While the squatters at Success were slowly being submerged under water and the police were firing pellet rounds, President Irfaan Ali was at the Providence Stadium in dream mode. He was attending the opening of a two-day exercise for the distribution of land titles called ‘Dream Realised’ held by the Ministry of Housing and Water.
Addressing himself to the squatters he said, “My brothers and sisters at Success… we want you to own your homes too; that is why we sent the housing team so many times to see you. We want to help you. We are going to move as fast as possible in this programme but I am appealing to Guyanese let us do it the right way.”
The right way, as it turns out, is not something that can be accomplished quickly. The President, himself a former Minister of Housing, assured the crowd at the National Stadium that there were at least four new housing developments which would soon be embarked on, and that applicants from 2016 and before would be given priority. However, the 50,000 house lots which he has promised to distribute over the next five years will be developed as part of hubs, in order to create areas of density which would be connected by a transportation network. “We cannot talk about sustainability in a housing programme if we cannot create areas of density,” he said. “Areas of density create demand. Demand creates jobs, it creates new growth poles, new towns.”
This vision is to be achieved through public-private partnerships. The President said the government was “bringing together the hardware stores, the banks, the builders, the contractors, the developers, to achieve economies of scale,” and that by granting these businesses a ready market pool of, say, 25 houses it reduced their marketing and operational costs. Both the original concept with the added complexity of public-private arrangements, mean that these projected housing schemes are not about to materialise in the very short term, even if the Success squatters occupying GuySuCo land were given priority treatment.
Their story, like so many others in this country, is one of government inaction and confusion. Most of them did not arrive on the land yesterday, but have been there for some time. Opposition leader Joseph Harmon was quick to jump into the fray, but the truth of the matter is that when APNU+AFC was in government they did nothing about the squatters, despite the fact that they, like their predecessors, pronounced squatting unacceptable. They have now bequeathed the problem to the present administration, in a situation where GuySuCo wants to reclaim its land for cane-growing purposes.
As has happened several times before, quite a number of the squatters are refusing to move, and it is likely that many of them genuinely do not have anywhere else to go. While some of them have been offered land, the bottom line is that there are no developments with the infrastructure already in place where they could be sent right now. Since they have been given nothing as an alternative, they are resisting eviction.
This newspaper spoke to Jagnarine, for example, who used to be a taxi driver, but became unemployed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and was unable to pay the rent for his home any longer. He said he had invested in his little house which he had built in May, after squatting in the area since March. He had no other option, he said, and did not intend to move since he had already put money into his home. “I never know cane so important to fight down the people so hard to cultivate cane,” he remarked. He was one of those who said he had applied for a house lot since 2003, and that nothing had happened.
Then there was Dalian, who told our reporter that before she started squatting she had been using her children’s child support money to pay the rent. Although it was intended for feeding the children, because of her very small income and unstable employment she could not afford the rent, and so what her child-father sent was diverted to ensure they had a roof over their heads. Like several others we spoke to, she said she was not fighting for the GuySuCo land specifically, but for an allocation of land so she and her children could have a home. “I don’t want to fight the government,” she said.
For her part Abigail Baker accused GuySuCo of not approaching the squatters in the proper way, or giving them enough time, or offering a solution to the land issue. “I don’t mind giving up the land,” she said, “but where we gonna sleep tonight?” She then explained how the matter should have been approached: they should have given people notice, and if there were structures they should help to rebuild them because people’s money was involved.
The government flooded the land probably because they wanted to avoid scenes of the police tear-gassing mothers with small children. Flooding, however, is an equally dangerous tactic, if more insidiously so, given the absence of adequate sanitation arrangements and the consequent danger of disease. It seems, however, that in any case the government did not confine itself to flooding. The squatters told Stabroek News that the police had opened fire on them without warning, and they insisted that despite the police statement about the attempted robbery on GuySuCo guards, no criminal activity had been involved. It was a matter, they said, of government excavators which were used to dig drainage for the water flooding the land being employed to break down their homes, and of them attempting to block them. It was then, they said, that the police discharged rounds of pellets at them. Some of them showed our reporter their injuries. One man named Carl said that the equipment from his house had been taken, because he was not there when the excavator demolished it.
The government has gone about this in the wrong way. The first thing they should have recognised is that there is a pandemic, and that more people are trying to eke out an existence below the breadline than is normally the case.
In addition, a lot of workers who were formerly employed are now jobless. They should have assumed, therefore, that a goodly proportion of the Success squatters may fall into one or another of these categories. Using excavators to destroy the few possessions of those, some of whom are already dispossessed, says nothing for the caring approach of the authorities.
Given the above, the second thing they should have taken into account is that a significant number of the squatters literally have nowhere else to go. Human considerations aside, it should have crossed their minds that the last thing they want politically speaking, would be news stories of single mothers with children, for example, living and begging on the streets.
Even if the government are prepared to offer house lots – and as indicated above they have said they are – they must have some temporary arrangements in place to accommodate these people in the meantime. In other words, you cannot move the squatters out unless you have somewhere to put them. Ideally, that should not be somewhere temporary, but a piece of land. Even if the infrastructure is not quite ready as yet, work could be slated to start on it immediately and the Success people could still move there in the interim. Mr Harmon pointed to the example of Plastic City, where squatters were given assistance to move, and that should apply here too.
Even though this is not a problem of the current administration’s making, they are the ones who have to address it, and in doing that they cannot allow humanitarian concerns to be overwhelmed by agricultural demands.
