The handover of 22 garbage compact trucks to the 19 Neighbourhood Democratic Councils and three municipalities of Region Six on Friday was a genuinely commendable act of governance. Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo did not simply hand over the keys and wave for the cameras. He issued a direct warning to local authorities that the vehicles must not be used for private work, must not be parked in compounds, and must be deployed consistently in service of the communities they were purchased to serve. That level of accountability messaging at a handover ceremony is not nothing. It deserves acknowledgement.

But standing in the shadow of that commendable moment is a question that the ceremony did not address and that no minister has answered adequately: what about Georgetown?

The nationwide garbage truck distribution programme has now reached Regions One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, Nine, and Ten. Minister of Local Government Priya Manickchand committed publicly that every local authority in the country would receive a garbage truck before June, in keeping with a PPP/C manifesto promise. That is a nationwide investment in sanitation, and by every measure it is the right thing to do for communities that have long struggled with inadequate waste collection infrastructure.

Georgetown, however, is not every community. It is the capital city of a country that has spent the last three years aggressively positioning itself as a tourism destination. It is the first place a visitor lands. It is the image Guyana projects to every diplomat, investor, journalist, and traveller who arrives at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport and makes their way into the city. And right now, that image is one of overflowing drains, uncollected garbage piling at street corners, deteriorating pavements, and a waste management situation that has been the subject of persistent public complaint for years.

The contradiction is not subtle. The government speaks frequently and with genuine pride about Guyana’s tourism potential. The oil boom has created the infrastructure investment space to develop the kind of destination experience that can attract visitors at scale. New hotels are being built. The Diamond Jubilee celebrations drew tens of thousands. Visitor arrivals at CJIA reached 482,500 in the most recent reporting period. The ambition is real and the opportunity is significant.

But tourists do not arrive in Region Six first. They do not land in Region Nine. They do not form their first impression of Guyana in Lethem or Mahdia, as important as those communities are. They arrive in Georgetown. They walk through the city. They eat in its restaurants, sleep in its hotels, and post photographs of its streets to the world. What they are currently seeing and photographing is not a capital city preparing itself for the tourism era it claims to be entering. It is a city that has been neglected in ways that are increasingly difficult to explain given the scale of national revenue flowing through the treasury.

The Georgetown Mayor and City Council carries a portion of the blame for this. The management of solid waste in the capital has been a recurring failure of local government for years, complicated by financial constraints, equipment breakdowns, inconsistent collection schedules, and a culture of limited accountability within the municipal system. These are real and documented problems. But the national government cannot point to City Hall alone when it is simultaneously committing to equip every local authority in the country with the tools for improved waste management. If the programme is national, Georgetown must be part of it in a meaningful and visible way. If there are specific challenges with the City Council’s capacity to manage additional equipment, those challenges should be named publicly and addressed directly, not ignored while the rest of the country benefits.

The deeper issue is one of coherence. A government serious about tourism does not allow its capital city to communicate visual disorder to every visitor who arrives. A government serious about governance does not equip nineteen NDCs in a single region while the city those visitors land in struggles with basic sanitation. These are not either-or choices. Guyana’s oil revenues are large enough to do both. What is missing is not money. What is missing is the political will to treat Georgetown’s appearance as a national priority rather than a municipal problem.

No visitor arriving from New York, London, Toronto, or Paramaribo draws a distinction between an NDC in Corentyne and the Georgetown City Council when they form their impression of Guyana. They see the capital. They see the streets. They see whether this country respects itself enough to keep its front yard clean. Right now the answer that yard is giving them is not the one the government’s tourism messaging is trying to deliver.

The garbage trucks going to Region Six are welcome. Every community in Guyana deserves clean streets. But if we are serious about tourism, and if we mean it when we say Guyana is open for business and ready to welcome the world, then the city the world sees first must reflect that ambition. Anything less is not a political disagreement between the national government and the City Council. It is a national embarrassment, and the government that controls the budget is the one responsible for ending it.

SOURCE: Guyana Chronicle, “22 garbage trucks handed over to Region Six,” May 30, 2026