Even as early as a few weeks ago it seemed likely that the floods which, official reports suggest, have now reached proportions of a crisis sufficiently severe as to warrant an appeal for international help, could escalate beyond the control of the country’s fragile response capabilities. We need to ask ourselves whether the crises that often arise out of flooding of various levels of severity annually, do not persist in their severity because we have not done as much as we might have, to mitigate their impact.
Contextually, this newspaper well recalls a discourse with the young Toshao from Karadarnau a few weeks ago, who spoke ruefully about what he thought was the indifference of the coastal authorities to indigenous recommendations that have to do with constructing homes and engineering drainage in a manner that takes account of the need to erect the best possible defences against flooding.
The consequences that floods bring in their wake are characteristically multi-dimensional, beginning with the loss of life and property, including crops and livestock, with the attendant knock-on into food shortages that ravage the affected communities and diseases that derive from dead animals, waters that become stagnant and infection-ridden and remain where they are, spawning outbreaks of diseases. We remember too, the Berbice widow and farmer bemoaning the loss of several head of cattle to the floodwaters, her remaining livestock encamped on her doorstep, just about the only spot on her spread that wasn’t under water.
As President Irfaan Ali was quoted in the media as saying last week the horror of the flooding and its consequences cannot be fully comprehended from the distance of a media report. You have to be there to see and feel the suffering of the victims.
It was this kind of ‘boots on the ground’ perspective which, one expects, would allow for the President’s visits, presumably intended to be a kind of morale-booster to the victims to be followed up by a multi-faceted avalanche of practical responses, designed, in the first instance, to address issues that have to do with food, shelter and human health and afterwards, with rebuilding.
We learnt earlier this week, officially, that there are pockets of disaster associated with the floods and that might be beyond our local remedial capabilities. Any external help that is forthcoming ought, correctly, to be attended by a corresponding bi-partisan effort that seeks to transcend the prevailing political environment.
Beyond that, it is to the longer term that we must look in search of a solution to the problem of floods and their consequences. Changing weather patterns may well have made periodic heavy rainfall a fait accompli so that while we contemplate those areas of investment into which we will sink our ‘oil dollars’ we need, surely to spare a thought for investments in projects that will help to mitigate against what, all too frequently are, the horrendous effects of bad weather. Here it is not just a matter of protecting life and property but also one of developing a more robust and decentralized infrastructure that takes account of the peculiarities of the various communities. Allied to this, of course, must be a dimension that seeks to ensure that our food security capabilities are not overly compromised by any flooding crisis. We cannot, of course, create a comprehensive response structure overnight, though one imagines that if we can minimize the customary dithering and adjusting of priorities from one political administration to another, then a decentralized flood response infrastructure, with the CDC at its centre, can be established over, perhaps, a few years. Certainly, it is one of the ways in which our earnings from the oil and gas industry can be expended.
No initiative can, of course, be considered more worthy of a collective approach than a significantly strengthened flood response/mitigation capability and surely the least that our political forces can do is to agree on a structure that possesses a patently bipartisan purpose.
