ONE politician sued another after being called a “low life.” The famous social media influencer, Michael Rodriques, that uses the pen name, “Guyanese Critic” waded into the controversy and announced that he invented the term “low life.”

Actually, years ago I used the term low-life to describe the bacchanalian crowd of fun-seekers that occupy the seawall road in the afternoon after 5 PM. I can remember doing two articles on these low-lives but I can only find one – Saturday, February 13, 2021 – “On the seawall, Friday morning: This is what Guyana has become.”

In that article I wrote the following; “I have seen well-to-do people park on the seawall road, west of Camp Road between Camp Road and the Kitty pump station and they make it difficult for you to pass – the seawall road is narrow. Yet there is a huge parapet on the seawall road to park on. Yes, I have seen the ‘low life types’ do just that on the seawall road but I have seen the fools from the middle and upper classes do that too.”

Low-life, as commonly used, refers to certain groups of people from both the proletarian and the lumpen-proletariat.

The assignment of the term low-life, in many cases locally, is misleading. Low-life is not a class role. Low-life is a mentality that cuts across social classes. The horse-cart driver can be a low-life. The nouveau riche has members that are low-life practitioners. They have no consciousness of what manners and etiquettes are.

I use the term low-life mostly in the psychological context rather than applying it to someone who throws an empty bottle out of his/her car window. For me, low-life is also about lack of values.
I came face to face with my definition of low-life by using the seawall road to get to the Eve Leary beach. I “grew up” on the Georgetown seawall because my father worked there. He worked as the head groundsman for Saint Stanislaus cricket ground. As a 10-year-old boy, I would leave school and go and stay with my father. I did that for years and the ambience of the seawall crept into my DNA.

I never left the seawall until I went abroad to study. I came back in 1984 and I resumed my residence at the Georgetown seawall since then. You can find me and my dog there this evening. I live at Turkeyen. So I would travel westward and enter the seawall road to get to the Eve Leary beach. I was doing that for years until the low lives hijacked the seawall road and chased me away.

You cannot travel on the seawall road going east from Eve Leary CID or going west from the Kitty pump station. After 5 PM each day (with Sunday night being total chaos), bacchanalian revelers take over that that part of the seawall that they are entitled to enjoy but not the actual roadway.

My 2021 column cited above was about that. Now I am writing about it in 2024. I have no problem whatsoever with people enjoying themselves on the beachfront. The mighty Atlantic sits right in Georgetown to be enjoyed. And there is sufficient space for you to park and have your escapades. But why take over an important roadway that links Kingston with the East Coast?

People from the East Coast who work in the heart of the city use that roadway to go home in the afternoon. People travelling from the East Coast to go to Marriott, the Pegasus, Eve Leary police departments and the DPP use that road. These low-life people have no conscience. They park on the seawall road itself. The grassy parapet is so wide that you don’t need to put your car on the road.

These low lives are people from different classes and different ethnicities. The most horrifying ordeal is that you cannot pass and they won’t move their vehicles and you dare not ask them to move. The police patrol the area every night and couldn’t be bothered with the confusion they see. On Friday, Minister Edghill announced that widening of the road will begin shortly and the vendors will have to move.

I feel sorry for the vendors because it is the low-lives that have brought this on them. The low-lives park right alongside the vendors to buy their liquor, thus blocking the roadway. But I have a question for Bishop Edghill. Why does he think the low-lives will not return after the road is widened and we go back to square one?