The fact that it took this length of time to cause the physical conditions in the vicinity of the National Assembly to secure some measure of public attention is a poignant comment on the way we live as a country.
In a sense it is ironic that the comment that triggered a report on the issue in yesterday’s edition of this newspaper came from the Speaker of the National Assembly. Indeed it begs the question as to whether, over all these years, it has never occurred to the single most influential collection of citizens in the Republic that something has to be done about the fact that the business of the nation is being conducted amidst the same filth and grime and unsightly vagrants and junkies that have now become par for the course in other parts of our city.
And since there had not been any hue and cry or threat to set aside the work of the National Assembly to stage a protest before the Speaker’s outburst, what are we to assume about the dispositions of those other Honourable Members who, surely, are as familiar with the conditions in the precincts of the Parliament Buildings as is the Speaker.
The circumstances outside the Parliament are, of course, a microcosm of what obtains in the city as a whole. At the end of last week we were still grappling with the odour and the obscenity of last year’s garbage. The seasonal solid waste pile-up, a manifestation of the customary Christmas consumerism, had descended upon us long before we had even come close to recovering from the rains of a few weeks earlier which had flooded downtown Georgetown and left it under layers of slush and styrofoam.
Along the East Coast too it appeared that the garbage disposal services provided by the regional administration had simply collapsed in some villages. In instances where villagers have either been unable or unwilling to burn or bury garbage, it remains stacked at the sides of the roads, being ransacked by animals, waiting for the resumption of the disposal service or the next downpour, whichever comes first. You wouldn’t have thought that communities that have any pride in themselves would endure those conditions.
The proliferation of garbage has simply overwhelmed the city, laying bare the dichotomy between our capacity to generate waste and our inability to properly dispose of it, so that when, like now, the garbage overwhelms us we can do no more than wonder whether or not we might become afflicted with some virus with which our health sector will be hard-pressed to cope. It is, to say the least, a lottery in which our health, even our lives are at stake.
Our chosen response to what is in fact an overwhelming national embarrassment is to engage in sterile debate about whose fault it is, when, truth be told, the fault is a collective one. Of late, there has been talk as to whether or not the solution may lie in an acceleration in the holding of local government elections. Surely, discourses of that kind even go to show just how delusional some of us have become since, while local government elections are long overdue, changing the elected officials in City Hall provides us with no assurance whatsoever that the garbage situation will change.
We have to begin to see a collective sense of indignation chiefly at the levels of cabinet, the National Assembly and the private sector support organizations since they are the ones who must drive the change. That is not to say that civil society and the citizenry as a whole do not have a role to play. At the end of the day, however, what it takes is the influence, the resources and the enforcement capacity to turn things around.
Until that collective indignation over the state of our capital reaches a point of commitment to corrective action at the very highest decision-making levels, we will continue to play those quixotic games with ourselves in which we studiously pretend that a country with a capital as filthy and as ugly as ours can lay legitimate claim to being either a global environmental ‘champion’ or a viable tourist destination. Those exercises in self-delusion do not impress the rest of the world one iota.
Like so many other things our garbage crisis has brought out the worst in the quality of our political culture. It is much easier to engage in political confrontation over the issues that divide us rather than get into a huddle on an issue of profound collective shame. Put differently, it is entirely acceptable to mortgage the city that gives our country its identity to the vicissitudes of political differences which, in all likelihood, would not be settled in a hurry, anyway. That, frankly, makes our political leaders no more environmentally conscious than travellers who nonchalantly deposit the remains of their fast food meals through the windows. The guilt, unquestionably, is a collective one.
