Coun­cil­lor for Re­form / Man­a­ham­bre Chris Ho­sein has lashed out at the Gov­ern­ment for their ap­par­ent dor­man­cy in the wake of yes­ter­day’s flood­ing say­ing that this has be­come their typ­i­cal re­sponse.

In a state­ment is­sued yes­ter­day Ho­sein de­scribed the flood­ing in com­mu­ni­ties across his dis­trict on Mon­day as some of the worst to date.

Coun­cil­lor Ho­sein lament­ed the fact that this river­ine flood­ing is some­thing that the peo­ple in these ar­eas have now sad­ly come to ex­pect and they are trau­ma­tized every time there are signs of rain.

Coun­cil­lor Ho­sein re­it­er­at­ed the nu­mer­ous re­quests made to the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port to have the Guaracara Riv­er prop­er­ly cleaned and ac­cord­ing to him to date, sat­is­fac­to­ry work has not been done.

He al­so not­ed the ab­sence of rel­e­vant state agen­cies dur­ing and in the af­ter­math of the floods.

“They were not proac­tive by clear­ing wa­ter­cours­es; they were not re­ac­tive by re­spond­ing to the flood­ing, they are sim­ply in­ac­tive.”

Ac­cord­ing to Ho­sein, flood vic­tims are still await­ing re­lief grants from the gov­ern­ment since 2017 and they are con­stant­ly giv­en a raw deal by the gov­ern­ment.

“These are peo­ple who pay tax­es like any­body else. Why does the gov­ern­ment con­tin­ue to ne­glect the peo­ple in these ar­eas?”

He has called on the gov­ern­ment to have a heart for the peo­ple af­fect­ed and do what must be done to en­sure this prob­lem does not per­sist.