Dear Editor,
At what point in his presidency is Mr Ramotar going to say, “enough is enough, we have to do something about the filthy and drowning state of Georgetown”?
If the President, did not drive around Georgetown on Tuesday, then I respectfully suggest that he should take a drive today, not with his outriders at 100 mph because that will exacerbate an already parlous situation, but at a slow pace so as not to create more waves in those areas which still have floodwater.
I also humbly suggest that he take the following folks with him:
Shyam Nokta and all the other high powered and highly paid staff in his Office of Climate Change, for obvious reasons;
Robert Persaud, Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment;
Leslie Ramsammy, Minister of Agriculture;
Irfaan Ali, Minister of Housing & Water, and Minister of Tourism, Industry & Commerce;
Gail Teixeira, Presidential Adviser on Governance ‒ because she is in everything;
Odinga Lumumba, Presidential Adviser on Empowerment ‒ he seems to be in everything related to tourism;
Kwame McCoy, Press and Publicity Officer to the President ‒ because I have not seen him around recently;
The two Ministers of Local Government & Regional Development, Ganga Persaud and Norman Whittaker, because they seem to hold the purse strings that control City Hall.
We can safely leave the Mayor at home because that is where he ought to be.
It would be a good idea to send pictures of the devastation in Georgetown to the five ‒ count them, five ‒ universities or whoever it was that awarded Bharrat Jagdeo five doctorates for his stewardship of the environment. If this is what they stand for, then, children, make sure you do not consider spending your money going to those universities. And do we really need 15 different agencies with overlapping mandates to manage our water supply, drainage and irrigation?
About the garbage: there is an abandoned no-longer-in-use public toilet in Carmichael Street, by the Parade Ground, that is now a repository for garbage from the neighbourhood. Can Mr Robeson Benn, Minister of Public Works, please send his wrecking crew around to break that outhouse down and maybe either burn the garbage or ask Miss Carol Sooba, Town Clerk of the Georgetown City Council, to send a truck to clear it away?
Yours faithfully,
Jennifer Bulkan
