In an excellent article in today’s Daily
Mirror, a former MP, Keseralal Gunesekera, succinctly elaborated on the destructive
publicity given by media institutions, promoting their flood relief delivery systems
with voice cuts from hapless recipients, who no doubt were not even paid to give
free advertising to the Media Institutions, that one would easily imply were exploited
and used by them in their desperation! A truly cringe worthy if not reprehensible
act, that MUST have consequences if they are to improve their image to a truly independent
Media institution, which at this stage is questionable.
I will recommend that one reads the article
in the link in full to truly understand what damage the Media institutions, (if
you can call them even that) have done to the cause of flood relief and rehabilitation.
Where are they now that the floods have ceased? What are they doing to locate people
truly in need and assisting them in the best way they MUST?
As the article implied, we don’t have a true
take on the extent of the damage. When people live at ground level in low lying
areas, their whole home goes under water and they lose all they have. There is going
to be a huge debate on whether to allow them to return, especially as the land they
live on should be reserved as a flood plain, and they should never have been given
Electricity in the first place, done by politicians seeking votes, but in the end
giving them false sense of security, by assuming now that they pay water bills,
and electricity bills, they somehow, have some legitimate right of abode, and also
legitimate right to be re-housed, NONE OF WHICH is the case.
In all the world, people migrating to the
city for employment sometimes can only find accommodation in such areas, as other
places are too expensive to rent. This pressure on accommodation is given legitimacy
by certain people for personal gain, and the hapless migrants are none the wiser
that they are living on a time bomb that could go off like it did. Then they seek
state intervention to save their bacon.
We must have a mechanism, of enforcing certain
laws of squatting on reservations, without legitimizing people, and also a system
of public housing that charges some monthly fee, and reduce the favoritism that
is rife in allocation, that supersedes need.
The need of the hour is assisting ALL state
institutions to get the affected people to as normal a life as possible without
delay, and asses the most practical method of long term settlement.
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