Flooding: what will foreign investors think

Jun 12, 2023 Editorial

Editorial…

Kaieteur News – The rains came down heavily and Georgetown went underwater in a hurry. Communities on the East Coast of Demerara and other scattered places also got a good share, more than they could have managed. While the deluge of last Thursday swamped many parts of the nation’s capital city, there was a most curious reassurance from the weather people. It was that the forecast for July is a dry one. Regardless of its accuracy, on Thursday last, July looked as far away as the next general elections, possibly beyond.

In these early days of June, a season of wetness and misery, being waterlogged is now the close company of citizens in many communities. It is a national shame and disgrace. Indeed, Georgetown is below sea level, is more a basin with small rivers appearing, small lakes rising, and water gathering everywhere and going nowhere. All of those are now lived with more today than ever before. The concern is that Georgetown is Guyana’s capital, the nerve center of government, commerce, and great crowds of people daily. With the advent of oil, flocks of foreigners fly to Guyana to sample more than the sun, or the water underfoot. They rush here to sample the many opportunities available, make money by the boatload.

The first order of business for those who come here is that they should get a boat, so they can navigate around town, and out of it, while keeping themselves dry and in good presentation, with their sanity intact. Now we must put this question before everyone: what do the people from the outside, the heavily favoured foreign investors think of Guyana, when they have the misfortune, and the trauma, to have to do business in Georgetown on a day when dogs and cats (possibly sheep and snakes and oil also) rain down from above? Guyana had been calculated to be the richest people on the planet, and is held in awe because of that statistical computation, but its superrich citizens carry the products of the gutter in their shoes, the stains and rank smells of the dirty streets on their clothes and persons.

Our biggest, proudest showroom transforms into a stinking, stagnant Dutch canal when it rains, and this is the place to which foreign investors make their merry way. Guyana’s Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo, is always laser focused on the rights of foreign investors, highly concerned about the state of mind of foreign investors, and toils diligently round the clock, including holidays, so that foreign investors will get the most that he can make possible for them. Nothing else comes close to Jagdeo’s priorities, this apology for a patriot, this most contorted Guyanese citizen. He is utterly unmoved, even when the interests of his fellow Guyanese must be sacrificed. For foreign investor friendly Jagdeo, it is their interests that always come first.

According to superpatriot Jagdeo and supersalesman Jagdeo, foreign investors are due a fair return. Did he pause to consider these same prized foreign investors of his taking one look at the cesspit that is Georgetown and returning pronto to Toronto or Toledo or Soho? Jagdeo who has his own standards for what is unpatriotic also weighed-in on how foreign “investors spook easily.” He must ask himself what the reaction would be when his treasured foreign investors come across the ‘jumbie’ and watery graveyard that is Georgetown. It has to be that this place called Guyana does have its rich opportunities, but it also has great prospects of being contaminated by its putridity rising from the drains and sewers.

Being the resourceful arranger and conductor of things toward the dark side that he is, it could be that Jagdeo steers them away from Guyana’s capital through shuttle flights to Ogle and Pradoville, so that they don’t have to sully their feet and sicken their stomachs by having to touch deluged Georgetown. All the cash given to the drainage and irrigation people and the best they can do is talk about pump structures. All the money withheld from the Georgetown municipality, and Jagdeo stands proudly over a flooded city, as his beloved foreign investors wade through (or flyover) knee-high waters. Governments and leaders have been overturned for less.

. Guyana’s Vice President, Communities on the East Coast of Demerara, favoured foreign investors, Guyana

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