During a walkabout the community of West Ruimveldt, Georgetown on Monday, Agriculture Minister, Zulfikar Mustapha made promises to provide jobs to residents to clean and maintain drains throughout the community.
Ahead of the upcoming rainy season, the Minister is currently inspecting communities in the city that are prone to flooding with the aim of making the necessary interventions now to prevent such disasters from occurring.
“The NDIA will be awarding these works to the residents to do the internal cleaning, the manual cleaning and they will also execute maintenance work over the next few months, so that we can keep it in a way whenever there’s heavy rainfall, the water at least could reach at the pump and the sluices so that we can drain the area,” Mustapha explained to residents.
He added that his team has already earmarked several areas within the community to do drainage work, which is set to commence within the next two weeks.
“We are looking at the drainage system within the area, the drainage is very deplorable. We have earmarked some of the drainage work that we’ll be doing immediately, within another two weeks from now, we’ll see work commence here. We’ll also engage the residents to do the manual cleaning and where there [is] need for mechanical cleaning we will have machine come in to do these works,” the Minister shared.
Meanwhile, he also expressed disappointment after seeing the condition of drains which were supposed to be maintained by the Georgetown City Council.
“What I found is very disappointing because it seems that the city council have not been doing any work whatsoever in these areas. The interlocking drains and the small drains that they had to do work on, those drains have been neglected for a number of years and that is why when you look at the sluices and the pumps, we are not getting the water coming out from these areas to go to the sluices and pumps, because the drains are clogged and blocked,” the Minister remarked.
“These areas are very vulnerable [to] flooding and what I promise to do… we’ll continue, not only now, this will be a continuous process. From the NDIA level/Ministry of Agriculture we will be looking to do the entire drainage system to clear it, to have it in a way that water can run off the land and run from the drain, easily to the pumps.”
Meanwhile, Councillor for the East and West Ruimveldt and Layne Avenue constituency Trichria Richards, shared that she is proud of the government’s swift interventions to provide relief to residents.
“What I like…is the quick intervention where things are happening. You can talk to the minister and immediately he’s here. He’s here…so that we can do a complete assessment of the drainage system in this constituency so I’m really happy about that and the changes that we’re seeing,” Richards remarked.
Over the past few weeks, Minister Mustapha has visited several communities across the country to find out about problems affecting residents and provide solutions to those problems. During his visit yesterday, he noted that he will also be encouraging his colleagues Public Works Minister, Juan Edghill, and Local Government Minister, Nigel Dharamlall to visit the communities and make the necessary interventions where needed.
