Dear Editor,
I write with a mixture of dismay and exasperation in response to the letter penned by Mr. Hamilton Green, published in your newspaper on March 28, 2026, regarding the government’s intervention to reclaim several streets in Georgetown. While Mr. Green is entitled to his opinion, emotional or otherwise, but his recent commentary suffers from a profound lack of self-awareness and a convenient historical amnesia regarding the state of our city. As such, it demands a firm rebuttal.
Mr. Green questions the government’s legal right to take over the management of several thoroughfares. Let us be unequivocally clear: the Government of Guyana possesses not only the sovereign authority but also the constitutional and statutory mandate to act in the national interest. Under the Municipal and District Councils Act, the central government retains ultimate oversight of municipal affairs, particularly when a municipality demonstrates a persistent and systemic failure to execute its core functions. The government’s intervention is not a seizure; it is a necessary remediation of a crisis of governance that has festered for decades. When a city’s administration fails to maintain its infrastructure, allowing it to become a hazard to public health, safety, and economic activity, the national government has not only the right but the duty to intervene. The current Mayor and City Council (M&CC) can optimally seek judicial redress, if so inclined. Mr. Green is not the current Mayor.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth that Mr. Green so desperately wishes to gloss over: his own tenure as Mayor of Georgetown.
As a young man walking for 5 years, from Stabroek Market to school in Thomas Lands, in the early 70’s, I thoroughly enjoyed the pristinely kept Georgetown. Of note, I was mesmerised, awestruck, by the Town Council workers, deftly using their scythes, with precision, to weed the grass around Georgetown, witnessed the staff’s daily pruning of the idyllic Promenade Gardens, slowed down to watch the Koker (now defunct/ inoperable) by the Government Technical Institute (GTI), groaningly open to allow water to gush into the Lamaha Street Canal. Even turning up my nose as the “smelly” (my neophyte mind) garbage trucks traverse Georgetown.
Now for the dystopian reality.
For decades, Mr. Green presided over the Mayor and City Council (M&CC). During that extended period, we witnessed the tragic devolution of Georgetown from a city once celebrated as the “Garden City of the Caribbean”—a place of exquisite beauty, with uncontaminated seawalls, clean canals, and orderly boulevards—into the decrepit, crumbling shell it became.
Under his lengthy administration, the city’s drainage was neglected, leading to catastrophic flooding after ordinary rainfall. The roads became pockmarked with craters that went unfilled for years. The very infrastructure that had defined the city’s character was allowed to rot. The question Mr. Green must answer is simple: where did the funds go?
For decades, the M&CC collected property taxes, business license fees, market fees, and rates from the citizens of Georgetown. These funds, collected under the auspices of his leadership, were supposed to be used for the maintenance of the city. Yet, as the city’s physical plant collapsed, the citizenry was left to ask the obvious question—was this money mismanaged, squandered, or, as many have long alleged, was corruption an endemic and accepted feature of the then-administration? The legacy of that era is one of opaque accounting, bloated and inefficient bureaucracy, and a council that seemed more focused on political patronage than on ensuring that a garbage truck could complete its route.
Perhaps the most glaring example of the lawlessness that was allowed to flourish under Mr. Green’s watch is the catastrophe of Regent Street. For years, this was the premier commercial artery of Georgetown. Under his administration, it was transformed into an ungovernable market. Street vendors were permitted to set up stalls with impunity, not merely on the sidewalks but spilling out into the roadways. They were allowed to block the entrances of legitimate, tax-paying businesses, whose owners dutifully paid their rates to the city yet were held hostage by the very council that was supposed to protect their right to operate.
Editor, this was not a spontaneous occurrence; it was a direct result of a failure of governance. The M&CC under Mr. Green abdicated its responsibility to enforce its own bylaws. Instead of ensuring order, his administration enabled a system where illegal vending thrived, creating bottlenecks that strangled commerce and turned a once-proud commercial district into a chaotic obstacle course. The legitimate business owners—those who invested in permanent structures, employed Guyanese, and paid their taxes—were abandoned by the city’s administration.
So, Mr. Green, let us have no lectures or emotional pontification about legality or overreach from the architect of Georgetown’s decline. If needs be, judiciary intervention is an option.
This the perennial “cause and effect” reality manufacturing and mushroomed under your stewardship. The government’s current action is not an overreach; it is a long-overdue rescue mission to undo the damage wrought by decades of neglect, mismanagement, and the breakdown of order that defined your time in office. It is a concentrated attempt to clean up a mess that should have been addressed decades ago. If the government must temporarily step in to restore law, order, and aesthetics to Georgetown because the past leadership failed so spectacularly, then that is not an abuse of power—it is a necessary exercise of it.