There was a familiar air of fretfulness and frustration among market vendors at the start of the week as they bemoaned their loss of trade and spoilage of goods arising out of last weekend’s ferocious downpour which, predictably, immersed in the capital and other coastal areas in several inches of water.
The evidence at the municipal markets and elsewhere laid bare once again the unacceptable risks which the small businesses occupying those trading spaces must run. Simultaneously, it underscores the monumental failure on the parts of both the Georgetown municipality and central government to bring even a measure of relief from the flooding and the abject ineffectiveness of urban business support organizations in mounting an effective lobby to at least force some modest measure of improvement in the situation.
These are all issues on which this newspaper has reported previously and their repetition in this column, far from arising out of any expectation that this time around there will be a miracle solution, is really intended to send a message to the new political administration that on this particular issue there is no post-elections honeymoon on offer. We cannot go on like this.
By early in the week the new Infrastructure Minister was going to some trouble to remind us of what we have been told repeatedly in the past, that is, that the infrastructure associated with preventing the flooding of the city is in tatters. When we spoke with Mayor Hamilton Green on Tuesday he promised a press conference, presumably, to repeat the same thing. There was talk, too, about a task force to look more closely at the situation. No one needs reminding of course that in our Republic, the term ‘task force’ has come to be associated with things being put ‘on ice.’
The best that can be said about all of these pronouncements, of course, is that we have heard them all before and that unless the interregnum between diagnosis and remedy becomes dramatically shorter than is customarily the case, we really need no further reminders about the extent to which the drainage systems in the city are compromised.
Frankly, what this newspaper finds far more worthy of public consideration are the consequences, mostly the economic ones, for the long-suffering traders and vendors – from the high street merchants to the market vendors – who, while they too are culpable in the clogging of the drains that prevent the flow of water, must bear the brunt of the consequences while the essence of official response remains the same – mostly empty words.
On the subject of garbage and the clogging of drains both our garbage disposal regimen and our social awareness and public education programmes designed to alter the habits of both the authorities and the citizenry to garbage disposal have been abject failures. Both government and the City Council have performed equally badly on this area.
What further concerns this newspaper is the frightening nexus between the familiar flooding and the alarming public health risks that derive from food contamination. Little if anything ever gets said by either government or the municipality on this issue. The pattern has persisted. Flooding and its consequences, followed by more or less pointless and irrelevant public pronouncements followed by an empty interregnum before the next flood; always, there are the fruitless protestations of those who lose the most – the market vendors who operate on wafer thin profit margins and for whom occurrences like last weekend’s flooding usually spells enormous financial setback.
Hopefully, when next we hear from the subject minister, it will be on the subject of a time frame for the application of remedial measures to a crisis on which we can offer the new political administration no post-elections honeymoon.
