Home Letters Central Government has been leaning over backwards to meet financial obligations of...
Dear Editor,
As I listened, over the years, to the senior elected officials, both past and present, of the Georgetown Municipality, and their utterances, I am reminded of the famous statement by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who said that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.
There is a big lie that has been peddled about for about three decades now, and that is that Central Government has been starving the Georgetown Municipality of resources; those being money, manpower and machinery. There is nothing further from the truth. In fact, to the contrary, Central Government has been leaning over backwards in meeting all of its financial obligations to the Council in a very timely manner, quite often paying property rates for Government buildings well in advance of the stipulated timelines to help out an always-cash-strapped Council.
Central Government has been paying over its subventions fully; and by the way, Georgetown gets the highest subvention of all municipalities.
Central Government has been funding and effecting most, if not all, of the road- and bridge-building and repairs in the City for the longest while; doing the vast majority of landscaping; has paid off huge sums of money owed by Council to garbage contractors time and again; has donated trucks, large amounts of skip bins and other garbage-collecting equipment to the City Council; has helped to clean the cemetery more than once; and has been investing huge amounts to purchase drainage pumps to help out the City with its flooding problems.
Under the direct leadership of His Excellency the President, Central Government agencies — along with military and paramilitary servicemen and women, and in collaboration with the Private Sector, Civil Society, and community groups — not so long ago, embarked on a Citywide clean-up and desilting exercise. It should be noted that the Mayor and his party’s Councillors refused to participate.
At a cost of more than G$4B, Central Government developed the Haags Bosch sanitary landfill in the East Bank Demerara region, which receives waste from all the wards of Georgetown, after the M&CC incinerator became unserviceable and its landfill at Le Repentir was overflowing and frequently catching alight, to the peril of neighbouring communities. And the list goes on and on.
Psychologists, psychiatrists and others have explained why the ‘big lie’ technique works. Repetition is important, because the ‘big lie’ works through indoctrination. The ‘big lie’ then becomes its own evidence base; if it is repeated often enough, people believe it, and the very repetition almost tautologically becomes the support for the ‘lie’.
Georgetown has had political leaders who have no care for the common good of the citizenry; who are grandiose, arrogant, and willing to exploit and manipulate people for solely their own political agenda and that of their party. With Local Government Elections around the corner, one can only hope that we get a new batch of City Fathers and Mothers who are not as megalomaniacal and narcissistic as we have had over the last three decades.
With thanks,
Riley Matthews