…the retracting bridge?
Your Eyewitness can spot an election gimmick a mile away…and the new Demerara Harbour Bridge the Government’s “bigging up” is nothing more than that. 2020’s almost nigh upon the APNU/AFC Government and they’re pulling their hair out to show they “did something” concrete (pun intended!) by then.
The D’Urban Park Jubilee Stadium, you murmur Dear Reader? The Government would like you to forget about THAT, thank you!! No concrete and not much greenheart even, to show for the over billion thrown into that white elephant.
And that new supposedly PAHO-compliant Pharma warehouse in Albouystown is privately owned by the other Larry – Singh – so that doesn’t count also. The new Terminal at Cheddi Jagan might be ready…but that was actually quite a long way already before the PPP were ousted, so they can’t really take much credit, can they? So since they just wouldn’t want to face the electorate as wankers who broke more than they built (Wales, Enmore, Rose Hall Estates, Stabroek vendors’ stalls, etc), we’re back to the Demerara Harbour Bridge.
Going full steam ahead, just like the captain of the Titanic, Patterson and crew insist that “all stakeholders” – -including NDCs and such like – have been “consulted” and they’re in favour of another retracting bridge!!! So all that’s left is the pre-qualification of contractors – closing on Oct 17. Now let’s pick sense from nonsense, shall we? If the cost for the Bridge is one aspect of the submission by contractors seeking to “pre-qualify”, how can anyone give their approval if they didn’t know what’s the difference in cost between the high-level fixed bridge recommended by the pre-feasibility study?
If anyone can tell your Eyewitness this isn’t another “pig-in-a-poke”, then he doesn’t know what is! If the Government wanted to hedge their bets, wouldn’t it have been better to ask for bids on both structures? We know that will take a bit longer, but we aren’t even talking about a suspension bridge for crying out loud!! And those have been around for more than a hundred years now! These concrete bridges – whether high or low level, retracting or non-retracting –aren’t exactly like cutting-edge quantum computers, are they?
As we mentioned before, Suriname built their fixed high-level bridge since the 1990s.
So we’ll be stuck with this low-level retracting bridge for 70 years just to win some votes!
…the exodus from Myanmar
While we rightfully bemoan the fate of Floridians streaming out of their homes in the millions to escape Irma, spare a thought for what’s unfolding in Myanmar and the more than a million Rohingya Muslim refugees. Unlike the Floridians, they’ve got no home to return to at any time. Heck, even before this latest outflow, they were declared “stateless” by the Myanmar Government because they were dubbed Muslim “foreigners”.
The question is why isn’t more being done for them by the international community in general, and the nearby Muslim-majority nations like Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia, in particular. But this is where it gets “complicated”. While most of the world feel the Muslim countries should do more, the Rohingya are Shia Muslims and the neighbours are Sunni – and they don’t see eye-to-eye on a host of what they consider to be fundamental issues.
Witness the distrust between Saudi Arabia (Sunni) and Iran (Shia).
Would that the world could be as one, as John Lennon asked years ago. Sigh…
