WHO CARES WHEN THE SMALL MAN SUFFERS?

Nov 23, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

We do not have a collapsed drainage system. In fact, the improved drainage infrastructure is most responsible for the increased rice production which is now soaring closer and closer to 700,000 tonnes per annum.
We also do not have a problem of resources. If one billion dollars could have been fritted away in the schools’ transportation voucher initiative; if seven hundred and eighty million dollars can be spent to build a school a mere forty miles from Brazil, and if close to nine billion dollars can be mobilized to recap one of the best public roads in the country, then there is no shortage of resources to address flooding which results in billions of losses each year.
What then, therefore, you may ask, is the reason why the country is experiencing so many floods and with such frequency? It has nothing to do with increased levels of rainfall. Anyone who is over seventy years old will attest that despite what the hydromet office is saying, we have had more rainfall in the past than what we are experiencing today. There were floods then, but not as bad as it is today in the urban centres.
If you have lived in the countryside, you would know that in the good old days it always used to flood. But the waters eventually went away. So forget about using climate change as an excuse for the flooding.
The problem is that we simply have become undisciplined and we must pay a price for this indiscipline. It is not just the littering. We have always as a nation lacked the discipline in this regard. The indiscipline that has us in the mess is of greater magnitude and involves public authorities and politics.
We have a small city, not much greater than two square miles. Yet we want to ensure that almost every square foot is converted to a business. Zoning has now gone through the window. The Central Housing and Planning Authority has to take most of the responsibility for this state of affairs. The buck stops there.
With an increase in businesses comes the covering over of the parapets for parking. This has reduced the absorptive capacity of the soils. With increased businesses, the parapets are now higher than the roads. The elevated parapets then empolder the roads. When it rains, the waters cannot run off because the parapets are higher than the roads.
But even if it could run-off, where would it run off into? Major drainage canals cannot be cleaned because persons have been allowed, encouraged by political operatives, to squat alongside these major drainage structures. No, these drainage structures have not collapsed, they have been trespassed on, and this makes their cleaning impossible.
Then there is vending which has complicated a most complicated situation. Increased vending has tripled the amount of garbage produced in the city and, more importantly, it has frustrated the cleaning of drains and alleyways in the city. This means that flooding will always take place, regardless of how many pumps you put in or how many outfalls you clear. In fact if those things succeed, all it will do is result in the expansion of the business sector in the city, increased vending and increased squatting.
You cannot deal with the drainage problems in the city and towns unless you deal with the problems of littering, the absence of zoning, squatting and vending. But who is going to bell those cats?
Do you really believe that the opposition parties will re-introduce a proper system of zoning in the country? Do you believe they will curtail the expansion of the business zones in the country? Do you believe they will remove their supporters from the banks of the major drainage canals? Do you believe they will stop the constant invasion of street vending?
We now have a drive-through market in this country. Vendors sell at the side of the roads and motorists simply drive through, stop and buy what they want without coming out of their vehicles. They are unconcerned about the build-up of traffic behind them? And where are the police and the municipal authorities?
The private sector has complained about the losses that it suffered as a result of last Thursday’s floods. But it can bear those losses. The small man cannot, and it is usually the small man who suffers the most in floods. And who cares when the small man suffers?

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WHO CARES WHEN THE SMALL MAN SUFFERS?

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