The Stabroek Business’ own assessment of the prevailing conditions under which scores of micro and small businesses ply their trade in the country’s capital and its environs compels it to make the point that, over the years, official attitudes to ensuring that small businesses that ply their trade in the capital ought, first, to be provided with convivial trading spaces within which to ply their trade; those spaces, having been allocated, the feet of the occupants should be held firmly to the fire insofar as ensuring that those spaces are well-kept, free of the filth and the assorted encumbrances that are left behind at the end of the trading day. This will require a much more diligent urban municipality.
Few people bother themselves these days to make distinctions between central government and the municipality insofar as the state of the Capital is concerned. Truth be told, the ‘cat-sparring’ between the two as to who should carry the can for both the eyesore and the health hazard which downtown Georgetown represents is a moot point. Neither can escape culpability; City Hall because the cleanliness of the City is part of its substantive responsibility and the government because it is, to say the least, absurd to see itself as managing a country which, globally, is now a serious oil producer, whilst seeming to have no serious mindfulness of the physical state of the Capital.
That unregulated vending cannot continue to co-exist alongside a capital that now has an even more challenging responsibility plying their respective trades alongside the comings and goings of an increased number of visitors to the country is something that neither City Hall nor Central Government appears to appreciate. If there had been a time when our non-oil circumstance had allowed us to ‘get away’ with a filthy, run-down, garbage-infested capital, those days are gone. What now obtains is a circumstance in which the condition of Georgetown stands in stark contrast to the noises that officialdom continues to make about Guyana being ‘open for business.’ A filth-infested gateway is by no means a welcoming sign.
That said, of course, it we are going to envisage a vibrant small business community emerging alongside an oil and gas economy (and this is something on which the government must pronounce definitively sooner rather than later) we are going to have to devise a strategy for urban small business entrepreneurship that acknowledges the legitimacy of the so-called hustlers, who are prepared to ply their trade in safe spaces in conditions that do not compromise the state of the capital. What would help (and significantly) is if, somehow, we could find a way of dismantling the political barriers that represents an unyielding divide between central government and the municipal authorities.
The problem here of course is that, over time, both central government and local government have been perfectly prepared to play the kind of political hardball that subsumes the interest of the capital (and other important aspects of the country’s development) below their political jousting. All this, of course, in an environment when there is never a shortage of clarion callers on both sides that clamor for intransigence and brinkmanship.
