An election date, flooding and chicken curry

Oct 06, 2019 News, The Story within the Story

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By Leonard Gildarie

I must confess that there are two sports that I live for each year…the Indian Premier League (IPL) and the Caribbean Premier League (CPL).
The shorter version of the game has grown in such popularity that it has dented Tests and One-Days.

Stars are born in the T20 version of cricket and the adoration for the version of the game has pushed boundaries.
In India, IPL is jealously guarded and regulated, making billions of dollars and over a decade-old, it is big business that runs for an entire month. Our West Indian players, like so many from around the cricketing world, have made serious money after they were lucky enough to be drafted.
I recalled the first T20 games in the 2000s when jailed Antiguan businessman Allen Sanford organized and announced that he was paying big time for a shorter version of the game.
As the T20 tournament proceeded, it gathered momentum. Guyana was in the finals and citizens cried and hugged after the heroics of Ramnaresh Sarwan and Narsingh Deonarine who won the tournament for us.
Since then, T20 has become a giant.
The past few weeks, the region and rest of the cricket-loving world were tuned to the Caribbean for the biggest party.
From Barbados, to Antigua to St Kitts, Trinidad and of course, Guyana, the grounds were swelled with the crowds.
The noise, the costumes, the lights and of course, the unbelievable performance by the stars of the show indeed made it a big party.
Save for the malls and creeks, Guyana is starved for entertainment.
CPL at the Providence stadium could not have gotten better.
The grounds have been swelling. There were videos of our people dancing.
Perhaps the biggest for me was the light-hearted bantering between Guyana and Trinidad whether it is chicken curry or curry chicken. The winner had bragging rights and power to decide.
CPL has been bonded our people like no event.
It is social cohesion in its truest form.
Our people stood together, shoulder-to-shoulder, brother and brother, brother and sister and in a good natured manner stood up to the curry chicken of Trinidad.
It is that type of patriotism that should be prevalent in our everyday lives.
We are heading into an elections that will be the mother of all.
Make no mistakes. The stakes are high. The winning Coalition or party will have control of our oil proceeds.
As a people, we will split and view our brothers of a different makeup with distrust.
It is what politics has done to us.
We refuse to vote issues.
We refuse to look at the bigger picture.
We need to be CPL-bonded as we march into elections.
Our country can ill-afford any deviations. We are our worst enemy.
Last week, we watched in despair as something happened.
It is a yearly event now, and it is getting worse each time.
Yes, we are talking about the tides.
All along the coastlands, very few communities were spared.
The harsh realities are upon us. On the coastlands, we are below sea level. The only thing that stands between us and the ferocity of Mother Nature is a wall.
The wall will crumble. We have too little resources to properly maintain the seawall and even when it is done, the contractors continue to rob us.
The other factor that we have to take into consideration is that the tides have been coming stronger and higher.
The waves that smashed into the walls on West Demerara, in the Uitvlugt and Anna Catherina areas, were unbelievable and beautifully dangerous.
There are getting bigger each year.
The problem has been blamed on the climate change. The ocean has been rising.
I saw videos of Wakenaam and Leguan, two islands in the Essequibo River which were both at the mercies of the waters that flowed onto the land.
Homes were swamped and it appeared that a tsunami was in full swing.
We are facing our biggest natural threats yet.
It will get worse.
Our farmers, engineers, citizens and Government alike will have to start seriously planning for the future.
Our capital city is congested.
Our Parliament Building is next to Stabroek, the busiest area in the city.
The Guyana Revenue Authority is moving to a headquarters near to the limits of the city.
We have to start thinking seriously of moving our essential services more inland.
Our policy makers on farming will have to focus more on drainage and irrigation.
We cannot have last minutes fixes and regional people who are lazy.
The corruption at the regional levels has been unbelievable from what I am told.
Maintenance and a strict adherence to designs will have to be followed to the minute.
I hurt for the farmers who lost crops and will not be able to return to their lands for a couple of years.
The impact of climate change is upon us and it will take lots of money to get us ready, to reduce the impact.
It is frightening what I witnessed with those waves.
It will get worse.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

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