Sascha Wil­son

Dis­miss­ing Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan’s as­sur­ance of an ag­gres­sive road re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion pro­gramme, a group of South Oropouche busi­ness­men yes­ter­day em­barked on a road re­pair ex­er­cise in their com­mu­ni­ty.

“That is the pro­pa­gan­da we have heard in the me­dia, that the Min­is­ter of Works and Trans­port said they did 50 per cent of the road. I could tell you about this south­ern part of Trinidad. We haven’t seen any ev­i­dence of that what­so­ev­er,” said busi­ness­man Clint Ar­joon.

He com­plained that the Gov­ern­ment some­times fo­cus­es on build­ing new roads rather than main­tain­ing ex­ist­ing roads.

Ar­joon and sev­er­al oth­er busi­ness peo­ple pool their fi­nan­cial, ma­te­r­i­al and equip­ment re­sources to re­pair a two and a quar­ter mile road­way from the Mon De­sir high­way ex­it to Sil­ver Stream.

He said the ma­te­ri­als in­clude stone, grav­el, used con­crete, used as­phalt and oil sand. “We have dif­fer­ent equip­ment here. We have ex­ca­va­tors, rollers, bob carts, dump trucks and flatbed trucks that are bring­ing ma­te­r­i­al, some of which I have sourced and some is from oth­er busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers that would have spon­sored some sort of ma­te­r­i­al and con­tributed some labour.”

Es­ti­mat­ing the cost of the ma­te­r­i­al to be ap­prox­i­mate­ly $25,000, Ar­joon said the project was ex­pect­ed to take five to six hours to com­plete.

“It has a few hun­dred pot­holes, very deep de­pres­sions. One de­pres­sion was so bad that a ve­hi­cle ran off the road af­ter go­ing in­to the de­pres­sion and bounced a fenc­ing that dam­aged the fenc­ing.

Fed up with plead­ing for the road to be re­paired, he said they had no choice be­cause of the high cost of main­te­nance to their ve­hi­cles and the loss of busi­ness.

“We have many lit­tle busi­ness­es on this road and we have cer­tain spe­cialised busi­ness­es where peo­ple from very far away come to this area and some­times it’s a de­ter­rent for peo­ple to come and do busi­ness in our area and we lose rev­enue. So the on­ly thing af­ter from con­stant beg­ging to the gov­ern­ment to fix road. We have to do it our­selves be­cause we have no choice to be able to try to help cre­ate a good econ­o­my in our area, so we have to get peo­ple from out­side of here to come and pa­tro­n­ise our busi­ness,” he ex­plained.

Ar­joon said he has been re­pair­ing the road on his own for more than eight years, each time spend­ing over $10,000.

He ex­plained that pre­vi­ous­ly Brazil­ian firm Con­stru­to­ra OAS, the for­mer con­trac­tors of the Solomon Ho­choy High­way Ex­ten­sion project, re­paired and main­tained all sec­ondary roads lead­ing to the project.

“They used to even in­vite the com­mu­ni­ties and sit with them and iden­ti­fy what it is that we need­ed and they used to solve the prob­lem. With the lo­cal con­trac­tors, they are not do­ing any­thing, just dam­ag­ing our road and not fix­ing it. They are not even giv­ing us ma­te­r­i­al to fix it.”

Asked if the Gov­ern­ment will be up­set as they got no per­mis­sion to re­pair the road, Ar­joon said, “What I can say that the Gov­ern­ment would be very hap­py to know that res­i­dents all over Trinidad is do­ing this be­cause they have to be able to cater for their ve­hi­cles to pre­vent dam­ages and by ex­ten­sion the Gov­ern­ment is go­ing to save mon­ey from do­ing prop­er re­pair work.”

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia last month, Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan stat­ed the min­istry iden­ti­fied 500 dif­fer­ent road projects to be tack­led in an “ag­gres­sive” re­pair pro­gramme for this year, of which it has com­plet­ed 50 per cent of those in the first phase.

He had said that this was ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed by the end of March be­fore en­gag­ing in the next phase of 250 projects.