President Irfaan Ali wants to think of Guyana as a truly progressive society with a government committed to ‘development.’ So there are new roads, new schools, new hospitals, new gas pipelines, new waste treatment plants and sundry new items all over the place. But for all this shiny infrastructure, we still can’t do the simple things.
We should have been able to live more tranquil lives, for example, but if anything ‘development’ has simply brought us much noisier music machines which can blare out sound at ever higher decibel levels. Every year we publish a clutch of letters complaining about noise nuisance and how neighbours, usually bars and nightclubs, routinely disturb the peace of a neighbourhood, disrupting sleep, affecting health and interfering with the routines of normal life. And this year was no exception.
Leonora, President Ali’s very own natal village, appears to have a particular problem where noise pollution is concerned, although since nowadays the head of state is safely installed in State House, he doesn’t have to be exposed to it. What can be said is that if he were still living there and he called out the police, they would certainly come and deal with the issue, and most likely offenders would appear in court the very next day.
But the ordinary citizens of Leonora have no such presidential advantage and one of the few recourses they have is letters to the press. Mr Jai Lall began writing on this subject in early June, although on that occasion he did not restrict his comments to that village. He did, however, expand on some of the reprehensible behaviour which accompanies noise nuisance, such as the loud, offensive conversations accompanied by foul language, and innumerable vehicles parked in small streets blocking entrances. Then there is the litter and the garbage thrown in the drains, among various other unsavoury spin-offs.
Last month Mr Sahadeo Bates of Leonora listened to his neighbour blasting music the whole day, saying he made six telephone calls to the police between 7.21 pm and 11.48 pm, but received no help. Mr Lall followed up on September 4 with a letter about bars and night clubs in the village which did not close until after 4 am, and how some merrymakers then convened in the street. There they continued the loud music and lewd conversations, and when one resident took a picture, his home was stoned with beer bottles from a side street. The actions of the police in this instance left a huge amount to be desired.
The following day there was support from Mr Jonathan Sobrian who wrote that he could attest to “every single nuance, syllable, word, adjective, situational effrontery described by Mr Jai Lall” and was crossing his fingers that following his first letter the relevant agencies would have acted. His second letter, he said, “nixed my hope.”
Mr Lall’s letter appeared several days after we had reported on August 29 that the Police Commanders of Regions Two, Three and Six had issued noise nuisance warnings to entertainment spots and business places. A release from the GPF said that Region Three Commander, Assistant Commissioner Mahendra Siwnarine had visited several entertainment spots and supermarkets where proprietors had been issued with written warnings about noise pollution and the relevant laws governing this offence. It was said that the proprietors assured the Police Commander that they would heed the warning. The Region Two Commander conducted a similar exercise in his district on August 27.
Whether it is that Commander Sewnarine did not visit Leonora, or that he did, but the entertainment proprietors there ignored him, and/or that he never reads letters to the press, his visits have clearly made no impact on the situation. That should come as no surprise to anyone because we have been down this road before.
Various Home Affairs ministers have made declarations about noise nuisance over the years with little effect, and in 2019, for example, police officers underwent training to curb the problem. At that time then Minister Khemraj Ramjattan said they would be supported by a move to revoke the licences of businesses which broke the law. Three years later in 2022 the Police Force was given meters by the EPA to assist them in their efforts against noise pollution.
None of this seems to have helped very much, because that same year the DPP wrote to acting Commissioner Clifton Hicken asking him to launch a campaign against noise nuisance. A statement from the DPP’s Chambers said that if people did not get a satisfactory result at the police station they were free to file a complaint with the DPP’s Office. Whether anyone has ever done so is not known.
In any event, three months after this the GPF announced it was collaborating with the EPA to tackle noise nuisance during the Christmas holiday season, and that anyone who failed to comply with the law would be prosecuted. This had the hallmarks of a temporary campaign, but then that is what the police are good at: campaigns which are not converted into a permanent state of affairs. The same problem exists in the Traffic Division.
As it was we had a repeat of police activities in relation to noise pollution last year, with the Grove police in April holding a community outreach in Craig, where residents had complained about the problem, and the East Coast police mounting a sensitisation exercise in their Division in November. Where the latter was concerned the police were accompanied by representatives from the EPA, with a release stating that contact was made with bar owners who were sensitised on the topic of noise nuisance.
It might be mentioned that there has been no announcement of a sensitisation exercise in Region Four, although it would do no more good than those in other areas. The bar owners already know what the law is, they are just secure in the knowledge that they won’t be prosecuted. There are the sorely harried residents of Station Street Kitty, for example, who starting in 2022 have sent more than one letter to this newspaper about being tormented by the noise from Sita’s Bar. Like the residents of Leonora, however, no authority has yet brought them relief.
Everyone knows what the problem is, and for that matter everyone knows what the solution is too. It is very simple: forget the campaigns, forget the high-level assurances, forget the sensitisation exercises, just enforce the law systematically. Is that too much to ask of Mr Hicken?
