Tone down the talk

Dec 21, 2008 Editorial

The main concern of citizens at this time is not so much what will be on their Christmas tables — even though I am sure that all Guyanese can do with some extra cash this year.

The primary concern for the vast majority of those residing on our coastland is whether their feet will be dry, come the holidays.

The rain is pounding down on our coast with all its fury. In some areas, water is inches high on the land, and in most others, the soil is totally saturated and can hold no more water.

Yet the rains are not abating, and there is simply nowhere for the water to go. It will therefore accumulate on the land until it can be drained.

This is raising alarm bells of a possible repeat of 2005. The situation is, however, far improved from that of 2005, which in itself was a product of decades of neglect and the inadequacies of poor maintenance.
The Government has been making a serious effort since 2005 to improve the drainage system.

Its efforts, however, are clearly being curtailed by a lack of resources and the indiscriminate dumping of garbage in almost all areas. A great deal of money has, however, been spent on improving the flow of canals, installing pumps, and in de-silting, maintaining and building new outfalls.

The general strategy is concentrated almost exclusively on increasing discharge. The latter has, however, been affected by rapid accretion in some areas, particularly along the Atlantic Coastline.

Almost absent is the corollary strategy of increasing the storage of water within agricultural and residential communities by investing in holding ponds and by increasing the collection capacity of existing canals.

Even if enlightenment were to descend as regards this approach, there remains the constraint of the unavailability, in many areas, of land to develop holding ponds.

The absence of land for holding ponds located in close proximity to the outfalls has been one of the serious constraints that has limited a more wide-ranging strategy, which today is now solely limited to getting the water off the land through improving discharge volumes.

In this regard, the Government must accept some failure. For one, areas such as Northern Belfield and Lowlands have been converted into housing schemes, when they would have better served as holding ponds to improve the drainage in that critical drainage belt.

In many other areas, squatting is pervasive, thereby affecting the authorities’ ability to adopt a two-pronged approach of increasing storage of water whilst at the same time increasing the discharge at the outfalls.

The topography of the coastline also presents a serious problem. The gradient of the land is so slight as to be virtually negligible in assisting in draining the land.

Faced with the mounting prospects of challenges and unrelenting and drastically changing weather patterns, the possibility of our feet being dry for Christmas remains a remote one. The battle now seems constrained to avoiding large-scale inundation.

This in itself requires a national effort, something surely not being helped by the attitude of the Government, which continues to engage is blame- shedding.

Its most recent histrionic was a threat to take over the pumps of the City. The Government itself has had a few tweaking problems with some of its own pumps on the East Coast, and therefore could be asked who will take over these.

We certainly feel that if the Government had intended to lend a helping hand to the City Council by relieving it of the burden of operating the City’s pumps, it could have done so in less intemperate language.

The ruling administration, however, finds itself in the unenviable situation of being isolated from the very stakeholders who are now so much needed to be mobilised nationally.

We therefore urge a total rethink of the country’s drainage plans, beginning with a more conciliatory approach to stakeholders.

The Government must concede that, on the question of drainage, there is an urgent need for all hands to come on deck. To approach this matter as if it is within the wherewithal of the Government to deal is to engage is self-delusion.

If there is at this time an issue on which national rapprochement is needed, it is on the drainage question. It is not too late for the Government to tone down the rhetoric.

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