Nomination Day is on April 7, and according to what has been said by both acting Town Clerk Carol Sooba and Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield, it will be held at the traditional venue, namely, City Hall. However, the thought of dozens of party candidates and their associates thundering up the building’s fragile staircase and along the rickety corridor, has made more than one official a little nervous.

We reported Gecom Chairman Steve Surujbally at a BlueCAPS ‘Let’s Talk’ event as telling young people in the audience that there had been some thought about changing the location of Nomination Day, and holding it in the Guyana National Convention Centre at Liliendaal instead. He had gone on to add that the latter was a beautiful building which could lend dignity to the event. However, he said, a change of venue would deny parties the traditional march from their headquarters, all of which were in the city, and so for the time being tradition had won out over dignity.

While the convention centre is a perfectly pleasant, modern building, it would not win any architectural awards at the international level. If City Hall were in its pristine state, there would simply be no comparison between the new and the old; Georgetown’s best-known landmark would win hands down on the aesthetic, dignity and tradition fronts. On a different note one is also tempted to muse whether Nomination Day would ever be associated with dignity, wherever it was held; it has always been part of the ritual of the occasion to have some noisy party supporters lending their enthusiasm to the preliminaries of submitting the lists.

Be that as it may, the question still remains as to whether City Hall can stand the strain. We reported Ms Sooba as saying at a press briefing on March 12, that she had met Mr Lowenfield in company with the City Engineer and several other officers of the city council to ascertain whether the structure could safely accommodate the activities associated with Nomination Day. Emerging from that it seems as if the municipal worthies think it can. An inspection of the area by SN gave rise to the suggestion in our report that at least a few of the rotten boards in the corridor could be replaced, but when Mr Lowenfield was asked whether Gecom might be prepared to fund it, he replied that the commission’s budget did not extend to this. “It’s their hall,” he said, “we are just using the location.”

The Chief Election Officer is perfectly correct of course; it is for the city authorities and the government, not Gecom, to fund any work on City Hall, however minor. Which leads on to the obvious questions as to why we are in this situation at all, and why it is that such a magnificent example of nineteenth century wooden architecture is in this state. As we reported on two occasions last year – in April and then again in October – Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon had announced that government had committed first $200 million and then $100 million to begin restoration work. And yet, after that little item of good news – zilch.

It might be recalled that some time last year too it was announced that the National Trust would co-ordinate the restoration of City Hall, but there has been no indication since as to what it has accomplished in this department. Looking at the state of the building, there can only be one conclusion – nothing. The acid relations between the Mayor especially, and the central government are no state secret, and the fear has always been that friction between the two could impede the rehabilitation of the structure, but Mayor Hamilton Green told a reporter of this newspaper, which was later repeated in a letter to the editor, that he would stand aside and allow the government to take full control of the restoration work.

So what is the problem? There is money – at least to do emergency work; there is an oversight authority; and there is a Mayor who will recuse himself from involvement in any project to save the building, and yet still nothing is happening. One is forced to ask who is standing in the way? Has the Ministry of Finance declined to release the money? Is the acting Town Clerk in her inimitable fashion blocking repairs? It is certainly no secret that Ms Carol Sooba’s pre-programmed objectives do not include anything relating to the preservation of the capital’s material heritage. (Look what has happened to Stabroek Market.) It is alleged that the only innovation she has introduced at City Hall is to install a new sofa in her office. At least she will be seated comfortably when the building crumbles around her.

As for the City Engineer, just why is he so seemingly slothful? One can only wonder which professional would watch the historic edifice for which he is responsible disintegrate in front of his eyes, without making a scene in the Minister’s office every day.   But then Minister Whittaker, closeted as he is behind the protective walls of his Local Government hideaway, appears incapable of taking any decision that would benefit the city. Perhaps he is on a leash, otherwise he too would be dancing in anger in front of President Ramotar’s desk every morning.

Even Minister of Tourism Irfaan Ali, who suffers from the delusion that attracting tourists means holding noisy fÊtes in public places to disturb the local residents, appears indifferent to the fate of City Hall. Perhaps he has never heard of historical tourism.

This is an election season, and since the discussions surrounding Nomination Day have cast the spotlight once again on our decaying municipal edifice, one might have thought that the government would have seen fit at least to start with emergency works, which were already identified by the two engineers who came down here a few years ago at the instigation of the private sector.

City Hall is a product of the carpentry skills of local people, a tradition which dates back to the Dutch Winkels of Berbice, enslaved African artisans belonging to the Berbice Company. When the British – who were very impressed by Winkel skills – took over the three Dutch colonies which now comprise Guyana, the Winkels were brought for a time to Demerara to work on public building projects. Those skills fed into the nineteenth century building styles here, that were added to by successive generations of contractor-carpenters.

Having said that, however, City Hall itself was constructed between 1887 and 1889, at a time when Georgetown had become very much a multi-racial city, and it is almost certain that representatives of all the ethnic groups made their contributions to it at one level or another. Other than the name of the architect, Fr Ignatius Scoles, no one knows exactly who worked on it, but it does, in a very real sense, belong to everyone’s tradition, and certainly forms an element of everyone’s heritage.

History did not start with the PPP, and buildings which have their origins in earlier days, more especially those of historic, aesthetic and architectural importance, should continue to be embedded in our landscape. They are quite simply part of who we are, and to allow them to moulder into dust without any intervention is beyond philistinism; it is cultural barbarism.