Those of us (or at least some of us) who either live in Georgetown or, for various reasons, frequent the capital, would have experienced the ‘feel good’ sensation that derives from the effort in the past few months to change the appearance of parts of the capital city that had been left to degenerate and decay over time. Perhaps more than that, the decline had been attended – at least so it seemed – by a disposition of indifference amongst citizens to what had become a worsening state of affairs and in many instances, it seemed, there was even a hardened cynicism about whether positive change was possible.
What the beginnings of the current clean-up tell us is that change is possible and that it is well worth working for. It will, however, have to be incremental. There are simply too many things to be done to have them all attended to simultaneously.
Worryingly, even as the clean-up ensues there are signs that the biggest challenge of all might be that of actually ensuring that some acceptable standard is sustained. City Hall may already have found itself in a ‘toe to toe’ with some citizens who appear determined to thwart its fledgling efforts to bring about some sort of transformation.
Loathe as we might be to admit it, at least an entire generation of urban dwellers has grown up in a garbage-infested capital; some of us have lived in the midst of garbage all our lives and have grown perfectly accustomed to indiscriminate dumping, or else to a studied indifference to the practice of dumping. Strange as it may seem the ongoing urban clean-up has jerked some citizens out of a comfort zone which, over the years, has come to see indiscriminate dumping of garbage and other environmental abuses as normal and accustomed indulgences. City Hall is already finding out that not every city dweller is comfortable with what it is doing.
More than that we have, for years, had to deal with a perfectly absurd line of argument emanating from some quarters to the effect that since Guyana’s tourism product reposes largely in its non-coastal nature offerings, there is no nexus between a better-kept city and external perceptions of Guyana as a visitor destination ‒ as if visitors to Guyana are to go around with eyes shut tight until they get to their interior destinations.
A related point here is that while the tourism sector cannot be blamed for the condition of decay into which the capital had slipped, that sector needs to do much more by way of lobbying for a cleaner, more attractive capital.
The rest of the journey towards a transformed capital will have to do with much more than what one might call cleaning up. It will also have to do with making Georgetown beautiful again in a manner that transcends de-silted canals, unclogged drains, weeded parapets and the absence of the myriad makeshift garbage dumps that dot the city. We are going to have to pay attention to things like street signs, road lighting and abandoned buildings (some work has already been done in this regard), places of recreation, observance of a strict building code and the passage of legislation that serves as an appropriate deterrent to those who still insist on despoiling the capital.
But even that will not be enough. Much as we may institute laws designed to serve as deterrents, we are still left with an urban population that will have to be taught that there is a nexus between their own physical and emotional well-being and an uplifted Georgetown. That will take much more than the unfolding physical efforts of City Hall. It will require initiatives that enter homes and schools and churches and youth clubs and vending communities and places of entertainment and all of those spaces where groups of people can be reached. City Hall must be aware that public information and public education campaigns cannot be one-off, seasonal exercises. They would have to be informed initiatives that rely on much more than sporadic media campaigns and public events. They will sometimes have to be subtle and they will have to be sustained.
Here, there is much room for inter-agency collaboration. The Ministry of Education, for example, can provide invaluable support for the efforts of the city council by robustly reinforcing the anti-littering campaign in schools and encouraging children to take the campaign home to their parents. State and private sector workplaces can begin their own anti-litter campaigns by creating workplace protocols that impact on employee behaviour. Here again, these efforts must be sustained.
For the first time in several years City Hall has undertaken an initiative that appears to have won the approval of considerable numbers of citizens ‒ citizens, moreover, who reside both inside and outside the capital. What its effort has done is to persuade many of us – some of whom may well have long abandoned any hope of the possibility of a restored capital in the foreseeable future – that it may, after all, be entirely possible. What we have seen so far, however, perhaps persuades many of us that Georgetown is well worth fighting for.
