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Pride and Air Jamaica
Morris Cargill
Not surprisingly, since I made the suggestion in one of my columns that it might be a good idea to sell Air Jamaica, I have received sundry calls and letters on the subject. A very few agree with me, but the majority strongly disagree.
Those who disagree make two main points. The first is that without Air Jamaica, adequate transport for our tourists would be at risk. The second point is that it would be a great blow to national pride. There was also the contention that Air Jamaica provides better food and service than foreign airlines.
The claim that the sale of Air Jamaica would jeopardise our tourism seems to me a lot of bull manure. Whenever there are people wishing to travel by air, there will be a wide choice of airlines willing and able to transport them. Moreover, while Air Jamaica's service has been extremely good, I doubt very much whether nowadays it is any better than any other good airline.
As to our national pride, if we go broke maintaining it, it would be the kind of pride that goeth before a fall. What it comes to is that we shouldn't persist in having things we can't afford.
Undoubtedly, the majority of our hoteliers are in favour of Air Jamaica. I do not know the full facts and figures, but I do know that we pay large sums in commissions to travel agents. In pursuit of the numbers game we play, our packaged tours are heavily discounted.
The hotels, of course, offer these discounts and I strongly suspect that these packages include discounts on air travel too; discounts which are probably greater in the case of Air Jamaica than they would be in the case of a foreign airline. If this is true, this would account for the popularity of Air Jamaica amongst our hoteliers.
In any case, I am not sure that these very large discounts are either necessary or wise. The more discounts we allow, the more we get of the cheaper kind of tourists.
We should really start to learn a bit from Cayman, which gets a better class of tourists than we do - and longer-staying ones as well. It might well be that when it comes to our tourism, it would be better to sacrifice numbers for quality.
It should be obvious to all by now that the huge sums of money owed by Air Jamaica, if put on top of all the other vast debts we now owe, are already too great a burden for our wobbly economy to bear.
We must bear in mind not only our huge internal and foreign debts and the enormous cost of rescuing our financial sector, but also the huge cost of reviving our sugar industry. What, with one thing or another, we are even now biting off far more than we can chew.
THE RPD
I know only too well the urgent need to reduce smuggled, illegal or under-invoiced goods. I am also aware that the Revenue Protection Division (RPD) is doing its best in this direction and should not be discouraged.
On the other hand, I have been getting a lot of reports recently to the effect that the RPD is getting a bit carried away by its own enthusiasm and too often uses methods which should not be used. There seem to be many justified complaints that the RPD grossly abuses the power they now have and often resorts to bullying and intimidation.
It seems that the RPD is soon to be given expanded and unsupervised power and this runs the risk of it being a threat to civil liberties, unless the RPD is very careful not to indulge in the excessive use of power. The fact is that RPD has got to be rough and skilful, but this should not be an excuse for some of the methods that they now use.
From now on, this column intends to be vigilant in this respect and would be glad to hear from any business person or reader who considers that they have been the victims of unfair persecution.
Hope departed
So, the PNP, namely the Peoples Nincompoop Party, have nailed their flag to the mast and are going down with the ship and taking us all down with them.
The stubborn refusal to change a policy that is obviously not working is not just mere stupidity, but insanity.
There is nothing that we can do about this except to observe events in horror, for there is no alternative. There might eventually be an alternative if only Eddie Seaga and Bruce Golding would stop massaging their egos.
As hope fades, downtown Kingston, for example, is fast becoming uninhabitable because of the thieves and vandals and Gordon House has been bombed.
The writing is on the wall. It is a horrible thought, but it may be that our alternative government may turn out to be ruled by the dons.
Morris Cargill is the Gleaner's senior columnist and has been writing for more that forty-five years.
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