Clean…villages or people?

Your Eyewitness thinks President Irfaan Ali’s “Model Village” initiative deserves loud applause!! From the griping he encounters, everybody wants cleaner roads, prettier villages, proper drains, attractive parks, and communities that inspire pride rather than apologies!! But before the Government starts planting palm trees, painting fences, and constructing archways, it might consider launching another project first – a Model Citizen campaign!!
‘Cause the biggest obstacle to beautiful villages ain’t the lack of money no mo – it’s the abundance of bad habits!! We Guyanese, egged on by the Opposition, have become experts at blaming “the Government” for conditions we create with our own hands and habits!! Somebody tosses a KFC box and soda bottles into the drains, another dumps an old mattress behind the playground, and your neighbour burns garbage into the night!!  Meanwhile, the village shops quietly convert the roadside into a mini landfill. Then, when the rains come (inevitably) and the drains back up, everybody declares that “de Government nah clean de drains”. As if the plastic bottles marched there by themselves!!
Give us a freshly-cleaned parapet, and somebody’s gonna park an abandoned minibus on it!! Install shiny benches in the playground, and within a month they’re tottering near the ground!! In Guyana, we’ve elevated public spaces to a curious status: everybody owns them, which somehow means nobody’s responsible for them!!
Perhaps the President should spice up the programme with a “National Beautiful Village Competition”! Not one judged by the size of the ceremonial arch or the loudness of the Tassa band, but by the things that actually matter: clean drains, tidy verges, flower gardens, functioning community spaces, well-kept playgrounds, and residents who believe that throwing rubbish out of moving vehicles ain’t a constitutional right!!
Offer a million-dollar prize and publicise winners!. Let the losers endure twelve months of good-natured embarrassment. Nothing motivates us Guyanese quite like not wanting the neighbouring village to boast that “we beat allyuh again”. Village councils might suddenly become energetic. Churches, masjids, and mandirs might organise clean-up days. Even the chronic litterbugs might think twice if they knew Auntie Datalene next door was watching from her veranda!!
The truth is simple. The Government can build drains, but it can’t stop people from filling them with bottles; it can install garbage bins, but it can’t force people to use them. Our oil wealth can buy concrete, asphalt, and streetlights, but can’t purchase civic responsibility. The real transformation of Guyana ain’t gonna come when every village gets a facelift. It’s gonna be created when every resident stops treating the village like somebody else’s problem!!
Till then, the Govt can spend billions creating model villages – while we continue behaving like model litterbugs.
And that’s one competition no village is gonna want to win!!

…and clear thuggery
As the Opposition parties continue to duke it out in the face of the disappearing relevance of the PNC, they continue an inexorable descent into political thuggery – evoking the “sharper steel” challenge of Burnham’s PNC!! Look at their latest creation of mayhem – when VP Jagdeo went down to Linden to listen to the concerns of the residents of Region 10 – which the Opposition constantly carps is being “neglected”!!
Both WIN and their bête noire PNC – with Sanction Man and Norton in attendance – rushed down to the bauxite town and besieged Watooka House, in which the VP was listening to the people!! Hundreds of them were willing to brave the mob – who called them “traitors” – for exercising their democratic right to inform the Government of their concerns!! They refused to picket peacefully and violently breached the security barricades to intimidate and threaten the VP’s safety!!
That gentleman, however, held his ground!! What next?? A repetition of the Father Darke murder?? This Opposition wants democracy or fascism??

…anarchy
After beating up on the PPP Government for donkey years over allegations of self-interested awards of contracts, the Opposition’s now demanding the Govt solely sources the salvaging of the MV Barima!!
So they could claim “evidence” was destroyed??!!