It comes as no surprise that there are eating houses, guest houses, barbering and hairdressing services and a host of other business ‘hustles’ in the city that are in breach of municipal public health and safety regulations. That is simply part of a wider pattern of lawlessness that has long prevailed in our capital, and if precedent is anything to go by there is every reason to believe that City Hall’s threatened clampdowns on these indiscretions will pass without any significant change in the status quo. We have become as accommodating of the transgressors as we have of City Hall’s delinquency, and there is no evidence that that is about to change.
Many of the delinquent ‘enterprises’ which City Hall says are now targets for either prosecution or threatened eviction are located at the western end of Georgetown in the general vicinity of Stabroek Market. Here, the municipal authorities have long countenanced the growth of a commercial culture that has been attended by a considerable measure of looseness. Setting aside the profusion of street vendors, the area is teeming with assorted pavement-based service providers – barbers, beauticians, food vendors and traders of various hues, most of whose business pursuits transgress one or more of the municipal by-laws. Sometimes, when all of these various influences converge, conditions in that part of the city are reduced to unmitigated chaos.
Above all else, it is the posture of the authorities responsible for enforcing the municipal laws that have allowed this situation to fester. City Hall’s inconsistency in what it so frequently says is its commitment to bringing an end to this state of affairs has been undermined by its own approach which ranges from turning a blind eye to the situation to sudden clampdowns that emerge out of the blue then disappear after a brief period of media attention.
Over time, too, there has developed an unsavory accommodation between the policing officials and the offenders, the nature of which works to their mutual benefit. Much the same is true of the “hospitality lodgings,” restaurants and rum shops nestled in that area which, given the evidence of their lack of mindfulness for considerations of safety and sanitation, ought not to be allowed to provide service in their present condition. As it happens they continue to remain open for business at the pleasure of the municipality.
In the cases of the pavement-based services, no one doubts that the lack of alternative employment has been responsible for the creation of what are mostly one-person ventures, though the argument that their circumstances somehow justify the transgression of the municipal laws remains unacceptable. Those laws exist to create and sustain a minimum sense of order for the safety and comfort of the citizenry as a whole. Indeed, if anything, the continued proliferation of these illegal business ventures reflects just how little the authorities have done, up until now, to create conditions in which structured small and micro-business pursuits can be undertaken. When you talk to some of these intrepid hustlers they take the position that their circumstances have materialized out of a lack of viable options, including the ability to afford the overheads associated with running a conventional business enterprise. Still, the enforcement of municipal regulations cannot be encumbered by an emotional soppiness that overlooks the fact that the offenders are in breach of the law.
What has also not helped is the municipality’s tendency either to turn a blind eye to the transgressions for long periods or – as in the case of the Stabroek Market vendors – to engage in the granting of selective amnesties, an approach which has more than once come back to haunt it. It is precisely because of its attitude of inconsistency and indecisiveness that City Hall’s current threatened clampdown on offenders resembles a puff of smoke which, given time, will eventually spend itself without having the desired effect. The fact of the matter is that a point has long been reached where such threats by the council cannot be taken seriously unless it demonstrates that it has the will to make good those threats and the stamina to ensure that its enforcement pursuits work. Otherwise, its attention-grabbing noises will continue to seem like whistling in the wind.
Were City Hall to make good its stated intention to disband the various pavement services, that would mean that scores of service providers would be displaced. Herein lies the challenge for central government which, interestingly, has, after an interminable delay, only just budgeted funds to kickstart its long-promised support programme for small businesses under the Small Business Act. Perhaps the displacement from the downtown of the various service-based entities can coincide with an initiative by the administering entity, the Small Business Bureau, to provide at least some of these with a legal option by offering them some measure of support in establishing clusters of modest facilities that enable them to earn a reasonable living within the limits of the law.
