursday’s revelation City Hall has not appeared unduly troubled; neither for that matter has civil society, the private sector and the urban citizenry.
Perhaps our attention is now so thoroughly turned to the fast-approaching general elections that we have forgotten, as we customarily do, that the privilege we enjoy of electing our leaders, whether they be at the level of central government or the municipality, carries with it the obligation of holding them accountable. That is not an obligation that we can afford to neglect – even for general elections.
