This newspaper’s coverage of business issues over the past year or so has included extensive chronicling of the role that municipal markets play in the broader national commercial culture.
We have reported on municipal markets in the capital, Georgetown and in parts of Berbice. During the course of this year we hope to get to markets elsewhere in the country.
This is a pursuit with which we intend to persist because we continue to discover that markets are significant beyond the role that they play as trading spaces. Markets often provide important clues to the culture of communities that they serve.
More than that, as many livelihoods are often made in municipal markets as in the formal employment sector and in most instances, by probing what happens in markets you discover that they can represent mirrors to ways of life in communities as a whole.
Market vending is unquestionably one of the more demanding vocations in Guyana. There are, for example, vendors who, for more than 30 years in some instances, have been making daily treks into Georgetown, some of them from the far reaches of Berbice, East Coast Demerara, the East Bank Demerara and parts of Regions Three and Region Ten to ply their trade in municipal markets in the city.
They return home at the end of each day not always adequately compensated for their efforts. It is, however, a journey that they must make. Lives depend on those journeys.
There are other things that we have discovered about municipal markets in Guyana: like the fact that most if not all of them offer grossly inadequate conditions for trading and that those conditions are often deplorable to the extent of being dangerous. Additionally, in the instance of Georgetown, for example, the exertions of the municipality have rather less to do with making markets safe, habitable places and more to do with what, frequently, are infinitely less important agendas.
This week we spoke with the vendors on Bourda Green, an expanse of broken down tarmac separating Robb Street from North Road where several vendors trade. Some of them have been doing so for years. Bourda Green is a particularly unpleasant piece of real estate. All sorts of vermin live cheek by jowl with the vendors who complain about flooding, drug addicts and thieves who raid their stalls with monotonous regularity. The vendors say that, for the most part, they don’t bother to complain to the municipality anymore. They have learnt to live with the vermin and the drug addicts and the thieves who raid their stalls. The mere mention of City Hall in these parts can earn you angry stares.
When we called Town Clerk Ms Carol Sooba, she did not bother to listen to the vendors’ woes which we had agreed to raise with her. Instead, she said that the Stabroek News should not anticipate any sort of public comment from her because our coverage of municipal matters that had to do with her own role did not meet with her approval.
We were left unclear as to whether the Town Clerk had notified us that she had placed a ban on this newspaper as far as the dissemination of information is concerned. We are more concerned over the fact that the woes of the vendors persist. Those, from our standpoint are infinitely more important than whatever might have hurt Ms Sooba’s feelings.
So we now wonder aloud as to whether this is not a matter which the Private Sector Commission (PSC) and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) might wish to embrace as part of their ongoing agendas. After all, aren’t municipal markets and vendors part of the private sector too?
Truth be told, the conditions of our markets have long been huge festering and long-neglected sores on the commercial landscape.
The absence of remedial action, we believe, has everything much to do with how the vendors are perceived. They have no voice. That apart, there is, it seems, the problem of people in authority not fully understanding the importance of their mission.
