It’s probably worth mentioning that just as we were beginning to wonder when Mr. Ramotar’s Preacher/Politician would make the media headlines GINA has announced that the Bishop is on the move, dispatched to the Canal Polder as part of the well-publicised Cabinet fan-out to talk with the farmers about just how the floods are affecting them.
How fitting that the Bishop’s first field assignment requires him to walk on water. It would have been nice if he had been asked – as his first field assignment – to look into the claims of ‘funny business’ in the treasuries of some of the Regional Administrations. But then you can’t have everything and the Bishop has to understand that he has to start at the bottom and work his way up.
By GINA’s account though, it was a pretty mundane conversation that the Bishop had with the farmers. One of the things which GINA says was that the farmers told the Bishop “that some of their crops were under water.” You have to wonder where else the crops could possibly have been if the area was flooded or whether the farmers might have been expecting that the Bishop could resurrect their crops. GINA says too that the farmers “claimed that the canal needs to have better maintenance.” Was it a “claim,” an unsubstantiated assertion, that is, or was it a long-established fact that has been told to several other Ministers visiting during periods floods long before the Bishop became a big time politician.
Here’s another thing that the farmers told Bishop Juan. They told him that the canal is affected by heavy “shrimp moss” and that it is this that is preventing the water from draining. Now it would hardly surprise us if the Bishop wouldn’t recognize “shrimp moss” if he were to be garlanded with it. His portfolio says Junior Minister of Finance not of aquatic plants though we concede that these are useful lessons for a man whom, were he to perform some miracle to bring the woes of the farmers to an end might yet be made Agriculture Minister. The other thing, of course, is that if, as GINA says, “the moss grows six inches daily” it means that the thing grows before your very eyes and that by now it can probably pass for a section of our rainforest.
It does appear that the Bishop got pretty intimate with the farmers; they talked about desilting the sluice mouth and about diverting the water from the Parfait Harmonie Dairy Farm through the Goed Fortuin Koker and they even probed the suspicion that some persons may have – deliberately, it seems, blocked a diversion and that it was this that had contributed considerably to the plight of the farmers.
No fishes and loaves though. It seems that food is not a problem in the Canal, a circumstance that may well have disappointed the Bishop since that might have been a good opportunity for him to perform his first miracle as Junior Minister of Finance.
Now from all that GINA has said Bishop Juan went down to the Canal Polder mainly to show his face and to take notes. According to GINA, like all the other Cabinet Ministers the Junior Finance Minister was sent out on a sort of a scouting exercise, “to check on the situation then to relay their concerns to the President. After that the Ministers of Agriculture and Health “will be guided in their interventions” which is just another way of saying that the farmers in Canal Polder will just have to hold strain though GINA did say that once a tete- a- tete with the farmers was done the Bishop “made immediate contact with Dr. Bheri who will probably be dashing down to the Canal Polder himself with a few doctors and nurses just in case it’s more than just the crops that are affected………. And by the way GINA says that he “touched base” with residents of Craig, Coverden and Mocha while he was at it. Quite a jaunt, we’d say.