DAWN RITCHDAWN RITCH
THE TELEVISION news is awash in the blood of murder too frequently, and on a scale none could have imagined. The statistics are killing, and deeply shameful. According to another newspaper, the Minister of National Security, Dr. Peter Phillips, paid a surprise visit to Spanish Town last week. Why was it "surprise"? Was he afraid that he might be recognised, or simply afraid of being shot? This display of so-called public concern is an insult to residents and business people alike in Spanish Town. Whatever else Dr. Phillips may have been doing there, many will find it easy to conclude that he wasn't being part of the solution.
The reflection made upon the country's public administration by the rising toll of already high murder figures, cannot be good. And there is little point in saying that the communities themselves must take responsibility for it. Nor that, as Dr. Phillips recently said on television, "(The Government) can't put a policeman in every kitchen". Mutty might say, let us examine this statement. Dr. Phillips is suggesting that wherever else policemen may be outside of people's kitchens, they are doing a good and effective job.
This is not true. When you're driving on the road and want to see a policeman out of idle curiosity, just look under the nearest tree, or in the shade of any building. Always there's one policeman, but usually two or three, as well as police motorcycles and squad cars obligingly parked in the shade too. The police are usually the ones bad-driving you.
SENSIBLE ACTION
As the Mayor himself has recently noted, police cars are parked in the 'No Parking' areas, and "particularly outside the Police Credit Union". He has been having them towed. If he continues to force policemen to obey the law, he will have done more for the security of the country than any visit, surprise or otherwise, to Spanish Town. This type of sensible action in the interest of good order is what is endearing Desmond McKenzie to a public eager for hope.
On the other hand Dr. Phillips and the Most Honourable are marked by their remote remove from the needs of poor people in this country. Prime Minister P.J. Patterson might find it odd to be so accused, when he's just announced a $1.5 billion plan to renovate Downtown Kingston by 2007 in time for World Cup Cricket hosted by Jamaica.
This plan is about expanding Sabina Park cricket stadium for foreign guests. It is not about providing more than one toilet per hundred people living for example in the shanty towns of South St. Andrew. They only get that one toilet if they're very lucky. And this from the Minister of Finance, Dr. Omar Davies, whose seat it is. Yet he has a Ph.D. in something or other.
Little girls will relieve themselves in gullies, and get raped for the trouble, when they have no public lavatories. It doesn't take an intellectual genius to realise this, but it escapes the brilliant and Honourable Dr. Omar Davies. Instead he's about to open wide the public purse for yet more vainglorious public expenditure, designed as usual to win international plaudits that will never come. Not as long as the PNP Government continues to subject the poor of this country to degrading squalor, where they have neither human rights nor human dignity.
There was recently an unseemly squabble between various public authorities over who had the gully and drain-cleaning money, who had the responsibility to clean them, and all this while a hurricane was hot on our heels.
It demonstrates that the inhabitants of shanty towns are as neglected by the state as much as the garbage in the gullies. They are left to live in unspeakable filth, and to wash away like dead dogs in flood after flood. Unless a Government can provide more than one toilet for every hundred shanty town dwellers, living on gully banks, there is no hope of ever cleaning Kingston Harbour. Gullies empty into the sea.
PUBLIC TOILETS
There can therefore neither be the redevelopment of Kingston, nor the preservation of our tourism business anywhere in Jamaica unless the sea water in all our harbours and ports is in a healthy, lifelike condition. And none of that can happen until the Jamaican poor are provided with public toilets and showers. Spending money to spruce up St. William Grant Park in time for 2007 does not even begin to address this problem.
As to the Harmony Cove Project being funded by the National Housing Trust and the Development of Bank of Jamaica, this column is already on record saying that it is wrong to use the mandatory contributions of poor people to develop hotels for tourism and the rich. Any number of international agencies will fund a project like that once it is environmentally sound and financially viable. The fact that the Government is taking poor people's money from the NHT to do it is both silent and deadly, as well as immoral.
How can a Government like this feel good about itself? Or are they all members of a Masonic Lodge and sworn to secrecy and personal motive? How can they preside over such a slaughter? Jamaicans are not, as Dr. Phillips suggests, being murdered in their kitchens but mainly on the country's public thoroughfares patrolled by a supposedly competent Police Force. The Government of the day is a disgrace to the human race. They think there is no helping us. But it is their own awful incompetence that has nurtured the bestiality into which Jamaica has descended.
