Stabroek News this week carried a photograph by Arian Browne of a solitary minibus driving on the Seawall Road in broad daylight. The caption read: “Public transport vehicles are not supposed to use the Seawall Road.
This one did yesterday anyway.” In one brief glance, Arian’s photograph, taken with his usual perceptive eye, conveys a microcosm of a condition that is one of the most crippling things affecting our country – the abysmal lack of enforcement of regulations and laws. Aside from the entrenched ethnic divide, this lack of attention to the rules of the society stands as the biggest single impediment to Guyana’s progress.
Letter writers in the press often refer to these problems – dumping of garbage, drunk driving, domestic violence, corruption, etc – as peculiar to Guyana when the fact is that these are universal problems.
5The refrain goes, “We don’t see these things in Toronto or Miami or London; Guyanese are degraded people.” The essential difference is that the developed countries have enforcement to deal with these problems, while Guyana has not. I lived in Toronto during the years when the notion of recycling of garbage came into being. In those years, dumpsters were put up at collection points around the city for residents to leave their garbage separated (metal, plastic, glass) and for a few months the approach was an awareness campaign seeking the public’s cooperation.
The result was (I lived there and saw it) that persons would leave garbage outside the dumpsters where it would spill onto the ground creating a mess. In short order, the municipality got tough. Residents were now required to separate their garbage at home into colour-coded containers (household garbage, brown; recyclable material, blue; green material, green; etc) provided by the city, to be placed on the sidewalk in front of their residence or business to be picked up; failure to do so resulted in a fine. Within three months, the garbage problem was under control.
A similar progression took place in the 1960s with the problem of dangerous driving (intoxication, unsafe vehicles, disobeying traffic laws) which was causing great concern in Ontario. Police Department campaigns, appeals from the Ministry of Transport, and copious television spots were aired, some with gruesome images of accident victims, but the problem remained serious. In the early 1970s the government cracked down. They made a sharp increase in the fines for drunk driving, brought in roadside breathalyzer tests, instituted a demerit system on a driving licence with points lost for offences, and they began impounding vehicles of drunk drivers.
Today, enforcement has been further toughened. If the roadside breathalyzer shows you have more than .08 alcohol in your blood (equivalent of one glass of wine, or one beer), they suspend your licence on the spot for 90 days and charge you.
When you go to court, if you’re found guilty you can be fined up to Cdn$1,000. (A GT friend of mine paid Cdn$800) and when you get back your licence, after a year, a device called Interlock is installed on your vehicle’s ignition; it requires you to blow into a tube, and if your reading is over the limit your car won’t start. If you try to sneak a drive in someone else’s car, and you’re stopped by police, the vehicle will be impounded, no matter who owns it, for a minimum of 45 days, and you face fines from Cdn$5,000 to Cdn$50,000. (Note that the Guyana fine for drunk driving is G$7,500 or US$45.) A convicted drunk driver in Ontario must also take a remedial Back On Track course which costs Cdn$578. Such a driver will pay legal and court costs of $2,000 to $10,000; Criminal Code Fee $1,000; Back on Track course $578; and increased insurance fees of $4,500 annually. Concerted enforcement is in play.
People who live in Guyana face the consequences of these enforcement lapses every day. We have buildings going up in our city without providing parking, and derelict structures close to collapse with no action by the owner.
We have residents routinely covering their parapets illegally with concrete to provide parking, and containers being parked blocking roadways. Punishments are rarely imposed on persons who abandon or mistreat animals, and we often hear of attacks on persons by vicious dogs with no consequence for the owners. As I’m writing this column, there is a Trinidad newspaper report of a piece of legislation being piloted there by Attorney General Anand Ramlogan that we should note.
Under the government’s Dog Control Bill, you are facing a ten-year jail sentence and a TT$200,000 fine if your dog kills someone. That is unless the person was about to commit a crime (such as illegally entering your property or do harm to you) and you have “reasonable cause” for “encouraging the dog to be aggressive or to attack” that person. If your dog injures someone, your situation is only slightly better: five years imprisonment and a TT$100,000 fine. This legislation would require owners of dangerous dogs to also have insurance coverage of at least TT$250,000.
It would also require owners to have a microchip installed in their dangerous dogs, so that if and when the dog attacks someone, the owner can be traced.
The shortage of consequence or enforcement for the flood of irregularities in our country impinges on every corner of Guyana on every subject. From the irregular logging in our forests to the vendor selling snacks in unsanitary conditions, the absence of enforcement regulations has become an accepted way of life here. It is an absence that has repercussions in the obvious inconveniences or dangers to the population.
But it does not end there. It also discourages foreign investors when they see our haphazard way of doing business; it discourages tourists when they wake up in our capital to see garbage on the streets and dead animals by our roadside; it provides yellow journalism fodder, sometimes created by our own people, in online videos showing our decrepit buildings left standing, our littered streets and clogged drains.
Our ethnic divide problem is a cultural malaise that is difficult to eradicate, but the issue of enforcement is simply a matter of political will that will surely find approval in the community for both personal and business reasons. With elections looming, one has to hope that the incoming brigade will at least begin the task of correcting this sad malady.
It will be one significant step up the ladder of an improved society for Guyana, and it will be heartening to see someone campaigning on this issue in the coming months.
