Dear Editor,
There is a NASA-produced documentary titled “The Journeys of Apollo” in which the Apollo 13 mission produced the popular phrase “Houston, we have a problem”, as the astronauts communicated their discovery of the explosion that crippled their spacecraft.
In Guyana, the Town Clerk has caused all and sundry to produce the phrase “Georgetown we have a problem”, to describe the crippled state of our capital city, due to mismanagement, venality and incompetence.
By now it ought to be crystal clear that our style of management of our capital city is not working, and in fact, is a total disaster.
What we have now in spite of a significant amount of work that has been undertaken in recent years to review and improve the Local Government sector more popularly known as ‘Local Government reform’, is our capital city being run under very archaic laws dating back to the colonial times, laws that cannot relate to, nor deal effectively with, the current circumstances.
What we have now is the Town Clerk of Georgetown cloaking himself with ridiculous powers, scope and authority to completely ignore the views and wishes of the elected Council, of the laws pertaining to procurement, of covenants ascribed to State lands, of accounting and audit regulations, of even answering to the Communities Minister.
All over the world city governments are run like businesses, municipalities have become municipal corporations, with executive Mayors and city managers who are given by charter a large degree of control and responsibility. Right nearby we have the likes of the Port of Spain Corporation and the Kingston Corporation.
In none of these places do we have a Town Clerk, who is merely the Secretary to the Council, who performs several administrative tasks, running around creating havoc, as this one is doing. In fact none of the previous Town Clerks of Georgetown ever attempted to seize and convert public open spaces into private housing projects, to establish parking meter systems in our city on the basis of a falsehood that the previous Council had approved it, of withholding statutory deductions from the Guyana Revenue Authority, the National Insurance Scheme and the Credit Unions, of granting contracts amounting to billions of dollars without adherence to tender board procedures and of jaunting around the world for no practical purposes.
Sincerely,
Magagula Jackson
