City vending

The announcement last Thursday that the Mayor and City Council (M&CC) was moving to implement a policy to regularise vending in Georgetown should have come as no surprise to anyone. In fact, if anything, some might have questioned what took Mayor Ubraj Narine so long. One of the just four mayors Georgetown has had over the past three-plus decades, it was almost a given. He had to step up to address what is one of the city’s most pressing issues: vending.

Like drainage and garbage collection, vending has proven so far to be insurmountable. No mayor has been able to get a handle on vendors in the city, much less to regularise them or their operations. The softly, softly approach has not worked, nor has the big stick. The vendor issue has proven to be the equivalent of civic quicksand and to date mayors have found themselves either stuck or floundering or both.

Back in 1992, Compton Young, who was then Mayor of Georgetown had professed that he was “very unhappy” with pavement vending and had threatened to do “something very dramatic” about it. It should be noted here that though there were many pavement vendors in 1992, the number could be considered small when compared with what we see around the city today. Mr Young’s plan for getting the vendors off the city’s pavements involved building a two-storey shopping mall on Bourda Green that would have 1,600 booths. He had told reporters in January 1992 that he had invited two reputable local businesses to be involved in the mall project. Well, there was nothing dramatic about that and it also never came to fruition.

In 1994, A Good and Green Guyana won the most votes at the local government elections and its leader and founder Mr Hamilton Green took over the running of the city. Mr Green remained the chief citizen of Georgetown for the next 22 years, during which time he blew hot and cold with the vendors amidst much wrangling with the central government.

There was, of course, a history of bitter politics between Mr Green and the PPP/C, owing to his former position in the hierarchy of the PNC and stints as vice-president and prime minister of Guyana. It did not help that Mr Green’s tenure as mayor spanned several PPP/C administrations: Mr Cheddi Jagan (1992-1997), Mr Sam Hinds (1997), Mrs Janet Jagan (1997-1999), Mr Bharrat Jagdeo (1999-2011), and Mr Donald Ramotar (2011-2015). Sadly, for Georgetown, none of these administrations had or wanted a good relationship with its longest serving mayor. It would not be incorrect to say that they all so badly wanted him to fail, they were prepared to let the city go down with him. There was some amount of success in that direction.

Mrs Patricia Chase-Green succeeded Mr

Hamilton Green as mayor in 2016 when local government elections were finally held again. She was previously a member of the M&CC under Mr Green’s mayorship, as well as his deputy and had once told him at a statutory meeting that by going to extra mile to assist vendors he was ending up “looking incompetent”. At that same meeting in 2011, she had berated her fellow councillors around the horseshoe table, accusing them of “playing too much politics” with the vendor issue. She remonstrated that they were all guilty of turning a blind eye to city vending and allowing it to “become a monster”. She had lamented too that the members of the City Constabulary were ignoring their mandate and worsening the problem.

Despite all this, however, Mrs Chase-Green was also unable to bring order to city vending when she took over as Georgetown’s chief citizen. She had begun by moving to register all vendors in Georgetown; from Agricola to Cummings Lodge, whether they were selling on the pavements, or the streets in front of schools and businesses. The idea was that once the registration was complete, no new vendors would be allowed to trade in the city. The problem was that the M&CC was going to have to rely on established vendors to turn in their new comrades, who in some cases were family members or friends. Promises were made by both sides, but before long the initiative had failed and things were back to square one. Mrs Chase-Green then turned her attention to the pursuit of the now-infamous and also failed parking meter saga for which she will be remembered.

Georgetown’s vendors do not fit into a single mould and perhaps therein lies the difficulty. There

are day vendors and night vendors; those who have a fixed spot and those who walk about. The ones who sell prepared food items are different from those who sell raw provisions. Those who sell confectionary are in different category too, as well as those who hawk clothing or haberdashery. There are seasonal vendors who only sell kites at Easter, fireworks at Diwali or Christmas and vendors who only appear at Christmas time. Any regulation of this wide variety of sellers will require much study and a multipronged approach. Perhaps the first step would be the difficult task of enumerating them to find out just how many they are and what exactly they trade in.

Of course, the best way to have dealt with city vending would have been to regulate it when it first started. That ought to have been implemented after the first dozen or score of vendors appeared. If there were proper city planners from the beginning, areas for vending would have been demarcated, and novending zones policed with stringent enforcement to repel any who dared to encroach on them. However, that is all moot and the problem today, as it has been for decades, remains not just realising a semblance of order but maintaining it.

If he is to have better luck with this issue than his predecessors, Mayor Narine will need a solid plan, time and a lot of prayer.

Reading of the most horrible crime to be perpetrated on any female, let alone a nonagenarian, forced my innermost being to once again cry out for a return of the death penalty. Yes, you have read correctly, and needless to say over the years I have paid attention to the plethora of excuses proffered for its non-return. I feel it is strongly needed, especially in this case.

Granted this elderly female perhaps should not have been residing on her own, but I am certain that her level of autonomy and mental cognition, among other things assured all responsible parties that such a situation presented no immediate danger. The perpetrators of such a dastardly act, on a helpless aged female, should receive punishment that serves as a lasting deterrent to all likely others.

In December 2012, a 23 year old physiotherapy student was gang raped on a moving bus in Delhi, India. She died a few days later from injuries sustained during the assault. Last March four of the accused were hanged. Following the global outcry over the brutality of the bus rape, India introduced tough new rape laws, including the death penalty in especially horrific cases.

In Guyana, protecting women and girls should top the list of government priorities. Granted there is no magic wand, no one thing that will make the problem of gender violence disappear overnight.

A lot need to change and quickly— police, judicial reform and greater sensitization of police and lawyers. However, what is needed most of all is gender awareness, the male mindset needs to be changed to prevent such atrocities from taking place in the first instance. Sad but nevertheless true, parents need assistance and cooperation in learning how to raise better sons. A certainly daunting task. The intersection of sexual violence and assault against elders has been largely ignored. Campaigns continue to reflect and possibly reinforce the real rape stereotype involving young women, strangers and acquaintances, alcohol and sexual desirability. Older rape victims do not fall into this stereotype, as they are routinely regarded as asexual and undesirable.

Additionally, the real-rape stereotype postulates that rape occurs late at night in public, a time when older people are less likely to be in public spaces. In this context, rape against older women is seen as different from, and worse than, that of younger women, less easy to understand and inherently more humiliating for the older victim who is no longer sexually active. On another level this case reveals yet another aspect of the social morass in which the country finds itself. Is gerontophilia on the rise? Perpetrators are routinely argued to be gerontophilic, a psychological term used to describe younger people with a sexual preference for the elderly.

Can the nation afford, let alone cope with another criminal vice added to its already beleaguered state.

This horrific assault by sexual predators who targeted one of the most vulnerable member of society, is further made more distressing by the fact that the offence occurred in her home—where she should have felt safe. There is a proliferating tendency to re-frame sexual violence against older people as “elder abuse”, a term which seemingly is more comfortable for society to accept. It is time to recognize and include rape against older people, not as elder abuse, but as a form of violence against women.

Consequently, the current Guyanese government, and by extension the judicial system and appropriate law and social authorities is hereby called upon to become deeply involved in this matter that not only deals a black eye to the face of the nation but would further lend truth to the words of Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi - The greatness of a nation is found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. Any punishment given should serve as a benchmark example, otherwise the nation should hang its head in collective shame. Sincerely,

Y. Sam