Flooded by Failure

Jul 30, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – Flooding in Guyana is no longer a seasonal inconvenience—it has become a way of life. Every heavy rainfall feels like a national emergency waiting to happen.
The water doesn’t just accumulate; it claims. It claims people’s belongings, it claims farmers’ livelihoods, and it is slowly claiming our patience.

The truth is, Guyana’s flooding problem is not just about rain. It is about the decades of neglect, the lack of maintenance, the short-sighted development, and the failure to treat drainage and irrigation as a core part of national planning.

In rural Guyana, flooding has always been a threat, but now it is getting worse. Farmers in places like Black Bush Polder, Mahaica, and Canal Number One are watching their fields turn into swamps overnight. The same kokers and canals that were built generations ago are still being used today—some of them barely functioning. When they fail, rice fields drown, cash crops rot, and entire communities face economic ruin. One farmer recently said it best: “We planting in mud and praying to the sky that it doh send too much blessings.”
The irony is painful. Agriculture is one of our economic backbones, yet we leave farmers to fend for themselves with collapsed embankments, clogged trenches, and the promise of relief after the flood already wash out the crops.

Meanwhile, in Georgetown and other urban centres, the situation is not much better. The capital city, which sits below sea level, seems designed to flood. A brief downpour is enough to turn most streets into shallow rivers. The drainage system is archaic, often choked with garbage, and poorly maintained. Pumps either don’t work or are turned on too late. It is as though we have become a city that waits for the water to rise before we remember we have engineers.

Urban flooding doesn’t destroy crops, but it does destroy homes, furniture, appliances—and pride. It brings disease, disrupts businesses, and sends schoolchildren wading through contaminated water to get to class. The cost of replacing what is lost adds up. But there is another cost—the emotional cost of knowing this keeps happening, and nobody seems to fix it.

What is frustrating is not just the flooding, but the predictability of the flooding. We know when the rainy season comes. We know where the vulnerable areas are. We know which canals need dredging and which kokers need fixing. And yet, year after year, we treat flooding like a surprise. Like a strange act of God, not the result of human neglect. There have been announcements. Studies. Proposals. Pilot projects. Emergency works. But where is the long-term investment? Where is the modern, coordinated infrastructure strategy to deal with a country that sits on the edge of the Atlantic and below sea level? Where is the seriousness?

Some will say the government is doing its best. Others will say climate change is making things worse. Both may be true. But Peeping Tom believes that climate change didn’t clog the trenches or leave the kokers to rust. We did. And until we accept that, we will keep losing the battle—against rain, water, and our own indifference. We cannot continue patching the problem with sandbags and press releases. Urban or rural, people are tired of empty promises and wet shoes. They deserve better. And if we’re serious about development, then flood prevention must be seen not as a luxury—but as the foundation. Because if the water keeps rising and we keep standing still, soon there will be nothing left to stand on.

(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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Black Bush Polder, failure, flooding, Mahaica, Peeping Tom

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