Resisting decision-making by edict
We live in a society in which there is an increasing propensity for people in authority to favour the practice of decision-making by edict. There is, it seems, an ingrained inclination among our decision-makers at various levels to dismiss the option of consultation either on account of a disdain for the practice of talking things through with the people whom the decisions most affect, or else out of a fear that to engage might impose the responsibility of having to consider conflicting opinions.
When the issue of parking meters first arose last year, it was clear that public officials including, particularly, Town Clerk Royston King and Mayor Patricia Chase-Green were not particularly mindful of any particularly vigorous public engagement prior to implementation. And when, in the heat of the vigorous public objection to the surreptitious manner in which the parking meters were being introduced, the Mayor, the Town Clerk and councillors Oscar Clarke and Junior Garrett took themselves off to Mexico, ostensibly to assess the inventory, many people interpreted their action as yet another act of unpardonable lack of mindfulness of the sentiments of the citizenry.
Even after the officials had gone to Mexico and returned, the posture of insensitivity and high-handedness continued. It transpired, among other things, that other municipal officials including councillors had remained decidedly in the dark in the matter of the parking meters. At every conceivable stage, therefore, it seemed as though, in their indecent haste to have the parking meters up and running in order to salvage the city’s cash-strapped condition as quickly as possible, those officials whose backing represented the engine driving the project, were banking on the powerlessness of the people to do anything to derail their plan.
What the contemporary outcomes of the whole parking meter fiasco suggest is that those in authority who believe that people can be ridden roughshod over forever, have clearly not been studying the evolution of the Guyanese society. As a nation we have developed, over time, some intriguing ways of responding to being bullied and some of those ways are, even now, being manifested in the public’s response to the advent of the parking meters.
The bottom line is that the parking meter system is an imposed and unwelcome development. The project has come to symbolize the kinds of ‘higher up’ impositions with which we as Guyanese have had to live with for years and which we have come to resent deeply. Not surprisingly, the just recently created Movement Against the Parking Meters sees the development as “bullying” and it says so in its slogans. The other particularly relevant point to make,
of course, has to do with the fact that the introduction of the parking meters comes simultaneously with new tax increases that bump up the cost of living.
Whether or not it came as a surprise to Smart City Solutions, it would appear as though this week’s move by motorists to “starve” the company
was spontaneous rather than contrived. Whatever we may think of the development it is a healthy sign that those in perceived authority will not always have it their own way when it comes to riding roughshod over public opinion. Over time, the people develop their own mechanisms for resisting that kind of tyranny.