Latest update February 7th, 2025 8:58 AM
Jan 20, 2022 Letters
Dear Editor,
Kaieteur News – As a citizen of Georgetown and more so as a Guyanese patriot, I must express my profound disappointment and deep concern regarding the positions taken and the sentiments expressed by the current Mayor of the capital city and a former Mayor of Georgetown regarding ‘Operation Clean-Up’, the massive sanitisation exercise that is currently underway. In fact, I was just gobsmacked.
I cannot understand how the Chief Citizen could condemn such an exercise and try to dissuade persons from supporting such an activity. Just in case the Mayor hasn’t noticed as he drives around in his fancy sports utility vehicle, the city is in a complete mess, with heaps of rubbish everywhere, with clogged drains, chock-full garbage with litter strewn on parapets that are all way overgrown in all the wards.
Let me just remind the Mayor that his Solid Waste Department has failed miserably, that he and his City Council have let the citizens down completely. Let us stop the blame game; the responsibility of maintaining the city rests squarely on the shoulders of the City Council, not the central government.
I hope the Mayor has observed that rather than heeding his call for a boycott of the exercise, persons in their numbers turned out, from foreign diplomats to corporate leaders to youth and civic groups to senior officers of the joint services to the rank and file. And that is because everyone is just sick and tired of the filthy state of the city. What would the Mayor have preferred? That the central government, the private sector and civil society show up at City Hall with bags of cash, hand it over to them and wait on them to clean the place up?
I heard the Mayor singing a song sung by some of his predecessors that the Council is cash strapped, that Council is without the requisite manpower and machines, that the city has extended its boundaries beyond its capacity, that central government is starving it of resources. This is all poppycock! The city is where it is because of gross mismanagement, financial and other.
In trying to pull wool over the eyes of the citizens, the Mayor is hoping that persons have forgotten the times when Georgetown was the Garden City. There were no private Garbage contractors costing hundreds of millions of dollars, but rather the Municipal Cleansing Services Section which was extremely well managed, and was responsible for the collection and disposal of all garbage in the city using their own equipment, residential and commercial and the city was the cleanest in the Caribbean. This very same Cleansing Section was also responsible for the weeding of all parapets and city reserves, which were all well manicured.
And I don’t understand this spirit of mendicancy which has taken over City Hall where they are just sitting and awaiting subventions, donations and financial grants from Central Government. What is the city doing with all of the property rates, fines, fees and other revenue it sources on a daily basis? Does it just go to a top heavy and bloated payroll, to contractors and to other lavish spending? One would have imagined that the Mayor would have welcomed any assistance it could get like this clean up.
Rather than moaning about it, the Mayor should be working out a plan of how his enervated and apathetic Solid Waste Department will maintain the cleanliness of the city when ‘operation Clean-Up’ is over and not leave it to become as disgusting as it was.
Sincerely,
Sean Moniz
Feb 07, 2025
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