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THE RIGHT STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
Mar 22, 2009 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
One of Guyana’s leading authors once wrote that the best way to experience the city of Georgetown is by foot. Not anymore.
Walking down Regent Street today is the best physical fitness regimen one can have. Just a simple stroll along the pavements can leave you breathless from all the contortions just to avoid colliding with fellow pedestrians and pavement dwelling. This is good for trimming your waistline.
And your cardiovascular system is going to have a good workout from your body having to manoeuvre the undulating pavements that we now have. Because of flooding, many property owners have been forced to raise the level of the pavement in front of their homes and businesses, thus creating that undulating surface.
Billions of dollars have been spent by city property owners in trying to keep flood waters from inundating their properties. If only a fraction of this amount had been given to the City Council to maintain the drains in the city, there would have been no flooding.
This has been proven in the case of downtown Water Street. Two years ago, the slightest of downpours would leave the heart of the commercial district under ankle high water. Not anymore. In the preparations for Cricket World Cup 2007, a group of business persons and private citizens got together and began to enhance the area. This process entailed keeping the very shallow drains clean. Not many persons felt that this would have eased the flooding but it has.
It just goes to show as to how expertly the British laid out the drainage of this city. There is no need to reconfigure the city’s drains. All that is needed, as the experience of downtown Georgetown has shown, is for these drains and canals to be kept clean.
I hope that the memorandum of understanding recently signed by the Government of Guyana and the Mayor and City Council of Georgetown would lead to an effort to de-silt and maintain these canals and drains, because it would save property owners in the city billions of dollars in construction costs. These owners would no longer have to elevate their premises and the pavements in front of their premises in order to prevent flooding. The drainage system would be much improved and there would be greater savings for all concerned.
Greater disposable income and savings is the right tonic for the present crisis we are now facing. The objective of any firewall to be constructed at this time should be to prevent the further erosion of living standards in this country because there is nothing which can destroy a country more, as our own experience has shown, than the migration of the middle class because of a decline in their standards of living.
A few weeks ago I was passing along Lamaha Street, east of Vlissengen Road. I noticed some men cleaning the Lamaha Canal of its heavy overgrowth of weeds. I also saw a truck from the City Council picking up the debris that was removed from the canal.
It struck me that a lot of the cleaning of the canals that has been taking place in recent years has been in the removal of aquatic growth. Yet this is something which can be done manually and which in the process can create hundreds of jobs for labourers.
While in normal circumstances, it would be cheaper and more efficient to have such jobs done by machinery, we are not living in normal circumstances. We need to create continuous employment for our people and the municipality of Georgetown can lead the way, as it did in the sixties and seventies, in creating hundreds of jobs for Guyanese while maintaining the city in a pristine condition.
As Guyana grapples with the downturn in the global economy it needs to create more jobs and therefore greater priority should be given to labour intensive methods of work. I hope that the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the government and the Mayor and City Council would give recognition to this principle and that the resources now being provided to City Hall would help create jobs to keep the city in a good condition.
The government must therefore be commended for having reached this agreement. It is perhaps the first acknowledgment that the problems of the city go beyond its management and involves the need for additional funding. The signing of the Memorandum of Understanding is a right step in the right direction and one can only hope that the Council will not blow the opportunity presented to develop a better working relationship with central government.
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