It was none other than Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, not some relevant minister, who held forth on the subject of Georgetown vendors in a press conference last week. It must be inferred that the reason for this was because local government elections were in the offing. He told the media that the PPP/C had promised road vending would continue but would have to be structured and complemented by rehabilitated municipal markets and other facilities. “Vendors need to understand that you will be allowed to continue earning a living but your conditions have to improve for vending,” he was quoted as saying.
Whether the ruling party has any realistic hope of releasing the APNU grip on its strongholds of Georgetown, Linden and New Amsterdam will only be revealed when the elections take place next month, but in the meantime it is sparing no efforts to try and win over opposition voters to its side. It has managed to recruit various high-profile opposition figures to its cause, including former Georgetown mayor, Patricia Chase-Green as well as Malcolm Ferreira, and where the capital is concerned has been employing its usual strategy of denying the M&CC funds and then swooping in to undertake work it says the City Council should be doing.
Now it seems Mr Jagdeo is also pursuing the tactic of wooing the pavement vendors who are very numerous, although whether that has any prospect of securing their votes, or of persuading the Africans of the southern wards that the government has their economic interests at heart is open to question. It is thought that a significant proportion of the vendors are single mothers, and in an economy where their options to make a living are limited vending offers an accessible means of survival. As such the opposition voters among them may be reluctant to take any political risks.
In any event, considering the history of the authorities’ dealings with the vendor question, both at the level of government as well as the council, those who feed their families by vending may view the Vice President’s assurances with something of a jaundiced eye. After all it was less than five months ago that Mayor Ubraj Narine and Mr Sherod Duncan were charged with racial hostility as well as an offence under the soon-to-be defunct cybercrime law for trying to prevent the removal of vendors from New Market Street by the Ministry of Public Works.
For all of that it seems likely that this time ‘orderly vending’ is indeed what the PPP/C has in mind. As mentioned, the government is committed to a major project to rehabilitate markets and associated facilities, and vending would be accommodated within this larger plan. The idea is, however, that it should not detract from the aesthetics of the areas where the stalls are located. “We made it clear,” said Mr Jagdeo, “in some of the most developed capitals of the world, they have street vending.”
He is not the first one to talk about a more coherent approach to the problem. Shortly after his party came into office in August 2020, the M&CC launched its five-year plan for a portion of the city, namely, the Stabroek Redevelopment Project. As its name indicates it was intended to transform the Stabroek area with the creation of a public transportation hub, the upgrade of the market and the removal of the Guyana Fire Service headquarters. It might be noted that the latter has been done without any reference to the City Council and its grand plan, and the government has no intention of including the M&CC in any market rehabilitation. But at its core the project involved improved facilities for vendors who would not be allowed to operate on the streets any longer. With organised vending, the Town Clerk said vendors would have “ownership” of their stalls, which could be passed on.
The Mayor was envisaging government support for this project, which clearly was not about to be forthcoming, and since the municipality lacked both the money and the management skills to put it into effect without such help, nothing more was heard of it. However, in October of that same year there were consultations with Public Works Minister Robeson Benn who had expressed his dissatisfaction with vendors selling on the roadways. He said that the M&CC would be tasked with repositioning some of vendors in an effort to facilitate the smooth flow of traffic and movement of people, and following that the City Council announced that with effect from November 2nd, it would not allow unauthorised vending in and around Georgetown.
Needless to say nothing much emerged from this, and Mr Benn’s intention of bringing “order, optimal efficiency and safety” to the situation was left to await another day, save for the municipality’s removal of some Regent Street vendors last month to facilitate the cleaning of the drains.
Since 2020 there have been various complaints about roadside vending, including from Public Works Minister Juan Edghill in 2021 who was reported as saying that vendors along the main roadways of Georgetown would either have to relocate or seek alternative jobs. While vending exists in other parts of the country as well, in the capital it is a major problem, traditionally fed by challenging economic conditions and an absence of sustained action on the part of the authorities. In addition, during the period when so many items were banned, it expanded to become the main source of hard to obtain goods. Matters are not helped by the fact that some storeowners have arrangements with the vendors on the pavement outside their shops to sell their goods, something to which Mr Jagdeo also made reference. While Shamdas Kirpalani did win a case in the High Court in 2021 to remove vendors from in front of his store, other shopkeepers have not chosen to go the same route.
In the early days when vending was still manageable, there were a few efforts at relocation, such as the Water Street Arcade. But this became nothing but an alternative market, offering none of the advantages of capturing passing customers that the pavement offers. There was also then Mayor Hamilton Green’s indefensible decision to allow vendors to set up shop in Merriman Mall. He had an even more bizarre one to relocate them to Bourda Cemetery, but fortunately City Hall does not own Bourda Cemetery so nothing came of it.
Owing to the total lack of cooperation between the central government and its local counterpart there has never been a consistent and agreed approach to dealing with the vending issue. At the stage when it could have been addressed, it was not, and now it is so extensive and so entrenched that it will be difficult to solve. Even as new roads open, there is generally no action to stop vendors establishing themselves there, so the problem just gets worse. As for ‘orderly vending’, the government will probably find that it simply cannot accommodate all the vendors currently on the streets, particularly as their plans as far as can be seen appear to be associated with the markets. In any case, there is very little space left in central Georgetown for relocation.
For a start the government needs to know the extent of the problem. They should commission UG or some suitable agency to undertake a survey of vendors: how many there are, their economic background, the geographical disposition of their stalls, what they sell, where they live – do any come from outside the capital? for example – and so on. Once the authorities have data they can start to look at answers. And where that is concerned, they will also have to work with the M&CC, however distasteful they find it. In the end this is not a political problem and it does not matter how the vendors vote, or indeed how Georgetown votes.