Dawn Ritch, Contributor
THE Birds, a ruling dynasty in Antigua, are a hugely popular political family with the people there.
Unanswered questions, charges and countercharges cling to father and son like a cheap suit, but the Antiguans don't seem to mind. When pressed about their habitual sanguineness Antiguans routinely reply that the Birds also develop the country to the benefit of all its citizens, they don't only enrich themselves.
Would that we had this confidence about our own PNP Government. They spend billions of dollars of taxpayers' money, waste billions more, yet nobody can find a job here, not even those with education. Everybody's hungry.
Last week this newspaper in an investigative report totalled the sums that have been involved in the PNP Government Money Scandals since they came to power. There was the Zinc Scandal of $1/2 billion in 1989, then Shell Waiver Scandal in 1991 over which the then Minister of Finance Mr. P.J. Patterson was forced to resign, and the Furniture Scandal also in that year, over which no one was forced to resign.
Then came the Public Sector Salaries Scandal in 1998, NetServ last year, and the Operation Pride/National Housing Development Corporation (NHDC) Scandal from 1997 and continuing to the present.
These scandals of corruption have sent $6.320 billion of public money spinning right down the drain. Somebody or bodies ran off with the money, and none of it did the country a striking piece of good.
A few days later this newspaper reported that an audit of Operation Pride/NHDC indicated that a massive overrun of almost $15 billion was expected. On a continuation page it told the story of 375 residential lots and 10 agricultural lots being located in a riverbed in St. Thomas.
As though the benighted residents in St. Thomas don't have enough trouble already. They build their houses on the banks of rivers, and get flooded out at least twice a year. Now the Government wants to sell them units not on the side, but in the middle of a riverbed.
The biggest overruns in the Operation Pride/NHDC scandal have been given to companies owned by contractors Danhai Williams in East Kingston, and Kenneth Black, otherwise known as "Skeng Don" and who received the biggest ovation from the mourners at the funeral attended by senior PNP Cabinet members last year of "Willie Haggart", an area don and suspected international smuggler of drugs and arms.
These contractors have close links to the ruling People's National Party. As a service to poor people therefore the PNP Government is going to give them housing solutions in a riverbed at nine times the cost. And this is what they call development. Not only steal, squander and waste the people's money, but overcharge them for public housing that endangers their lives. No Bird in Antigua would have done that.
The Government in Jamaica, however, has done so. In this the PNP administration is ably assisted by one Cabinet Minister after another, each exceeding in scale the calamity caused by the preceding scandalous activities and policies.
No wonder little Trinidad and Barbados can buy out Jamaica. In any one year they can use their trade surplus with Jamaica to do it. Dr. Omar Davies, Finance Minis-ter, has pursued, he says, a policy of defending the Jamaican dollar. Yet the dollar is worth nine times less than what it was when the PNP came to power. And currently 90 per cent of the money in Jamaica goes to the public sector, crowding out private credit almost entirely.
Dr. Davies' decade-long regime of by far the highest interest rates in the world have beggared productive Jamaican enterprise, and driven it out of business. This is at the heart of the unemployment disease in Jamaica, and why our people become willing victims to the drug trade.
Neither the dollar nor the people has been defended, not by Mr. Patterson when he was Finance Minister, nor now as Prime Minister. It's plain that the late Michael Manley knew what he was doing in the first place when he made Patterson resign from Cabinet. Patterson said he would return, and when Manley stepped down for reasons of ill health, Patterson ran for the office of President of the People's National Party and won, defeating Portia Simpson.
What a colossal mistake that was electing a disgraced former Cabinet member as President of the PNP and Prime Minister of Jamaica. The election came, the PNP won a third term given, we are told, in a spirit of fairness because P. J. hadn't had his second term, and everybody should have two. If the country acted in haste, it has certainly repented at leisure.
Mr. Edward Seaga, leader of the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party, should immediately put the PNP Government on notice. Their corruption stinks to high heaven and any reasonable person will expect a new Government to investigate its predecessor and punish the wrongdoers.
It's so bad that, for many Jamaicans, seeing the People's National Party defeated in the next General Election will not be enough. They want to see the guilty parties prosecuted, tried, convicted and locked away for a very, very long time.
This is why so many people who don't support Edward Seaga have offered to help him in the next election campaign. Even some members of the PNP are helping him, not because they care about him, but because they care about Jamaica.
When the JLP returns to power as I think it can with that additional support, young Jamaicans will discover a shocking fact. Not only is development possible, but it is possible without widespread corruption.
