By Mark DaCosta- Days after deep trenches opened along grass parapets in several Georgetown communities, the Ministry of Works has finally explained itself. The works are a shoulder-improvement programme meant to firm up roadsides, ease parking pressure and improve drainage. Residents, however, say they were left in the dark, and the digging has pushed vehicles and pedestrians into the driving lanes. The central question is not whether the capital needs better roadsides. It is whether the project was planned and communicated with the people who must live alongside it.
For several days, motorists and pedestrians in Queenstown, Alberttown and other areas navigated a puzzle with no explanation. Verges / parapets that Georgetowners have long used for parking and walking were suddenly opened up, and nobody official said why. It took a post by journalist Gordon Moseley to draw the Ministry out. “Development is welcomed but it must also make sense and residents ought to be consulted,” he wrote, adding that the Works Ministry “should explain its plan.” The Ministry’s statement followed shortly afterwards, on Thursday, November 5.
According to that statement, contracts have been awarded and work is under way in some communities. parapets will be cleared, excavated and packed with compacted crusher-run or similar aggregate. The Ministry says this will replace surfaces that turn muddy in the rains and hold water in hollows. It also argues that some verges have crept higher than the road itself, blocking runoff into the drains and worsening ponding. Reshaping them, it says, will let water move off the carriageway, while the granular material allows some seepage to replenish groundwater. The Ministry has stressed that the surfaces will stay granular, with no concrete cast.
The statement is just as direct about who is expected to help. Derelict vehicles, unauthorised shops and structures, and stockpiled building materials have accumulated on road reserves over the years, and owners are being told to remove them. The Ministry describes the effort as phased. The first phase creates usable shoulders and recovers obstructed space, with some locations possibly supporting future widening after assessment. Tree planting would come later. Similar works are planned for Regions Two, Three, Four, Five and Six, so this is a coastal programme, not a Georgetown experiment.
The scale appears considerable. Reporting by the Guyana Chronicle indicates that about 50 contractors are working across the city, with nearly 260 shoulder projects identified for Georgetown and more than 2,000 nationwide. The same report quotes Public Works Minister Juan Edghill telling residents that pavements and road reserves in front of their homes are state property, and warning that chains and boulders placed on reserves could hamper the upgrades. That is a firm statement of the State’s position. It does not answer the complaint that many householders learned of the works only when the machines arrived. Some residents say they received notices as work was starting, and others say they received none.
Here the Ministry’s logic and the street-level experience diverge. A programme that promises better parking and safer movement has, for now, delivered the opposite. Village Voice News observed excavations that, by its estimate, run three to five feet deep and up to six feet wide. Stretches of streets that were already narrow have effectively become single-lane. With the verges unusable, drivers are leaving vehicles in the traffic lanes, and the elderly, schoolchildren and the infirm are being pushed into the path of traffic. In a city where reckless motorcyclists and minibus operators are an everyday hazard, losing the parapets as a refuge is no small matter.
A veteran taxi operator who spoke to this publication on Wednesday, November 4, before the Ministry’s statement, put the danger in stark terms. He said he had no idea what the authorities were doing and had assumed it was a sewerage or water-supply installation. The roads have been unruly for years, he said, but the digging adds “a new and alarming dimension.” He confessed to having considered a grim scenario in which he must choose between striking an errant driver and hitting a pedestrian or a law-abiding vehicle. He has resolved to hit the errant driver, and he hopes never to face that choice. His practical criticism was simpler. Work could have been staggered, he suggested, with alternate streets done in turn so that road users always had a workable route. “This is Guyana,” he added, with a shrug that many readers will recognise.
The driver also alleged that the government manufactures work for favoured contractors and that kickbacks change hands. He offered no evidence, and such claims cannot be verified. They are reported here only because they reflect a level of public cynicism that the Ministry cannot ignore. In a country where citizens have learned to expect that major projects arrive without consultation, silence breeds suspicion, and the Ministry’s explanation came only after public pressure, not before the first excavator moved.
The engineering case may well be sound. Georgetown floods readily, earthen verges do deteriorate, and a firmer shoulder could improve both drainage and parking. But sound engineering is not the same as sound implementation. Phasing the works, publishing schedules, notifying residents in advance and keeping at least one safe pedestrian route open on every street are modest demands. Until the Ministry meets them, Georgetowners will keep asking why the explanation arrived after the trenches did.
