Depriving The Poor Of Water!
By Emil van der Poorten –March 27, 2016
Emil van der Poorten
When one of the elements necessary for the very survival of any being is toyed with, it is time to cry halt to corruption at every level, particularly the local one where a simple task becomes a life-threatening one.
I live near a settlement of what can accurately be described as displaced persons and, since that term is going to raise a few hackles among those who believe that Sri Lanka is in fact Nirvana, let me relate some relatively recent history.
When the great Kobbekaduwa, as a Minister of Agriculture who had probably not planted so much as a bean seed unless the tenant farmers who his kind had parasitized did it for him, decided to wreak political vengeance on, among others, the van der Poorten family, his minions took over a swath of land that belonged to several bearing that last name, included it as a part of “Trafford Hill” group so that nothing of that family’s heritage would survive, even in name, and proceeded to run it as one of the State Plantation Corporations’ monuments to the employment of crooked sycophants without an atom of agricultural knowledge. Anyway, the edifice ultimately collapsed under the weight of the corruption of Hector K’s stooges who were widely known to arrive with a simple piece of hand luggage and require several lorries to move their personal possessions if, for any reason, they had to depart for another plantation or other destination.
The trickle escapes!
When the collapse occurred, subsequent to this country having rid itself of the parasitic radala regime, all the workers, including many who had been, literally, born and bred on that land, were summoned to a meeting to be informed that they had no jobs the next day. An interesting concomitant to this fact was the fact that several families would also cease to have a roof over their heads at the same time, because they had estate-provided “lines” or other lodgings on the land that was, to all intents and purposes, being abandoned, except, of course for those politicos and their friends who through goodness-knows-what means acquired chunks of it from which they proceeded to exploit the timber, rubber trees (as firewood) and, ultimately, even the cocoa trees which went to the same “end use!” Pretty near 1500 acres of productive mid-country plantation land has been reduced to the on-going “take-over” of “Guinea A” grass which was originally introduced as cattle fodder and, in the absence of any bovines, has become the most invasive plant species in the mid-country.
