Dear Editor,
As I travelled across the Essequibo Coast, I saw a great danger emerging when the rain began to fall. All the sluices or koker doors are blocked up by drift mud (slush mud) for miles going towards the sea. For decades most of these kokers were not operating, some were even condemned by the previous administration causing floods in the housing areas and the rice fields.
These were kokers built when Essequibo had 36 grinding sugar estates starting from Walton Hall to Spring Garden in the south. There is a need for the flushing out of the drift mud from the front of these kokers. I doubt that the Minister of Agriculture is aware of this development. In the past, crops and livestock were lost due to this same situation. and no one seems concerned to correct this situation.
These sluice doors were clogged up for years. There is a drainage and irrigation and sea defence department which falls under the office of the regional vice chairperson at Anna Regina and I doubt that she is aware of the mud taking over these kokers.
Following the great flood of 2005, the previous administration never thought of building the levee system and jetties to send the sediment into the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the coastal marshes began eroding inwards to the sea defence which has now clogged up these sluices and the mangrove trees which were there on the coastal shore have disappeared.
Blockage of these sluices now poses a real and immediate threat to the future of agriculture in this region. Unfortunately, our elected officials haven’t come forward with a plan to protect and rebuild these abandoned and condemned sluices or to even try to excavate them before the rain comes. Anna Regina, La Belle Alliance, Lima and Hampton Court had large and deep canals with the construction of complex locks and sluices in the late nineteenth century. These structures are still here but not in the same condition.
I am calling on the Minister of Agriculture and his specialist engineers to urgently look into this matter before the rain begins to fall.
Yours faithfully,
Mohamed Khan
