Coverden residents feel punished

COVERDEN residents are beginning to feel like their ancestral lands are a curse.
But the longing for their community to benefit from the bonanza of development seen in
neighbouring communities will not go away.
They want progress where they live. They yearn for advancement in spite of the fact that local
legislation is clear: ancestral lands ‘fall outside of the responsibility of the Neighbourhood
Democratic Council (NDC) and can’t receive funding from the annual budget.
Mr. William Thomas, community leader of the Coverden East Bank Demerara community told
www.aroundtheregions.com that residents are deeply affected that the transformation they are
witnessing all around them. Contiguous communities to Coverden are moving ahead since they
were handed over to the government.

“Because our lands are ancestral there is no way that we can attract funds to develop it through
government institutions because you have to regularise it and hand over like the roads and so
forth,” Thomas said explaining their impediment.
It sounds like a case of eating your cake and still want to have it. They don’t want to follow
Esau’s example and mortgage their future and generations to follow.
So, the community leader headed a delegation which had dialogue with government Ministers,
Mr. Nigel Dharamlall, Minister of Local Government and Regional Development, and Mr.
Kwame McCoy, Minister Within the Office of the Prime Minister, during a recent outreach. The
talks were to help design a compromise position to help bring much-needed infrastructural and
other forms of development to their community.
“Seeing that the Ministers were here, we wanted to see how far we can get to that level for
assistance because we already approached the NDC and they said that there is a law (preventing
the government using taxpayers’ monies to develop private property). If we need to have lights,

(if we need) to do the roads, (if) you have to survey, you have to hand it over to the NDC and it
then becomes a government area,” to attract government funding, he said.
While they want to preserve the lands bequeathed to them by their ancestors, the weak financial
status of the residents is preventing them transforming where they live, the village leader said.
“We don’t have the funds to do it presently because our land is large. Coverden is large,
ancestral lands. It is…more than one and a quarter mile,” long, he estimated.
The perennial poor state of the roads and drains hurt their agricultural enterprise, and numerous
past self-help activities proved futile “because we are ill equipped technically and financially to
get it done effectively,” Thomas explained.
“We have the potential to feed large sections of the East Bank corridor, but once again drainage
is very important. We plant a lot of citrus and even rear livestock among other things. There is so
much that we can do (because of) the size of the land we have but we need to expand, we need to
go broad-based, but bear in mind the land is private land” he declared referring to the vexing
issue.
“So, it’s a financial issue to get a million dollars, to get three million dollars or let’s say
$50M to do a particular part of the project,” Thomas reminded.