Dawn Ritch, Contributor
THE PUBLIC disorder caused by this country's administration is nowhere better illustrated than in the consequences of a week's steady rain in Jamaica.
Nine people were washed away and drowned, hundreds of homes of the urban and rural poor were flooded out (some destroyed), roads washed away, bridges severely undermined, and sewage ran freely in the streets of new housing schemes for the working poor.
We are sadly well-acquainted with the phenomenon of squatters denuding the hillside, and therefore causing the top soil to wash way in the rain.
Haiti, a far worse victim of public disorder than we are in this regard, saw 21 people die from these same regional rains.
Either we put a stop to public disorder, or we become like them.
Already we are worse than them, because this Government has managed to legalise squatting, and has turned a blind eye to people squatting in unsafe areas.
They build not only on gullies, but in some cases on river banks and on canals frequented by crocodiles.
As though to institutionalise the public mayhem NHDC/Operation Pride recently built housing schemes to locate people in flood-prone areas and river beds. These they sold to the working poor and registered squatters at hugely subsidized cost and criminally extravagant waste of taxpayer funds.
Nothing is done to stop the illegal sand-mining that undermines roads and bridges.
We need not even get into quality of building materials used for public infrastructure in this country. Suffice it to say only that the improper use of marl is the bane of our existence.
Talking freely
But this Government doesn't do anything about anything. They prefer to talk about things in committees and fuel endless public debates.
While they talk, the one or two squatters originally on White River and Roaring River grew to hundreds.
After a thousand, I suppose, the Government may feel a responsibility to remove them, and end the degradation of our watersheds and rivers. But one can't be certain of that.
Under the Housing Act, the Government doesn't have to get planning approval from town planning authorities in order to build housing schemes. The Minister of Housing is a corporation sole.
So if anyone wondered why Government housing schemes are built in flood-prone areas and river beds, that is the reason.
This administration turns a blind eye to squatters building in unsafe areas because it is not above doing the same treacherous thing itself.
The state doesn't clean the canals and gullies, and the squatters throw old stoves and fridges into them.
This policy and vision of the People's National Party Government for housing poor people leads to loss of limb, loss of life, loss of belongings, loss of trees, loss of soil and loss of human dignity and the country's wherewithal to provide it.
It is the single most pernicious policy ever pursued by an elected Government.
They put people first in harm's way, but not before cruelly removing their ability to earn a living and provide for themselves in the first place.
In the late 1960s, a great public outcry went up against the JLP Government-run National Lottery.
The PNP Opposition led the charge, ably helped by the church which held the lottery was immoral and unethical. This was one of the hot issues which led to the defeat of the JLP Government in 1972.
One of the first things Michael Manley did when he took office therefore, was to scrap the lottery.
For those too young to remember, lottery tickets in those days were sold by sidewalk vendors and little shops all over Jamaica. But it was the vendors who complained most bitterly about the abolition of the lottery.
A way of life
Selling lottery tickets was putting two or three children through school for every vendor. And they said so to no avail.
As a state-owned lottery, all the profits were ploughed by the Government into health and education in the island.
When Michael Manley won office again in 1989 he re-established the lottery. This time, however, he put it in the hands of the private sector first Howard Hamilton (Jamaica Lottery), and, now more recently under Prime Minister P. J. Patterson, a second lottery to Peter Stewart (Supreme Ventures).
When street vendors and higglers sold lottery tickets, they didn't sell shoes, T-Shirts, bags and dresses because they didn't need to.
Lottery was a steady source of income for vendors, the sidewalks were clean and orderly, and the public purse was fattened by the profits.
Today, the profits go to private companies, and a little money is given on the side to Government for sports.
So a way of earning a living was taken away from poor people, thus beginning the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the history of the island by the PNP Government.
