Resolving the trading spaces issue must go beyond clamping down on delinquent street vendors
The fact that it took a great deal of prodding and protestation and the eventual intervention of the Courts to cause the obscenity that passes for urban trading to impose itself on the country’s capital for ‘ages’, is a circumstance which, truth be told, ought to be a matter of embarrassment to both the state and the local authority.
Here, one hastens to add that the scourge of a capital that is, to a considerable extent, downright unsightly in the face of a protracted indifference to this reality by both Central Government and City Council cuts across political boundaries so that in the matter of bringing a measure of remedy to the situation there are no bragging rights here.
The Stabroek Business, however, hastens to add that there is nothing wrong with urban vending that is structured and controlled. These pursuits are part of everyday life in countries across the world and the strict regulating and monitoring procedures that attend this aspect of urban trading is designed to accommodate both the right of access of the traders to honest and livelihoods and the entitlement of the citizenry to a presentable capital.
It is the view of the Stabroek Business that the unacceptable and at times deplorable urban conditions that obtain, are a function, first, of the municipality and central government, more particularly, evidence, over time of an unwillingness to work together to bring our urban eyesore challenges to an end. Unless the ‘politicking’ of the problem ceases, not a great deal in terms of urban transformation is likely to take place.
Unquestionably, the information at our disposal suggests that some modest inroads have now been made, though history suggests that it is the retention of the status quo that is usually the problem. This can only be realised through an approach that goes beyond pure policing and seeks to find options that are both legitimate and convivial, and access to which is within the financial reach of the vendors.
The worst thing that the Local and Central Government authorities can do is to take action on what, in truth, are the unacceptable conditions that apply in outdoor trading, without moving, in short order, to provide alternative convivial trading spaces. Here it has to be said that if the urban vending community are simply contemptuously swept to one side, that circumstance could breed its own unpalatable consequences.
It is right and fitting that urban trading that ensues within the limits of the law have a right to object to such unlawful encumbrances as might hinder their right to trade untroubled by unlawful impositions. The challenge here – for the Local and Central Government authorities – is to put measures in place that take account of the right of both established enterprises and more modest traders to ‘make a living,’ though, not one, at the other’s inconvenience.