Georgetown is sinking ever deeper into a cesspool of filth, squalor and smelliness. Its progressive decline into decay makes it the most ideal of locations upon which to heap incremental abuse. If, for example, you create sizeable garbage heaps by simply emptying your bins onto unoccupied spaces, on the side of the road or even in drains, for that matter, that then becomes clogged, foul-smelling and leaving parts of the Capital threatened by flooding, the likelihood of any kind of reprimand is remote. Up until now, the advent of oil has still not reduced our appetite for urban squalor. Abuse of our capital has become par for the course. Even if we accept that there are few convivial spaces in the capital where small business owners can ply their trade we cannot overlook the proclivity for adding to the stench and the disorder by simply converting indiscriminate garbage dumping into a routine. If you wander into parts of the capital (not just downtown Georgetown) you will discover that there are a great many people who are comfortable in their own filth… or at least so it seems.
Politics is an enormous ‘spoiler’ here. The never-ending political back-and-forth between central government and the municipality over whose substantive responsibility it is to uphold the dignity of the capital has not only become vacuous and boorish, it also reflects an across-the-board indifference to a capital where both sides must, at one point in time, or another, welcome visitors. City Hall has been, over time, burdened down with inefficiency and halos of corrupt practices (and by the optics of its own edifice). Meanwhile the political administration, with significantly enhanced resources now at its disposal notwithstanding, refuses to find ways of wholeheartedly taking on the serious transformation of the capital, preferring instead to drown its indifference in waffle. So that both central government and the Georgetown municipality are altogether inclined to ‘play politics’ with the capital.
The hideously delinquent political forces were not even capable of delivering a Local Government Poll that focused on working together for the good of the capital. The poll was (as it has always been) an exercise in the retention or capture of a political constituency. This, while the roads crumble, the drains are clogged and smelly and Georgetown comes, more and more, to resemble a kind of half-way-house ghetto into which many of us must venture from time to time. It is from the behind the rampart of a thoroughly abused capital that we, Guyana, that is, sheepishly ‘soak up’ the encomiums associated with being, these days, one of the world’s high-profile oil producers. We do so not recognizing that the age-old ‘Banana Republic’ stigma is still the lens through which much of the outside world sees us.
