Dealing with… floods

Your Eyewitness is in a permanent state of amazement at the amazement some folks experience at the floods that are inundating our communities during the rainy seasons!! After Pressie held that Independence flag-raising – well, let’s not get too snarky;  one was eventually raised, wasn’t it??! – ceremony at Fort Island, did it sink in that the reason the earliest settlements by the Dutch – going back to 1621! – were upriver and NOT on the Atlantic coast where 90% of us presently live because the latter were permanently flooded and the latter was not??
That’s right folks!! The Dutchmen of yore, moved to the flooded coast after the fertility of the soil up-river ran out!! But to do so, they had to drain the coast where only Mangrove flourished on account of the Atlantic salt-water constantly flooding their roots – all the way miles inland to where we’re digging up all that white sand for our construction boom!! Soil – brought down east to the Atlantic from the massive Amazon – swirled west around South America’s shoulder to become snagged in the roots of the mangrove to build up our coastline to where it is!!
While the silt was extremely RICH, it had to be drained to make it habitable!! Any other Europeans woulda been stumped – but NOT the Dutch!! They’d actually drained an expansive North Atlantic inlet with a series of canals, dykes and sluices to create thousands of fertile acreage!! And that’s what they did here. They created sea dams to keep out the Atlantic in the north-coast – and “back dams” to keep out the water roaring down from the higher lands inland! And sluices or “kokers” to drain out the water when the tides were low – since the “land” they’d created was 4-to-5 feet below the Atlantic high tide!!
Now since we’ve known this since the mid-1700s –why are we always in a tizzy about floods?? Hence your Eyewitness’ permanent state of bemusement!! We get floods when we aren’t draining off the water on our land faster than it’s accumulating!! And which we should fix if we don’t want to live in a Venice-of-the-South?? We’ll let your Eyewitness count the ways!! In “developin” of our urban and semi-urban housing schemes, we’ve concreted up more than half the land that used to ABSORB the rainfall!! We’ve also filled in most of the drainage canals in the sugar plantations that were abandoned to create Georgetown – to made wide boulevards!! We the people also insist on blocking-up the remaining canals and drains by dumping our garbage into them!!
Adding to our woes is climate change giving us longer periods of droughts – and shorter but more intense periods of rainfall!!
Let’s fix it or get off the coast!!

…chicken matters
With the amount of chicken, we Guyanese eat – fried, broiled, curried, BBQ’d, roasted, stewed – or put into every conceivable dish – Cookup, metemgee, soups, pepper-pot, burgers, etc  – our chicken business ain’t no chicken feed!! So we shouldn’t be surprised that Chicken Man – Norton’s hand-picked Parliamentary head honcho from out off nowhere – recently weighed in on the state of the said chicken industry!! After all, owing a fast-food Chicken franchise had to’ve given him an insight going beyond testifying that the bird’s “finger-lickin’ good”!!
More specifically, he wants the government to assure him that we’ve got chicken self-sufficiency!! Now to those who may snicker that Chicken Man has a conflict of interest since he might be just concerned that his franchise doesn’t run out of birds to fry, your Eyewitness believes chicken self-sufficiency should be the highest priority of the government!!
In fact, when he was voted in, your Eyewitness suggested that Pres Ali should’ve guaranteed “a chicken in every pot” – like FDR!
Rather than delivering a car in every driveway!!

…corruption
The Integrity Commission just ORDERED the country’s 231 top politicians and members of the judiciary to declare their income and assets by June 22!! If not – or if assets are out of whack with income – it’s jail-time!!!