What CARICOM Heads saw and didn’t see

Jul 05, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I live on the Railway Embankment next to the CARICOM Secretariat and the Convention Centre. There is a trench on the southern side of the road which looks like a jungle. This small waterway caused a huge controversy one year after the Great Floods. It was a disturbing indication of the appalling degeneracy of the regime that controls this country. At the junction of the Railway Embankment and the UG Access Road at Cummings Lodge, an investor, very closely aligned to powerful people, was given permission to fill the trench and on the trench and part of the reserve build a business place.

Engineering work was advanced when this column with other sections of the media alerted the people of this country to the pathological levels the PPP Government had descended to. This area just one year before was the scene of the worst natural disaster Guyana ever saw in its entire history since the Dutch first came here.
The trench the investor was building on is a holding pond. To have filled it would have resulted in unimaginable disaster whenever the rains came to Industry, Turkeyen, Cummings Lodge. It was simply an unforgivable act by politicians who witnessed first hand what the Great Floods did.

Let me digress just a little bit. I use the plural to refer to what happened in January 2005. For me there were two inundations. One was what the rains did to Georgetown and to the lower East Coast. The other was the devastation the overtopping of the Conservancy did to the villages of the lower East Coast.
The Government resisted an investigation. But the entire country knows that the flood of January 2005 went into February and lasted for three weeks on the lower East Coast because the Conservancy was leaking. One day, if there is a new government, they should let this dark secret come to light.
Let me return to the holding pond episode. Here was a ruling clique that was fully aware that this was a trench that drained water from three villages yet ignored the traumas of the Great Floods and permitted a construction on top of this waterway.

The last time this trench was cleared was during the Commonwealth Finance Ministers conference in 2007. Watching the huge Hymac machines in front of my home, I wrote a column titled “Dinosaurs eat a baby in front of my home.” It was a satirical piece on the hypocrisy of this Government.
The jungle was only cleared when we had high-level dignitaries from abroad. Since 2007, the trench has returned to its jungle status. Then came last week. Guyana was hosting the annual CARICOM Heads meeting. And the Hymac tentacles were in the trench in front of my home again. What should be a frequent exercise in any normal country returned two years after it first appeared.
The exercise outside of my house was a smaller manifestation of hypocrisy in comparison to what has taken place in selected parts of the city. In certain parts of Georgetown, where visiting CARICOM officials would pass, the cleaning was meticulous.

Readers would not understand what meticulous means here by reading this column. They had to see the men at work. I saw workers literally bending on their knees picking old grass from the parapet on Homestretch Avenue. It was as extreme as that. Areas of Georgetown that have been neglected for years were suddenly given a humongous face-lift. It was the usual barefacedness whenever we host an international meeting.
When it was the Rio Summit, the Commonwealth Finance Ministers confabulation, World Cup Cricket and Carifesta, a smelly, stink, dirty looking capital was cleaned and painted over. But only where it mattered.
Carifesta came to the National Park and the recreation centre was spruced up. The East Bank from Houston to Providence was lit up for cricket.

The Railway Embankment gets refurbishing whenever foreign VIPs enter the Convention Centre. The present dressing up is for the visiting CARICOM Heads.
The deeper meaning of these episodic manifestations of aesthetic renovation is tragic and sickening. Georgetown is generally viewed by anyone who has seen it as a city that is awfully unpleasant. No country deserves to have such a stink capital. It is an assault on the dignity of every citizen of this country to keep its capital mired in miasma, putridity and filth and parts of it are only cleaned up when we have important visitors from important countries.
The CARICOM Heads may have seen some handsome parts of the city the past two days. But there are dark sections of Georgetown that would have sent them on a plane back home right away had they seen these hell-holes.

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What CARICOM Heads saw and didn’t see

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