Last Thursday’s deluge and the attendant filth and chaos which it visited on the capital are nothing unusual. For all the damage that it did flooding has become an occupational hazard of dwelling or working in Georgetown and its environs, so that we have learnt to accept such events without becoming overly melodramatic about the consequences.
Whenever it happens we re-state the sorry grim tale – the flooding of homes and the losses to residents and businesses, and inconveniences like the closure of schools and business places. Those too we tend not to dwell on. The media report on them then we move on.
What is worth reflecting on, however, is the context within which occurrences like last week’s flooding took place. There is, first, a seeming national resignation to an altogether remediable situation which, in itself, is a poignant comment on public confidence in those whose responsibility it is to salvage and upgrade our capital.
That is a collective responsibility that requires the application of equal measures of material investment, collective stakeholder commitment and political will. All of these have been sorely lacking so that the problem persists like a monument to our folly.
The current emergency is occurring in a circumstance where the necessity for a hasty recourse to the National Assembly will raise a different set of issues and where, moreover, the political season is far from convivial for such extra-parliamentary discourse as might create an enabling environment for an attempt at a collective solution. The government and the parliamentary opposition are simply not talking. The fact that we live in the belly of such a discomfiting political circumstance is bound to accentuate any emergency that might arise.
In effect, we now dwell in a socio-political condition in which the welfare of the city (and the country as a whole) is subsumed beneath a mountain of political ill will and more particularly beneath the will of the executive.
Nor can we take an iota of pride in a political culture that triggers tirades of theatrical public excursions into invective and rhetoric whenever occurrences like last weekend’s flooding happen. Apart from their lack of any real remedial motive such outbursts are designed to do no more than score cheap political points while adding to the decibel level in the kind of discourse that never quite makes any sense in the first place. Those outbursts simply ‘loop’ the same language and the same accusations in a monotonous blame game that holds no more than nuisance value.
It is not as though we do not have an awareness of much of what it will take to bring a measure of relief from flooding in Georgetown. It is, among other things, a matter of ensuring the free flow of our waterways, the efficient functioning of our pumps and kokers and a far greater element of mindfulness and efficiency in the disposal of our garbage. On the whole, it is a matter of practising the environmental lessons which the government, particularly, preaches with monotonous regularity. Even that we have continually failed to accomplish.
Some of what is required, admittedly, necessitates the allocation of considerable resources, even though one is bound to ask whether we value our capital so little that we refuse to incrementally apply ‘doses’ of capital to remedying the problem of flooding in circumstances where it is no secret that considerable resources are spent, sometimes squandered, on far less worthwhile pursuits.
So that the question that arises is whether we have invested sufficient collective effort, material resources and political will in the search for a permanent remedy to flooding in the city and that answer is an emphatic no… We have not been able to get past the ceaseless chatter, the blame game and the political invective and in the process we have left our capital vulnerable, exposed.
It is the political will, one feels, that is the major issue. Central government has demonstrated time and again its eagerness to play politics in the matter of financing the municipality which itself has continually demonstrated that its weaknesses extend beyond its financial limitations and into the realm of acute incompetence. It will be recalled too that a former Local Government Minister is on record as making an altogether inane pronouncement about the likely consequences of the municipality’s failure to serve the city well and that the pronouncement ventured into unwholesome political brinkmanship and, presumably, mirrored the political administration’s political posture.
In the matter of managing the capital – as with so many other things – we continue to nurture a national climate that grows more polluted by divisions that are rooted in political power games and partisanship. Increasingly, those who sound their voices do so mostly out of a desire to take a side, their underlying perspective being that all we really need to do is to fight our respective political corners, staying the same counterproductive political course in the process rather than recognizing that in matters that are critical to the collective good we simply must rise above our political prejudices. It is either that or we no longer have the moral right to govern or otherwise to lead.
Surely there can be no point in President Donald Ramotar waxing warm about the virtues of investing in the tourism sector and in marketing Guyana abroad in circumstances where his administration has simply not demonstrated a corresponding will to look after the capital as any central government should. Indeed, even as we await the outcome of the ensuing half a billion dollar urban cleanup we cannot help but wonder to ourselves just how far that will go towards remedying the problem of flooding and otherwise rendering our capital more presentable. And as far as enhancing visitor arrivals is concerned, the President must surely be aware that in a global tourism environment where visitors are increasingly demanding value for money a pristine Marriott Hotel in a city that habitually floods and stinks will not ‘cut it.’
Once the President invests his own political capital in talking up tourism he simultaneously takes upon himself a corresponding responsibility to see to it that our capital is as ready as it can be to host visitors.
Nor is it that over time we have not been served with fair warning. Up to last Wednesday the vendors at Bourda Market had been fretting over what by then was an alarming buildup of rotting garbage on the northernmost section of Orange Walk just opposite Deen’s Pharmacy, even as the rains were closing in. The day after the rains came and it was only after that deluge had come and gone and done its damage that the municipality turned its attention to what, by then, had become a far more onerous exercise than it otherwise would have been. This is precisely the kind of repetitive folly that makes us a complete laughing stock.
More pertinent is the fact that since the two major floods of 2005 and 2006 the government has been unable to do much to stem the tide of flooding that descends upon coastal Guyana – and more particularly, the capital – unfailingly one year after another. That is an issue that it can neither ignore nor sidestep.
We are now close to the peak season (Christmas) for the reckless disposal of garbage and the attendant clogging of our waterways. One might argue that last weekend’s events were a blessing in disguise (the high cost of the flooding notwithstanding) and that we might now be encouraged to put measures in place to prevent another flood of the proportions of the one of last weekend. As it happens, precedent provides no indication that we are inclined to learn from our errors. As Christmas draws closer government may rue its decision to postpone the banning of styrofoam container imports which was due to come into force earlier this year. Perhaps the error in the postponement will occur to us sooner rather than later when we stare ruefully into our overtopped drains and canals to find mountains of those used receptacles staring back at us.
