With great illogic and no sense behind it, the Ministry of Public Works has embarked upon a project to rip up earthen parapets that have stood the test for decades and to replace them with a mix of gravel and sand.
Members of the public may have missed it so maybe the ministry and the government as a whole should notify the citizens when this project was devised, who was notified, who was consulted and on what basis was the decision finally taken to defile parapets.
The social contract with citizens who pay rates and taxes in the city and have benefited from the occasional use of their parapets required real consultation. While the Minister of Public Works Juan Edghill appears intent on proceeding with this project President Ali must take notice of what is transpiring in his government’s name and bring it to an end.
In a statement yesterday, amid the rising backlash against this project, the Ministry said that the Georgetown “hard-shoulder improvement programme involves clearing, excavating, and backfilling existing earth verges with layers of compacted sand, sifting, and crusher-run stone to create a firmer, more durable surface. The minister clarified that the surface will remain granular with no casting of concrete, a specific engineering design that allows rainwater to penetrate the ground, replenish groundwater, and improve drainage while providing extra parking space outside of active traffic lanes.
“These works are particularly vital in Georgetown, where earth shoulders have grown higher than the adjoining road surfaces, preventing rainwater from reaching roadside drains and causing localized flooding and rapid road deterioration”.
This is epic and arrant nonsense. If earth shoulders have magically risen in height then they only need maintenance and grading down by the city and channels created for water to flow into drains. What has changed all of a sudden over the decades?
The real reason for this move has nothing whatsoever to do with suddenly rising earthen verges. It has everything to do with a government that has no policy on parking spaces and the volume of cars in the city so that the only option it can envisage is the appropriation of parapets. Grass and mud in this city will soon become endangered species as a result of the folly. The Ministry of Public Works should immediately embark on considering two matters: how to engineer multi-level parking as in the case of Banks DIH and how to begin limiting the number of vehicles in the city.
The Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley clearly brings a different quality of leadership to these parts and President Ali and Minister Edghill should take careful note. Speaking at the Barbados Labour Party’s 87th annual conference two weeks ago she raised concerns about the number of vehicles on the island, saying the issue required national discussion.
“Let me also deliver an inconvenient truth. We have to discuss the number of cars in this country. We will soon have more cars than Bajan adults,” she said. She put the number of cars at 185,000, compared with an adult population of approximately 220,000. It is an inconvenient truth in this country that the Guyana Government refuses to recognize. The unrestrained importation of mostly gas-guzzling second-hand vehicles is overwhelming the city and polluting it. Parapets in all parts of Georgetown are jam-packed with vehicles during the day causing them to deteriorate. New roads and gravel parapets will not solve the problem.
This misconceived project, aside from discomfiting many residents of the city, no doubt provides a golden opportunity for the government to hand out supply contracts to its cronies in the private sector and work contracts to others. These contractors should probably not even be allowed to build a sandbox if the Ministry’s press release yesterday was correct.
The press release stated: “The minister (Edghill) expressed grave concern over the current approach to the works, criticizing the obvious carelessness and lack of common sense displayed on project sites with little to no consideration shown for the public.
“The warning was issued during a meeting with contractors at the Umana Yana, where Minister Edghill highlighted several severe operational failures. Among the issues raised were improper excavation, the indiscriminate dumping of materials on roadways, damage to existing road surfaces, water pipe breakages, and the unauthorized removal of trees”. It sounds as if the entire lot of contractors should have been summarily dismissed from the task.
There are other incongruities here that President Ali and his friends in the international community should behold. Pumping nearly one million barrels of oil per day, Guyana recently hosted a second biodiversity conference. What tangibly came out of it is unknown but being wedded to biodiversity would require respect and conservation for all ecosystems no matter how tiny, particularly if they have been of great utility. Hopefully the local and foreign delegates who attended the recent meeting would be aghast at this parapet project and air their views. How biodiversity is affected by the extraction of one million barrels of oil per day is for another discussion.
The other major concern revealed by this decimation of microhabitats is the incremental seizing of control of Georgetown from the hapless city council. Various ministries and government agencies have overrun the city with their projects and impositions. There has also recently been a new player in this calculus – the UK’s King’s Foundation founded by the now King Charles III. Citizens of the city should be asking who is in charge of municipal services in Georgetown. Is it the city council or the government?
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