By GHK Lall- It was a few minutes before 6 on last Saturday’s grey, grim beginning. Rain six sheets deep, and more than six streets later, there was Guyana’s inspiring capital, Georgetown. A floating waterbed up the road, around the corners, down the streets, past the stoplights, and beyond the handful of soggy stragglers braving the rainy, slippery, sloppy, early hours.
What weren’t small rivers, were shallow lakes. Most streets qualified, with a few wet, bare patches of asphalt here and there, but drains swollen to advanced pregnancy states. If they are in that overburdened condition, where is all the excess water piling up in yards, rising in some homes, going to go? What release valve and when? How much more rain before this is over, this giant waterbed that extends and extends, billows and balloons further? The sultry, steamy heat of June to December suddenly is longed for, takes on wintry hues.
Six years after the first pint of oil exploded from the sea, like a geyser, it continues to force its way at greater volumes upwards into tankers, to markets, then Guyana’s share deposited in a Big Apple bank.
Six years later, after all the big budgets, the many oil money withdrawals, why is a deluge of rain such a horror for Guyanese? Six years later, and considering the billions allocated for drainage and irrigation, why do Guyanese in the city and other low-lying locales dread going outside, fear getting off their beds?
For that could mean stepping into a pool right beside the bed, then the dread, the reality, of a trek through floodtide and riptide to cross from one street to another. If I were Excellency Ali, I would join a monastery, take a vow of silence. The more political leaders talk in this country, the more I hear jesters. What have Guyanese got from their billions for drainage? Streets paved with layers of water? To where did the billions in oil money withdrawn go, the billions in new loans grabbed disappear?
A pitchfork and cast net seem like good candidates for recipients. The pitchfork is to mop up the oceans of water, the cast net is to collect the fish, then squeeze some of the fluids out of them. Every gram off the streets is one less shoe soaked, one less citizen sickened, one less smudge of mascara ruined.
The omens are favorable, though. Pres. Ali has a blueprint, what could be safely titled his rehabilitation and modernization vision (RMV) for the nation’s capital city. I bend a knee. What is still fondly remembered as the Garden City, now stands limply, raggedly, as the world’s sloppiest, most innovative oil capital. Why waste money and go to Venice to sail down one of its canals on a gondola, when dark, deep canals are on most streets in this town and country at doorsteps and with every footstep? Be sensible, Guyanese! Stay home and save.
The Ali RMV (sounds like a missile) has in its ops manual seismic mapping and sophisticated technologies. The Ali army is moving, with 22 GT streets extracted from the Georgetown City Council’s asset portfolio. A preemptive surgical strike, and as if to celebrate its precision, the skies opened and the rains tumbled down like a swarm of locusts, leaving not a single eye dry.
I am thinking of 22 streets grabbed by the heels and belt buckles from the City Council’s grasp, and have this rare, rich vision. The capital city divided into two: Higher Georgetown and Lower Georgetown. To put rather tersely and peacefully: who get wet, get wet. Pres. Ali is reputed not to be a dense man, so he should follow easily. The sparkling and inspiring in 22 streets. The dreary and desultory in the excluded, in the abandoned, probably 122 streets more.
Hard times call for hard decisions from hardened leadership. It is not whether the president is up to the challenges at hand relative to constant flooding. It is what he and his people could be up to, given all this oil money raining on Guyanese, and yet their tears keep running down their cheeks, as they become poorer, sicker, weaker. Oil overflows, rain floods. Doesn’t matter one way or another, Guyanese are worse off. Pres. Ali’s RMV will gallop faster, bring globs of relief.
