The morning after the Executive Order
Mar 19, 2017 , http://www.kaieteurnewsonline....the-executive-order/
The decision of the Ministry of Communities to issue an order suspending the parking meters bylaws offers an opportunity for a resolution of the problems of the controversial parking meter contract.
Firstly, it allows for all those sides which were complicit in the agreement to implement parking meters, including the government, to rethink this project.
Parking meters do not exist in any Caribbean state. It should not have been imposed in Guyana. It is claimed that it was implemented to help to bring order, but it seems to be more a revenue-generating measure than anything else.
What exactly is the Council trying to achieve by this project, and can it be done without ceding so much rights to city’s parapets to a private company? Can the same objectives be achieved without having a private company employed?
Secondly, it gives the government an opportunity to dispense with this hands-off attitude which it has employed in this entire matter. The government has an obligation to protect the national interest and to signify its disapproval whenever it feels that such interest is in jeopardy.
The government has a chance over the next 90 days to decide just how it will relate to local authorities. It must decide what it will tolerate and what it will not, when it will intervene and when it will not. The parking meter protests have been damaging to the administration. It waited too late before it acted, and even with this belated action of suspension, it is still likely to lose considerable goodwill for its approach to this matter.
Thirdly, the suspension allows for the Council to respect itself better. The contract, when it was first signed, was done so without the approval of the Council. The matter was subsequently brought to the Council and it was approved, but not unanimously. Those who were part of that approval have questions to ask themselves. From the moment it was clear that they were not initially consulted on the signing, the council should have overturned the deal. It should never have gone further.
There are other issues which will come before the Council, in which the members will have to decide how they will vote. They must not place themselves in a position where their constituents may be forced to question their leadership.
Fourthly, that said, it is time for those who were behind this contract to make a decision about their own futures. The suspension of the contract should cause pause for persons to decide whether they will continue on the Council and, for that matter, in municipal politics.
Guyana has long departed from that tradition in which people stepped aside on questions of principle and on the basis of convention. It is time for some persons to step aside on the basis of principle and on the basis of convention.
Fifthly, the people of Guyana must not assume that they have discovered a powerful weapon to effect change. The protests have only worked because they involved the middle class, from which the leadership of the political elite is traditionally drawn. The sugar workers have been protesting long before this parking meter protest was conceptualized. The rice farmers have been protesting. Those whose leases were cancelled have protested, but their protests have fallen on deaf ears. The middle class has no interest in those causes.
Sixthly, the movement against parking meters must not disappear. The movement now has a bigger challenge. It has to work with the Council and the government to find a model which will allow for some form of parking controls in the city. It should work with these parties to identify areas for public parking on government lands, and for shuttles to be deployed to move persons around.
There is no reason why downtown Georgetown should not be turned into a walking zone. There is no reason why all vehicles should not be banned from traversing central Georgetown. This may be a hard pill for the movement to swallow, but its victory will be short-lived, unless it can find a solution to the congestion in the city without having to resort to parking meters.