Hope is what you rely on when you do not have a plan

Apr 17, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News- I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been comforted by something named “Hope” during a flood. It’s like calling a leaky lifeboat “Faith” and rowing into a hurricane. Yet, here we are again—standing beside the spectre of knee-deep water with our boots filled and our spirits soaked—learning that the government is building more Hope-like canals.

One in the Canals’ Polder, two in Region 6. Because if one Hope Canal didn’t quite do the trick, maybe three more will do absolutely nothing three times faster. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not against canals. I like canals. They’re long, they’re wet, they go places. Venice has canals and gondolas and wine. We have canals and floodwaters and weeds. But I’m beginning to think that maybe—just maybe—our government builds these Hope Canals not because they’re effective, but because they come with catchy press releases. “A Hope for Every Flood!” “Drainage with Dignity!” “Don’t Worry, It’s Just a Bit of Moist Democracy!”

The last time I checked, the original Hope Canal—the granddaddy of them all—was supposed to save us from another Great Flood. It was built with all the fanfare of a national holiday, complete with ribbon-cutting and a speech about … well, you guessed it… hope.

The Dutch, incidentally, are the global royalty of water management. They live below sea level and yet manage not to drown on a daily basis. That’s impressive. But when they came to Guyana and told us we needed better data before building more drainage infrastructure, we apparently nodded in solemn agreement and promptly ignored them.

The thing is, nobody seems to know if the Hope Canal has actually worked. Oh, sure, it’s there. You can drive by and wave at it. But in 2021, when the rain gods went on a rampage, the East Demerara Water Conservancy—despite Hope—was still so full it looked like it was one angry rain cloud away from saying, “To hell with this dam!” and flooding everything from Mahaica to Mon Repos. Water had to be deliberately released into the farmlands to prevent disaster. A sort of controlled sacrifice, like offering your crops to Neptune and hoping he spares the rest.

And now, in a glorious show of optimism, we’re building more Hope-like canals, presumably with the same scientific rigour as one uses to pick lottery numbers. No feasibility studies, no hydrological modelling, no projections about rainfall and runoff, just vibes and a whole lot of excavators. It’s the engineering equivalent of closing your eyes, throwing a sponge into a pool, and hoping the water goes away.

Let’s consider the word “Hope” for a moment. It’s not a plan. It’s not even a strategy. Hope is what you have when you don’t have a plan. You hope the flood misses you. You hope the crops survive. You hope the cows can swim. So when the government announces it is building another “Hope-type” canal, what I hear is, “We’re out of ideas, but we still have a budget.”

Meanwhile, the farmers in Region 6 and Region 3 don’t need hope. They need relief. They need data. They need to know when it will rain, how much water will come, where it will go, and how fast it will drain. This is not Greek mythology—it’s hydrology. But in Guyana, water management has become a faith-based initiative.

This may sound harsh, but imagine being a farmer in Black Bush Polder, where every year is like a coin toss between feast and famine. You plant with your fingers crossed. You harvest—if you’re lucky—with a canoe. And when the rain comes, it doesn’t fall on the just and the unjust alike; it falls mostly on the lowest parts of the field and then sits there, grinning, while you lose everything. So, forgive me if I’m sceptical that a canal named Hope will fix what is essentially a scientific problem.

The Dutch, bless them, came and said what we all kind of suspected: you cannot manage water if you don’t understand it. You need sensors. You need flood maps. You need models that predict what happens when rain falls here and drains there. And for all of those, you need data. But we, being who we are, decided that’s too complicated. Why use science when we can use cement?

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next plan involves building canals shaped like the word “HOPE” visible from space—so if the canals don’t work, at least the aliens will know we tried. So yes, build the canals. Hope away. But know that all the excavators in the world can’t replace a good spreadsheet. Until we invest in the thinking part of infrastructure—until we measure before we build, monitor after we build, and revise when we fail—we’re just pouring money into ditches and calling it development.

The truth is, the government is not building Hope-type canals. They’re building “Fingers-Crossed” canals. “Maybe-This-Will-Work” canals. “Don’t-Blame-Us-If-It-Floods” canals. And unless they start grounding their flood mitigation strategy in actual science, the only thing that’s really going to be drained, besides the land, is the national treasury.

(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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