The Dangerous Comfort of Doing Nothing
An opposition MP says enforcing the law is intimidation. What she is really defending is the status quo that left Georgetown's streets flooded and its institutions hollow.
Amanza Walton’s op-ed in Kaieteur News this weekend is the most polished piece of opposition writing in months. It is well-structured, and lands with the kind of seriousness that Guyanese political opposition commentary rarely achieves. It is also, at its core, a defence of institutional paralysis dressed up as a defence of democracy.
Walton’s argument proceeds by accumulation. She stacks a series of government actions: the publication of names linked to fraudulent driver’s licences, the Attorney General’s blunt public statements, the Minister of Public Works ordering illegal structures removed without extended notice, and central government’s takeover of 57 Georgetown streets. She presents them as a pattern. The word she reaches for is “intimidation.” The spectre she raises is authoritarianism. The historical warning she issues is that this is “how societies begin to drift.”
Let us take the claims seriously, one by one, because Walton deserves that courtesy and her argument deserves to be met on substance rather than dismissed with partisan noise.
The driver’s licence crackdown. The government announced it would publish the names of individuals linked to irregularities in the licensing system. Walton characterises this as “deterrence through fear and public shaming.” But what are the underlying facts? The licensing system was compromised by a fraud ring. Licences were issued to individuals who did not sit the required examinations. These are not minor administrative errors. They are safety hazards. Every fraudulently licensed driver on Guyana’s roads is an unexamined risk to every other road user. Publishing names is not shaming for sport. It is accountability in a system where opacity enabled the fraud in the first place. If Walton’s preferred alternative is quiet internal correction, she should say so, and then explain how that approach deters the next fraud ring.
The illegal structures. Walton objects to Minister Edghill’s enforcement posture on structures built on government reserves, specifically the speed and the tone. But the underlying problem is real and chronic. Illegal structures on reserves block drainage, obstruct road widening, and create hazards that could potentially cost lives during flood events. These are not new encroachments. They have stood for years, in some cases decades, precisely because the M&CC has lacked the political will to act. When someone finally acts, calling it “enforcement delivered as threat” is a curious framing. What does enforcement delivered as comfort look like? And how many more flood seasons should residents endure while we work out the aesthetics?
The takeover of Georgetown streets. This is the centrepiece of Walton’s argument, and it is where her case is strongest and weakest simultaneously.
Strongest, because the principle of local democratic governance matters. Elected councils carry their own democratic mandate and deserve to be treated as partners in governance, though that partnership requires a track record that earns it, something the M&CC has not always delivered.
But weakest, because Walton’s argument requires you to ignore what those 57 streets actually looked like before central government intervened. As an elected city councillor of the M&CC, I can tell you what the Council’s stewardship of Georgetown’s road and drainage network has produced: clogged outfall channels, collapsed culverts, streets that flood ankle-deep after forty-five minutes of rain in a city that sits below sea level. The PNC-run M&CC has had decades to maintain these assets. It has not done so. Not because of insufficient authority, but because of insufficient capacity, insufficient revenue collection, and insufficient political will to do the unglamorous work of drain clearance and road maintenance.
When central government steps in to take over streets that the municipality cannot maintain, you can frame it as a power grab or you can frame it as emergency triage. The honest answer is that the residents on those streets are not interested in jurisdictional theory. They are interested in whether the water recedes.
Walton writes, near the end of her piece, that “development is not a slogan, nor is it measured only in oil revenues or new roads and bridges. It is measured in the strength of our institutions.” She is right. But institutional strength is not measured by how long an institution is allowed to underperform without consequence. It is measured by whether the institution delivers for the people it serves. The M&CC, by any honest reckoning, has not. Defending its prerogatives without demanding its performance is not a defence of democracy. It is a defence of the comfortable fiction that democratic form is sufficient without democratic function.
I firmly believe that a government that refuses to act because action might look forceful is not governing at all. It is posing. And posing, in a country with Guyana’s infrastructure deficits and institutional gaps, is a luxury that ordinary citizens cannot afford.
The most dangerous shift in state power, therefore, is not a government that enforces the law too loudly. It is a government that stops enforcing it altogether because the commentary class finds enforcement unseemly.
The positions in this blog are entirely my own. I use AI tools in my editorial workflow, from research to grammar and spell check. Every piece reflects my judgment, my direction, and my willingness to stand behind it.