Dear Editor,
AS I listened over the years to the senior elected officials both past and present of the Georgetown Municipality and their utterances, I am reminded of the famous statement by Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, who said that if you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth.

There is a big lie that has been peddled for three decades now, and that is that central government has been starving the Georgetown Municipality of resources, those being money, manpower and machinery. There is nothing further from the truth.

In fact, to the contrary, the central government has been bending over backwards in meeting all of its financial obligations to the council in a very timely manner, quite often paying property rates for government buildings well in advance of the stipulated timelines to help out an always cash-strapped council.

Central government has also been paying over their subventions fully, and by the way, Georgetown gets the highest subvention of all municipalities.

There has also been funding for most if not all of the road and bridge building and repairs in the city for the longest while, a vast majority of landscaping, and the provision of huge sums of money owed by council to garbage contractors time and again.

The central government has donated trucks, large amounts of skip bins and other garbage collecting equipment to the City Council, it has helped to clean the cemetery more than once, and it has been investing huge amounts to purchase drainage pumps to help the city with its flooding problems.

Under the direct leadership of the President, central government agencies, along with military and para-military service men and women and in collaboration with the private sector, civil society and community groups, not so long ago, embarked on a city-wide clean up and desilting exercise. It should be noted that the mayor and his party councillors refused to participate.

Central government developed the Haags Bosch sanitary landfill on the East Bank of Demerara, which receives waste from all the wards in Georgetown after their incinerator became unserviceable and their landfill at Le Repentir was overflowing and frequently catching alight to the peril of neighbouring communities. And the list goes on and on.

Psychologists, psychiatrists and others have explained why the big lie technique works. Repetition is important, because the ‘big lie’ works through indoctrination. The Big Lie then becomes its own evidence base – if it is repeated enough, people believe it, and the very repetition almost tautologically becomes the support for the lie.

Georgetown has had political leaders who have no care for the common good of the citizenry, who are grandiose, arrogant, and willing to exploit and manipulate people for solely their own political agenda and that of their party.

With Local Government Elections around the corner, one can only hope that we get a new batch of city fathers and mothers who are not so megalomaniacal and narcissistic as we have had over the last three decades.

Yours respectfully,
Riley Matthews