Guyana Pres­i­dent Ir­faan Ali has re­ject­ed claims in the Trinidad press that Guyana has re­fused to ac­cept flood re­lief items of­fered by the Gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Dur­ing a tele­phone in­ter­view with Guyana’s me­dia yes­ter­day, Dr Ali ex­plained that “What Guyana com­mu­ni­cat­ed, the For­eign Min­is­ter (Hugh Todd) in a con­ver­sa­tion with the For­eign Min­is­ter in Trinidad and what we did was to ask for spe­cif­ic help in re­la­tion to pumps be­cause we al­ready have food and food sup­plies cov­ered and we don’t want to bur­den any­one in ar­eas that we had cov­ered,” Pres­i­dent Ali clar­i­fied.

Dr Ali ex­plained that the re­quest was for portable pumps, for which the spec­i­fi­ca­tions have been for­ward to the Trinida­di­an au­thor­i­ties.

“We are await­ing a re­sponse now,” he said.

Dr Ali sus­pects that Trinidad was re­spond­ing to the list dis­sem­i­nat­ed by the Civ­il De­fence Com­mis­sion (CDC) which had in­clud­ed food sup­plies but with Suri­name al­so suf­fer­ing a sim­i­lar fate, Guyana has since clar­i­fied that its ur­gent need is for pumps.

He said it is not a case where Trinidad has a ship loaded with items and Guyana is re­fus­ing it. Dr Ali said if Trinidad can­not sup­ply the pumps, then Guyana would pur­chase them on its own.

The Head of State said with an as­sess­ment cur­rent­ly un­der­way, Guyana will have to look at ac­cept­ing oth­er items at a lat­er stage.

All 10 ad­min­is­tra­tive re­gions in Guyana have had to bat­tle the ef­fects of ex­ces­sive rain­fall that has led to flood­ing at vary­ing lev­els.

With wa­ters now re­ced­ing, Guyana will soon com­mence its re­cov­ery and re­build­ing ef­forts. (Source-News­room Guyana)