Georgetown, the new, modern, “Garden City” metropolis is coming

Georgetown, the city that was once known as the “Garden City” of the Caribbean, is now universally deemed the Caribbean’s “garbage” city. Clearly, the PNC-led Mayor and City Council, which has been running the affairs of Georgetown for more than six decades, appears comfortable with the morass and neglect that characterises the management of Georgetown.
They are truly shameless. It appears as if the neglect of Georgetown is not merely incompetence, but deliberate. It appears as though the Mayor and City Council is deliberately allowing the city to reach to the bottom of the bottomless pit just to embarrass the Central Government, which happens to be under control of the PPP.
It is therefore a welcome announcement that President Irfaan Ali himself would lead a taskforce comprising Government officials, civil society groups, and the private sector to develop and implement a plan to deal with the garbage situation and the drainage problems.
The move comes amid widespread concern over the deteriorating state of Georgetown’s streets and public spaces, where uncollected garbage has become a daily eyesore and health hazard. It comes also at a time when Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo castigated the City Council for neglecting its waste management duties despite receiving substantial revenues, and echoed what many have been saying: that the Council’s neglect of the city is a political one, intended to embarrass the PPP government.
Simultaneously, the Vice President has announced that there are plans in the next term in government to develop parking spaces and zones for commercial businesses, and to implement a massive internal drainage system for municipalities and villages.
Vice President Dr Bharrat Jagdeo has stated that improving internal drainage and waste management systems would be among the main focus of the PPP in the next term of administration. In this regard, two weeks ago, the PPP rolled out a public discourse initiative in which Guyanese were invited to share ideas that could shape the Government’s 2025-2030 Manifesto, including ideas for transforming Georgetown and other municipalities.
The PPP leaders have essentially wetted the nation’s appetite with part of their plans for a second Irfaan Ali-term. They are basically telling us that transforming the present Georgetown into a modern, iconic metropolis, a modern “garden” city, is a major project for the post-2025 Elections period.
It is time for a new beginning for Georgetown. It is time we rescue Georgetown. It is time for Georgetown to again become Caricom’s iconic “garden” city.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Georgetown was regarded as the Caribbean’s “Garden City”. This was before Forbes Burnham became the Mayor of Georgetown in 1959. He continued as Mayor until 1964, and officially was Mayor of Georgetown between 1964 and 1966, but had also become the Prime Minister after the then Governor of Guyana did not invite the winner of the 1964 General Elections to form a government.
Since Independence, Burnham’s party, the People’s National Congress (PNC) – whose present form is APNU – has, in one form or another, been in charge of Georgetown. Counting the years since independence, it means Georgetown has been under the PNC for 59 years. If we count the years when Forbes Burnham, as leader of the PNC, first became mayor, it has been 66 years that Georgetown has been under the PNC, no matter what disguise the party presents itself to voters.
As bad as Georgetown is today, it would have been worse had the PPP government not invested massively in the city. Today most of the streets have been rehabilitated or reconstructed; not by the city, which has responsibility for this, but by the Central Government, which has refused to just allow the streets to deteriorate further. These streets are being rehabilitated and reconstructed under a massive Central Government investment programme in Georgetown. Street lights have been repaired, and new ones are being installed under a Central Government programme.
City drains are mostly disappearing. Where they still look like drains, they are overgrown and in desperate need of cleaning. The Council has been sending some workers to do minimal amounts of work. By the time these workers, sometimes equipped with cutlasses and basic tools, are finished, they make more mess than what they have cleaned up. City sluices to the Demerara River are so silted up that many cannot be opened when there are heavy downpours. Pumps are often inoperable. The President, since 2021, has started a clean-up campaign that has helped a little. But the same spots where cleaning up occurred become garbage-infested the next day. Not one day has the mayor or any member of the PNC leadership joined the clean-up campaign.
We have experienced the frequent suspension of garbage collection because the City of Georgetown has failed to pay its bills. These are the reasons why when you “smell” rain coming, you know the city will be flooded.
New modern buildings are popping up across Georgetown. Both Central Government and the private sector, and also citizens building their homes, are investing to ensure the old, dilapidated buildings disappear. But if our streets are not maintained, if the curbs are overtaken by grass and bush; if our cemeteries are neglected, the playgrounds are not maintained, and our drainage is neglected; if there are no parking spaces, then our city would remain an embarrassment and a shame we carry like an albatross around our necks.
Some positive things have happened. Led by the First Lady, the seawall area is being transformed, giving a glimpse of what we can create. Some of the playgrounds are being rehabilitated by central government. Clearly, the Mayor and City Council has no interest in building a modern metropolis. But hope for transforming Georgetown into the modern “Garden City” metropolis has been lit. With President Ali leading the charge; with the PPP government deciding this is a worthy project; with or without the Mayor and City Council’s cooperation, we know that the “Garden City” would be re-established before 2030.