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.